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I posted my spaghetti recipe 'round here awhile ago...good thing I did, 'cause not long after I scrambled the diskette it was on.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Have you ever thought about how bad of an idea it is to make mint smelling markers? I think that might have been a major cause for the fact that I don't remember fourth grade.
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I attended a Traffic Diversion this week with my 16yr old son.
He was not wearing a bike helmet (idiot) and got a ticket. A Traffic Diversion is Police-speak for Traffic school. But I am in the middle of writing a steam punk-romance short story where the MC (a proper young lady named Mercy) talks about being diverted so I sat for two hours while the officers (who ride motorcycles), one of which was british and did not speak Californian and the other who had managed to make it to adulthood and gods knows how many of these classes and still not know how to man a PowerPoint presentation go on and on. I do believe they resurrected several frames of blood on the highway. While I imagined Mercy and Horatio being diverted by their wonderful flying machine...wearing helmets, of course.
After class, I asked them what a Diversion was and they gestured around them and said "Well, this..." and then I asked why it was called a Diversion and they looked at me like two leather clad owls. Their boots were cool, though.
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Dang now I want to do everything in my power to make sure the answer to that question is both.
Posts: 1895 | Registered: Mar 2004
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It's not really as simplistic as depicted by Pauli Shore in Encino Man, or as slick as Alicia Silverstone in Blast from the Past. Mr. Shore's dialect is really a derviative of Dude, which has roots in the Malibu surfer communities of the mid 70's. And Ms Sliverstone bases hers on the Galleria movement of the mid-80s so prevalent in the Valley.
Today's modern Californian, as observed in Northern California, is closer to a blending of LOL-speak mixed with cracker-rap as interpreted by over indulged white boys. Most communication no longer happens verbally but only via txt.
Examples include:
"Dude, Mom. I didn't cut that class I was just hanging." (single example of verbal communication)
"I feelin bad and none of my classes r doin anything. Can I come home?"
"U r a dwb" (this was in response to a negative on the above)
I have discovered that removal of the cell phone, X-Box and computer (where WOW is played) results in a slow resumption of normal communication.
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When I think Californian I get this strange fusion of gang members with funny teeth and uzis in old cars with shiny wheels, The Beach Boys and palm trees, and the Hollywood sign.
Which is funny, because I spent some time in LA and the actual memories of that time was concrete, traffic, and more concrete.
And as for X-Boxes and WoW... one of these days I should disconnect my internet for a month as a social experiment and see what it does to my home life. Maybe those brain cells WoW ate will grow back and my productivity will no longer look like this:
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Never been further west than Laramie, Wyoming. And that was nearly forty years ago.
Never got into games. I kinda bought my first computer to try out a video game of "The Simpsons," but everything else I loaded onto it was either (a) free, or (b) associational with something I was interested in. By the time I bought my second computer, I hadn't found any games I was so interested in that I thought it was worth downloading...most of the downloads since then have been music-related, i. e. maintaining and adding to an iTunes program.
Not that my social activity, or even actual writing time, has gone up from not doing any of these extracurricular activites...
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I stopped watching TV about 9 months ago and I think my IQ has increased but I also found that I don't know what anybody at cocktail parties is talking about anymore.
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I tried "Juggling for Klutzes," but without much luck. I did better with "Harmonica for the Musically Impaired," or whatever it was---I'm more musical than I am coordinated.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I just finished using tubs and tubs of penetrating epoxy and bondo to repair a rotted exterior beam. That stuff is nasty- mostly the bondo the epoxy does not smell as toxic.
I think I lost all the IQ points I gained from not watching TV.... 8(
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I like to hold back until somebody else says something.
*****
Come to think of it, I do have something to say.
Last month, after a bad hangnail experience, I decided to let that fingernail grow long...then started letting them all grow long. Twasn't easy, being an inveterate nailbiter, but I managed...somehow. Yesterday I trimmed them a little, but...
How can you guys with long nails stand it? I'd rub my eyes or scratch an itch and damned near draw blood. They poked me when I didn't expect it. I worried constantly about getting things under them. What gives?
While I was sitting watching football in the drivers lounge of a truck stop in the middle of nowhere a driver noticed that I was on the net and started to ask me questions about the shooting at Ft Hood. Now I know it was a week ago but hey, some people really try to disassociate themselves from all the bad news. You really can't blame them. Well, this guy just heard from home that a kid he knew back in Indiana was one of the ones that was murdered. I pulled up todays news and the Sgt he knew as his neighbors son was the first person mentioned in the story. This poor guy crumbled right before my eyes.
