SAN DIEGO -- Thousands of jumbo flying squid -- aggressive 5-foot-long sea monsters with razor-sharp beaks and toothy tentacles -- have invaded the shallow waters off San Diego, spooking scuba divers and washing up dead on tourist-packed beaches.The carnivorous calamari, which can grow up to 100 pounds, came up from the depths last week and swarms of them roughed up unsuspecting divers. Some divers report tentacles enveloping their masks and yanking at their cameras and gear.



And the cephalopods shall inherit the beach!

I wish to note that I have not had a migraine since MAY 27!!

After having them once every 2 weeks, I am very happy about that... but now the suspense is killing me.

Okay, if you thought the RaceFail bingo card was useful for tracking responses in that conversation, adapt and apply it to the comments to this Salon article on the retiring of the word "midget" in favor of "little people" or "dwarfs."

Once again we see:

1. It can't be an offensive word because I didn't mean it to be offensive.
2. Why are you people harshing my mellow?
3. What you want me to call you instead seems worse.

et cetera.

(For a very interesting conversation on the word midget see also Roger Ebert. )

See, here's the deal: privileged* folks who are well-meaning get remarkably upset when the unprivileged folks say, "Hey, don't say/do that, you're hurting me."

(*because you're white or tall or male or ambulatory or sighted or or or or or or....)

WHENEVER YOU ARE THE PRIVILEGED PERSON, PLEASE REMEMBER NOT TO DO THAT.  Accept criticism. Think deeply before speaking. Be respectful.

Thank you.

Is there free Wifi widely available in the UK? City-wide, or in cafes and
whatnot?

I recaptioned this one. Couldn't resist.

Kate Harding, who also blogs on Shapely Prose, wrote today in Salon's Broadsheet
about a clothing line that harkens back to the worst clothing of the 80s for
plus size women, and touches on how hard it was to find clothing in the 80s
that was flattering if you were fat.

Her reward, in the comments, is multiple posters explaining to her how she
should lose some weight.

Okay, I'd like to go on the record right now: if in any of my posts I
mention my weight, this does not mean I want your unsolicited advice on
how I could/should lose weight. The exception would be a whiny "what do
I do nowwww" plea.

Geez. I don't know WHY I read forum posts ANYWHERE. Salon readers at least
used to seem more intelligent than the local "But Obama's going to take all
our guns!" crowd -- apparently, no more.

of trying to find something to wear to summer weddings.

I've got two summer weddings to attend this year... quite unusual for me; the last summer wedding I went to was quite a few years ago now. But I'm feeling the usual pain, because 95% of the dressy events I attend are when it's cold out. Hence, my dressy clothes are long sleeved velvets and velour -- and a lot of black.

I was going to sew something for these occasions, but all the extra time I've spent at work, complicated by getting my dye work ready for the Isidora workshop on 7/25, meant that I literally have no time to do so. And the thing I planned to make is not a throw-together-and-done item, it required a lot of alterations to the pattern to fit me, and even then there are indications that it would require an initial muslin and further fitting. There's just no TIME for that.

There's also no MONEY to go shopping. Between the prices of everything going up, and our expensive older cats, I really can't go out and drop $100 on an outfit I plan to wear twice. I'm in the process of working through weight watchers again (I have lost some weight already), and with luck and diligence I plan to be a size smaller by next summer. That's why I was going to sew, using fabric I already had, so as to make the outfit very cheaply.

So when you have no time and no money, what the heck do you do?? I can scarcely go to a thrift shop and expect to come up with a nice outfit to wear to a wedding inside of a lunch hour!

Arg. I predict I will be spending a lot of time digging in the back of my closet this weekend, hoping vainly to come with something that (a) fits, (b) isn't black, and (c) doesn't make me look like a 1991 sitcom refugee.

I said I was going to write more about this and never did so, so a leetle teeny trip report now:

I was kinda bummed to be going to Tribal Rev by myself. Why?

a. I don't dance any flavor of Tribal bellydance style.
b. I knew I would probably know only about 4 or 5 people at the festival.
c. Unlike some dancers I know (jassugirl , cough, cough) I don't really enjoy long drives by myself, and Elgin is 2.5 hours away. I also wasn't very confident about finding the hotel since it's not exactly right off the highway.
d. Then there was the whole pay for the entire room thing, but at least they got us a fabulous room rate for the event.

But I dragged myself out of bed incredibly early and got on the road only 15 minutes later than I planned, and there was almost no construction on the highway, so that part was fine. I was also really impressed at how the I-Pass system on the tollway has relieved so much congestion at the toll plazas -- while I still had to stop and fish out money, I never waited for more than a minute or two in line, far cry from the giant snarl ups I used to see on that road.


