stoutfellow

Apparently hashtags of the form #notall(category) have become popular on twitter: #notallmen, #notalllibertarians, etc.

Obviously they are intended to be parsed as not-all-(category), but I find myself irresistibly tempted to read no-tall-(category).

What? I'm not quite 5'5", and I have dreams....

Kenny Rogers' song "Twenty Years Ago" is well over twenty years old.

I just noticed that.

One thing I didn't mention.

From here to the vet is about two miles. On Wednesday, I walked that distance four times (to and from, once for each dog); though it wasn't always sunny, at worst it was partly cloudy. In any case, the UV was strong.

On the shirt I was wearing, the top buttonhole (well, the second if you count the collar) is worn, and will not hold the button. To keep it buttoned requires rebuttoning every few minutes, and I generally don't bother. Certainly I didn't on Wednesday, my hands being otherwise occupied.

The upshot is this: I have a curious narrow triangular sunburn on my upper chest. It isn't painful, but it's quite prominent when I look at myself in the mirror shirtless. Kinda funny-looking.

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do...."

I'm currently being earwormed by that song, and it's Salman Rushdie's fault. I'm still reading Midnight's Children (or rather, again reading it; I detoured into Liaden for three books, but now I'm back), and just hit, for the second time, a reference to "Daisy, Daisy".

The problem is that "Daisy, Daisy" has jerk-me-out-of-the-book connections in my head. One, as any SF reader could guess, is 2001 - that horrifying scene toward the end, as Dave rips out HAL's memory chip by chip, like a fast-moving case of Alzheimer's, and HAL retrogresses to his first meetings with - was the name Dr. Chandra? The other is from Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, which is a series of interviews with baseball players from early in the 20th century. One of the interviewees - Sam Crawford, maybe? - talks about one of the early World Series, in which Honus Wagner was unmercifully ridden by the other team's fans with a parody of a then-popular song. The song wasn't "Daisy, Daisy", nor was it "Murgatroyd Darcy, the Belle of Canarsie", but either of those songs inevitably calls that story to mind. (Damned if I can remember what the song was. I should get myself a copy of the book; there was some good stuff in it.)

I suppose it's fitting. Rushdie is one of those kitchen-sink writers, like Neal Stephenson or Laurence Sterne, constantly spinning off into obscure digressions about noses or duffel bags or Cap'n Crunch. (I do that too, I guess. Last week, before my Differential Geometry class, I found myself talking to the students about elephants....) But it's distracting.

After seeing the Serenity Prayer on the cashier's arm the other day, should I be surprised to notice that the background spoken bit towards the end of Boston's "Higher Power" is -

the Serenity Prayer?

I hadn't noticed that just now, listening to the song.

A few days ago, I found myself looking up the definitions of various gaits of animals, with the aim of correctly naming Gracie's favored mode when excited. I was right; the technical name for it is, indeed, "bounding".

I've been trying to come up with a pun on John Bunyan. Perhaps Gracie a-Bounding to the Chef at Dinner.... Maybe it shouldn't be a pun, but rather some kind of :ahem: shaggy dog story.

Sorry. I haven't been getting enough sleep lately.

I just received a letter informing me that I had been nominated for membership in the American Chemical Society.

The last time I did anything having to do with chemistry, I was in ninth grade. That was almost forty years ago.

My latest message from Amazon informs me that, "[a]s someone who has purchased or rated books by Various Authors", I may be interested in another book by that prolific person.

Oy.

I just realized that my TV set is older than most of my students.