(no subject)

Laptop in HMS-IT sickbay with its backlight problems. This is the first internal problem I've had with the machine, and (given other behavioral clues culminating in this probloem) I would tend to lay the blame on its previous repair (for broken hinges) than its orginal manufacture. Unlike their white plastic iBrethren, these PowerBooks are tough duggers, in my experience.

(My parents used to say "duggers" a lot in this context when I was growing up, but to my knowledge I haven't heard them (or anyone else) say it since then. I guess I should say "duggas" given that I've only heard it spoken in their accent and therefore have no proof that it's spelled otherwise. Then again, their Downeastah accents weren't very strong when we all lived in Mass, as they had been outside of Maine for more than a couple of decades at that point, so maybe they actually did say "duggers".)

So, farting around on my work Windows box again. Have Debian on it (yes, nostalgic ADMers, I gave it the hostname thud), but I can't actually use it unless I can run WinMSIE on it, as that app is the primary acid test for any software I make here. I know this is possible, probably in any number of ways, so I'll probably just mumble an incantation to summon one of the Bearded Helper Grogs for this task.

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Didn't get much done this weekend. Went to a Snappy Dance show with cthulhia Saturday night, which was great fun. It featured "The Temperamental Wobble", their new Edward Gorey-inspired material. I found some of it kind of weak (the bit with the dancers pretending to be tombstones just doesn't work, imho) but the rest was brilliant. One piece hit the Gorey mystique jawdroppingly dead-on, where the dancing of black-shrouded figures in perfectly low lighting exactly evoked Gorey's silent, unnameable monstrosities, barely visible as they slouch through broad fields of ink. I also loved the non-thematic bits they opened with; my favorite of these was "Flip/Switch", which I've seen the same company do before. It's just a lot of people on stage at once, flowing back and forth to the tune of manic music and doing a lot of stuff simultaneously, chaotic while precisely timed.

Much of Sunday evening spent chatting about horrible 1960s/1970s Hanna Barbera cartoons with aspartaimee. (Dug up some fun links to show you but they're all at home, so, later.) Realizing that this is exactly what I saw Baby Boomers doing in their popular-media depictions, 20 years ago. Usually on things like Heineken TV ads, I guess. Anyway, pleased to find someone besides the Cartoon Network who has any recollection of these, which made up a significant portion of my childhood (mostly via rerun, viewed during the 1980s, largely via the USA Network's "Cartoon Express" show and countless idle afternoons locked up in a high tower on the seaside. (Seriously.)) I invoked the Herculoids during a HoRGN game of Boticelli not too long ago and nobody in that group of highly culturally literate folk knew what I was on about. Damn, people. Herculoids. Come on.