It’s mildly amusing to me that the current blogoland/livejournal “post a candid photo of yourself” meme happened to coincide with suit day at work.

When all the wolves in woolly wigs
Have huffed, and puffed, and blew the bricks
The skulls of Brooklyn’s cruelest pigs
Will rain on Fulton’s newest kicks
As mulish swine of all surrounding counties sniff the gruesomeness
We pass around the pineapples and pull the pins in unison
I will gladly feed you to the breed who wants you sacrificed
No pagan or sacrilege, just bacon for scavengers
I will gladly seat you with the chickens, not the passengers
Hopefully the crack in his armor spreads to his avarice
Never that, Wilburs multiply quicker than triples
And hunt their truffles in fistfuls, but it was all bells and whistles
Bougie this and Bougie that…
War pig or pussy cat…
Glitzy to the pork ribs, had to gold-leaf the booby traps
Powder-pink, double-breasted, mess of mud and money
Waddle off the fire to make his stubborn tummy wroggle
And while I don’t really know the working details of your tribes
I know that that’s one ugly fucking tie.

(—Aesop Rock, “Pigs”)

 


So I normally never much care for the results of the omnipresent “let our crappy algorithm decide which 5 celebrities your photo sort of looks like if you squint!” tests, but this one was too hilarious not to share:



It’s funny enough that it only found one male “celebrity” (and who the hell is Eddie Kaye Thomas anyway?) that it thought I looked like. But Charisma Carpenter and Grace Kelly?! I am so far beyond flattered that I suspect this site’s programmers are trying to get into my pants. And for the record, I think it may have succeeded. Call me anytime, dears.

(And for bonus weirdness points, I once dated someone named Krista Allen in college. Funny old world.)

Edit: Eddie Kaye Thomas appears to be an American character actor who’s not really “famous”, but who’s been in a ton of stuff, some of it reasonably good. He was Rosenberg in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, so I’ll take it as a compliment.

This one just tickles me, as it hearkens back to my NYC Subwayese Translator:

How Many Metros Have You Ridden?

Got at b3co.com!

Sadly, the page’s creator forgot about PATCO, because, well, everyone forgets about PATCO. So, here’s their logo:

That “How many Hugo winners have you read” meme, but with added snark!

