Euan Me

Euan Semple decided to send invites to stumble upon to me and 1,000 other close friends (check out the comments--some funny replies there from Euan's good natured "spammed friends"). Needless to say, ADD-like wanderlust ensued for various parts of the day. Musicovery and Refrigerator Poetry have been particularly fun. Firefox made the toolbar install easy. I wish their profile pages were more social. And a big plus would be to be able to "blog this" find or in some other way have linkage between your blog there and your other blogs and social sites.

More and more I think we will be writing in apps like Qumana and publishing to multiple sites--especially when these tools can cross social sites or use RSS to shape-shift our writing (also knowns as content), breaking it down into particles to send it across our social spheres and recomposing it in the style/form/look-and-feel appropriate for each venue. There's no reason I can't pull a twitter out of the same blog post I'm posting here and designate the last half of it in some Funky Font with emoticons to blast over to MySpace (once it's open--it will be), FaceBook, Friendster, Pownce, LinkedIn, Stumble Upon, Allied, Blog Sisters, all of em.

I have more to say on this stuff--just too little time and energy.

SO that's a round about way of saying, Thanks Euan!

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Famous future reply to the question, "How did you find our site?"

"Euan did it."

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Tags: myspace, euan semple, stumble upon, bad UIs, 1000 close friends, musicology, the solution is poetry, active reading, facebook, friendster, pownce, linked in, stumble upon, blogging, web 2.0, social software, tech, marketing

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So we got this young hamster girl from the pet store to breed with Marshmallow, who is the best fricking, longest living, cutest hamster in Georgia (exhibit A to your right) if not the continental U.S. He is friendly, kind, doesn't bite, potties in ONE spot only, and basically lives a sweet and quiet life with good genes and teeth.

Can you ask for much more than that in a specimen of any species? I think not.

That is why we decided--or I should say George decided--that Marshmallow's lineage must be preserved in a new generation. So he and jenna bought Cupcake and brought her home. She is very sweet. When we put them together in one cage, they got along famously.

REALLY famously.

Wooohooo type famously.

So imagine our surprise two days ago when we found Marshmallow cowering on his back in a corner with Cupcake swiping away at him.

"GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME YOU NEEDY BASTARD!" she screamed.

"OH CUPCAKE--WHAT? WHAT DID I DO?"

He continued to offer her his underbelly as if to say: I know you could kill me, and I love you for it, but if it's all the same to you, I wish you wouldn't.

Clearly she's hormonal.

Another couple of incidents like this followed until we got the picture: Time to separate them--the blessed event must be getting close.

What I'm saying is, if you listen, women will tell you what they want.

And even if you DON'T listen, women will show you what they want.

And if you don't listen and don't take heed, then they will swipe at you and you will be laying face up begging for them to just not hurt you and maybe to get a cage of their own if that would be at all possible.

Then when they move next door, you go back into your plastic dome house and lay around, just like you used to before they ever showed up.

And that's kind of how it works.

Hamsters are a window on the world.

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unstrung by a commute

good writing good man that BMO good thoughts good truth: what do you do with the ordinary? numb out or see through it? who might take you down for telling what you see? anyone or no one? the whole internet or just some someone? blogging your way through things is extreme sports in pixel play. you can break a bone. sometimes it is simply beautiful. it's not so real that it has to hurt. but you never know.

i like this:

Being in traffic, is like being in a meeting. You are stuck. You’d rather be
dead.

We’ve pulled alonside a GO train. Double decker. With the entire side of one car covered in a Clinique ad. Painted on there. Little thought or art direction. Still better than the green and white. Me? I’d paint them a banana yellow.

We’re through The Green Belt now. Farms between two towns. Hay.

A beer and a bag of cashews while loading and unloading passengers at
Oshawa.

Then it’s through the Darlingtin Nuclear plant. Thing is the grounds
around the facility are beautiful.

I think I’ve decided that this is where we enter yet another country.

Farms, radio towers, power lines.

I’ve decided that when I get home I am going to weed the garden. The train is flying
over the countryside now. I’ve decided I want to live in Europe.

Most of my ideas are romantic.

Damn it.

to blog is to write the ordinary unordinary.

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making meaning of what wasn't mean and meaning it...

"The Bad Guys Won." Those Meanies. Right? RIGHT?? I mean? Well--Right?

That blog had many obscurities. Many of the posts were not ad hominem. Many were non satiric. There were strange and surreal things, which perhaps would be worth resurrecting (some other day).

What is difficult to convey is how, in that oblique roomful of voices, fuller than usual because most of the voices were doing more than one voice and the tenor of certain of the posts was someone speaking in character giving the whole thing a pretty radically dialogical pitch and yaw -- in that barroom of parodic lunacy, it was often impossible to ascertain who was writing, the tenor of any given post on first reading, and some sort of available context to make sense of things. When one contributor seemed to be gratuitously attacking a specific person, the first thought was not just: "this seems to be unacceptable, nasty stuff," but, at least for me, a series of questions, like, "is this some sort of joke about hate speech?" "is there some relationship between the writer and the apparent target that would explain why this is considered worthwhile?" etc., questions which took some time to gather meaningful answers because neither the writer nor the target was someone whose work, life, reputation, offered much in the way of clues, and, as noted, the absence of any "purpose" for the blog - other than to not be simply another mindless blog - complicated the interpretive status of much of its contributors' utterances.

In short, confronted with what seemed like ugly hateful stuff, and knowing that at least four of the people involved had no truck with that mode of writing, the first response was to wonder what was being aimed at other than mere scurrility. First there was the theatricality of the act of apparent ad hominem writing, then there was the question of how to read it: what was it about? why was it there? was there some undisclosed joke/relation/context? would this become clear via some response? Apparent nastiness is not always nasty, although in this case, it turned out to apparently be just that.

One other point: Posts and comments that seemed to be pushing some limit were met by other posts and comments that seemed to try to bring the entire brawl onto a different track. I.e., there seemed to be something genuinely dialogical going on, multiple voices very much not in sync, not in harmony, not even intelligible to one another - yet with some vulnerability to the idea that there could be, beyond the immediate surreality, some place this thing wanted to go, and if we were to keep going, something of interest might come of it, something other than the regrettable, distasteful, and abhorrent thing that is now what it is remembered to have been. As usual, much has been obscured in the rumor and retelling.

These are some words that I have not been able to find. I didn't think I was reading satire, not quite.

Something--something unencountered. I thought I was reading this, what is described there. The questions of what this is called, and if there is a place for it, have been made moot. Too much, to far, to soon, to least to most?

Reading, in this case, demanded complete attention -- to the lines and to the between -- or demanded not to be read at all.

...