Noise in the Shape of Writing

Don't be so credulous, kid. You'll go blind if you do that.

New York Times' Pete Wells on the new (and more fun) Rum Rebellion

FOR a drink with a ball gag in its mouth, the Night Marcher has a lot to say about where cocktail culture may be heading.


Um... Richard... Aaron... road trip?

( If you're interested, my tweets can be found behind this cut )

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Have Twitter? Follow me! @amianda

Hi all!

My family is selling an antique Steinway player piano. It was built sometime in the 20's (probably), has an art case that is in perfect condition, and a Duo Art playing mechanism. It is a medium grand. For pictures, go here. There isn't a "distance" shot of this, as these photos were taken for an appraiser. We also have rolls for the piano and the original manual. It's located in Van Nuys, CA right now and would need to be picked up by professional movers, installed, and then tuned and maintenanced. It is in working order, just needs the routine maintenance done (tuning, cleaning, etc.)

If you, or someone you know, might be interested, please send them my way.

Anything is possible. But the probability curve has an asymptote.

Oh my. More than a year and I still don't have theatre-specific icon on here. Oops. Cupcake from Tracing Sonny will have to do.

Busy around here all of a sudden and I'm handling it gracefully by ignoring it all. Getting the laundry done, listening to metal, doing a crossword puzzle. (and writing this entry) You'd never guess at the mountain of work I'm ignoring.

Still have a ton of busy work from my mom. Which doesn't have to get done right away but I feel the sooner it's gone the happier I'll be (plus then I get paid - woo, half a tank of gas here I come!) It's also tedious so I'm not crazy about the work itself, even if it does give me something to do while watching archived Daily Show and stuff on Hulu.

Last night two folks reached out to me and made me feel all warm 'n fuzzy. The assistant artistic director of Son of Semele Ensemble gave me a call to ask if I'd like to stage manage a play for them. Rehearsals start in two weeks (just some stuff to get on the same page before the holidays then we come back in the second of January). Edgar was really nice in talking to me and it totally made my day. Stage managing is sort of the technical dirty business that few theatre people want to do but it was cool of him to reach out to someone not in the company. I'll work with Barbara who directed Melancholy Play, the only play I've done at SOSE so far, so I don't have to get used to a whole new director. (Hopefully the personality issues are clearer now. But I won't really know until tech week, when *everyone's* blood pressure tends to boil over.) I accepted of course and now I have to read the (very long) play and give Barbara a call. There's a tiny scheduling conflict that's giving me a lot of agita but Edgar is aware and I hope he'll be able to solve the issue for me.

The other person was diabhol who randomly let me know he was thinking of me. Where and why probably better left offline. But it made me smile. }:>

Tomorrow I have jury duty. Naturally. I don't mean that I'm annoyed to have jury duty, I don't have much that's better to do right now. But that with jury duty suddenly my schedule has loaded up. Because there is just no way I can have one thing to do at a time. The universe just hates that shit. So I'll take the play and spiral notebook with me (they have wifi but I doubt there's a good reason to take my laptop) and get a bit of work done while killing time in the jury pool.

Oh and they're just going to love me down at the courthouse. I've had an occasional cough over the past week and today it's developed into a scatchy throat that I feel like I continuously need to clear. I'm chugging hot tea with honey but the ease it brings only lasts a few seconds. }:/ I don't have enough tea or honey to keep this up. Here's hoping it doesn't get worse.

Friday I help CK move and Saturday is the last USC conference game plus a certain cocktail party.

All in all, except for the throat thing, and the everpresent worry over money, I'm pretty good with all this.

( If you're interested, my tweets can be found behind this cut )

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Have Twitter? Follow me! @amianda

From LAST

Hangover Square is perhaps not a great film, but it does have great moments, including the climax. Laird Cregar plays a classical composer (in 1890s London) with a cinematic dissociative disorder -- discordant noises send him into amnesiac rages. Yes, a pretty lame gimmick.
Despite a budding romance with the good girl, he falls in with the very very very naughty Linda Darnell as a dancehall singer. She quickly has him eating out of her hand, and who could blame him?
( Read more... )

Don't be afraid to toot your own horn. Just keep the volume at a reasonable level.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

I've been idly pondering in my copious spare time a question regarding theories of planetary formation (and no, I'm not making this up, it's a writing thing):

As far as I know, nobody has yet established a direct correlation between the (spectrographically determined) chemical composition of stars and the chemicals likely to be present in extrasolar planets. (In other words, "If your star has lots of iron, manganese and chlorine, for example, its planets will have them, too.") Is this right?

