Oh, Kgaard? This is for you.

Click the picture above to read the rest of the comic strip. Yet another reason for nerds to love Wii! (Broken link fixed – my bad!)

Yeah. No surprise there.

84% GeekMingle2.com – Free Online Dating

Zee peeg, senor! Zee peeg!

This entry on CuteOverload made me remember a clever little ditty some camp friends and I made up, lo these many years ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you "This Little Piggy", in Latin:

::ahem::

Porcus agoricus

Porcus domesticus

Porcus carnivorous

Porcus deprivitus

Porcus incontinentus (get it? Get it? Went “wee wee wee all the way home”?)

And I wonder why I was voted "Miss Unpopularity" in high school. ::facepalm::

Geekily yours,

Book Stud

P.S. This is Latin in the Spanglish sense of the word.

P.P.S. Or, more accurately, about as Latin as Pig Latin is.

P.P.P.S. Ha ha ha ha! Pig Latin! ::wipes eyes:: Ooh, I just slay me.

Far from the madding crowds

Today was absolutely lovely – a day at the Met with LongLostKennedy, DesignStar, and Globetrotter (totally exploiting the fact that LongLostKennedy is currently teaching a class on Asian art, which is what we’d gone to see – instant tour guide!) and then coffee and pedicures, because cultcha goes down beautifully with caffeine and vanity, don’t you think?

I’m home tonight with a ton of extra work, but a part of me is just blissed-out to be getting a lot of alone time this weekend; as time goes by, I find that my triple-booked schedule has become more onerous than exciting, and that I look forward to time alone the way I used to look forward to nights out. I remember being vaguely peeved when older friends would try to explain this theory to me; “but people want to see you!” I’d think to myself. It seemed vaguely selfish, somehow.

I’m beginning to appreciate the merits of selfishness. Perhaps this makes me a Real Grownup ™. This is only one of the signs – the first came earlier this week when I had music on random, and the Rent soundtrack came on – music I used to listen to consumed with the glory and beauty and passion and pathos of it all – and found myself crying crossly at the speakers, “OH GET A JOB!!!!”

Perhaps I have skipped maturity and gone straight from immaturity to curmudgeondom…

Stroke Book Stud’s ego!

From gypsyecks – I love this! Make my hectic week less hecticer and tell me you once had a crush on me. It doesn’t have to be true, but it’s better if it is.

Crush this person!
Get your own ThisCrush.com CrushTag!

I think crushes are the best thing ever! I try to have three or four going at any given time. It’s fun doing the blush-n-stammer when you talk to someone; or just staring at her poster, not of course that I ever do that.

G’wan, make my day better, you know you wanna.

No, really, waaaay TMI.

So I’m at the doctor to get  Girl Stuff done.  New doctor swans into office, efficiently gloves up, orders me into stirrups, apologizes for making me wait.

"No problem," I say, "we’re not far from where I work."

"Ah," says doctor cheerfully, and lifts modesty sheet.  "Oh! Are you in publishing?"

For one blinding, surreal moment, I am struck dumb; what on earth, I wonder, could be specific to the ladybits of people in publishing such as to give away their career on first glance? Why has no one told me? And really, was ignorance bliss?

"What…" I croak, blushing fiercely. "How’d you know?"

She nods towards my pile o’ stuff, on top of which is my handbag, on top of which is the copy of Gogol’s DEAD SOULS through which I am finally working my way. "Only literature students and people in publishing read Russian novels," says she.

I have still not recovered.

Betty Crocker, I challenge thee to a duel. With SPOONS.

I am taking domestic goddess-dom to a somewhat uncomfortable extreme.

Due to the great holiday generosity of my boss, I am now the proud owner of a yogurt-maker.

After some illiteracy-based false starts, I have now made my own yogurt.

It is delicious.

Plans are in effect for the summer, when lovely things like fresh apricots and peaches and currants will be available. (I really should not be allowed to have hobbies, as they rapidly migrate into full-blown obsessions.)

Homemade YOGURT. Whatever is next? Churning my own butter?

Sheesh.

Nerds!

I’ve found myself embroiled, lately, in several who’s-nerdier arguments.

Weaponry has consisted of esoteric movie quoting, quipping in Latin, and knowledge of regrettable forms of math.

But now, we have the final, smackdown answer as to who’s nerdier:

Tai is the Queen. All hail Tai.

Grammar Nazi gets cross

People of the world, please take note of this special Public Service Announcement.

1. The following words are not interchangeable.

• Less/fewer
• Amount/number
• They’re/their/there
• Loath/loathe

They’re just not. I’m sorry.

