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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
- John Roberts, age 55
- John Paul Stevens, age 88
- Antonin Scalia, age 72
- Anthony Kennedy, age 71
- David Souter, age 68
- Clarence Thomas, age 60
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg, age 75
- Stephen Breyer, age 69
- Samuel Alito, age 58
| Saturday, July 5th, 2008 | ||
|
jessiehl |
6:17p | I feel like an athlete again Since I've ridden a couple of times now on the Minuteman Bikeway, I decided to do my run along part of it. I was originally planning to do 6 miles, with a couple of minutes to catch my breath at the halfway mark - which, these days, is a long run for me - but I felt good after 2 miles, so I decided to do 8. Well, I ended up doing 8 at a pace (subtracting the couple of minutes I spent pacing and catching my breath) of just under 8 minutes/mile. I am totally floored. I don't know how I did that. That would have been pushing it when I was 14, and a serious athlete, and 110 lbs. And I am currently none of those things (far from it, for any of them). And it's not like I've been working out all the time lately - lots of 3-3.5 mile walks and runs, nothing fast. I did feel really good, by intense workout standards, on the Minuteman Bikeway (as I do when I bike - I've done it twice now, and pulled off speeds of 15 mph). It's a nice course, and since it's mostly downhill in the inbound direction, it makes the second half of a workout somewhat easier than it would be. But I am still absolutely floored. For the first half of the workout in particular (and part of the second half, until I got too tired), I tried really hard to run like I have biked when I've gone on the bikeway. When I bike, my legs don't hurt the way they often do when I run, so I go at a nice steady pace, but the key is, I push hard with each step. So when I was running, instead of just getting one foot in front of the other without much push (which I tend to do), I concentrated on pushing off hard on each step. And keeping a steady pace. Apparently it worked. Current Mood:  satisfied |
| makinglight | 10:13p | Cold beef salad with preserved lemons and fresh basil Here's the setup: While working too fast in the kitchen late last night, put the plastic bag full of little individually-wrapped frozen beef tenderloins on top of the refrigerator. Forget it's there. Find it this morning, still chilly but definitely defrosted. Cook all the tenderloins before making breakfast. Around lunchtime, contemplate the stack of cold cooked beef in the refrigerator.
5 cold cooked beef tenderloins, about 0.75" thick Slice tenderloins in half along their horizontal axis, then cube the resulting half-thickness pieces. Put them in a bowl. Seed your lemons and chop them fine. Chop or snip your sun-dried tomatoes into bits. Snip the fresh basil into thin bits. Put the chopped lemon, sun-dried tomatoes, and basil bits in with the beef, and toss gently. Stet. Wash your greens, get the excess water off via your preferred method, and put them into a very large bowl. Chop the green onions. Cube the tomatoes. Cut up the mutant dwarf bell peppers. Toss them in with the greens. Snip some more basil leaves and toss those in too, if you feel like it. Add the beef mixture to the main bowl and toss everything together gently. Dress it with a good olive oil (the cloudy greenish sorts work well with this) and some balsamic vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste. Eat happily. Before I go any further: no, I have not become a spendthrift! The Fairway in Red Hook sells cut-price whole beef tenderloins. I de-sinew them (that's the trickiest bit), slice them into individual servings, and wrap and freeze them myself. If they're not the cheapest meat on the market, they're also far from the most expensive. The preserved lemons are from Fairway as well. They import them from France under their own "Campagne St Eugene" label. They're small, salty, and intensely flavorful. The complete ingredients list is "lemons, water, salt, anti-oxidant F300, citric acid." If you can't get French lemons, use Moroccan preserved lemons instead. I'm recording this one because it turns out there's something alchemical about the combination of cold beef, preserved lemons, and fresh basil. It's possible the alchemical effect depends on some of the other ingredients as well, but it's the beef, lemon, and basil that rise up singing. |
| makinglight | 9:57p | One Simple Reason to Vote for Obama The US Supreme Court: |
|
allyscully |
1:20p | In an effort to not be completely depressing about everything, here are some things that I recommend! Magazines Harper's. My best friend subscribes to it, and I used to steal his to read them; now that I'm A Grown-Up I got my own subscription, which also gives you access to everything online, so I've been reading some back issues. The Index, the Findings, the short story--all delicious. It's also the only magazine where I read and enjoy every single article, even when they're on topics I wouldn't normally be interested in. If you want to read it online too, comment and I can email you my login info. Music Beck: Modern Guilt. It's not out yet, but if you like the rest of Beck's musical output, it's very much in line with that. Danger Mouse produces. I'm still in love with Elbow, and their newest album The Seldom Seen Kid which features lyrical mastery like "I've been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce" and "there's a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall" and, incidentally, some pretty great website design. Books I'm still recommending anything and everything by Richard Yates to everyone I see, even as I read his entire