Fast Fiction

For those of you not currently in the know, 1.4 pounds of “junk” was removed from my abdomen two weeks ago. Weren’t we all surprised that it was that much? Makes me sorry that we didn’t have a pool going on how much it would weigh or how many tumors there would be.

For the record, there were twelve uterine fibroid tumors and one polyp. (Yes, the polyp would have been a tiebreaker.) The entire mass with the uterus weighed 630 grams and the largest tumor was the size of a Japanese eggplant (seven or eight inches long and three or four around). A normal uterus weighs 60-80 grams. Here’s a short list compiled with the help of Google of things that weigh approximately 630 grams.

A pregnant hedgehog
All of a bald eagle’s feathers
A pair of Vittoria Bike Shoes
A Video Camera
A Red Billed Whistling Duck
The Question of God by Heinz Zahrnt in hardback
A Lafuma Daypack
A twin sized down comforter

For those of you not metrically inclined, 630 grams is about 22.25 ounces (1.4 pounds).

LA Blogs has their LA Insight questions for the week (eight is always enough). This time it’s about geography.

1. What city or part of Los Angeles do you live in now?

Silverlake. Yes, I prefer to spell it as one word.

2. If you have lived somewhere else in the area, where was it?

We used to live across the hill, but still in Silverlake. Here for six years, there for four and for eighteen months in Sherman Oaks on Moorpark.

3. Besides where you live now, where else would you want to live in the area?

I really like where I live and don’t want to live anywhere else in the area.

4. Where would you not want to live?

I don’t think I’d like Santa Clarita on account of it being so hot and so far away from stuff. I’m not sure if I could live in the flats anymore. Any flats - I think I would feel exposed and claustrophobic (yes, I can have both those feelings at once).

5. How often do you venture out of your area?

All the time. I work in Hollywood. We go out to eat downtown a couple of times a month. We go to Orange County to visit relatives twice a month. Sometimes out hiking (when I’m feeling better we’ll do that again). Pasadena sometimes once a week. Burbank, Glendale, Los Feliz, Century City, Sherman Oaks, Beverly Hills for shopping. I’m lucky though, all my friends seem to be moving closer to me!

6. Where do you usually go when you get out?

Mostly down to Sunset and I really prefer walking if I can since it means everyone can drink! We usually stick to Silverlake and Eagle Rock for restaurants. But sometimes downtown.

7. How far do you work/school from where you live?

Exactly four miles. I’d like to start walking it again. I used to do that once or twice a week.

8. Money is no object; Beach, the Hills, the City or Leave?

If money were truly no object, the Beach. But if I still had to commute, I guess it’d be the Hills with a killer view and a pool.

I’m on an email list called WIST (Wish I Said That).

Today’s quote was about religion. But I reckon it’d work pretty well for homosexuality, too.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
  —Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

So I woke this morning and remembered my dream.

I thought I’d recount it for you.

I was leaving work and instead of carrying my large shoulderbag, I was carrying just my wallet and iPod. There were a few other people in front of me, including the dreadlocked fellow who works as our messenger, and he docked his iPod to a little spot next to the place where they scan our ID cards and then the guard fellow waved him on and he undocked and left.

The guard then directed me to dock my iPod, which I had a little trouble doing. (The connector was like the one for the remote and earphones, not the long one that you usually use for the docking/synching thing - but hey, it’s dreamworld.) Once it was on there it threw up an alert and I was told that they’d have to scan my iPod as it held questionable files.

Okay.

They called a tech guy, who came down, but took about twenty minutes to get there. Meanwhile the sun is going down and it’s getting late and the guards have changed shift and are getting ready to go for the day. So the tech guy gets there and he’s probably 22 years old and could have ridden a skateboard there. He take the iPod and docks it to his little laptop and shakes his head and says, “yeah, there are questionable files on here.”

I explained that there were non-mp3 files. That I was using the iPod for additional storage and if he simply opened one of those jpgs he’d find that they were all pictures of me. 7 gigs of pictures of me.

