I'm back from Apollocon in Houston. It was great fun, and I was very glad to see starcat_jewel again - oh, fuck, I can never remember how to make those darn LJ-person links. Too tired to look it up, I'll fix it later. Yesterday I spent about 13 hours in airports and on planes (I got to Houston airport at 12:10 Sunday and got home at 1:10 this morning), and today, I sleep. Tomorrow, work will be chaos. More later.

George Carlin. See you in the next life, man. I hope.

Dammit, people I liked and admired when I was young are dying. They need to stop all this dying business, right now.

I'm mainlining all of John Moore's books. I was just going to re-read part of one while eating lunch, but they're like potato chips; I can't stop. Fortunately, reading is calorie-free.

I don't understand people who can listen to music and sit still. This is why I don't listen to music very often at work! I find myself bouncing in my seat, looking ridiculous. Just one more thing to love about working from home!

For the few Neil Gaiman fans who didn't know it, they're making a movie of Coraline.

A friend of mine said (and I quote with permission), "I saw a clip at the licensing show and it looks all kinds of scary. So not a kid's movie, yet the studio sees it as a big holiday thing. The scene they showed us was the little girl being held down as they try to pluck out her eyes and take her soul then sew on buttons. The clip ends and they say "We think this will be THE holiday children's movie!" and I thought "yeah, children like I was, not "normal" kids"."

Older kids, maybe, but the under-12 group will be traumatized. Nightmares for months. They'll be having fits long before they get to the happy ending. Hell, that story scared ME. The studios are nuts. Clearly none of them ever read anything they make into movies.

However, I can't wait! It may not be for little kids, but it's definitely for me! My favorite Gaiman story. (Except Sandman, which was a graphic novel, so that's different.)

So my doctor gave me a script for an albuterol inhaler.

I said, "I don't have asthma."
He said, "You might have exercise-induced asthma."
I said, "I think I'm just fat and out of shape."
He said, "You're not THAT fat. You should be able to walk up a flight of stairs and still be able to talk."
Then he asked if I'd ever had trouble breathing before. I assumed that he meant, before I got fat.

I said, "Yes, actually, all my life I've had trouble breathing with exertion, even when I was dancing. I was a skinny kid, but I still couldn't breathe. And, also, stress would sometimes cause me to have a horrible coughing gasping fit. It's embarrassing. My mom smoked a couple packs a day. It was the 70s; apparently no one thought that cigarette smoke could give a kid breathing problems."

He said, "Uh-huh. Try the albuterol. If it doesn't do anything for you, no harm done."

I put it off for four days, because I can't be bothered with such little things. This morning I decided, what the hell, and took a couple puffs off the inhaler. Nothing seemed to happen. I shrugged and left it on the counter.

Now I'm at work. I just walked to the cafeteria and back, including a long flight of stairs that usually leaves me praying no one will try to talk to me. I was still a little out of breath (still fat, after all), but hey. I could talk. I can take a really deep breath and my chest doesn't seize up.

I seem to have this strange new superpower. I'll call it "breathing". It's pretty nifty.

I just saw a commercial that featured a plump young woman in a bikini. She was pretty. She was not hawking diet products. (I have no idea what the silly commercial was for.) She had plump arms and a round face and a soft tummy, and big boobs that looked like real big breasts - you know, responding to gravity. She was cute. She wasn't in the background; she spoke and the slender young woman sitting beside her did not. And the guy was talking to her. It was as if such a thing as a plump woman were ... normal. I had to rewind and watch it again. Yup, little tummy rolls, right there on camera.

Egad. Could it be the world is changing, a tiny little bit?

My reliable local cable company got eaten by Comcast, and I am not happy about it. I'd take my business elsewhere, but there's no place else I can get cable Internet - certainly no place that would be cheaper - and living without the Discovery Channel is not acceptable.

While I'm on the subject of giant soulless corporations that suck, Verizon is a lying bastard. Switching to their long-distance service doubled my phone bill. Alas, when I tried to switch back to the little company I'd had before, they were gone, leaving no trace, probably eaten by Verizon. Or a grue. So I switched to Working Assets. At least part of my money will do somebody some good.

Dexter doesn't start up again until September. I think I'll cancel Showtime until then. That'll show 'em!

NASA JPL's Mars Phoenix made a successful landing on Mars today! It will, among other tasks, look for ice and possible signs of life.

Robert Asprin, author of, among many other works, the Myth Adventures series, passed away unexpectedly yesterday. Link to the news on SFWA.org is here.

I'm so shocked and sad. He was a talented writer and a great guy, one of my favorite authors.

Good-bye, Bob.

When I got home from Virginia yesterday evening, I looked out my back door, checking for packages, and found three gorgeous red-violet irises in full bloom in the mucky gutter runoff beside my patio. This is the first year they've bloomed; I didn't even know they were there. I love irises!

In a recent paper submitted to a technical publication, the name of CERN's Large Hadron Collider was misspelled as Large Hardon Collider.

While I'm sure they're very proud, we decided to correct the mistake before publication.

And that is why I will never be replaced with an automatic spellcheck!

