Tag: random

In which I ain’t got nothin for ya

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized4 Comments

I don’t think I have anything for you today, Internet.  I’m still full of sushi from yesterday, I have a lot of stuff to do today (Grading! Writing! Reading! Video games!  Housecleaning!  Home renovation! Oh, right, parenting!) and am not feeling super inspired.  There might be something later if I come up with a story worth telling, but I kinda doubt it.

In the meanwhile, feel free to wander through the archives.  Click here for a random post.

In which I stall for time

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

There will be a post later, I swear, but for right now I’ll just leave this here because awesome.

Monday miscellany

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Music, Television1 Comment

A whole lot of stuff today, most of which isn’t worth its own post and I don’t want to have 300 posts today anyway, so you get a bunch of bullet points.  Enjoy some commentary and a bit of open self-promotion:

  • The entire northern part of the state is on a travel warning again and school has already been called off for Tuesday.  Both my wife and my son are home; we’d have had to pick him up from day care (they closed at noon because of the travel ban) and I had to clear the driveway before getting anywhere was even possible.  I figure Wednesday is downgraded to “doubtful” at this point from “I’m sure we’ll be back” earlier today.
  • Despite the headline of the previous post, I’m actually not upset about the weather, nor am I angry with the various people posting “Awesome out here in California!” or “Hey, it’s 65 degrees here in Florida!” people.  I prefer cold weather to hot under all circumstances, period.  I admit if I still lived in Chicago, where there’s nowhere to put the damn snow, I’d be miserable, but clearing the driveway every once in a while isn’t actually that big of a hardship– I’d rather plow the driveway than mow the damn lawn any day of the week.  That said, I’m growing ill about the lost time before the ISTEP test.  I really am going to be writing a letter to the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent to advocate for pushing back the test at least a week.  It’ll be interesting to see how contractually bound we are to the dates we’re scheduled to.  Pearson doesn’t give a damn about the contract, mind you, but I suspect our state officials will.
  • The Internet is for porn; everyone knows that.  I finally figured out what Twitter is for last night; Twitter is for snark.  Watching the Grammys, for example, isn’t terribly exciting (exceptions in a moment).  Watching the Grammys and mocking it on the Internet along with half of the world is hilarious.  I know I talk about Saladin Ahmed a lot around here, but Christ the guy was on fire last night and it was hysterical.
  • What Twitter appears to be less good for: driving traffic to websites, at least as far as I can tell.  Nobody clicks on links in Twitter.  I’ve had blog links retweeted by celebrities three times– Cherie Priest RTed my “10 best books of 2013” post and both Lyrics Born and Lateef retweeted links to yesterday’s post about them (also: Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truthspeaker and Cherie Priest read something on my blog, squeeeeeee) and it led to maybe four hits from Twitter yesterday and maybe six when Priest did it.
  • That said, I have 93 followers right now and I want 100 today.  Follow my twitter feed!  There’s a button right over there on the right!  I’m funny sometimes, I promise!
  • Also, I should hit 1,337 blog followers today, which makes my inner Internet nerd happy.
  • Speaking of naked self-promotion, note the “Short Fiction” page that’s been added to the header up there.  If you’re a newer reader there’s a couple of stories up there that you may not have seen.  I’ll be beefing this up in the future, especially if the summer writing grant goes through– I find out about that in less than a month.
  • Back to the Grammys:  I don’t usually watch them; the Grammys actually are what people say the Academy Awards are and usually they are best ignored.  I’m glad I caught last night’s show, though, if only because it was so amazingly, unashamedly weird.  Steven Tyler’s weirdly inappropriate affection made Smokey Robinson want to put on the Ring of Doom and bamf off the stage.  Cyndi Lauper was painfully, obviously, amazingly drunk.  Pharrell’s hat was just obvious and amazing.  The Macklemore/Queen Latifah/Madonna thing was weird and creepy and somehow both massively inappropriate and inspiring at the same time– like, Latifah’s gay, right?  Everyone knows that?  She’s got a long-term partner.  So you have the straight white guy, and it’s not like the Grammys repeatedly recognizing white rappers over more talented black rappers (coughKendrickLamarcough) isn’t already a problem, and he’s rapping about how being gay is great, then you pull out the mostly-closeted gay lady to marry a whole bunch of people, both straight and gay couples and a couple of notably interracial ones as well, and CBS does their damnedest to only focus on the straight couples while it’s happening, and meanwhile Madonna is there for some reason and she’s leaning on a cane and looks older than Betty White.
  • Somebody– can’t find it right now– said that Macklemore’s unique talent was managing to come off as a douchebag even when he’s being perfectly sincere and saying things you agree with.  That’s not far off from the truth, near as I can tell.
  • The Awkward Taylor Swift Dancing tumblr.  You’re welcome.
  • Good stuff, though:  The Pharrell/Daft Punk/Stevie Wonder/Nile Rodgers collaboration was awesome, but holy shit were they overshadowed by the Imagine Dragons and Kendrick Lamar’s mashup of Radioactive and m.A.A.d city
    earlier in the show, a performance so outstanding that by rights it should have ended the entire ceremony on the spot.  Like, the Grammy people should have just sent everybody the fuck home and released the rest of the awards by email or something.  I wasn’t terribly familiar with Lamar before the show; I downloaded his (also Grammy-nominated, but it didn’t win, see above bit on Macklemore) album on the spot.  Sadly, I haven’t had time to listen to it yet; I’ll report back.  That shit blew me away.
  • Cutting to that poor little country girl right after the Lamar/Imagine Dragons performance was the cruelest decision of the evening and I can’t believe they did it.  They went from a showstopping performance straight to something that was deliberately staged to look like a show in a poorly-attended country bar, complete with lame Christmas lights sewn into clothes and fucking neon cacti, and meanwhile the audience was wiping sweat off their foreheads and going to the bathroom.  I may download her album too just out of pity, if she hasn’t retired from music out of sheer embarrassment by now.
  • My wife and I are both pretty digitally connected people, right?  So much so that we can’t really tell each other things that have happened anymore without beginning with the phrase “You’ve probably already heard this, but…”.  We had a particularly bad example of this this morning, one that may well be a sign that the two of us need to reevaluate our lives:  I cleared off the driveway and let her know that I was going to go take a shower, then as I was drying off afterward she knocked on the door to the bathroom and said “Hey, you probably already know this, but school’s cancelled tomorrow.”  Because apparently it is reasonable to my wife that I’m on my phone checking Facebook and Twitter while I’m showering, or that perhaps I check my phone before drying off.  Which entertains the crap out of me.
  • No, shut up, I didn’t know yet.

