Category Archives: Uncategorized

Life Stories

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I’m on an organizational kick. The mind clutter level has gotten too high, there are two many things going on to keep it all straight, and things were starting to fall through the cracks.

kaughy inadvertently provided me with a path to follow to solve this issue whilst posting about his own efforts to manage the startup of his business, and more about this later, for that is not what this post is about.

This post is about, sort of, Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. I’ve told this story many times, maybe even in this journal. It bears repeating.

Julia Cameron was a professor for a time at the undergraduate university I went to. I never took her class, but a couple friends of mine did (stronglanguage, for example). Everyone who took her class loved it. One of my friends believed she was a witch because of her uncanny way of knowing what you were thinking, and what you needed/wanted at any given time.

One of the first exercises in this class was to write your life story. They had a week or so to do it, and on the day they turned in their papers, Ms. Cameron asked everyone to raise their hand if they had done a major purging of their stuff the previous weekend. Everyone raised their hand.

It seems the act of recording your life down on paper frees up some of the need to pack-rat mementos. It clears out some of the cobwebs and baggage hanging around in your brain.

So, I’m going to make an effort to try and get some of those stories out of my brain. Time to turn the hose on the mind clutter.

I may need to rent a dumpster.

Post Office Temperance

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I went to the post office on Saturday morning to ship some stuff steakums had sold on eBay.

After the cliche’ long wait in line, the woman told me I couldn’t ship in the box I had, because it had the words “Wine” and “Champagne”1 in various places. It wasn’t labeled wine or champagne, persay, just had the name of a Wine & Champagne company on it on several sides… “Drunky McDrunk’s Wine & Champagne Distributors” or some such thing.

She offered me some leftover waxy paper that self-adhesive stamps come on to cover it up, but with no tape or anything to do it with. Nor did she have a black marker. So I left, as I had a show to get to and a life to lead.

But later I thought… how does someone send something to Champagne, France? Or Champaign, IL? Or Champagne Lane, Kane, IL? Or Champagne Ct., Naperville, IL? Or Wine Street, Randolph, IN? Or, for that matter, to the Wine & Champagne company itself?

What if I had taken a regular pen and written “NOT” in front of each instance of “Champagne” or “Wine”. Would that have worked?

Or written “Street” after each?

Or inserted an “h” in between the “W” and “i”?

Words. Fear their power over the Post Office.

1 Box taken from Georgia Shakes… we don’t drink champagne by the case around here.

Those Brits do pick on religion…

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Does Religion Do More Harm Than Good?, courtesy of galbinus_caeli.

A quote of a quote of the original study, regarding religious belief in developed, democratic countries…
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, (venereal disease), teen pregnancy, and abortion,” while “none of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction.”

First off, I hate that they dropped “pro-evolution” in there. Religion and Evolution are not opposites.

Secondly, is this an increase-in-preachers-causes-increase-in-criminals sort of false correlation? (or, if you prefer, decrease-in-pirates-causes-increase-in-global-warming) Perhaps is there selective data being reviewed? Dunno.

As the author of the article mentions, all of these issues are more likely to happen with the economically disadvantaged and countries with stronger belief in a higher power tend to have fewer social programs (at least, fewer governmental social programs).

My instinct is to resist the blow to religion. In a country where there are few social programs and a harsher form of poverty, I would hypothesize a tendency to look towards satisfaction in the afterlife when satisfaction in present life seems unattainable. Thus, poverty and its accompanying ills beget religion, rather than the other way around.

And Britain is “post-Christian”? Who knew?

Sucking.

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Okay-

Who’s got a vacuum they love?

One what’s got all those fancy HEPA anti-dust filtration whatamajiggers. Picks up allergens and dog hairs and bad juju.

We’ve had a terrible vacuum for years now, and its complete and utter inability to pick up dog hair off the couch is the final straw.

My mom is extolling the Oreck XL series, but I see too many bad reviews out there on the internets. Allergy Buyers Club sells a host of high-end, pricey ones I’ve never heard of.

Help!

Venturing into the kitchen again

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I used to cook a lot.

Not a lot of different dishes, but often. Mostly, variations on stir-fry. The wok was my friend.

I rarely used recipes, and the results ranged from perfect to inedible.

For years now, steakums has completely taken over the reins of cooking. Largely because she used to get home well before I did (upwards of an hour to two hours) and got hungry. In my bachelor days, I would often just skip dinner, or not start thinking about it until 8 or 9pm.

So, only very rarely do I take up the wok again. Less than once a year. And every time has been an abysmal failure, lack of practice does not make perfect.

But our schedules have realigned in recent months such that my commute is much shorter, and I leave earlier, and all those sorts of things, and thusly I arrive home right around the same time steakums does, or at least not before she’s started cooking. So, last night I made a stir-fry again. And it went pretty well.

I only bring all this up because my hands smell severely of garlic. This is only a complaint insofar as every time I scratch my nose, I get hungry.

Decline of websites

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In this post, I tallied some website popularity, according to Alexa.

SITE 9/16/06 RANK 03/21/07 RANK
LiveJournal 68 68
The Motley Fool 974 1,508
Cisco 1,140 1,157
Keith and the Girl 38,526 6,512
Creative Loafing 42,880 55,307
Scientific Atlanta 76,996 93,267
Georgia Shakespeare 746,484 7,414,733
Atlanta Coalition of Performing Arts 971,451 882,452
Dad’s Garage Theater 1,065,810 1,069,744
Alliance Theater 1,189,508 1,056,610
TheaterReview 1,221,688 2,413,153
Shakespeare Tavern 3,130,112 3,075,352
eLucas.net No Data No Data

It’s interesting that gashakespeare.org dropped quite a bit, but I remember there were some issues with the Alexa link… the link for gashakespeare.org actually went somewhere else. That seems to be fixed, and the current low ranking prevails. Possibly as a result of being out of season.

TheaterReview.com dropped a big chunk. I attribute it to the fact that I’ve started censoring flame wars, and thus interest has waned.