I slept an enormous amount last night. I ate a huge dinner and decided to lie down just for a minute around six o'clock, and woke up at ten. Then I stayed up until one, and woke again at 9:30. In the midst of all of this sleeping, I had a dream in which I catalogued all the kinds of writing I do — I couldn't think of a word to describe a writer of letters, so I labeled myself an "epistoleer." I like that.
It's the time of the month when I find it most interesting to examine my site statistics for referrer information and curious searches that brought visitors to somniloquy.org. Among the stranger referrers:
http://www2.doctorpills.com/cgi/click
http://www2.overweightsex.com/cgi/click
http://www2.xtremeasiansex.com/cgi/click
Do yourself a favor and don't follow these links — I presume they're an attempt to spam webmasters and the like. It's pretty ingenious — I mean, if you run a website and see that people are visiting from some adult site, wouldn't you just have to follow the link to make sure that your good name hasn't somehow been worked into Lolita porn?
I've been spending a fair deal of time hanging out in nanotechnology forums (fora?) and the like, mostly gathering info for a fiction project I'm working on. Lord knows what the strange nanotech people think when they come to this site.
And then, there's this:
c:/marigold/ssl/tpp/automated/instance_url/url_8.txt
It's (obviously) a file on someone's hard drive. I went to Google and searched for "c:/marigold/ssl" and pulled up a handful of sites, most of which appear to be either blogs or poetry-oriented (and generally better designed than somniloquy.org). Pretty interesting.
Best search strings this month (linked to the local search engine, in case you're curious):
the world is a good place and worth fighting for
seven sins according to gandhi
art made from garbage
dennis drake (who knows what our visitor thought when they came across this)
And among the more interesting new readers of the journal is Kean Soo, whose comic art skills kick my ass. Visit his site.
Some time ago, I put together a script to search all top 40 songs of the 1980s. It was part of a (since abandoned) research project to investigate Cold War references in 1980s pop music. Play around with it if you like, but please don't tell the whole world about it.
The search results display the song's release date, song title, artist name, best rank in the top 40 and number of weeks on the billboard. Click on the title to find the song's lyrics at lyricsearch.com.
Oh, I forgot — I had another odd "news" dream last night, in which I was perusing the web and reading CNN or some other news source. I distinctly remember an article about Colin Powell being taken hostage, and a degrading photo of Powell sitting in a chair in his military dress uniform and bound in black material (like torn curtains or bedsheets), electrical tape across his mouth. Strange.
Today's late breakfast/brunch thing was a quick kind of pan bagnat, which is a kind of French sandwich. You're supposed to make it with tuna and all sorts of goodies, but I made it with rosemary potatoes.
Basic recipe: thickly slice some red potatoes. Mince three or so cloves of garlic and sautee them in butter with a copious amount of rosemary. Next, add the potatoes and cook for a minute, then add beef stock, salt pepper and a pinch of thyme. Cover and simmer until potatoes are tender. You may wish to spend this time worrying over your Spanish homework, which you haven't touched (it's so much worse because you skipped Spanish Monday in order to prepare for a statistics test). You should have a good ten or fifteen minutes to agonize. When the potatoes are done, remove them from the skillet and reduce the stock under high heat. When the stock is down to a whisper, add a splash of white wine and deglaze the skillet, cooking until the whole mess is fairly thick.
Pause to check your email.
Take a loaf of French bread, cut it in half lengthwise, and scoop out some of its innards. Drizzle olive oil along the insides of the loaf, then spoon in the sauce from the skillet. Layer in the potatoes, fresh sliced tomato, lettuce or endive, and Swiss cheese. Wrap the sandwich and refrigerate for about an hour. You may wish to spend that hour agonizing some more over your Spanish homework, which you still haven't touched, you lazy bum. Remove the sandwich and cut it into slices. Munch away.
If you have a spare moment, make an entry in your journal about lunch, which is so much more interesting than that Spanish homework you're agonizing over. You big lazy bum.