That’s enough for now.  I’m bound and determined to get The Benevolence Archives 5 done today, so you might see another post from that this evening sometime.

In which I’m still here

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

alive“Be interesting” may be beyond me at the moment; consider this a proof of life post.

This was supposed to be the Week of Meetings; bad weather cancelled two of the three and there are dark rumors floating around about tomorrow; it’s supposed to be around five below zero between six and seven AM tomorrow, which is when the buses are picking the kids up and the walkers are walking.  That means maybe twenty below with the wind chill; nothing compared to a couple of weeks ago where it was forty below, but still probably too cold to get everybody to school.  Monday and Tuesday next week are supposed to be bullshit too.

…yeah, I got nothin’.  I spent all day in a meeting; it was good and productive and useful (even if technically it’s probably not done yet; we have a lot more work to do) but it’s kind of sapped my will to be creative and funny right now, and right now everywhere I’m looking on the Internet is pissing me off, and I’m not really in the mood for a long politics rant right now.  Apparently every Republican in America has decided to say or do something fucking stupid about either gay people or women in the last 24 hours.  I don’t know why.  I’m perfectly happy for the epidemic to stop any goddamn time now, thanks, you assholes.

In which I bullet point

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

ostriches-head-in-sandJust  a couple of things that are rolling around in my head; do with them what you will:

  • President Obama did the right thing– politically, morally, and legally– by going to Congress for authorization to attack Syria.  I have no idea whether he’ll get it, but this thing where we just attack other countries without a declaration of war because the President wants to needs to stop.  That said, the AUMF is probably too broad, and for it to matter Obama’s going to have to pay attention to what Congress says to do, which he doesn’t actually have to.
  • Congress should say no, and Obama shouldn’t have wanted to do this in the first place.  Not one more thin fucking dime for bombs in the Middle East; I don’t give a shit what they do to each other anymore.  Chemical weapons, machine guns, eat each fucking other for all I care.  No more goddamn Middle East wars.  There’s no good outcome from this under any circumstances– we take out Assad and bring democracy to Syria, they’re just going to elect an Islamist government– so we shouldn’t do anything at all.  Let them solve their own goddamn civil war.
  • Humanitarians are no doubt thinking humanitarian things based on that last paragraph.  I initially supported the Iraq war on humanitarian grounds; look at where that got us.  “Fuck it” is now officially a position on war.  If that makes me a bad person, I can live with it; if that means tinhorn despots will continue to use chemical weapons to ineffectively kill relatively small numbers of people I can live with that too.
  • NICE OF YOU TO SAY “FUCK IT” WHILE PEOPLE ARE DYING, ASSHOLE:  Refer to “no good outcome” response.  Nothing we can do about this.  Bombing just kills more innocent people.  I’d prefer we not do that, and since there’s no viable positive outcome that means we don’t do it.
  • I was already aware of most of the information in this useful article except for the bit where we’re pissing Russia off, which seems like another reason for this to be a nay-nay war, as John Pinette might say.
  • Notre Dame’s first home game was yesterday, which meant we got our first onslaught of poorly-housebroken drunk asshole fucks after the game, two of whom were wearing shirts that said “SOUTH BEND FUCKIN’ INDIANA” on the front and something along the lines of “IF YOU DON’T BLEED BLUE AND GOLD TAKE YOUR BITCH ASS HOME” on the back, displaying the kind of grace and class I’ve come to expect from Notre Dame students over the years.  I considered throwing them out on the spot and settled for making them turn the shirts inside out, then managed to get into a minor Twitter fight this morning while making sure I’d gotten the back of the shirts right.
  • No demolition today in the bathroom; we’ve decided to wait until measuring is done and we have a timeline on the guy coming in to do the tile.  There’s no point in wrecking the bathroom early– possibly a couple of weeks early– when there’s so much else to be done before we can put it back together, even if a three-day weekend would be convenient.
  • Here’s the front of the shirt.
  • It’s probably time to potty train the boy.  There have been Constipation Issues this week.  I don’t like knowing about other people’s poops.
  • Making snow pea beef stir fry tonight.  I am hugely looking forward to it.
  • Looking less forward to having to wade through four inches of grading HOW THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN ALREADY.

