Thursday, July 27, 2006, 13:39
Section: Miscellany
To cut back on the spam, the blog is now set to hold for moderation any posts that don’t include a name and e-mail address. (E-mail addresses are not visible to anyone other than me, once the post is approved.) After that, you should only be held for moderation the first time you post here (and are moderated and approved) or if you use any spam key words (you can make a good guess at what these are).
If you’ve been hitting lots of moderation, this should fix it. If it still doesn’t, try registering with the site and log in before posting (this is obviously only for regular posters) and that should let you automatically post after the first time approval.
I apologize for any inconvenience caused and love getting feedback here.
I grew up overseas for much of my formative years — five years of middle school and high school, returning for 11th and 12th grade in the foreign country of America — and it’s rare that I encounter anyone who seems to understand the life.
This week, NPR is doing a series by a former Foreign Service wife talking in detail about what it means to be in the diplomatic corps. While her experience doesn’t directly mirror my family’s — she and her subjects tended to be in more Third World locations than we were — it’s otherwise very much in synch with my memories:
Wednesday, July 26, 2006, 17:08
Section: Miscellany
I suppose it should have been no surprise after we found our cats, Lucky and Hanna, through a pet search engine, but I just stumbled across one for tattoo designs. Neat.
While it’s always interesting watching Zayra Alvarez insist that, no, she really is good in the face of absolute bafflement on the part of the audience and open disdain on the part of Supernova (in a car wreck sort of way), and while her costumes are increasingly interesting — where the heck do you even get an astronaut/stripper Spandex costume? — her off-key singing has gone from amusingly messy to just irritating.
Likewise, Jill’s groupie-with-a-good-voice thing is getting kind of embarassing.
Four weeks in, Rock Star: Supernova is pretty clearly four-to-five finalists and a bunch of mediocre people whom cutting is really just a formality. Lukas, Storm, Dilana (great to see her do a great ballad like that this week) and Toby really have almost nothing to worry about.
And I could so clearly be the biggest rock star in Iceland.
A low-bandwidth Storm Large fansite (apparently 10 or so fansites were crashed when she told Navarro to Google her and she became the #12-most-searched for thing on Google) that includes MP3s of her live shows over the years. I particularly recommend the Live at the Sweetwater Saloon concert, which is 90 minutes of good music and potty mouthed attitude.
Just heard this on Coverville: Laura Cantrell does a cover of “14th Street.” And the best part is that the MP3 is free. Beautiful song, beautifully sung at a beautiful price.