(I know that there are theories out there indicating that some chemical presences in stars seem to be more frequent when they have planets at all, but that's not the same thing.)

For all I know, maybe nobody thinks that stellar composition has such a relationship with planetary composition. I realize also that we probably have next to nothing by way of spectrographic analysis of extrasolar planets' chemistry (and are lucky just to know they're there), but still... are there any theories about this?

If only I had brilliant friends who know far more about astrophysics than I do, I'd have someplace to begin besides tons of research in texts I can barely read...

MSNBC's Morning Joe's Mike Brzezinski makes a case for women getting married and making babies early on, essentially at the same time as creating a foundation for their careers.

Don't push away that chance if you're one of the lucky ones who find that partner. And remember, you can always change a job. I hear it's much harder to switch out a husband.

But let's talk about the greatest gift a woman can receive: being a mommy. For professional women, there simply is NO good time to have a baby. Putting it off only makes the challenges greater. Having babies after 35 increases medical risk and is, lets face it, exhausting. It is also trying on a marriage and a career.

Right so, if in college, or even perhaps in high school, a girl finds herself besotted with a dude who's not strictly against marriage and(or?) kids she should snag him on the spot! Never mind getting any kind of perspective. Never mind living out HER life without being someone's provider and partner for a little bit.

The biological is the only hard rational reason for scheduling pregnancies in one's 20s. Nothing else Ms Brzezinsky (daughter of Zbigniew) cites really makes the "challenges" particular to a given age. Kids are always exhausting. At 22 my sister was continually tired thanks to her infant daughter. Marriage is always tricky. blah.


Is it bad that I hope one of Ms Brzezinski's daughters gets pregnant in college? And/or gets engaged to the first loser that comes along?

( If you're interested, my tweets can be found behind this cut )

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Have Twitter? Follow me! @amianda

Sushi tastes best on the way down.

O the wailing and gnashing of teeth that will ensue when friends and relatives receive our holiday cards so early in the season! We blanket the world in dismay and envy! Mwahahaha!

Speaking of mind-numbing horror, I finished reading Ligotti's Teatro Grotesco, a collection of his distinctive short stories, like dreams or urban legends from some region just over the border. Fantastic and evocative stuff, but sometimes I wish he'd dial it back to 10 from 11. Then again, maybe if they made even a smidgen more sense they wouldn't be what they are. I like his work a lot, even if I wind up scratching my head in abject befuddlement afterwards. I may even have generated a [not too derivative] story idea, though I doubt I can ape Ligotti well enough to execute it successfully.

You may recall, dear reader, that I skipped a week in my 'read a book a week' resolution a couple weeks back when professional obligations and social commitments left me with four busy evenings in a row. I wrapped up the book last week and I've taken advantage of the holiday break to get myself back on track by polishing off two books! I'd actually rather hoped to get three books in, but remarkably, staying in LA actually led to less time to read than driving up to San Jose would have done.

The lovely bewcastle started feeling sniffly at the beginning of the week, and we started considering the possibility that we would not be able to head up to San Jose to have Thanksgiving with her family, which has been our tradition since we got married. Tuesday found her feeling worse, so we decided to pull the plug on the trip. It's not that she was too miserable to travel so much as we feared bringing germs into her elderly mom's home. What's a minor annoyance of congestion and coughing for a healthy younger person can be much more serious to somebody older after all.

Now, ordinarily we drive up to San Jose on Wednesday morning and return home Saturday afternoon, so we have Sunday to do laundry and recharge our batteries for Monday's return to work. That's about 12-14 hours of found time, hence my optimistic assessment of getting a third book read. The reasons why I had to settle for two, however, are perfectly fine with me - I got to spend lots of time with friends!

