The good thing about style sheets and server-side includes is that they allow you to change the look of an entire web site by editing just a couple of documents. The bad thing about style sheets and server-side includes is that they allow you to change the look of an entire web site by editing just a couple of documents. I had too much time on my hands tonight er… make that last night, but there was an ftp gaffe someplace just before bedtime.

Anyway, the picture this time is of my great-great-uncle Ole, who spent most of his life herding reindeer in Lapland.

I leave town for… well, four months, I guess… and so they set the big shiny dome on fire. The time before that, they burned up a bunch of stuff in my old high school auditorium; and before that, they closed my favoritest ever ice cream shop. C’mon, guys, there are better ways to say you miss me.

In today’s referral logs, we have a search for “trendy socks” and another one for “mullet coffee table book”. I’m so happy I could just pee. But speaking of socks, I needed a cheap disposable tablecloth today so I went down to the Danish equivalent of the venerable Dollar General to hunt for one. Of course I didn’t find anything close to what I was looking for, but I did find some pretty incredible socks. They’re orange, with a picture of a voluptuous disco woman on the top and the words “sool babe” written in yellow across the foot. For 10 crowns, I couldn’t refuse, and I also picked up a pink pair that says “girls are best friends”. They were made in the U.K.

Europe is so surreal sometimes.

Oh, look, it’s a new toy for suckers with web sites. Sign the guestmap, won’t you?

Remember that time before you went to college and had the enthusiasm beaten out of you with a big ol’ stick? I was going to double major in math and physics, and I was looking forward to utter crap humanities classes. I also had given myself “lots” of work for the last few dregs of high school. Ha ha.

On the other hand, I’ve been frustrated lately by what I perceive as a gradual decline in the size of my working vocabulary. There are so many times, now, that I sit racking my skull for a word that I know is out there, the word that is a particularly apt and lively way of expressing something subtle, and after about five minutes and a visit to the invariably useless thesaurus.com, I settle for some Californian combination of “like” “really” and “dude.” I don’t remember having this problem back in the halcyon days when I was voted largest vocabulary of my graduating class. Maybe this is a sign of higher standards on my part, but I’m inclined to blame two years without serious literary influences. Now all of a sudden I’m feeling nostalgic and starving for eloquence, so I’m going to plumb the depths of old emails for a portrait of the blogger as a young(er) woman.

Thursday, April 15, 2020
My life-as-movie today has been nothing but one big voiceover; and not even an at-self voiceover, where you gain useful insights into the character & motivations of the
protagonist, but a Disney voiceover from “The Life of Timmy Tapeworm”:
Wow! this traffic jam in the hallways reminds me of the time I was clinging mindlessly to the duodenum of an obnoxiously yappy French poodle who had just eaten a bowl of cheap generic dry dog food pellets…
*fade to flashback*

Sunday, May 23, 2020
I’m really in a pencil sort of mood. Typing is too transient, too easy, really, I type so much faster than I write, almost faster than I can think at times, and pen is just too dark
and permanent and thick with the greasy odor of all the old, fermenting emotional garbage leaking out of the words on the page…. Pencil is light, probing without being abstract and intellectual, allowing most of the panoply of journalling insights to fall on the page without losing too much of their lustre.

Panoply! I haven’t used that word in ages! Panoply, cognizant, slithering, solace, pathos, bathos, garrulous… I miss tasting words as they fall from my fingertips, little tangy drops from the specialty speechshop. Maybe it’s time to go hunting for James Joyce.

On a totally unrelated note, someone has gone and installed a piece of shit “enhancement” to Internet Explorer that slows everything down while advertising some bite-sized banana republic of a portal site. I can’t figure out how to make the damned thing go away - I’d normally just nuke any and all references to it on the hard drive, but I don’t have the requisite access permissions. Any suggestions?

They forgot to mention that I was buying “wake up early the next morning unable to go back to sleep” beer, and not “sleep until it’s dark out again” beer. I should not be awake yet, and I most certainly should not have been awake three hours ago, after finally stumbling home at around 3:30 in the morning.

