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  • http://u.nu/3nf4f This has made my face smile at least twelve times. I can't move it out of my reader. Yes, mark as unread!
  • Happily devastated after finishing Atonement. The movie was wonderful, and the book was better.
  • Suddenly a heavy rain.
  • @stakethisclaim Our dinners were sisterwives. Mine also had a lot of mushrooms in the sauce. I believe in mushrooms wholeheartedly.
  • Oh, Top Chef. If I'm bored with your pre-finale episode, how can I hope to get jazzed for the finale? Stop being so boring this season.

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• Way back:

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• Reading:

  • The Demise of “Cathy”
  • cooked my first not-from-a-box pad thai!and i quote the...
  • After-Dinner Turtle?
  • “Nobody ever eat 50 eggs.”
  • Mad Men, 4x03 The Good News
  • Bus Story: Not a Drop of Lemonade in Sight
  • Plus-Size Wars
  • Zeugma
  • sanctuary
  • Are Migraines Linked to a Heart Defect?

• Listening to:

  • Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
  • The Shins – Caring Is Creepy
  • Jimi Hendrix – Fire
  • Led Zeppelin – Black Dog
  • Radiohead – Karma Police

• Comics

  • Comics Curmudgeon
  • Donation Derby
  • Dreamless
  • Garfield Minus Garfield
  • Overcompensating
  • Questionable Content
  • Red String
  • Secret Vespers
  • XKCD

• Food

  • Cake Maker to the Stars
  • Coco Cake Cupcakes
  • Elana's Pantry
  • Frugal Vegan
  • Get Sconed!
  • Vegan Appetite
  • Vegan Dad

• Friends

  • Alizarine
  • Marty
  • Still Going Native
  • Tychoish
  • Young Mountain

• General

  • Dear Prudence (Slate)
  • Free Range Kids
  • Ironic Sans
  • Love Letters Project
  • Nytpicker
  • Pajiba
  • Rands in Repose
  • Stanley Fish (NYT)

• Visual

  • A Suitable Wardrobe
  • Book Covers (Financial Times)
  • Book Covers Anonymous
  • Caustic Cover Critic
  • Creative Bits and Bobs
  • F*** Yeah Christina Hendricks
  • Henry Sene Yee
  • Nuena Photography
  • Sartorialist
  • Shelved Books
  • Strange Maps

Five books that school ruined for me:
1. Jane Eyre
2. Wuthering Heights
3. A Tale of Two Cities
4. The Tempest
5. Julius Caesar

Five migraine triggers:
1. Soy
2. Avocados
3. Aged cheese
4. Onions
5. STRESS

Five things we did at our work party last night:
1. Grilled
2. Chain smoked
3. Made mojitos
4. Listened to a coworker’s former band’s record
5. Tried to remember any Eddie Money song by name OR tune

Five people I’ve talked to while out on the shipping dock:
1. The manager of the furniture store
2. A woman whose daughter is finishing veterinary school soon
3. A guy in a jumpsuit who works at 6:30 a.m.
4. A delivery guy who was not excited about several grosses of printer cartridges
5. This really uninteresting guy whose name began with M but was so dull I can’t remember

Five kinds of animals that woman’s daughter apparently had to learn about in veterinary school:
1. Large
2. Small
3. Water
4. Tropical
5. Fish

Five animals I no longer see regularly:
1. Cattle
2. Horses
3. Hawks and turkey vultures
4. Canada geese
5. Deer

Five magazines I read most of, if I have them:
1. GQ
2. Esquire
3. Real Simple
4. National Geographic
5. Vogue*

* I have no delusions of being even remotely vogue. Or . . . vaguely vogue? Either way, I’m not.

Five magazines I am repulsed by:
1. Seventeen (57 Ways to Tell If He’s Into You!)
2. Cosmo (57 Ways to Win Men With Sex!)
3. O (57 Ways to Lose 10 Pounds!)
4. Family Circle (57 Ways to Decorate with Snowmen!)
5. FHM (57 Ways to See Down Her Shirt!)

Nauru, my favorite tiny island nation, is long plagued by insane international corruption and has a terrible economy.

Recently I read a WSJ book review on somewhat obscure place-name changes which included a Nauru shoutout:

Take, for example, Pleasant Island, the South Pacific atoll that now calls itself the Republic of Nauru. It was once richly valued (and plundered) for its ­deposits of “super-phosphate,” a mixture of chemicals used in artificial fertilizers. [ . . . ] It has since tried to set itself up as a tax haven, started a smuggling operation for North Korean defectors, and even—you can’t make this up—invested its tax dollars in musical theater, all to no avail.

Yeah, to keep referring to it as Pleasant Island once it became a burned-out strip-mined shell would be, well, disingenuous. See also: The great Greenland/Iceland hoodwink.

In other island topics, this weekend I learned about Yerba Buena Island, a residential spot in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Yerba buena means “good herb,” similar to yerba mate, a popular variety of tea.

The island is accessible by bridge, which reminded me of Pigeon Key, a nature preserve-ish educational center off of the now-shut-down A1A Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys. The new Seven Mile Bridge runs alongside the old, and in places the old bridge is preserved for pedestrians and fishing. On one side it runs long enough to allow access to Pigeon Key.

In honor of the mostly-dead, great website 5ives, here are some lists.

