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I was going to do a post on the correlation between fortune cookies and an unexpected boost in self-esteem and joie de vivre, but it’s much too complicated to get into here, so we’ll just use this fortune cookie bullet icon while I catch up on posting other stuff:

I didn’t get around to mentioning this: Yesterday was t he birthday of RennyBA, our blogging friend in Norway. Stop by and wish him a belated HBD!

I also meant to mention this on Thursday: I got back the results of my followup CT scan, the first one since my surgery in March:

Welcome to No-Tumorville — Population: ME! Woo-hoo!

That was what the doctor had expected, given the nature of neuroendocrine tumors, but it was nice to confirm that I’m still cancer-free. He said we’ll test about twice a year until about 2 years after the surgery, and after that I can be considered to be in the clear.

A few weeks ago, I did the first of what I’ve been meaning to do a lot of: Take pictures of one of my Patrick O’Brian books and post them on Flickr. I started with “The Wine-Dark Sea” (#16 out of 20), and posted it to a couple of book groups.

Since then, other people who are fans of the author and the series posted comments on my picture, as well as pictures of their own. Now, one of those people has started a Patrick O’Brian Flickr group, and it’s grown to become a wonderful gathering place for us O’Brian fans. There are not just pictures of books, some also some screen-captures of a TV interview with O’Brian, and dozens of photos of the ship used as the HMS Surprise in the Master and Commander movie.

This is just another example of communities are still forming on the Internet, even of non-computer-related subjects, and how Flickr can be used for things other than just pictures.

Go figure.

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Okay, that’s it for this weekend; the magical properties of Chinese desert novelties, or rather of the anticipation of said novelties, will wait for another day.

Or not.

Okay, so I haven’t posted, so instead of telling you what I’ve been doing, I’m showing you. It should be self-explanatory, but just in case it isn’t, I’ll write more at another time — plus I wrote brief descriptions under the pictures on Flickr, if you just need to know more …
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The local TV stations said it didn’t hit 100 today, but I’ve been a Texan all my life so I know better, so here comes the sun:

The Spook (who now has his own category here, you may have noticed) reports that he just finished reading Mark Twain’s Roughing It. I read it in high school, and of course, being Mark Twain, it was great. I especially remember a great little passage about a camel eating Twain’s overcoat and a manuscript it contained.

I recommended to Spook that he look up and read Twain’s 1601 — but to you, my other readers, I would advise caution, since this story was not published during the author’s lifetime, and is for mature audiences only …

Still, though, it’s highly enjoyable, so read it if you dare.

(You’ll need to look it up yourself on Project Gutenberg, because I’m pressed for time, but it will be well worth the effort …)

There was a great line on tonight’s Invader Zim: “Prepare your bladder for imminent release!”

The episode was “Room with a Moose”‘; click here to see it for yourself.

Also: The second episode was “Hamstergeddon”, which featured the line, “The weiner tempts you!”

I just now heard this: Billy Preston has died. He was one of those artists that I wasn’t crazy about at the time, but now I like hearing his music for the nostalgia factor …

I uploaded some old pictures (from last November and October) to Flickr tonight, for no good reason, except that I’ve neglected to UL them before … so click on my Flickr box in the upper right to check them out …

… so let’s do this thing:

First, the important thing: I’ve got a doctor’s note saying I shouldn’t go to work tomorrow — woo-hoo! With both Big Bosses out of town, it couldn’t happen at a better time, and the official note keeps the pencil-pushers in the High Holy Corporate Office happy.

Of course, tomorrow is also Main Computer Guy’s day off, so if any of my esteemed colleagues have a problem, say, starting Excel without me having created a shortcut on their desktop (true story! that’s actually happened!), they’re just S.O.L. until one of us gets back.

Another thing that makes the timing fortuitous is that I got the latest issue of Wired today — woo-double-hoo!

I’ll go into details later, but here’s one of the words from Jargon Watch: “Boot Mail”, which is military slang for a message that, due to incompatible technology, has to be loaded onto a disk and trotted to the intended receiver.

Nice thought, but it’s really just a variation of “Sneaker-Net”, which I first ran across about ten years ago in the same column.

