web-goddess

If you haven’t seen the Powers of Ten site yet, take a look. It starts in the Milky Way and then closes in on the Earth by powers of 10, ’til you end up looking at a proton from a leaf on a tree. Very cool.

I’ve wanted to buy a new mobile phone for a while now, but I haven’t been able to justify the expense to myself. My old one works fine; I just want a cooler looking one with ring tones and games. But if I can get one with Atari games on it… Clear a path to Carphone Warehouse, baby.

Reuters asks, “Is Michael Jackson Still Marketable?” As a big former Michael Jackson fan (with the souvenir glove to prove it), even I have to answer with a resounding: No! Even if his new album is the greatest piece of pop ever, the man still looks and acts like a freak show. And not in a good way. Not in a marketable-to-teens way.

On my way out, I stopped at reception to pick up a package that had arrived for me. It turned out to be three! One was a CD from a musician friend, one was a Roald Dahl video, and one was my long-awaited copy of The Wind Done Gone. So I came home, put in a load of laundry, and cracked the book. It’s pretty short and I’m a fast reader, so I’m already about halfway through it. Max, you have no need to worry about this book tarnishing the glorious South. I have no problems admitting that it sucks. Big time. I was honestly interested in reading an alternate version of Gone With the Wind, but this version is seriously on crack. If you’re planning on reading this book (and I wouldn’t advise it), skip the rest of this post. If you’re curious, here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Gerald O’Hara’s slave Pork was the real lord of the plantation. He contrived to get himself won by Gerald in a poker game by poisoning his own master with alcohol, and then he used the same trick to help Gerald win Tara. He and Mammy conspired to get Gerald to marry her mistress. Pork designed Tara himself and built it from the ground up.
• Gerald started sleeping with Mammy on his wedding night. Something about Mrs. O’Hara being frigid and frail.
• Mammy killed all three of Mrs. O’Hara’s infant sons so there wouldn’t be any “sober” white men on the plantation to order them around.
• Mrs. O’Hara and Cynara (the mulatto protagonist) would become so jealous after seeing Mammy nurse Scarlett that Mrs. O’Hara would spontaneously lactate and nurse Cynara in her room.
• Belle Watling was a lesbian.
• Rhett Butler was screwing Cynara a full year before he even met Scarlett. He even slept with her the night his daughter died. They have a special couch that they use when Rhett’s in the mood to “visit the honeysuckle garden.”
• I’m pretty sure there was an allusion to an affair between Prissy and Ashley that somehow led to her brother being beaten to death, which is what made her so “silly”, except she’s not really silly, she’s crafty. Oh, and I think Prissy killed Melanie.
• Mammy raised and taught Scarlett to break men’s hearts as a weapon against men. (Miss Havisham, much?)
• Rhett’s getting old and having difficulty getting it up.

Seriously, was the world crying out to have this stuff told? No. This is not a thoughtful re-write of literary history from a politically correct point of view. This is Gone With the Wind on acid. The “parody” label is fully deserved. This isn’t a novel; it’s the kind of thing you imagine as a dirty joke. It isn’t thought-provoking, it isn’t well-written, and it isn’t a fun read.

Of course I’m still going to finish it. I paid $30 for the damn thing. *sigh*

Woohoo! The meeting my project team had this morning with the head of the company (and that I stayed here til midnight preparing for) went so well that my manager’s given us the rest of the day off. Any further posts will be done from home while sipping a cool drink and enjoying daytime television. Kickass.

You are, of course, aware that it’s Royal Ascot week over here in England, right? As I know nothing about horse racing, my favorite part is the hats. The BBC have chosen some Hits and Misses for this year, but personally my favorite’s the one on the right. These are supposedly the best from last year, but they look more like “Fashion Don’ts of the 1980’s” to me. The rules about what you can and can’t wear are pretty amusing, too.

I don’t quite get it. So there’s *less* cold water flowing south from the Arctic than there was 50 years ago… and yet England’s still getting colder?? Climate change is so weird. Everytime I hear something like that, I’m reminded of all the chaos theory my high school calculus teacher tried to teach me. Butterflies flapping their wings and all that, you know. The ice caps are melting, so water levels should rise. Then there’s the greenhouse effect, which should make everything get warmer. And yet now suddenly the Gulf Stream might change, meaning the winters get eleven degrees colder. So random. It’s hard to fathom on a day like today, with the sun shining and an entire beautiful weekend stretching before us. I’m sure I’ll feel differently in the pits of January next year, though.

If you’re running Mac OSX, you might be interested in a Register article about the real differences between Cocoa and Carbon and why rewriting the Finder isn’t necessarily a good idea.

It’s a horrible thing to contemplate, but I have to admit that I was morbidly curious about how she did it. I mean, I’m sure that by the age of five I would’ve known what it means to be “dead.” (I’ve got memories of nightmares as evidence.) Did she start with the young ones, or the old ones? And she did it one at a time? If Mom kept bringing my lifeless, wet siblings out of the bathroom wrapped in sheets, I’d be pretty damn freaked out. As it turns out, I was pretty much right. She evidently had to chase the eldest boy around the house. This is just so sad.

Sad day. John Lee Hooker (who I always think of singing outside the Soul Food Cafe in “The Blues Brothers”) and Carroll O’Connor (aka Archie Bunker) have passed away.