Year	Book	Author	Read it?	Commentary
2005	Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell	Susanna Clarke	No
2004	Paladin of Souls	Lois McMaster Bujold	No
2003	Hominids	Robert J. Sawyer	No
2002	American Gods	Neil Gaiman	Yes
2001	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	J. K. Rowling	Yes	The “oh, right, Harry Potter!” Hugo.
2000	A Deepness in the Sky	Vernor Vinge	Yes
1999	To Say Nothing of the Dog	Connie Willis	Yes
1998	Forever Peace	Joe Haldeman	No
1997	Blue Mars	Kim Stanley Robinson	Yes	See “Green Mars” — a pair of sympathy Hugos was probably not unwarranted in this case, even if this one in specific dragged on a lot.
1996	The Diamond Age	Neal Stephenson	Yes	It’s a good thing that endings are apparently not a requirement for a Hugo.
1995	Mirror Dance	Lois McMaster Bujold	No
1994	Green Mars	Kim Stanley Robinson	Yes	Kind of a sympathy Hugo for “Red Mars” losing out to Bujold in 92, really.
1993	Doomsday Book	Connie Willis	Yes	How embarrassed am I that I never read any Connie Willis until a few years ago? Very.
1993	A Fire Upon the Deep	Vernor Vinge	Yes
1992	Barrayar	Lois McMaster Bujold	No
1991	The Vor Game	Lois McMaster Bujold	No
1990	Hyperion	Dan Simmons	Yes	See “The Diamond Age” (of course, Hyperion got an ending in a later book — on the other hand, it was crap)
1989	Cyteen	C. J. Cherryh	Yes	Worst title for a brilliant book ever. I avoided it for years because I assumed it was about cybernetic and/or psychic teenagers. How embarrassing.
1988	The Uplift War	David Brin	Yes	See “Startide Rising”
1987	Speaker for the Dead	Orson Scott Card	Yes	…actually Ender’s Game isn’t so much my “favorite” Card book as “the only one I didn’t actively loathe.” “Ender” was a lean and mean stab of brilliance. “Speaker” was three times as long and ten times more ponderous and boring. I gave up halfway through Xenocide, and I never do that. You have to give Card props for managing to make quite a bit of money off of a group of people he’d just as soon see thrown in jail, but his contempt for his audience shines through the cracks here.
1986	Ender’s Game	Orson Scott Card	Yes	My favorite book by my favorite petit-fascist fundamentalist Mormon nutjob.
1985	Neuromancer	William Gibson	Yes
1984	Startide Rising	David Brin	Yes	I really, really liked this when I read it in high school. I’ve been completely underwhelmed by everything of Brin’s I’ve read as an adult. This suggests strongly that I should never, ever re-read this.
1983	Foundation’s Edge	Isaac Asimov	No	I suppose it’s possible that a late-period Asimov novel (and a Foundation book at that) might have been that good. Monkeys might also fly out my ass at ANY MOMENT.
1982	Downbelow Station	C. J. Cherryh	No
1981	The Snow Queen	Joan D. Vinge	No
1980	The Fountains of Paradise	Arthur C. Clarke	No	Must… not… make… pedophilia… jokes… resolve… failing…
1979	Dreamsnake	Vonda N. McIntyre	No	Who?
1978	Gateway	Frederik Pohl	No
1977	Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang	Kate Wilhelm	No
1976	The Forever War	Joe Haldeman	Yes	Really, there should be a constitutional amendment requiring anyone under the age of 25 to read this within 3 months of finishing “Starship Troopers”.
1975	The Dispossessed	Ursula K. Le Guin	Yes
1974	Rendezvous with Rama	Arthur C. Clarke	Yes
1973	The Gods Themselves	Isaac Asimov	No
1972	To Your Scattered Bodies Go	Philip Jos Farmer	Yes	A Riverworld novel? Seriously? 1972 can’t have been that slow a year.
1971	Ringworld	Larry Niven	Yes
1970	The Left Hand of Darkness	Ursula K. Le Guin	Yes	If I had to pick one book out of this list to make required reading for the next generation, this would be it. (Canticle would be a close second.)
1969	Stand on Zanzibar	John Brunner	No
1968	Lord of Light	Roger Zelazny	No
1967	The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress	Robert A. Heinlein	Yes
1966	Dune	Frank Herbert	Yes	If only Frank had taught his son a useful trade.
1966	…And Call Me Conrad (This Immortal)	Roger Zelazny	No
1965	The Wanderer	Fritz Leiber	No
1964	Here Gather the Stars (Way Station)	Clifford D. Simak	No
1963	The Man in the High Castle	Philip K. Dick	Yes	As yet not adapted into a big-budget action movie vehicle for an aging Hollywood action star, but give them time: I’m sure Vin Diesel would like to take a crack at it.
1962	Stranger in a Strange Land	Robert A. Heinlein	Yes
1961	A Canticle for Leibowitz	Walter M. Miller, Jr	Yes	There’s something to be said for writing one truly brilliant novel and then ceasing and desisting. (cf Orson Scott Card as counterexample)
1960	Starship Troopers	Robert A. Heinlein	Yes
1959	A Case of Conscience	James Blish	No
1958	The Big Time	Fritz Leiber	No
1956	Double Star	Robert A. Heinlein	No
1955	They’d Rather Be Right (The Forever Machine)	Mark Clifton & Frank Riley	No
1953	The Demolished Man	Alfred Bester	Yes	Really, “The Stars My Destination” is much better, but at least he’s here.

Number that I’ve read: 29 out of 52

Number that I’ve read that I’d risk re-reading: 18 or so. (A couple borderline cases: Cyteen is probably worth re-reading, but I’d have to be in the right mood.)

