Barkerburgh

I give you Warp Factor Love.

Kittens, hearts and rainbows, my friends. Kittens, hearts and rainbows.

That’s Fremen for ‘I am profoundly moved’ (which is what the bookstore should have been named instead of that mournful Brooklynese near-homophone of my surname…).

Google is experiencing server errors, both the search engine and Gmail.

It’s been so dependable in the past. This is like when my grandfather, an endless, bountiful fount of shiny new quarters straight from the bank and Scotch mints, got too senile to even remember he had grandchildren.

Kull wahad.

Oh!

Luisa is part ancient Roman, part pre-Indo-European Italian aboriginal (maybe related to the Basques), probably part Classical Greek (ancient pre-Roman colonies at Naples, Taranto and Cumae, for example), maybe part Etruscan (it’s a short hike) , possibly part Saracen (invasions), possibly part Norman French (more invasions), perhaps Spanish (even more invasions). She might have the blood of immigrants, slaves or merchants from all over the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or possibly, just possibly, Phoenicians or Egyptians out exploring for lands or trade opportunities far past the edge of their worlds when Greece and Rome were nothing and nobody.

(Of course, that means her two boys are half all that too, plus half of whatever their fathers have going.)

Well, she’s going back to one of the ancestral homelands for a visit, the central Italian province of Isernia, and the municipality of Macchiagodena.

This is a bit about Macchiagodena, the burg her parents come from, actually a village outside Macchiagodena with the mysteriously delightful name (for an Italian mountain village), Incoronata.

This is the Google map of Italy focussed on the latitude and longitude of Macchiagodena, (because Google Maps couldn’t find it otherwise.) You can zoom in on the mountains and countryside. It must be beautiful to be parallel to it at ground level, instead of perpendicular. I’m sure Luisa will get plenty of pictures for us.

Have a safe trip, dear friend. Bring me back a rock (even a pebble) of geographical and historical significance.

Just saw this on Plastic: “The English got rid of all their pesky intellectuals by sending them to Canada, their criminals by sending them to Australia, and their religious fanatics by sending them to America. ”

‘Nuff said.

today i am this many 1111111111 1111111111 1111111111 1111111111 11111111

thats a lot

before i was only 1111111111 1111111111 1111111111 1111111111 1111111

that was a lot too but now i am more

1) Battlestar Galactica season finale : Very good! Clarified some things, opened new boxes, shot a commander.

2) Doctor Who, second episode: Very nice. Excellent story, very Who-y. Spot on Michael Jackson reference.

3) Sunday dinner at Reid and Luisa’s. Mmmm. Barbecue. Reid thinks Commander Adama’s first name should be Lorne. I agree. Ronnie can play Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious on the piano. I can’t even spell it. Can’t spell Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis either. Betcha Ronnie can’t play it. =;]

4) Corner Gas episodes: baseball, corn, Brent broke. Larf and a harf!

5) CNN, the Catholic News Network: felt guilty for hoping something ‘newsworthy’ would happen in the US to get the Pope funeral coverage off the air (”Yes, Miles, I can confirm our source inside the conclave, if you will, tells us the Pope is still dead, I say the Pope is still dead. Miles?”) Then Charles and Camilla got married. CNN replayed both events in their entirety. WTF? Oh, and Lou Dobbs is an opportunistic racist and Nancy Grace is trash.

You may have noticed that I have added a Parallel Blogs link to Creford Wong’s cutegd.com. He works in Shenzhen, China as a web designer.

He left a comment on my post about seeing The Incredibles and kindly included his own URL, which I checked out.

This is what I love about the internet. Twenty years ago the chances of my finding out about some guy in China would be slim, and even if I got his mail by mistake, I still wouldn’t know as much about him, his work, and Guangdong as I do now.

Very cool.

Okay, so I have IM accounts for AIM and ICQ, two main email accounts, orkut, this blog, this and others’ blog comments, et cetera. Et cetera includes but is not limited to, real-time telephony, telephony facilitated voice messaging, SMS text messaging, and further et cetera.

Here’s the thing. When I want to communicate something to someone, for example remind Reid to look for MS Project, how do I do it, id est, which method do I use? What social priority or weight is given to each one, by me or by him? After all, in communicating with him, his perception of the message and his attitude towards the medium or sub-medium should be taken into consideration.

How public is the communication going to be? Does it matter if it is public? And if it does matter, then how private should it be?

Do I want the communication to remain on file somewhere, or is an ephemeral flash in the virtual aether enough?

Is talking about a specific message in a universally accessible forum acceptable?

Aw, screw it. He’ll probably just read this anyway. Hey, Reid, howzabout that MS Project there, buddy. And my best to the family.

Seriously, Dude! Ouch!

My young friend Michael broke his leg last week while skiing, just a few days before the family was due to go away for a week in the Dominican Republic.

He’s thirteen, so you can imagine what’s going on in his head : guilt, recrimination, probably feeling a little bit of a whole lotta stupid. Maybe us grownups can tell him not to fret himself, but it’s only natural. Poor guy.

His right leg’s in a cast from his toes right up to his hip, I think. He got to choose the colour and glow-in-the-dark was an option, so that’s what he got.

I’ll tell ya, I felt pretty useless when I visited him on Saturday, which is probably nothing to how Reid and Luisa feel, and his father, Steve. Michael’s pretty much confined to the living room couch because he can barely get around and only then with help. He’s putting on a brave face - we played Space Munchkin - but there were times when the pain was bothering him.

I’ve known this guy since he was four - both him and his nine year old brother are cool kids. Which says a lot for the parenting.

Anyhoo, long story short, I feel terrible because a friend is injured and I can’t do much about it, but I can’t begin to imagine how his family actually feels.

And then Debbie Ohi goes and breaks her tharibular runulus (on the armal appendage somewhere…I think), just when she was recovering from punishing tendinitis. She’s a web-goddess and a writer, fiction and non, and basically makes her living with her keyboard. She’s got ViaVoice, but she prefers hands on.

I’m sure she’ll be fine but it must be terribly frustrating for her to have this happen right now, just when she was recovering.

Get well better, Debbie!

And Michael!