       2.    "Their" is not the third person singular. Not even if you are attempting to indicate gender neutrality. Yes, "his/her" is awkward. It’s also right. Deal with it.

        3.    It’s not "aren’t I". It’s "amn’t I". (Unless you in and of yourself are more than one person, which is a bit too complicated an existential question for me to address grammatically.)

         4.   Nor is it "there’s [plural number] of them." It’s "there’re". [I've actually seen smoke emerge from SoundGrrl's ears over this one.]

          5.   Sentence fragments make the baby Jesus cry. They also make you sound like a half-domesticated Neanderthal.

Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Hearts and ponies,

Book Stud

*********************

Kids! Do you want to grow up to be a curmudgeonly crank who actually gets her tail in a knot over the above? Let’s play a fun game: Add Your Own Grammatical Pet Peeve In The Comments!

Le Geek, C’est Moi

I have finally attained true Marian the Librarian chic.

For many years, my hair has been short enough that I’ve been spared this level of geekery; but I just caught myself with the whole mop twisted up in an absent-minded bun with a pen stuck through it.

I will never, never, never be a hipster.

As the boy said to the tiger: Verbing weirds words.

My Scrabble dictionary informs me that "dyking" is a word.

Dyke is a verb! Who knew?

"Honey, I’ll be late for dinner tonight. The boys and I are going out dyking."

I Heart Vacation: Part Eight Zillion

If y’all New York types get the chance in the next few weeks, go see the Vollard exhibit at the Met. It’s really extraordinary; Vollard seems to have made friends with basically every important painter working around the turn of the last century, and to have collected an extraordinary span of their works. Many pieces that have been far-flung have been reunited; one triptych, for instance, had its various parts spread to museums in Chicago and Dallas, and a private collection. And there they were all in one place for viewing! Fantastic.

There’s also an amazing exhibit called Americans In Paris; unfortunately I got there just a few minutes before it closed for the day, but I did get to see some lovely Sargent, including "Madame X", for the first time in many years.

And before leaving, I visited my favorite painting: Jules Bastien-Lepage’s "Joan of Arc". You can’t really see it this small, but it’s absolutely gorgeous. The colors are bright and luminous, Joan’s expression is perfectly done, and Sts. Catherine, Michael, and… er… someone else, sort of hide in the background until you look right at them and the gold pops out. Go say hi if you’re in the museum.

 

I think someone in Fort Worth is pulling my leg.

After a week of mostly brain-candy vacation – Grey’s Anatomy marathons in my pajamas, and an ice-skating outing with Soundgrrl – I decided the poor neglected gray matter needed some actual, y’know, cultural input. So Miss Snark and I girded our proverbial mental loins (to mix a metaphor) and went a-museuming. The Guggenheim, specifically, to see the excellent "Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso".

There were many amazing paintings on view – Dali’s "The Specter of Sex Appeal", Picasso’s "The Bullfight", and much Velazquez, Miro, and Goya. Really interesting stuff, and highly recommended if you can make it.

And then there was this.

It’s called "Four Figures On A Step", and it was painted by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo somewhere around 1655.

Does anyone else find this kind of… surreal?

Not Dali surreal, or even Man Ray surreal. But surreal like someone at a Fort Worth art school replaced the real painting with this one as a practical joke. Virtually nothing about this painting looks like anything I’ve seen in a painting of that era before.

Consider:

1) The figure on the left looks exactly like he’s posing for a photograph. I hope he’s comfortable; that smile would’ve had to last about 200 years.

2) The middle figure is sneering in a way that just doesn’t look right for the time. "He’s looking at us," whispered Miss Snark, awed. And yea veryily, it was creepy. It also looks like something out of the Harvard Lampoon; an organization unknown to  seventeeth-century Spanish painters, to the best of my knowledge.

3) The figure on the right is clearly a young Mel Brooks in drag.

4) I hope the parents of the prostrate young boy in the foreground have the cash for a good lawyer and good child psychologist; it’s easier to see in the actual painting, but his trousers have been torn very carefully and deliberately, so that we just get a very pornographic glimpse of a portion of his anatomy hopefully not often displayed by children in public.

And yet, googling seems to imply that yes, this painting is just what it purports to be.

I am  bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

This is what comes of trying to improve one’s mind. Back to soap operas and singing show tunes to the cat.

No no WAIT.

THIS is.

Code Monkey.

AND, Code Monkey has a groupie!

In her pajamas.

I am entranced.

Braiiiins.

This may actually be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

Brains!