is a blog by Brendan
Context. Ken, DC, Ian and I went to see Revolutions last night. One of the previews was for Punisher, which features Thomas Jane kicking many, many butts in various styles and fashions.
Payoff. Ian, on watching the preview: “Brendan, look! They already made a movie about Sigurdur Petursson!”
Via Sumana:
“It’s like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that’s written or anything that’s created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It’s all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a f***ing act of will.”
Me and Stephen? We’re all four Bob the Angry Flower book buddies.
He didn’t say anything about how cool my name is, but he did claim that I a) rock, b) rock and rule, and c) rule. So that was happy.
Caitlan was here over the weekend, and I wasn’t a very good host, but it was good to hang out with her again. I’d like to say we went to the circus and fought ninjas, but actually we mostly did homework. We did have some bright spots, though, including Caitlan’s cooking of the first fried green tomatoes I’ve actually liked, and Caitlan’s assistance of Ian and me in our attempt to buy wedding clothes–a grueling journey that involved going to one store, then going to another store right next to it. Okay, it wasn’t actually grueling. It’s harder to find dress shirts with French cuffs than you’d think, though.
Caitlan is doing very well at Georgetown, on track to go to Oxford (Oxford!) for a couple of years, like I never got to do. In fact, she’s already been once, though only for a week. I instructed her over the weekend on the fact that, if she does go and gets the accompanying degree, she’s allowed to trump basically any argument against her by saying “Ah ah! Oxford.” It is also street legal to respond to any attempt at countering this trump with a back-handed slap.
I just read my favorite girlsarepretty ever. I think the reason I like it so much is it’s like the best parts of GAP, plus choice morsels of Stephen, Leonard and Cody Powell. I want to write like that.
Xorph has now been immortalized in (blasphemy and) ink, pixels, three dee, cookie dough, human flesh, hot glass (still can’t believe that), and now, thanks to Maria, a pumpakin. I have the greatest fans ever! There should be a grant for this kind of thing.
Work is tricked out today. It’s pretty ridiculous. There’s your standard decorate-the-office / costume contest, and the offices (most of the floors in this building) have your standard dress-up: lots of spiderwebs, inflatable witches, light-up pumpkins and general knickknackery.
Over here in the software division, though, we have Duygu. Duygu is a competitive swimmer (and recently married to Sevket), and she likes to win contests, so she arranged to organize the decoration of our quadrant…
All our cubes and the entire hallway between cube floor and office walls are swathed in black plastic sheeting, top to bottom (I had to stand on a ladder and tuck it under ceiling tiles). The hallway is festooned with the most glorious fire hazard I’ve ever seen–vertical green and black streamers about every two feet, lit by Christmas lights (all the ceiling panels have been turned off), and neon green spiderwebs in the “entrances” and “exits” to our “world of scary computer bugs.” You have to find doors cut into this sheeting if you want into an office or cube, or in or out of our division. There’s a fairly strong Matrix theme kind of mooshed in (thus the green streamers–they’re lines of code), and one of the walls is covered with printouts of REAL Matrix code, colored with green highlighter and illuminated by a large blacklight so they fluoresce. Everybody’s dressed in all black, and we have white masks and glowstick mouth-lights so we glow inside them. At each corner of the rectangle that this all covers, there are two “scary computers,” one a posterboard “keyboard” and “screen” (also blacklit and covered in Matrix code), the other a cardboard triptych covered in green rope lights and with circuit boards from dead peripherals taped all over it.
I really meant to bring my camera, but I forgot it–I’ll try to get duplicates if anyone else gets pics. I want to be able to prove I’m not making this up.
Update 1454 hrs: We won!