Number that I’m sort of embarrassed I haven’t read: 5 (Jonathan Strange, Downbelow Station, The Snow Queen, Stand on Zanzibar, A Case of Conscience)

Number by authors who I full-stop have never heard of: 6 (Robert Sawyer, Vonda McIntyre, Kate Wilhelm, Clifford Simak, Mark Clifon, Frank Riley)

Number of actually decent books that I am unfairly trashing because their multitudinous awful sequels retroactively ruined for me: 4 (Dune, Ender’s Game, To Your Scattered Bodies Go and Hyperion)

Metacomment: boy oh boy does the Hugo committee love it some Lois McMaster Bujold. Four Hugos: that’s as many as Heinlein, twice as many as LeGuin or Asimov, and as much as Herbert, Bester, Dick and Brunner put together. Also exactly four more than Samuel Delaney, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, Johnathan Lethem, Douglas Adams, Gene Wolfe, Thomas Disch or China Mieville, to name a few at random. What gives?

Blame Mars. Meme behind the cut.

Rules: Name 10 fictional characters you’d do and tag 5 of your friends.

In no particular order, by which I mean “I’m going to slip the comic book characters I was crushed out on in 7th grade into the middle and hope nobody notices”:

• Juliette
• Jack Manfred
• Ted Pikul
• Jean Grey (n.b.: not the useless movie version)
• Qiwi Lin Lisolet
• Michael McManus (Okay, this one’s kind of a cheat: any and all of the character leads from that movie. Yeah, probably even Hockney. McManus just flirted the best. “Shall we dance?”)
• Vivian Sternwood Rutledge
• Madeleine Elster
• Detective Shakima Greggs (fans self)
• Jill Layton

Moral, for the most part: competence = sexy. And I would appear to be fairly visually oriented, given the surprising lack of characters from non-graphic novels.

Tag:

 
This is really just the best thing ever (this week). Nominally, it’s a small tweak to the nose of Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association’s anti-gay-marriage campaign, but really it’s just a chance for FleshBot‘s graphics guy to put together a great banner image.

It is, ever so slightly non-worksafe, so the shoulder-surfable should wait until an opportune moment before clicking…
 

(The rules: has asked me 5 questions. I’m answering them. Respond below and I’ll try to ask you five questions. [edit] Aieee! Okay, stop! No more! It’s gonna take me a day or ten to come up with the necessary number of questions as it stands right now…)

1.You get to take over the world for a day. Any changes you make during that time will stick after your gone, but you only get to do five things. What are they?

Damn the law of unintended consequences, full arbitrary steam ahead! (Note: this list completely off the top of my head. Ask me again tomorrow and get a different list.)

— Open immigration everywhere. If capital can jump from country to country in order to arbitrage labor costs, it should be perfectly legal for people to pick up and move to wherever the jobs happen to be.
— Tax exemptions for religions? Kiss `em goodbye. If you can afford to build a gilded temple (or, ahem, buy up half the real estate in lower Manhattan), you can kick over 15% to Caesar just like everyone else, and you can be just as audit-able as the next guy.
— Term of copyright: 15 years. Term of patent grant: 10. No patents on business methods, computational algorithms, or mathematical formulae (for the love of god, people).
— 90-year ban on members of the Bush family holding political office anywhere. They’ll just have to be Unspeakably Rich for a while.
— I’d make the official dress uniform of the U.S. armed forces Levis blue jeans, white t-shirts and black bomber jackets.

2. You and occasionally are my providers of fantasy for when I wish I lived in New York. The way you write about the city captures it perfectly to me, so much so that I’m both envious and completely undesirous of living there. Is there any place else that you could live and be so satisfied?

As much as I love love love NYC, I do sorta suspect that any city of a similar size in a first-world country with reasonably non-xenophobic immigration laws would probably provide me with a similar level of enjoyment. London and Paris, certainly, are in the same rank as far as being culture generators and social particle accelerators. Rome, Amsterdam and Berlin would all be “maybes.”

That said, there are lots of places where I would love to be able to live for, say, a year or two, even though I don’t doubt that they’d drive me bugfuck if I stayed any longer: Tokyo, Rio, Buenes Aires, Saigon, Bangkok, San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, Shanghai, Madrid and Jerusalem would all fall into that category.

But I’d have to learn to make my own bagels and smoke my own salmon.

