A Hate Freak, NaNoWriMo, Wild Cows, A Blog List, Punky Girls, Starcat's Leaving, And Scrabble

This man has some crazy, anti-homosexual rant that he keeps revisiting, and his sources are so skewed to the hate end of things that they can’t even see their own illogic. Yeeks. At least, from my own experience, homosexual men are not the only ones who partake in such sexual activities. Are we all going to hell?

Last year around this time, I took part in the National Novel Writing Month. The Fiery One had gone away on another work trip across the continent somewhere, and I took that as my opportunity to get a hell of a lot of writing done. I never did meet the 50,000-word goal for November, but I did manage to wring out 108 pages (at about 250 words per page), and I’m thinking that, since the Fiery One is gone on a work trip again, I may try to at least finish what I started a year ago. Last November was a completely insane time for me. I had worked it out that I needed to write 1,666.67 words a day to meet the goal. That sounds like a lot, but it is manageable, except for those times when going out with friends after work seems like more fun, or “Law & Order” is unavoidable, or suddenly taking a two-hour walk to make up for the exercise you never get anyway becomes imperative. When I saw the movie "Adaptation", I bubbled with controlled laughter in the theatre when Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) promised himself a coffee if he wrote something down and then had a lengthy conversation with himself about what he would treat himself with if he created anything at all. That is exactly what I found myself doing. Staring numbly at my computer screen, I would glance up at the coffee maker and promise myself coffee if I wrote 500 words; that would downscale to 300 words and I could have a coffee if I also wrote 500 to follow that before I had a cigarette; then, I would have the coffee with having written only 250 words and duck outside for a smoke to “think through my character’s next move”; finally, I would hit a good streak and squeak out approximately 1700 words, congratulate myself wildly, but then lie awake chastising myself because I had not met my goal over the previous two days and was still behind by 3,000 words. When the Fiery One arrived home six days before the end of the month and the end of the contest, I threw up my hands despairingly, but decided to continue to congratulate myself on getting as much written as I did. It did do wonders for my writing life, though. I have written more over the last year than I have over the previous three, and it kick-started my brain into an authory mode of thinking. NaNoWriMo, you rock. Thank you. (By the way, this is my personal plug for NaNoWriMo. Check it out, and remember two things: red wine is bad for writing (the hangover totally cuts into the next day’s quota), and beer is good).

Mad cows. No, not the kind with Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease. These are angry, wild mofos with an attitude.

The Ageless Project lists blogs by the blogger’s date of birth. They seem to have really strict rules for getting your blog accepted, so their list is relatively small, but it’s worth a visit. Alas, there were no bloggers with my birth date.

If you sort of have a thing for super-cute, punky girls, go here. Sweet.

As you can see, I’ve spent a lot of time surfing the internet lately. Starcat just left for his home city, and much of his stay here was spent with him and I travelling this way and that on the internet, googling, checking out anything and everything. There was also much beer drinking, because that is what he and I do together. Well, we also play Scrabble, but he kept it at two games, because he trounced me twice and did not want to upset his winning streak. It was a blessing that he came down here for his vacation when he did, because the Fiery One’s absence usually drives me crazy for the first few days, and having Starcat to keep my mind off things saved me my usual forgetting to eat and bathe and stuff. I just saw him off on the bus about an hour ago, and it really sunk in how when I got back to the apartment, no one would be here to greet me, and that no one would be here to greet me for another fifteen days (except for Gordon, the bunny, and Elliott, the bird). Yuck. I will be strong. I will blog, I will write, I will play on-line Scrabble, and I may even keep this apartment up to snuff. I am so brave.

