Me: Hey, here's a neat apartment. Might be too far up the hill, though.
thingswithwings: Oh, but look at the picture of the cabinets!
Me: Well, and maybe it's worth living too far up the hill for $950 rent, including utilities. And OSP. Whatever OSP is, this apartment INCLUDES it.
thingswithwings, googling: Oregon State Police? Outside Plant Magazine? Office of State Personnel?
Me, looking over her shoulder: oooh, orange smoothie productions! If it comes with free orange smoothies, I'm SOLD.
thingswithwings continues googling; I wikipedia.
Me: omg, Oral Service Provider!
thingswithwings, laughing: No, seriously?
Me: SERIOUSLY!
thingswithwings: Wait, how about Online Sexual Problems?
Me: Or, or, Oblate Sisters of Providence?
thingswithwings: Off street parking.
Me: What?
thingswithwings: It's totally off street parking.
Both: pause. Oh.

For your information, all possible things OSP can stand for, from the freedictionary's acronym page.

I go to the cafe around the corner to read and drink some coffee on Wednesdays. I have a seven pm class, and it's really hard to leave the apartment at six thirty. Much easier to meander to the cafe at one or two, read for a while there, meander up the hill at five, read for a while or print things out in the library, and get the uphill part over with while it's still light and warm and going to campus seems like a (moderately) reasonable idea.

Only today, today that backfired. There I was, calmly and innocently sitting and doing my reading, when a group of three middle-aged folks walked up to the counter and began making extremely specific demands of the barrista. (They do food, but it's counter service, so usually you just, you know, order something and wait for them to call.) They wanted the barrista to run out to the store and get blueberry jam when she told them she only had strawberry, they wanted her to wash new water glasses rather than taking them from the shelf because otherwise they couldn't be "sure" that they were clean, they wanted all three of their drinks immediately after the omlettes were served "not before! not during! IMMEDIATELY AFTER! ALL THREE OF THEM!" So I noticed them early, is what I'm saying.

And then they came over and sat down immediately in my line of sight. And one of the women picked up a toothpick and, sitting there complaining vociferously, began to skritch the toothpick around her ear canal. Skritch, skritch, skrtich, she didn't even seem to notice she was doing it, but nonetheless kept at it for five minutes before switching to the other ear. Skritch, skritch, skritch, went the toothpick.

Then she stuck the toothpick in her mouth, licked it clean, and returned to ear number one.

So I came home to do my reading, is what I'm saying.

So, you know, I've been crap at updating LJ. And the thing about not updating for weeks is that then you go "omg! but there is so much to say!" And that sounds like a) work and b) a really long, boring post, so you don't say any of it. ON THAT NOTE: forget the last couple weeks! Probably they were mostly boring, except for Doppelporner. (Dopornganger? Pornelganger? graycastle and I can't decide which is correct.) And my family was here this weekend. That was cool.

So! Onward, we find ... look, guys, it's Tom Lehrer in his youthful misanthropy! Before his full-blown misanthropy!



Aaand? The guy who uploaded that to youtube? Also uploaded a bunch of other songs from the live performance! Awesomeness!

AND and... apparently Tom Lehrer is on myspace. I have hope that it's entirely an impersonation. Remember: he liked that people thought he was dead! So it had better be an impersonator.

Otherwise, fiatlouis and I have no excuse for not being on myspace.

***

Other news: I now have a purple, white, and gold striped flag with purple and gold stars hanging in my office. It commemorates the nineteenth amendment in the US (women's right to vote) and comes from the Seneca Falls museum, which I visited on Friday with the family. I am quite happy with the placement above my desk, because it makes me slightly less cranky about articles like the one apple_pi talks about here.

