My laptop is broken

I love my laptop, a red Sony Vaio, and a week ago, it stopped charging. One of the things that holds a power plug in place in the laptop broke, and the cord could no longer fit inside there. It has been in the repair shop for six days.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not a huge deal. I've owned an iPad for the past three months, so its not like my boyfriend and I are (the horrors!) sharing one laptop. Its just weird how much things have changed.

It used to be that if you had a computer in your household, you only had one. It was the family computer, and people took turns using it. I'm not sure when exactly that changed, but I can't imagine having to share my computer with another person full time. It would be like sharing a cell phone with another person. Only worse, because I hardly ever use my cell phone. Its just a given now that you have as many computers in the house as there are people.

Its indicative, I guess, of how mainstream the internet has gotten. The internet is a great tool, a great entertainer, and a great way to keep in contact with other people. Its interesting to think back on my grandparents, in the late nineties, whispering that they thought my mother had "become addicted to the internet." They had seen a program on the news about it. They don't say stuff like that anymore, largely because people aren't as alarmist about it anymore. It is acceptable now. Its just weird how fast that was.

After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn

I loved After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn. I loved loved loved loved loved it. In fact, the day after I read it, I wanted to read it again. This is technically against the rules of my 150 book challenge. While I'm allowed to reread books, it should be books that I finished before the beginning of this year.

(I cheated. I reread it today.)

My love of this book falls into two major categories:

1. A Celia character who doesn't suck. As a person named Celia, there are few other Celia's out there, in literature or otherwise. I remember there being a Celia in Under the Lilacs by Louisa May Alcott, and not being offended by her, but not impressed either. Celia Hodes, on Weeds, is the worst Celia ever. Seriously. I can't watch Weeds because she is the worst person on that show.

Celia in After the Golden Age is pretty awesome. She's exactly my age (25!), rides the city bus (me too!), and is a bit of a work-a-holic. As one of the few "super-heroes" in the book, she's got a lot to prove, and she goes ahead and proves it. She's pretty bad ass in a runaway bus scene.

2. I'm a sucker for the love story. Seriously. Carrie Vaughn did something that seems pretty hard. She had the protagonist fall in love with a telepath and made it sweet. That seems so impossible. But it isn't played creepily, and it just works. I love every second of it, and even though I saw it coming, I loved re-reading it, paying close attention to their interactions and savoring it.

Since then, I've been on the lookout for Carrie Vaughn books. I just read Steel and it was good too. But the DC public library doesn't really have a lot of her books (almost none of a series that she writes). Oh well, I'll just have to keep watch! I also subscribed to her blog and am really enjoying that too.

Note: I borrowed After the Golden Age from the public library. I am an Amazon Associate, which means if you click a link to there from here, I'll receive a portion of the purchase price at no additional cost to you

Handsome Furs - Repatriated

Oh man, this song. So catchy! I think I got it as a download from them via email, and I like it way better than "What About Us." I do think its interesting that the song is called "Repatriated"...implying that it happened, but the song says that he'll "never be repatriated." Would it have been better to give the song the title, "Never Be Repatriated"? Or how about "(Never Be) Repatriated".

Where did the future go?
I was feeling down
I was feeling so low
Had to get out
Had to get out parts unknown

Where did the feeling go?
I got it back when the plane touched down
I was over
I was over - oh well

Here it comes
Here it comes
Here it comes
Here it comes

The frozen light
I'll never go back there
It was a lie, a lie
Believin' in it is so, it is so hard

I saw the light
Saw the reconstruction
And I will go, I will go
Out in the heat
And the rush and pushin' when its five at night

Your little heart is gonna beat so
Where did the future go?
Parts unknown
Parts unknown

Your little heart is gonna beat so
Where did the feeling go?
Well, it comes and goes
It comes and goes

Here it comes!

Your little heart is gonna beat so
Where did the feeling go?
Well, it comes and goes
It comes and goes

Here it comes
Here it comes

Blackout

I've seen the future
And its comin' in low
I've seen the future
I will never be repatriated

I've seen the future
And its comin' in low
I've seen the future
I will never be repatriated

I'll never be repatriated
Never be repatriated
Never be repatriated
Never be repatriated

If you have any thoughts, put them in the comments!

