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.)

(Thanks to everybody who answered my David Paterson question!)

There’s a great podcasting app available for my new phone (an Android Dev Phone, the unlocked version of the T-Mobile G1, about which I could write an awful lot if I had the time and energy), so I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. Most often, I’m listening to On Point. (It’s two hours every weekday, so that’s a lot to listen to even if I don’t listen to every show.)

Tonight, I listened to yesterday’s segment “Everything, Incorporated”, in which Douglass Rushkoff talks about the ideas in his new book Life, Inc.. I found it really really interesting. He talks about the origins of the modern corporation and of money, about railroads and corn and hiring a lactation consultant to teach you how to breastfeed so you don’t have to impose on mothers you know to talk to you about it and about being criticised by his neigbours for posting about a mugging because they thought it would hurt their property values. It’s a fascinating scratch-the-surface but very interesting examination of how we ended up with the social and economic structure we live in. It touches (briefly) on an idea I’ve had rolling around in my head for a long time and wanted to post about (but never collected my thoughts enough) about how money distorts our priorities and our notions of sacrifice and benefit, because some kinds of value and importance are much more easily measurable with money than other kinds.

Anyway, if any of that sounds interesting, I would encourage you to listen to it. The page linked above has a big “Listen to This Show” button to stream it, or you can download he mp3 here.

I bet about 50% of University art professors could be replaced with Tiny Art Director without their students noticing. Thanks to nex0s for the link!

EDIT: Syndicated as tinyartdirector.

Another lovely weekend with my sweetie. Saturday afternoon I got ingredients for crockpot chicken and dumplings (incidentally having to get out and sprinkle kitty litter under my wheels three times to get out of the driveway!) and got that started. Picked up plumtreeblossom in the evening and we came back to Quincy for dinner. After dinner, we had a couple drinks and (as is often the case) ended up link-surfing on Wikipedia, and finally landed on this site of colour photographs of Tsarist Russia by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. I forget how we ended up on the topic, but something reminded me of that exhibit and those photos — oh, I remember now! We’d been listening to recordings from old phonograph cylinders on Wikipedia, and plumtreeblossom mentioned how weird it felt to be listening to recordings from the 19th century and how it made that era seem less distant, and that reminded me of how it felt to see colour photographs from before the Russian Revolution, so I googled to find the Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit again.

This morning (after shovelling out the car with cathijosephine’s help), I drove cathijosephine and m_c_t to the T station so they could go to the airport for m_c_t’s flight back to the Wrong Left Coast. It was lovely having him here, and I’ll miss him.

When I got back my darling was making me bacon and eggs and we had a lovely breakfast before running out to the store so she could do a shopping run. (It’s handy to do that when I can drive her, so she can get heavy stuff and not have to carry it from the grocery store to the T to her house. And it’s fun to shop together.) I had only been planning on getting a couple things myself, but I failed to exercise any self-restraint and now I have yummy things in the fridge.

Then I drove her home, and came back to Quincy (stopping to get a few things for the house, notably sand, which yesterday’s experience demonstrated I need). I picked up some Chinese food on the way and ate it with cathijosephine and darxus.

I have a large number of things I needed to get done this weekend that I didn’t do, but I don’t particularly care. Life is full, and life is good.

EDIT: I forgot to mention; she gave me a couple more pieces of purple clothing, adding to the sweater she gave me a few weeks ago. ( And she took a picture of me in my new purple hoodie. )

Howdy. Just wanted to mention two Firefox plugins I’ve started using lately and find extremely useful:

It's All Text! lets you edit text-entry areas (like LiveJournal post and comment fields) with your favourite real text editor. (So you can search-and-replace, load prepared files, and use whatever convenience features like abbreviations or filters your editor provides.) Works on Linux/Unix, and I gather it works on Windows; evidently it doesn’t work on MacOS X. "Remember, with great power outages come great responsibility outages."

Aardvark lets you interactively delete things from the page you’re looking at (or alternatively, select an element and delete everything else). It’s especially useful when you’re printing, because you can print out that one recipe that’s in the middle of a long string of comments, or print out the map and directions to the hotel without including the hotel’s banner, navigation sidebar, and list of reviews. Presumably you could also remove that one wide image that’s messing up your whole Friends page, although I haven’t had to try that since I installed it. It’s also useful for web developers or HTML/CSS geeks to see the structure of pages they’re looking at.

This Daily Kos entry about the inclusion of incentives for bicycling in the stimulus package is kind of interesting, although we are talking about pretty small numbers.

The Boston Sunday Globe did an article on the live radio drama show I’m in, with a picture of me and lediva. The print version also has a picture of plumtreeblossom’s hands making door creaks, and her housemate vanguardcdk (the house manager) is quoted. Yay! I bet we sell several of the nights.

Hi! I had a fabulous weekend, involving dinner, good conversation, and Reefer Madness: The Musical with eisa on Saturday, and then a date with plumtreeblossom that started with a three-course dinner on Sunday, and continued with a trip to the Topsfield Fair on the holiday Monday. We had a fabulous time eating fair food, riding the Ferris wheel, eating fair food, petting the bunnies, eating fair food, browsing the fair museum, eating fair food, checking out the cattle and newborn baby piglets and raptors, eating fair food, seeing the giant pumpkin (1400 pounds!), eating fair food, petting and feeding critters at the petting zoo, and eating fair food. And plumtreeblossom rode an elephant and I got pictures of her on it! And I got pictures of a kangaroo and a camel and the raptors and piglets and lots of other nifty things. And the food was good. I had a wonderful weekend. I love my darling and love doing simple outdoorsy stuff with her, and it was wonderful to see eisa and get caught up a bit, and I got some nice relaxing time with cathijosephine in there, too.

Oh, I also slept about twelve hours Saturday night! This means I did not get as much done on Sunday as I might have liked, but I seem to have needed the sleep; I felt great during that fraction of Sunday that I was awake for.

Also, I've gotten through selecting and commenting the first (and largest and best) batch of my Montréal photos: the animal photos I took at the Biodôme de Montréal. Some of them are pretty nifty, and this is the sort of thing my new camera is wonderful for (and why I wanted it). You can see them in this Flickr photoset. I will be posting a few more Montréal photos at some point, but I really went overboard in the Biodôme.

Of course, I also hope to post my Topsfield photos soon. Amusingly, both the Biodôme and the fair had ring-tailed lemurs, so I got two opportunities to photograph ring-tailed lemurs in one month. The ones at the Biodôme had been pretty sedentary, but at the fair I saw a pretty impressive behaviour. They would be on the side of the cage and jump backwards to land onto a perch in the middle of the cage. It was nifty to watch, and I wish I had been able to get some video of it. They did a lot of jumping, but the backwards jumps were especially delightful.

PS — My weekend was so fabulous that I haven’t come close to catching up with LiveJournal, and probably won’t. If you posted something I should see, feel free to point me at it.

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).

Of possible interest to some of you: mono_poly and its associated Yahoo! group, intended as a support group for monogamous partners in open relationships (but open to poly folks, too). Some of the links on the community’s profile page are interesting, too.