Lila baila!

Um, you know my dear sweet wonderful friend Lila is in the Peace Corps, right?  Serving in Panama?  And that she keeps a blog about it?  And that it's great and you should read it?  Right.  You did.  Ok.

Laila Baila en Panama!

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An awesome summary of my blog, which I just noticed in October and then blogged and then forgot to post until now:

"Director of Dance reviews books and her crazy life"



Thanks, Sickness Cinema!

At least it doesn't say "Why I Climb Mountains"

Everyone else is doing it, so why can't we? I mean, me.

Click to embiggen.

Funny how the results of my actual name are a lot more "read dance bliss"-ish (at least, "books music social") than my blog name... although the blog name is skewed by all the meta-blog stuff (the label "online" comes from all the zillions of times this very page includes the word "links" and "post", for example). Cool anyway.

wordle wordle wordle

One of the gazillion wordles of this blog that I've made since finding this fabulous toy. You gotta try it. (Click to embiggen.)



(From wordle.net: Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.)

Here's another one:

I'm sick in bed, and on my fifth "just one more" episode of Californication. Thanks, JJD.

OG: What's your latest obsession?

Hank: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it's really given us is Howard Dean's aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People... they don't write anymore, they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it's just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto- language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King's English.

OG: Yet you're part of the problem, I mean you're out there blogging with the best of them.

Hank: Hence my self-loathing.

OMG

Most amazing review ever.

Dude, I wasn't going for any contests; I was just being narcissistic. WOW. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

What They're Saying - where "they" = "this one guy I have never actually met"

Nonsportsmanlike Conduct! says
"read.dance.bliss. Funny.Short.Brilliant!"

The Best of Everything says "Writes and thinks the way I would write and think if I was good at writing and thinking."

Thinking The Lions says "read.dance.bliss: For once, a title that captures the essence of the writing."

AfterDark says "like poetry, only fun to read."

Have I mentioned how much I like this guy?

Also, thewunderblog used to call me "opinionated" but doesn't anymore, and back when it was at its old home, my blog was described as "The most defenestrate blog out there." I can't argue with that. Any other descriptions of my blog out there that I haven't seen?

Things I Occur More Often Than, a partial list

* anger (4)
* travel (4)
* Portland (3)
* ice cream (3)
* kcrw (3)
* politics (3)
* clothes (2)
* newspapers (2)
* plants (2)
* rain (2)
* rat (2)
* vocab (2)
* GROSS (1)
* bus (1)
* cement (1)
* david sedaris (1)
* donkey kong (1)
* eyeballs (1)
* graffiti (1)
* grammar (1)
* grandmother (1)
* hebrew (1)
* hipsters (1)
* monocle (1)
* moustache (1)
* mouthwash (1)
* sailors (1)
* scandinavia (1)
* sculpture (1)
* smells (1)
* stamps (1)
* transportation (1)

I also occur just as frequently as
* Colorado (5)
* apartment (5)
* shoes (5)

and of course, less often than the really important things, like
* music (32)
* movies (19)
* photos (19)
* celebz (18)
* school (16)
* food (15)
* concert (13)
* law and order (13)
* television (8)
* holidays (6)

Famousssssssss!!

Could I possibly be more excited that I was quoted on Metroblogging Los Angeles?

I WAS QUOTED ON METROBLOGGING LOS ANGELES!

First of all, I've known for a long time that blogging.la just rules and you should read it. That's why there's that handy link to it over on the right (you should check out all the other sites listed there too, duh. Think I just like making lists for my health?? Ok, I do kind of just like making lists, but seriously, the lists over there are for you). But now, man, now I am truly in love.

Hooray!

(and, of course, thanks to Follow That Ostrich for noticing!)

Oh, the irony!

You may have noticed, depending on what browser you use, when you were last here, if ever, and how observant you are, that this blog has a little helicopter as its "favicon", ever since last week. I was reading someone else's blog that I like and noticed that her favicon wasn't the usual white-B-on-orange-background icon of every other Blogger page and it was instantly clear that if she could change hers, then I had to change mine. So I googled to find some code and the right place to stick it and viewed the page source of a couple of good pages that used favicons, because that's how you learn things about html and xml, by mooching, and I tried for a very short time to design my own icon and gave up on that pretty quickly, and then just decided I'd find one that I liked and steal it. Because that's how you do things on the web, by mooching.

