I believe this to be the first weekend I’ve had to myself—sort of—in a month.  “To myself,” in this case, means no conference, no travel, no grading.  Ironically, perhaps, it also means that Mom is here, the only excuse I could grant myself for taking an entire two-and-a-half days off.  This afternoon, there were manicures and massages.  Tomorrow, there will be shopping in Pasadena.  Sunday, museum-going in downtown Los Angeles.  So:  pampering, consumption, culture.  What more could a girl need toward a general revival of spirit?

I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my hosting provider—first, of course, there was that ill-timed and unannounced bit of downtime last week, which I can’t be too upset with them about, given that their presence somewhere in SoCal may have been under the same kind of threat that mine was.  But then there was another crash night before last, and when they brought the site back up, we’d entered a bit of a time-warp:  the .php pages for the site as it was supposed to exist at that moment were still there, no problem, but MT’s Berkeley DB had reverted to its state as of 26 October.

What follows is even more arcane than that, so I’m going to take this inside.

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Definitely a bang.  Or maybe California just breaks off from the rest of the US and goes off to hang with Hawaii.  Either way, it’s The End of the World.  (But Australia’s down there, like, WTF mates?) [Flash required; watch that volume.  Via Metafilter.]

I’m finding googlings in my recent referrer logs that look like this:

MT-Blacklist!), but is there some other purpose such a search could possibly have?

[UPDATE, 10.26.03, 8.17 am:  Yup.  Confirmation:  the IP of the search is listed in my referrer logs as 61.181.5.69, and I’ve just found in my activity log three entries that look like this:

     2003.10.25 02:14:10    61.181.5.69    MT-Blacklist comment denial:
                                             00000-online-casino.com

Jay Allen is my new hero.]

Accordion Guy, who not only got to attend an extended Q&A with Neal Stephenson but also won one of the door-prizes (a trip backstage to meet the author), lucky bastard, blogged his notes from the Q&A.  The entry is entirely fascinating in a wonderfully geeky way, but there’s one passage in particular that caught my attention.  Stephenson digresses momentarily, talking about his arrival in Toronto:

He’d flown in from London, and over the duration of the flight started to feel feverish. On the “three-mile long walk from the plane to customs” (Toronto, despite the fact that it’s a major Canadian hub, has what has to be one of the most poorly-designed airports on the planet), passed by a customs officer, who was seated with a laptop. The laptop was attached via some kind of interface cable to a pole, on which sat a box. This pole/box setup was position in such a way that all passengers had to pass by it. After Stephenson walked past it, the customs official stopped him and asked him to walk past it again. When he asked why, the customs official showed him the setup—the box was a sensitive infrared camera which was hooked to to the laptop. While the other passengers who walked past showed up as moving blue shapes, Stephenson registered as hot red flare. A nurse showed up, and after a brief interview during which he assured her that he hadn’t been spending the last few weeks “hanging out on a pig farm in Guangxing”, was free to go.

You know, my conference roomie, Tara, said she’d seen something like that, though she interpreted it as a more standard video monitoring point.  Of course I’m pleased that health officials have got that SARS thing under control, but I can’t help but be a little concerned that this technology has been deployed with so little announcement.  Today, they screen for fevers.  What next?

I’m throwing in a link here to the color picker that everybody is linking to, mostly so I don’t forget where I put it.  External memory cache, you know?

Via George comes Dictionaraoke, in which “Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power of the dictionary.”

“Waterloo” is sublime, but “Oops, I Did It Again” leaves me utterly without comment.

I’d really begun to feel a bit left out:  all the cool kids were busily discussing their comment spam problems and solutions thereto, while I remained, with one pathetic exception, completely unhit.

I’m thus bizarrely happy to report that in the last 24 hours, I’ve been hit six times by Lolita, who is desperate to tell me that I have a Nice Site!

Given the plethora of her compliments, and the utter failure of her attempts to link to a pretty hardcore pr0n site, I’m doing a little editing, but just leaving them be.  A record, if you will, of my entry into the hip crowd.

Of course, if things get more plethoric, or if they come with more successful linkage, they’ll probably get deleted.

[UPDATE, 10.11.03; 8:32 am:  Got hit seven more times by Lolita overnight, with more objectionable content.  Comments have been deleted and IP banned.  We’ll see...]

[UPDATE2, 10.12.03; 10:56 am:  Sixteen more today, with slight IP variations.  This is getting tiresome.  Looking forward to Monday...]

This site has been making the blog-rounds of late, but it’s still worth playing with, for the odd poetry (and even odder critical commentary) that it’s capable of producing.  Input a line of English text, and Lost in Translation will use Babelfish to translate it into French, and then translate that result back into English, and on from there into German, English, Italian, English, Portuguese, English, Spanish, and finally English once more.  As jill/txt points out, “I love you,” run through this mill, becomes “Master to him.” My own personal favorite thus far, however, is “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” which morphs into “The dream of loaded white man.”

Now that’s deep.

Late this evening comes news of the death of Neil Postman, University Professor of Culture and Communication at NYU, and author of Amusing Ourselves to Death.  I never studied with Postman while I was at NYU, and, frankly, much of my recently-completed manuscript on the relationship between contemporary literary culture and television argues explicitly against the Postman line.  Nonetheless, he has been for years a leading figure in media ecology circles, and will be much missed.

[UPDATE, 10.08.03:  At last, confirmation.  Interesting that this comes from Toronto; there’s still nothing in the NY Times...]

[UPDATE2, 10.09.03:  The NY Times obituary has at last appeared.]