Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

This one’s for Seema… Sarah Palin Facts: Little-Known Facts About the Alaska Governor. Here are some samples:

• Sarah Palin uses French Canadians as bait to catch giant king salmon.
• When Sarah Palin booked a flight to Europe, the French immediately surrendered.
• Sarah Palin knows who was on the grassy knoll.
• Sarah Palin’s finishing move in the VP debate will be pulling Biden’s still beating heart from his chest & taking a bite.
• Russia sold Alaska to America because Sarah Palin would not bow to autocracy.
• Alaskan wolfpacks give Sara Palin first dibs on their kills.
• Sarah Palin will give birth to the man who will lead humanity’s war against the machines.

In betaing one of my forthcoming Firefly ficlets, Jade felt that it was too true to the show—the depressing, hopeless show. She didn’t mean that in a weeping-because-it’s-off-the-air way, but in a Buffy’s Law way. Buffy’s Law, if you don’t want to follow the link, was If anything can happen to make Buffy more miserable, it will.

I was going to post a whole entry on your-bitter-is-my-poignant, but then I actually watched “Heart of Gold.” Now I’m somewhat in the Jade camp. Back on Buffy, it was easier to dismiss the self-destructive behavior of the characters as general teen stupidity (or alternately, soulless fiend stupidity). That doesn’t really fly with Firefly, except possibly for Simon and Kaylee.

I find Inara in particular a very difficult character to understand (and therefore to write). She reminds me of Sam, whose feelings were also inscrutable, although from a technical perspective she’s probably closer to T’Pol in her inscrutable superiority. I had indifferent luck fanfixing Sam into a coherent character, and I’m not sure I can do any better with Inara.

On the bright side, the Sci-Fi channel is having an 11-hour Firefly marathon on Sunday. I thought that meant they’d skip the unaired episodes, but they’re skipping some from the middle of the series (such as it was, in the DVD order) instead. So if you, too, want to be depressed, you can see “Heart of Gold” at 5pm Eastern time.

Here’s a new feedback form from the Bureau of Communication: Unsolicited Feedback. Another one that may prove useful to fans is the Airing of Grievance form.

Make your own edible Flying Spaghetti Monster with these edible googly eyes!

The Cthulhu link of the day is this motivational poster from b0st0n_snark.

And for a mostly unrelated link, here’s a dark armageddon story: A Colder War by Charles Stross.

LOLthulhu combines cat macros and Cthulhu into, as the master would put it, “the slippery blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts in ocean’s floor.” I love the subtitle: CTHULHU FHTAGN CHEEZBURGER.

Avast me hearties! ‘Tis International Talk Like A Pirate Day once again. If ye need help, here’s a handy English-to-Pirate translator that e’en does web pages (includin’ this entry).

Cthulhu of the day: My Little Cthulhu, with victims! There’s also an angry version.

Here’s a timely lolcat from MacroCats.

Hashiwokakero, or Bridges, is a sudoku-like logic puzzle in which you have to connect all the islands with the number of bridges specified on each island. They have to go in straight horizontal or vertical lines, and you get a maximum of two bridges between any two islands. The solution must also be connected; that is, there has to be a path over the bridges from any island to any other island. For a sample solution, see the FAQ.

You create a bridge by clicking on one island and dragging to another, and a second bridge the same way. If you try to do a third bridge, you go back to zero bridges. You don’t actually have to drag all the way to the second island, just a little ways in one of the four possible directions. Click the Ready button to check your progress.

Now you’re addicted, too!