I should just have an "egg salad" tumblr by now, eh?

Go read this article about a fish being eaten by a shark being eaten by a shark!

And while we're here... tumblr? I hardly know 'er!

Also, this:

(Twitter? I hardly know 'er!)

Also, regarding the official inclusion of the meaning of figuratively into the dictionary definition of the word literally, I still propose beginning now to use figuratively in every day conversation, every day, as follows:

I am figuratively sitting at my computer right now. 

I am figuratively updating my blog at this moment.

And now, I am figuratively ending this random post and going to bed.  Gnight.

10 days and counting...

Did I mention that I'm going to be a HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER while living in Tel Aviv? I know that idea doesn't conform to everyone's idea of a good time, but I COULDN'T BE MORE EXCITED.  I HAVE BEEN A SECRET CLOSET WANNABE HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER SINCE... forever. My last stint doing anything like this was teaching 5th grade reading a few years ago at Heschel Day School. That was a great experience, and this new gig will be a dream come true.

So in this moment of literary delight, allow me to share with you the most incredible collection of artful book-porn I've seen! Not the usual library/collection/bookcase kind, but the real ART kind. It's all here at Tor.com. Take a look, and tell me which is your favorite!  Shout-out to my mom, who first alerted me to this, and whose favorite is the "awesomest book group ever."

(Definitely filing this away for future printing and hanging and decorating...)

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!

.

Punksatauni? Punxatawnee? Punxsutawney?

My dear friend Aloni is spending a semester in Hungary. Today is his birthday, so why don't you mosey over to Aloni's Blogna and wish him a good one?

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!

Sidereal: of, relating to, or expressed in relation to stars or constellations; astral

Tonight I went to Poets of the American West, 1910-2010, the Poetry Society of America's Centennial Celebration at the Hammer Museum. Five poets read poems of their own and of their favorite poets of the region from the past century.

I was scared it would be pretentious argle-bargle, as the girls of Cable210 would say, but it wasn't. It wasn't pretentious at all. It was beautiful, if a little bit boring.

Wanda Coleman read first, and she read poetry the way poetry is meant to be read. I had never heard poetry read well until I went to college and my roommate read some to me (I am forever grateful to her for this). And then I got the In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry box set and my education continued... which brings me to wonder about education, and do English teachers have any idea how to read poetry? And does anyone today teach children how to read poetry? I mean this literally, how to read it aloud, how it's supposed to be said, not just understood. I know high school kids are made to read at least some small number of poems in English classes; the question is does anyone read them, perform them for the students? Certainly none of my own beloved English teachers ever did when I was in NY and then FL public schools. I loved English, I loved reading, I loved my teachers. I didn't even know they were falling down on this particular job.

Anyway, back to tonight. Wanda Coleman was awesome.

The best line I jotted down in Sharpie (where's my pen?) on the back of the Hammer Winter Calendar (where's my notebook?) was:
"I put my eyes on a diet, my tears are gaining too much weight", from "Heavy Water Blues" by Bob Kaufman, which has many more almost-but-not-quite-too-cute bits I liked.

Also:
Two jokes walk into a bar.

The emcee, ohemgee, accidentally pronounced Pasadena as though the n were an ñ. I may say it like that forever, starting now.

I learned two important things that I almost knew before but now really know:

0. CA poets are enthralled with the fires.

1. Modern poets love the word "Egyptologist".

There is a scarf for sale to benefit the Hammer Museum (It's a museum. What kind of museum? A hammer museum.) that says "DO ASK. DO TELL." I kind of like it.

As a performing dancer, I couldn't help noticing the dimensions of the stage and the physical layout of the theater. It was funny to me to see the entire thing used only for a small podium arranged on the far (audience) left of the stage. I mean, it's poetry. But on a stage.

In an art museum! Awesome.

Something someone said made me want to make one of those WANTED posters for Black Friday... like, the reward is offered, but TODAY ONLY, 50% OFF!!

Terry could do it and make it funny. I can't.


PS Better Book Titles is killing me right now. Litgeek humor, anyone?

WAY CRAZIER THAN ME

In a comment on my post about my upcoming fourth marathon, SJK pointed me to this short article about a man running a marathon on every continent. My favorite bits are these, mostly the descriptions of the races:

...Heyl will brave sub-zero temperatures, strong Katabatic winds, and the task of running 26.2 miles in Antarctica to realize his goal of completing a marathon on every continent; joining a club of less than 100 people who have done so in history, said Richard Donovan, organizer of the race and member of the club.