I'm watching a Travel Channel program that follows an native Amazonian tribal family. It opened with the black warning screen that said "This program contains indigenous nudity and mature content and may not be suitable for young children."

I love that. From now I shall describe my own household that way. "House contains indigenous nudity and mature content; may not be suitable for young children."

'cause gosh knows it's true. Why, I'm indigenously nude right now. Mostly.

Obama-ites talk about how great he is, and justifiably so IMHO, and you know, it hasn't hurt his campaign that he's attractive and tall. Didn't someone do a study that showed the tallest candidate always wins? But never mind him for a moment; let me say something about his wife Michelle.

It hasn't hurt his campaign that his wife is beautiful, either. Seriously. She's hot, she's tall, and she dresses well (without hiding, in appropriate situations, the asset that is her legs). That's the first impression, and it's a good one. Better yet, when she talks, we aren't disappointed: she's sophisticated, poised, intelligent, educated, funny, charming, and admirably adept at handling awkward situations and smoothly turning irrelevant questions back onto topic. The topic being, of course, why her husband is the best choice for PotUS we could possibly make.

And I believe she believes it. I don't think she's just saying what she's supposed to. I think she believes in him, loves him, admires him, and is not above teasing him about his ears.

I remember an interview with them, back before the campaign began, back when he was still saying he wouldn't run. I remember being impressed by both of them, and wishing he would run. What stands out in my memory was Michelle's answer to an awkward question, something about whether Barack was the kind of man with a roving eye, another politician who would someday be confessing to and apologizing for some juicy indiscretion. Michelle responded, with calm confidence and not a hint of defensiveness, that, and I believe I quote her correctly, "Barack's just not that guy. He has more important things to do." How refreshing.

I say, Michelle Obama is the new Jackie O. I'd vote for him just to get her.

Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts?

There's a segment on CNN now, an interview with a woman who lives in a gated community in Nevada with ~$800,000 houses. This lady says the house next to hers has been foreclosed on, and no one ever moved in to the house on the other side. The community is like a "ghost town", its residents being foreclosed on and forced to move out of their huge near-million-dollar houses. With no one to pay the association fees, they can't hire gardeners and caretakers, so the remaining residents are having to take care of all the empty houses and yards, as well as their own.

Okay. I can see how it would be disturbing, being in this situation. I can see being ticked off about having to care for a bunch of empty residences, lest their deterioration bring down the property values of the whole community and thus your own house.

But you still have your house. You're one of the lucky ones, you haven't been foreclosed on. When this housing collapse turns back around - and it will, eventually - you'll still have a near-million-dollar house, in a gated community, where people will slowly start to move back in and take care of their own huge expensive houses. So you have to work more now, doing the work that you can no longer afford to hire someone to do for you. If that's the worst thing that happens to you because of this whole mortgage/housing crisis? You are still lucky.

I can barely afford to buy a dump, and I'm one of the lucky ones, these days, too; I have a stable job with an income I can live on. I'm probably never going to be able to afford a $800,000 house in a gated community, even if I wanted one, no matter what the housing market ever does. So if I have no sympathy for you, imagine how badly someone who just got forced out of their modest middle-class home might want to just smack you.

The FreeCreditReport.com commercial with the guys in the fish restaurant makes me want to sing along with it whenever it comes on. The horror. And I can't get that damn Subway "5-dollar-foot-long" thing out of my head. It isn't making me want a sub sandwich, but it does make me run into the den to watch every time I hear it.

"Anyhoo" for "anyhow".

Why this? Where and how (hoo?) did this start? Did you ever hear someone take a really deep breath and say "aaanyhooooo" on the exhale, like what they just said exhausted them? I don't get it.

So. If you've paid off those credit cards and you think you've got too many of them, closing them used to be the thing to do. Apparently, not anymore. I closed all but two of my credit accounts, having paid off all the others, and now my credit score is lower because my "credit history isn't long enough". I've had credit for 24 years, and now it apparently looks like I've only been managing credit for a few years? Well, fuck.

With housing prices in the dumpster, it ought to be a perfect time to buy a house. Except thanks to the whole sub-prime mortgage clusterfuck that got us into this mess, it's harder to get a mortgage. Honestly. I'm paying over $1000 a month in rent, and I've been paying it on time for years. And my car is paid off, which was $300 a month. Shouldn't that alone prove that I can handle a $1200 a month mortgage on a damn little 2-bedroom bungalow in the sticks? Jesus.

Maybe it's a sign, then. I'm sick of living in Jersey, maybe I shouldn't be buying a house here. Maybe I should be looking for a job somewhere else. Maybe something great is about to happen, and if I buy a house, I won't be able to take advantage of it. Maybe things happen for a reason.

Sure. And maybe if I clap my hands Tinkerbell will fly out of my butt and give me next week's winning lottery numbers.

Have you seen that Vehix commercial where she says "you're literally driving in the car"? It drives me mad. (Not literally.) I mute the tv while that commercial is on to keep myself from snarling and gnashing my teeth. (Literally.)

Woman, you are VIRTUALLY driving in the car. If there's no car under your ass, you are not literally driving the car.

Seriously.