updates: so far, i love working for the pope. i am also pretty damned cranky, and if you want me to do something, it'd be a good idea to ask me rather than waiting for me to figure out that it needs doing. yes, this is personally directed at you. and you, and you.

on the other hand, the family reunion was fun this weekend, and the dogs are happeeeee to have me home. so, that's good. must concentrate on the fuzziness of puppies.

i am an eeeeevil genius. for a better tomorrow. of course.

also, i am a nice girl.

eXpressive: 5/10
Practical: 2/10
Physical: 10/10
Giver: 6/10

You are a RSYG--Reserved Sentimental Physical Giver. This makes you a Nice Guy/Nice Girl.

Oh, poor RSYG. You're the one all your friends of your target sex *should* be dating when you have to watch them go out with jerks. You're the sweet one that the lead in a romantic comedy ends up with after s/he learns a valuable lesson. You're the best friend, the chaperone and the shoulder to cry on when you should be the lover. Well, no one ever said people were smart.

You dislike conflict -- you prefer to express yourself through action, not discussion -- but you know it is necessary. This means you are more likely to tackle an issue before it grows, but you're also more likely to stop fighting before the issue is resolved to your satisfaction. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- it's kind of a nice compromise between fighting about everything and fighting about nothing -- but you have to remember to look out for your own interests sometimes.

You have a strong sexual appetite, but it seems so out of place with the rest of your persona that people find it hard to believe. Often they try to shield you from sexual content -- it's ridiculous, but you can use it to your advantage: everybody wants someone clean in the kitchen and dirty in the bedroom. That's you.

You don't want to cheat, but you might. Especially since it's only when you're in a relationship that you start getting the attention from your target sex that you should have been getting all along. Your experiences could make you misanthropic if you weren't so tenderhearted.

A lot of RSITs think they're RSYGs. They're not.

You'll end up with someone who deserves you in the end.

Of the 30190 people who have taken this quiz, 4.2 % are this type.

Obituaries (08/22/04)
O'CAIN, Iain Sedgeman On August 17, 2004, Iain O'Cain passed away at the age of 36 years, after a struggle with life. A memorial service will be held for Iain at the University of Alberta Alumni House, 11515 Saskatchewan Dr. Sunday, August 22, from 2pm to 4pm. His Mother, Mary Ellyn Cain, his father, Mark Sedgeman of Ann Arbor Michigan, half brother Luke Sedgeman and step-siblings and many many friends mourn his loss. Condolences may be sent to www.connelley-mckinley.com.

oh, iain. many many friends indeed.

i just submitted an abstract for an anthology. like an actual honest to pete usable in educational settings anthology. holy cow. i'm gonna go remember to breathe, now.

my friend iain killed himself sometime this week.

i had been looking forward to seeing him in baltimore this january. we weren't especially close, but we saw each other at alt.polycons, and i read his lj, and i did look forward to seeing him every nine months or so.

oh, christ. he was one of the few people who'd been at all the alt.polycons. iain, if you wanted to break the streak, we could have made sure you got bronchitis that week or something.

he was sweet and funny and well liked and smart and deeply geeky and i liked him a lot. and he had been struggling with anxiety and depression and meds that didn't quite work for him for longer than i'd known him.

safe journey, sweetie. i'm going to miss you.

look! i'm related to an expert!

Small Business: Rebuilding from the grounds up:

The expert's opinion: Lorman Lundsten, chair of marketing at the University of St. Thomas College of Business, said it might take more than positive attitude for the two-store coffee business to turn around.

okay, how can a person read this and not go diving for linguistics texts rapturous with cries of glee?

Ethnologue report for language code: YKG

YUKAGHIR, NORTHERN: a language of Russia (Asia)
SIL code: YKG
ISO 639-2: mis

Population 30 to 150 Tundra out of 230 to 1,100 in the ethnic group (1995 M. Krauss, 1989 census).

Region Yakutia and the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Alternate names YUKAGIR, JUKAGIR, ODUL, TUNDRA, TUNDRE, NORTHERN YUKAGIR

Classification Yukaghir.

