Happy Birthday, Pookahontas!

My youngest sister turns 16 today. I keep starting this entry and deleting it because I inevitably wind up writing some insanely maudlin, teary-eyed thing about how amazing my sisters are and how much I love them, and I should probably just do that in private letters to them. So I'll just say this: Charlotte is the greatest 16 year-old on the planet. She likes They Might Be Giants and the Magnetic Fields and the Beatles and Erykah Badu and NSYNC. Her favourite Woody Allen movie is Love and Death. She has seen Moulin Rouge at least 4 times, in that perfect teenage obsessive way. She is prone to giggle fits, and she likes to go to art museums and is a great dancer. She's sensible and fanciful and wonderful to be around, and if Sassy still existed, I'd nominate her as a Sassiest Girl In America. I love you, kiddo, and I wish I could be there today. Have fun in Austin! If you see Lucinda, or Nanci, or Emmylou, tell them I said hello.
Friday, July 27, 2001 01:44 p.m.

Sponsor Nanette
Blogathon, people - it starts tonight, and Nanette will be updating Amplified to Rock every 30 minutes for charity. Read all about it at her site, and then donate whatever you can. She's going to give the funds she raises to a fund to get a public library going in Ford Heights. The town is so poor that they don't even have the tax base revenue to get a tiny, one-room public library, or even a bookmobile, going. As you can imagine, public library service to poor people (and underserved folks, in general), is an issue close to my heart. Give what you can, or just link her a whole lot this weekend to show your support. Go, Speed Blogger, Go!
Friday, July 27, 2001 01:42 p.m.

In a Lather Over Blather
As a babbler, I'm all in favour of blather. And Blather, too -- found via Scrubbles -- especially since it's provided me with an article about & recipe for my soon-to-be-favourite cocktail, caipirinha.
Friday, July 27, 2001 01:41 p.m.

Norfolk Dialect To Be Saved!
This warms the cockles of my stubborn little diversity-loving heart. I like standardization in spelling, but I think it's a crime that received pronunciation (given extra strength through the media of radio & television) has been able to kill off so many regional dialects & accents. Language is a craggy, messy, living & changing thing, and we shouldn't be so eager to flatten it out and blandify it with an insistence on having things be just so all the damn time. So Hurrah! for the Friends of Norfolk Dialect (FOND) and their project to record and preserve the local speech patterns of that county. Memo to the mind: start using "gazunder" to refer to the toilet. Via The Words at World New York.
Friday, July 27, 2001 01:40 p.m.

A Little Milestone

I just checked my stats, and as of this very moment, kerplink has had 11,111 visitors. Somehow that's a cooler numerical milestone to me than 10,000, which we hit just around my birthday last month. 11,111 is a palindrome. And it reminds me of when the time is 11:11, and you make a wish and look away from the clock til the minute changes or your wish won't come true. It's a nice, non-round, non-prime, but beautifully symmetrical number. Thanks, guys.
Thursday, July 26, 2001 10:09 p.m.

Interview With An Anne Who Doesn't Write About Vampires
That'd be Anne Fadiman, folks. Author of an outstandingly good book of medical reporting called The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, and of a sparkling collection of essays about books & reading called Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman is one of those writers who makes you want to meet her based purely on the quality and warmth of her prose. She's just that spectacular. The site that this interview is featured on is an all-interview site, so be sure to click around in their archive for discussions with other cultural doyennes.
Thursday, July 26, 2001 04:30 p.m.

Space Ghost Interviews Bob & David
More interview hilarity, via mr. pants. April has probably seen this already, but it's for her anyway, since as soon as I saw the link, I thought, "Ooo, April would love this!"
Thursday, July 26, 2001 04:28 p.m.

Oh, Mr. Leguizamoberg, You're So Dark & Exotic
Wrapping up our Interview Theme Day, we have John Leguizamo. One day in the mid-1990s while the kids I was babysitting were napping, I was doing what all babysitters do: channel surfing on the fancy-pants cable package my employers subscribed to. As I flicked between endless re-runs of The Real World, I came across what turned out to be Mambo Mouth (or maybe it was Spic-O-Rama, I can't remember) on HBO. I couldn't tear myself away from it & John Leguizamo's brilliant, scary, hilarious humour. Thank goodness those kids took long naps. One day, Mr. Leguizamo will receive a McArthur Foundation Genius Grant, and I'll be proud to say that I nominated him way the hell back in 2001.
Thursday, July 26, 2001 04:23 p.m.

Rufus "Yum!" Wainwright
I have so many gay rockstar boyfriends. Well, just two, really. Stephin Merritt is my cranky, hermitic gay rockstar boyfriend, and the delectable (and, ok, very very talented) Mr. Wainwright is my saucy, flirtatious gay rockstar boyfriend. Terry Gross interviews him in her usual amazing style. Listen, learn, and try to control your drooling. Also, I'd like to point out for the benefit of Audra Estrones Williams, that Mr. Wainwright is not Britpop. So that's four non-British artists that I like. Nyah nyah nyah.
Wednesday, July 25, 2001 09:38 p.m.

Hear No Evil: Troublesome Homophones
Another great usage clarification article by deborah. I never get tired of these things. So good it should be bookmarked all by itself for handy reference.
Wednesday, July 25, 2001 09:35 p.m.

