Oh, I haven’t mentioned this yet, have I? Kevan’s new site lets you earn XP for chores. Would that my mother had had this when I was fourteen! I probably still have a dozen Nintendo Time Tokens (or “pennies”) saved up from taking the trash out, but I have to tell you: I was not always responsible about properly deducting them.
Category: People
Follow-up
Mr. Munson wrote me a great email about The Implicit, and noted echoes of Naomi Shihab Nye’s Valentine for Ernest Mann–which I think we read in his class, and which I had completely forgotten until I read the “poem like a taco” bit, but had clearly absorbed and recycled. Just illustrates the point, really.
And Holly made two cakes (they were supposed to be a four-layer cake, but they got nervous and decided to be two cakes instead), one of which had this written on the dish around it:
Eventually he finds himself writing another pubic hair story, and realises he’s bored. He’s done three zombies, twenty-six otherworldly small girls, ninety-three ninjas; fifty states, every tube stop, all two thousand UN constituent nations, cutting everything he’s ever seen into 101-word pieces. He’s sent the small girls to Ganymede to fight the ninjas (the small girls won), and then set up a rematch deep within the sun (they united against their common enemy, the masked superwhale).
“Next time,” he says, eyes narrow beneath the unruly crest of his white eyebrows, “a hundred and two.”
People read my stuff and write about it. There is no better feeling in the world.
The insignificance of numbers
Today I posted the 1001st story in Anacrusis, and I wanted to do something a little different for the occasion: an audio story, read aloud by a startling array of generous people. I thought the hardest part would be actually asking them to read the silly little thing without cringing, and the next-hardest would be the actual mixing process. It turns out that the hard part is not being able to use all the material from everyone for the whole thing. They were all so good!
Thanks to Robert Baker-Self, Maria Barnes, Amanda and Jon Brasfield, David Clark, Amanda Dale, Kevan Davis, John Dixon, Holly Gramazio, Josh Hadley, Sumana Harihareswara, Stephen Heintz, Catriona Mackay, William O’Neil, Leonard Richardson, Kristofer Straub, and everyone who’s had a kind or critical word to say about Anacrusis. Let’s do this again when we hit 10,201.
I promise I’ll do the hard part
Finally got around to following Leonard’s links to Rachel Chalmers’s blog, and now regret not doing so in 2004. Her blog is the blog other blogs want to be when they grow up. Blog up. Wait, no.
I’m reading backwards through her archives, so most of the content so far has been about her daughters Claire (who appears, from this perspective, to be carefully paring down her vocabulary) and Julia (who has disappeared, then had her name retconned to Zoë, as if in a bad thriller movie). I know blogging is the new selective memory, but they sound like amazing kids. I want kids now, dammit! SOMEBODY HAVE SOME KIDS WITH ME.
I’m running the first (theoretically) paid ads ever on xorph.com, now. I don’t have any particular moral objection to ads; it just never seemed worth the trouble before. Until Clockers got boingboinged.
As Holly pointed out, I wrote 991 extremely short stories and she wrote 41 stories that interlock in a crossword, and yet the fanfic we did for a bad movie is what starts eating into our fifteen minutes. Internet is really weird.
Merry Christmas, Ken and Jon
Ever wondered about my mental self-image, as a lifelong Kentuckian landing in London for the first time, back in March? Uncle John provides.
A day late
I keep track of Anacrusis anniversaries in an idiosyncratic way, which means that I don’t notice things like June 21st, the day I first went public with it. But Mister Munson did, two days ago:
“Something seems to have worked in your googlebombing efforts. Bobrulez is higher in the google results than your blog site.
Hey, Happy Birthday to Anacrusis tomorrow, and as a nod to that spirited bit of rhetorical dabbling, I have posted my xanga entry in 101-word-anacrusis form.
It’s no great shakes, but it was fun. It is actually more of a writing exercise, isn’t it? It’s like Soduku for the literate.
Not sure I want to get on face book, it just seems so public. Xanga is so much more anonymous.
By the way, this email was an anacrusis!
I’m hooked.
Bryan”
I’m not sure whether I prefer “Sudoku for the literate” to “fiction for the attention-deprived,” but it is a nice dig at Sudoku. I’m not a huge fan of crosswords, but at least they’re not entirely computable.
Apparently there is wireless all over Innsbruck. And all it costs is money!
I have no doubt that Caitlan will enter a full report that details the fantastic services of Ryanair (you get what you pay for) (although I’m not sure we paid for the riot cops), our midnight bumbling around Bologna, finding our contacts (Christi and Melissa) almost by chance at the train station, and getting vaguely interrogated in our compartment upon crossing the border very early this morning (Polizei: “Gesundheit dachshundt ein knockwurst Deutschland?” Us: “…” Polizei: “… Americans?” Us: “Yes!”).
But we are here now and the mountains keep sneaking up on us. They look like giant matte paintings. I am suspicious that somebody keeps wheeling them around behind the buildings and will eventually jump out to say “Boo!”
We got here at 0700 today and couldn’t check in until 1700, so we crisscrossed the city a few times–almost on purpose–before finally filling our unwashed selves with bread and cheese and fruit and passing out in a park for a few hours. Now we are checked in, and scrubbed up, in a bright and breezy hostel where I understand they will shortly remove our eyes with blowtorches.
Okay! EUROPE!
“Say hello to Bono and Sandra Day O’Connor!”
All right, I freaking live with The Surrealists, it’s about time I memed it up, right?
Presenting Dr. O’Callaghan’s Scientific Fist Names Generator.
This is all 30 Rock’s fault really, even if they didn’t invent the gag. I love 30 Rock.
On Sunday I was supposed to meet Caitlan here so she could drop some things off before she, Kristi and Melissa went touring in London. The original estimate was that she would show up at 1:00, give or take an hour. Kevan and Holly left to go to Kew Gardens at 2 and Caitlan still hadn’t made it. By 4:00 I figured they’d just decided to lug things around rather than spend time getting here and back, so I decided to try air-drying all my laundry simultaneously. In my small upstairs room, this means festooning every available protuberance (coathooks, shelf corners, light fixtures, etc) with my underpants.
By 6:00, Catriona was home and I went out running. Circa 6:50 I returned and was greeted by Kevan. “Oh,” he said, “your sister and her friends came by. They’re upstairs.”
My life is a sitcom, second in a series.