Comments: Not inherently intelligible with Southern Yukaghir (Kolyma). It may be distantly related to Altaic or Uralic. Even is the literary language used. Speakers below 50 years use Russian as second language. All can speak Yakut. Reindeer herdsmen and some other families can speak Even. Chukot is also used. Most speakers over 50 years old. Endangered. No sense of ethnic identity between speakers of the two Yukaghir varieties. In the 19th century their territory shrank because of merging clans, military clashes, assimilation with the Even, and later, collectivization. From the 1950s to the 1980s the state sent all children to boarding school. 'Odul' is their name for themselves. SOV; postpositions; genitives, articles, adjectives, numerals, relatives before noun heads; question word not initial or final; 2 prefixes, 6 suffixes; word order focus preverbal, subjects and topics tend to be initial; affixes indicate case of noun phrases; person and number of subject indicated by obligatory verb phrases; split intransitivity: intransitive subjects encoded as transitive when nonfocus; focus marked the same way for intransitive subjects and direct objects, and only those, otherwise rather accusative; resultative; reflexive; reciprocal; causative; comparative; CV, CVCCVV; nontonal. Taught through fourth grade in the Adnriushkino settlement, and as an elective through eighth grade in Nelemnoye. Pine and deciduous forest. Riverine. Swidden agriculturalists; heavy dependence on the support of the government. Christian, traditional religion.

affixes indicate case of noun phrases! intransitive subjects encoded as transitive when nonfocus!

oh, now i am all swoony.

(p.s. ethnologue rocks.)

this is the preliminary schedule for worldcon programming this year.

this is me making sad little noises about the part where i won't be there.

sad pathetic little noises.

monkeeee!

there's a lot of the time when the onion is truer than the actual news. like with this.


The Onion | Kerry Unveils One-Point Plan For Better America:

WICHITA, KS-- Delivering the central speech of his 10-day 'Solution For America' bus campaign tour Monday, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry outlined his one-point plan for a better America: the removal of George W. Bush from the White House.


'If I am elected in November, no inner-city child will have to live in an America where George Bush is president,' Kerry said, addressing a packed Maize High School auditorium. 'No senior citizen will lie awake at night, worrying about whether George Bush is still the chief executive of this country. And no American-- regardless of gender, regardless of class, regardless of race-- will be represented by George Bush in the world community.'

momma cat's name is tahini.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | At play with firm's clone kittens: "At play with firm's clone kittens

A US company offering a pet cloning service has successfully cloned two cats: Tabouli and Baba Ganoush. BBC News Online's Maggie Shiels is the first British journalist to see them. Here, she tells of meeting the copy cats.

The cats were born through the technique of chromatin transfer
To most people, the two kittens running around the top floor of a San Francisco mansion might not seem like anything special. But to Lou Hawthorne, the owner of this house, Tabouli and Baba Ganoush represent a major scientific breakthrough.

so, last night we went to mythic for mousie's birthday party. i got to pet all three cats of the house, and one of the small children spent a while in my lap. also, we brought chocolate chip cookies. mmmm.

this morning, i got up unreasonably early (745am! on a weekend! without an alarm!) and we went to the waffle party hosted by the jla. yummy yummy waffles. i had mine with butter and brown sugar, which was surprisingly wonderful.

then, a wee (ahem) bit of book shopping, and then off to the go away beth and joe party, at beth and joe's house. saw many people we knew, including the aforementioned small child and her seester.

grabbed dinner at holy land, and then came home and watched monster house.

sort of a slow, mopey afternoon for me; dinner helped. still a little slow and a little mopey, but astropop and conversations with people i like are continuing to help.

What Common Breed of Dog Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

i have apparently been having a slow blogging week.

that's because none of my big news for the week is really sharable yet.

soon it will be.

no margarita related news, though. settle down.

have i blogged this yet? xander and giles writing sonnets. the characterization is dead on, and they're good poems, too.


stakebait: Iron Author, round three-I-think, -maybe-four

no quoting, because the best quotable bit is the wrapup to x's sonnet, and you really need to read the whole thing together.

how about you, you there reading this, just vote for the party that isn't acting like junior high kids?

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Bush Planning August Attack Against Kerry:

WASHINGTON, July 31 ? President Bush's campaign plans to use the normally quiet month of August for a vigorous drive to undercut John Kerry by turning attention away from his record in Vietnam to what the campaign described as an undistinguished and left-leaning record in the Senate.
Mr. Bush's advisers plan to cap the month at the Republican convention in New York, which they said would feature Mr. Kerry as an object of humor and calculated derision.

yup, junior high was about the first time i ran into "calculated derision"...

my knee hurts like a son of a bitch. ow. ow. ow. ow. i am trying not to twist it, tring not to hyperextend it, trying not to put much weight on it.

still hurts.

i even took codeine and it still hurts.

ow.

is the weather pixie broken for anyone else? i'm looking at it from inside our internal network, so i don't know if it's just an absolute vs relative link issue or if weather pixie is b0rken. scroll down on the sidebar to see weather pixie.

make that today for the last time i cried.

if you're susceptible to baby cuteness, you need to read dooce.

P.S. You rolled over today! TWICE! And then immediately looked up at us like “WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED?”

see! go read!