Scrabble® Facts and Links:
* The W is worth 10 points in French Scrabble because it is so rarely used in that language.
* Read Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis. I am a little Scrabble-happy, but you don’t have to be crazy about the game to love the book. It is one of the funniest and saddest things I have read over the last year.
* The only American President who regularly played Scrabble in the White House was Richard Nixon.
* The official Scrabble website, because I can’t skip it.
* The official National Scrabble Association website, because I can’t skip this, either.
* Over 100 million sets of the game have been sold in 29 different languages, easily making it the world's best selling word game.
* In 1931, Alfred Mosher Butts developed the initial idea for the game. It was called Lexico.
* Movies in which Scrabble is played include "Sabrina," "Foul Play", and "Sneakers."
* I have this game on my computer, and it helps me through this world I live in where I have to be in a city and a social circle that contains not one truly willing Scrabble competitor for me. WordBiz is the best free game out there.
* Expulsions from Scrabble tournaments are very rare. However, in the United States two players have been expelled for violent play. One thrust a pencil up his opponent's nostril, the other knocked out his female opponent by a blow to the jaw.
* If you really have the drive to improve your word-power Scrabble-wise, word lists are essential. Yes, I have perused the two, three, and four-letter word lists, and they have been immeasurably helpful, even if my score is still embarrassingly low. I am nerd, hear me creating loopy letter combinations.
* A Scrabble game can be found in one out of every three homes in the United States.
* The highest individual score in tournament play in North American was 770 points, achieved by Mark Landsberg in California.
* Jeff Widergren from California scored most points in a single play – 338! My god, that demands dedication.

The Sighted, The Evil, A Good Film, And Traffic Signals

Yesterday, it became clear to me that the people who wait for the bus at the stop outside the Canadian National Institute for the Blind are developmentally challenged individuals. No, I am not cruelly referring to blind people waiting for the bus. These are sighted university students, and it is generally this same group waiting at this stop most mornings. There is a blind man who takes this bus every day, and he works at the CNIB. Every morning he descends the steps of the bus with his red and white cane held out in front of him, and every morning these same people just stand around directly in front of him looking uncomfortable, as though they don’t know what to do with themselves. I know what they should do – step aside. Let the man, who cannot see you, pass. It’s like they can’t tell where he’s going, but it’s obvious that he is going to the CNIB and will need to get to the path directly behind them that has the handy railing to lead him to the building. I think I’m going to create a tidy, little pamphlet entitled “How to Step Aside Out of a Blind Person’s Path,” and I’m going to go down to that bus stop early one of these mornings and hand it out. It will have instructions on how to identify a path tailored to the unique needs of the blind, and it will outline the protocol to follow when you find yourself standing dumbly in the middle of this path and a blind person is approaching you. Do not stand there, silently staring at his sunglasses, with that frozen look of an animal in headlights. Do not be that last silly girl who can never decide which way to go, right or left, and so is yet again left stuck in the middle of this man’s path, wondering what she’s gonna do now. For god’s sake, MOVE ASIDE.

Okay, now that that ranting is over with, on to how evil the Fiery One is (aka “The Palinode”). I was happily starting up my own little blog, figuring out HTML, all pleased with myself, and really enjoying that no one I knew was aware of this thing. I kind of liked the secretness of it all, because I would never have to worry about a thing I wrote. It felt like mischief. But the Fiery One thought he was all smart, linking to me on his site, and now I’ve been outted. I will live, I suppose, but his evil deeds will not soon be forgotten.

And speaking of the Fiery One, he has excellent taste in movies. Our local library has a good collection of DVDs, and he came home with a humdinger the other night - “Sunset Boulevard" – from 1950. I do recommend this film as a must-see. It is a fabulous mix of comedy and film noir. Also, because I always seem to notice the inconsequential background stuff, I loved it for the semaphore traffic signals at intersections. You only get to see them a couple of times, but they were delicious. As a result, I ended up googling traffic signals and lights, and there is whole webring devoted to them.

I'm not sure if this serves as footage for the development of a video game, or if it is considered a dramatic performance, but it's a good watch.

Take a look at this very strange monument in a strangely named town.

Traffic Signal Facts and Links:
* This is for those deeply moved by traffic cone preservation.
* I had not realized the aesthetic appeal of gas stations before, but some of these are truly magnificent.
* Even polypeptides need directions.
* Electrically powered incandescent traffic lights can cost $4, 450 US a year to operate because of the amount of energy they consume. LED traffic signals are proving more practical with energy savings of approximately 89%.
*A new traffic signal can cost anywhere from $70,000 to over $100,000 US, depending on the intersection. The components in the cabinet alone can cost from $8,000 to $10,000.
* There are more than 160, 000 traffic signals in the U.S. This number actually seems small to me, but we’ll go with it.
* Garret Augustus Morgan was the first to patent the traffic signal in the 1920s.
* The world's first electric traffic light signal was installed 75 years ago in Cleveland, Ohio at the intersection of Euclid Avenue and East 105th Street.