Pliiz Riiliis Mii

God help mii. It started innocentlii iinough. It was a rainii day with the familii. A good day for riiding a book, I thought. But wii spend so little time together as it is. So when my nephiiew suggested a vidiio game, I said okay. Usuallii, I suck at vidiio games. Twitching my thumbs and shooting at everiithing that moves is a talent I happilii never diiveloped. But now wii stand and thrash about. I siim to have a natural talent though for fake wakeboarding in the living room. And I have siin few things funniier than bowling with 100 pins at a time. I had to ice down my shoulder biifore the day was out. I knew I was in riil trouble though when I got up thii next morning and thought, “Time for Tai Chii.” When I changed my name to Tiim, my fate was siiled.

Flash in the Pan

While on my blogging hiatus I put together a little e-book of food-related flash fiction. Flash in the Pan is now available on Smashwords. I did this as a learning experience. Page layout is always a challenge and formatting for an e-book has its own rules. [Smashwords provides a thorough style guide, but still....]

I don’t currently own a dedicated e-reader, but I have an i-Pod Touch with the Kindle and Stanza reader apps. The small screen is much easier to read than I expected, but I’ve only read short works on it. I don’t think I would enjoy a novel reduced to bite-sized pieces. I’m wondering how many of you have an e-reader and which one you have? What do you like most about it? What features are lacking? Anyone have an i-Pad? How many of you read on another portable device like I do?

Feel free to download a copy of Flash in the Pan, because that’s the price: free. There’s a PDF version for those without an e-reader. And I will be very grateful on any feedback you can give me.

Flash in the Pan cover

Cover photo by Jurvetson (flickr)

.

.

.

Follow Friday Flash Fiction on Twitter, Facebook, and Mad Utopia

.

Funny Stuff on the Interwebs

I’ve seen some funny stuff around lately. And me? I’m NOT telling drunken Irish jokes this year. [I have a Lent joke that I'll probably post next week though. So, you know, you have that to look forward to.]

Travis, a mathematician, over at komplexify has Joke Time! As he says, “Each semester, I offer students a last chance for extra credit by writing their favorite joke or riddle on their crib sheet, with extra credit assigned based purely on how funny I think it is.” I’m entirely geeky enough to think that he got some very funny stuff again this time.

Completely unrelated, except that this also comes out of a classroom, is this Course Evaluation from Zero Out of Five. [Note to self, revise course evaluation before I distribute them in June....]

Roger von Oech, an inventor, author, and consultant, over at Creative Think has Color Names. While I don’t want to promote gender stereotypes, I thought it was funny. Go look at it and then I’ll tell you something else I think is funny. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Really. I’ll be right here. Because this is — oh, good. You’re back. I was describing this image to a friend of mine, but it had been a few days since I looked at it so I didn’t remember all the color names in the left column. So I just started naming colors like periwinkle and puce. Neither of which are even on the silly thing. [But I am still secure in my masculinity.] And, I just learned that puce is the color of fleas. So there’s that….

Oh, No

I have a sort of millennium bug up my ass. It’s not exactly a Y2K problem… it’s a Y2KX… no YMMX… well, it’s all these end-of-the-decade-wrapup stories I’ve been seeing the last few days.

Remember back when everyone was partying like it was 1999? I mean, when it actually was 1999 and they were all like, “It’s the end of the millennium!” And all the geeks [like me] were all, “No, the millennium actually ends next year.” And we would try to explain that there was no year zero, which NEVER worked, so then we would say, “OK, see. The first century had to be years 1 to 100, and the second century had to be years 101 to 200, and so on. So the twentieth century has to be years 1901 to 2000.” And that’s when we were uninvited to all the new year’s eve parties that year and some of us the next year also [because we just couldn't let it go and we would have spent all that night too explaining that this was the dawn of a new century] and a few of us several more years after that [but I'm not bitter].

OK. So we have NOT just finished the first decade of the twenty-first century. We have finished a decade of years with 0-numbers. But even though I am one of those annoying people [shut up] that said twenty-oh-one right up through twenty-oh-nine, not even I ever said twenty-oh-oh instead of two-thousand. [I have said uh-oh a LOT, but the date has nothing to do with that. Well, once it was on a date. But that's a different story....] And I know you’re wondering, so yes, to me this year is twenty-ten, not two-thousand-ten.