(And in case you’re not familiar, sneaker-net is the act of networking computers by running disks back and forth between them.)

I’m a bit disappointed in Wired for not catching the near-duplication, but I guess they’ve got a lot of things to keep up with.

Anyway: It’s good to have a new Wired to help you through a period of recuperation.

And speaking of me being sick: I’ve mentioned before that my doctor is great at ongoing good-health maintenance, but my results in getting him to fix my occasional problems have not been so great.

But today, miracle of miracles, he gave me antibiotics! And Prednisone — Bonus! He made a special exception since I’ve basically been sick for a month.

So anyway, the diagnosis: Bronchitis, and possibly pneumonia, depending on what the x-rays say later this week.

Yeah, yeah, been there, had that.

Anyway, it’s an excuse to sleep all day and order pizza.

And as a fringe benefit, maybe soon I won’t feel like hammered catfood.

A quick recap for those just joining us: My adopted family is Irish, but as far as I know none of my cousins has anywhere near my interest in Celtic history. I guess that not knowing my true ancestry, having that huge gap in my knowledge, makes me even more curious about Old World heritage.

My annual activities started as an observation of St. Patrick’s Day, then, in the past decade I started ramping up my participation, with the purchase of Irish music, coffe-table photo books of Ireland, scenic calendars, tickets to the Irish festival, and, most relevant to this post, a book of Irish folk and fairy tales.

Oh, and all sorts of shamrock-shaped beads and stickers.

But back to the books for a moment:

Well, okay, not back to the books yet, there’s something else first:

Something happened this past summer that puts my annual months-long celebration of all things Celtic: I got my DNA tested, and the strongest matches in the DNA database point toward Iceland.

Iceland! So now, instead of going all out for a culture that’s not really mine, I have my first true indication of where I actually come from!

Ever since finding out my background, I’ve been wondering if I would still feel like ushering in Spring with my activities.

And as it turns out, I do feel like it.

I’m still getting excited about the Irish Festival in early March, and I’m still listening to my Irish and Celtic CD’s.

This year, I’m just blending a new flavor into the mix, and I’m doing so in part by ordering these books off Ebay:

The first one is a book of Icelandic sagas, which, according to Wikipedia, “are prose histories describing mostly events that took place in Iceland during the Age of Settlement. They are written in Old Norse in Iceland during the 12th to 15th centuries and mostly during the centre of that epoch.”

At lunch the past couple of days I’ve been reading Egil’s Saga, which is pretty tedious. I’ve read at least 18 chapters, and still haven’t run across Egil. There’s just been a lot of family history (it’s almost as tiring as that “Begat” chapter in Matthew), and Norwegian nobility, and the tracing of King Harald’s conquest of Norway — there’s only been one mention of Iceland so far, and that was just in passing.

A note about King Harald: He swore to not cut his hair until he conquered all of Norway, thus earning him the nickname Harald Tanglehair.

After becoming king of the whole country, he made his long-overdue trip to the barber shop, after which his nicknamed to Harald Prissy-Pants, or something equally reflective of his newfound fastidiousness.

ANYWAY: The story is finally starting to get interesting, with one character’s step-cousins turning King Harald against him, in retaliation for getting stiffed on an inheritance years earlier.

But the important thing is that I’m learning some of the ancient back-story of new-found Motherland.

The other book is sort of a history-and-travel guide, and I haven’t read much of it yet, but it has a lot of good information in it too.

And best of all, springtime can remain my Old World holiday season, even now that it turns out that I’m not really Irish.

Abucn of blogs have recently been mentioning the upcoming Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19), but hey — I’ve been there, done that, got the eye patch. Two years ago, on my old blog, I did 19 whole days of pirate posts, leading up to the day … so yeah, pardon me for not getting too worked up when everybody else just tossing up a link, plus maybe an occasional “scurvy bilge rat” or “walk the plank, matey”.

Want to really get into the spirit of the day? Then check out my pirate tribute from 2003, starting with the 19th and scrolling down to the 1st.

