Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:15 PM

Well, I only had to go back about 160 posts in my LJ friends pages for the 36+ hours since I was last online. Not bad. Two items that particularly made me laugh out loud:

1. Seen numerous places: The actor playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's (antisemitic) passion play was struck by lightning. According to witnesses, the lightning forked and hit both the actor and an assistant director. And this is the second time that particular assistant director has been hit by lightning on the shoot! Nobody was hurt either time, but... well, make your own obvious joke about divine intervention.
2. This account of a cooking project gone horribly wrong... which led me to discover the LJ community failed_recipe and start reading back a ways. Oh dear gd -- the horror! And the humor. Oy.

This post by zeppo didn't make me rush to call my husband, as the others did (no web connection at home means I can't just IM him the links, as I usually do), but I did cheer at the poetic justice of the grill cook's response. [Although the final resolution diminished some of the smug perfection.]

BTW, when I was asking about outlining tools, Darkhawk commented to suggest something lo-tech, like notecards. I responded that I might try Post-It Notes, where the advantage of adhesiveness might outweigh the more flimsy nature of the material. Amid the flotsom of my friends list, I discovered this technique for outlining w/Post-Its via Peg Kerr. Cool.

[Of course, this reminds me of one more problem caused by the home web outage -- access to my NaNoWriMo story. I do sometimes work on the story here at the workplace. As I've said elsewhere, when the phones aren't ringing, I have to do something with my time. I use some hidden folders on my website to store the latest version of the story, so I can access it and update it anywhere. So, the loss of my web connection has also affected my ability to work on my NaNoWriMo story. Also annoying, three songs that I suddenly desperately wanted to hear were all ones that I don't own, but listen to streaming versions. FWIW, the tunes in question were School of Rock, Coin-operated Boy by the Dresden Dolls, and Spirit in the Sky from last year's Comic Relief. But I digress.]

BTW, Sisyphus Shrugged is an excellent news blog. She was the first to comment upon the juxtaposition between Rush Limbaugh going to rehab for the third time for using illegal drugs and Tommy Chong getting months in federal prison for selling glass art. [I can't believe nobody else thought of that angle til now.] From an interview with Chong:

"It's a totally different case. Mine is political, his is medical. Is it unfair? Yes, it is. But I would hate to have Rush Limbaugh change the way they handle addicts. You don't put addicts in jail, you put them in rehab. You put political figures like myself in jail."

Classy. [And, before anybody gets hackles up trying to diminish what Rush did, it's only precription medicine when you're following a doctor's prescription; if you're making late-night deals in parking lots, that's a whole 'nother ballgame.]

And now, lunch is over, and it's back to work for another several hours. Later!

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:40 PM

It seemed to work so well last week, so I think I'll do it again.

What Irrational Number Are You?

You are φ Of all the irrational numbers, you are considered to be the most beautiful. Those who know you well have called you by many names, all golden. However, most people don't know you by name and probably won't even recognize you by sight, but they do like to see you. Despite your pretty face, you are by no means shallow. You are involved it many things: finance, biology, architecture, art, music, and much more. In some ways you and e are a nearly perfect match. The power and intensity of e excites you. Your lucky number is approximately 1.61803399

Shiny Lemur Straif's Blog

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The Force of Nature Quiz: Somewhat poorly designed, and some of the questions don't offer enough or precisely the right answers, but on my first try (and without trying to spin the results in any way), I got:

Have I ever mentioned how spring and fall are my favorite seasons, when it's what I like to call cloak weather (when it's neither too hot nor too cold for me to wear my wool cloak). And I adore windy days. I had near brushes with two hurricanes in my life -- Elena and Bob, both of which threatened my region before switching direction and heading off someplace else. I have fond memories of times during these storms of going outside when it wasn't raining and the winds were just gusting incredibly high. <sigh> The Tampa Museum of Science and Industry has a hurricane simulation chamber with 74 mph winds. I wanna go.