Fewer than 100 people!

...the Paris Marathon, a tour through the City of Lights, and then found himself training for The Great Wall Marathon, which takes place along the Great Wall of China.

He spent his afternoons that year running up and down the stairwell of the 13-story building where he works, trying to prepare for the tiny steps and high slopes of the Great Wall, designed to repel invaders with uneven footings and narrow pathways.

Sooooooooo cool!

The Gold Coast Marathon in Australia was followed by the Big Five marathon in a game reserve near Johannesburg, South Africa — where Heyl said he ran along lions and cheetahs over loose sand.

Heyl's wife, Andrea, said his sixth race, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was a treat for her too.

Australia and South Africa and Buenos Aires are sooooooo high on my travel wish list I can't even tell you.

Registration for the [Antarctica] race is listed [at] 9,900 Euros, or $12,741.30, on its website.

Haaaaaaaaaa ha. Too bad I have this work-for-a-living thing going on. Independently wealthy, and I might consider this a decent way to spend some time :)

Hey there, me:

"It gets to the point where I don't email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me."

This is why I'll never be an adult.




(While you're there, you can also read about how I'm wrong every time I say "there's no such word as alot".)

This is why.

Yes, I ran another marathon. It was amazing, and I'll have the details for you soon. For now, instead, here's why I did it. Please read.

http://ihaterunningbutihatecancermore.blogspot.com/2010/03/marathon-update-12-rejoice.html

The solution to your holiday gift-giving quandaries

This post was going to be about the Dizzy Feet gala, the most amazing dance show ever, which show I saw at the Kodak Theatre on Sunday afternoon (in basically the best seats in the house), but instead it's going to be about a scarf.

No really.

Guys, check this out:


And yeah it's cool, and yeah the fashion buzz catalog-copy accompanying the pictures on the website is all very designer/fashion/taking-itself-seriously stuff, but really what I love so very much about the whole thing is this comment by some random guy:

'We can watch movies on a device the size of a credit card. Why did it take us so long to come up with “pockets scarf?”'




Nice. Reminds me of how I used to point out that we put a man on the moon years before we could figure out how to make Pong.

(That was an Atari game, young'uns. An Atari game THAT I OWNED AND USED TO PLAY IN THE BASEMENT. Ah, the good old days.)

Walking is so... pedestrian.

In a funny coincidence, the two tabs of my browser are currently open to these two pages:

On the left:

The Great LA Walk, a 13+ mile stroll around town (that I WISH I could do, but I'm busy running on Saturday!)




and on the right:

an article entitled You Walk Wrong from New York Magazine.

The Fun Way

So, on the drive home from work today I listened to this long dry debate about "the Safeway plan" in which employees are "incentivized" to make healthy choices by basing their health insurance premiums on their Body Mass Indexes. Blah blah boring.

And then I saw this, by way of the kottke.org twitter feed:



THIS is how to incentivize people to exercise and make healthy choices. Make. Them. Fun.

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.

From the essay "Dehumanized" by Mark Slouka

Despite the determinisms of the day, despite the code-breakers, the wetware specialists, the patient unwinders of the barbed wire of our being, this I feel is true: That we are more nurture than nature; that what we are taught, generally speaking, is what we become; that torturers are made slowly, not minted in the womb. As are those who resist them. I believe that what rules us is less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions, delusions, and lies; that only by studying this world can we hope to shape how it shapes us; that only by attempting to understand what used to be called, in a less embarrassed age, “the human condition” can we hope to make our condition more human, not less.

Harper's Magazine, September 2009. Page 32

Per. Fect.

I have thought Lore Sjöberg was brilliant from way back in the day, so why should I be at all surprised to find this in my Google Reader?



Love it.

But not today.

One day, I'll stop thinking this is hilarious:

or that this is awesome:

Lady brings a new cup of coffee.

So, I've definitely never linked to or posted a picture of myself on this here blog, and for that matter I've pretty much not included any actual personally identifying info at all. Well, but something about this picture of my ghetto israeli dancing self just calls for sharing. Yalla.

Um, I took three separate naps yesterday. THREE. What the hell? I think the cold makes me tired. They were all, like, *deep* sleeps, too. Weird.