Might add more later.  Whee!

In which I post about nothing in particular

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Uncategorized2 Comments

originalCan I just start by saying that I’m planning on making pulled pork sandwiches tomorrow for dinner and I’m going to have to get up early to get the meat seared and into the crock pot and that I could not be more excited about the prospect of getting to eat pulled pork? I can’t explain it. I’m just glad I’m married; my wife, who is smarter than me, pointed out that we absolutely needed to hit the grocery today if we wanted to get all the ingredients, since one of them is beer. I don’t drink– at all– and the fact that you can’t buy beer in Indiana on Sunday because the same god who turned water into wine once will get angry or something had temporarily slipped past me.

Anyway, point is pulled pork sandwiches tomorrow, mmm.

Interesting phenomenon the last few days; hits on the blog fell through the floor for no clear reason. I go back and forth on why I write online; some sort of engagement with people is certainly a good thing (at least, most of the time) and the fact that I was regularly getting thirty or forty views a day (spiking at one point to 59) after only a few weeks of the blog’s existence certainly seemed to indicate that sooner or later comments would start showing up from people I didn’t already know. Granted, yesterday’s post was a one-liner, but I went from an average of 39 views a day last week to, in the last three days, less than ten.

In the long run, of course, it makes no difference at all, but it’s curious.

We took the boy to the zoo today. One of these days, the emus are going to boom while I’m there. I’ve heard the lions roar from fairly short range, but the emus have been annoyingly quiet every time I’ve been out there. An emu boom is supposed to be audible from a couple of kilometers away so you ought to be able to hear them from anywhere in the zoo if they’re bothering to make noise.

The boy’s favorite animals? The birds, interestingly. And the turtles. He thought the alpacas were geese, which entertains me; it suggests that the neck is the most salient characteristic of each of them for him.

And now, from the I Don’t Feel Like Talking About It But You Should Read These files:

Actually, one thing on Deen: I had an interesting conversation with my wife this morning where she suggested that sexism forms a nonzero portion of the reason for the truckload of shit that Deen’s taking where other male celebrities, Michael Richards, Mel Gibson, and that not-Howard-Stern radio idiot– Don Imus!– got away with similar outbursts with less of a massive impact on their careers. I don’t want to discount the idea, but I can’t think of another example that quite fits the same situation that Deen has; Imus lost his job, Richards and Gibson don’t have endorsements to be fired from, and all three handled their respective PR disasters with something less than the complete idiocy that Deen’s been putting on display lately. I said something on Facebook recently about how Deen seems to have managed to find a way to shove her foot into her mouth and her head up her ass simultaneously, which is a pretty impressive feat; literally every time she opens her mouth she makes shit worse, which I don’t quite feel like the other three did. Plus, as the Rude Pundit points out in the link above, Deen’s not in trouble for what she said however many years ago so much as her unbelievably poor treatment of her employees and complete inability to figure out why people are mad at her. There’s more to this than just language.

I dunno. I hate the word “mansplaining” a lot; maybe I’m doing that here. Sexism probably does have something to do with it insofar as it’s a woman we’re discussing and it’s always going to be difficult to tease out this-is-sexism-and-this-is-not whenever we’re talking about an issue this complicated. I’m just not sure at all how much.

(Also: you don’t get to use “from a different generation” to defend yourself when you were in your early twenties during the Civil Rights movement. Your ass has had plenty of time to learn better.)

Anyway; I gotta go to work. It’s raining; we’ll see how busy I am tonight. Last night was completely dead until 8:00 and then batshit bugfuck insane for two hours where we made as much money as we usually do on a Friday night except in 1/3 the usual amount of time. I came home freaking exhausted last night.