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Last Friday, I mentioned that I rather liked the quizzes by OutOfService.com, which actually appears to be run by some academics involved in psychology research.

One of their tests, Are you a blurter or a brooder? asks you to rate not just yourself, but your partner (if you're involved in a relationship). I took it, and then made Ian take it before telling him about my results. Interestingly enough, we came up with comparable answers. Both of us rated both of us as brooders rather than blurters, and "recent findings indicate that people are happiest in relationships when their blirt levels match." I rated myself as more critical than Ian, while he considered us both to be in the moderate range. FWIW, here are my results and Ian's.

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Finally, also updating from last week, I got the results from my Car Talk Car-O-Scope. A few excerpts:

Boy oh boy, Lis, you picked a vehicle that just isn't quite right for you. You're compatible with your Toyota Camry only in terms of your tolerance for taking risks and your income.

When compared to other people who drive a Toyota Camry, you're a bit too young to be driving this vehicle, you're, well--to be generous--a bit too frugal, you're just too educated to be driving a Toyota Camry, you are a little too much of a snob, you are much more objective and logical, and you just don't care as much about your car as other Toyota Camry owners

They go on, thinking I'd be far happier with one of these models:

1. Buick Skyhawk
2. Nissan King Cab
3. Dodge Colt Vista
4. Oldsmobile Cutlass
5. Buick Roadmaster

Feh. I like my Camry, and none of the cars they recommend sound in the least bit appealing. The radio show includes a segment called "Stump the chumps" in which they contact previous callers to determine whether their advice had been useful. This time, I think they blew it. Ah well, they can't all be gems.

Maybe more quizzes next week.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:30 AM

Wednesday night, sometime during Smallville and Angel, our cable modem went out. :( The cable company's sending somebody to look at it tomorrow. And then yesterday I was home sick, a combined victim of the sudden drop in temperatures and early cramps. [Lis's preferred cramp remedy: 2 tablets of Midol, 2 shots of a good liquor (I prefer Gekkeikan Silver sake), and then nap for several hours until most of the pain has passed.] At any rate, since I do most of my newsreading and interpersonal communications online, I felt rather disassociated yesterday.

I realized yesterday that the only times I've actually lived with someone not already well-known to me were: the summer in HS I attended BC, my first semester freshman year (my roommate moved out 2nd semester, leaving me the room to myself), and my junior year summer sublet. Other than that, I've always lived with friends or alone. I've often argued that living alone builds useful skills, and I think in some ways I'm more self-reliant than those who have always shared living arrangements. But I think that goes the other way, too.

Since Ian got the job at the Harvard Club (he didn't actually get the fulltime Commonwealth Lounge position, but is getting lots of hours and is being trained to handle any of the bars in the place), we only rented out the back rooms downstairs, making the front rooms of the first floor into shared space. So, we're interacting more, but between my introvertedness and some weirdness about mixing business relationships and friendships, I still feel awkward. But Ian's a natural at the people-skills and they're already making grand plans together for restoring the house.

It's rather disturbing that in the month he's lived here, Dave's done so much work on our house. I won't go so far as Ian to say he's done more work, because we did spend several thousand on the wiring when we first moved in and a small fortune replacing all the windows, but aside from those big projects, Dave's done a lot more, and done a lot more of the deferred basic maintenance stuff, like cleaning up the side of the house and the basement.

I think some of that also stems from the fact that he already had a close relationship with the third floor tenants before moving in. In fact, he became our tenant because he was so close to our other tenants. That means he's far more willing and able to go through and rearrange their stuff than Ian and I have been, with our (possibly exaggerated) concerns over our liability as landlords. Dave's putting so much work into the house, in ways that are improving our home's value, that I almost wonder whether we're taking advantage of him somehow. But Ian reassures me that he's looked at comparable rates for renting of rooms, and we're charging him below market rates, meaning that we are being fair, even with his additional work.

