This is how See Jane Run by Joy Fielding begins:

One afternoon in late spring, Jane Whittaker went to the store for some milk and some eggs and forgot who she was.

Today (an afternoon in mid-spring), I went to the store for some milk and some eggs (and other stuff) and my iPod forgot who it was.

Or, more precisely, it seemed to forget all that stuff that was supposed to be stored in its memory, namely, my songs. In the middle of a song, out of the blue, it just locked up. I reset it, but after it cycled, it didn’t return to the main menu. Instead, a little file icon appeared along with some icons indicating some confusion on iPod’s part (which I can certainly understand; I was confused too). Thankfully, when iPod and I returned home, syncing him with iTunes restored iPod’s memory, though it remains to be seen whether iPod actually *lost* all his memory, or if he just couldn’t figure out how to access it.

I guess I should be grateful that it only happened while I was at the store, and not while I was in the first hour of a long road trip.

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If you’re reading this, you probably noticed that I added one of those AIM Remotes to the banner at the top of the blog. See, when I added it, I thought that the Remote would tell you when I was online and open to chatting. Well, I guess it does do that, but it always says I’m online. Even when I’m not. So what’s the point?

Just wanted to point out that it’s there, and that I’m not actually online all the time as it says I am. But if you add me to an AIM buddy list and I pop online, you should feel free to IM me if you like.

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So, I was watching The Family Guy today. It’s mostly funny. A few times each episode it seems like it’s trying to hard. Overall: amusing. But someone answer me this:

(1) Why is that damn baby so smart?

and

(2) Why is that damn dog so smart?

and

(3) Why doesn’t anyone notice that that damn baby and dog are so smart?

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Today,
I was pondering what sort of monkey I’d like to own.  I was thinking
initially of something with opposable thumbs, but then someone told me about

Cotton-Topped Tamarins, and I immediately fell in love with them because
they look like pygmy demon dogs. 

What’s your favorite monkey?

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Being an editor, and aspiring to get some copyediting jobs eventually, I’ve become familiar with a number of style manuals, The Chicago Manual of Style being one of them. Unfortunatley, since they want to continue selling the book and making money, they have thus far refused to make an electronic edition of the book, even though such a thing would be infinitely more easy to search.

However, since they realize that this is an issue, they’ve made their website searchable, so that you can input queries which will return with the section and subsection of the hardcopy; with this information in hand, you can go to the appropriate section and find the rule you were looking for.

All this is a rather long-winded way of me explaining how and why I’m on the CMS’s mailing list, which includes a regular (monthly?) Q&A update. One of the Q&As this month made me laugh out loud when I read it, so I thought I’d share it.

Q. What is the rule about using a product or company name that implies the type of product to avoid redundant words, for example, Fred’s Bakery bakery products are the best in town? What is the justification for not including the adjective for products (bakery)?

A. The justification is that that would be silly.

[Read the rest of the Q&A]

But perhaps most amusing of all… The Chicago Manual of Style editors have senses of humor? Who knew!

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A friend of mine sent me a link via email the other day, instructing me to go check out a particular site, saying “This is leet.” He was using “leet” ironically, and I realized this, but I was bored and though I already knew what the term meant thanks to a story written by another friend, I decided to look up the term on Wikipedia. I figured there’d be a short description of the term and a brief history of it. But what I found instead was one of the longest, most comprehensive entries I’ve ever stumbled across in the ‘pedia. The leet entry begins thusly:

Leet (most commonly 1337 but often also leetspeak, l33t5p34k, 133t, or l33t) from the phonetic form of the word “elite”, is a cipher, or novel form of English spelling. It is characterized by the use of non-alphabetic characters to stand for letters bearing a superficial resemblance, and by a number of spelling changes such as the substitution of “z” for final “s” and “x” for “(c)k” or “(c)ks.” Leetspeak was first traditionally used on bulletin board systems and then later adopted by America Online users and other Internet communities.

However, leetspeak is not popular amongst all hackers, and nowadays is most commonly used in an ironic manner to represent immaturity. Many consider it a pointless affectation, and as it has become widely used it is less useful as a way of showing membership of an “elite” group. It is nonetheless a cultural phenomenon well-known amongst hackers and many other Internet users. [more…]

In response to this phenomenon (or plague, depending on how you look at it), is The Anti-1337 Manifesto:

Over the years, I have had to put up with people in chatrooms, posters on message boards, people on instant messengers, even people at my school, using 1337 in their everyday lives. It is permeating every branch of society. It is giving our great American nation (and every other nation with 31337ists) a bad name. I have put up with it long enough, and now it’s time to take a stand. Someone must bring the horrors of 1337 and 31337ists to light. That someone is me. [more…]

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The recent flame war on the F&SF message board got me thinking about how to refer to a specific flame war. I decided that it would be best (or at least most amusing) to refer to them as if they were court cases, which is fun, and also convenient if one wanted to cite something from the text when participating in a new flame war, as if citing case law.

For example, this recent flame war would be:

Bromfield v. F&SF, (2005)

So rather than retread the same topics over and over, flame warriors could develop a sort of shorthand to argue their cases: “Ah, but see, that’s where you’re wrong. In post 73633 of Bromfield v. F&SF, Nick Mamatas said…”

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In
case you were wondering, this is what 28 lbs. of dried apricots looks like. 
Men’s Health recently called dried
apricots the king of dried fruits.  Me, previously being a raisin man, had
never bothered with Prunus armeniaca L. 
But MH convinced me to try them out.  Turns out, not only are they the best
from a health perspective, but they’re also damn tasty! 

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Build
your very own android head for just $600!

From the designer’s introduction:

"It is possible to build a computer-driven, life-size, android robot head
(Figure 1) for cost of materials of about $600.00. The android head will have
two color video-camera eyes with the video going both into a window on the PC
and into an image processing Java application. The robot will have six servo
motors controlling: (1) base of the head spins, (2,3) each eye moves left/right,
(4) both eyes move up/down, (5,6) each eye-lid opens/closes. All servo motors
are controlled via a Java application. The user supplies the computer (PC). The
details of how to construct such a head follows, based on the authors creation
of Robot Maxamilian, R. Max for short." [link]

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On SFF.net, someone asked the question:

If you had the ear of an SF-friendly billionaire, what would be the best thing they could do to promote reading SF?

Paul Allen has the SF Museum in Seattle. Any other ideas?

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