Good Things Week: Web sites!

First off, please note the offical Chicago Manual of Style styling of the word "websites" in the title up there. I hate it--it looks like a bunch of middle-aged academic copyeditors had no idea what to do with this new-fangled terminology and decided to treat it like a brand name modifying a generic product. Which...is pretty much exactly what happened. "Gee, Wally! I really enjoy your Web site!" See how dumb that looks?

Second off, it's a good thing I made a list yesterday of Good Things to think about, because today was a Not Good Thing. I fought everybody today. I pissed off everybody today. Because I'm a practically middle-aged academic copyeditor just doing her job, and sweet jesus in a jam jar, people, let's just lay off the attitude and do it my way, okay?

Cleansing breath! GOOOD THINGS!

Okay. Some good websites (HRMPH!) that if you haven't read, you must, like, right now:

For somthing to think about: Feministing www.feministing.com
Feministing is the best damn thing I've seen in ages. It's got so much news, and so much of it is irritating as all hell, and they get it up there and commented on pronto, and I don't know how they do it but bless them for it. I've probably already pointed to this one, but it's the only site--besides the BBC--that I check every single day.

For weather reportage: The National Weather Service
I loves me some NWS. If you sneak around long enough, you can find the place where meteorologists hang out and discuss which projection models are likely and which ones are totally loserly.

For the saddest, most heartbreaking commentary on New Orleans: Chris Rose

First off, he's a writer for the Times-Picayune, whose NOLA.com site was the lifeline of the storm. Then when I was down there for the conference, so many people--mostly locals--told me to buy his book before I left town. So I did. It's a colleciton of columns from Rose post-Katrina. They are so sorrowful and so confused and so poignant, it takes you right there. He continues to right on post-K issues for the NOLA site. He may be crazy and he's got almost textbook symptoms of clinical depression, but his writing is so raw and honest and he's so sorrowfully, moodily, hopefully funny that you'll wish you could buy him a beer and pat him gently on the arm. Leastways, I do.


For the What Should I Read Next days: The Literature Map
This is really cool, albeit wildly inaccurate. You enter the name of an author you like and it gives you this floating map of similar authors, with people most similar to your entry closest to the center. It's openly defined--anybody can enter people they think are like somebody else--so you get some pretty oddball connections. No matter whose name I enter--fiction, nonfiction, an author I love, an author I hate--the same napes pop up on the map. Maybe I'm just that predictable.


There are a lot more Web sites out there that rock. I'll think of some more for later.

Good Things Week: Music!

I'm trying to focus on things that are good, happy, positive, loveable, totally not-melancholy. So this week is All Good Things week. Except "all good things" must end, they say, so it's just plain "good things" week.

First up: Music!

I was talking recently about how I haven't had a song stick this summer, nothing to constitute The Song of Summer 2006. That's okay by me, kind of, because the official songs of summer tend to be kind of craptastic. ("My Lumps," did you say?) But that's okay, because I've been listening to a lot of superfantastico old stuff. Rock it!

Most of the summer, I've been playing Uncle Tupelo's "No Depression" album on endless repeat. I'm blown away by that album. It's so rock and so well written and so old-soul, and knowing that it was written by some bored, sweaty kids in southern Illinois who had nothing much else to look forward to...mmm. So good I want to buy copies for everybody I can think of who might not have heard it and leave it silently on their doorsteps in the middle of the night. Maybe I will. I could probably qualify for SuperSaver shipping.

But what else?
I stopped by G&Bs and picked up some records on my last trip through Decatur. I went expecting to pick up one thing, and left with three other things, and all of them were kind of "what the hell, take a chance" albums. And I LOVE them.

The Animals, "Animal Tracks"
I always like the Animals--except for "House of the Rising Sun," which makes my brain hurt--but I'd never even heard of this album. Which is a shame, because it is scrumptious. Mostly covers, and kind of all over the place; the first track reminds me of Scotty and the Ligonnaires, then it goes awesome all over Ray Charles's Hallelujah I love Her So, and gets kind of Fountains of Wayne by track 7. It's very joyful and soulful and fun.

The Shirelles, "The 21 Greatest Hits"
The other Shirelles Greatest Hits album at G&Bs only had 11 hits; so I figure this one must be extra hitty. I don't think I'd enjoy this one nearly as much if I hadn't read Amelier's copy of the awesome women-in-rock book "She's a Rebel." They're so young and lovelorn! So harmonic! So being used by white guys to propogate a manufactured image!