He's found a kerosene chandelier in the basement! Probably one of the original fixtures to our house. It was in several pieces, but he seems to have uncovered them all and bolted it back together again. All it needs is a glass (if we want one), a fresh wick, a good cleaning, and a place to hang it. [Unfortunately, the logical place in the front hall, where an electric light fixture is currently, is too close to where the smoke detector was placed.] It is just so cool! [This item on eBay has a similar look, as do these; ours is cast iron and has a nifty counterweight thingie that allows the lamp to be lowered for refilling/turning on & off and then raised when in use.] He's also found either a well or a very deep covered pit while cleaning out a small storage area along the side of the house. We haven't explored that further. [How do you lose a well?] And he also came across a stack of newspapers from 1977 or 1978 in good condition. I wonder whether we have anything from the Blizzard of '78 and/or original reviews of Star Wars? [I doubt they're worth much for resale unless we've got a big event, but should be amusing to skim through.]

And I suppose that's about it for this morning.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:30 PM

And so much for my prediction of changing the tone. :)

Thanks to browngirl, I just found this essay against NaNoWriMo, by someone who claims NaNoWriMo diminishes professional novelists by somehow trivializing the term.

Browngirl has already started a thread to discuss the merits of Hromic's arguments, and I've given my response here. But, like browngirl, I'm curious to hear what other "real writers" have to say about NaNoWriMo, and while our readerships overlap, they also diverge. Feel free to post your responses in her journal with the rest of the discussion.

Having recently read Stephen King's On writing, I just found this article in which seven professional writers "what they thought about the book and how their own writing style corresponds to King's" One of the respondents is Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket. [I'm particularly amused by Handler's metaphors on outlining]

I didn't read all the questions or answers, but will share this one, since it's one of King's suggestions that I've been noodling over:

One of the many nuggets of advice contained in On Writing is to do a first draft, put the bad boy in a drawer for six weeks, and then take it out and read it again. King notes, however, that this method, while it works for him is not universal; some authors write and revise a page until it is right, then proceed to the next page, and so on. What do you do?

And, interestingly enough, most of the authors admire the sentiment, and agree at least somewhat with the intentions behind it. They do some revision during the first draft, but mostly seem to separate the act of writing from the act of editing, using the first draft to move forward more than they look back. Which seems, in certain respects, an endorsement of part of the NaNoWriMo method.

To produce 50,000 words in a month without taking a sabbatical from the real world to do it in (in other words, while working a full-time job, as opposed to those who can afford to be full-time writers), one can't afford to get bogged down in rewriting and revising. Rather than getting stuck for months until I can get the tone of a scene right, or trying to figure out how to seamlessly weave in a certain piece of foreshadowing, I'll just write it clumsily, continue to the next scene and later go back to finesse the details. It can't be worse than my previous technique, which completely stalled the story in Chapter Four.

One thing that means is that you shouldn't expect to read my completed story on December 1st. Even if I finish the story, I'll probably still need time to polish the rough edges. And I'll probably want to get back to my former beta readers and see if they're still interested and available to get their takes.

As part of my NaNo prep, I have put the first 3.5 chapters (which I wrote this spring) in close to a final form. I've also moved them into a separate file (so it doesn't blow my "official" NaNo wordcount). If anybody's interested in reading them, let me know, and I could make it available. [The chapters have been modified from my original postings on FictionAlley. After/assuming I finish it, I will re-post the entire story on that site for the benefit of those early readers.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:25 PM

Remember what I've said in the past about the pendulum-like nature of blogging?

Three days ago, I posted to comment on this trend, as a possible warning to readers. Even though I knew Murphy plays havoc with such statements, I really thought that the drive to NaNoWriMo would be preoccupying enough to divert me from news-blogging. And it has been about two weeks since I last felt driven to do a great deal of heavy newsblogging (looking back to about Oct 9th).

Then, just before lunch, I see one news story that causes such jaw-dropping astonishment that I can't help blog it. And then I see another, and then I start thinking about other things I've read recently that I really wish I thought to mention...