Is this what Santayana meant by, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”?

Hot, Hot, Hot

There is an interesting little slideshow on the Scientific American website with a few examples of products marketed in the early 20th century that contained radioactive materials. From the home science kit to the beauty products to the supposed health products it is a cross-section of our curiosity and naivety. I suppose we can be glad that we didn’t receive radioactive water in our stockings this year, but the cynic in me wonders what products we will be shaking our heads over in dismay a hundred years from now. [And by "we" I mean humanity collectively, since I seriously doubt I will still be around in another hundred years. And, as much as I love you and wish you all great health, I doubt you will either. Maybe we should agree to check back in say... ten years and shake our heads then. I'm reasonably certain that ten years from now some of what we are doing today will seem extremely stupid in retrospect. I mean, just think about all the stupid stuff we were doing ten years ago.... Wow, I think that's the longest parenthetical tangent to which I've subjected you here!]

So, anyway, as I watched the slideshow [you remember, that's where I started this post] I was reminded of a recent post by Karen over at Miscellaneous Yammering. You should go read that one. There’s always something to make you smile over there! And if you have any brushes with radioactivity that you can share without violating national security, put them in the comments.

Excuse me now. There are men in white coats that seriously want a moment or two of my time….

RRR: My Extremely Brief, Unintentional, and Unprofitable Ownership of a Pornographic Website

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
This is an update of a post originally published on 21 November 2006.

I garnered three new followers on Twitter this weekend. I have blocked two of them because they link directly to porn sites. [I am not philosophically opposed to porn. It's just not what I publish in this space nor will I promote it here.] I’m guessing I picked them up because I had the word “erotica” in my Friday Flash title and the tweets promoting it. And I’m guessing I’ll have to block a couple more when I publish this post. ~Tim 14 December 2009

Here’s the old post with updates:

Let me tell you about the time my website was labeled “pornography”. [And it was not last month when I got all crude and rude on a couple posts. In fact, it predates my blog by a few years.]

The school district where I work has only been hosting websites for teachers for about a year or two. Those of us that were ahead of that curve were on our own. So for a while I used some of the space provided for personal pages by my ISP to post information for my classes. I registered a domain name and had the URL forward to my pages.

That worked well… until one day the filtering software the district used blocked access to my site. It was classified as pornography. Hmm. Well, I was angered a little and amused a lot. But URL forwarding was a trick often used by pornographic sites so you could have a link for PureAsTheDrivenSnow.com that actually links to RaunchyDebauchery.com. And since it wasn’t really practical for them to, you know, actually have a person look at every website that passes through our servers, the filtering software just blocked every site that was forwarded. And labeled it pornography.

[I just made up those domain names and figured I better check whether there are websites attached to them. As of this writing PureAsTheDrivenSnow.com is registered but does not have a site up and RaunchyDebauchery.com is not yet registered. Wow! Same as three years ago! ~TVS So if you're looking for the Christmas gift for the person that seems to have everything....]

I copied the section of the agreement with my ISP that expressly prohibits posting obscene material and emailed our district network administrator. The reply shocked me more than having my students see the big stop sign when they tried to get to my site. It was district policy not to unblock sites owned by teachers. I think they adopted the policy because a lot of people were using services like Geocities [remember Geocities?] that were full of banner ads over which you had very little control. But I wasn’t using Geocities for my class pages and I had no ads (or pornography) anywhere on my site. And shouldn’t we expect a site owned by a teacher to be among the most relevant of the sites we want our students to access?

Fortuitously, I also emailed the publisher of the software the district was using and they unblocked my site. The argument with district policy was moot for me then and it was a battle I was not inclined to fight just on principle. Eventually web hosting prices dropped low enough that I was willing to have a site devoted just to my classes so I don’t have to forward the URL any more. And thus ended My Extremely Brief, Unintentional, and Unprofitable [dammit] Ownership of a Pornographic Website.

Two Trebles

I [re]wrote recently about my search for treble entendres. [Double entendres are SO 20th century, after all.] In one of those quirks of synchronicity I read a story last week about an attractive young woman that worked in the financial market and got a promotion by accusing her boss of sexual impropriety. [I would link to the story, but I just spoiled it for you. Let me know if you still want to read it....]

