Warning: This video depicts scenes of pure, unadulterated human joy.

Side effects of viewing this video can include a lump in the throat, tears in the eyes, and an urge to hug total strangers. (Seattlites, watch to the end - we’re the finale!)

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)

Technorati Tags: Matthew Harding, joy

Working, writing, and werewolves

Sorry for the radio silence. I have a good excuse, though: I am on a roll with my novel. The muse took off at a run a few days ago, and now I’m spending most of my extra time catching up with her.

And when I’m not writing or working, I’m reading Lonely Werewolf Girl.

Martin Millar, where have you been all my life?

How can a book be 560 pages and still be too short? ¹ It was the same with The Good Fairies of New York, which is shorter but no less enchanting. I never want your books to end.

That’s good reading.

Technorati Tags: Martin Millar, writing, fantasy

1. I felt the same way about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which is 1,024 pages, and I hope its sequel, if there is one, is even longer. [↩]

All Men Are Liars

The other day I noticed that all of the blogs I read are written by women. Oh noes!

Lest I get completely out of touch with the souls of stem-people (other than the one I live with), I’ve been making a concerted effort to find quality blogs written by guys for inclusion in my digital library.

My standards are high, I admit, but then, it’s my valuable time and bandwidth we’re talking about here.

The writing’s gotta be above the tenth-grade level and the content reasonably informative and misogyny-free (or at least self-aware enough to admit it when he embraces his Inner Oppressor). Funny, while not a requirement, greatly increases the likelihood of a second date.

One of the few that have made the cut is All Men Are Liars by Sam de Brito. His blog is very good - well-written, insightful, and yes, funny - but it was this video that earned him my feed subscription.

Not a lot of straight guys from uber-macho Australia have the guts to see for themselves how the other half lives, especially when it involves a Brazilian bikini wax.

Technorati Tags: All Men Are Liars, Sam de Brito, blogging

On writing and the soul of murder

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Demon.

I read a funny article this morning by a writer who thinks of his resistance to creativity as Brenda, the earthy, red-lipped, fishnet-stocking-clad Anti-Muse.

Well, my anti-muse isn’t quite so much eye candy but she’s definitely from the same jar. I think of her Simone, Brenda’s darker, more neurotic distant cousin.

Simone has messy hair, wears too much black and smells of faintly of brimstone. She doesn’t smile much and thinks constantly.

She has been known to scare away my muse with a single, scathing glance.

Simone’s favorite past-time is engaging me in long, circular, unenlightening discussions about Art, Life, My Navel, and so on.

When she can’t appeal to my mind, she gets physical. Aren’t I hungry? Or, if I just ate, Wouldn’t tea be nice? Or Doesn’t a walk sound good? After all, I’ve been sitting here in this very same chair for at least five minutes. That can’t be good for my back.

And finally, when these things fail and I am dangerously close to writing, Simone sits down at the piano and plays a few bars of The Insecurity Rag. Pretty soon I’m perched beside her on the bench, warbling along like a gutless chanteuse.

One¹ would be tempted to say that Simone is not just an anti-muse, but truly a demon from the ninth circle of hell.

Which ain’t bad at all, according to Ray Bradbury, who’s made a career out of dancing with the devil.

If you must write of assassinations, rapes and Ophelia suicides, speak the speech, I pray thee, poetry in your breath, metaphors on your tongue. Remember how glad Iago was to think on Othello’s fall. How, with smiles, Hamlet prepared his uncle’s death.

Shakespeare and my Demon schooled me so: Be not afraid of happiness. It is often the soul of murder.²

Since my story has, in fact, assassinations, rapes, suicides and murder, I’d say Simone and I could be very happy there together.

Technorati Tags: Ray Bradbury, writing, creativity

1. OK, I. [↩]
2. From “My Demon, Not Afraid Of Happiness, in Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars, essays by Ray Bradbury. [↩]

Calling all Ribs: save the date!

Next Saturday, I’ll be contributing to the Take Back The Blog blogswarm, hosted by Bruce at Crablaw,

…in support of the rights of women to participate fully in all aspects of our society, including specifically online in the world of blogging but indeed everywhere and at all times, day and night, without fear of harassment, intimidation, sexual harassment, online stalking and slander, predation or violence of any sort.

Bruce, you are a righteous rib, as is Renee in Ohio and her kick-ass TBTB logo.

However, dear Readers, you may be a little distracted at this point by the peculiar term “blogswarm.”

A “blogswarm” is when a bunch of people blog about the same crap ON PURPOSE! It is a premeditated thing, as opposed to the usual randomness that tends to rule the Internet. Order from chaos. Entropy. Call it whatever you want.

I want to call it an attempt to herd cats, but an ingenious one.

Now that we have context, I invite you to resume contemplating the delicious uppityness of a global blogorama entirely devoted to giving the big, feminist fuck-you to sexist online cowards everywhere.

If you have a blog, I also encourage you to join me in this most excellent blog-in. It just takes an email to Bruce, some bandwidth, and a little bit of your own personal uppity.

See you then!

Technorati Tags: blogswarm, Crablaw, Take Back The Blog, sexual harassment, sexism, feminism

Honey, I have a headache….

… and you got the cure…

This Excedrin commercial nearly made me slip in my own drool and fly right off the treadmill.

Technorati Tags: Rusty Joiner, men we love

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

Today is Dr. Seuss’s birthday.

I knew that Dr. Seuss had died in 1991, but didn’t know March 2 was his birthday until I read it online today. At the mention of his name, my brain was flooded with whispered rhymes of cats and hats and foxes and sockses and green eggs and ham, Sam I am.

Like most people of my generation and beyond, Dr. Seuss’s poems are woven into the lyric of my childhood, as much a part of me as water.

According to an online bio, Dr. Seuss is largely responsible for kicking off post-industrial-era literacy. In response to a 1954 article in Life magazine that stated kids weren’t learning to read because their books were boring, Seuss wrote The Cat In The Hat:

This book was a tour de force—it retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Seuss’s earlier works, but because of its simplified vocabulary could be read by beginning readers.

Yeah yeah yeah — we kids know instinctively that Dr. Seuss was a genius.

Seuss’s poems are everything whimsical, quirky, funny and true. His illustrations are a child’s imagination made manifest. He just plain speaks Kid, and thus eternally and to all of us, no matter how much time goes by.

Technorati Tags: Dr. Seuss, children’s books, literacy