I'm also cranky, speaking of cranky, about the whole Dumbledore thing. Once again, other folks have said it way better than me: toft_froggy, here, and marythefan, here. Suffice it to say that "Celluloid closeting" appeared as a verb when I sputtered at m_shell about this. I mean. GOD. Hey guys! I've decided that Dumbledore is gay, had a big tragic gay affair that blinded him to Grindelwald's faults, and never loved again, and then died! That's novel and innovative and freeing and will lead to the acceptance of gay people, especially the part where I didn't put it in the book!

In short, I am wearing my crankypants.

***

My family was here this last weekend; we went out to dinner rather too many times, really. And we ran around a lot. And looked at fall color, and went to ABC, and went to the farmer's market, and walked at Taughannock Falls and Buttermilk Falls, and went to Seneca Falls and the Erie Canal and I took redphotoframe out to the awesome espresso that is Gimme! Coffee. (She was like "okay, so, how can we get their coffee again tomorrow?") Also, my dad and sister took many photos of campus and of downtown and of fall color and waterfalls and things, which I hope they will post so I can continue lazy.

We also discovered, in the process of driving the two extra miles north of Seneca Falls that you need to drive to see the Erie Canal? That there is an amazing wildlife preserve up there! It's called the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge (no, really). It's this amazing, huge wetlands restoration and protection project, through which the NY Thruway and the Erie Canal run (weird!). We saw a ridiculous number of birds, including a pair of extremely well-fed hawks. (They looked kinda kestrely, but it was a long way off.) And apparently in the spring they have ospreys, and bobolinks, and tons of other cool things like muskrats. And they have islands! And canals! I am charmed by marshes, if not by mosquitoes.

... now updated!. Not as fun as the Mayor's proclamation regarding sundaes, but still amusing. Oh, Ithaca.

***

Ithaca in the summer is not the same as Ithaca in the winter. I mean, basically the people who are left are adults and hippies (obviously those two categories overlap) and ten undergrads. Recently, I have seen...

... a round-shouldered man named Rodney with extremely poor social skills. graycastle asked me, how did you know his name was Rodney? And I said, well, remember how I said, with extremely poor social skills? Yes. He walked up to me and immediately began asking me about my groceries. Did I like ginger beer? What was the best ginger beer? What was in my ginger beer? Was there anything bad for people in ginger beer? What if I made stirfry? What did I put in stirfry? What if I was having a party? Think Rodney McKay if he worked the prepared-foods section.

... Ithaca's (apparent) official Don't Get Heatstroke man. Me: walking from Gimme Coffee to downtown, hot day, a bit red-faced (stupid complexion). Middle-aged man approaches. "Hello!" he says. "Don't get heatsroke!" "... I won't," I say. "Excellent!" he says, pats me on the shoulder, and walks on by. I say "official" because he, or someone very like him, did the exact same thing to graycastle the week before.

... nine teenagers hanging out on the commons. Possibly buskers, possibly runaways, possibly just hangin' out. One of them had a guitar, and in front of the case he'd placed a sign: "Parents killed by ninjas. Need money to learn kungfu." As I walked past, he started to play "Kung Fu Fighting" on his guitar.

... a woman wearing a sarong in that "please god don't" way. You know, they wrap around twice, right? Not for this woman, oh no, she'd tied a loose slipknot on her hip and was nearly falling out of the sarong. I noticed her because she was stopped on the side of the street across from me, shouting at a woman in a car. Who I hope was a friend of hers, because what she was shouting was... "I have poison ivy on my crotch! CROTCH RASH! And on my ASS! I have poison ivy IN MY ASSHOLE!" I hope this was, you know, an oversharey answer to "how are you?" rather than just ... random oversharing.

Five random things about me: fannish, personal, ridiculous, serious, all of the above

1. ( why reality tv is scarier than doctor who )

2. ( my flist and fandom analysis )

3. ( typing )

4. ( now redacted )

5. ( earworms )

---

Random links:
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have a new motto on their website: "defining San Francisco values since 1979." Ha! Also they are having an Easter party.
Other ways of updating Jane Austen: someone has vidded two versions of P&P to a Justin Timberlake song.
The most hilarious election day story of all time.
Apparently we make the gorges safe by ... rappelling down the sides and knocking off loose rocks. AHHH.
Geraldo Rivera doesn't take Bill O'Reilly's shit.
Commentary on the Sun op-ed suggesting Cheney should run for president.
A three minute preview for tomorrow's Doctor Who.