Finding the hotel was a little tricky, but it wasn't too bad. I left my luggage in the trunk and went to find the reg desk. I stopped at the hotel's front desk on the way: "Sorry, your room isn't ready yet." Well, of course not. Check in time isn't until 3. Just thought I'd ask. I checked in for the event and chatted to haflagirl briefly, and she alerted me that the zils teacher, Sharon Moore, hadn't been able to make it due to flight trouble (boo) but that Artemis would be teaching the class instead (yay!). Artemis is the reason I was there. She's a highly respected, highly talented, very intelligent dancer whose specialty is the Turkish school. Her dancing is backed up by education in Turkey as well as Ph.D. level research. You could just watch this:



I actually went down to take her afternoon class on theatrical skirt dancing. This is a slightly controversial subject in bellydance, because there's a lot of fakelore around about how swirling your skirt around is "gypsy dance." That's kind of like saying that something is "white trash" dance... "gypsy" is looked on as a derogatory term by many of the Romani people. On top of that, only a few segments of Romani dancers do anything at all with their skirts. The theatrical skirt movements we like so much are fusion dance -- some flamenco, some Latin American, some other sources. It looks great! You can add it to bellydance! But you need to know what you're fusing before you fuse it. Artemis goes into detail on all this... THAT'S why I wanted her class.

Her finger cymbal class turned out to be very good indeed. She's working on a zils CD and booklet to be released later this year, and had her notes with her, so she had an agenda already in her mind. It was really fun... not just the basics, but a lot of playing around and changing tones. And she was so funny and sweet... she talked about being able to play zils with your hands in almost any position. Then she seemed to remember that she was addressing a group of Tribal dancers, who usually hold their hands all in the same way for troupe unity... and said, "Now, I don't want you to think I'm criticizing your teachers or anything... I'm just saying, don't get so you have to have your hands in a particular position to play!" Her rhythm-chants for playing were a hoot. She explained that not everybody can follow zil patterns that are counted since not everyone thinks the same way. So instead of 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 we have "is it you? is it you? is it really really you?" and things like "old macdonald had a farm, eieieo". I had a wonderful time... except that so much sitting on the floor really did not agree with my back.

More later! Gotta feed the cat!

I signed up for an e-newsletter. It had two email blanks, one labeled "email address" and one labeled "retype email address for accuracy." I filled it out.

ERROR: 

Leave the 1st e-mail field blank. Only use the 2nd one.

Uh huh. Right. So I erased the first blank and submitted again.

ERROR:

Email address is required!

Yeah. So I typed it in again.

Thank you! Your form has been submitted.

You know, the outrage wore off a long, long time ago.

Pomegranate Tootsie Roll Pop.

I've been trying to set up Virtual Box on my MacBook Pro so I can run a Win XP virtual machine. Then I'm going to install my favorite Win software there before the old PC goes belly up.

Only one leeetle problem:

While installing off the Win XP disk, I get the message "please put in the disk of your full OS so we can tell you aren't a big cheater head." Well I have an NT disk. I would LOVE to put it in. BUT I CAN'T. I can't figure out a way from within the virtual machine to eject the XP disk! And my Mac is all "CD? What CD?" I can't eject it from the Mac OS because it thinks there ISN'T one in the laptop.

Let me just say AURGGGGGGHHHHHH!

Crap.

EDITED TO ADD:

Well I got it to work.

By unmounting the CD drive in the virtual machine... ejecting the disk... remounting it... putting in the other disk... lather rinse repeat.

I now have the dubious honor of looking at the win xp default background floating in a window on my MacBook Pro. It's... eerie.

Okay, so I've now taken two Zumba classes. It's essentially Latin dance turned into aerobics. It's pretty fun, though of course I find the choreography boring... it's not meant to be good choreo, it's meant to get you moving. Our instructor is like a lemur on amphetimines. Her movements are frantic and uncontrolled. But she's friendly and she leads the class, so I can't complain.

However.

I don't know whether it's her or Zumba, but she has little concept of what a warm up is supposed to do!

One of the featured bits of the warm up song has very fast very violent arm circles. Swinging your arms like you want to do damage to people does not warm up your arms... it threatens to HURT your arms. As somebody who strained an arm muscle and spent 6 months unable to raise the arm above shoulder level, I know whereof I speak.

The warm up has nothing in it for your neck or back, either, yet two songs later she's cuing us to whip our head forward and down in a drop. I say PASS. Your head is a big heavy thing. Having done almost nothing with your neck all day, popping your head down and back quickly could HURT you.

Her stretches also suck. Having just spent an hour raising our heart rates, she wants us to drop over to stretch our hamstrings. I'm surprised nobody has passed out yet. And guess what she doesn't stretch at all -- the quads! Yes, having bopped around doing cha cha, samba, salsa for an hour, we'll just skip the quads altogether, shall we? Guh.

I don't really feel like I can say something. I don't want her to be all pissed off at me. I'm going to modify my own movements and stretches... but that's all I feel like I can do. Sigh.