Wednesday was spent in relaxing and getting the last-minute shopping done so we could actually have a Thanksgiving dinner for ourselves, the preparation of which occupied a chunk of Thursday. No big turkey for just the two of us, just a turkey breast complemented by some chicken drumsticks so bewcastle could have some dark meat. The mashed potatoes, acorn squash, and brussel sprouts were all fresh, and while the stuffing (StoveTop, I will confess) and pies (store-bought at Trader Joe's) were not, the meal was delicious. Friday I met my friend JM for lunch at In-N-Out (it is our custom to stop at the Santa Barbara In-n-Out for lunch on our way up to San Jose each year, and i was missing my double-double with animal fries fix) followed by a pleasant early afternoon geeking out at the gaming store. I bought my first random pack of D&D minis (I usually buy from the store's excellent display) and got a dragon among the figures! Woohoo! Not that I really have any use for a dragon in my campaign - nope! None whatsoever. I really can't imagine what I'd do with a dragon...

Anyway, later Friday we headed over to get our trivia on with zorker and postgoodism who invited us over to contribute to the hive mind in the XBox 1 vs. 100 game that was slated for that evening. We had a lot of fun, and in our last round we finished in the top 100 players - out of over 50,000 nationwide and across Canada! Yay us! The secret, as in Jeopardy!, seems to be having a quick trigger finger. Knowing the answer before they flash the choices is a decided advantage.

Saturday we went to the Page Museum with Rzelle and CDSB, who took his mind off his broken bones by looking at... bones, some of which were broken (I stole that quip from CDSB's facebook feed, to give proper credit). Despite livng within walking distance of the place, I'd never actually been. Well, now it's off my 'to do' list, and well worth the trip! Impressive skeletons of Ice Age megafauna, but the sheer scale of what they've taken out of the pits (one display showed 404 dire wolf skulls!) matched the individually impressive specimens. Still need to see the Natural History Museum by USC, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Any other suggestions for big cultural sites in the area? I've done the Getty (museum and villa), LACMA, Huntington, and Norton Simon (a return trip is pending for the near future) to name some of the biggies...

I do have two books to review don't I? Well, I'll keep things brief, as both books were installments of series I've already praised in earlier reviews. Simon Scarrow's The Eagle in the Sand follows the continued adventures of centurions Macro and Cato. In this installment, they find themselves shipped to Judea to take command of an auxiliary cohort garrisoning a border fort guarding a caravan route from Arabia to the Mediterranean ports. This, however, is only their cover. The emperor's chief spy suspects that the governor of Syria is interested in stirring up the always-restless Jews into revolt for his own nefarious purposes. Is the brutality of the Roman garrison in the area an understandable reaction to relentless hostility from the natives, or something more sinister? The plot keeps the pages turning, and the battle scenes are, as usual, top notch - well-imagined, exciting, and original. You never get the feeling with Scarrow, as you do with some lesser writers, that you're just seeing the same verbal bits rearranged. It's also great fun to try to pick out his reimagining of Biblical figures who pop up to play key roles in the plot, from a burly caravan guard named Simeon to the matriarch of a pacifistic sect named Miriam, both followers of a local rabble-rouser/prophet executed by the Romans a decade or so earlier. If there's one flaw to the book, it's the plot twist that keeps Cato and Macro from taking full command of the garrison immediately upon their arrival. While the complications that ensue are suspenseful, the underlying premise to this particular thread in the plot seems a bit contrived. On the whole though, if you've made it this far into the series, such a minor problem is easy to overlook.

I have to keep my complaints about the second installment of Joseph Delaney's Last Apprentice series, The Curse of the Bane, a but more vague as I'd give away too much of the plot if I got too specific. Suffice it to say one of the main villains (although not the Bane of the title) is a bit too boo-hiss EE-VILLE for my tastes - I like my bad guys highlighted in shades of gray, a bit more complicated than this one. Delaney usually complies - most of the characters are complex and ambiguous, which is why I will be coming back for future installments. But the handling of this one villainous character rankles whenever he appears. The rest of the plot, however, is suspenseful, the characters compelling, the setting engaging, and the action hair-raising. I'm glad to see there are several more in the pipeline.

Well, I'm off to make a bigger dent in William Gibson's latest, Spook Country. The start has been slow, but he's done enough good things in the past to earn some patience from me. I'll report next week whether it was deserved.

When I say that we should do more things together, that does not include having the flu at the same time.

( If you're interested, my tweets can be found behind this cut )

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Have Twitter? Follow me! @amianda

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )