Trivial Pursuits

Please do not feed the robots tomatoes.

Saturday the Twenty-Ninth of December, Two Thousand and Seven

"Anyway, this cake is great."

The Year in Online Video, by our beloved Lore Fitzgerald Sj�berg. A thousand bonus points if you manage to watch all twelve videos in their entirety without crying. (I managed it, though by minute four of "Chocolate Rain" I was pretty close to breaking.)

wryly posted by Martin Marks at 3:12 in the afternoon // four comments by:

Friday the Twenty-Eighth of December, Two Thousand and Seven

And yet I can't help feeling like I should have more books than this.

Bookshelf 1: English-language fiction (Adams-Vonnegut)
Bookshelf 2: English-language fiction (Vonnegut-Yehoshua), foreign-language fiction, memoirs, poetry, general non-fiction, linguistics
Built-in shelves: General reference, linguistics reference, Spanish, Russian, other languages, photography reference, art/photography, comics, religion/folklore, philosophy

Actually, I have a lot more shelf space than I realized, thanks to my thirty-six linear feet of built-in bookshelves. That's a very good thing, because those shelves are the closest I have to a pantry. (My apartment, I've noticed, has plenty of storage space in theory, but the distribution isn't exactly optimal.)

Are there any good authors whose last names start with "E"?

literally posted by Martin Marks at 7:57 in the evening // ten comments by:

Where in the hell am I going to put Persepolis?

I hate trying to categorize things. It always seems so arbitrary.

animatedly posted by Martin Marks at 6:03 in the evening // six comments by:

"But I'm not done vomiting!"

So I tried to make today a Decadence Friday, but as it turns out, my idea of shameless and unabashed hedonism is apparently sleeping in until 6:45. Also, I somehow managed to volunteer to come in to work tomorrow. I suck at Decadence Friday.

vertiginously posted by Martin Marks at 4:23 in the afternoon // one comment by:

Martin

Thursday the Twenty-Seventh of December, Two Thousand and Seven

"My breakfast was half-English, and I'm half-English too."

Mango trifle!

compulsively posted by Martin Marks at 7:34 in the evening // comment? by:

Wednesday the Twenty-Sixth of December, Two Thousand and Seven

"Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel."

I can't believe I'm working on Boxing Day. So not cool.

piquantly posted by Martin Marks at 5:38 at night // comment? by:

Tuesday the Twenty-Fifth of December, Two Thousand and Seven

Merry Christmas, blogmass.

Got on a lucky one,
Came in eighteen to one,
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you.
So happy Christmas.
I love you, baby.
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true.

venturesomely posted by Martin Marks at 8:27 in the evening // two comments by:

Monday the Twenty-Fourth of December, Two Thousand and Seven

BLOG PIRATES STAY AWAY

So my sister, of whom we are all so irrationally fond, has a new blog, because ~~she sort of kind of forgot what email she used to set up the first one~~ the first was kidnapped by blog pirates. She promises to actually post to this one occasionally, too! She likes it when people she doesn't know comment on her blog, so feel free to do so.

amateurishly posted by Martin Marks at 4:00 in the afternoon // three comments by:

Sunday the Twenty-Third of December, Two Thousand and Seven

♥ Zingiber officinale ♥

I made gingerbread the other day, and I have to say, I'm somewhat disappointed in the recipe. I doubled the amount of ginger called for and it still wasn't anywhere near enough. Also, it desperately calls out for fresh ginger in addition to the ground. Plus the recipe originally called out a teaspoon of ground mustard, which would have completely overwhelmed the ginger. Well, next time I'll know better, I guess.

cannily posted by Martin Marks at 5:43 in the afternoon // four comments by:

Saturday the Twenty-Second of December, Two Thousand and Seven

They just kept offering me nagilas!

So I went down to the Local tonight. (Dad—Joe says "merry Christmas.") I was hoping that maybe it would help me break the writer's block I've been stuck in since the end of October if I tried writing in longhand (which I never do) in a different yet comfortable setting. I think it might have worked; I ended up rewriting much of the opening scene. I also solved a problem that had me scared that the whole damn thing was fundamentally broken—namely, the fact that I didn't really know what Baltimore rowhouses converted into apartments looked like. When I first wrote it I inexplicably envisioned the house being split left-right as opposed to front-back, which in retrospect is completely insane, and I should really have known better given that I grew up in a house that was about 15' wide by 80' long. Given the sheer number of times I've tried drawing up the floor plan for the apartment, I really should have come to terms long ago with the fact that a 7'-6" by 80' apartment is not particularly workable, but it would have necessitated such major changes to the novel that I think I just wasn't prepared to contemplate it and mentally blocked the problem out entirely. But now I think I've got it sorted so that the building actually makes sense without it affecting things too badly.

Anyway, the whole reason I mention this is because the session band that was playing randomly broke into "Hava Nagila", and they actually knew all the words, and I was impressed. That's all, really.

beatifically posted by Martin Marks at 11:23 at night // one comment by:

the old feller