> get lamp

I've been reading some of Montague Whitsel's stuff lately after coming across one of his books (The Fires of Yule: A Keltelven Guide for Celebrating the Winter Solstice - more later about that peculiar word "Keltelven") by chance in a Campbell bookstore a couple of weeks ago, and I'm having mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand he has some nice poetic ideas, but on the other he seems to be (consciously or not) presenting elements of the fictionalized/mythical history his own system has (see "Ross County, Pennsylvania, Imaginative Landscape of Montague Whitsel") as regular this-world fact, and I come away with a feeling of "I want to like this, really I do, but what the hell are you talking about???" ( Read more... )

Anyway. I don't really mean to harsh the man's spiritual buzz. There is definitely an interesting Something in what he's created. The everything-mixed-togetherness has an air of a personal poetic journey about it, something like The White Goddess, meant to be read with the heart and not taken too literally. In its own context it works fine. It's especially too bad that all the books written by his fictional characters are themselves fictional, because some of them sound fascinating. I would love to read them and take them on their own terms. But the articles on Isis often set my teeth on edge because they were presented much more as "fact" rather than being straightforward about where adaptation and sometimes fantasy (not that that's inherently bad) had taken place.

Cute. MetroFi has apparently decided that to connect you now must download and install an "MSN SideGuide", which from the tiny pictures I assume is where they want to place the ads (and take up sizable screen real-estate to do it, I might add; it seems bigger than the banner across the top was). I guess they got wise that people were blocking their JavaScript-inserted ones. Heaven only knows what tracking they would be doing with it. Also, XP SP2 and Vista only, so sorry, Dad, with your Win98 machine.

Yeah, well, you doods can forget that.

Ugh. The lack of broadband here is getting stupid. Sharing a dial-up account between three people is just not on (I know from experience). I know my internet appetites are stupidly huge, but my mother's and father's have grown as well, especially since my dad is trying to give up the newspaper (which he derides, rightly, as being mostly crap and advertising these days) by getting news online. I was so happy when we finally got MetroFi working over a year ago. Now we're pretty much down to satellite and that's only if we decide to get satellite TV, which is the kind of decision the wheels turn very slowly on in this household.

*sigh* I guess maybe we should buy a second dial-up account. Then at least two of us could be online at once, since we have two phone lines. Wow! $40 a month (between them) for 56k! That sounds so reasonable in this day and age!

CLICKY CLICKY CLICKY CLICKY CLICKY

AAAA OMG BEEYOTCH DITCH THE FAKE NAILS YOU ARE MAKING SO MUCH NOISE TYPING OVER THERE IT IS DRIVING ME BUGGY

Your completely-Flash-with-no-alternative website design sure is purty but it is IMPEDING MY ACCESS TO YOUR INFORMATION. Also, it means that not only can't I bookmark any one page within the site (you know, like, the one I actually want to return to later, not your language selection screen), but in fact Ctrl-D does not work at all, and I have to use the damn mouse to do so. QUIT ALTERING MY USER EXPERIENCE U JERKFACE.

Your completely-Flash-with-no-alternative website design sure is purty but it is IMPEDING MY ACCESS TO YOUR INFORMATION. Also, it means that not only can't I bookmark any one page within the site (you know, like, the one I actually want to return to later, not your language selection screen), but in fact Ctrl-D does not work at all, and I have to use the damn mouse to do so. QUIT ALTERING MY USER EXPERIENCE U JERKFACE.