They said they were going to have to scan the entire iPod to verify that nothing of Paramount’s was on there. I rolled my eyes and said I’d wait. They said it could take all night. I wanted a receipt if they were going to hold my iPod.

Anyway, that was the dream. Not a bad dream. I wasn’t frustrated or anything, it was just another hassle.

When I woke up I realized that what they were searching for were non-MP3 files and when they found JPGs on there, that’s what threw up the red flag. I also figured if this happened in my dreamworld again, I should just temporarily change the file extensions for my JPGs to MP3 and they’d be none the wiser.

I’m not sure why I’m trying to solve my dream problems in my waking life. I think I should be solving my waking problems in my dreams.

I’d like to count myself among the first people to recommend you go out and buy this book when it comes out next month: No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty.

There is a rumor going around that I’m quoted in this book and I’d like to believe it’s true. (Okay, yeah, it’s true and I think I get mentioned in the acknowledgements as well. Or I hope I do. Not that it matters to me. I enjoy the whole process of writing bad novels quickly and enjoy talking about it even more.)

Though that’s not why I’m asking you to buy it. Well, actually, don’t buy it if you know me well enough, I’ll probably give it to you for Christmas. Aw, crap, I just spoiled the surprise, didn’t I?

LABlogs.com is doing a thing: LA Insight.

Here are my answers. Who know’s if I’ll keep up the weekly pace. (You know how I am lately.)

1. Where is the last place you ate out?

Rambutan Thai the night before I went into the hospital.

2. How often do you eat out?

Out? Probably once a week. Order from some of the same places that I go to? Sometimes twice.

3. Where is the place you eat most?

We order a lot from Rambutan, and go there just about as often. Cirxa on Sunset. Cafe Beaujolais in Eagle Rock. For special occasions we go to Edendale Grill or Blair’s.

4. Where do you tell your friends that they “have to try”?

I like Rambutan. It depends on what they’re in the mood for. Quick bite: Senor Fish. Decent meal: Rambutan. Long lingering meal with friends: Cafe Beaujolais. Special: Edendale.

5. What dish do they have to order when they get there?

Ba Mee at Rambutan. Start with the Thai rolls. Drink a Soju Praying Mantis hold the marachino cherry.

6. Where do you eat when money is not a concern?

Edendale.

7. Where do you eat when money is tight?

Leela Thai for lunch. (Cash only.)

8. What restaurant have you wanted to try but haven’t been to yet?

Gingergrass over on Glendale Blvd.

I saw this article this evening.

It’s about a study that shows a statistical link between birth month and likelihood of brain cancer. And then it goes on to state that left-handedness and ambidextrous people are also at higher risk. Those born in the winter have the highest risk.

Great.

LA Blogs just posted LA Insight. Maybe I’ll give this a try. I’m not even sure if you’re interested in these things, but hey, maybe asking questions will get me blogging again.

1. How long have you lived in Los Angeles?

Twelve years as of July 29.

2. Were you born here?

No. Pennsylvania.

3. How long did you plan on staying here originally?

I’m not sure what my plans were. But I believe it involved my entire adult life.

4. How long do you plan on staying here now?

Pretty much the same. Unless we get the comma. The Man and I have a joke. That if the value of our house goes up so dramatically that we actually gain another digit on the price of our house, we might just cash out.

5. What keeps you here?

I like the climate. I like the people. I like my house, my neighborhood. My job. The Man’s job. It used to be pretty affordable for a large city, not so much anymore. We just redid the kitchen (gotta stick around and enjoy that!).

6. What makes you want to leave?

How housing prices have skyrocketed. The air pollution.

7. What is your biggest suprise about living here?

How much nature there is around. I guess when I was coming out here (sight unseen for the most part), I just thought it’d be more urban. I didn’t expect coyotes, lizards, the profusion of birds and wonderful plantlife. The accessibility of natural recreation areas is a huge plus.

8. What is your biggest disappointment about living here?

I few disappointments about the city itself. Sometimes I’m disappointed by the intolerance of people, but I consider LA a much more liberal city than some that I’ve lived in.