Hey listen, I know you've all seen the "Take On Me - literal version" video already, but I just found a friend who hadn't yet so I can't resist mentioning it in case you also live under a rock. How f'n fabulous is this?? Go watch it now.

Happy Chanukah. Merry Christmas. Etc.

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:

Or, you know, introduce me to one of your friends. That could work.

I really like these videos by BriTANicK. Bri, Nick, will one of you go out with me please? Okthanksbye.




PS Thanks, Adeo, for pointing.

One-way mirrors, aka two-way mirrors. (Flammable/inflammable, anyone?)

So, there are things in movies that you wish existed in real life, and there are things in movies that you kinda wish didn't exist. I mean, if you're me. So I've always been a little fascinated (by which I mean terrified) of the one-way mirror. Without getting too deep into the dark recesses of my psyche, let me just say that, as a child, before undressing in clothing store dressing rooms, I would occasionally (always) check the edges of the mirrors, trying to determine what sort of mirrors they were, and leave it at that. Ok, maybe one more step - I would occasionally address the person supposedly watching from the other side of the one-way mirror to let them know they weren't fooling anyone, even though I had no choice but to go ahead and try on the clothes even though I knew they were there. I had an active imagination (and extreme self-consciousness).

As I was saying, I've always found the one-way mirror thing to be intriguing and a little bit scary, and I'd count it as one of things I'd just as soon not have exist. Are they used outside of psychology experiments and police interrogation rooms? Are they used in actual police interrogation rooms or just in Hollywood ones? I am here to tell you that they really exist and they are really out there - just this week in my own small life I've encountered two of them.

I was about to describe each and start out by saying that the first isn't that freaky, but come on. It's a one-way mirror; it's freaky.

So, there is a dance studio in the Valley where my dance company sometimes rehearses (as do some of the contestants on Dancing With The Stars! Yes, I met Mario. Yes, these are the perks of living in Los Angeles.). The large studio at the back has one stretch of mirror that is actually a one-way mirror, and there is a small sitting room on the other side of it. It's great - when you arrive early for your class or rehearsal, you get to sit and watch without disturbing anyone. Except, that whole idea is disturbing!

And just now, I am actually sitting in a cafe (in San Diego today, not LA, more on this later[0] if you care...) with some grad student friends. While they type away at their dissertations, I'm surfing and blogging and being otherwise unproductive, yay me! So I just went to the restroom, and in the space over the sink where a mirror should be, there is a one-way mirror. Ok, to be very clear, it's set in such a way that the pee'er can look through the window side and see the patrons of the cafe at their tables, NOT the other way 'round. But freaaaaaaaky! You walk in there and realize there's a window, and you fight the overwhelming urge to walk right back out and look in the window... and you lose that battle, so you do walk right back out and around the corner and there is the same plant you just saw through the window, but it's in front of a mirror, not a window. Allow me to say it again: Fuh-Reak-EE.
(Click the pic to biggen.)


[0] So, on Thursday afternoon I met someone for ice cream, and from there I met another couple of friends that were out to dinner, and from there we went dancing, and when that ended at midnight I went to another friend's house and played Guitar Hero for four hours (I LOVE Guitar Hero. Make no mistake. If you were in the mood to buy me a little something to brighten my day, that would be an excellent choice. But then, I may never leave my house again). After that, at 4:30am, I drove down to San Diego, I arrived at 6:30 or so and crawled into bed with my bestest friend. You'd think I was trying to get in a whole summer vacation in the three days before I go off to work at sleepaway camp or something. That is how I ended up in this cafe with the one-way mirror in the bathroom, this lovely cafe that has as many laptops in it as people and has free wi-fi and yet apparently no website. It's in South Park and it's called Urban Grind, if you care. The turkey-and-brie panini is fabulous. The grilled veggie sandwich less so (even if you get it with pesto instead of hummus (which, speaking of which, are like the two most anti-social foods ever. Either it's green specks in the teeth or terrible garlic-breath, yeesh. Who invented these things?) but if you're going to try to pick the little green pesto bits out of your teeth, don't use the mirror behind the plant... someone is probably looking right at you from the other side!).


OMG UPDATE: Since not everyone will read the comments or follow links from there, I had to update to include this link to these public toilets with one-way mirrors - I will tell you the truth; I do not think I could do it. Thanks, jjd!