Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I thought for a while before posting an Orson Scott Card quote. His hateful rants have twisted my fond memories of him and his novels. I decided this quote should be posted and remembered because of its truth.
Card’s political views, rants, novels, and this quote reveal the complexity of being a human being. We can be great but flawed. I admire Card’s skills, but his flaws sadden me. Like others celebrities I’ve seen exposed and other people despairing of finding ugly truths about people they admire, I try to separate their work and their life. But it’s a struggle; under the work that I enjoy, I can’t resist knowing the artists’ ugliness. Once known, it’s can’t be forgotten or ignored.
Flooflator (catfinition) – a person who can understand cats’ meows and translate them for others. It’s a difficult profession because cats each speak their own dialect, so they even rarely understand one another. Professional flooflators say that the key to understanding cats is to acquire a vocabulary of a few common core words and phrases, such as “feed me,” “let me out,” “let me in,” “treat,” “no,” and “catnip.”
In use: “After forty years of shared ownership of thirteen cats, he’d become a decent flooflator, sufficiently skilled that others called him the cat whisperer, which he dismissed that as an exaggeration.”
You ever see a photograph of yourself and scream in horror? “Oh my God, is that really how I look?”
In this case, the photo was on a website supporting a charity where I was a volunteer drone. It’s on the page where you order the tickets for this year’s event. I can imagine people seeing my photo and asking, “Alfred Hitchcock was there? I thought he was dead.”
Funny, but I never see myself like that in the mirror. Beauty is in the beholder’s eye, innit?
Have you ever looked back on something that happened and think, “Man, was I a shithead”? Best thing about knowing you were a shithead is that you can fight against letting the inner shithead come out. You know, apply lessons learned, and not be a shithead.
So, yeah, streaming this in my head: “You spin me right round, baby, right round.” That’s something to have going through your head.
I don’t know much about the group who performed it “You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)”. The song came out in 1985. I was traveling a lot in the military. Stationed in South Carolina in America, I traveled from Africa to America to Asia, and back again, dipping down to Florida and Louisiana, up to WV, PA, Illinois, and to New Jersey, and a few other places. When in Asia and America, we were mostly cut off from modern pop culture. This was by the military’s doing, as we were trying to blend in. No uniforms, tee shirts, jeans, ball caps, and sports shoes (or cowboy boots, buckles, and hats), because those were all considered indicators that we were ‘Mericans. Always travel in a group of three, but never more than five. And don’t take the same routes, or travel the same times every day.
Anyway, I ended up with spotty exposure to what was happening in America, with these gaps that were sometimes sixty days long. Sixty days in pop culture? Songs came and went in that period.
First time I saw the video is today. Have to laugh. This song is catchy, though, like electronic popcorn, with easy to learn lyrics, right? It’s stuck in my head today, so, hello? Take it off me, would you? Before I get spun right round again.
Michael Seidel, writer 