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Epiphany Meal #2

July 7, 2005 /

Yesterday my sister Caitlan arrived in Cincinnati, home safe from a three-week (I think) trip to Greece and Italy. Caitlan sucks. But actually she rules.

Before we let her sleep, my family went to dinner at Le Relais, where Ian’s roommate Jesse is a chef. Jesse had arranged a “tasting” for us, which was pretty cool–we got VIP treatment at what is widely considered the best restaurant in Louisville, if not Kentucky.

I was expecting a selection of small courses, which is kind of what we got, only there were six courses plus dessert, and even with small portions that was still a tremendous amount of food. Every bite was incredible. Duck breast and paté with whole-grain dijon, pan-seared sea scallops and hyacinth bulbs (!), medium-rare fillet in veal reduction sauce, five kinds of cheese and pistachio pound cake with saffron ice cream. And I don’t even like cheese! My favorite was the pan-fried red grouper in lobster stock reduction, which was like eating butter if butter was a fish.

Like the first Epiphany Meal, I felt a bit transformed afterward (and not just because I could barely move). I never really knew I liked French food. Maybe it would have been better for my waistline if I still didn’t.

Site news that nobody cares about

July 7, 2005 /

Xorph.com served six hundred-odd pages to the Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya yesterday, which presumably means somebody in their CS department told a bot to crawl me–I’ve never seen them in my referral logs before. Anyone else get similar hits?

Also, Dreamhost now has a thing where they up your bandwidth and disk space quotas every week. It’s not much in terms of disk space–like 20Mb a week–but the bandwidth grows by a gig a week (both for the cheapest plan). Dreamhost is pretty great.

July 7, 2005 /

I’d always thought that the route I ran–when I ran–was about three miles: my average plod is about 6mph, and I ran for roughly half an hour. Also it kind of… felt three-milesish.

This morning Leonard delicioused the GMaps Pedometer, which allowed me to discover that my route was… 3.0165352158455165 miles!

At least I know that for a while, I was still in reasonable shape to run a 5k (for which half an hour is a hideous time).

July 7, 2005 /

NOT COOL. My mom is supposed to leave for London tomorrow. That is quite enough with the bombing.

Only two fatalities so far, but as of this morning there were still people trapped underground.

Update 1046 hrs: Thirty-three.

Update 1329 hrs: Thirty-seven.

I’m stealing the idea of the photo-caption story.

July 1, 2005 /

I found Roy Peter Clark’s Fifty Writing Tools via Leonard’s del.icio.us, originally, and had them recommended to me again by Catherine Frostflake. I’ve been reading and digesting a few every day, and today I hit Polish Your Jewels, which reads like a manifesto for microfiction:

“The shorter the story form, the more precious is each word…

My friend Peter Meinke, a brilliant poet, taught me that short writing forms have three peculiar strengths. Their brevity can give them a focused power; it creates opportunity for wit; and it inspires the writer to polish, to reveal the luster of the language.”

All of the essays (so far) are solid, interesting, unpretentious and broadly applicable.

I’ve been thinking for a while of putting together a similar set of microfiction-writing tools, to be released around the time we hit anacrusis #500 (August 16). I’m not a pro like Mr. Clark, so this would involve some significant hubris, which is why I started mocking myself for the idea with Story Hacks. After a while I realized that all the useful word-cutting advice I’ve got could be applied to itself, which leaves me with

  1. Contractions!
  2. Cut out the first paragraph.
    • And probably the second.

June 30, 2005 /

Should I even talk about Six Feet Under? It’s one of those things where I’ve known forever that it would be great, and everybody in the world got into it and said it was great, and then two years later I finally watch it and guess what! There is no indie cred in late adoption.

Six Feet Under is incredible.