So some of you may remember that last summer, my darling plumtreeblossom wrote and directed a short one-act play for Festival@First 6. (I helped a bit with the play itself, and then was on the stage crew for the whole festival.) Juliet’s boyfriend Rich took and edited video (thank you, Rich!), and the play is finally up on YouTube! Yay! It had to be split in two parts because it’s (a couple minutes) over YouTube’s ten-minute limit on individual videos, so here are part 1 and part 2 of Dan in the Lion’s Den, by Mare Freed, as performed at its world premier in Somerville, Massachusetts, by the fabulously talented Juliet Bowler, Kerri Babish, and Lou Lim!

(plumtreeblossom has also posted these to her journal here, and to theatreatfirst’s journal here.)

Found via omegabeth:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open the book to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the next few sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

 ‘What about if it’s got an urn or a plinth or a potted plant?’ said Nobby.
 ‘Have you got one in mind, Nobby?’ said Colon suspiciously.
 ‘Yes. The Goddess Anoia* Arising from the Cutlery,’ said Nobby. ‘They’ve got it here. It was painted by a bloke with three i’s in his name, which sounds pretty artistic to me.’

That’s watchmen Nobby Nobbs and Fred Colon in a museum discussing when pictures of nude women are Art, and when they’re just dirty pictures, in Terry Pratchett’s Thud. The footnote explains that “Anoia is the Ankh-Morpork Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers.”

Michael Palin for President (video). A hockey mom, and a whole lot more. Thanks to samuraizergling, who posted the link as a comment on this post in mizarchivist’s journal (which you should also go read).

Thanks to larksdream for pointing me at Wikihistory, a very very short story by Desmond Warzel.

Kind of tired by the end of the workday. Need to pack for Arisia. Take T home. Stop on way to have dinner. Arrive in Quincy Center. Walk home from T station.

Where car?

Oh. Drove to T station in morning. Left car at T station.

Maybe now is time to walk back to T station.

The disturbing thing is that this is not the first time I’ve done that.

So I had a dream last night, in which I was having dinner at a table with a few people, and there was a big stinging insect that was bugging us. (It was the shape of a wasp, but about twice as big, and it had the yellow-and-black colouring of a bumblebee.) Anyway, it landed on a couple of our plates, and then it landed on my cheek, and I could feel it tickling. I decided that my best bet was to try to squash it really quickly, so it wouldn’t have a chance to sting me, and that’s what I did. In real life, waking myself up. And since I was wearing my CPAP mask, I smashed the hard plastic into my cheek. And either the jerk of me hitting myself or the noise I made woke plumtreeblossom up. (We both fell uneventfully right back asleep.)

It didn’t hurt that much at the time, and hasn’t hurt at all since, and I would have completely forgotten except that I just saw myself in a mirror and wondered what that little mark on my face was.

So, last night as I was getting ready to go to bed, I puzzled a bit over how cold it was in the house. I’ve been keeping the heat fairly low to save oil while I’m the only one in the house, but it seemed colder than it’s been. But I wasn’t too worried about it, since I sleep with an electric blanket.

This morning when I got up, the first thing I noticed when I got outside my room was that the side door was wide open.

So much for saving oil. :-)

Amusing headline of the morning, from the Boston Metro: Dems hold breath, nation turns blue.

dietrich posted this parody of libertarianism, based on “I am the very model of a modern major general”. Allow me to quote the first verse:

I am the very model of a modern Libertarian:
I teem with glowing notions for proposals millenarian,
I've nothing but contempt for ideologies collectivist
(My own ideas of social good tend more toward the Objectivist).
You see, I've just discovered, by my intellectual bravery,
That civic obligations are all tantamount to slavery;
And thus that ancient pastime, viz., complaining of taxation,
Assumes the glorious aspect of a war for liberation!

But go read the whole thing! It appears to have originally come from here.

Sums up my political biases against libertarianism perfectly.