The Deathray Davies, "The Day of the Ray"
I don't know why I never bought their albums before, considering how much I love some of the bands they've played with. Yeah, Violents, I'm looking at you. And the Old 97s. Probably because I'm an idiot, because this album is the bee's knees.

Add to these three gems the CDs I got on the cheap at Amoeba, and I'm having a swell musical summer. Speaking of the Amoeba CDs, S-to-the-A...

There's this weird little woman who lives in the building in my backyard. I don't know if she has a job, and she doesn't seem to have a car. She's maybe in her fifties and is small and kind of very plain-spun, sort of like Carrie from the movie "Carrie" would be if she hadn't combusted before she reached middle age. She does not smile. She does, however, take a chair out into the yard, position it directly across from my front door, and read books. All the time. She never reclines, or slumps around in her chair, or tosses a casual "hey-how-ya-doing" when somebody comes out of the building. She'll just sit there straight up and down with her book in her lap, nad if you come out she might look up at you without changing expression at all, as if you might be a squirrel that she noticed in the yard. Then she goes back to reading.

Anyway. Yesterday I saw her go out of her building and around to my yard with a book. I was cleaning and had just put on the Violent Femmes album I bought out in S.F. I forgot how much cussin' there is on that album! The windows are open, and the VF are tossing out "motherfucking" this and "fuck" that. When the album finished I left my house, and she wasn't sitting by the yard anymore. Now I'm kind of worried that the weird gnome lady in the apartment building in my backyard thinks I'm a satanist or something.

I was going to write a bit about the GOOD THING that is live music, and how I finally saw some at the Decatur Celebration, and how there are fun shows coming up, but it's late and I'm hungry, and I'm going to go home now. So tell me instead:
What are YOU listening to?

...on a stick!

Things you could buy on a stick at Decatur Celebration:

* "sweet meat", the "best 12 inches in the state"
* Thai chicken or beef
* Calzones
* Frozen cheesecake
* Alligator
* Shrimp
* Hot dogs, cozy dogs, and pronto pups
* Shishkabobs
Plus roasted corn (on a stalk) and cotton candy (on a tube).

The Illinois State Fair won't rest, however, unless they're the stickiest fair of all! And so, they bring you:

Egg on a stick! A prepackaged hard-boiled egg "jammed on a stick" and served with a dipping sauce. For only $1! Yummmmm! Salmonella packaged in an easy walking-around delivery system!

Here's the deal.

I keep not writing because I have nothing to write about, and then if I do think of something worth tossing out general commentary on, it just seems so arduous. Some people have to try to cross the countryside while other people throw rockets at them, I have to come up with some statement of what I've done lately. We all have our crosses to bear.

So here are some things I should have written about, and haven't. If you haven't already heard everything I have to say about a topic, just ask.

* New Orleans
* San Francisco
* Corporal punishment and retaliation, and how people who are 31 maybe shouldn't get all "whoever's stronger has the power, that's just reality" after they've just had a "whose dick is bigger" contest with an eight-year-old
* The Cough of Unrelenting Tenaciousness
* Why Microsoft spell-checking software doesn't flinch at "tenaciousness" when "tenacity" is an actual, real word
* The inexplicable "planning" of the construction work near the library
* How when you drive around with the windows down people feel it's okay to mock your hair
* How I decided to get my air conditioning fixed, and then had a friend volunteer her husband to do it, and how I then pissed off said friend, and now I don't know whether I'm still supposed to come to their house, or if I should just get it fixed
* All the movies I've seen lately
* My two-year-old niece's weirdly Victorian habit of calling entire families by the name of the male head of household
* How kids these days are bugging the shit out of me
* How all of the Goodwills in the I-72 corridor have gotten rid of their dump boxes, and also refuse to accept more crap right now
* How I've been to more movies in the last two weeks than in the last two years, and how most of them were perfectly tolerable
* Decatur Celebration
* Pringles with jokes printed on them
* The effect of Pringles-worthy jokes on park district softball teams
* Craptastic but summerific books I read
* The end of Schaffer's bowling alley, and the rise of O'Flannagan's Irish Pub and Restaurant (and Bowling Lanes and Banquet Hall) (and I am not making all of that up)
* Paul Harvey's ludicrous American Marine Saved by the Healing Power of Thinking About Wal Mart story, and how Paul Harvey can't possibly still be alive anyway, and how do they think we're buying this shit?
* The pressing urge I feel to go eat and drink and shop and run around everywhere in town RIGHT NOW before the tidal wave of students eddies in, even though I've had two months to eat and drink and shop and I've mostly just stayed home
* And just where the hell has summer gone?


I'm betting there were others that are best left forgotten. What's been on YOUR mind lately?