3. In a week-long period, you are able to eat at seven restaurants anywhere in the world. What are they, and why?

Oooh. I’m salivating at the thought… but I’m afraid that other than the French Laundry in California, I’m not sure I can come up with seven names off the top of my head: I’d have to actually sit down and do some research.

Well, okay, I do know what I’d start with:

— Where is Joel Robuchon currently cooking?
— Where is Alain Ducasse currently working?
— What was Tony Bourdain’s favorite restaurant in Vietnam?

That’s four restaurants in three countries already… I’d probably try to throw Moscow and Tokyo onto the list somehow, even though I haven’t the faintest idea of where I’d begin…

…and I’d probably try to track down the little wonton soup stand in Shanghai where Miranda and I had The Best Soup Ever a few years back.

4. Who do you think you are?

Just another bozo on this bus.

…I think we’re all bozos on this bus!

5. (Bonus question) Why don’t you come up and see me sometime? ;)

<Mae_West>You know how to whistle, don’t you?</Mae_West>

create your own visited states map

Huh, better than I was expecting when I started it. A few unconnected notes:

A couple of them are layover ringers: Missouri was a 45-minute stop at STL on our way back from Hawaii with Miranda in 1994. (Our first real vacation together — I should really get the film scanner fired up and post those.)

Texas was about 90 minutes of unexpected terror and hilarity: my “nonstop” flight from San Diego to Boston in 1996 turned out to have an equipment change at Dallas/FtWorth — had I known that in advance, I probably would not have worn my Church of Euthanasia t-shirt, with its cheery “suicide · abortion · cannibalism · sodomy” logo on the rear. And perhaps I would have worn a hat over the bright green hair. No joke: I had not even gotten off the plane (hell, I hadn’t even managed to get my carryon out of the overhead compartment) before people started handing me bible tracts. I maintain a theorectical fondness for the lone star state, but the next time I go back, I think I’d like it to be under more controlled conditions.

Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were all drive-by visits: on two separate occasions, the same group of lunatic college friends and I drove nonstop from western Massachusetts to Florida. The first time was allegedly to accompany Marcel to check out the University of Miami’s graduate film program, but really just because it was midwinter in Massachusetts and we were all stir crazy, the second time was for his wedding. I got no feel whatsoever for the places themselves, but I will say that South of the Border at 3am in a misting rain is like being on the set of a great unfilmed David Lynch movie.

The first trip to Florida was a few short months after Hurricane Andrew had flatted half of Miami, and we arrived in Dade County just in time for the start of rush hour on a half-demolished freeway system, after 24 hours of nonstop driving. I’ve never been so convinced of my own imminent death before or since.

create your own visited country map

Tsk tsk. Haven’t maxed out a single continent yet. Never thought I’d regret not taking that day-trip to Mexico from San Diego.

…and for once, the Friday Five questions aren’t completely annoying me. So with no further ado:


1. What food do you like that most people hate?

Kimchee. Mmmmmm…kimchee. Blessed, blessed kimchee.

Shut up or I’ll breathe on you.

2. What food do you hate that most people like?

Eggs. Shudder, twitch, retch, etc. The form doesn’t matter: scrambled, fried, deviled, omelet, boiled — it’s all horrible jiggly sulfurous congealed mucous. I honestly can’t understand the appeal at all.

3. What famous person, whom many people may find attractive, is most unappealing to you?

Britney Spears. Yawn. Nice body, I guess, and it’s not that I don’t generally find jiggly blonde femmes attractive, but her face is just… not doing it for me at all. She looks like what an 8-year-old boy who wasn’t actually yet into girls would describe if you asked him to imagine what a beautiful girl looked like. My eyes get no traction on her face: they just fall off and start staring at whatever’s next to her.

4. What famous person, whom many people may find unappealing, do you find attractive?

Gary Oldman. Objectively, well, he is ugly as hell. Doesn’t matter. He’s plugged straight into god’s own electrical socket. That works for me.

5. What popular trend baffles you?

Voting Republican. Rimshot

More seriously…with the previously noted exception of my addiction to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I remain perpetually baffled by the popularity of “reality TV”. I mean, hello, this crap sucked back when it was called ‘The Real World’ Who authorized converting our entire nation’s entertainment output into this horrible format?