Palfrey's life

Admittedly there's probably a whole of bunch of translation issues here (how many non-Americans give a shit if someone burns a flag?; brief mental tallying of how many "patriotic people" I've ever actually spoken to; the Patriot act having in general not done anything to my rights (well, at least my rights while I'm outside the USA, which would be 99% of the time); relative comparisms of government spending - I might think some European goverments should spend a bit less, but that the US government needs to spend more; whether a lack of true "freedom of speech" has ever bugged me, or is likely to bug me; etc), but it's still pretty interesting to see at least one opinion about where I might be classified in the whole left-right thing (having always considered the issues that I would want politicians to support being badly unrepresented). Although, having had a look-see at the wikipedia page on Neoliberalism, I think I still haven't found an accurate political niche...
( Politics meme )

While sifting through the back archives, I saw hazyjayne's post here with the interests collage (and probably a few other entries, can't remember offhand). However, this being >48 hours since the meme had started, the site was naturally deader than disco/A-line flare's with pockets in the knees/the dodo/etc. So, an hour's worth of assorted messing around, I bring you my version. Looks pretty similar, but using images.google.com rather than yahoo to get the pics. Hmm. Never quite really realised just how geeky my interests were....
( *lots* of images )

There's this "fill in your birthday into wikipedia and list three interesting facts, two births, and one death for that day" meme going around. Now, my birthday (raspberrysalmon, if you want to steal things here feel free) would be January 8. There's a few vaguely interesting events (one train crash, two aircraft crashes, 3 significant battles), but nothing I would consider of particular interest to me. The births list is however more substantial (even without exiting the 20th century), and that's getting listed.

Births:
1935 - Elvis Presley, American singer and guitarist (d. 1977)
1937 - Shirley Bassey, Welsh singer
1941 - Graham Chapman, British comedian (d. 1989)
1942 - Stephen Hawking, English physicist and author
1944 - Terry Brooks, American writer
1947 - David Bowie, English musician
1967 - Michelle Forbes, American actress
1974 - Xzibit, American hip hop performer, actor, and television personality
1977 - Amber Benson, American actress

(Oh, and old Lord B-P died 40 years to the day before I was born)

(If only in part to stop need_fire from bugging me...)
The first player of this game starts with the topic of "5 Guilty Pleasures" and people who get tagged need to write an LJ entry about 5 Guilty Pleasures as well as state this rule clearly. In the end you need to choose 5 people to be tagged and list their names.

1. Gilmore Girls - they're kooky (and I'm not using that word lightly), and they live in this bizarro-world combination of small town america + rich family (acting as a ongoing deus ex machina for every problem). But it's so addictive.....


2. Will and Grace - the HMV card from the sane grandmother went on the 3rd series of this. I now actually, physically own the 1st 3 series of this... and then I watch several episodes in a row, gorging myself on pop culture references ("What's your damage Heather?"), endless jokes on gay society, and pondering if Will can actually be counted as fat (given Jack's endless insults on the topic).


3. Pointless web browsing - or, why I need to build an RSS reader that I like, if only to automate my reading of Slashdot, The Register, my LJ friends list, Planet Debian, Planet Gnome, OS News, etc, etc...


4. OK Cupid - smart dating site. Source of the recent querying here. Sadly most of the interesting prospects are umpteen thousands of miles away, otherwise I'd probably be a lot less incel than right now. I've so far answered 562 assorted questions, plus a long list of assorted "tests".


5. Windows - not a pleasure thing, but defiantly up there under guilt. My desktop machine is *still* running W2K. 95% of everything that's running on it is either runnable on Linux (Firefox, Thunderbird, Azureus, VLC, Gaim, Gvim, Python) or have good alternates (Semagic -> Drivel, Winamp -> XMMS/Rhythmbox), but I wouldn't then be able to play all the games and all the other little random new stuff that I so enjoy. Maybe I'll be able to get away finally with the aid of Xen eventually.....

Tag yourselves folks...

Random thoughts percolating through my head: a possible start to a story plot - What if everyone had a clone? (influences: sclerotic_rings posting the Mary Sue Litmus test, which has the question "Does the character have a clone or identical twin?") Still needs a bit of development, but I suspect I'll end up writing a short story (handful of paragraphs) if the muse hits me enough at some point.

Idea fragments so far

• Neither yourself nor the other one know who's the clone


• Do they even live together, or are the two deliberately separated (post-apocalyptic society? or maybe post-post- and the policy is a throwback that no-one's gotten rid of yet)


• Possible abuses of the word "clone" - using it in standard context, but twist at the end revealing they're not actually clones


• Clones as mythological creatures (who says clone has to be same species? ref: previous point)

NB: these are idea fragments, this is strictly a current brain dump, and some or all may be discarded before I write this (if I even do). I suspect 365tommorrows and my now reading of Iron Sunrise are helping this muse moment....

Oh, and I gained a new office-mate today. Aline Baggio, who's our resident French post-doc got shuffled. She has a small fridge she's just brought into the office, which means I'm probably going back to proper tea again :-)

Meme:

Woo! BITS is back (my mail/web server). So glad I had the backup Gmail account with all the mail getting forwarded tho.

And, as I've haven't posted a meme in a long while
( Big-list meme )