Google Maps and my graphics card engage in an anime laser battle.
April 5, 2008: Anglo-Saxon words for animals, French words for meat: This hoary old factoid writeup of mine gets an update at the prompting of (and based on information provided by) Tem42. Kudos!
I met a grocer in an ancient store
Who said: 'Two vast and yellow wheels of cheese
Stand in the deli. Near them, on the case,
A crumpled label lies, amid some crumbs
with veins of blue, and a tray of used toothpicks,
which shows how passing well those Gourmands ate
Whose tastes do demand. Stamped on this paper scrap,
An Italian name and a freshness date.
And on a nearby card these words appear --
"Today's Special: Gorgonzola, king of cheese:
Take a free Sample, patrons, and delight!"
A few crumbs yet remain. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The aisles of tins and boxes stretch far away.'
With apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley, but he's dead, so he won't mind.
TO DO (I need prodding. HELP!):
- Organize all the stuff I gathered to revise Maryland and post it
- revise space opera
- Axiom of Choice (factual)
- computable number (rant)
- Tetrapod (factual)
- Carboniferous and Permian (factual)
- Gadget Story (factual)
- The Fall of the Towers (review)
- Empire Star (review)
- City of Saints and Madmen (review)
- Shriek: an Afterword (review)
- The Realizer (fiction)
- K-T Extinction
- Shoot People who Don't Vote (fiction. idea from 2002! dead?)
- A Recounting of Recent Events, Sozs 13, 8922 (fiction) (can of worms)
Don't be surprised if you get a /msg from me suggesting a correction to one of your writeups; power's gone to my head.
E2D2: Gorgonzola: A dangling modifier is a terrible thing to waste.
dannye: Chicken / egg. I've got to have a dead cat first. You're as uselss as my dog.
Major General Panic says re up: NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD
RACECAR says "extra points for mentioning Bob Ross, whom a fellow student in my Walker Art Center class mentioned when discussing contemporary art. she said, 'I got into art when I used to get stoned and watch Bob Ross in college'. It was special."
mauler says "No, but I was impressed to see that your o'erweening pedantry even extends to commas in your /msg's!"
If you have a question, feel free to send me a /msg.
Jet-Poop says Node something... or I KEEEEEELL YOU!
/me misses sensei.
There appears to be a Gorgonzola@slashdot who is not me. Same goes with Wikipedia. Must be a more popular name than I thought.
Sensei has suggested a vision, a Platonic form perhaps, of the minds that meet here: The ecosystem of the nodegel. The Noder is an ectoplasmic being which wafts its way through the gel, using its cilia for propulsion as well as organizing the gel into nodes, to the delight and dismay of other noders which happen to waft by. The ordinary noder, once it has reached a certin level of maturity, can leave little tokens of its delight or dismay behind. Other noders, called 'content editors', have the power to extinguish or heal diseased writeups. Others have still greater, unheard-of powers; they are able to unravel and re-knit the cosmos of ideas, and other things we mortals can only guess at.
For myself, I present to you an alternative vision, more like a slightly modified version: Into the gel, someone has dropped a piece of gorgonzola cheese. Now recall what blue cheeses really are: curdled milk with mold growing in them. Not the most attractive of mental pictures, although there are stranger cheeses. Nevertheless, you must form such a picture in your mind.
Now, the lactic concretions are dead, simply a home, as well as a food source, for the mold. This mold, upon contact with the nodegel, becomes sentient. Not only that, it finds the gel more nutritious than its cheesy substrate and expands beyond its former bounds. Rather than cilia, it has mycelia. Upon contact with the mold, the gel self-organizes into simulacra of nodes. Left to itself, one day the gel will be all cheese.
Noders waft by these cheesey simulacra and inspect them as they are compelled to do by nature. They are attracted to them, or repulsed, as is their wont, but at no time do they realize what lurks at the heart of these "nodes". Sometimes, an unsuspecting noder carries a little piece of mold away with itself. Such a piece can grow, and slowly take control, until its host is one with the mold. Some perish; others are strengthened, and a new colony begins.
In the meantime, the primary colony has, after several years, extended its rhizomes far into the gel; it has managed to trick the Cosmic Beings into granting it greater powers; but it is also resigned to the annihilating blow that will come when those Beings invariably realize their peril. Perhaps its moldy progeny will survive.
My precious1 former writeup under the title E2 Cookie system:
It's not a system, dammit!
You do something someone considers cookie-worthy; that person gives you a cookie; you eat the cookie.
If you get several, maybe you share them with other noders.
You don't hoard cookies just to say "Neener! Neener! I have more cookies than you do!", because after a while, the cookies will go bad and turn into a huge stinky mess.
A cookie is instant gratification! Enjoy!
1You thought I meant "precious" as an emotional attachment rather than a style of writing? Well, no, but still...
A foray into an EKW scheme:
ekw_alinkcolor="#404040";
ekw_bgcolor="#008000";
ekw_headingfont="Tahoma,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial";
ekw_linkcolor="#C0ffC0";
ekw_logoaccenttext="#00FF00";
ekw_logobackground="#00A000";
ekw_logoborder="#00A000";
ekw_logofont="Tahoma,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial";
ekw_logofontsize="17pt";
ekw_logomaintext="#ffffff";
ekw_monofontsize="9pt";
ekw_oddrowcolor="#00A000";
ekw_textcolor="#ffffff";
ekw_textfont="Arial, sans-serif";
ekw_textfontsize="9pt";
ekw_vlinkcolor="#80ff80";
Remember to turn off the softlink gradient!