In the Headlights

My So-Called New Life

Dear Friends, Relatives, Colleagues, Romans, Countrymen, devoted readers, blah, blah,

It is fitting that today's post will be late, part of my new laissez-faire attitude toward blogging.  Though I also blame it on this stupid early daylight saving time rollback.

  But I digress.  For over 2 1/2 years, I have blogged on a schedule.  First, two posts at 1 and 5, and more recently, once a day at 1 PM.

Lately, other things have been crowding my schedule.  I'm preparing to take a recertification exam.  We are moving to a new workplace in a month, lock, stock and pussy-cat.  And work's been a bear.  I have a number of trips coming up, some work, some pleasure.  And I squeeze in a dance lesson when I can.

And so it's become too too.  The things that should relax and divert me have become deadlines and pressure.  I'd come in late from work, and know I had to pre-post something for the next day, and get it done before I went to bed, because it sure wasn't going to happen in the morning if I expect to be at work by 0630. 

For that reason, I am going off-schedule with the blog.  No more daily posts.  I'll post  when I have something to say.  And I have plenty to say.  I'll keep going with books and movies I find interesting, good recipes, and places to travel, interesting things and people.  But I won't push myself to post when I have no ideas.  (Oh, God, now I feel the ideas rushing into my head...).

I won't have to prepost for trips, or take the computer for short trips.  Besides, now I can do short posts from my cell phone if I have something to share.

I know I'll lose some readers, I realize that some will migrate away after checking a few times and finding nothing to divert them.  Others will stick it out.

I have to do what I have to do.  Thanks for your help and support as we go through this transition.  Hopefully, In the Headlights will be a better blog for the change.

[Image of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last from Wikipedia]

Big Brother

I'm a pretty cautious person, to which end, I try to stay beneath the radar.  Or at least I don't pop my head up over the horizon if I don't know who's out there to take a shot at it.

What the heck am I talking about?  I blog under an assumed name.  I try not to be too radical in my blogging.  Even so, every now and then a colleague will send me an email with a link to a post of mine that they happened to run across.  Heck, I even pop up in Google searches of my own now and then.  So it's hard to have an internet presence and remain totally hidden and anonymous.  In fact, it's practically oxymoronic.  Or maybe just moronic.

But on some level, I can feel the dismay of Chez Pazienza,  a savvy, well-read blogger who had a promising career at CNN, until they found out about her blog.  She wasn't hiding it, she blogged under her own name, and quite prominently.  But her astonishment is palpable when the powers that be turned on her and invoked a vague clause in the handbook stating that any writing done for anyone other than the mothership had to be passed through their standards and practices department.  She admits her opinions were occasionally controvertial, adding that she never wrote about her job or employer.

More poignant is the fact that she took up blogging to pass the time and keep her writing skills sharp as she was recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor.

Is there a made-for-TV movie in this?  Sarring a spunky Julia Roberts maybe?

But I digress.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

I find it chilling that not only did she get fired for blogging, but found out that CNN actually employs several people whose jobs it is to ferret out this kind of thing.

They probably didn't have to ferret very far.  Chez Pazienza is a featured blogger on The Huffington Post  .  They probably just browsed through this very prominent blog site over their morning coffee, which got spewed all over the screen when this viper at their bosom popped up.  Ultimately, someone from HR admitted to Pazienza that it wasn't just that she was writing, but "also, you know, the nature of what you've been writing."

She goes on to add "whether a respected and loyal CNN producer of four years, like myself, could've gotten off with a warning had I chosen to write about, say, my favorite pasta sauce recipes, who knows."

(Damn...she's been reading my blog.)

Anyway, it's a most interesting situation.  Is blogging a new frontier in free speech?  What does it say about the rigidity of a fairly cool but established media giant like CNN?  Are we all going to hell in a handbasket.  (Well, yes, but that's beside the point.)

[Thanks, Stryder, for this most interesting link.]

Bent Objects

Deb sent us the link to this great site, Bent Objects.

Terry Border is the still-life artist who created these mini-masterpieces.

Check out his site.  And in 2009, buy his book:  Bent Objects:  The Secret Live of Everyday Things.  It can't help being wonderful.

It can't help being wonderful.

 

My So-Called (Unexamined) Life

I was recently at Everything and Nothing, and noticed that Shawn had taken The Unexamined Life Test.