Well, Buster's got crystals in his urine again. We thought he might get some because he sneakily got into Scout's food dish recently. How do I know for sure? A combination of factors:

1. Excessively snuggly with me this morning, reclining on my head, kneading, purring, and wanting attention.

2. Washes his butt every 30 seconds.

3. Peed on the blanket I was sleeping under.

Yes, ding ding ding, number 3, that was the clincher.

I highly recommend buying stock in Nature's Miracle. We go through a lot of it.

I went to Tribal Revolution over the weekend. Full report later, but just to give you an idea:

How would you like to get somewhere and be told, "The finger cymbal instructor couldn't make it... so Artemis Mourat will be teaching that class  instead" ?

WOO HOO!!!

Okay... so if you

a) sent in a claim for $700 against the remainder of your flex benefits, and then

b) got an email denying your claim, and then

c) checked on the website to verify that no money had been paid to you,

wouldn't you assume your claim was denied.

BUT NO!

I called them up and they said they cut me a check on Friday for the remainder of my flex benefits.  

The email was sent TODAY!

I'm sorry. This flex benefits company is just TEH DUMB. Their website is incredibly lame and hard to get into. I've had to have my password reset several times. Following some links in the site to "your benefits summary" gets you to the summary... but sometimes you get a page that says "no information is available." 

The people on the phone figuring out my problems are nice... but I shouldn't be having the problems in the first place!!!

Fail.

Went to my first "bellydance fitness" class last night, taught by Mahela. Mahela is a very nice young woman who has been dancing about 7 years, some of those years very intensively indeed, and teaching about 2. She's quite versatile, though her speciality is lock/pop Tribal Fusion style; she's tall and slim and uses her build to its best advantage in dancing. I would probably not normally take a class from her, as her style is very different from mine, but this fitness class offered me a chance to do so, and it sounded like fun.

The class is quite full, probably 20 people. Mahela explained up front that we'd be using bd moves to stretch and strengthen and that there would be a cardio section. She also added a disclaimer that what we'd be doing in class would not be performable bellydance by any definition and explained that if students were interested in actual dance classes she could provide more information on where to get them -- GO HER, I say, because what a perfect thing to lead off with!

The warmup was heavily Suhaila and yoga flavored. A few of the yoga things I couldn't do, c'est la vie.

She explained correct posture and gave several posture reminders thoughout the class. We did hip slides, twists, flat 8s, and chest lifts. She got a basic mechanic going for the basic bent-knee shimmy and gave good corrections to help people get where they were going. She also had us moving between releve and flat... I find it really hard to shimmy on releve without traveling! Why is that? 

The cardio section was very interesting. She cleverly moved us from step-touch side to side up to the folkloric stepping side to side with the following leg kicking crosswise in front. Then she turned it into a hopping motion (I stayed on the floor and gave it what M calls the "grandma's debke bounce"). She added a few arm motions. The other main cardio step she used was the rocking forward and back step M calls Zenouba. Again, she started simple, added a hop, showed horizontal arms, then overhead arms if you weren't feeling quite winded enough (I was).

After a brief cooldown we stretched on the floor. We did Suhaila's butt grabs on the floor... for all I can do a darn good butt grab shimmy, I can't do those glute squeezes on the floor. Just doesn't fit my mechanic for some reason.

I really thought she did an excellent job and told her so. It's hard to figure out how to turn bellydance moves into serious cardio. I hope she comes up with more folkloric-flavored aerobics for us.

Don't worry about a thing,
cause every little thing gonna be all right.
Don't worry about a thing,
cause every little thing gonna be all right!

Still kind of sick. The cold has moved into my head, which makes me feel weird. I always wonder whether this weirdness is due to cold drugs or the cold; this time it's the cold.

Work is very odd. We've moved from panic-stricken development phase B to panic-stricken development phase C... it's just a different flavor of panic. We'll be panicking for the next three months or so. It's just a question of surviving it.

Don't worry

I am still losing weight on Weight Watchers. We have a pretty good meeting leader who doesn't make me crazy, and I'm staying off the WW online boards where the obsessed people lurk. I am trying to not allow the numbers to make me happy or sad, but it's very difficult.

about a thing

I've got a Bellydance Fitness class tonight. Very curious to see how this will be handled. I'll report back.

cause every little thing

I'm making jewelry for my sales table at the Izzy workshop in July. I don't know how well I'll do selling it, but I'm trying to make some pieces that invoke the antique look of kuchi jewelry without being quite so massive, quite so antique, or quite so expensive. There are a lot of people who go to dance workshops who might like to buy some cool jewelry to, you know, WEAR instead of use as costume pieces. And it would be nice as well to have some things people might buy for $20 or $10 instead of all the expensive things typically for sale. Maybe I'll post some photos.

gonna be all right!

And that's the news.

I'm watching a documentary about creators of costumes worn by Elvis Presley. DROOL O RAMA! Hey, we think bellydancers are addicted to bling... The King had us all beat.

Have just discovered it is impossible to doze off when Alan Rickman is on TV in Blow Dry.