Praise, continued

But the woman writer whom I've discovered most recently is getupgrrl at Chez Miscarriage.  I am in awe of her ability to keep going despite disappointment and pain.  I've not really spoken to anyone about the three miscarriages I've had in the past year - including the first one, the awful one, the one where we saw the heartbeat and then I went into the doctor and it wasn't there.  Oh, so unspeakable, this pain so many women go through, and yet our society as a whole is so silent about.  And yet somehow getupgrrl can name - and overcome - the pain.  Oh, thank you for continuing to get up.

Let us now praise (semi-) famous women

Thanks be to God for the women who write the truth about the world as they see it on the Internet.  To name a few names (not that I have ever met or even corresponded with any of them):

• Deborah, who runs Chicklit; I miss her more frequent diary entries (and her snarky West Wing recaps on Television without Pity), but I always am interested in hearing about her life as a booklover, a freelancer, a decorating enthusiast.
• Sars, who runs Tomato Nation, and can work both the occasional Simone Weil epigraph as well as riff on Derek Jeter's hair.
• Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who writes at Making Light.  I know nothing about science fiction or its fandom, but I'm still fascinated by her writing on various topics, including this creed.
• Julie of the now-defunct Julie/Julia Project and her tenacity in cooking despite all the small obstacles of an apartment in Queens; and her own credo:

"Julia Child wants you -- that's right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end secretarial job and nothing but a Stop-n-Shop for miles around -- to master the art of french cooking.  (No caps, please.)  She wants you to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste alright.  She wants you to remember that you are human, and as such are entitled to that most basic of human rights, the right to eat well and enjoy life.  And that, my friends, blows heirloom tomatoes and first-press Umbrian olive oil out of the fucking water."

Unconvinced swing voter

So John Kerry has decided that he's going to remind us all of his wartime heroism by, um, taking a boat across Boston Harbor.  Does this mean that every time George W. Bush gets on Air Force One, we're supposed to think about the time he spent (or maybe failed to spend) as a pilot in the National Guard?  Sheesh.

Still here

Just kind of bored and lacking in great or not so great things to say. Life is tough as an INTJ (particularly when one's organizational skills are not up to true "J" par). Oh well.

Fun hypotheticals

Paul Ford on software:

With Word, you can sit down at the beginning of the day and set up your tables and page numbers, align your margins, set your styles, add some charts, establish your index headings, and at the end of the day you haven't written a single word. Its icons call out like the Sirens tempting Odysseus. Click me! Click me! A wraithlike paperclip leaps up and cries out “Looks like you are writing a letter!”

Would George Eliot have finished Middlemarch if she'd been pestered by an animated paperclip? Could Shakespeare have coined the words “hobnob,” “watchdog,” or “lonely” if the spellchecker had marked them with wavy red lines? Would the United States government work better if, rather than amending the constitution, we used “track changes” instead?