Poor Shawn.  She only scored 53% (that's an "F", isn't it?).   She must have been having a bad day.  It did say she is 99% self aware, so I guess that's a bit of balm on the wound.

I decided that I, self-examiner and autoflaggelator that I am would do pretty well.

Here's how it came out:

"Your score:  oblivious"

I am 26% self-aware.

and:

"you scored higher than    0%  on self-awareness."

OK, it would be pretty hard to score lower that 0%, n'est-ce pas?

I have to say, in my own defense, that there were no good fits to the choices of answers after any of the questions.  Of course, I knew which the touchy-feely "right answers" were, but didn't select them.

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living.  I guess this confirms that mine might not be either.

However, I have no intention of taking hemlock, as he does in this painting by Jacques-Louis David.

Party Time

I'm taking today off and breaking out the good bubbly.

The good stuff!  What could possibly warrant that?

Well, two years ago I wrote my first post.  For about a year-and-a-half, I posted twice a day, at 1 PM and 5 PM, but about six months ago, I went to once a day, at 1 PM.

It's been a fun ride, a refuge, and a virtual reality for me.  I have some new friends, most of whom I haven't met but can't wait to.  Shawn Lea and I have had some adventures, and I have a couple of people I am planning to meet soon.

I hit 500,000 hits earlier this month.  I realize that a lot of it is thanks to Google (Thanks, Google!), but I am honored to have the small and somewhat devoted following I do have.  You know who you are.  There are fewer thrills than Googling something and seeing one of your posts pop up on the first search page.  A few days ago, a friend mentioned a lanyard (imagine!), and I asked if he had read Billy Collins's poem.  He hadn't, so I decided to Google it so he could read it.  One of my posts came up third in the search.  Since people at work don't know I do this, I clicked on another site, but I had a secret smile the whole time.

It's been a lot of work, but has also been a refuge from the frustrations and disappointments of everday life (like when your pasta comes out over-cooked).  It's a way to share my feelings with anyone who wants to come for the ride. 

Welcome.  While I find it hard to slot into my schedule at times, I have no intention of stopping, and I hope you'll join me on this wild ride.

[Image from Wedding Insurance]

The Julie/Julia Project

Recently, Amy Bergstrom asked if I had ever gotten into the Julie/Julia Project, wherein Julie Powell, mild-mannered government drone by day spent her nights for an entire year cooking every recipe (524 of them) in the first edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

In her spare time, she blogged about it.

And in the rest of her spare time, she wrote a cookbook.

Through the project, she worked her way through the chapters.  Athough she also backslid, at times ordering from Domino's,she faithfully produced dish after dish.

Here, she writes about one difficulty she encountered.  Killing a live lobster to make homard Thermidor. 

(I feel the same way.  I don't like to see my food alive, and certainly don't like to be the one to kill it.  I like to keep a certain distance, mentally and physically.  Red, who had grown up on a farm and hunted for his dinner as a kid, used to enjoy making me squirm talking about calves and cows with big brown eyes, or how smart pigs are, and how they are only dirty because of how people raise them.  He also used to like to tell me what went into bologna and hot dogs (cow lips and pussy).  He also hoped that we would retire to a farm and raise our own food.  And that I would go outside and wring the necks on chickens, and pull their feathers, then dip them in boiling water so that I could pluck the pin feathers. And then fry them.  Mmmm.

In a way, it's a good thing he didn't live to find out how far from his dream our future was going to be.)

I may try making lobster Thermidor (named for the eleventh month of the French Republican calendar).  But rest assured that I will start with lobster tails, or something.  A few years ago, my sister, who lived in Maine, shipped my father some live lobsters for his birthday.  My husband boiled them.  The rest of us couldn't bear to watch, nor did we much enjoy the meal, even though as I recall we braced ourselves with a fair amount of champagne.

Final digression:  The best lobster Thermidor I ever ate was in Monrovia, Liberia, several decades ago.  My father was working there with the Vocie of America.  It was at the nicest restaurant in town, at the beach:  The Atlantic-Rasputin Restaurant.  I'll never forget the name.  And the lobster was sublime.

Anyway, back to Julie Powell.  She made all the dishes in her small Long Island kitchen.  This NYT article appeared when she had 13 days and 22 recipes to go to complete her goal.

She published her best-selling cookbook, Julie and Julia:  365 days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.  Later she went through a demoralizing divorce, and moved to the West Coast.