I get a free subscription to eWEEK at work — because I’m a TECHNOLOGY PROFESSIONAL! Ha! — and while most of it is pretty dry technology industry news, I always make it a point to check out the last page, the “memo” from Spencer Katt. There are usually two or three interesting technology bits, but the downside is that it’s written in a pretentious, trying-way-to-hard-to-be-whimsical style, that it’s all but incomprehensible.

For starters, he constantly refers to himself in the third person — which is usually the kiss of death right there — and he takes it to ridiculous lengths: In one installment alone, he referred to himself as Spence, The Katt, the Maven of Murmur, The Mouser, and the Lynx.

Yeah, yeah, we get it, your name is Katt. ENOUGH ALREADY.

But even if you find his tortured prose completely unreadable, there’s one thing that makes it worth the visit: At the top of each page is a picture of a bar drink sitting on a cocktail napkin, and on the napkin are scribbled two URL’s for you to check out.

The result is quite a treasure trove of neat links; I open each issue like a new Crackerjack box, wondering what cool toy I’m going to find inside this time.

Here are what were in the most recent issues:

Conan O’Brien vs. Bear. Who will win?!

Droogol, a search engine for alcoholic beverages.

They were originally called Droogle, but the lawyers at Google decided to murder the fun, as lawyers tend to do.

“Don’t be evil”? Yeah, right.

Tetris Shelving.

JackPC: This is cool: A “computer in-the-wall” that replaces a standard Ethernet jack plate with multiple connections, including audio, USB, and — get this — digital video (!).

Bumvertising.

MentalHygiene.com, which I noticed has a nifty tutorial on making a wall-sized mosaic out of Post-It Notes; he has even posted examples of other people’s work.

Strider HoneyMonkey: Sounds like a James Bond villain, as written by Tolkien …

VistaWindowCo.com. Not to be confused with Windows Vista.

But I’m sure a lot of people will.

And then here will come the lawyers.

Ever wonder what happens to all those knives (and leather-working tools, and corkscrews) confiscated at airports these days? Our benevolent government overseers sell your former property on Ebay, that’s what, and you can see what’s currently up for grabs here.

I haven’t been able to do a proper post tonight because I’ve been busy squeezing under a deadline. The drop-dead date for turning in revised manuscripts for the 100 Bloggers, 100 Voices project is tomorrow, and as is my style, I used almost every spare day to mull over what I was going to say, and in the past 24 hours I’ve knocked out a couple of thousand words, then pared down almost half of those.

Because let’s face it, if you can’t slam down several hundred words at the drop of a nickel, then journal-style blogging is going to be very tough going.

For me, writing a rough draft of 400 words is nothing — it’s like a couple of games of pinball. 1000 words isn’t that much tougher.

The quality aspects are another matter entirely, but I find that the more raw material I have to work with, the better chance I have of finding good stuff in it.

Anyway, now that this is out of the way, I can get back to other projects, like bringing you more long, rambling posts with cool bullet points, scanning in more stuff for Flickr, and, perhaps most importantly, following up on a certain project that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago …

The Tolkien Society is holding Tolkien 2005 this weekend, starting today.

2005 is the fiftieth anniversary of the complete publication of The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. The first two volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers) were published in 1954, while the third, The Return of the King, was published on October 20th 1955. To celebrate this anniversary the Tolkien Society is holding a conference and convention in August 2005. It is taking place at Aston University, Birmingham, England from 11 to 15 August 2005. [...] We are creating a programme with as broad an interest range as possible. From serious academic streams to ones relating to the recent films, from ecological to mythological, from the serious to the light-hearted – and that’s just during the day… In the evening there will be entertainments. Take a look at the Programme page for further information and for details of how you can present a paper or otherwise get involved.

We are arranging for a wide variety of guests to be in attendance. Tolkien 2005 isn’t just a film-fan event, so our guests include notable Tolkien scholars and experts. For up to date information please visit our Guests page.

That’s right, the event focuses on scholars — highly educated men and women who have dedicated their lives to the study of imaginary humanoid races.

Also, note that they scheduled this erudite shindig to avoid conflicting with the huge comic book convention in Glasgow last weekend.

