rochelle.mazar.ca

Andrea, Erik….how I *love* you…..just got home after a great time at the Bookshelf. What more can I say?

Melissa, Pete, yes, I love you too. 🙂

Oh, this is quite disturbing…Re-Versed Lyrics: they take popular songs and put ‘Christian’ lyrics to them. My favourites:
All-Star becomes God’s Star; We’re the Monkees becomes We’re Not Monkeys, which even just the title kills me; Mombo #5 becomes Praise #5; and, my very personal favourite is here: sing this to the tune of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious:

Reformation Polka
When I was just ein junger Mann I studied canon law;
While Erfurt was a challenge, it was just to please my Pa.
Then came the storm, the lightning struck, I called upon Saint Anne,
I shaved my head, I took my vows, an Augustinian!� Oh, –

-Chorus:

Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation –
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let’s start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

When Tetzel came near Wittenberg, St. Peter’s profits soared,
I wrote a little notice for the All Saints’ Bull’tin board:
“You cannot purchase merits, for we’re justified by grace!
Here’s 95 more reasons, Brother Tetzel, in your face!” Oh-

-Chorus:

Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation –
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let’s start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

They loved my tracts, adored my wit, all were exempleror;
The Pope, however, hauled me up before the Emperor.
“Are these your books?� Do you recant?” King Charles did demand,
“I will not change my Diet, Sir, God help me here I stand!” Oh-

-Chorus:

Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation –
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let’s start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

Duke Frederick took the Wise approach, responding to my words,
By knighting “George” as hostage in the Kingdom of the Birds.
Use Brother Martin’s model if the languages you seek,
Stay locked inside a castle with your Hebrew and your Greek!� Oh-

-Chorus:

Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation –
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let’s start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

Let’s raise our steins and Concord Books while gathered in this place,
And spread the word that ‘catholic’ is spelled with lower case;
The Word remains unfettered when the Spirit gets his chance,
So come on, Katy, drop your lute, and join us in our dance!� Oh-

-Chorus:

Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation –
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let’s start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

Oh yeah….

I’m not entirely certain what this has to do with my blog per se, but I’m quite pleased and flattered nonetheless.

WOOOOOO! Looks like I’ve convinced Laurie to get a character at Achieve! Wonderful! Now we can actually moo productively for a change….

Well, I don’t think it could get any hotter. I’m melting here. My sister and I went to the mall and found funeral outfits. (Funeral is on Wednesday.) We had a good time in spite of our reason for being there. I just got out of the workstudy meeting on achieve, and Laurie stumbled on! Hooray! How I miss her….I know I owe her a trip out there, and I’d better get on it…Oh, funeral. It’s my Uncle Juris. He’s not really my uncle. Actually, he’s my grandmother’s cousin, on my mother’s side. But really, really really, is was the closest thing I ever really had to a grandfather. I’m glad though that while he’s been suffering for years because of the affects of the numerous strokes he’s had (suffering, along with his wife, my aunt Ruby), in the end he was diagnosed with cancer, far too much for them to do anything about, and he died quickly after that. They had just taken a trip out east and had a lovely time…when they got back home, Uncle Juris just felt terribly tired.

I’m not sure what to say about belief these days…I’m suspicious of atheists now, where I used to be a vehement one. (Who am I to say what is and what isn’t?) And I don’t believe most of what’s said about god. I don’t particularly believe in an afterlife, though, I recognize my profound inability to have a well-informed opinion on the matter. But I can hope….that perhaps there’s a moment, between life and death, a moment of profound well-being, that stretches out and seems to last forever…and that’s where I like to imagine my uncle juris is.

Do I need this? Of course I do.

Bah, now I’m getting tired again…and cranky. Someone is testing my tutorial and just commenting that I should use more animated gifs or quicktime movies instead of standard gifs, and that I should have sounds (which are currently disabled because of the upgrade), and just pointed out typos in my text. Gaaaaaaaaaah…..

ThatFaT GiRL is pretty serious….I mean, when they say hate, they aren’t kidding. Still, there are some interesting quotations….
“My dream is to walk on the street and not be noticed.”
–Jerry Poole, candidate for Dr. Mal Fobi’s $20,000 to $40,000 obesity surgery.
“Anxiety is worrying about getting your waist back after having twins.”
–Jane Seymour

Well. A friendly cat nipped in to ‘meowr’ at me to go out (I should have put her out before I went to bed) and now I can’t fall asleep again. Funny thing about this house. And Top Gun is on. Can Tom Cruise ever ‘act’ as anyone other than this Top Gun guy?

I went to see a fabulously silly movie that I absolutely adored…and on the way back home the sun was setting, and there was a thick fog the the ground, with that thick, sweetish smell that comes with it…and I remembered how much I love southern Ontario, how it can go from absolutely urban to nothing but rolling countryside in a matter of minutes. So there we were, driving through the in-between places between Kitchener and Guelph, with the fog in our noses, singing along to the music in the car, windows wide open, and I felt the way I’m supposed to feel at moments like that, so happy, so overwhelmingly happy, that the only thing I can compare it to is complete dispair in its totalizing impact. There was a moment there that I thought I was crying. I’m not sure I wasn’t. And with nothing but happiness. And why? Because I’m alive, because I have a future, because good things happen, and they even happen to me. Do you ever turn around and realize that you are a gift to yourself?

