Into the light, lurkers!

One year ago I ran my first annual Delurking Week here at Byzantium’s Shores, and I figure it’s time to run one again. So, if you will, lurkers, please feel free to drop a note in comments! You can do so anonymously if you wish, of the “Shout-out from Walla Walla, Washington” variety; you can also do so via e-mail if so desired. Feel free to comment, ask something, whatever. I’m curious as to who’s out there!

(I’m especially curious about you. No, not you, you. Yeah, you. What are you doing with that chainsaw?)

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Tremble, mere mortals!

I’m writing this entry not from home, but from the wi-fi enabled cafe at another location of The Store. (My own Store does not currently have wi-fi, because the local telecom carriers don’t yet have a transmitter in close enough proximity to The Store for wi-fi to be possible.) I honestly don’t remember if I’ve ever posted to the blog from outside the friendly confines of Casa Jaquandor, so this may well be a first of epic proportions. I’m sitting here, drinking strawberry-infused iced tea, typing away as I generate the second draft of a short story I finished some time ago, and I’m happy as a clam.

(One day, someone’s going to have to do some actual scientific research as to the happiness of clams. How happy can they be, really?)

Oh, and I’ve got my cell phone on, too. In one fell swoop, I have planted my feet squarely in 2004! (I’m still lacking an iPod, obviously.)

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Holding Pattern Delta!

I’m not sure what “Holding Pattern Delta” involves, but it sounds cool, so that’s what I’m going with!

Anyhow, regular life this week still has lots of stuff in the hopper, what with The Wife’s vacation, family stuff, and various other activities planned, so posting here will still be sporadic for probably a week or so. I’ll try to have some Sentential Links and a Burst of Weirdness at some point, but they may not appear on their standard days.

By way of a progress report of sorts, in conjunction with my recent birthday (last week, for you lazy stragglers!), The Wife and I took a one-night trip into the Fingerlakes region (a few photos of which are available on my Flickr stream, accessible through the “Flickr Badge” thing in the sidebar). We took a scenic drive during which we did not enter a single four-lane, limited exchange highway, either the NYS Thruway or any other such expressway, which is really still the best way to see places. There was birthday cake and birthday pie, there was an Apple Festival in Ithaca (holy used bookstores, Batman!), one of the best toystores I’ve ever seen (don’t tell The Daughter! One of her Christmas presents is in our closet!), and other nice things done. And today we’re going to Pumpkinville…and I’m planning another round of tie-dying this week…and in between all that, I’m escaping to the planet Barsoom to adventure alongside Captain John Carter.

So anyway, keep checking in!

(Oh by the way, nobody still has made any guesses on Unidentified Earth 18, so I’ll keep narrowing it down. It’s in Oregon, folks. Come on! Somebody’s gotta know what that thing is!)

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Here I go, again on my own….

Actually, I’m not sure what that post title has to do with anything, but it’s what leaped to mind, so there it is. Some notes:

:: Exactly fourteen years ago today, I turned twenty-two years old. Good times, those were! I remember it as though it was…fourteen years ago.

:: Happy Birthday George Gershwin, wherever you are! S’wonderful, s’marvelous, she should care for me….

:: Things may look a little weird around here for a while. I’ve exceeded the bandwidth limit on where I keep my graphics, and I don’t have time to try to fix it until later.

:: Only one guess thus far at last week’s Unidentified Earth, so apparently a hint is in order? Pictured therein is the only municipally operated one of these in the United States.

:: Here’s an article about the twenty greatest spaceship captains. It’s pretty good, up until the final five, when it gets the rankings horribly, awfully wrong.

:: EW, a magazine I wrote off years ago because I finally couldn’t take the insufferably smug tone of its critics, has a fairly non-smug selection of the Top ten episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They’re all superb episodes, and their Number One episode is also my Number One episode, which is nice. (Both these links from SFSignal.)

:: The women of SWILL have created a calendar which they are selling in order to raise money for Living Beyond Breast Cancer. Buy one here.

:: October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. More info here. Consider lighting a candle that night at 7:00 pm.

On a meta-blogging note, posting will be light for the next few days, and possibly even a week. The Wife starts a much-needed vacation tomorrow, and I’ll be taking a couple of days off from work in order to spend time with her and with The Daughter and do stuff that doesn’t involve a keyboard but may involve large amounts of Cool-whip. Behave, folks!

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Useless Factoidia

A bunch o’ stuff!

:: Several people have indicated that they were highly amused by the bunny with the pancake on its head. That’s great! But there turns out to be a backstory here: the bunny (now sadly deceased) was named Oolong, and had the ability to balance stuff on its head, an ability which was “exploited” by Oolong’s owner for Internet photos. The stuff you learn!

:: Reader Charlie (who hails from Iowa City!) directs my attention to this set of 2007 NFL predictions, which equates each team with a Star Wars character. This is pretty funny stuff…although Norwood’s miss was almost 17 years ago! Can’t we move past that as the defining moment for this franchise?

:: I don’t know about this possible approach to Star Trek that may be in the offing in the movie JJ Abrams is making. Basically the idea is that old Trek standby, the “bad guys go back in time to alter history so our heroes never existed” plot or something like that — but the plot succeeds in some fashion, meaning that instead of telling a story set within established Trek canon but in the days of James T. Kirk’s years at Starfleet Academy, Abrams is literally re-setting the timeline to zero. It’s an interesting approach, but I like established Trek canon, and I’ve never much enjoyed JJ Abrams’s work, so we’ll see.

