It has been awhile since I posted a text fragment, but I loved this little bit of The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Every schoolboy turned over the final page of Richard III with relief, because now at last the Wars of the Roses were over and they could get on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow.
Okay Canada, the feline overlords know you freaked out when you half-assed went metric back in the Seventies. However, it’s time you and the world took on standardized units of measurement.
The Cat of Ironhorse Ranch cares deeply about this:
Here are the units:
Distance is henceforth to be measured in: claws, paws, tails, short pounces, long springs, and unacceptables.
(Any distance sufficiently far as to require transport in a car = 1 unacceptable.)
Volume - Crumbs, kibbles, mouthfuls, gulps, hairballs, dust bunnies, kittens, cats, unreasonably large.
Time - Yowls. As catkind lives in the present, one unit of temporal measurement should do. One yowl is the unit of time that should pass between a cat’s making its wishes known and having them executed by the nearest available ape. (All other measurements are irrelevant.)
Also on the subject of time: nap-interrupting clocks that scare the crap out of us by periodically going “BONG” are totally banned. What is wrong with you apes that you think this is okay?
The above examples are not meant to cover everything, but should give you a decent idea of what’s required here. Strike a committee, work out the other measurements, and get it done. We make the proclamations. Logistics are, naturally, your problem.
“Fool For Love” is one of the better season five episodes, in my opinion, and one of the less painful ones to watch (or rewatch), too. Here’s my essay.
I know I’m not alone in this, but I just love infographics. Knowledge! Packed into memorable pictures! Beautifully designed and all laid out in color! What’s not to love?
I decided when I began my infographics pinboard that if it looked good and the basic facts on any given topic weren’t deeply stupid or obvious lies, I’d pin them without further digging. The general idea is that if I ever choose to make use of the info, in a story for example, I’ll fact-check it then. So when the “psychology of color” graphic claims that blue is the most productive color for an office, I’m giving myself permission to go Mmmm, really? Says who? and still hoard the image.
This board is, in its way, cousin to photos like this one:
Not checking the info immediately is a strategy to keep me from deciding whether to exclude some lovely but silly stuff, and risk losing the potentially useful. I’ll never want to pause long enough in the pinning moment to do the truth-checking. Save now, research later is a way of ensuring I don’t end up with a brain full of “Wasn’t there a picture of this I could have used now? I wonder where on the intertubes that got to?”
It also means the range of info on this particular board is rather eclectic. There’s everything from stats on Kickstarter projects to facts about coffee and a few things that don’t exist in the world, like the Geek Tube Map.
The unifying thread, I suppose, is “This Might Be Knowledge.”
I have a cold, and not much brain, and somehow this has led me to dorking around with WordPress and the website a bit more.
This, in theory, should have a little streamer with the latest Instagram posts.
On February 1st and 2nd I was Guest of Honor at Gottacon, where I met many lovely and charming fans:
Gottacon is very gaming focused, with a single track of panel programming. I was on two panels: So You Want to Become a Published Author with Matt Hughes, Dave Duncan and T.J. Silver and Digital Rights Management: The Pros and Cons, with Wired author Jules Sherred and Karl Johanson. Both panels were expertly moderated by Sherred, who interviewed me for Geeky Pleasures last year when Blue Magic came out, and who has posted them on the same site.)
As we were talking writing and publishing, war raged on next door.
Getting invited to be a guest of honor had been on my career-related bucket list for a while. Getting to do it for the first time in Victoria, a city I love, was a delightful extra bonus. The organizers and fans were all very lovely and inviting, and the day was full of nice surprises. If you’re in the vicinity next year might enjoy playing games all day with like-minded spirits, I can’t recommend it enough.
And if you missed me, my next appearance will be at FanExpo Vancouver on April 21 and 22.
Don’t get me wrong. I looove While You Were Sleeping
Here’s the preview, wherein Sandra Bullock talks about going home to a cat as though it’s not enough:
Note, too, that Fluffy is left alone in the home of a coma patient who isn’t even their primary underbeing, for well over a week!
Thistle says: Shape Up, Humans!
Obviously the unnamed cat (unnamed!!) in Sandra Bullock’s apartment and Fluffy both need star billing in this picture. A good start might be to have Bill Pullman’s character take Fluffy home to his mancave. Both romantic leads should have the cats with them in subsequent scenes, except possibly the one where they get to falling down on ice. Pullman should probably live in Sandra’s building so that Fluffy only has to endure one car ride. Maybe instead of building chairs he should construct cat trees.
Alternately, Joe Junior could take on Fluffy, in which case the romantic outcome for the humans may have to change a bit. Your script treatments and suggested edits can be submitted here.
I’d say “Nothing to see here,” but you can help. If you have a second, post a quick comment, either here at the site or wherever the post caught your eye. (Or both, if you’re ambitious!)
By way of thanks in advance, I’ll give you a nice picture to make it worth your while. Who can say no to Mark Twain?
It may actually be required by law in some jurisdictions that if you pin, you have a funny board.
In other news, this cormorant is also funny.
Remember when many many people were new to the Internet? Every now and then someone in your life would go through that phase of passing along every single e-mail that came their way that made them giggle. Not to mention hoax virus warnings and the one about how Canada Post was going to start charging us a dime every time we had a naughty thought? And it wasn’t horrible. You like a good laugh as much as anyone else, right? But the four people you’d had to kindly dissuade before this particular mad mailer started hitting SEND had also forwarded all of these exact same silly things when they discovered them, six months and a year and two years and three years ago?
Now this niche has been filled by Tweeting and posting teh funnies to Facebook, and we can set our filters to pay a lot of attention, if we wish, or dial it down to none. I like Pinterest for this, for the simple reason that it keeps everything I find amusing in one easily clickable place.