I have stolen this random links idea from svendra, because if I don't stick unrelated things at the bottom of my posts, I fail to share the awesomeness that is Alanis Morissette doing "my humps" with everyone. I mean, I feel like all my random links don't deserve single posts, so then the only people who see them are the people who are on IM when I find them. (If you still haven't seen the Alanis video, it's here. Also awesome. SERIOUSLY.)

1. Cooked! A lot. I made apple-pear crostada and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and mashed yam with oranges and rum and pecans and salad and other things as well that I've forgotten. m_shell made kick-ass apple-cranberry-turkey sausage stuffing, and was responsible for cooking the turkey. (Turkey is scary.) It was all quite good, even if we did have a minor pie crisis (for unknown reasons, it took an hour to cook instead of thirty minutes -- baffling). Also, we then ate leftovers for days.

2. As a corollary to #1, I did a lot of dishes. Because I have only three mixing bowls, I washed them about every thirty seconds all day Thursday.

3. Taught m_shell to knit. Go me! She picked out some yarn and everything, and is knitting a hugemongous scarf, which she had time to practice because...

4. ... I watched the entirety of the 2005 series of Doctor Who since Friday. We'd both sit here with our knitting, and then I'd pause it to explain Daleks to m_shell, and then we'd agree that Daleks were creepy, and then we would watch more Doctor Who. Um. Yeah. It ... didn't feel like thirteen episodes?

5. Knit. A lot. (See #4.) I finished a scarf and am halfway through a purse made of sari silk.

6. Discovered that I live in a town where you can buy pony carts on craigslist and the police need to remind people to lock their doors when they leave for a month. A month. I cannot deal. It was a front-page story in the local paper: attention! lock your doors! Where is reality from here?

So today is my five-year lj-versary. Five years ago today, I finally gave up on keeping track of three friends' ljs individually, and got a livejournal account of my very own. (Thanks for the invite code, sineala!) "I won't post to it," I said. "It's just for the friends list." Yeah, right.

***

Today, on my way to the bigger and further away co-op location (the little one, called "Oasis," doesn't sell crucial things! like, um, Dagoba Xocolatl hot chocolate.) and the Ithaca Bakery, I realized that the Ithaca Friends of the Library Booksale was not only still going on, it was on its last weekend and thus nearly everything was ten cents. (It closes Tuesday, so everything's a dollar a bag then, but whatever: I spent about two dollars a bag today, and there was more stuff to go through.) As ten cents a book is about my speed, I detoured and spent a ridiculous amount of time picking out murder mysteries.

This, apparently, is how to attract the attention of this particular set of the buying public at ten cents a book:
Matte, textured cover (stands out next to all the oooh shiny)
Witty title
Excessively bad bun in title (mediocre puns get an 'eh')
Reference to something written before 1950 in the title

This is how to insure that I won't even pick the book up:
Gold shiny text on spine. (Unreadable, among other things.)
Author photo with big hair. (Sorry, big haired authors of the 80s.)
There are still ten copies of it. (Not sorry at all, Mr. Grisham.)

Picking up books and glancing at the text for about ten seconds, these books go back on the shelf:
"... he interjected."
"... her perky breasts..."
"Sure thing, guv'nor."
"The woman scientist had long, blond hair and beautiful blue eyes..."
Back cover copy mentioning child pornography rings, "best thriller of the year," "vengeance," "the one who got away," ex-CIA assassins, forensic pathologists without knowing what forensic pathologists actually do, "treason," "brutal serial rapist" (the chance of this being handled well is about 0.001%), "terrorists," policemen breaking the law for "justice," and other things I've forgotten.