published oeuvre two months ago. I'm also recommending "Before the Storm" (although out of print, it might be at your library) and "Nixonland", both by Rick Perlstein, and constituting parts 1 and 2 in a proposed trilogy about the rise of the modern Republicans. They're well-researched, funny, and entertaining in their digressions, and even though, through a quirk of knowing a guy who knows the guy, I know that the author has specifically insulted me without knowing me except through hearsay, I like his books anyway. How's that for maturity. Also, for something I've only read excerpts of but KNOW is going to be great: Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen. Blogs Three Quarks Daily, a wildly intelligent and varied blog that Richard Dawkins reads. News, poetry, opinion, philosophy, all generally interesting and well-presented, sprinkled with the occasional esoteric essay (like a recent three-part deal on saffron.) I'm always looking for The Perfect Litblog, and I haven't found it yet, but as niche markets, I like The Literary Saloon for news about literature in translation that I otherwise wouldn't hear about, and Emerging Writers Network for the frequent "Sources of Lit" feature that highlights good short stories in places you might not otherwise look. Movies The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama Bushiko), a 1983 remake of a 1958 film based on a Japanese novel, recently got a great DVD release, and the movie is beautiful and funny and sad and tremendous. It's about a small, struggling agricultural village in the mountains of Japan whose elders must be carried to the mountain Narayama when they turn 70, so as not to be a burden on their families. The film takes place over a year, when the matriarch of one of the families is 69 and preparing to go to the mountain. It's like Ozu but dirtier; Kurosawa but more personal. The Furies also recently got Criterion-ized, and I love me some Stanwyck. The story is a loose retelling of the Oresteia, set in New Mexico in the late 1800s. Really I guess I'm also recommending netflix; for $9 a month I can go through 6 or 7 DVDs that I'd never find at a rental store, and watch older films online. The Intertron McCain/Madonna Remix this person's gorgeous apartment the Lumiere Reader on film and art |
|
agentfroot |
5:59p | We watched Sister Act 2 last night, which I hadn't seen in at least 10 years. It was on TV, so there were Danish subtitles. I don't have that movie memorized, but it was interesting to see again. For those of you who aren't familiar with all my bizarre obsessions, I was totally batshit about Sister Act when I was about 9-11. That kind of explains the weird nun fixation, huh? Kathleen and I went to a yarn shop today. Mmm, yarn. I bought a bunch (but didn't get into too much trouble), so my needles are happy. We took the ferry to the mainland and spent most of the day walking around Svendborg. Current Mood:  chipper |
|
superhappy |
9:45a | SAMBA It's nice to hear Bellini again. I want to touch Bellini. I sold my Wii to Chris Hastings, but with this and Wario Land Shake, I may have to try finding a new one. =| |
|
davekirtley |
10:09a | My Short Story "The Disciple" Set to Appear in Reprinted Edition of the Dead But Dreaming Anthology I came across this blog entry by Dave Rust, who's been hosting a midnight "Bedtime Stories" event at Convergence, where he's been playing stories from Escape Pod, PodCastle, and Pseudopod (including my short story "The Skull-Faced Boy"). I can't say I've ever heard of an event like this before -- sort of a "virtual reading," no author required. It's an interesting experiment. The same blog also contains this behind-the-scenes tidbit about the Golden Compass movie, courtesy of one of the animators who worked on the film: "Now, for those who thought the film ended abruptly or didn't match the book very well, Vin told us that originally the film did include the final three chapters of the book and followed it very closely. The studio made the decision to have the film re-edited by an action movie editor to 'speed it up.' They also cut out the final three chapters because test audiences felt it was 'too downbeat.' 50 minutes were cut out of the film and many scenes got shuffled around creating continuity errors and plot holes that were not in the original picture. The hope of most the people in the production is to see a Director's Cut of the film come out on DVD which restores the original ending and puts things back in their proper order." Speaking of Pseudopod, my short story "The Disciple," which appeared on the podcast last year, looks set to be reprinted soon. "The Disciple" appeared back in 2002 in a first-rate Lovecraftian anthology titled Dead But Dreaming. This was my first anthology appearance. Unfortunately, Dead But Dreaming fell victim to the infamous "anthology curse" that plagued my early book appearances. For what was supposed to be my first-ever anthology appearance, the publisher paid me for the story (quite well, in fact), but due to a production error they neglected to actually include my story in the book. For Dead But Dreaming, my story made it into the book, but the publisher went out of business the week the book was released and only 75 copies were ever printed. I was offered a chance to buy some of them, but I declined, since I already had other publications and some of the other authors in the book didn't, so I figured I'd be nice and give those other authors first crack at the books, which were quickly snapped up. I've been kicking myself for this ever since, as those rare copies quickly started selling on eBay for upwards of $300. So I guess the moral of the story is: Always buy books with my stories in them. Or something like that. For my next anthology appearance, my story made it into the book and the publisher printed thousands of copies -- but most of those were promptly obliterated in a freak warehouse fire. It was around that time that I started to wonder whether the universe had some objection to me appearing in anthologies. Fortunately, subsequent projects have gone off without a hitch. Anyway, back to Dead But Dreaming. One of the editors states in this forum post, "We hope to release in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more information." |