Five poets I truly love:
1. Charles Bukowski
2. Pablo Neruda
3. Edna St Vincent Millay
4. e e cummings
5. Stephen Dobyns

Five favorite rearrangements of my name:
1. Leronica
2. Cornelia
3. A Corn Lie (the title of my tell-all expose of farm lobbies — originally An Inconvenient Corn)
4. Ion Clear (my successful line of cleaning products, not yet invented)
5. Lo, carnie!

Five bands or performers that remind me of important males from my past:
1. Saves the Day
2. The Album Leaf
3. Blackalicious
4. Songs: Ohia
5. Nine Inch Nails

Five paperback authors I’ve read obsessively at some point:
1. Michael Crichton
2. Stephen King
3. Sue Grafton
4. Brian Jacques
5. John Grisham

Five pastimes I am very into:
1. Scrabble
2. Doodling
3. Knitting
4. Underlining in books
5. Xacto-knife crafting

Five foods that make me really sick:
1. Corn (regular or popped)
2. Milk, ice cream, cream sauce
3. Bananas
4. Onions
5. Citrus fruits

“You can’t beat Walmart’s unbeatable prices.”

As most internetizens do, I occasionally Google myself and my domain and see what’s up.

Aetataureate shows up on some spammy-looking website that compiles a list of “Websites with ‘tata’ in the name.”

Sorry folks, no tatas here. Move along.

• The Caustic Cover Critic has a funny roundup of the obscenely irrelevant covers of a print on demand (POD) outfit dealing in public domain works.

• Today’s Garfield Minus Garfield mimics my life, and I am not ashamed.

• Another genuinely funny and clean Jerkcity.

• Andrew Sullivan’s blog has these three posts on shitty work: first and second lists of reader thoughts on menial jobs and some opinions on President Obama’s job history.

• No Caption Needed examines photos of the death of the Virgin Megastore in New York:

More importantly, we are privy to the mourning process; we see human grief for the loss of commerce, exchange, goods often enjoyed in common.

• This is poignant in a consumer climate where, the New York Times reported this week, consumers are still saving over spending, totaling in a .1% loss instead of the .7% gain expected:

Major clothing chains including Macy’s, Nordstrom, Liz Claiborne and Kohl’s posted earnings declines this week. Even Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest retailer and one of the hardiest survivors of this recession, reported lower sales on Thursday.

Busy day.

Today’s Jerkcity is genuinely funny, instead of the usual abstruse and baffling.

Seth Godin tells us why it’s never okay to say “I just work here”:

Susan said, and I’m quoting precisely the same line, “All I do is work here. They pay my salary, but I’m me, not them.”

No, Susan, you are them.

The reason your brand is falling apart is because so many of your colleagues are saying the same thing, denying the same responsibility. Consumers don’t believe (or care) that there are warrens and fiefdoms and monarchies within your company.

From the Frugal Vegan (such a good blog!), a thoughtful, resonant post on choosing childlessness:

More than once, I have spoken to parents who said that knowing what they know now, they would have chosen not to have children. [ . . . ] I am always told “Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love my kids but if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have them.” My mother in law even said the same thing after a long discussion.

Popular wisdom does hold that the people who should have children are the ones most likely to choose not to. Maybe it’s because they grasp the full ramifications of their decision and have the most genuine sense of fear of inadequacy as parents.

• Billy Joel and his newest wife are divorcing. This aside on their ages made me chortle:

(she’s 27, he’s 60; if the age difference were a person, it would arguably still be too old for her)

• Sonia Zjawinski recently published one of the stupider ideas in recent memory: Trolling popular photo website Flickr, making and framing your own prints of photos you like for free. As the commenters (and the Nytpicker) point out, this is to photography what unauthorized downloads are to the music industry: Illegal.

People in the comments drew all kinds of analogies, but there’s no need: this is a crappy thing to do. You aren’t stealing from faceless millionaires or record label corporations, it doesn’t have any awkward nobility the way music downloading does, and many of these photographers would likely give you the permission if you’d only ask — they’d probably be delighted to know their work was in someone’s home. And if cheapness is the key here, hell, offer to PayPal each photographer ten bucks.

The real craw-sticker here seems to be that this blog post ran in the New York Times, which apparently has no common-sense regulation anymore.

• My new breakfast of choice: 1/2 cup Grape Nuts, 1 6-oz Dannon All Natural Nonfat Plain Yogurt, 4 packets of Truvia, and a few drops of pure vanilla extract. The yogurt and subsequent ingredients basically recreate the vanilla Dannon Light n Fit, with Truvia instead of a digestively caustic artificial sweetener, and straight yogurt instead of a long list of ingredients studded with chemicals. 280 calories, 1 gram of fat (0 saturated), 28% of daily fiber, 28% of daily protein.

I haven’t been sleeping much, or well, for reasons unclear. The weather finally fell over into summer here so that could have something to do with it; I’ve started swimming again, but this week my work schedule is backwards and my body may just be screwed up. Either way, I don’t love this.

My new favorite late-night time killer is this Flash game on FreeArcade called Globs. (The site is loaded with ads and most of them have soundtracks, be forewarned.)

Also, I’m intrigued by TotalNetGuard, a Christian-themed ISP whose purpose is to block whatever scale of objectionable material you choose. Obviously I’m not religious and this isn’t a product marketed to me, but the internet is full of unavoidable inappropriate stuff. I like that people can make an informed decision to avoid what they don’t want coming into their homes.

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