“Known for her persistence and ability to embrace difficult characters, Lt. Cmmdr. Rebbeca Jordan used speed and pugnaciousness in leading her Smog Town troops in the Battle for Interstate 5 while still maintaining professional poise and a ready supply of head shots.”

• Latest entry in the sub-optimal feline storage series:



• I just bought this ring. It has a bug in it:

Tippi Hedren from The Birds. via Boing Boing Gadgets, elsewhere.

This is so cool. Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

This one is generated from the prologue & part of the first chapter of The Rules for Hearts. I don’t know how big a block of text you can use — I might try it with more. And I’ll probably do an Empress one too.

via matociquala

Want to play along? Post your CD cover in the comments.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. (Photo credit in this case to .kimmika.)

P.S. Incidentally, this spurred me to join flauntR, which seems like a keen way to do basic, lolcat-level image manipulation without pesky, expensive software.

It’s about getting lost, and getting un-lost.

2. I don’t have a gym story this week, but I have a couple of snippets:

Dude on treadmill, breathing heavily, to his trainer: “Now, I expect my stomach to be gone when I get off this thing!”

Trainer: “Uh uh, I am not responsible for what you do when you’re outside this room.”

Dude: “Well, that ain’t gonna work!”

And there was a bald guy with an eyepatch on the next weight bench over. We were resting between sets, also breathing a bit heavily. He got his breath back: “It ain’t fair we have to work so hard!”

3. I will not explain why I know this, but hey, if you ever just happen to be obsessively cleaning out your house and take a whole lot of things to Goodwill, and then you realize, possibly after someone else in your house informs you of the fact, that one of the things you donated really, really should not have been given away, there is a thing you can do. If you still have your donation slip, and it has not been very long since you have made said donation, you can go to the Manager and fill out a form called “Donation In Error.” And then, if it hasn’t been too long, and nobody’s, you know, bought the thing, then you can have it back.

4. Oh, and in case you haven’t seen it already, Free Rice is, to me at least, way more addictive than Sudoku.

I hadn’t, but I couldn’t get back to sleep, either.

So it was a good thing I had an audiobook. A LONG audiobook. I’m currently listening to George R.R. Martin‘s A Game of Thrones, in part to see how someone who’s incredibly vicious to his characters does it. I’m really glad I’m enjoying it, because it means that I’ll have listening material for months to come.

Now I have three suitcases of differing sizes laid out on the bed, and I am torn between the desire to be fancy and the desire not to take so damn much luggage for once.

Also I am seized with the irrational fear that if I pack my favorite fancy clothes in the giant suitcase,  it will get lost and I will never see said clothes again. Maybe I’ll just take a few fancy items and stuff them into the little carryon.

In sum, Internet, I am very excited about going to NCTE/ALAN (it will be my first time!) but also, I am preoccupied with the trivial.

Which, when it’s not at Goodwill, nicely broken-in with some schmutz on the bottom, possibly makeup, that proves to be mostly removable with the application of hot coffee (I just sort of thought, huh, the coffee’s the same color as the bag, so it won’t mess with the dye, and since it’s hot it’ll probably be good at getting off the stain) — is this.

I have asked this before but I am endlessly fascinated by it: what are your favorite thrift scores??

Advise me, Internet!

And the same search revealed that there is also a Brueghel painting available as a table lamp.

I am now sort of tempted to buy both the wine and the lamp, and juxtapose them. I wonder what else you can get Brueghel paintings on?