Procrastination (original) (raw)
01 January 2013 @ 12:01 am
Oh, yeah
18 January 2012 @ 02:48 am
The answers
It's been a few days, and I can't sleep, so I guess it's time for some answers to that music meme!
1. Everywhere people stare
Each and every day
I can see them laugh at me
And I hear them say
Hey, you got to hide your love away
Hey, you got to hide your love away
Yes, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", originally by the Beatles. I was actually listening to a cover performed by Eddie Vedder from the I Am Sam soundtrack. I Am Sam: terrible movie, wonderful soundtrack. This song was guessed by hammond and
sarianna. Not one of their more well-known songs. en_ki theorized that this might be Carry on My Wayward Son because of the phrase "And I hear them say". That is indeed a line that (mostly) appears in Carry on My Wayward Son, but in the following context: Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man / Though my mind could think I still was a mad man / I hear the voices when I'm dreaming / I can hear them say.
12 January 2012 @ 01:24 pm
General Update, Meme
Went to the doctor this morning for a look at the Bell's Palsy. Seems to be recovering still; I can move my eyebrow pretty well, and this morning I could close my right eye by itself for the first time since this started. At this point we just have to hang around and see how things go, but it's looking good for the future. Might be another month or two before we get to whatever point we're going to get to, though.
In celebration, let me do a little meme. I'm sure you've all seen the music meme where you guess which song and artist a particular line came from, especially since I do it all the time. I'm going to do a bit of a variation on it. When I quit IRC, I habitually quote a song lyric in my /quit message (at least the first time I leave IRC in a given day). So rather than mine iTunes, I'm going to take the last twenty /quit messages out of my logs and use those as the songs. Even the ones that make it really, really obvious which song it is.
Ready? Let's begin.
1. Everywhere people stare / Each and every day / I can see them laugh at me / And I hear them say
2. And every demon wants his pound of flesh / But I like to keep some things to myself / I like to keep my issues strong / It's always darkest before the dawn
3. This dragon had a plaguey hide / Fa-la-lanky-don-dilly / That could the sharpest steel abide / Fa-la-lanky-don-dilly / No sword could enter through her skin / Which vexed the knight and made her grin
4. Come out upon my seas / Curse missed opportunities / Am I / A part of the cure? / Or am I part of the disease? / Singin' / You / Are / You / Are / You / Are
5. She's a Killer Queen / Gunpowder / Gelatine / Dynamite with a laser beam / Guaranteed to blow your mind / Anytiiiiiiiiiime
6. I like to play the drums / I think I'm getting good, but I can handle criticism / I'll show you what I know / And you can tell me if you think I'm getting better on the drums
7. Season's greetings in our so~ouls (yummy Fruity Pebbles in our bowls)
8. You might hear some reindeer on your rooftop / Or Jack Frost at your windowsill / But if someone's climbing down your chimney / You better grab your gun and shoot to kill
9. Ying tong ying tong ying tong ying tong ying tong iddle I po
10. Hasof zroa kodshekha, vekarev ketz hayeshu'a / Nkom nikmat dam avadeikha me'uma haresha'a / Ki arkha hasha'a, ve'ein ketz limei hara'a
11. I need your grace / To remind me / To find my own
12. There is a party / Everyone is there / Everyone will leave / At exactly the same time / When this party's over / It will start again / It will not be any different / It will be exactly the same
13. I'm just an animal looking for a home / Share the same space for a minute or two
14. And now you're under control (now you do what they told ya)
15. A singer in a smokey room / A smell of wine and cheap perfume / For a smile they can share the night / It goes on and on and on and on
16. When the last days come / We shall see visions / More vivid than sunsets / Brighter than stars
17. Think of bombs / We're poised on the edge of disaster / Whether it's right or it's wrong / We opened the window / Played some Nintendo / Sang a few bars of some pretty old song
18. Dead eyes / Dead eyes / And are you just like me?
19. I fear that I'm ordinary / Just like everyone / To lie here and die among the sorrows / Adrift among the days
20. Bang, bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon her head / Bang, bang! Maxwell's silver hammer made sure she was dead
There you go. Song and artist, one point each. Looking them up with a search engine is, naturally, cheating. Comments are screened so people can guess freely. On the one where the "artist" is not obvious (there is one), I'll accept a general note about where it came from.
01 January 2012 @ 12:01 am
This year really deserved it
11 December 2011 @ 11:07 am
Facing Some Trouble
I already posted about this on Twitter (and thereby Facebook), but I know some of you guys don't read those, plus I wanted to get all the details down. And then I put it off, but I need to stop doing that.
Okay. Last Tuesday I had an earache. The kids have had a cold so I figured I was getting that. Wednesday it was worse, and in the evening my tongue felt funny, like it had a coat on it. Thursday morning, when I woke up, the right side of my face felt sluggish and thick. I was having trouble doing anything with it. I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until my wife got home from her morning dentist's appointment and I tried to talk to her about it; I sounded like mushmouth because I couldn't get the right side of my mouth to move properly.
We called the doctor's office around noon, but nobody would be available until four. I didn't want to wait that long, so we went to the ER. After the usual poking and prodding I got my diagnosis: Bell's Palsy. What this means, in summary, is that some swelling tissue on the side of my head is impinging on my facial nerve, causing paralysis of the side of my face. (The right side, in my case.) This can be caused by a number of things, but sometimes it just happens and the mechanism is not well understood.
The ER doc prescribed me Amoxicillin in case I had a bacterial ear infection that was causing the swelling, and Valtrex, an anti-Herpes drug, for no particular reason. Apparently this is often done in these cases, although it hasn't been shown to have any real effects. I'm taking it anyway because if there's even a chance it will work I'm willing to try it, and two doctors and a pharmacist have assured me it's relatively harmless, and I know and trust two of those people.