My unpredictability can be so predictable, sometimes...

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:55 PM

Alas, a blog makes a pretty persuasive argument for case: "So why isn't there a national ban on late-term abortions? Because the Republicans don't want one." [via BT!]

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:40 PM

I am simply agog at this New Yorker excerpt blogged by corrente:

Who produced the fake Niger papers?
...
[A] small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

"The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former [senior CIA] officer said. "They said, 'O.K, we're going to put the bite on these guys.'" My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. "Everyone was bragging about it -- 'Here's what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.'" These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the SISMI[Italian] intelligence.
...
The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration.

Too bad they didn't out the docs as fake earlier, when it might've still done some good. By now, those faked papers have been used to justify a war, and in defending them, the administration outed and smeared a CIA operative, in an action even Dick Armey says "was just a short-sighted, self-centered, simple-minded cowardly act of revenge. [via Kicking Ass]

Evidence of this is all over the blogs I read. This administration was so desperate to justify an invasion of Iraq, that they jumped on anything that would support their worldview, no matter how fragile, and dismissed anything even remotely critical. And now, our soldiers and Iraqi citizens are paying the price.

Despicable.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:25 AM

Well, it looks like this journal is taking a turn towards more introspective and internal and away from the more external and political material. Of course, as I have often learned, such attempts at prediction are usually their own undoing, and some new news story is likely to capture center stage of my attention because of making this statement.

But, if I actually do intend to succeed in NaNoWriMo and write 50,000 words over the month of November, then I'll have to focus on that writing over my blog or other leisure pursuits. And I would like to finish the story.

Over the weekend, I read Stephen King's On Writing after noticing it serendipitously in the library. He uses an interesting metaphor of story as a found object -- akin to a fossil or an artifact. The writer's goal, like that of a paleontologist or archaeologist, is to extract it as intact as possible. At least as far as this story is concerned, that actually seems to work for me.

King also describes writing as a form of telepathy. The OED defines telepathy as ‘The communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense´ Realistically, words are a channel, but I'm still trying to communicate what's in my head, as vividly and intact as possible, to other people.

In his comments to my high school fiction, the Admiral said:

Nice story. Why did you feel so bad/silly the next day for sharing it?

It honestly took me quite a bit of thought to answer that question, and it's still tentative.

At any rate, Stephen King likes to write 2000 words per day, which would add up to 60,000 words per month. If I could manage that rate, I could take five days off and still meet the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words. I suppose it's rather selfish of me to put this internal competition ahead of other people's needs, but I rather hope we don't have too many social activities over the month so I can write every day. And, looking at it that way, I guess I ought to get off my duff and pull my outline together, so fewer things interrupt the actuall writing month. As I've said, I have a good idea what major events need to take place, but the ordering of them is still somewhat up in the air.

Other random thoughts:

• Skills atrophy through disuse. I've gotten so used to Ian doing all the cooking that now that he's working nights, I've got to relearn how to prepare dinner for myself... Doesn't that sound pitiful, somehow?

Ian and I will also have to redivide the chores. When I was working fulltime, bringing in an IBM income, and he stayed at home, it was reasonable to divide things like the 1950s model (albeit with genders swapped).

Now that he's working about 66% the hours of mine, and bringing in about 50% of my income, it only seems fair to reorganize. Which may mean I actually have to learn how to operate our washing machine, finally...

• We saw School of Rock over the weekend. Good movie, fun movie, but not as over-the-top great as many of the reviewers let me to believe. Very formulaic, and too many of those sitcom-like cringeworthy moments where you can see something embarrassing is about to happen and just wish they'd get it over with. But the ending really rocks, and honestly redeemed many of the earlier problems. I don't know that I need to watch the whole film again, but I've been listening to the final song (via music video here) over and over and over again. Oh, and I really want a legible copy of the chalkboard chart he draws giving the history and connections of Rock and Roll.