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Sagittarius Horoscope for week of November 6, 2014

P. G. Wodehouse wrote more than 90 books, as well as numerous plays, musical comedies, and film scripts. When he died at age 93, he was working on another novel. He did not suffer from writer's block. And yet his process was far from effortless. He rarely churned out perfection on his first attempt. "I have never written a novel," he testified, "without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again." The way I see your immediate future, Sagittarius, is that you will be creating your own version of those 40,000 wrong words. And that's OK. It's not a problem. You can't get to the really good stuff without slogging through this practice run.

I didn't even think about NaNoWriMo this time around.  But my problem is that my long spans of quietude aren't long enough for actual work.  They come to crashing halts when the furnace fires up.

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Sagittarius Horoscope for week of February 20, 2013

The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Eighth Symphony in a mere two months during the summer of 1943. He worked on it in an old henhouse on a former chicken farm. The location helped relax him, allowing him to work with extra intensity. I wish you could find a retreat like that for yourself sometime soon, Sagittarius. I think you would benefit from going off by yourself to a sanctuary and having some nice long talks with your ancestors, the spirits of nature, and your deepest self. If that's not practical right now, what would be the next best thing you could do?

Some would say that Rather Manor is a good place to start if you want a creative retreat.  But I have found over the years that we tend to bring in a lot of our own noise without realizing it.  So I don't know what the answer is here.

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Barking canines. At about 2AM overnight, EVERY SINGLE ONE in a two or three mile radius had to go berzerk and howl or scream or belch or whatever.
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Errands today, came back, and...

We learn that Dad had all the local NPR pledge drive gibber he could endure, so he switched the radio in the living room to a commercial Top-40 station for the afternoon.

Now, I probably have the most open mind about music of anybody in the house.

But ninety minutes of autotuned rubbish is all that I can stand. Music these days is nothing short of horrible.
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A list of the applications that I have BLOCKED from my Facebook account so far: ExpandRead more... ) There are probably more to come. There are some FB users I may just give up on because they never actually post anything, just play with the apps and be cute about it.
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...Every minute they spend watching is a minute they CAN'T spend running power tools.

Yes, if life only had a mute button option...
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So now, I've been back from vacation for a couple of days and life is settling back in its usual patterns. Granted, these patterns have been somewhat modified since the virus attack that hit my computer earlier this month.

I want to start writing again but I need more quietude from my surroundings first. I think I've figured out how I really want to finish Chillin' Out...but the idea of having to plow through the full version to chop it down to a printable length scares me.

Lately I've been updating my music collection. There is a lot of stuff I have acquired over the years that I don't understand...not that it's too hard to find the answers to my questions.
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*) I treated Moonshine to an oil change and lube, but the place where I got that no longer has a car wash. Just as well because snow is forecast for the weekend. Want to get Moonshine a new set of tires before my long-delayed trip to Florida in February or March.

*) The Jimmie Johnson cap I got is nice. The 21 shotgun shell salute, that wasn't so nice. And I could have lived the rest of my life without the surprise package inside the water heater.

*) I made pizza for dinner. No cake or dessert but I'm holding off on that till I see my brother and/or my other buddies.

Midnight...

Jan. 1st, 2009 12:50 am
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Was a slice of bread pizza in the oven and echoes from some town's very loud fireworks.

As the sound came about two minutes after the stroke, and sound travels at a mile every five seconds, it must have been from Morristown or Knoxville.

My green tea must be finshed brewing by now.
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An Earthquake Happened Near Here. It sounded like a very loud truck going past. I didn't feel it so much, but I was seated in a castered chair and if the earth moved I could have blamed the chair.
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Well, the title is over the top, but you get the idea.

I tried to link it, but recently on one of the radio programs I listen to, they interviewed one of the former members of the 1980s band Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Last night I downloaded one of the music videos they made from YouTube. I'm not going to bother embedding or linking to it here, for a number of reasons.

I forget whether I loved or hated Sigue Sigue Sputnik when they were "big" in the late 1980s. The two main songs that got play were "21st Century Boy" and "Love Missile F1-11"...and more on the music video channels than radio. "Love Missile" was included in the soundtrack of Ferris Bueller's Day Off--one of the first songs played in the film itself.

They came late to the Punk Party. Yes, they had the bondage leather and the mohawks and the angry snarls, but there was something missing--and something phony--about Sigue Sigue Sputnik. They were an example FOR a punk-rock band, for people who had precious little idea of what a punk-rock band was like. I guess Andy Warhol would have created something like Sigue Sigue Sputnik if he didn't have the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and The Cars to play around with first.

I have no idea how big they were in Britain or Europe, but they were bottom-feeders in America. I'm not sure if any of their stuff broke into the Billboard Top 40 pop charts.

But this isn't meant to be a slam. Just a note of a milestone I went through culturally. Just something I saw again in a way that I could examine it more closely...finding mold marks where I thought I saw the gleam of gold.

FP
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News is this week that the Navy Department has dubbed the upcoming aircraft carrier, currently only a collection of drawings and designated CVN-78, the USS Gerald R. Ford.

This act is making a large number of Navy veterans angry, especially veterans who served on the carrier USS America, which was scuttled in the Atlantic some time ago as part of a munitions test program. They wanted the new ship, which is also the lead ship of a new class (replacing the Nimitz-class), named America to honor the previous one. Frankly, I see their point. The new class will be the most powerful and advanced surface ship ever put to sea by any navy. Why should Ford get the honor of having this ship named after him? Just because he died at the right time?

FP

Fans

Jul. 4th, 2006 08:18 pm
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Hey.

As some (if not most) of you know, inside the CPU case of a computer is two electric fans, one for the motherboard's chip and one for everything else.

As my computer is sitting atop my desk, and is open on all four sides, my thinking was that it got adequate air circulation, so I originally disconnected the everything-else fan because the two fans together are just too noisy.

Today I re-connected the everything-else fan for summer, and I'm trying to get used to it. Man, I wish these things were quieter.

FP
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An F-18 has been cutting circles over our neighborhood this afternoon. Naval Reserve on maneuvers?

I remember, some months after I moved here, I saw a pair of F-16s making simulated strike approaches at Morristown, which was perhaps chosen for its likely resemblance to Sarajevo or Belgrade. (Andrei Codrescu voiced a similar complaint that New Orleanians had for when Army helicopters maneuvered around there, using the Easy as a stand-in for Bagdad.)

The only thing I could see being quasi-bombed around here would be the mine at New Market.

If there are any Iranians reading this--stay out of the hills.

FP

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Stephen R Bierce

March 2022

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