The next morning the paralysis was actually a bit worse, so my primary care doctor added on a corticosteroid called Prednisone (to reduce the swelling - this is noted online as being the most effective treatment for this condition) and Prilosec (to combat stomach issues caused by same). She did this, bless her heart, from her vacation in Florida after taking a call from us on her cell, and told us we should call her back if anything got worse.
So that's what's up with me right now. Half my face doesn't work. The prognosis is basically unknown. A lot of cases of this go away (up to 85%), but upon digging into it it turns out that "go away" means that some of the functionality comes back. It might not be 100%, but at this point I'd take it. Some people take a long time to recover; one of my co-workers had it in high school for two months. Some people never do; Jean Chretien, former prime minister of Canada, lost the use of the left side of his face permanently. (A good line from that Wikipedia entry: he's "One politician who didn't talk out of both sides of his mouth".) So I'm just taking my various pills and hoping for the best right now. My wife has been an enormous help through all this, I have to say, both emotionally and in terms of the actual physical details. I don't know how I would be dealing with this without her.
I'm going to go into a bit more detail now, but I'll put it behind a cut for those of you who don't want to get into it, since it might be a bit more information than you wanted.
And that's it. There's nothing to be done about it that we aren't doing already, so it's just a matter of trying to keep it together and seeing what happens. How's everyone else doing?
18 October 2011 @ 09:36 pm
Writer's Block: It’s about to get hairy
Oh come on, I had to answer this one.
I always wanted a beard, even when I was a lad. I've had a beard since I was able to grow one. The idea of not having a beard never even really occurred to me.
Once, I actually tried shaving it for a bit, mostly because my wife wanted to see what it would be like. It turns out I look like someone's creepy drunk uncle without a beard, so I grew it back in.
Anyway, even if it wouldn't make me look terrible, I could never get rid of it. What the hell else am I supposed to stroke while laughing maniacally?
Don't answer that.
23 September 2011 @ 11:41 am
Writer's Block: “We built this city on rock and roll”
Damn, there's no way I'd be able to pick just one. What the hell. What I actually did is looked at my most-played in iTunes and picked three of the ones with the best lyrics at random, so here you go.
Walk on the Ocean
We spotted the ocean
At the head of the trail
Where are we going
So far away
Somebody told me
This is the place
Where everything's better
And everything's safe
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But, Peas, you say, using a pseudonym instead of my real name as people on the Internet are wont to do, how can that be one of your favorite sets of lyrics? The chorus rhymes "stones" with "bone". One of the verses rhymes "things" with "things"! The whole thing is incredibly simplistic and straightforward. Yes, I say to you, totally hypothetical person, and that last bit is why I like it. This is a song about going on vacation written using uncomplicated terms. And yet it contains some incredibly vivid images, particularly in the contrast between the vacation spot and the return to everyday life (presumably in the city, if the choking air is any indicator). The wistfulness of looking back on times in your life when you escaped from the everyday comes across pretty plainly. Sometimes the best way to pack an emotional punch is to keep it simple.
I'm not thrilled about them rhyming "things" with "things", but I'll let it slide. Okay. That was a little downbeat, so let's see if we can cheer things up a bit with the next one.
Angel from Montgomery
I am an old woman
Named after my mother
My old man is another
Child that's grown old
If dreams were thunder
Lightning was desire
This old house would have burnt down
A long time ago
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This is another one that manages to pack some very powerful images into some fairly simple language. As the author put it, it's a song about a middle-aged housewife living in Montgomery. Specifically she's gotten to a point where she doesn't know what happened to her life, which is something I think we can all empathize with. Note that the cowboy she's talking about and the person who has nothing to say are the same person, changed by time. Look at how the author hears the flies in the kitchen and knows she should do something about them, but is clearly not going to. The despair is palpable.
...
I guess I failed at cheering things up. But with the next one, for sure! I'm bound to get it right sooner or later.
No Children
I hope that our few remaining friends
Give up on trying to save us
And I hope we come up with a failsafe plot
To piss off the dumb few that forgave us
I hope the fences we mended
Fall down beneath their own weight
I hope we hang on past the last exit
I hope it's already too late
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...it's bouncy, right? I pretty much could have included any Mountain Goats song in here, because damn, but that guy can write some lyrics. This one is great because of the way the tone of the song doesn't match the content, though. I'm a sucker for that. This has some more complex stuff going on, but it still carries a strong set of images with it - strong enough that I don't really feel like I need to explain them. You've got to love phrases like "hand in unlovable hand", though. And you don't hear a lot of songs with a chorus like "I hope that you die, I hope we both die". It's magical. This is the song everyone sings along with at their live shows (while swaying gently back and forth).
Okay. I'll include one extra, just to end on a happy note. For real this time. Trust me. Would I lie?
Asleep and Dreaming
I've seen you laugh at nothing at all
I've seen you sadly weeping
The sweetest thing I ever saw
Was you asleep and dreaming
Well, you may not be beautiful
But it's not for me to judge
I don't know if you're beautiful
Because I love you too much
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Awwww, wasn't that nice? Don't say I never do anything for you people.
06 September 2011 @ 06:44 pm
Freddie Mercury
It is possible that there is a human being who has not seen this Google Doodle. I would not like to be that human being, and so I share this with you:
02 September 2011 @ 01:43 pm
Posting videos because it's friday
Yeah, let's post some friday videos.
29 July 2011 @ 01:04 pm
Video Friday
It's Friday. Let's all post videos.
First one to post the Rebecca Black song gets shot dead.