What's so ironic about stealing a helicopter favicon? The page I stole it from is about favicons. Really - here's the post from goodbyehelicopter.com

"The best tour I took was with a group of radical reference librarians in town for the Anarchist Bookfair in Golden Gate Park."

"The question of accessibility is a question of invitation: will individuals feel
invited to participate in and contribute to a democratic culture or will they live
in a world where most content is corporate-owned and -provided? The
promise of the Internet-as-Alexandria is more than the roiling plenitude of
information. It's the ability of individuals to choreograph that information
in idiosyncratic ways, the hope that individuals might feel invited by the
gravitational pull of a broad and open commons to "rip, mix, and burn"-to curate. This new sort of curator, in effect, is one definition of blogger: an amateur experimental librarian for the Internet, the curator of (in blogger/writer Cory Doctorow's phrase) a digital Wunderkammer,
a private informational choreographer who has made her alignments public."

I love Harper's Magazine.

Nu?

So, what do you think of the banner? BESIDES that it's too big; I already know that.

the meta-post

So, the thing is, I'm not sure why I started this blog, or why I somehow feel like I should blog, or what exactly is the Point of All This. The blogs that I like are those of real-life friends (I should say, for one in particular, those of real-life fiends!) of mine or those that are pretty specifically and intelligently about a particular topic. So, why should anyone read *my* blog? What do I have to say? Why do you care?

Ok, if you're my friend, maybe you care because you care about me. But still, if I go on and on about nothing, even you can get bored, right?

And what do *I* get out of this? It's not like I specifically need a place to put my daily thoughts and activities; I already have that and it's called my journal and I write in it nearly every single goddamn day without missing any days except in cases of extreme trauma or extreme exhaustion. (In the latter cases, I almost always make up for it the following day. In the former case... well, I broke up with him and eventually got over the block, more or less.)

I have considered a few different aims, or themes, or raisin-duh-etres for this blog, as follows:
0) I sort of started this around the time I started thinking more seriously of writing fiction, so I thought maybe this would be a good place to post bits of that and see what y'all thought (see this post, for example.) But I haven't really been doing that, and none of you posted on *that* particular posting anyway.
1) I already post my quick thoughts on each book that I read, elsewhere on the web, and I thought about expanding that a bit, since I also like to learn new vocabulary from what I've read, keep track of what I recommend, remember quotations from the books, etc... but it's not clear that I need a new place to do that, separate from where I already do it, and I'm clearly not up to reproducing the effort in two places, since I often fall behind in the one place...
2) I am a teacher, and I learn a lot from teaching. Sometimes I think my focus here ought to be recording my thoughts about teaching, since there are lots of days that I lose sight of my so-called "teaching philosophy" or days that I'm not the best teacher I can be, and maybe recording my daily ideas/triumphs/failures/illuminations about all that could be helpful to myself for remembering and possibly even helpful to others. Plus my students say damned funny things sometimes and I've considered the latest-best-kid-ism theme.
3) I believe the original or truest definition of the blog thing was not "here are my musings" or "here are my pictures" or "here's my diary" but "here's a link to something I found somewhere else on the web that you should see, and also here's my original and insightful commentary on that thing". So I've considered doing *that*, but who am I kidding? There are umptimillion people doing that better than I could... I hardly even surf!

Basically, so far this blog is still totally unformed and camp is imminent which means either: you won't hear anything from me for the next nine weeks and then I'll start all over or not, OR, this'll continue to be an unfocused mash of all of those things until a particular urge gets stronger and it becomes Something Real. In the meantime, if you *are* reading, I hope you'll comment and let me know what you think, because I am clearly casting about alone here :)

AND: Dude who claims to be the BoMD: reveal thyself! I'm tired of waiting :)

ultra-violet whaa?

I will, myself, one day lament the dearth of snarkiness in this blog.

Do I have to write "hello world" ?

Is it mandated by law, or just custom?