Julie Powell earned every bit of her fame.  She worked hard to complete the recipes, and then came the mixed blessing of eating them with all the butter and cream. I'm a bit jealous.  She got to eat the food of the gods, but there's a price.  She also had to eat the kidneys, the brains, the sweetbreads.  I like to think I am pretty adventuresome, in a culinary sense if no other, but I'd have had to be pretty lubricated to get some of those things down. 

I guess that just goes to show my insight isn't so insightful.  Oh, well. 

The image was taken from a blog called Esurientes- The Comfort Zone, by Niki in Melbourne, Australia.  If you want to drool over your keyboard, check it out. 

Living in the Past

After I wrote abut the Bulwer-Lytton contest, I received an email from commentator Mary Beard with a link to her post about a conference she attended called "Ruins and Reconstructions" about Pompeii.

   The conference was about Pompeii after the discovery of the ruins; she says that much of the conversation at the conference was about Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Last Days of Pompeii, about a couple who escape the eruption of Vesuvius and the ensuing lava flow.

She mentions that the novel was frequently described as "ghastly" despite the fact that it was a nineteenth-century best-seller.  They posited that the reason for its success was that it appealed to a certain British class at the time of its publication.  But the novel had broad appeal and sold well, so it probably had a readership that crossed class lines.

I think that tastes change, as does language and literature, and that Bulwer-Lytton's contemporaneous popularity is probably attributable to that. 

Professor Beard also met Lindsey Davis, author of eighteen detective novels featuring Marcus Didius Falco, who was born in Rome, in AD 41.  Falco travels the ancient world solving mysteries.  These sounded like fun, so I ordered three of a long list of Davis' novels from Amazon. 

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge, and Classics editor for the Times Literary Supplement. She has also written a number of books about classical topics.

[Image from Geocities]

Blogging

I found this site, Blog Pulse through Rich Ray's Web Watch column in the Florida Times Union. 

The site highlights top blog posts, top videos, top news stories (sadly, none mine).

It also looks at trends:  Kodak vs. Canon vs. Nikon, for instance, gives you a graph of the percentage of blog posts that mentions the company, on a given day.  Or, if you really have no life, you can check out Yahoo vs. Google vs. MSN, or Jon vs. Dave vs. Jay, or Rehnquist vs. O'Connor vs. Roberts. 

Great way to spend the day.

What really fascinated me about the site were the statistics about blogs.  43,259,622 total identified blogs, with 62,580 new ones in the last 24 hours, and 817,537 new posts indexed in the last 24 hours.  This amazes me.  I know blogs are a force to be reckoned with, but here's how it looks from my vantage point:  I don't know a single blogger whom I didn't meet through blogging.  And one whom I did meet in person. That's Shawn. 

When I meet people and tell them that I blog, they are always amazed.  None of them know any bloggers.  Many ask me what a blog is, how you become a blogger.  Many also say they have never read a blog. 

Many bloggers who know one another do so because of some special effort to recognize and gather bloggers with a particular interest, or from a particular geographical area.

I just seems to me that with that many blogs and bloggers around, you wouldn't be able to swing a cat without hitting a few, but in my actual experience, we seem to be a rare breed.

I prefer thinking that I'm a bit special for my blogging.  Maybe I am, after all, that 43 million is in the whole world...

Nora

This is Nora, the piano playing cat.  The YouTube video was sent to us by Jan. 

The video is adorable.  As you probably know, I like cats, and this one's quite smart.

But this is historic for another reason:  It is the first time I've attempted to include a video file in my blog.  It's an article of faith, because to do it, you have to embed the file, the the instructions say "the video will not be visible within the application or when previewing the post".  When it's published, the video player will be displayed.

An act of faith.  We'll see.

Road of Death, No Matter Where

I may have mentioned in the past that I am not an adrenalin junkie.  In fact, I may be the antithesis of an adrenalin junkie.  So I won't be travelling on this road any time soon.  A couple of friends will remember my panic attack just driving up Grandfather Mountain.

Jan sent us these widely circulated photos.  They are identified as being shots of a road called Stremnaya in Bolivia. I tried to blow up the photos to get a good look at a license plate, but the blow-ups were just too fuzzy.  Or else my astigmatism is getting worse.  A little further investigation, corroborated by comments, indicates that they are actually the Guoliang Tunnel in China (and yet they persist in having population problems).  The tunnel was hand-carved by villagers to transport goods and goats.  I doubt they envisioned this.