We'll limp along for a bit longer, but WordPress is looking better and better.

Update: This feed is now at http://www.dustbury.com/feed

For some incredibly-stupid reason, I decided to try to update Movable Type from 3.21 all the way up to 4.21 on 6 September 2008. It took four hours, and not everything is in place just yet: the comments popup doesn't work, for one thing. (It may never work again; they said they were dropping support for it, and while I'm looking for a workaround, there's a limit to how much I'm willing to put up with just to retain a feature.)

Also, until further notice, any comments that do come in will have to sit in the moderation queue until I have that rearranged to my liking.

But it's late and I need some sleep and I'm not going to work on this mess any further until I get some. Sleep, I mean.

Har. But his answer is priceless:

[O]n the one of the hands, you wish to give yourself the making over so as to seem more fashionable, while on the other of the hands you do not want to lose that refreshing American naturalness which others recognize as the heart of your charm.

In the other words, how to be more Catherine Deneuve without sinking your Molly Brown.

How to pull off this transformation? The Manolo recommends Karolina by Kate Spade, a classic black-patent pump (you can also get it in grey or black satin) with a lowish throat and a 3½-inch heel. At $259, you might not want to wear these while field-dressing moose, but once in a while, the all-American girl ought to try on some Italian shoes.

I'm just jealous that she sleeps for 8 (or 10) hours.

I should point out here that even doing the shower in the morning, I can still get out of the house in 30-35 minutes, and that when my accumulated grossness exceeds a certain threshold, I'll do one in the evening in addition to one in the morning: today's session was the 9th of the week.

I know one, I think. I'm not absolutely sure; I seem to recall that she mentioned this at one time or another. It's not like I ever saw her do it or anything.

"I've never seen an inning like that," opined Oriole manager Dave Trembley

Then Thursday evening presented me with 75-degree weather and a front lawn that had grown rather a lot in six days, so I decided to risk it. The results were Not Awful, and gleeful at the prospect of not having to do any of this stuff on a Saturday, I finished my ten-hour work day Friday and attacked the back yard, which is way larger.

Sore, though not especially tired, I betook myself to bed about a quarter to ten, and stayed there eleven and a half hours. And judging by the condition of the bed this morning, it was a rough night indeed. No fewer than three narratives were played out in dreams:

• Cher, of all people, had consented to appear in an online centerfold, on the condition that the photo be impossible to reproduce elsewhere on the Net. I was attempting to do exactly that, and failing: the handy Save As command didn't work, since the filename kept changing randomly, and none of my graphics tools could get a grip on the file.

• I was attending a session at a Guatemalan bingo hall, hosted by someone who looked a lot like Wink Martindale. I had no problem with the processional, during which we were blindfolded; however, those who wanted a place in the competition area were asked to surrender their shoes temporarily, and I never got mine back for some reason. While searching in the coat-check room, I managed to pull down a set of blinds, and discovered some very un-Bingo-like materials: I've played this game before, and no one has ever called out "C-4."

• A desperately-ill child has undergone an amazing synthesis: the body was allowed to die, and the consciousness was somehow uploaded into a device the size of a Treo. Which wouldn't be a problem, exactly, except that someone has infected the poor kid with some sort of virus, and Venomous Kate and I are searching the backwoods of northern Missouri for clues to the identity of the perpretrator.
  

Note to self: Take fewer drugs.

(Linked to this.)

It's about 180 miles from Sulphur (Springs), Oklahoma to Sulphur Springs, Texas. (Me, I'd probably get lost around Denison.)

Meanwhile, here's Lesley Gore in a Vandella-esque groove, making a similar point:

Actually, I threw this in for the benefit of the poor shlub who spent part of last week trying to find my IQ.

But:

I can believe (1); I'm not buying (2). (She's younger than I am, and not by a smidgen either.)

Time to dig out Gilbert Kaplan's recording of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. And who is Gilbert Kaplan?

If that sounds like an odd change of careers, it's a highly-specific one: Kaplan conducts Mahler's Resurrection. That's what he does. He's recorded it twice. He's written extensively about it, and about the composer. He owns the autograph of Mahler's original score and has published a facsimile thereof. And he did none of this stuff in his twenties or even in his thirties.

Still, I can't argue with this:

Yea, verily.