Thanks to my darling blue, a link we can all enjoy:FaT GiRL, for fat dykes and those who want them! (There’s anyone out there who doesn’t?!)

Andand…
Did I mention that I’m in Guelph?

And…
I’m crushed to tell you that I went downstairs to watch star trek this afternoon at 4pm (the appointed time) and no star trek was there to be found. Then I realized that today is Saturday.

But, aside from that galling disappointment, I managed to produce a remarkable amount of work today. I finished my superfabulous encore 3.0.1 GUI tutorial (Yes, do come see!) which takes the user step but url-illustrated step through how to function within the GUI. Jan, you need me. You really, really need me.

Once I finished it, I realized that I actually needed TWO such tutorials…a ‘new character’ one, and a guest one. Why, you ask? Well….we have guests who come on, often on their own, who need something to look at….but we also have new characters who don’t really know how to manage with the GUI. I mean, they clearly know some of the stuff, but I went through and dissected the critical buttons in the button bar as well. So I made two of them. It’s always easier to make the second.

After that, I had to deal with the fact that these HUGE verbed THINGS needed to place to sit. So I build a wing of tutorial stuff. A main room, a guest tutorial, and a new character tutorial. (Is there a better word for them? Other than 1) tutorials, and 2) characters?

And THEN….oh yes, we’re not done yet….

Well, I wanted a basic commands room. How do you easily explain some of the very basic commands in an interesting and engaging way? Not like I came up with an answer. But I did come up with an annoying room. I created an object named Rochelle. Which was my first mistake. Then I built a room filled with noises like this:

Rochelle lets out a loud yell, “Aaaaaaaaargh!!!!” (To do this, type ‘arg’)
Rochelle cringes. (To cringe, type ‘cringe’)
Rochelle tickles you relentlessly! (To tickle her back, type ‘tickle rochelle’)
Rochelle points at you. (To point back at her, type ‘point rochelle’)
Rochelle blushes. (To blush, type ‘blush’)
Rochelle shakes your hand and greets you warmly. (To do this, type ‘hsh rochelle’)
Rochelle nods. (To nod, type ‘nod’, or ‘nod rochelle’ to nod at her.)

Will people manage to not type the single quotation marks? Who knows. We’ll see. Biggest mistake was making the emotive character ME, because shortly everyone will hate me.

And it’s thundering. And you know how I feel about thunder.

Anyone need a a little repetition?
would just like to point out that I have now started THREE blog entries in a row with the phrase “I would just like to point out that.”

@edit here:learn any any any
I would just like to take the time to point out that I wrote a singularly kickass verb today, with the perennial help of salmon and Brin. It’s a tutorial verb that flashes urls at you. I’m so thrilled with it. It’s based on the prop functionality I used for the tour verb….so that the user uses the same verb over and over, and gets different results. And now I get each user to add a prop to the object, and that prop holds their own sequence, so that multiple users can use the verb at once. 🙂 Yay! Part one just dissects the GUI and tells newbies how to use it. I think the next one will be basic commands….and eventually I’ll do building and a teacher’s tutorial. I’m thrilled it worked in spite of the upgrade…

Webbies
I would just like to take this time to point out that blogger is a fabulous service. Perhaps it shouldn’t be listed under ‘personal’ site for the webby awards at all. It’s not a personal site, it’s a public service that helps us to create personal sites. And some of us use it to create things that aren’t even personal; I’m using to keep track of my comps notes, and my colleagues and I are using it to keep track of professional ideas. Ev and his crew came up with a truly great idea. I wish they had a Webby sitting on their desk. Of course, we could each sent them our own version of a webby, but I don’t think Ev has room on his desk for that.

Just got word from mom that my Uncle Juris isn’t doing so well…as in, he’s got terminal cancer and is in the hospital. Don’t really know how long he’s got…

So I guess I’m about to get pretty mobile.

Lies and platitudes about Art ; I post this attempting to make my sister giggle and nod knowingly at the same time.

Oh, man, very funny comments about that personality test onMetafilter. Kills me. Man….now, admittedly, I was starting to feel a little like a psych case today, but man, does seeing other people’s scores ever make me feel better. And I’m glad I’m not obsessive-compulsive. That just sounds like too much work.

How I love metafilter.

Actually working today; getting ready for a meeting tomorrow. I’m reading some really FUN stuff on medical history. All the good stuff. Medical history is such a great case in point for so many things that are going on in the early modern period…for me, it really helps to pinpoint some of the ‘class’ issues that are at work, and the gender issues as well. It isolates the relationship between the past and the present. I’ve had professors try to remind us that when you’re looking at this time period, you can’t assume you understand what you’re seeing. Because everything they say and do and think is so different from what we would imagine…and we have to be careful not to assume too much….looking at the history of medicine really makes that point so obvious.