Things that I will keep (unless they fail one of the premises above):
Meta murders. I have a ridiculous attraction to these, and I'd never buy them at full price, but for ten cents? Bring on the murder mystery in which a murder mystery author is investigating a real murder and then is killed mysteriously! Bring on the murder mystery featuring Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie solving crimes on a cruise ship! And I'll take the one with the author whose work is being transformed into a play when the lead actor is killed, too!
Academic murders. Amanda Cross, yes. But also the ones with "retired physicist turned police consultant..." and "statistician doing copy-editing on prof's magnum opus..." and so on.
Really, really ridiculous historical murders. Again, mediocre ones? Boring! But give me Alexander the Great's tutor solving murders while Alexander is conquering the world, and into the bag it goes.
Anything where the cover design involves a gun made of sashimi. (Honest to god!)

1. Six guys wearing honest-to-god sandwich boards standing on the benches outside of the campus bookstore stumping for Jesus. All white men. The one doing most of the talking was waving a Bible around in the air and thrusting it towards passers-bye as he tried to make his points: "you have sinned," "how dare you have sex or attend courses that question religion," "Rapture Rapture Rapture," and "I'm sure wearing a sandwich board saying 'Jesus will save you from eternal suffering'' will convince you that you should leave your miniskirts for Jesus." Anyway, most students were studiously refusing to make eye contact or walked behind them to avoid having Bibles stuck in their faces. Except for one girl, who walked right up to Weird Preaching Man, looked him in the eye, and said "Dude, you know that shit won't work here, right?"

2. Boy on cellphone: "No, no, I'm in the library, and I'm not supposed to talk on my cell here, so you should talk quieter."

3. Girl, to reference librarian: "I emailed the librarian about help for my thesis two hours ago, and I haven't heard back yet, so I was wondering what was taking so long."

4. Girl in bookstore: "Is the New York Times free here?"
Bookstore clerk: "No?"
Girl: "Well, it should be. It's free in the library, you know."
Bookstore clerk, clearly trying to keep snarkiness in check: "I'm sorry, but it costs a dollar here."
*girl leaves without buying anything*
Bookstore clerk, to me, the instant she's out she's out of earshot: "Did you hear that? It's free in the library? That's because it's a library."

5. Boy in class: "Hey, where do you get your coffee?"
Girl sitting next to him: "I make it at home. Sometimes I buy some at the Olin Library Cafe."
Boy: "I can't go to that cafe. It's all those girls who want stupid fancy drinks with sugar and milk make the line take too long. I don't have time for that."
Girl: "Well..."
Boy: "Who wants latte, anyway? It's all a scam to put less coffee in your drink."
Girl, to friend: "Did you know people got so angry about this?"
Friend: "No. And what's wrong with milk?"
Boy, backpedaling: "Oh, I didn't mean you were, like, wasting my time with your drinks. But there's something wrong with all of that milk and sugar crap, and then saying you're drinking coffee."
Girl: "I'm drinking a latte right now."
Boy, backpedaling again: "Cool, if that's what you like, but it's such a girl thing, like you all just do it because everyone else does. And it makes the line too long."
Girl, to friend: "Do you want to take even longer at the counter next time?"
Friend: "It'll be hard to make my 'medium coffee' take more than ten seconds, but I'll try."

Oh, Ithaca: the Sundae Wars. I can't c&p bits from this without ruining the joke, but suffice it to say that the cities of Ithaca and of Two Rivers, Wisconsin are both trying to bill themselves as the location of the nation's first ice-cream sundae. And the Two Rivers government recently issued a cease & desist letter to Ithaca, telling Ithacans that they could no longer attach the name of Ithaca to the sundae. (Which is hilarious in and of itself. I mean. Cease and desist letter. Especially since Two Rivers also wrote a FIGHT SONG. Yes. To the tune of "On Wisconsin.") The above link is to the mayor of Ithaca's response. And it is FANTABULOUS.