Spam is always a drag, but the last couple days I have been getting one subject line in my email that I find particularly unfortunate: "What a stupid face you have here Tracy."
It's really beginning to depress me. I don't need to hear those words in my head every time I look at my email. Time for a filter, I guess.
Maybe I should set up a robot to spam myself with junk email with headers like, "Tracy, you are amazing!" and "I love you Tracy."
"You are smart and pretty, Tracy"
"Your hair looks great today Tracy"
"Tracy, you are so right."
Stereoscopic Cameras
The Stereoscopic Lens cap
Loreo Stereo Camera (no longer being manufactured! What a shame!)
Garter Belts (I wear tall socks)
Bare Necessities
Sock Dreams
Button Makers
(I'm hoping to come across one at a thrift store now that I know what they look like)
Dramatic Tea (I just got a glass teapot at the Salvation Army)
Xian Kang
Blooming Flower
Teaposies
Rising Sun
Lily Basket
Golden Prosperity
Awakening Spirit
Jasmine Fairy Maidens
On our way home from Vermont recently, at a particularly commodious rest area, a flyer for Spiderwed Farm caught my eye. "Home of the 'original web site'", it boasted. Today I finally got around to checking it out.
"REAL SPIDER WEBS ARE HARVESTED -
collected by Will Knight. The colorless, fragile web of an orb-weaving spider called Araneidae is first brought to light by painting. It is then transferred by hand to a wooden plaque where it is protected with a fine furniture finish to assure a lifetime of enjoyment for all web lovers."
I bet these are kind of amazing in real life, too bad the pictures aren't a little better. I'm sure they don't do the work justice. I bet these are hard to dust.
This just came for me via registered mail to J & D's address in Portland. I have no idea what it is.
Last night, Erik and I went to River Gods for a nice dinner and to see Chris spin for his Tourfilter DJ night. We sat with some friends of his, one of whom was a pretty Brazilian woman. She and I made a little small talk and at one point she she said, "Has anyone ever told you that you look like Gwyneth Paltrow?"
I wonder why these statements so often start with "Has anyone ever told you that..." It's an interesting convention and I wonder how it got started.
This was, to my recollection, the first time that anyone has ever likened me to Ms. Paltrow, but I am often told by new acquaintances that I "look just like" someone else, usually someone they know personally, and only occasionally a celebrity. My theory is that all blondes look alike. Especially when the hair is long. There's just something about that shiny silky yellowness that impresses itself on a person's brain.
Generally, I don't like being compared to other people. It makes me feel a little, I don't know... oddly furious. I suppose I like to think of myself as incomparable. "No, I look nothing like your friend Mandy!! You are completely mistaken," I might be screaming behind my polite and only slightly disdainful smile.
I used to get Diane Keaton a lot when i was in college, because of her characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall. That's less of a blonde thing than a small-town gal in the big city stereotype.
When I was in High School I was often told that I was a perfect double for Lauralee Bell, who played the character Christine aka "Cricket" on The Young and the Restless. Cricket was supposed to be a model, but I never thought she was really very pretty, so I bristled at the comparison. After hearing this from so many strangers at the mall (the woman at Great Cuts who trimmed my hair, the salesgirl at Claire's who sold me my bangles), I would watch The Young and the Restless and try harder to think Cricket was pretty, but all I really managed was to feel sort of irked.
My favorite celebrity look-alike and the only one that hasn't in some way annoyed me, is Gerda Wegener, which I got from Kai. She makes the exception to the rule, because I can identify with her and admire her. I think she's someone I would have liked to party with and I think she's hot. Something about the obscurity of her fame and her quirkiness make her a palatable doppelganger. I've used a picture of her as an avatar on online communities so much that I sometimes forget that it isn't actually a picture of me. I'm not even sure she was blonde, so she also has the merit of not falling into the all blondes look alike paradigm.
So, to illustrate this post, here are pictures of me at my most airbrushed and glamourous (my high school senior picture) and all the celebrities anyone has ever told me I look like, as best I can remember.
I've never liked my name much because it is too common and rhymes too readily with "Spacy." When I went to France, my name became exotic and inpronouncable and that really helped bring me around to liking it better. Hardly anyone calls me Spacy, or Space anymore.
When I was little I had an imaginary friend named George.
My mother used to call me "Toad" sometimes.
When I was 12, I changed from Catholic school to public school. I spent the entire summer fantasizing about being in a whole school of people who had never met me. I cut my hair extremely short and decided that I would come up with a new nickname for myself. I compiled lists of cool names taken from soap operas. I didn't want to take a name directly from a soap, but it was good research into what sort of name could be hot. I wanted something that seemed like it could be a plausible nickname for Tracy, but something sexy and more gender-ambiguous.
I chose "Chase."
Of course it didn't work, mainly because I didn't have the balls to pull it off. The haircut was also possibly a mistake as schoolmates were genuinely confused by my gender ambiguity and people really don't feel comfortable (especially between the ages of 12-15) not being sure whether a person is male or female.
I survived all that and learned some interesting life lessons. Then in high school I had another, more successful, naming experience. My high school had a radio club and every week a local AM station handed the operations over to us for two and a half hours on Sunday morning. My segment was weird news and movie reviews and I gave myself an on-air name: Chuck.
The name Chuck was taken up by my fellow AV nerds and it spread from them to the debate club nerds and naturally from there to the drama club nerds until my favorite nerds all over the state of Iowa knew me as Chuck. I felt that I was the Queen of the Nerds, and I was. I was named Godess of the Debate Team two years running.
I left Chuck behind when I went to college, along with drama clubs and debate.
In 1995, Justine and I drove cross-country together. During the trip we took on pseudonyms and called each other by our chosen names for the entire adventure. She was Viva and I was Lola. (I had a bit of a Marlene Dietrich fixation at that time).
Derrick briefly tried to nickname me "Blanche," which I quite liked, but it really just could not compete with Spacy. Though both names are apt enough.
I just now discovered a beta community website I had not yet heard of: Squirl. I was looking for a picture of a dead bug.
The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society
Some gems:
Photographing air
Foreign Accent Syndrome
The Blind Photographer
Jim Bumgardner's Time Graphs
Animals in the Womb
Alternate Alphabets
The Automatic Mapper
Gallery of Scale Model cities
The Frog Museum
A Guide to Hyperbolic Space
Publis Aeolian Harps
Wonderfold Squares
Plaster Casts of Harvester Ants
Bigfoot Casts
Frozen Dandelions
Whew. I'm giddy.
There was an ice storm yesterday in Portland. Click on the video link at the top right of the story to see a very impressive lack of friction. Yikes!
It's amazing what you can do with a laser beam and a watermelon.
I've been on a lot of different social sites lately, most of them frequented mainly by middle schoolers. For some reason, this example of teen angst moved me.
Click "continue reading" to see a map of trucker slang for city names.
Who gives a fish? There is a Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish.
Aaarg. My weblog is being spammed by Viagra and other pharmaceutical vendors! The last five "comments" here were spam.
Bored Homestarrunner fans can now join an online community on Blurty. It's called Fhqwhgads. (Beware: sound.)
I don't have a link for this one, but I just wanted everyone to know that Elvis Presley's manger, the Colonel, was actually an illegal Dutch immigrant named Andreas van Kuijk.
Chris Marstall sent me this. It is FREAKING ME OUT!
What is the official Ohio State Rock song? (beware, plays automatically). Don't settle for knowing the capitals, learn these arcane state facts.