I didn’t actually do any blogging in July. But when I looked at my archives list on October 6, 2004, I noticed that there was no archive for July 2004. I just couldn’t have a hole like that.

So this post isn’t real. I didn’t make it in July 2004. I made it in October 2004 and dated it for July.

My apologies for the deception. Or the appearance of deception, as the case may be.

I know everyone’s offering them, but I’ve got them, too.

I have two Gmail invites at the moment and I’m happy to share if someone wants them. Just pop me a note on any of the known methods of getting a hold of me (email or comment).

As a reaction to Gmail, SBC’s Yahoo email that I use most has upped their pitiful 10 megs to 100 megs without me so much as asking. And they removed the annoying animated banner ads. I appreciate that. Because I am, after all, actually paying for the SBC service and deserve that little perk.

I have trouble with Gmail, mostly because I have to check it. I have a great little client on my computers called eprompter that tells me when any of my email addresses gets a new message. And I can actually preview the message as text, too. Gmail doesn’t let me do that. So I’ve been hesitant to use it.

And I like my SBC, actually. It’s functional. Which is all I really wanted anyway. So, that’s where I’ll stay for the moment.

I never truly abandon any email address anyway. I still use my AOL address from time to time, even though we left AOL five years ago. Call me old fashioned, but you never forget your first email account.

I feel like I’ve let you down. I was posting so vigorously there for a while and now it’s been almost ten days. And the thing I left you with, well, some of you aren’t so happy with the roach.

The things I have to blog about are not things I’d put in my blog, so things will be sporadic here for a while. I may get inspired and inventive and want to keep in touch. Or not.

It’s nothing personal, of course.

In the mean time, I don’t think I’m going to give up on the photos, so if you want a little Cybele goodness, just pop on buzznet and you can at least see what’s in my back yard at any given moment or maybe on my drive home.

I won’t say where I found this fellow (not in my house!) but those of you who know me well will know where he came from.

Though I’m not the type to take photos at the site of an accident, I did huge photo shoot with this guy and used the “burst” mode on my camera where it takes three shots in quick sequence.

Once I saw those, I just had to make them into an animation.

Because I like to learn new things.

Okay, I really should be using these skills for good, not evil.

Every once in a while I get a song in your head. It’s been happening to me a lot.

And last night when a few folks were over and the topic was pretty much TV, it’s easy to get TV main title theme songs stuck in your head. Right now I’m having trouble with the theme to Night Rider. I have no idea how it got in there, but there it is. Lodged next to the damn Fanta song.

Thanks to Nathaniel I found this link to a great site that has gobs of ‘80s main titles themes in all their video and audio glory.

Great, now I can get Airwolf stuck in there, too.

I saw this link on 20/20 Hindsight and wanted to make sure everyone go to see it.

It’s a photo of the sunrise in Manhattan looking down one of the streets towards the east and it lines up perfectly.

See, as it’s explained at the site Astronomy Picture of the Day, Manhattan streets are not perfectly aligned to east/west and north/south, so the regular equinoxes don’t line up there. But on May 28 and July 12, they do and you can catch it coming and going (sunrise and sunset).

The photo there was taken in 2001, but stunning nonetheless.

I got this advice second hand from the coffee guy who was on the Paramount lot for the week doing the premium coffees for LA Screenings. (As we would have to explain to our clients - we offer plain old brewed American style coffee and his European style coffees.)

He also works his little coffee stand on movie sets and other big Hollywood parties and gets to know a lot of folks.

Turns out he was talking to one of those big young, up-and-coming action stars about how too much caffeine can give you the shakes. He had a great cure for that. He’d noticed when he was in auditions and was a little amped either because he was nervous or had too much coffee, if he wiggled his toes, his hands wouldn’t shake.

I’m getting hundreds of hits today because of some entries I wrote about some guy that writes a blog and some people are trying to figure out who he might be.

A little trip over to BoingBoing lets me know that the story about this mystery blogger has been picked up by Reuters.

I’m afraid they’re coming here and are horribly disappointed.

You have my apolgies if you’ve been lead astray.

