oh I sincerely miss those heavy metal bands

I am looking into RSS feed aggregators. I read about fifteen blogs on a regular basis, and all this clicking is doing a number on my carpal tunnels…it’d be nice to have one spot where I could check for updates. Much more time efficient as well. There are two problems I have encountered so far, though: the most recent postings for a particular blog are not always what’s linked to (ran into this with Mimi Smartypants), and at least in the aggregator I have tested, you cannot access comments on a blog, and the formatting is not the blog formatting. Now, I have only tried one (Bloglines) so I need to do a little research but if anyone has any suggestions or comments, they would be much appreciated.

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I finally finished The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I did enjoy it, after a fashion, and it was clearly meant to be influenced by and viewed as a homage to Thomas Hardy and also Edith Wharton (Dante Gabriel Rossetti even shows up just at the end). But in the end it reminded me of nothing so much as one of those “Choose your own ending” books I used to read in junior high school. (These, not these!) So there are essentially two endings, one wanting to be Edith Wharton-worthy, and the other not so much. And neither particularly satisfying.

Another aspect I found incredibly annoying was that Fowles would wrap up a piece of the story lickety-split, in half a page, and then in the next few chapters, write in loving, minute detail about how the wrapping up happened. Once or twice, this is fine, but became a tiresome affect.

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Pittsburgh city buses have undergone a makeover in the past year or so, and now we have all these spiffy, graphically interesting buses rolling around. Some of them say, “Hello” in a gazillion languages all over the bus, some say, “Ride,“ some say, “Move,” and some say, “Connect.” Every time I see the Connect one, I think of Howard’s End.





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Jude is entranced with the idea that the baby is coming to the shore with us in September. “Baby to beach….in Mama’s belly?”
“Yes, Jude.”
And then, worriedly, “Baby home…in Mama’s belly?”
God, I hope so!

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Rotten Mama moment 1,567,893:

Si is having a tough time when I drop him off at daycare these days. Lots of clinginess and crying, and I don’t know why, really. He loves school, and loves his teachers, and always seems to come home having had a good time and ready to tell us all about it. Today he cried to sit next to Jude at breakfast, and then he was fine momentarily until I started toward the door. I turned around to wave and there he was, mournful look on face, tears welling up in eyes, arm outstretched like…well, it reminds me of nothing so much as that old comedy skit with Heathcliff and Cathy (was it SNL? I couldn’t find a link), where they run past each other in the fog, arms outstretched, calling, “Cathy!” “Heathcliff!” And so I giggle. Instead of being sensitive and comforting, I giggle. Rotten mama, that’s me.

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Snippets, or, Why do I even read the news some days? Not in order of importance:

Someone please tell me that this is the child’s natural hair growth patterns and that she did not give the boy a Mohawk. That said, I think Angelina Jolie is a pretty intriguing person. I don’t know if she’s a good actress or not, I haven’t seen her movies, but I do think she’s a good person who is trying in her way to make a difference in the world. I give her a lot of credit, despite all her weirdness re: Billy Bob and his vial of blood. (That *might* be the title of the seventh HP, by the way.)


This is beyond making laws and enforcing them. Men who believe gang-raping an innocent person is the appropriate reaction to someone else’s ill-advised love affairs are beyond man-made laws. We need to start considering entire cultural influences. We can’t think that we’ll just abolish an oppressive body of power such as the Taliban (or a dictatorial government) and suddenly we have enlightened millions of people. It doesn’t work that way.

I do not even know what to say about this, other than “Tee-hee” and perhaps “What the f**?!” What child voluntarily signs up to go to a camp where the primary activity is nudity? And why is this a national story? Good thing we don’t have any more important things to worry about.