|
superhappy |
7:30a | Help me Batman.  I couldn't help but notice that a lot of webcomic artists and other indie artists have a penchant for doing Batman parody comics. This is, of course, entirely understandable. |
| getfuzzy_comic2 | 12:01a | Comic for 05 Jul 2008  |
| deefeed | 6:00a | |
| wizard_of_id | 12:01a | Comic for 05 Jul 2008  |
| sinfestfeed | 1:00p | |
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non_sequitur_ [ madmarty ] |
12:34a | Non Sequitur - July 5th, 2008  |
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non_sequitur_ [ madmarty ] |
12:34a | Non Sequitur - July 4th, 2008  |
|
non_sequitur_ [ madmarty ] |
12:32a | Non Sequitur - July 3rd, 2008  |
| dilbertdaily | 12:00a | Comic for July 5, 2008 
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| Friday, July 4th, 2008 | ||
| diatryma | 11:57p | BOOM. Fireworks! The fireworks are usually at City Park. City Park is still kind of damp-- I don't know if it's still underwater, but it wouldn't surprise me. Instead, they set the fireworks off at Hubbard Park, which is a tiny patch of green by the IMU and Old Capitol. It's not ideal; there are trees all over the place. Turns out, trees don't matter when you're that close to the explosions. Good show, lots of enthusiastic people, some frightened babies whisked away by parents who thought it was worth a shot-- those were my parents, only I don't think they did much whisking. There was a blanket full of drunk girls just in front of us, passing around a breathalyzer and discussing which bar to go to after the show. There was a thirty-second section of nothing but aerial bombs. Just boom-boom-boom, flashbulbs with noise. Each one boomed, then echoed off the buildings around us, then rolled off into a background rumble that only showed up when nothing was happening-- every time there was a lull in the bombs, the rumble stepped forward and oh, the noise. I could feel every explosion in my chest, and some of the echoes too. More holidays should have fireworks. |
|
allyscully |
10:00p | At a time when we are still mired in a deadly war of occupation and colonization, a time when even the Democratic candidate for President is reversing his earlier campaign-trail promise of immediate withdrawal with hedging language about 'toning [it] down' and meeting with military hawks to initiate a compromise plan, celebrating a holiday of freedom with explosives and pretend bombs seems ludicrous, insulting, and ghastly. |
| Saturday, July 5th, 2008 | ||
|
nihongo_only [ novenia ] |
12:11a | こんにちは 私の名前はバレリアです。私はアメリカに住んでいます。私は十八才です。 私は4年間日本語を勉強しています。しかし、私はまだそれほど良いです。私はここに来 よろしくおねがいします。 Current Mood:  nervous |
| Friday, July 4th, 2008 | ||
|
tobias_buckell |
3:57p | Quote of the Day
Jim Hines, July 3rd, 2008, on his blog. I like this so much I’m stealing it. Attribution will come, Jim, yes, but this enters into my lexicon of clever things to say about writing. Originally published at Tobias Buckell Online. You can comment here or there. |
|
ghibli [ fitz_carraldo ] |
9:35p | Howl's Moving Castle Comic Hope this is allowed here! I couldn't find anything in the rules about fanart. |
|
cinaed |
3:30p | Murmurings in a Field Hospital "Murmurings In A Field Hospital" by Carl Sandburg [They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.] Come to me only with playthings now… A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers… Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories Of days that never happened anywhere in the world… No more iron cold and real to handle, Shaped for a drive straight ahead. Bring me only beautiful useless things. Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet… And at the window one day in summer Yellow of the new crock of butter Stood against the red of new climbing roses… And the world was all playthings.   Current Mood:  awake |
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pandemonium_bks [ iconocaust ] |
2:16p | Midnight Release for Warhammer 40K Fifth Edition July 12th sees the release of the fifth edition of Warhammer 40,000, Games Workshop's seminal miniatures game of conflict in mankind's dark and distant future. To celebrate, we'll be holding a midnight release party for the game on Friday, July 11th -- the game itself will go on sale at the stroke of midnight, but there'll be additional ad hoc events running both before and after 5th Edition will officially go on sale. |
| makinglight | 5:35p | Hey, McCain and Obama! The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. That's the Fourth Amendment, complete. What part are you having a hard time understanding? Listen, call me on the phone* and I'll explain it to you. --- * That way the NSA can hear too. |
| dorktowerfeed | 12:11p | Dork Tower for 04 Jul 2008 Dork Tower by John KovalicCurrent Comic Please support John by buying his stuff at your favorite game or comic shop. Alternatively you can shop online at Warehouse 23. DT syndication services provided by John 'FuzzFace' McMahon fuzzface00@livejournal.com http://fuzzface00.livejournal.com/ http://www.io.com/~fuzzface/dt/dt.xml Last Build Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:00:00 UTC-0500 |
