Neil Gaiman on the French....

Found from a friend² post:

I have very mixed feelings about Americans disliking the French. I'm English, after all. We have a special relationship with the French: we are in awe of their sophistication, their cuisine and their wines, we think their women are beautiful, we like them as individuals, we badly want to go and live in their country when we retire, while at the same time we are deeply suspicious of them. It's like having people living next door to you who may be snappier dressers and better cooks, but who, after all, borrowed the lawn mower sometime in the thirteenth century and never gave it back. Anyway, the English dislike the French. We're really good at it. We've been doing it ever since we got up one day and realised that the Norman Conquerors were now, like it or not, Us, and weren't conquering French people any more. We feel, frankly, that if anyone's going to dislike the French, it's going to be us. On the whole we manifest our dislike for them by drinking their wines, buying up their cigarettes, and, despite the fact that all English people can naturally roll their Rs and speak perfect French, declining to do so, and when forced by circumstances to speak French the English do it with an English accent on purpose.

These are tactics we've worked out over the course of hundreds of years, and if carried on long enough, they will bring France to its knees. I'm English. I know these things.

Changing the name french fries to freedom fries, on the other hand, will just make them laugh at you.

Las Vegas and other aromatic herbs

So we (Keely, khubli, Flossie, and Team Boobie) booked our flights and rooms for April's Sin City Spectacular. It cost a pretty penny, but I think it'll be worth it. I sent Jerry e-mail to see if he wanted to go, as well, since it looks like I'll be partaking of a single room at the Luxor by my lonesome. Of course, I could hook up with some nymphet while trading chips at the Bellagio Poker Room, but since I'd expect the women at the poker tables (aside from those going on the trip) to be at least seven years my senior, as well as the abject terror which grips me when it comes to talking to new people, I'll probably be spending my room time alone.

( I went indoor rock climbing for the first time in almost a year )

I just found Iusedtobelieve.com from a FOAF. A particularly funny entry:

For some reason, when I was a little kid I was convinced that if you hooked two nine volt batteries to each other, they'd explode violently and destroy anything within about 100 feet.

Some part of me still thinks this. batnandu suggested that we try it sometime--connect two nine-volts and leave them someplace. You'd think that someone would have already done this experiment and written it up on some website, but a cursory search of Google turns up nothing but a description of devices which use two nine-volts.


My parents are coming up this weekend. I need to clean the condo up and put away all the, umm, non-childish things.... I've already thrown a bunch of stuff into the closet, which is a veritable jungle of boxes and papers, but since my father is a bit of a stickler for "proper" bookkeeping, I need to get all my bills and statements in order.


I'm writing something. Nothing particularly concrete as of yet, but listening to some of Philip K. Dick's stories--"Second Variety," "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," "Paycheck," and "The Minority Report"--on the way down and back up from Miami put me in a writing mood.

The story which I'm writing puts a different spin on Rekal from "Wholesale"--what if you could rent someone else's body to wear for an hour, a day, or a week? What kind of person would allow themselves to be rented out?

Bronze Archives will be down this weekend...

Apparently a break in a water line at the University of Florida Computer Science department means that they need to shut down every machine in the building. Since the Bronze VIP Posting Board Archives are located on the CISE web server, this means they'll be shut down, too (yes, I know I need to move the archives--I am a lazy, lazy bastard).

Because everything is handled through scheduled scripts, that means the archive program won't run until the machines are back up. I'll make sure to get everything from the Beta Temporary VIP Archive.

I'll let everyone know what's up when I get an update.