Nonsense Verse

Geek attractant

In the course of my work I must check the precise titles of books and spellings of authors' names and dates of publication and other such minutiae, a detail-oriented activity that a lot of people might find mind-numbing but which I, queen geek, derive a certain satisfaction from. Perhaps you're thinking I'm the kind of gal who is easily amused. And I am -- by certain things. Like the fact that one of the reference sites I use these days, the Catalog of the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library, has a ridiculously apropos nickname: Catnyp.

So that's why I get such a buzz from a room lined by well-stocked shelves. Why any story I tell about a quick trip in search of a single title always ends with an "hours later…" Why that last time I went to a Barnes & Noble I ended up rolling on the floor and mewling and purring and chasing invisible mice and gnawing on my toes. They put drugs in the books! Yay.

Excuses, excuses

A friend sent me a smoke signal the other day: "great blog, no words. bad typepad?"

The sign of a good friend: She gives you the benefit of the doubt and blames the technology first.

I initially decoded her message as a gentle non-prodding prodding: "I see you haven't written in a while. This is me hinting that you should get off your ass, while shrewdly suggesting that I could be off base, that in fact the root of your problem is not slothfulness or ennui but a failure of your blogging tool."

As if. That was my wild imagination doing the translation. Because she then wrote to clarify (again giving me the perfect out -- it's not you, it's me!): "actually, i'm not getting *any* text on your blog, which is weird. just being ms pesky IT person, i guess. mebbe it's just me."

No, in this case, the blame all rests here. Not only have I not been writing, but I also failed to set my configuration to protect against my inconsistency and my site consequently going "poof!" Or, to be clearer: I had set my configuration to show only the "last 7 days" of posts, optimistically thinking that this time around, I would write frequently enough for that not to be an issue. And that meant that as soon as the inevitable failure to post within 7 days did occur, the blog entered the "no words" state. (In other words, if you thought the blog was useless before, get a load of the way it looked the past few days. Eesh.)

Let this be a warning to all bloggers of the spasmodic kind: If you set your configuration based on days, be prepared to receive spankings in the form of a great white void. It ain't pretty.

But to make up for it, I give you something that is pretty -- my excuse for not being around to blather with regularity. Which is that I was too busy hanging out here:

Uh, thanks for the timely warning

One week ago, it was reported that Apple was recalling the batteries for some of its computer models because there was “a risk that they could overheat and catch fire.” (My first reaction to language like that? “Sweeeeet.”)

And that newsy warning was all well and good, but there did seem to be one problem: Where was the e-mail alert?

As a digital consumer, I assume that if my electronic toys run the risk of overheating and catching fire (sweet!), I should get an e-mail, posthaste, warning me of such a possibility. I mean, what about all those poor people who don’t read the newspaper? Is this Apple’s means of punishing an uninformed populace? They are not with it enough to read the news — thus, they deserve to become victims of spontaneous combustion?

Then finally, today, a full week after news reports of the battery problem, I did get an “Important Safety Recall” message, its heading in blazing-red-hot type, as if to make up for its tardiness. Well, hello! So nice of you to let us know. Do come again sometime — perhaps when the seared skin of my thighs has healed over and I’m able to sit and have a proper conversation.

(Just kidding, of course. I’m much too anal to read a news item like that and not be the first person to hop online and dutifully follow the instructions. It’s an affliction, really.)

The goose is greedy*

I'm conducting an experiment: Will the prospect of earning a few extra dollars a month be enough incentive to keep me writing here, on the interweb?

"Pshaw! Don't tell me you're in this for the MONEY?"

Well, no, of course not. It's just that I'm lazy, you see. And I live in New York City, where there are so many other ways to spend one's time than playing on, and writing for, the interweb. And many of those things require the distressing handing over of many, many dollars. Without some sort of incentive here, I'm worried that the fresh enamoration engendered by my sassy new logo and nifty TypePad tools will soon fizzle, as I seek out other ways to spend my time and other ways in which to earn those dollars -- like working more, or teaching dance lessons, or running off to join a burlesque cabaret.

Speaking of random, I have to say: Do you not LOVE the redesign of Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com? So pretty. I visited them just now to look up "engendered," to make sure I was using it right, and a synonym for "dim," which I typed first instead of "fizzle," but which I knew ought to change because a "dimming" of "enamoration" just didn't seem right to me. Right? But yes, I could spend hours just clicking back and forth through those easy-to-reach dictionary/thesaurus/encycopedia tabs. Swoon.

And the encyclopedia tab! "Not much use for that," you may be thinking. "Looking up the meaning of a word or searching for a tastier synonym is one thing, but looking up, what, every use of that word known to man?" Not quite. The encyclopedia, you see, offers great juicy spasms of randomness. For instance, an encyclopedic look-up of "fizzle" yielded this amazing morsel: Doggy Fizzle Televizzle. (!!!) Do you know what this is? I am completely out of it, so my guess was that it was a children's show, most likely featuring rotund, primary-colored creatures with squeaky voices and scary I'm-high-on-E eyes who did a lot of bouncing. But no. If only I weren't lacking in the all-important MTV gene (whose first cousins once removed include the VH1 gene and the BET gene), I would have been signaled by the root, "izzle," that this was an extension of the "fo' shizzle my nizzle" ... thing. And from that I might have deduced that Doggy Fizzle Televizzle was not, in fact, a children's show, but an all-Snoop-Dogg-all-the-time show.

But wait! The wondrousnous does not end there. After this discovery I of course had to know, once and for all, what in god's name "fo' shizzle" really means, and so I turned to the Urban Dictionary, whose first explanation was this:

"fo shizzle ma nizzle" is a bastardization of "fo' sheezy mah neezy" which is a bastardization of "for sure mah nigga" which is a bastdardization of "I concur with you whole heartedly my African american brother"

(See there how I also got it wrong the first time? I said "my nizzle," when really the cool kids know it's "ma nizzle." There I go betraying my East-West-Coast-sushi-eating-latte-sipping half-whiteness.)

The Urban Dictionary being a free-for-all in its own right, "fo' shizzle"  is also explained to be, among many other things, an antiseptic-looking Vietnamese noodle house (is there any other kind?) and a term originating in medieval England whose meaning was "Alas! An advasary has come upon us! To the catupults!"

In a perfect world, the Urban Dictionary would also be a tab on Dictionary.com/Thesaurus.com. I am more than willing to help broker this deal. For my cut of the proceeds, of course.

* Thank you Marc Bell, "Shrimpy and Paul and Friends"