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

If you observe these signs, please let me know!

1. I use IM mostly to chat with FeedBot.
2. I read more blogs in rss than John Scoble does. (The Scobleizer claims he reads 618.)
3. I tack “-ster” onto names to show approval–e.g. calling my colleagues “The Scottster and “The Rafester.”
4. At parties, I make notes on cocktail napkins of words I want to do Feedster search on later.
5. I talk, with a straight face, about Bookmarklets and Drill Me.”
6. In IRC, I also hang out with Feedbot.
7. I try to find my lost car keys with indexed search.
8. I start giving “normal” friends nicknames like “The Davester“–or calling my favorite candidate “The Deanster.”
9. I go Christmas shopping and come home with presents for Feedbot.
10. Even my kids refer to me as “The Bets-ter.”

I remember my mom, age 80, telling me, “I look in the mirror and I think, who’s that old woman?”

I don’t know what my mom’s “real” image really looked like. I do know the person who lives behind my eyes–she’s still somewhere in between 10 and 13. She’s somebody who lives happily in her body, but expects you mostly care about her ideas and her jokes.

Yep, that’s me up in that apple tree.

And how about you? What do you really look like, inside your head? Give me a comment and post a link to “your” picture, okay?

Oh, the things we do for, er, love.

I myself remember when I was 14 or so, and very smitten with an “older man” of 18, trying to make myself desirable by dipping the ends of all ten fingers in a teacup full of perfume. Yes, I poured several different perfumes into a cup and dabbled my fingers around in it thinking, “What am I doing? This is so stupid!” But even so I was smiling….

He never looked twice at me, though he must have wondered about the perfume smell–don’t you think? And yet, even remembering it, I’m smiling.

So I’m not surprised by this official news–sex is good for you!*

I’m still hoping for similar news about chocolate and whiskey….

* That is, sex is good for you if you’re an affectionate, grown-up human being. If you are a penis-fencing flatworm (ouch!), it’s bad news to be a female. On the other hand, when redback spiders have sex, it looks to me as if the pleasure’s all hers.

(Thanks to Amity Wilczek and the Harvard sex tutorial for exotic links.)

No, not Rush Limbaugh, and not Andrew Orlowski–there’s an actual giant plastic Colossal Colon headed our way.

Big Blogger Dave Barry (I guess he’s famous for writing some other stuff too) crawled through the colon when it was in Miami. And if local bloggers want to meet up in Copley Square sometime between October 15 and 18, let’s do the same.

But let’s do lunch first–we might not feel like it later.

Q: How does Snoop Dogg wash his clothes?
A: With ble-ach!

This joke got peals of laughter from my kids and a meta-kid at lunch yesterday–I just looked blank, which made the joke more sweet.

They kindly explained: Snoop Dogg is a musician, famous these days for creating his own mini-language. For example, when he says “Be-ach” (a lot), he means the word Barbara Bush euphemized as “something that rhymes with witch.”

Another Snoop-Dogg-language feature is using “izzle.” You can stick izzle in the middle of any word–the example I got was that “Holyoke Center” becomes “Holy-izzle-oke Centrizzle.”

An expert can substitute “izzle” for most of most of a word–“Fa shizzle” in Snoop-Dogg language means “For sure.”

I was impressed and jealous that all three kids could perfectly speak and understand Snizzle Dizzle–while I had to think it out slowly, word by word.

Back in my bubble-gum days, we “fooled” our parents with “ig-Pay atin-Lay.” Many years later–our parents were too smart to tell us–we found out Pig Latin had been our parents’ private kid-language too.

Kids now are too smart to make that same mistake. Son of a bee-ach–it doesn’t seem fair, fa shizzle.

MARY SHELLEY is to be commemorated by a blue English Heritage plaque on the London house where she died — an honour proposed in 1975 but resisted by the vicar who then lived there. He objected to the words “author of _Frankenstein_”, presumably for fear of crowds of peasants with torches, and felt that “author(ess) and wife of the poet'” would suffice.

from this month’s Ansible is Dave Langford’s wonderful British sf/fan newsletter

I have some sympathy with the vicar, because we lived for years in the Princeton house once owned by Albert Einstein. Einstein was adamant he didn’t want the house to be a museum–and it wasn’t–which didn’t stop tourists from ringing the front doorbell.

The most persistent in wanting to come in anyway were the Germans. In less charitable moments, I thought about pointing out that Einstein would happily have grown old in Germany if their ancestors hadn’t pitched him out on his ear.

I never thought of the English vicar’s solution–“Here lived an author, the husband to two Mrs. Einsteins.”

Gollum’s rap video has disappeared, though his Oscar acceptance speech is still available.

Now, the trailer for Return of the King is online in a 9M version, with a 19M version rumored to come out later today at LordOfTheRings.net

I really enjoyed the frame-by-frame analysis, but if you’re that geeky, you’ve probably already seen it. OTOH, if you’re that geeky, you’ll be desperate for any distraction between now and December 17…

I just acquired a new Flash cartoon addiction: Homestar Runner’s cyber-villain Strong Bad.

It could happen to you–one minute you’re watching him draw a dragon–the next, you’re terrorizing helpless peasants with Trogdor the Burninator.

You want to know how addictive Strong Bad is? You’ll even want to watch him clean out his inbox.

Wake up call from the shrinks–now they can figure us out from the way we sleep?

I was happy to learn, from early reports, that my sleeping position is unusual and shows (preen, preen) I’m “gregarious and brash.”

Then I read the story in its BBC original:

Freefall (7%): Lying on your front with your hands around the pillow, and your head turned to one side. Often gregarious and brash people, but can be nervy and thin-skinned underneath, and don’t like criticism, or extreme situations.

Now, just a minute there–“nervy and thin-skinned”? That sounds almost like some kind of criticism….