020: Cryogenics

Everybody in the house ran out to do errands today, when the high temperature was somewhere around eight degrees Fahrenheit.  Balmy!  It wasn't bad, so long as you remembered to wear your long johns and didn't take any walks longer than parking lot-to-building and vice versa.

Why venture out today?  Because tomorrow's outlook is somewhat more unsettling:

High of 1 degree. The overnight windchills are predicted between -25 and -40 degrees.

Part of me actually enjoys this godforsaken weather, in part because I love seeing the looks on the faces of non-Midwesterners when you tell them about this kind of windchill, and how 20 degrees above zero starts to feel positively springlike in late February.  The utter horror is worth it, every time.  Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely miserable and literally dangerous to venture out in temperatures that far below zero -- but once you've done it, you've earned bragging rights, and that's got to be worth something, right?

019: Dastardly evildoers

Villains!  Who doesn't love a really good bad guy?  There are characters we love, and then there are character we love to hate.  Sometimes the bad guys are more interesting and complex than the good guys; sometimes the good guys are so damn annoying that you start cheering for the bad guys (see: Claire Bennet, Heroes).  And occasionally the villain appears to reform, only to turn out even more malevolent than before.  But -- and this is important -- there has to be a reason the antagonist is villainous.  Bad just because is lazy, unless they're socio- and/or psychopathic.  And villains on television are great for the simple reason that they can come back again and again (until they get killed off).  In any case: a handful of my favorite TV baddies are under the cut.  Who would you pick?

018: Bleeping brilliant

I don't know how familiar you are with Tumblr, random blog reader, but it's basically the easiest blog platform out there.  The only reason I don't use it is that I've had this one for ages and neglected it, and I'm loath to sign up for yet another thing I'll end up abandoning for months at a time.  In any case, there is a phenomenon on Tumblr that, in an effort to be PG-rated, we'll call the "Eff"-Yeah! blogs.  Essentially a catch-all for a particular topic or fandom, it's usually one-stop shopping for your own peculiar obsession.

Below is a screen capture of my Google Reader subscriptions.  I may have a problem, I don't know.  (Warning: profanity ahoy.)

How sad?  So sad.

And I've also given the internet a peek into the odd assortment of men I find aesthetically pleasing.  You're welcome, Internet.  You're welcome.

017: Dreams

016: Super sidekicks

In the vein of the other day's my-favorite-sleuths blog, I thought I'd do a bit of a triptych: detectives, sidekicks, and villains.  It was harder to think of sidekicks than investigators -- I had trouble paring down my runners-up list on that one -- but you can find my attempt below the jump.  If you have other favorites, I'm eager to hear them!

015: And that's not nearly all

This song came up in shuffle last night and it's been stuck in my head ever since, so have a creepy music video this Saturday morning:


Of course, my favorite version will always be this one, from HBO's Generation Kill.

014: Gutsy gumshoes

I love my fictional crime-fighters.  I grew up watching Murder, She Wrote with my family on Sunday nights and Poirot movies on PBS.  I've been reading mysteries, beginning with Agatha Christie and meandering forward in time, since I was in elementary school.  Ghostwriter was my favorite show in the early 1990s (so much so that I actually joined the official fan club and put together my own detective kit, complete with fingerprint powder).  Nowadays, I'll take a good whodunit over a nighttime soap any day.  Even if I can usually guess what's coming next, I still watch because the really good shows are the ones that manage to surprise me regularly (e.g. Castle).

Because I thought it would be fun, my top ten (or so) favorite TV detectives, in alphabetical order, are under the jump.

013: Winter Wonderland

Yet more snow, falling in very aesthetic huge, fluffy clumps for an hour or so.  Very pretty, and made the roads utterly disgusting to boot!  Ah, the joys of winter.  It reminds me of this old Puke & Snot routine, "A Lovely State," off Are You All Right? (warning: some not-work-safe language).



I can't get as irate as that fictional transplant. It's more of a heavy, resigned sigh than anything else.

On the bright side, there's only five months until summer!

012: With the City of Miami as Itself

Before I canceled my Netflix account, I was working through season one of Burn Notice on DVD.  Michael Westen's voiceovers take an already fun, witty show up to the next level of amusing.  I also like how the whole show is inadvertently (or purposefully?) a how-to guide for covert ops.  One of the local TV stations also runs back-to-back syndicated episodes on Wednesday nights, which my family has started watching with more and more dedication every week.

Having finished Twin Cities Noir, I'm reading Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem at the moment, and the main character is a private detective with the standard wry film-noir first-person narration.  Between the voice and the offbeat situations in which Conrad Metcalf finds himself, the shamus has started looking like a polished-up Michael Westen in my head.  Like so:


from Changeling, via Google


With almost every book I read, I inadvertently play casting director, which means the story plays out like a movie in my head as I work my way through.  I'm convinced this makes me enjoy a lot of books more than I would otherwise, and as a result, I probably think a lot of things I've read are better than they are, just because I've had the cast of Castle acting out the plot for me.  Or whatever.  Does everyone do that, I wonder?  Or do I just watch too much television?

