Mrs. Adams

When I was in the 3rd grade, our teacher, Mrs. Adams, who was otherwise a really likeable teacher, told us we could remember how to spell "friend" because "friendships always 'end.'"

I thought that was a horrible thing to say.

We weren't even talking about spelling. It was in the middle of a science lesson or something. She just tossed that jewel out there. I've never had trouble spelling "friend" though. But, I can't write or say the word without remembering that day.

Here's another one that messed me up:

I went to a basketball camp once in my life. It was one of those one week, every afternoon, learn how to dribble and shoot etc. I was in the 7th grade. On day one, the coach sat us all down and held up a basketball. He asked, "Doesn't it look like 2 of these could go through that hoop at the same time?" The implication being that if the hoop was big enough to fit two...how much easier one would be. Everyone else seemed to have an epiphany. "Yeah!" they said. With vigor. I didn't say anything because it looked to me like, if you set them both up there side by side and pushed, maybe you could squeeze them through, but I doubted it. I did horribly at basketball camp. I tell people I have a natural inability for the sport.

I just looked it up: A regulation hoop is 18 inches in diameter and a regulation basketball is 9. So... Whatever.

While I'm all for an interdisciplinary education, I don't think we need to combine the field of spelling with the likes of nihilism and philology. I also have no problem really with avoiding non-Euclidean geometry during basketball practice. Kids should get a chance to just be kids, you know?

A Connecticut Yankee

But there was a sound here which interrupted the stillness only to add to its mournfulness; this was the faint far sound of tolling bells which floated fitfully to us on the passing breeze, and so faintly, so softly, that we hardly knew whether we heard it with our ears or with our spirits.

- Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

If you took Twain's style and ran it through one of those paint-mixing machines they have at Home Depot, I think you'd end up with Vonnegut.

Orisinal

Ferry Halim over at Orisinal has over 50 little flash games that are fun and pretty. He has other gizmos too like an app that lets you pick flowers from a garden, arrange them, then email them to a friend. Even his guest book is fun.

I dare say the stuff is inspirational. I think I'm still recovering from E3. Orisinal, in contrast, is a nice little pocket of games that make you feel like it might OK to be alive.

Not Recommended

If Amazon really wanted to make a buck, they should occasionally tell me that a book would be wrong for me.

Bill, this book is not recommended for you. Here's why. If you're not Bill, please click here.

I wouldn't be able to not click "Here's why." Then they'd be all, "well, we just don't think it's your type...you know it's kind of...edgy...and the writing style, well, it's an acquired taste."

And I'd be all, "You don't know me Amazon! Give me that book."

They'd pack it up and ship it, chuckling all the while and serving each other mimosas.

I'd probably hate the book...but at least it would've been my decision.

Agenais

Donna Lewis - Agenais (Ay'-jha-nay):

as I sit with the sun falling over
the hayfields by the river
a little hand reached out and touched me
and stole my heart away
I followed into a labyrinth
of gold and rose red color
then I heard such beautiful voices
calling out to me
to go floating down, floating down,
floating down to Agenais

and there it was lit by a blue flame,
a gold and crystal palace
they were dancing in long silver veils
with white lilies in their hair
then we rose above in the moonlight
to watch the city sleeping
this beautiful magical place
I no longer want to leave
and we'll go floating down, floating down,
floating down to Agenais

Camelot, Rivendell, Amber, Cyan. It's fun to think a place is magic.

The Half-Blood Prince

I think there are like 5 people on the planet who haven't bought and read the latest Harry Potter. My sister (16 years younger than me) stood in line at midnight for the 2nd book back in the day, or maybe it was the 3rd. I stood with her, then started reading the books to find out what she was reading. They're fun stories. Good yarns.

One of the most intriguing things about them is what a darned quick-read they are. I finished the 649 pages of the Half-Blood Prince in 4 days, and I gather I'm on the slow end. There's something going on there, I wish I knew what. They're readable, and they keep your attention...but that's what everyone tries for isn't it?

Someone said she deserves the success, she tells a good story. I don't know that anyone deserves 576 million pounds (more than a billion US dollars), but I did laugh out loud when Dumbledore and Harry are chatting outside the Weasley's house and Dumbledore, speaking of the Weasley's mother, says:

I see a light in the kitchen. Let us not deprive Molly any longer of the chance to deplore how thin you are.

The Select Few

In his August 2005 Wired article, Kevin Kelly reports that the number of books published in the US in 2004 was 175,000.

One hundred and seventy-five thousand. You'd have to read 480 books a day to keep up.

I'm just sayin', that's a lot of books.

I'd like to know how many weren't published.

Timequake

I've always liked Kurt Vonnegut's writing style. Absurd situations punctuated with moments of poignancy - his stories match my experience. Life is bizarre, inscrutable and occasionally, momentarily, incredibly beautiful.

In Timequake, speaking in his own voice, Vonnegut tells of a real conversation he had with his dying ex-wife. I'm a sucker for stuff like this when it's surrounded by healthy doses of things like time travel and case studies of human nonsensicalness:

Our last conversation was intimate. Jane asked me, as though I knew, what would determine the exact moment of her death. She may have felt like a character in a book by me. In a sense she was. During our twenty-two years of marriage, I had decided where we were going next, to Chicago, to Schenectady, to Cape Cod. It was my work that determined what we did next. She never had a job. Raising six kids was enough for her.

I told her on the telephone that a sunburned, raffish, bored but not unhappy ten-year-old boy, whom we did not know, would be standing on the gravel slope of the boat-launching ramp at the foot of Scudder's Lane. He would gaze out at nothing in particular, birds, boats, or whatever, in the harbor of Barnstable, Cape Cod.

At the head of Scudder's Lane, on Route 6A, one-tenth of a mile from the boat-launching ramp, is the big old house where we cared for our son and two daughters and three sons of my sister's until they were grownups. Our daughter Edith and her builder husband, John Squibb, and their small sons, Will and Buck, live there now.

I told Jane that this boy, with nothing better to do, would pick up a stone, as boys will. He would arc it over the harbor. When the stone hit the water, she would die.

Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength.

It's a testament to something that even invented, unreasonable connections like that can give us pause. We're wired to hunger for meaning? The world is such a wreck that even the stretchiest attempt to cause-and-effect it prompts a response?

Seamwalkers, Prompt 23

>> Send crappy text adventure back to store for refund. "It just locked up", I will tell the clerk.

You take the game back and receive a full refund. "Everyone's been returning this," says the clerk. "It must be poo."

On a whim, you check out an online walkthrough. It turns out you would've had to trick the gnome in the tree into building a mechanical butterfly so you could enter the sylph's realm and get something to help you breathe underwater in the mermaid's realm so you could go there and get something to help you survive the heat in the salamander's world so you could go there and get the explosives you needed to blow open the "employee's only" door where you'd find a guy sitting at a desk blogging an improv text adventure that he wasn't allowed to stop improving until or unless he got someone else to take his place which would, of course, be you, and off you'd all go to blog your own improv text adventures thereby participating in the great 21st century text adventure revival and sealing your places in history remembering always the quiet, unassuming start it had here in this sorely-in-need-of-a-facelift space called gigagiggles.

The End

Thank goodness.