Whoops! And, Things That Are Awesome June 8, 2007

I sort of forgot about this blog. I’ve been blogging once a week at work (which is where I learned to do that tidy linking trick! Sweet), and that’s been taking up most of the original thoughts I have. (Yes, I only have two original thoughts per week. Sue me.) Anyway, sorry for the disappearance, Calvin, my lone friend and reader! I hope you had a great Western road swing.

I’ve realised that I think about things that make me cranky too much. I’ve been feeling really tetchy lately. So I’ve decided to make this blog a compendium of Things I Find Awesome. Every day, I see at least one thing that makes me grin or laugh or think, “Gosh, that is so NEAT,” and I’d like to share those snippets with everyone instead of complaining all the time. Maybe some days I’ll need to complain, but for now, I’d like to try to stick with the Awesome stuff. I’ll try to put up at least one thing every other day.

To kick start this new theme, I present two things I’ve really enjoyed in the past week:

1) The teaser trailer for Ocean’s 13. You can find it here, but you have to click on “teaser trailer” – I don’t know, the full one just isn’t as fun somehow. I love the music, and the montage with the music, and the prolonged shot of Clooney, Damon, and Pitt just sort of sitting there musing at the end. I think this is going to be a fun one, and I’m looking forward to seeing it. I don’t care what y’all said about Ocean’s 12; I enjoyed it.

2) A really interesting New Yorker article about plagiarism by Malcolm Gladwell. Reject the Kool-Aid posted a link on their own blog after commenting on the Quillblog post about how Rebecca Eckler is a crackhead and thinks the plot of Knocked Up was stolen from her oh-so-clever memoir. The article on Gladwell’s own site here. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he makes some very interesting points about who owns words, really, once they’re strung together. Can anything ever be truly original, composed in a vacuum, or are we all riffing on what we’ve read, heard, absorbed somehow? And is it plagiarism if it makes the original better and more beautiful? (That’s where I start to disagree with Gladwell, but he’s a fascinating writer nonetheless.) Also stop by Reject the Kool-Aid to see a project to discount Eckler, which is awesome.

A shiny new blog March 21, 2007

How many posts like this has the internet seen? I shudder to think. Anyway, here goes: testing, testing, one, two, three! And so I leap out of LiveJournal (that was luminous4.livejournal.com, on the off chance anyone cares) and into the world of real-ish-looking blogs. It seems like a moderately good idea now. It probably won’t later. Oh well!

 I should begin with something interesting…hmmm. Well, today in magazine writing class – a strange experiment in torture by being berated for three hours straight about our poor story pitching skills – I decided I would really like to write about hiccups. What is a hiccup, anyway?

There’s this girl in St. Petersburg, Florida, who hiccuped 50 times in every waking minute through most of January and all of February – and now, the AP article said, she’s at it again. That poor kid. She’s now known as “the hiccup girl” in her hometown. What would it be like to have everything you do interrupted with 50 hiccups a minute? And for months on end? I couldn’t stand it. How does she?

 Anyway, I probably won’t end up writing this story. Who knows? Just thought I should give a taste of how my brain is working these days. To wit: there’s a lot of real news going on this week – the budget dropped, Gordon O’Connor is (hopefully) in a lot of trouble over Afghanistan mismanagement, the trial of the dreadful Lord Black is starting (and I’m sick of it already) – but I’m mostly thinking about hiccups.

In conclusion: hooray for minutiae! Cheers, and thanks for reading; I’ll be back soon-ish.