good morning. well, morning.

It’s 0432 and I haven’t slept. This is almost entirely my fault for the luxurious and gin-fueled nap I had too late in the day.

So of course I’ve been Wikipeding. I was looking at information about actors, because I remembered hyniof pointing out years ago that David Lynch cast the antagonists from West Side Story as antagonists in Twin Peaks, and sure enough it’s Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn.

This reminded me of Amber Tamblyn, and of a “literary magazine” I saw at the B&N recently. Don’t remember the name of the thing, but it was very glossy and hip. It billed itself as some kind of “community project” and the front matter was touchy-feely and sweet in a way that reminded me of eTarded ravers.

And among its writers was Ms. Tamblyn, who also considers herself a poet. She’s not.

Also, the magazine had a picture of an anonymous pretty girl on the cover, which isn’t typical for literary magazines. For a moment I thought about submitting a William Carlos Williams poem and seeing if they noticed, but snark is a lot of work sometimes so I just had a Fatburger and went home.

I also read a lot of pages about Tolkien stuff on the Wikipedia and was too tired to correct typos. This reminds me that back in the day when I was an L.A. music lizard, Exene of X had this husband post John who was a poet or something. He’d show up at clubs and I think I saw him read, not sure. He was sort of annoying but mildly, and he had an unforgettably Scandihoovian name. And then I forgot all about the guy until he popped up as Aragorn in the film version of The Lord of the Rings and suddenly that weird Viggo poet person from the club scene was the object of 15-year-old-girl lust and mountains of slashfic. Now that’s just plain strange.

Similarly it’s weird when I hear Gary Calamar on the radio because he managed this band who were friends of mine in my early 20s and kinda hung out with us and had been the manager of the Licorice Pizza record store where they’d all worked. So he was Gary, that nice guy who was always doing something or other musical, and now he’s some kind of media presence. I bet he’d write better poetry than Amber or Viggo, too.

Maybe I should try sleeping again! Let’s see how that works.

the “Nice Guy” thing, wankipedia edition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_guy_syndrome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Nice_guy_syndrome

The talk page isn’t quite what it could be. I was hoping for a real dust-up between self-diagnosed “nice guys” and the women who hate them, but it’s pretty tame.

At least the first few words are correct: “folk psychology” about covers it.

hay guys lets make r own sciense @ home by puling it out of our ases lol

Birthday Wikipedia “meme”: ZAMENHOF DAY!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_December

Selected Events:

1791 – The United States Bill of Rights becomes law when ratified by the Virginia legislature.

1961 – In Jerusalem, Adolph Eichmann is sentenced to death after being found guilty of 15 criminal charges, including charges of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and membership of an outlawed organization.

1994 – The web browser Netscape Navigator 1.0 is released.

Selected Birthdays:

37 – Nero, Roman Emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (d. 68)

1859 – L. L. Zamenhof, Russian initiator of Esperanto (d. 1917)

1923 – Freeman Dyson, English-born American physicist

1955 – Paul Simonon, British bassist (The Clash)

1964 – me!

Selected Deaths:

1890 – Sitting Bull, Sioux nation leader (b. circa 1831)

1944 – Glenn Miller, American musician (b. 1904)(probably – date of plane’s disappearance)

Apparently it’s the Roman holiday of Consualia, on which day the Rape of the Sabine Women took place. The holiday is all about THE GRAIN THAT IS UNDERGROUND AND HIDDEN AND PROTECTED. Fascinating stuff.

rumors on the internets: neurofeedback

I decided to do some armchair research on this thing I’m trying. First stop was wikipedia, where a neurofeedback article had been flagged as both “neutrality disputed” and “needs to be cleaned up since May 2005”. Uh oh. Sure enough, there are links to Scientology everywhere, and the tone of the article is not only dismissive but actively disparaging. Not very wikipedia. A link is provided to the talk page which is the usual ridiculous holy war involving pro- and anti-neurofeedback parties and of course Scientology.

It was depressing in that “Oh man, there goes that Internet Guy again” way. That guy in this case being njyoder, a talented and energetic troll who baits feminists and particularly rape awareness organizations.

The actual professional association seems to be pretty sane and know their limits.

New cures bring enthusiasm, messianic prose, The Solution To Everything, cranks, and naysayers. Looking around the web in a first-click way I see all of those in about ten minutes. From my point of view it’s worth a try, since it doesn’t seem likely to break my brain. At the worst I’ll lose $200 a week for a while and then get disgusted. Since I’m already disgusted, here we go.