:: I’ve had some search hits the last day or two for JP Losman on the Jim Rome Show; I assume they’re looking for this interview Rome did. We’ll see how he does on the field, but as far as talking to media goes, Losman’s come a long way. I really hope he succeeds as the quarterback here, because Losman’s just one of the most likable guys to come to Buffalo in a long time. He just seems like a good guy, and I hope his career reflects that.

:: For some reason I’m also getting lots of search engine hits for “What was the Millennium Falcon in when it lost its topside radar dish”, or some variant wording thereof. The answer is, of course, the superstructure of the Death Star II.

:: I sympathize with a guy who got sick, certainly, but I’m flummoxed as to how anyone could consume multiple bags of microwave popcorn on a daily basis for over a decade. I adore popcorn, and I don’t even eat it every week, much less every day. Wow.

:: Matthew Yglesias has a good, and brief, post about Sen. Larry Craig. I agree with pretty much every word.

:: A couple of weeks ago, Jayme e-mailed me about For Better or For Worse, when the strip was in the middle of a week-long thing where all that happened was Liz going on in very long-winded fashion to her friend Candice about how Anthony’s life has been a disaster and how he ended up in a terribly unhappy marriage and how now he’s free and he’s the love of her life and all that jazz. As Jayme wrote:

Seems to me that Lynn Johnson is going out of her way to justify the storyline’s direction, and writing almost a point-by-point rebuttal of bloggers’ gripes in the process.

Well, Comics Curmudgeon is on the case, finding an interesting parallel between recent “present day” events in FOOB and the past events that the strip is now depicting in some kind of weird flashback mode.

Personally, I find that reading Michael’s narration makes me hear the voice of Bob Saget in my head, and that’s never a good thing.

:: Here’s a fine essay on how we’ve lost “silence”:

Just give me five minutes without it; that’s all I ask, perhaps all I’ll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor’s home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical “negative space.” Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.

(via)

:: I think that now I know where Linus will be hanging out this Halloween. He’s looking, after all, for the most sincere of all pumpkin patches!

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Moving along….

OK, folks, I’m not returning to regular blogging just yet — that’ll be on Tuesday, day after tomorrow — but I’d like to push that bummer of a post down so it’s not the first thing people see when they load the blog.

Of course, I need something to take up some space here, so I guess it’s time to invoke an old piece of Net lore. So, without further ado, here’s a bunny with a pancake on its head.

Have a good Labor Day, folks, and look for new content on Tuesday.

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Be well.

[Updated below]

The three posts that appear directly below this one were all written yesterday and saved in draft form, which is why they’re appearing at all.

Due to a sudden and dramatic shift in my personal circumstances, I am putting this blog on an indefinite hiatus. I genuinely don’t know when I’ll be able to return. If it’s sooner, then so much the better; if it’s later, then we’ll meet again one day.

Farewell for now.

UPDATE 8-28-07: Thanks to everyone who has either commented or e-mailed with well-wishes; as ever, it means a great deal to me. While all this falls into the general category of “Stuff I won’t blog about except to mention in such vague terms that nobody but me will ever know what I’m really talking about here”, I can at least report that today things are better, and that my return will, in all likelihood, be in fact sooner rather than later.

However, it won’t be for a few days still, because I’m still too raw and too tired to write coherent postings about anything interesting. That being the case, I’m going to make this an “official” hiatus of definite length: unless something else happens, I’ll return to active blogging next Tuesday, the day after Labor Day.

Oh, and Jen: are we having a Christmas party? I think that would be great for all us denizens of the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan. We should discuss this.

See you all in September.

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Maybe I should pose holding a power drill?

In the comments to this post at Belladonna’s blog, I am taken by not one but two of her readers to be female. Aieee!

Of course, this is obviously due to the fact that my Blogger avatar photo looks totally minuscule over there, so that while my long hair is clearly visible, the beard is not. But maybe I should help matters by butching up my photo! (I could try signing my posts over there with my real name, but that’s not likely to help either — one of the occupational hazards of being a guy named Kelly.)

I just think it’s funny that this happened twice in one comments thread!

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Quik Hits

Some lazy linkage and updates:

:: The next installment of Unidentified Earth will appear on Friday this week, as opposed to its normal Thursday appearance tomorrow. We’re going to the Fair.

:: I’ve been remiss in noting that Lynn has a new look and a new title. Adjust blogrolls as necessary. (Memo to self: revise the blogroll soon. I’ve got a lot of additions that I haven’t got to yet.)

:: I am now on the blogroll at By Neddie Jingo!, which I consider to be a high honor. Thanks to him. Linkage makes me all tingly inside. (So does rum, but that’s another thing.)

:: Reasons not to like workplace pizza parties. I never much liked them either when I was in my “office” job, because, well, fat chance getting toppings other than pepperoni or plain cheese. If you, like me, occasionally have a hankering for Italian sausage and mushrooms, well, you’re screwed at office pizza party time.

:: I’m rarely one to complain about Buffalo’s weather, but man, this heat-and-humidity is Godawful. I hate it. Of course, it’s not just a Buffalo thing; most of the country is unpleasant right now. But I still detest this steaminess.

:: I just checked out of the library three books by Anais Nin. When did I become interested in her? Seriously, I have no idea — but it may have something to do with the fact that there’s a quote by her on a bookmark that my dearest friend gave me last year. Anyway, I’ll report after I read some of it.

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