I suppose I did promise to tell you all what Thanksgiving is about nowadays anyway, since I am of course the single unquestionable authority on such matters. But I’m going to cheat you with a quick and dirty answer, because I need to go shopping (ugh). Thanksgiving is about what Christmas is about, minus all the commercialism and the winter imagery, and the mostly irrelevant story about a baby religious nutcase has been replaced by a mostly irrelevant story about a starving group of grownup religious nutcases.

And that leaves us with buying inordinate quantities of food. Cheerio.

Well, here I go again, trying to plan Thanksgiving dinner for an as-yet-unknown number of people. This is one of the most benign American traditions I can think of, and I’ve always felt a little bit disgruntled that we’ve managed to export Valentine’s Day and Halloween without ever trying to foist Thanksgiving onto other cultures as well. It’s a bit of an unbalanced view, I think. Sure, no starving groups of religious nutcases who were assisted by the friendly natives have gone on to become the dominant cultural force on any continent besides North America, but is that really what Thanksgiving is about nowadays? And besides, it’s not like the marketing geniuses who brought you orange-cellophane-wrapped Halloween mums at Netto have any care for piddly historical details.

Of course, I’m mostly just not looking forward to the upcoming hunt for a giant roasting bag. I love to cook, and can say without snarkiness that I get warm fuzzy feelings just thinking about an entire day in the kitchen with a turkey, some potatoes, and heaps and heaps of brightly colored veggies. Oh, and maybe a bottle of wine for, uh, flavor. But I hate shopping, and if I don’t know exactly where to go to find every last thing then I positively dread the experience. So the first thing I am thankful for on this Thanksgiving shall be the presence of the little American grocery, where they have canned pumpkin pie filling with a recipe on the back, in English.

Next up: what is Thanksgiving about nowadays, anyway? I’d answer the question now, but Rasmus is having a housewarming party tonight, and it’s time to get going.

I’ve just (well, a couple days ago) gotten a huge file of correspondence from two years ago, and have been reading through it with the bizarre and morbid interest with which one ought to look at the corpse of a dead self, or more aptly the shed skins of bugs. I have to visit sleepland fairly soon here, as I’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning to discuss the salient bits of Dansgaard-Oeschger events and the afleveringopgave for my climate modelling class, but before that happens I’ve been reminded of a little backhanded back-formation neologism I committed, and neglected to atone for.

The word I wanted was tuitive, which of course should be the opposite of intuitive. So it describes things that ought be obvious but aren’t, like the interpretation of quantum mechanics or why I saw a guy wearing a white t-shirt and a gas mask bicycling down the same bit of Holmensgade on two mornings in a row a couple weeks ago, but haven’t seen him since. If we take the etymology a little further, we find that the opposite of intuition is of course tuition, thus disproving this silly libertarian notion that privatized education is obviously the solution to all our problems.

So you see how I deserve punishment. Perhaps some old photographs of Kongens Nytorv will help? There are more old pictures of Copenhagen where those came from. And while we’re on the subject of old photos, it’s always fun to check out the Caltech photo archives - they found science in a basement somewhere, I think.

I walked out of class today and there was this bright yellow thing hanging low in the southern sky, which was inexplicably saturated with blue and there was no water coming out of it either. At first I thought I had woken up in California and this had all been a dream, but then I thought I’d better take advantage of the afternoon and grab some pictures of the little mermaid for my mother. Mom wanted to be a mermaid when she grew up.

Shockingly, I had never walked down the Langelinie quai before. Since my expectations had been lowered so much by a constant background murmur of “really little” “ugly industrial harbor backdrop”, etc, I was pleasantly surprised - but that’s really because I like industrial settings, especially when they involve rows of windmills, and also because I had walked all the way there and still not gotten rained on. What all the disdainful tour guides forgot to tell you, though, is that even though it really is worth grabbing a quick snapshot of the Lille Havfrue to take back to your mother, if you don’t do so on a summer evening the statue’ll be rather horribly backlit and your shoddy focus-free camera will make a hack job of it. But I think some of my random street scenes should turn out rather well. This afternoon’s roll of film will be a test of my shoddy-camera photographic techniques; we’ll see what happens.

And I hope I made lots of Vitamin D - I doubt there’ll be much more where that came from.

MathWorld is back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I simply cannot use enough exclamation points for this.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, and someone decided to do a streaming ascii version of Star Wars.

That is all.