For some reason this made me think of a Robert A. Heinlein observation:

Please note that these particulars apply equally on both sides of the gender divide and everywhere in between.

She's got suggestions for twenty-three storms, which should be enough for a whole year. (I'm assuming that "Moxie Crimefighter," for example, counts as one.)

[I mentioned that here.]

This is approximately where I say "Why didn't I think of this?"

And you have to admire the preparations:

I have faith that she will prevail. (Besides, she's got seniority, even over the likes of me.)

And I may not get this one, either:

Come up with a slot that holds a HotPocket and we'll talk.

(Via Belhoste.)

I suppose this is an improvement over the Bad Old Days, when chart positioning was based on sales, airplay, promotional cash and the phases of the moon, but I'm finding it difficult to be impressed by 240,000 sales; Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon moves that many copies every six months, and it's thirty-five years old fercrissake.

(Via Fark. Disclosure: There are a couple of Slipknot tracks I can actually stand.)

The one that's always worked for me is "You look at something — anything — on your dinner plate, and wonder what it would be like deep-fried."

Send him some responses. He's actually going to give away some Tulsa State Fair passes.

And, well, I promised myself I wouldn't say "Meh."

And a lot of applied CSS might actually clean up this site, though I'm not holding my breath. Besides, the existing stylesheet is already 7274 bytes, and it applies only to blogstuff; all the other subsections have their own declarations and decorations and whatnot.

The brain activity being influenced, apparently, is the distribution of receptors for the peptide hormone vasopressin, which mostly regulates water retention but which seems to have some connection to aggression.

I know I get peeved if I'm retaining water. But seriously:

I'm guessing I have this thing woven through the entire freaking helix. Not that anyone is likely to let me get away with "But it's genetic!" as an excuse.

(Seen here.)

This is very good, but it omits one semi-crucial detail: when you take the tire in for repair, they're going to see that you used a can of that two-dollar goop, and they're going to warn you never to use it again. I don't know if it's really bad for the tire, but the guys who work on tires revile the stuff, probably because they have to scrape sticky goop off the inside before they can do a proper fix.

Last flat I had, alas, the implement of destruction got screwed right through the sidewall: not fixable at all.

Disclosure: I have an actual full-sized spare, which apparently is unheard of these days.

I'm perhaps not as white as all that — got Mexicans and Syrian/Lebanese on one branch of the family tree — but I have no qualms about admitting here that I have, at best, a moderate understanding of classical music, and by "moderate" I mean "less than Lynn" or "less than Dr. Weevil" or "less than Steph Waller." And I don't fear discussion of the topic with any of them, or with anyone else on a similar level, if only because I stand to learn something in the process.

This commentary on Satie, though, is golden:

I figured there are two ways I can drop Satie's name:

• by mentioning Blood, Sweat & Tears, who, on the first post-Al Kooper album, did a couple of bits from Trois gymnopédies, which mostly reminded me how much I dislike quasi-orchestral transcriptions of piano works;

• by quoting a story about him told by Meredith Willson, about a dustup between Satie and Debussy: supposedly, they were attending a performance of La mer, and during the first movement, "De l'aube à midi sur la mer" — "Dawn to noon on the sea" — Satie is supposed to have said to Debussy something to the effect of "I really like that part in there about a quarter to twelve." Debussy, in return, turned his dudgeon up to 11.
  

Neither of these tales, of course, will accord me any concert-hall credibility.

Then again, we had database issues almost exactly two years ago, which resulted in having to scrap the entire structure. I hope I don't have to go through that again.

Addendum: Working in the database alone is fairly speedy; it's just the writes to the actual Web pages that take up major minutes. (No, they're not on the same machine.) Pingwise, they're equidistant from here, but perhaps they're a long way from each other in the host network.

And Reed went places, too, especially after Elvis picked up on his "Guitar Man" and "U. S. Male." He had a solo hit in 1970 with a Cajun tale called "Amos Moses," followed in 1972 by "When You're Hot, You're Hot." Occasional appearances on Glen Campbell's TV show got Reed a reading for Cledus "Snowman" Snow in Smokey and the Bandit, and thenceforth he mixed picking, songwriting and acting in whatever quantities happened to be coming along.

It was emphysema that got him yesterday, and therefore I've decided to remember the man with a spin of "Another Puff", which flopped midchart in 1971. No one ever had so much fun talking about something that was going to kill him.