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

How wonderful kitchens are, when we’re very small.

And sometimes, how terrible! I must have been three or four on that long-ago day when my mother got a big silver spoon caught in her cake-mixing beaters. We children had been watching her, hypnotized by the good kitchen smells and the hum of the mixer, patiently waiting for leftover batter to lick.

Suddenly–Whack! The spoon was pulled out of my mother’s hand and bent double by the beaters. The motor stopped droning and began to smoke. We looked at our mother. She looked at the beaters, tears came to her eyes, she was trying not to cry…. She didn’t like making mistakes–and she was still (from my point of view now) very, very young.

Of course, my sister and I began to cry at once, setting each other off to louder and louder wails. Then my mother started instead to laugh, so we both laughed too, and all three of us thought the whole thing was a wonderful joke.

This isn’t what I had planned to write about, but blogs can be like that….

Well, here’s my mom enjoying a happier moment, a few years before my earliest memory.

The illusion that we’re spying on “secret” kisses sells millions of movie tickets every year.

Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka has some great stuff to say about blogs and the borderlines of public, private, and secret:

In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate….

On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world.

This is why, incidentally, why people hate blogs so much. My God, people say, how can Livejournallers be so self-obsessed? Oh, Christ, is Xeni talking about LA art again? Why won’t they all shut up?

The answer why they won’t shut up is – they’re not talking to you. They’re talking in the private register of blogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public…They’re writing for friends who are interested in their hobbies and their life. Meanwhile, you’re standing fifty yards away with a sneer, a telephoto lens and a directional microphone. Who’s obsessed now?

Read the whole post, lots of great stuff, starting off with Foo camp and Andrew Orlowski–who can kiss mah grits –preferably in public.

I never realized before that teaching evolution in our schools has long been a secret project of Apple Computers.

My gosh, I’m going to throw out my Macs and get a PC, because now I know secret agenda of Apple–to quote just a few here–

• The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called… Darwin!
• Consider the name of the company and its logo: an apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent.
• [The BSD-Unix] OS — and its Darwin offspring — extensively use what are called “daemons”…. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these “daemons” on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism.
• Apple has just announced the “eMac”, a Macintosh computer designed specifically to smuggle Darwinism into our schools…it should be obvious to readers by now that it’s really a cryptic tipping of the hat to their true agenda: “Evolutionism”.
• One additional technique that I have noticed while perusing their new literature is the common cult tactic of indoctrination through a special insider language….For instance, an industry standard connection for peripherals is idiosyncratically retermed “FireWire” (or should we just be honest and call it “HellFireWire”?)

HellFireWire? Hey, give me the Blue Screen of Death!

Thanks to Colin Meiklejohn for sending me to this important information!

Blistex

xxx

(Thanks to Metafilter for the link.)

More identical letters signed with different names are hitting small-town papers around the country. All of them claim that the US occupation of Iraq has been an unqualified success.

Right-wingers claim it’s just a homegrown, amateur effort by low-level soldiers.

That’s not what the soldiers who signed say about these letters.

• “When I told him he wrote such a good letter, he said: ‘What letter?’ ” Timothy Deaconson said Friday, recalling the phone conversation he had with his son, Nick. (Gannett story)
• One soldier, who asked not to be identified, said he was reluctant to sign the letter because he did not agree with the comments in the letter but said he was ordered by a superior officer to sign. “When I’m given an order, I obey it,” he said.  (Capitol Hill Blue account)
• Sgt. Christopher Shelton, who signed a letter that ran in the Snohomish Herald, said Friday that his platoon sergeant had distributed the letter and asked soldiers for the names of their hometown newspapers. Soldiers were then told to sign the letter. (Capitol Hill Blue account)

An amateur effort or a slick PR job? Well, what does this sample sound like to you?

“We also have been instrumental in building a new police force. Kirkuk now has 1,700 police officers. The police are now, ethnically, a fair representation of the community as a whole. So far, we have spent more than $500,000 from the former Iraqi regime to repair each of the stations’ electricity and plumbing, to paint each station and make it a functional place for the police to work.”

To see the whole letter, just do a Google search on “I have been serving in Iraq for over five months now”.

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?

Another Photoshop toy* from Betsy’s subconscious: International Babe Magnet Frank Paynter.** I see him surrounded by glamorous bloggeresses. (If you saw the first Austin Powers movie, you know–these “girls” are far from pushovers. Each cute fluffy bra-cup conceals a machine gun! But with IBM Frank, one just wants to have fun.)

I got to know Frank because he interviewed me.
I’ve done interviews before, but Frank’s are amazing. He asks such friendly, surprising, intelligent questions–because he wants to get to know you and let you shine.

Some other personal favorite Frank Paynter interviews:+ Elaine of Kalilily, Jeneane Sessum, Halley, and most recently Shelley Powers who pointed out:

“…this isn’t a Frank Paynter interview if there isn’t sex in it in some way.”

And in conclusion, I’d like to thank Beth for sharing her IBM husband with the blogworld.

* No actual women were harmed while making this picture–all models accurately represent my own appearance and clothing at BloggerCon.
** My other favorite IBM Niek Hockx was too busy Nederlands shutterclogging to get to BloggerCon.
+ Frank also does great interviews with men, though that’s off my topic. If Frank wants to interview you, say “Yes, yes, yes, yes!”

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.)

In the picture above the God of Technical Innovation swoops in from stage right, bringing new possibilities for work and play to Technically Challenged Humanity.

Support for God has been provided by BloggerCon Angels including, left to right, Dave Winer, Chris Lydon, Dan Bricklin, and Bob Doyle.

Ready to take over when any gods get tired, the cool guy in a hot shirt is Feedster’s Scott Johnson.

I’d like to thank the Spirit of the Gift Economy,
Dan Bricklin for all the headshots and–er, excuse me, Michelangelo’s lawyers seem to have buzzed my cellphone…

Actual tech news from BloggerCon:

• Scott Johnson is prototyping a multi-blog feed that lets you look at, say, 5 candidate blogs in parallel.
• Erin Clerico (Weblogger) announced new virtual hosting for multiple blogs.
• Adam Curry–even cuter in person than his blog pix–created a Syncpod channel to put web audio into your iPod. He and Markserman–er, I mean, Kevin Marks–plan to do more with it.
• Chris Lydon and Bob Doyle just launched BlogRadio–check it out!

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.