It has come to my attention that the Dino in the White Island Crater will not exist forever. And it’s sad, because Dino probably knew that the acrid environment would shorten his lifespan.

But cry not, beloved readers, because we can do something to keep his memory alive.

I’m looking for a few brave volunteers who would like to find a webcam in their neighborhood to put up a memorial Dino or other Flintstone’s pen topper. (thanks Koga!) If we get enough people involved, we can probably get a bulk deal on these fellows. Of course in memory of dear White Island Dino, they would wear magenta/purple armbands. (You can just draw them on with a sharpie.)

This one looks like a prime candidate for the Los Angeles Area - Hollywood Sign Cam.

Maybe there’s some clever evolutionist out there who can explain something to me about humans.

Why do nose hairs hurt so much when you pull them?

What is the evolutionary advantage to keeping people from yanking them out?

I can pull out hairs from my eyebrows or arm or leg (individually, I should specify, any large mass of hair at one time anywhere on your body hurts like a mofo) and it’s relatively painless - just a little pinch and it’s gone.

I pull out a nose hair and my eyes are spilling over.

What’s that all about? Was there a point in human development when people started pulling them out and those people didn’t survive as well, but the ones that had some sort of super pain-receptors in their noses survived better and passed along their genes to modern humans?

Why should the nose, that part of the nose, be so sensitive? It it to keep us from shoving things up there? To keep us from taking things out?

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to live with it, I love the new blogger interface.

It’s more powerful - it’s a better way of working with a large blog (let’s face it, I have hundreds of entries and have had trouble doing trackbacks to my own entries because I couldn’t even search by month on the old version.)

What’s good:
1. The homepage is spare - the old homepage would have load problems because it would have to reference the database for the recently updated list. Lets face it, the vast majority of us are here to work on our blogs… if we want to see all that other stuff, we’ll go look at it. Thanks.

2. Search is available in the edit area. Let’s face it, once you get more than 100 entries or more than 1 year under your belt, you need a search feature to find stuff.

3. Previous posts by title instead of just a code number.

4. Stats for your blog are available in your profile (finally, I know how many posts I’ve made), and number of words written.

5. Preview - it allows me to see my text in format, not necessarily in my stylesheet but at least I can check the links easily.

What’s bad:
1. I’d like more control over my template - and I’d like that part to be clearer. A WYSIWYG editor would be great, but besides that, some way to have the list of the blogger codes displayed in the same window as the template would be very helpful. Sometimes I just want to go in and do one small thing and I have to have three windows open to tweak my template.

2. No post links available within the edit section. I want to be able to reference previous posts without opening another window to my blog and searching them out. It shouldn’t be that hard to have it in the edit section somewhere.

3. Stats for the blogs are not always accurate. Sometimes Spambiguity says that it only has one post, when it has over 15 so far.

4. Stats.blogger.com is still wonky. 9 times out of 10 when I try to go there, I get the white DNS error screen. Why is that?

Other things I’d like:

1. Option on the create a link within a post tool to have it automatically prompt me if I want it to open in a new window. Right now I hand code most of that. Same with photos - MT lets me upload a photo and it will offer to make a thumbnail and an autosized pop up version of the image.

I really hope the folks that pulled this one off are getting full credit.

There’s a webcam run by the Geological and Nuclear Sciences group in New Zealand that monitors a crater in a volcano on White Island in the Bay of Plenty (New Zealand).

Though the volcano is a tourist attraction, most visitors just view it by boat (or webcam) so it’s rather odd that a little pink dinosaur has appeared on the lower part of the frame.

The article here doesn’t say anything more specific than a pink dinosaur - but it looks like the Flintstone’s Dino to me.

It’s very slow - but you can try to catch a live glimpse of him on the volcano cam yourself.

I joined Buzznet a while back (I had to ... I met Marc Brown at a party). And here I’ve been populating my little gallery with some yummy daily snaps. (I even updated the neon gallery there too, take a look.)

Now it’s time I share them with you directly.

So you’ll notice that there are some swell images over there on my sidebar.

