clearing out the irritations of a long day...

...by blogging. therapeutic, right? far better than plotting how to do damage to the town office of the miniscule town i went to high school in. demands for money should be both carefully timed and, ideally, not phrased as though the recipient is a blithering idiot and this one was neither of those things.

anyway, the amusing thing about this article, "in defense of distraction" by sam anderson is that i did have to follow the advice he gives in the first paragraph. i had, in fact, forgotten a brief but important email i had to send to a friend so i went and did it and then returned to read the rest of the article with, it has to be said, two interruptions to deal with other emails. which is fair, i think. i don't think the article covers anything particularly groundbreaking in terms of internet distraction -- or other kinds of distraction, for that matter -- but mr. anderson writes well and he makes some interesting points although i'm not sure if his conclusion is that great; it seems kind of like a cop-out to "the internet generation is just different. woooo." and it works as an interesting counterpoint to the bishop of paisley's outburst against twitter.

i sent jeremy clarkson's article about the honda insight to my mother because she and my father are talking about getting a new car. not that i seriously think they will buy a hybrid -- and if nothing else, the insight is far too low to work on our gravel road without getting the bottom torn out of it regularly -- but because clarkson writes excellent snark, describing the car as "Biblically terrible" at one point. this is quality snarking, guys.

i've watched the trailer for the road a couple of times now in the hopes that i will become more convinced. but it just isn't happening. the book is awesome; i read it in one sitting last summer after wandering across it in the bpl's immensely date-flexible "new fiction" section and thinking, "what the hell." great stuff -- really; but you should probably wait for a nice cheerful sunny day before you read it, make sure you have a kitten (or puppy, if your tastes swing that way) close to hand, and maybe some alcohol to go with it because it is not cheerful. not even a little bit. the closest thing to cheer that you can really find in it is that not quite everyone dies. although this is a pretty good thing, i have to say. anyway, just in case you haven't seen this video nineteen times already, i'm putting it here, too, just so i can consider it again later:



i was still tired enough before work this morning that, having arrived about half an hour early as usual (it's either that or be ten minutes late), when i wandered over to the guardian website to check out the uk headlines, the picture of john barrowman leading this article completely baffled me for a minute. now of course i'm linking the article because john barrowman is awesome and i'm marking time 'til torchwood season 3 but i also don't really dare check out much of the text of the article due to fear of spoilers. still, i don't doubt that any re-staging of la cage aux folles will be improved by his presence!

lastly, a dailyom post from a month or so back that i find helpful.