Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Pirates of the Caribbean will have two sequels, according to
ComingSoon.

And Rolling Stone Keith Richards (the non-cartoon half of Johnny Depp’s inspiration as Captain Jack Sparrow) will play Sparrow’s dad.

Shhhh–nobody tell Jack Valenti.

This just in from Xeni over at BoingBoing:

Ouch, Xeni, you’ve twisted my arm, I confess.

This whole “Betsy Devine” blog was a sham.

You say, people met so-called “Betsy” at BloggerCon? Wearing a badge with a red
ribbon that said Mom?

Ha ha ha! That was Dustin
Hoffman. And it was Dustin who threw the prosciutto at–well, just
check the tabloids to find out whose ass it was. Dustin can’t help
himself, he gets so into a
role.

But I knew that prosciutto meant the end was coming.

I heard about David Weinberger‘s
“meaningful look.”

My friends did
what they could to hush up the stories. Larry, Sergey, you’re just the best doggone pals … That whole Google IPO story? Just a smokescreen, thrown up to distract the media from my story.

But I knew–I KNEW–that  Gawker and BoingBoing would
find me…

Geeze, it’s really over?

How am I going to tell my husband and children?

It’s spring, and my kitchen counters are filling up with tiny cheap pots of plants I can’t resist–grape hyacinth, crumple-leafed primrose, tiny daffodils.

Today I went even wilder and brought home a huge handful of sweet peas. I love their rumply delicate look, their colors like spun-sugar candy or honeymoon nighties.

I never buy cut flowers, and I could have resisted these if they didn’t remind me so much of that poem:

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness…

Yes, these sweet peas are brought to you now by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)…and maybe, just a bit, by the month of April.

I don’t have an iMac tho I do have iTunes, iLife, iPhoto, and iEtc on my Powerbook. Thus I have some useful Mac iInformation about what happens when you lose electric iPower:

1. Your Mac laptop makes a good emergency flashlight. Its spooky glow will keep you from falling downstairs while you search for your actual flashlight, which is not in the first three places you thought you left it.
2. Your Mac desktop doesn’t really mind power failures. When the power comes back, you have to log in again but it won’t need the kind of tender smoochies and coddling that my Windows PC used to insist on.
3. You still can’t post to your blog during power failures–but your Airport comes back on when the power does and you can go right back to posting informative blog entries–just like this one!

One of the seductive, heartbreaking things about owning a pet is that they stay the same for so much longer than people. OK, so Marianne no longer looks like a ball of white fluff, punctuated by shiny black nose, pink tongue, white teeth (ouch!)

But when I look down to see who is dancing around my ankles every time I open the fridge, it is recognizably the same little dancing dog who has tried hard to trip me in many previous kitchens.

When Marianne arrived, my daughters were 7 and 14. Do you want to guess if they’ve changed in 15 years? Marianne stayed short–and her interest stayed focused on things I might drop on the floor.

A pet’s life is like a long, peaceful plateau where, for years and years, whatever else in your life changes, the pet stays the same. In fact, there are only 5 stages in a pet’s life:

1. Every morning, you are delighted: that cute little puppy is still there!
2. Every morning, you are delighted if that cute little puppy didn’t pee on something you care about.
3. Every morning, your dog is delighted, and treats you as if you had been away for 6 months and returned with an armload of dog biscuits and chew toys. [This is the stable state for owning a dog.]
4. Every morning, you are delighted if that dear old dog didn’t pee on something you care about.
5. Every morning, you are delighted: that dear old dog is still there.

Marianne, I regret to say, is now at stage 4.

Light spring snowfall today–special effects snow really, just enough
to make the world look pretty but not so much that you were in danger
of skidding. Car windows have just a tiny, brushable frosting. And on one parked car
I drove by, driving home tonight, someone had hugely printed the word
“PEnis.”

I had to smile, remembering my long ago fascination with the word
“uterus.” I must have looked it up in five dictionaries, and all of
them said about the same thing, “a sacklike organ where the fetus
grows”, and none of them gave me the tiniest little clue about why
conversations including the word “uterus” embarassed my mom so very
much.

At least my snowfall graffiti-ist has probably seen a penis, or has
some idea what one looks like. So he (or she) is way ahead of where I
was with “uterus.”

Patent laws were created for things made of wood and metal with maybe a pane of glass here or a leather hinge there.
How well do such laws apply to “things” made of ones and zeroes?

Big companies with good lawyers are eagerly “gaming” the patent and copyright laws. Google deals with the people who “game” their search results by revising to meet such attacks at the end of each month. I wish our government were half as vigilant.

Inspired by Joi Ito’s musing on vanity as a business model, I’m now at work on a new best business best seller: Seven Deadly Sins, One Hell of a Market.

Sample chapters:

Envy-based marketing

6540 Google results for “don’t be the last.”

Covetousness-based marketing

11,300 Google results for “dies with the most toys”

Anger-based marketing

254,000 Google results for Nader+president

Gluttony-based marketing

2,580,000 Google results for buy+delicious

Lust-based marketing

3,580,000 Google results for buy+sexy

>

Sloth-based marketing

5,520,000 results for buy+sleep

Vanity-based marketing

25,200,000 Google results for “blog”!

Linkage!

Movie clichés

For example, “All beds have a special L-shaped top sheet, which reaches up to armpit level on women but only to waist level on men.”

New Tasmanian photojournal I heard about from Frank Paynter

“You know the bluebells in Hagley Park? My father planted them,” says the author.

New issue of David Langford’s Ansible

Sci fi fandom–I love Thog’s Masterclass, whose examples of bad writing this month featured “perambulating buttocks.”

Beer, as you’ve never seen it before.

Beautiful microphotographs of beer–for example, the photo above is a slice of Molson Light.

Want even more linkage?

I just got finished my Monday writeup of a week in review for Feedster’s Feed of the Day.

Enjoy!

I’ll start by admitting I’ve often broken this one.

“Thou shalt not plan face-to-face meetings during winter months (i.e. months not June, July or August).”

(Thanks to Scott, who came down from the mountain with something similar.)