If you recall, this is why I wanted a three column format ... but it was not to be. So you only get one photo a day. But just click on it and it’ll take you to my gallery at buzznet and of course everyone else whom I link to. (I also post to the blogging.la buzznet on occasion, because I’m a syndicating gal.)

Anyway, I should be posting to that pretty frequently, as I snap photos just about every day, which as you already know is more often than I post on my blog.

Oh dear, I’ve been referred to on Defamer.

And here I was, lamenting my lack of readership.

You nice Defamer readers come here expecting more about the Andy Kaufman/Rance story.

So here goes, first, a commenter on the original post spake thusly:

[Even if Andy was still alive:] There is NO WAY ‘Rance’ is actually Kaufman. Andy was never that boring, insipid or trite. Rance’s hackneyed retelling of 4th generation Hollywood urban myths cannot be compared to Kaufman’s actual genius. You dishonor Andy’s legacy by attributing that pablum to him: he might be out there blogging but it would certainly be far more entertaining than the crap on ‘Rance,’ which is watered-down vanilla with a hint of the shit he has to eat as some mogul’s assistant. I’d hope after 20 years in hiding, Andy could come up with something better than tired cliches and children’s puzzles.
Tony_Clifton’s_Ballsaque

He has a serious point here. Rance’s blog is soooooo seeped in the verisimilitude of an person with a shallow life it’s hard to believe that Andy is that good. And further that Andy never had any interest in commenting on that part of our culture.

But I can defend that. Because as I understand Andy, he was always reinventing his performance art. And why not take it to another level on the internet? I’m old enough to remember Andy’s first appearances on Saturday Night Live. I remember his complete dedication to whatever he did - no matter what he faced, he threw himself into whatever his current role was.

As for the commenter referring to Andy never being boring or trite ... well, it’s easy to look back and say that, but in the moment, especially with Andy’s early performance pieces (the wrestling stuff) it was very easy to write the whole act off as offensive or just the wrong direction. It went to a place, for me, that was not terribly funny and made a point that I didn’t need to have made to me.

Mostly I hope that Rance is a deft parody to the point of complete surrender by his readership to his nuanced portrayal of Hollywood insipidness.

After a vast amount of reading and comparison, I’ve decided that Andy Kaufman did, in fact, fake his death, and he is, in fact, alive.

I did not get this from his press release.

I did not get this from his website.

I’ve decided that Andy had nothing to do with those things.

I’ve decided that it is time I unmasked Rance as Andy Kaufman.

For just a moment I’d like to pretend that I’m perfect. That will allow me to pick on others imperfections. (Well, maybe admitting that I’m not perfect allows me to pick on others, whatever it is, just pretend that I’ve admitted it or we’re suspending our disbelief for this exercise.)

I’m reading the NY Times. And there’s an article called When Alzheimer’s Steals the Mind, How Aggressively to Treat the Body? by Gina Kolata. I read it. There’s a little photo to the right and the caption says:

Randy Bryant and his mother, Hattie Kuykendall, who has advanced Alzheimer’s. He choose a feeding tube for her. “With a lot of people, it’s an easy decision to just let people go ahead and pass away,” he said. “When it’s your mother, you can’t do that.”

Is it me or is there an error there? Choose? Should it be chose? Or chooses? Something other than choose.

Then, later in the article:

Putting in a feeding tube can cost about two thousand dollars, said Dr. Douglas Nelson, a geriatrician in Hickory, whose practice mostly consists of nursing home patients. Inserting a tube requires a consultation with a speech therapist to verify that food is entering the lungs and an X-ray by a radiologist that requires swallowing barium. The procedure itself is done in a hospital, with an anesthesiologist, and a gastroenterologist or a general surgeon.

Now, I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure we don’t want food in the lungs, and further, we don’t want to have to hire someone to confirm that we’re putting food there. So either we want to verify that food ISN’T entering the lungs or we want to verify that food is entering the STOMACH.

This article came out Tuesday.

I’m not sure how this whole correction/retraction thing works, but I’m pretty sure that the web allows you to fix these things instantly. I can see that it might have been up there for a few hours, maybe a day wrong, but for two days?