Buddhist University
It's true: Soka University of America, in the recently incorporated town of Aliso (not-so) Viejo, CA, is a secular Buddhist college with an first entering class of 125, drawn away from fancy-pants schools like Brown, Pomona, and Bryn Mawr, and faculty swiped from Knox College and Carnegie Mellon. Dang. It takes big guts to start a new college/university, especially in these days of absolutely ferocious competition for undergraduates. Good luck, Soka Lions!
Wednesday, July 25, 2001 09:28 p.m.

Baaaack! In the Saddle Again
What is it about this time of year? People hang up their journalling & blogging spurs, and others roar back into town, hell for leather. What the hell does "hell for leather" really mean, anyway? And what's the derivation? Anyone? Anyway. So, the above-linked Loobylu is back after her extended break, with a beautiful new palette that looks like the colours the chilled-out older sister of Mary Chen would wear. Also back on the scene is the much missed, cheerily disgruntled Jackie Danicki, in both journal and handy weblog form. Welcome Back, non-Kotters!
Tuesday, July 24, 2001 03:42 p.m.

Crush-o-Matic Venus Freak
Is it me, or is there some serious romance vapour in the air these days? Everyone is falling in love, or getting married, or both! Claire of Loobylu announces, with what seems to both joy and slight bewilderment, her engagement to Big P in her newly restarted journal, Kate and Graeme announce their previously secret engagement, Hellsbelle and The Bishop just got married, and at the end of August, I'll be going to the wedding of a high school friend. Dang. All this swooning and amour and planning, it's so fun to be around. So it's as good a time as any to re-link to the excellent (but woefully under-updated) Crush.nu.
Tuesday, July 24, 2001 03:35 p.m.

Eggpants
The ongoing story of an egg and his favourite pair of pants. This could be dreadful and just a big old turn-off (I mean, come on, Egg + Pants?), but it manages to be completely funny and charmingly oddball. Kind of like what might happen if someone gave Tim Burton happy pills. While you're at devotedbee.com -- which is, by the way, my current nomination for best domain name ever -- be sure to check out Chad's lovely Days of Summer & Spring artwork -- excellent for making impromptu desktop designs!
Tuesday, July 24, 2001 03:32 p.m.

An Amendment To the First Entry of the Week

It has been brought to our attention in a recent e-mail from alert reader and editrix materfamilias Judy that in our first entry on the current state of so-called children's music, and on our own good fortune at having been raised in a children's music-free environment, we neglected to include the early and frequent application of the humourous song stylings of gentlemen to whom our esteemed mother refers as Gilbert and Solomon. We regret this error, although we would like to point out that we never attended a production of Der Yiddischer Mikado, though we were delighted to attend several performances of Gilbert and Sullivan's decidedly non-Yiddischer, High Victorian, Orientalist comic operetta, The Mikado.
Monday, July 23, 2001 08:31 p.m.

Heard In Passing
I'm nosey, though I prefer to think of it as being very attentive to other people's details. So I always overhear (sometimes accidentally, even!) bizarro, context-less snippets of other people's conversations. I never write them down, but obviously I should, because some Berkeley student has built an entire website around her ability to unobtrusively gather and publish hilarious, out-of-context conversation bits. If you've got a few hours, read through the archives. Favourite quote so far: "Listen to me! No guy has EVER said 'Oh, I'd ask her out, but wait, look, her hair has bumps in it when she puts it back in a ponytail.'" --One girl, to another girl frantically trying to put her hair smoothly into a ponytail, in the restroom of the UC Theatre. Hee!
Monday, July 23, 2001 07:36 p.m.

The World Needs More Blythe
I've linked to Blythe stuff before, but Gina Garan is always taking more photos of her strangely doe-eyed Blythe dolls in so many settings that I need to link this just to remind myself to go click on them all! Via gmtPlus9.
Monday, July 23, 2001 07:27 p.m.

Actually, I Do Like It
When April elaborates on a previous entry. Especially when her meta-commentary is so snarf-inducingly hilarious. Even more especially when said hilarious commentary is the part about Nelly's latest single featuring MC Escher. Is there really an MC who calls himself that? Because that's a rapper whose records I want to buy, right now. If he exists, I want him to do a split-single with MC Paul Barman.
Monday, July 23, 2001 07:11 p.m.

Cool Tunes for Younguns
When the Pook was just a wee baby, we listened to an awful (and I do mean "awful") lot of Raffi. And the much less awful (and Canadian!) Sharon, Lois, & Bram. I could probably still sing all of the words to "Baby Beluga" and "A, You're Adorable" to this day, but it's not what I'd call good music. To be fair to my parents, they also introduced us all to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkle at a young age, to say nothing of Woody Guthrie and Cole Porter and the Muppets, and all of the hand-me-down Broadway & classical LPs my Mom gave us to play on our little record player. In fact, before the Pook, there was no specifically "children's" music in the house. There was just music. And I'm grateful for that, to say nothing of how grateful I am that the Pook finally got sick of so-called "children's" music, because most of it sucks ass. All of which is to say that I like what Dan Zanes (yes, the Del Fuegos' Dan Zanes) is doing for kids & their music. And that Jonathan Richman, you know a bunch of his songs (OK, not "I Was Dancing In the Lesbian Bar", but "Ice Cream Man" and "I'm A Little Dinosaur") writes great songs that are great for kids, too. And I bet I'll like They Might Be Giants' kids record when it comes out, too. And if Stephin Merrit & say, Lemony Snicket, were to take a break from writing their rock musical and record a quick & dirty album of tunes for the kids, that'd be really good and smart. It's time for a revolution in kids' music! And that adorable Mr. Zanes is just the poster manchild we need!
Monday, July 23, 2001 06:45 p.m.