I’ve been majorly neglecting my poor weblog recently. After a busy start to a new semester, I’ve finally had time to start reading Gore Vidal’s latest, The Golden Age, which was thoughtfully sent to me via my Amazon.com wishlist by regular reader Chris — and I am completely engrossed.

I was never a fan of history classes all through school and college because I found the subject dry and uninvolving — with the single exception of a “Modern Europe” class I took at DePauw in which we spent the semester reading 10 literary novels (including Candide and Frankenstein) and extracting the history from them. Gore Vidal goes one step further and places his fictional characters smack dab in the middle of important historical events. Sure, some literary license is taken with historical fact, but I’m learning more about the historical period than I did before (most of what I know about history (the Declaration of Independance, for example) comes from the musicals (1776). I never would have read all the way through Candide without falling asleep if I weren’t so intimately familiar with the opera).

Vidal’s novel reminds me somewhat of the recent Cradle Will Rock, which artfully fused the genesis of Marc Blitstein’s musical with the surrounding political times — Vidal alludes to the genesis of the Latouche/Moss musical The Golden Apple (the original reason I wanted to read this book, though I haven’t reached that section yet).

Speaking of The Golden Apple, Amazon has finally shipped my copy of the John Latouche tribute, Taking a Chance of Love, which I ordered back in November. A witty lyricist I’m only familiar with through his work on The Golden Apple and Candide, this recording of a recent Off-Broadway revue has been getting high praise and I’m looking foward to finally being able to hear it.

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At first I was upset that my website was down most of the day. Then, I discovered that my domain service (mydomain.com) was causing even bigger problems — and just when I was about to compliment them for improving their service… (via Mr. Barrett).

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How to manage your site with Blogger, XML, and PHP. Yeah, something I just whipped up in my spare time.

Hopefully it’ll work for the people who try it — it’s powering Web Queeries now (and hopefully Paul won’t mind that I based it on — i.e. plagiarized — his Blogger/XML/ASP tutorial).

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After fighting a reoccuring cough for 3 weeks, I finally broke down and visited a doctor today. Because Kirksville is the birthplace of Osteopathic Medicine, there is only one M.D. in town — everyone else is a D.O. (and I’m suspicious of all that manipulation stuff they do). Fortunately, I was able to get an appointment the same day I called.

He couldn’t really find anything wrong with me (even with me sitting in front of him, hacking up my lung tissue), so he placed me on 2 strong pills, a liquid for nighttime, and a nasal inhaler. In case that doesn’t work in 10 days, he gave me a backup prescription for a bronchial inhaler. Then he gave me a 5 minute lecture on the importance of regular exercise and safe sex (both of which I wish I had more of in my life).

So hopefully I’ll be back up to speed soon. I start teaching a Web Workshop at our campus library for the freshmen class on Monday. I’m terribly behind on reconciling the budget for my bulding. And I’ve got tons of reading to do for the Queer Theory class I’m taking this semester. And there’s always this website to worry about.

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The third season of my favorite British copper show Touching Evil, starring the sexy sexy Robson Green, returns to PBS starting tonight.

As before, I’m intriqued by the different way that British series are constructed compared to American series.

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Web Queeries is down for the time being while I try to Blogger-XML/PHP-ize it (it may take a day or two).

I set up a samba server on my linux box tonight so that I can map my web files as a drive on my Windows PC (previously I used a hokey ftp program that tricked my PC into thinking a drive had been mapped). It took me far longer than it should have to get it working correctly, which is why I should never be the administrator of a machine-critical server.

I’m also getting really sick of the current design of this weblog. Hopefully I’ll have time soon to revamp – I’m thinking about readding the “hit” and “miss” ratings on each post.

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I’m one of this week’s 7 Deadly Sites. I still can’t imagine why anyone actually reads or enjoys my site, let alone want to feature it as a cool stop or on television.

Since I don’t think the reviews are archived, here’s the mention:

If you’re ever completely frustrated with searches on the web and find yourself losing faith in the Internet itself then console yourself with the fact you’re not alone. Everyone has on and off success with finding what they want and one angered American set up a site devoted to his searching results to express his frustration at this. What he was left with was a useful web surfing resource. Hit-or-miss.org got its name from the fact that searches can yield a hit or a miss result at any given time. So he lists his hits and his misses – a collection of randomly interesting site links – for the public’s benefit.

Yeah. Where do people come up with these descriptions of my site?

(BTW, Web Queeries was also recently featured in an article).

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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Library Man! Surely my old friend Chad can’t send me this picture and not expect me to post it on my weblog.

Ah, Library Man. I’m sure he is still the stuff of legends back at our grad school of Library Science.

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Those cool loft apartments in the Philips commericials? They’re actually an abandoned mental hospital in Capetown, South Africa.

The article also has a description of a new Philips TiVo commerical I haven’t seen yet – why doesn’t adcritic.com digitize the commercials I want to see and link? (like the recent funny Discover Card commericals).

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Welcome to ZOMBO.com. Turn up your speakers. Anything is possible at ZOMBO.com.

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