It feels as if I did something wrong. I know that is illogical but it is still a feeling I cannot shake.
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Don't feel bad, snapper. If it were you (assuming, because if it were me), you'd want to know. Even if you really hoped it wasn't true.
Posts: 3687 | Registered: Jan 2007
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In the last forty-eight hours, I've heard "Adeste Fidelis" and "You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch." (Of course, they were on my iPod, playing in random order.)
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My daughter threw up today,all over her purple shirt and in the mall. Luckily it was outside the mall, unluckily I had no other shirt to put her in. So I had to zip her up in a red jacket and she was almost sweating the rest of the time in our 80 degree weather.
Posts: 968 | Registered: Jul 2008
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Thank you rich for enlivening our random musings, I was about to put a stake in it's heart and consider it dead for maybe good. And then you have to post that Stephen King say's that Stephanie Meyer can't write worth a ****.
My comments are based only on what the article said and in no way reflects you rich. It only sounds that way.
I think it is obnoxious the way every would be writer has to bash Stephanie Meyer. I know she made mistakes, like "shhh" she hushed and everything. But come on. Twilight was her first novel. The very first novel she ever wrote, and I bet if you dug into your bag of tricks and pulled out your first novel, there would be a few minor mistakes in it. I know there are in mine.
Second off, Steven King must feel threatened or something, or Oh yeah... he has a book coming out. Let's bash the most popular book out there and remind people how well he can write.
I think the article is just a publicity stunt used by the man who hocked his new book on The View.
Personally, I wish he would have taken the Orson Scott Card route and spoke kindly. Then, when the fad fades away, and Stephanie Meyer has to stand on her own skills as a writer, she can either fade away with the fad, or show everyone why so many people have bought her books. Steven King calling her out as just a fad, might come back to bite him on the butt now that she has more power in publishing than he does.
And third off, if a publishing house bought her book, and she actually can't "write worth a ****" then, Sweet! There is hope for me to be published too.
So maybe we should think positively that the next big fad out there will have one of our names on it, and think how we would react if that happens. Steven King, I'm disappointed. ~Sheena
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Tell King his writings are so overloaded with words that it's a wonder they can stand up on their own, and that the idea for his latest sounds like something he lifted from The Twilight Zone---which wouldn't be the first time he did. Some guys just can't stand that others can be successful, in sales or artistic standards.
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If you read the entire article, you might notice he admits Meyer writes well for her target audience--teenaged girls and timid adults. That's not the audience he cares about, so it's not surprising he would bash a writing style that appeals to its members.
Posts: 1139 | Registered: May 2008
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I don't think Stephen King has written a decent book in quite awhile, but a couple of things:
He never called Meyer out as a fad, and I don't think he's jealous of her success. It's just the guy's opinion. Obviously a few of you don't share his opinion, and that's cool. But I think you're attributing motivations to him that are not possible to gauge from that snippet.
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If I were to one day be able to successfully emulate one or the other - I would choose King (I would rather make millions and be respected, than possibly make billions and be mocked by my peers).
Posts: 2003 | Registered: Jul 2008
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David Farland (Wolverton) was Stephanie Meyer's teacher (as well as Brandon Sanderson's) and he has about the same amount of appreciation as King for her prose. Essentially, she tapped into the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" market as it was dying, so she caught all those residual fans.
You want to make a mint? Write a door-stopper about a couple of angsty witch-sisters....Do that with "Charmed".
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited November 21, 2009).]
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I've given King's works a pass for, oh, about five or six years, I think. The only thing of his I read regularly is his occasional column in Entertainment Weekly...where I thought he puts an unusual amount of arrogance forward, something that's shown up elsewhere in his nonfiction, that didn't when I first started reading his stuff.
I think it comes across that he was once one of the sheep, and now he thinks he's the shepherd.
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know when to fall alseep . . . know when to slum.
Sorry I just heard the ghost of Kenny Rogers singing those words to me. (And before you tell me Kenny Rogers isn't dead look at a picture of him recently and look at one of him ten years ago. One of two things happened, horribly botched facelift or he died and they replaced him with a phony.)
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A lot of celebrities have had horrific facelifts...some of whom deny ever having had one. (The last time I saw Cher, she looked like she could have played the lead part in Mask and not the supporting role she did play. Her surgery is said to have ended her acting career.)
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