011: Packrattery

Everyone in my household is a packrat.  I am afraid to watch shows about hoarders for fear of recognizing their behavior in myself and my family.  I try to be a little more discerning in what I save, having grown up with clutter that has gotten more than slightly out of control in the last few years.  I have also worked, off and on, for the last five years, at an archival library, where we appreciate important people who are packrats ("important people" being well-known authors and architects, performing arts organizations, etc).  The following is gleaned both from knowledge gained on the job and from sporadic attempts to clean my own home.

A quick list of things to not put in with papers you plan to save for a long time:

• rubber bands, which either lose their elasticity, turn rock hard and crumble to tiny bits, or lose their elasticity, turn rock hard and adhere themselves to your papers like very determined barnacles.
• paper clips, which will oxidize and, if left long enough in the right conditions, start to eat straight through paper.  Even staples can go bad.  Stainless steel paper clips, however, are fine.
• tape.  Fun fact: old cellophane tape leaves a crusty, brownish-yellow stain when the adhesive dries out.  I have yet to figure out a way to get it to come off.
• post-it notes.  As far as I can tell, the longer they are on paper without being peeled off and repositioned, the stronger the adhesive gets.  By the time your friendly neighborhood archivist gets to them, removing them leaves a tacky strip that is more or less permanent.  However, they are awesome for short-term use.
• three-ring binders, especially the kind with the clear plastic window on the front for a cover page.  With laser-printed pages in particular, the ink gets stuck to the plastic both inside and out; I don't know if that's because the plastic is decomposing or the ink is.  Actually, plastic of any kind is bad news, eventually.
• newspaper, unless you put some acid-free paper in between it and other types of paper.  I have, while processing, come across documents permanently marked with the perfect brown shadow of the newspaper clipping filed behind them.
• receipts and other thermal paper.  I just pulled some receipts from the late 1990s out of a drawer in our kitchen, and they had turned from white to neon yellow and all the black ink was faded beyond legibility.  Fax paper (remember faxes?) just develops an even grosser, slimier texture than it had originally.
• rodents.  You'd be surprised.
• insects.  No, really, you'd be surprised.

On the other hand, a few things that may be helpful for you or whoever goes through your stuff in the future:

• keep two copies.  Three copies, if you want a backup for your backup.  It might seem like a good idea to keep a whole stack of, say, identical leaflets, but if you're not going to be distributing them, they just take up space.  On the other hand, if you have only one copy of something, you can be sure a hungry rodent will find it.
• make paper copies.  If there are e-mails to which you will want to refer in the abstract distant future, print them out.  Floppy disks and CDs become obsolete or get corrupted.  It is almost impossible to find a machine to read 5" floppy disks.  It is remarkably easy to read a piece of paper.
• label everything.  Someone else may not know that a handful of scribbled notes is actually the plot outline for the Great American Novel.  You may not even remember twelve years later.  Acid-free tabbed folders, labeled, are your friends.
• date everything.  One of the easiest ways to figure out where something belongs is to date it and organize chronologically.  Even noting when you received an undated letter could be helpful in the future.
• make box lists.  If you're throwing a lot of stuff in a box for storage, take the time to make a list of what's inside.  It doesn't have to be terribly detailed, just a bullet-point list you can throw in on top of everything else before the lid goes on.  I can't tell you how much easier this makes my life as a processer when whoever packed the box tells me what's supposed to be inside.  On the home front, if you're looking for something and don't know which box you put it in, having a quick-and-dirty inventory that's the first thing you see when you open the box makes the search go much faster.
• label photos.  Label photos.  LABEL PHOTOS.  If a stranger goes through your photos (not in a creepy way, hopefully, but rather an archivist or genealogist), chances are they will not recognize your acquaintances on sight.  In my own experience, it's hard to tell some of my great-uncles apart in their childhood photos, and it's hard to tell where family photos were taken when all living rooms looked alike in the 1960s.  Captions help.  A lot.
• go acid-free.  If you know what you're printing will be saved for a long time (and you can afford it), consider printing on acid-free paper.  A lot of scrapbooking supplies are acid-free, since the whole purpose is to preserve the photos and whatever else goes into scrapbooks, and I believe office supply stores carry some acid-free as well.  It's more expensive, but in terms of conservation, it's probably the best option.
• avoid miscellany.  "Misc." on a box means nothing.  It reveals nothing.  It is an enigma.  And it's exasperating when you're searching your dimly-lit attic or basement.

That's all the unsolicited advice I have for the moment.  I hope someone, someday, finds it helpful.