First: the history of the body: they understand the body so differently. A sack of fluids, really. No concept of the circulation of blood until later in the period, a complicated sense of illness. There some push-pull between disease come from inside (imbalance) and outside (cosmic, smell, through the eyes of others, etc). The simple idea, a northern European phenomenon, that the body is KNOWN already, that all that makes it up was known by Galen and Hippocrates and Avicenna and there’s no really need to delve too deeply…delve into the BOOKS, delve into what they thought…as if knowledge is disintigrating, it’s an element of the endtimes, that their ‘modern’ brains can’t possibly work it out, and why try to reinvent the wheel, when better minds have already done so? That knowledge lies in the past, not in the present or the future…that knowledge lay in the world of these greats, and that it doesn’t exist in the world as they knew it….

Except that some people debated that. Slowly. But what’s been most interesting about the reading I’ve been doing is the way that historians are hestitant to say that it’s just a process away from medieval ideas….because it’s not. It’s kind of a flapping around, hitting all kinds of ideas and processes along the way, some of it more obviously ‘modern’ (experimentation, ‘discoveries’, questioning of the traditional texts) and some of it clearly ‘medieval’ (looking for omens, religious healing, alchemy, astrology, etc.). The history of medicine is the clearest example, really, of the rethinking of the whole concept of the early modern period. Aha. Yeah.

And I’m not doing my reading quite yet. Almost. I quit and did some prog work instead this afternoon. Terrible.

What’s your personality disorder? Not to shock anyone, but I’m histrionic and moderately dependent. I know, I know, it’s really unbelievable, but try it for yourself and see if it’s more accurate for you.

Wow….did you know that Julius Caesar keeps a weblog? Cool…those Romans were way farther ahead than we usually think…

Saturday night frolics:

Question: What did you do last night?

Brin says, “Had a coffee, went the the Riverboat and watched people bowl, then had another coffee and came home. :)”
blue says, “nuthin.”
blue says, “rented a documentary on breasts and then i went to bed around midnight.”
Jason says, “I worked until 7:30, then I had dinner with yuka at a tapas on baldwin, then walked about to get a video on queen, and watched it at home. It was O Brother where art thou.”

For the record: I went out for dinner and Hoegaarden at the red lion on jarvis with emma, and then we wandered around looking for coffee. And finally I came home at an ungodly hour and read metafilter until I collapsed. And here I was intending to do some good reading. Sheeesh.

Wicked flame on metafilter responding to a LOT of hot air explaining why a 12 year old who was raped by her father and doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand that she’s pregnant AND living in utter poverty in Mexico should be a good sport and carry the baby to term, even though her chances of survival are shockingly low. Break it down, man. Break it down.

Handcuff the teachers.
AUSTIN � It was a decision that cost him his job as a teacher, but Grady Roper says he has no regrets.

Mr. Roper was fired at Katherine Anne Porter School in the Hill Country town of Wimberley last fall after defending controversial artwork by some of his students.

The art in question was a 30-by-10-foot mural painted by his students in the main hallway of the charter high school. The colorful mural contained numerous images � but some parents and school board members objected to a 2-by-2-foot section that showed two men kissing.

The painting sparked several days of debate, including a unanimous vote of support for the mural by the school’s faculty. But teachers and students returned to class one Monday and found that the mural had been whitewashed over the weekend.

One more reason not to live in Texas.

Stockwell Day makes a fool of himself again. Day wouldn’t talk about it. He says he’s trying to teach his MPs discipline to keep such matters for internal discussion only. “That’s part of the maturity process for the Canadian Alliance that I’m trying to help them learn,” he said. Could he get any more patronizing?

Eggs fertilised without sperm
Theoretically, it also could mean that lesbian couples could give birth to a baby girl without the need for a father. Women do not carry the genetic information required to make a boy.

I knew everything would work out in my favour eventually….

A pic of Hildegarde. Priceless. Yes, this is me before my morning shower.

Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb
So much to do so much to see
So what’s wrong with taking the back streets
You’ll never know if you don’t go
You’ll never shine if you don’t glow
–Smash Mouth, All Star

A pic of the new Enterprise. Woohoooo! There can never be too much star trek, oh no. Will this new show suck, or not? I’ve heard pretty much nothing about it. Someone told me that it’s supposed to be before the first trek (what kind of costumes do they get then?), and that that guy from Quantum Leap will be in it. I guess we’ll see…

Oh, Stockwell Day…. “He can’t last much longer,” said Art Hanger. “Why he wants to postpone it, I don’t know.” Stockwell Day gets more demands to step down, and offers to take a ‘leave of absence’, and of course, offers up a personally selected interim leader. The 13 dissidents say no. Is it just from the elect? Stockwell Day says he has to maintain his mandate from the grassroots. (From Grassroots for Day? Red Deer MP Bob Mills says longtime party supporters are telling him they’re losing faith. “When you start hearing that from people who’ve been with you since 1987,” Mills said, “that’s a pretty terrifying message from the grassroots.” Ah, how I love it. Preston Manning must be popping those pepo bismol tablets while lying in the sun.