Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I sent in two entries to a writing contest five months ago. I included SASEs with both, and neither came back. The website didn’t list the winners, and I didn’t hear from them when the judging happened, so I assumed I had lost. I just got a bunch of my forwarded mail, though, and in it was a certificate for first place in one of the categories, and a prize (of as yet unknown monetary value). There was no actual notification with it, though—no cover, no list of who won the other categories or places, nothing.

I’m happy, but it reminds me of the time a magazine published a story I’d submitted without telling me. The publishing industry is infinite in its weirdness.

For reasons that shall go unmentioned, I’ve been looking for nice LotR fonts. There’s a lovely collection of rune and tengwar fonts at Orlando Bloom Central, but I was looking for the Latin alphabet in an Elfish style, or a nice Carolingian or Uncial font. Thundrune seems to have some.

On this day in 1969, two men set foot on the moon. But the eagle doesn’t fly there anymore.

A while back, Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities posted a review-by-review comparison of the reception of “The Passion of the Christ” and “Fahrenheit 9/11″: A Tale of Two Movies.

Tired of the DNC? This summer may be a good time to spot NLCs: noctilucent clouds. “During the summer months, look west perhaps 30 minutes to an hour after sunset when the Sun has dipped 6° to 16° below the horizon.” The mysterious blue-white tendrils are made up of tiny ice crystals in the mesosphere.

It’s like a horror movie descending on the city: The Democrats Are Coming! I’m happily out of town at the moment, but my lovely sister Veronica will be fetching me from the woods just in time for the DNC. I’m not as worried as I thought I’d be about the city getting blown up by terrorists, because the cure is sounding worse than the disease: shutting down the highway, half the commuter rail network, and part of a subway line, needing ID to take the T and not being allowed to carry a backpack downtown, and worst of all, smiling T employees. Now that’s horror.

I’ve been so enjoying on-the-fly spellchecking in Safari that I wanted it in Emacs, too. Flyspell was mentioned in an aside in a MacDevCenter article, and I have it running now. It took me a while to figure out how to set up the hook to run it automatically (because I forget geek stuff faster than I learn it) - I found some examples in people’s on-line .emacs files: Thomas Krennwallner and Anoop Johnson.

Some mac moments:

• The iTunes store has sold 100,000,000 songs.
• See what’s filling up your mac with Disk Inventory X
• James Duncan Davidson explains why macs are the new black

Wired ran an article recently on bloggers burning out. They mean the big-time bloggers, of course, not us small fry, but the phenomenon is the same.

Although I’ve been burning out on fandom for most of the time I’ve been in fandom, blogging has never worn me down. I’ve been canning content recently where other bloggers might shut down, but the joy of blogging hasn’t gone away. In writing fanfic the tropes pile up until you’ve seen them all, but with link blogging, there’s always something new and fascinating on-line. You never really reach the end of the Internet.

MustangSally has an interesting LiveJournal entry on the history of stirrups.