I bet they still make fun of the guys who translated the Bible into Klingon.

Seriously, though: I don’t want to sound like I’m making fun of this whole process — well, not much, anyway — because I’ve read the Lord of the Rings trilogy several times over the past 25 years, and when the movies came out it was the first time in my life that I’ve ever been ahead of any given curve.

But five days of seminars and dissertations just seems to me to be sucking the life out of what was a very beautiful work.

But if they threw in activities like mead drinking and pub dancing and bawdy folk-singing, as well as a well-placed swordfight or two — that sounds like a conference that old man Tolkien could get behind.

In summary: Fewer English professors, more English soccer hooligans.

The gauntlet has been thrown! The Presurfer has challenged me to the latest “meme” that’s been going around, the Literary Meme. I usually don’t do these because so many are incredibly dumb, but this one has promise:

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?
I’m assuming you mean that I’m one of the volunteers who dedicate themselves to memorizing books and passing them on to future generations, since dead tree editions are banned and being destroyed. (I never read the book, having always lacked the ability to get into Bradbury, but I saw part of the movie on TV when I was in high school. Ironic, huh? Or whatever the correct word is for what I’m going for here, the concept of relying on a TV broadcast of a book-burning movie to answer a question in a quiz that obviously treasures reading as a pastime — yeah, that one’s plumb dragging the ground with dramatic tension and paradox.)

SO ANYWAY: What book would I “be”, hmm … ? How about … Treasure Island! Ha! I bet the volunteers get into fistfights, even duels to the death, over gems like that one. The people coming late to the party probably get told, “Sorry, Turtleboy, all the good ones are taken … you get to be some Robert Ludlum piece of crap!”

The Hobbit or Robinson Crusoe would also be acceptable, as would some nice H.G. Wells.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Is “a crush on” the same as “the hots for”? If so, then how about Ayla from Clan of the Cave Bear?

NO BUT SERIOUSLY: Eowyn from the Lord of the Rings books. I was sweet on her and her formidable strength of character long before she was played by the seriously slobber-worthy Miranda Otto.

What are you currently reading?
Just magazines. Oh, and a downloaded Creative Commons Snow Crash ripoff piece of crap called Accelerando.

I’ll try to find the link for y’all soon …

The last book you bought is:
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne. At Half-Price Books, just last Sunday. Sure, I’ve got the text version on CD-ROM, along with about 700 other classics, but it’s too hard to read something like that on the computer. Sometimes ya just gotta have real to get away from the bits for a while …

The last book you read is:
Probably it was half of the ninth book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin (”Master and Commander”) series. I need to get back to the whole 20-book series one of these days, but I just had to take a break in about April of last year because I wasn’t getting anything else done.

People, they are JUST. THAT. GOOD.

Don’t tell me “Oh, I wouldn’t be interested in books about sailing.” My answer to that: Just shut up and read it. Read the first one — it’ll be a piece of cake if you’ve seen the Russell Crowe movie — and just try to tell me you’re not hooked.

Five books you would take to a desert island:
Trick question. The books I would take would be:

1) An encyclopedia of local edible plants.
2) A book on surviving on a desert island.
3) A different book on survinging on a desert island.
4) See #3.
5) See #4.

My first impulse, of course, is to pick books I would want to read and re-read for a long time, but once I got there I’d feel pretty freakin’ stupid with nothing to eat but the complete works of Mark Twain.

Screw reading. If can just keep myself fed and alive in a situation like that, I’ll find enough things on the island to keep my mind occupied.

But if the question is: What books what you take if you were going away for an indefinite period of time with zero input from the outside world but plenty of time to read, that’s totally different. Hmm … How about:

1) Can I get the O’Brian series in one volume?
2) Ditto the complete works of Twain?
3) Yeah, complete works all around: Verne!
4) Wells!
5) Stevenson!

Who are you going to pass this stick to?
To Yay Kim, of course, and to The Wife and The Spook, if they’ll just write them up and give them to me to post.

And I should point out: Most people that do this meme don’t rattle as much as I do in the course of the writing, so it’s not as much work as I make it look like.