So my comment was:

Figures!

And I like having thought of it so well that I am sharing it with you. It does work on three levels!

And then in another quirk of synchronicity I had a conversation with a friend who said,

“It’s like they say in real estate, ‘Location, location, location.’ It’s the same with sex.”

[I like the way she thinks!] And I asked her if I could use that in a post, because I think it works as a treble entendre too. I am hoping that a third example will come my way, but I have had precious little time to post anything this week and I have grown impatient waiting for it.

Publisher’s Clearing House

I’ve been thinking about trying to get something published — you know, in a place where they pay writers rather than just here in this blog and other sites that amount to little more than vanity presses (without the press, no less). That’s why the nature of my posts have been a little different lately. I haven’t submitted anything in years and I feel the need to stretch a bit.

NaNoWriMo is coming up and I’ve toyed with trying that. I’m not sure I have a novel in me — at least not one that I’m ready to write. I tend to prefer shorter forms. And NaNoWriMo is a big commitment — 50,000 words in 30 days. Would that suck up all my free time? And while I agree there is some value in writing a lot without taking the time to edit [editing can always be done later] I don’t think that’s the challenge I want just now.

I considered proposing a shorter variant: Nano-WriMo, but that would be confusing and the Nano prefix is a billionth. 50,000/1,000,000,000 reduces to less than one word. Hey, maybe that means you have to read 2,000 words for every one you write! No, that’s not the balance I’m looking for either. Kilo-WriMo could indicate writing 1,000 words and that would allow plenty of time in a month for editing. I think I’d rather have 1,000 really good words than 50,000 of slop. Plus, I like mysteries and Kilo-WriMo sounds a bit like Killer-WriMo.

Another idea I kicked around was a month of poetry writing, Rhymo-WriMo. That has a certain ring to it. But rhyming poetry seems to be passé these days [even though I still favor it]. As an added challenge, each day could be a different form — limerick, haiku, sonnet… hmmm, I suppose I should make sure there are 30 so I could have something different for every day of the month. That sounds like work, or research, or something.

I suppose I need to give this some more thought….

RRR: Seeking the Elusive Treble Entendre

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
The first two-thirds of this was originally posted on 18 February 2005.
But, there is trouble with trebles — this feels incomplete without a third part so I’ve added to it.

complex – noun: a group of repressed desires and memories that exerts a dominating influence upon the personality
complex – adjective, 2 : hard to separate, analyze, or solve
complex – noun, 1 : a whole made up of complicated or interrelated parts (a complex of university buildings)

Therefore, if you have repressed desires about a hard to analyze group of university buildings, you have a complex complex complex.

fob – transitive verb, archaic, DECIEVE, CHEAT
fob – noun, an ornament attached to a fob chain
fob off – transitive verb, 1: to put off with a trick, excuse, or inferior substitute
2: to pass or offer (something spurious) as genuine
3: to put aside

I took it off my keychain. It was a little plastic license plate I carried for three years. Because she gave it to me. Because we flirted a little. Because even though I knew we could never be, it was fun to pretend a little that maybe…. But it was chipped and faded. And it wasn’t really the one she gave me anyway. My keys were stolen so I bought one just like it. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

fool – 1 : a person lacking in judgment or prudence
fool – 2 a : a retainer formerly kept in great households to provide casual entertainment and commonly dressed in motley with cap, bells, and bauble b : one who is victimized or made to appear foolish : dupe
fool – 3 a : a harmlessly deranged person or one lacking in common powers of understanding b : one with a marked propensity or fondness for something [a dancing fool] [a fool for candy]

What kind of fool am I? [Yeah, um, this is what you call a rhetorical question....]

Definitions from Merriam-Webster Online

LO god, itz me, otoh

What if, instead the whole mountaintop thing, God had texted the 10 commandments to Moses? Thanks to Jamie Quatro at McSweeney’s we know it might have looked like this:

1. no1 b4 me. srsly.

2. dnt wrshp pix/idols

3. no omg’s

4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)

5. pos ok – ur m&d r cool

6. dnt kill ppl

7. :-X only w/ m8

8. dnt steal

9. dnt lie re: bf

10. dnt ogle ur bf’s m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl.

ttyl, JHWH.

ps. wwjd?

Along the same lines, but in the CE, we now have:

wtfwjd