Anyway, I know that I have typos up here on my blog all the time. But let’s face it, I’m not getting paid for this. I’m not the NEW YORK TIMES! I’m just fast fiction, which implies that I type fast and don’t look back.

File this under something you just couldn’t get away with in America.

In Japan there’s a candy that’s known as ‘Snot from the nose of the Great Buddha’

The article goes on to say:

Local media have suggested that the sweet is popular because the people of western Japan have an earthy sense of humor, which other Japanese often find coarse. Another famous Nara sweet is called “Deer Droppings”.

See, I just don’t think anyone could do that here ... you would never find St. Paul Spit Soda or Jesus Boogers Gummis or Mary Menses Tea or God’s Is Great Earwax Candles.

I wonder if they taste any different than Hello Kitty Snot?

I’ve started a new blog. Not in place of this one, just another one.

I was going to ask for some help from readers. Anyone wanna join in? There’s no obligation to post often, just some. I suppose if enough people join in, the obligation is very little.

It’s called Spambiguity and it’s just a blog of the curious spam that I get on my many email addresses (11 at last count). Right now I’m obsessed with the strange text they throw into spam in order to throw off the spam catchers. I have a small program (eprompter) that allows me to view my email as text only, so I don’t have to worry about anything nasty. It’s PC only.

I can add in contributers quite easily on Blogger. So if you want to play along, just pop me an email or leave a comment here.

It’s not getting the most press, so I thought I’d do my bit.

Children are getting injured by the appearance of the 17 year cicadas.

Yes, it’s true. Hospitals have noticed a rise in injuries related to cicadas. During the winter cicada related injuries fall off precipitously, but now that spring has arrived in the east and the cicadas have emerged from their underground slumber.

Pediatrician Warns Parents About Cicadas

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

Fri May 14, 2004. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - First there was the girl who fell off her bike fleeing a flying cicada. Then a boy trying to swat a cicada out of the air with a baseball bat instead hit his friend in the nose.

The final straw came when another child hurt his hand trying to squish a cicada under a car’s tires. Dr. Ray Baker of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital was convinced—cicadas can be a safety hazard to children.

- snip -

“We had a stab wound to the arm from a kid who was trying to kill a cicada on the arm of another child but unfortunately he was using a knife,” Baker added.

The article goes on to detail other freak accidents caused by cicadas (let’s be clear, these are children that wouldn’t have put their hands under moving auto wheels or run into brick walls otherwise - they’re perfectly normal, intelligent children).

This being a 17 year event, I think we can start planning for the next cycle now. There’s little need for us to waste public health education money on vaccinations and basic medical and dental coverage for low income families. The real threat to America’s youth is cicadas.

The Man saw this on BoingBoing today.

Fast Fiction Friday - Warren Ellis of Die Puny Humans asked a bunch of writers to contribute a few words of short fiction to his blog. Just cycle through them using the next arrows at the top.

Enjoy some refreshing fiction! Now, how do I get to play along next time?

Okay, the photo safari was last night, but I’m posting it today.

Will and I took a few fab photos last night on Sunset Blvd/Hillhurst/Hollywood. We decided after seeing the Vista Theater that our focus would be neon. And lo and behond we found quite a bit. The most spectacular being the Wacko sign on Hollywood Blvd.

I was very surprised at how well my camera did (Sony DSC-V1) in these conditions. The best photos came when I was able to stabilize myself against a pole or something. Of course I shot over a hundred photos and there were only about 15 keepers.

UPDATE: Will posted some of his photos at Buzznet too. And I put some larger versions up on PhotoBucket and you can see all my latest at Buzznet, too.

I’m sure some folks have already seen the article. But here’s a link to Travis’ website that has the whole article. Blogging.la has a poorly scanned (but ultra-fun) copy of the photo that went along with it. Note that the dumpster and wall they’re in front of is part of the header image for the site.

To live and blog in L.A.

By Travis F. Smith, Special to The Times

It began as any good Internet fable should—two Internet-savvy twentysomethings who had never met face to face sit down in a coffee shop and, over a handshake, agree to develop a new idea.