Frak It Friday: Elsinore's YES YES YES clip on So You Think You Can Dance

News from the Elsinore Twitter Account! And, may I say, its a very appropriate chorus for a competitive reality show.

Like Sports? You should be listening to The TV TimeOut

Like sports? Why aren't you listening to The TV TimeOut? Or following their Tumblr? Or Twitter? And not just because they made me Twitter Follower of the Week. But because they are awesome and make me laugh at my desk/on my walks.

[Yes. I walked 5.5 miles to work. Yes, my feet and butt hurt now.]

Dennis Miller Bunker

Dennis Miller Bunker's "The Pool, Medfield" which hangs in the Boston MFA

From the biography of Dennis Miller Bunker by R. H. Ives Gammell:

We can measure the extent of Bunker's achievement in this difficult branch of art by comparing his landscapes with those of the painters who have been universally considered its leading exponents. Placed beside the best Medfield studies, the one in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (note: not the one above), for instance, or the painting entitled "The Brook, Medfield", Claude Monet's pictures look a little candy-colored and artificial, while even Sisley's seem rather haphazard and incomplete. Standing before the best Renoirs one thinks of fuzziness and a lack of solidarity. Dennis Bunker's landscapes look simply right.

Standing in the Gardner Museum, "The Brook, Medfield" immediately caught my eye. In the words of Tina Fey, when I saw it I thought, "I want to go to there." It looked like an open field on a summer's day, with a creek running through it, like bare feet and cloud watching. Like a warm breeze. 

Bunker died young (age 29). Maybe that's why I had never seen his paintings before. Maybe because his work is mostly based in Boston, and I had never been there before this month. To learn more about him, I checked out the only book in the DC library system about him, the aforementioned biography that was written in the 1950s. (When the author talks about "the 90s" in the book, he means that 1890s. Whoa.) All the paintings and pictures are in black and white, which feels blasphemous for a book about an artist. 

The biography is tiny. Including the index and several pages of paintings/drawings, it clocks in at 81 pages. And it bears repeating: all the pictures in the book are in black and white. 

Surely Dennis Miller Bunker deserves better than that. I mean, look at the above painting!

[I'm an Amazon Affiliate, so if you follow a link from here to Amazon and purchase something, I get a portion of the price at no extra cost to you. I checked out Dennis Miller Bunker from the local library]

The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan

This book is so much better than the original series. The original series was fun and quick, and the writing....well, it felt like Dan Brown decided to write young adult/children novels and wasn't taking it very seriously.

BUT. The Lost Hero is so much better. The writing flows. There's more diversity in characters, while keeping to a central theme: no one's quite sure that they belong anywhere.

Last August, I read a piece from Mixed Race America called Why the phrase "half-blood" needs serious interrogation. While some of the article is flawed (its clear the author had other stuff going on and hadn't really examined the source material), this was worth noting:

And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "half-blood" has at its core the idea that there is both a quantifiable ("half") notion of blood AND a qualifiable (as in hierarchical) idea embedded in the phrase "half-blood":

"half-blooded a., born of different races; spec. of superior blood or race by one parent only."[again, emphasis in bold is mine]

It just makes me cringe to think that these kids are going to these "half-blood" camps and will be referring to themselves as "half-bloods" without understanding the long and painful racial/racist history behind that term AND without understanding how problematic it is to split one's "blood" and the not-so-implicit connotations of blood (and really, wherever you see the word "blood" you should insert the word "race") as purity--of being able to determine which bloodline is better than the other. 

This is one of those things that seems like it would be really easy to be ignorant about. Remember when HP cameras were racist? Because no one thought to be like, "Uh, shouldn't we make sure that this works on all people?" Rick Riordan probably didn't have a Native American (or anyone who would have been knowledgeable about it) read the book prior to publication. And that sucks that the world still works that way.

So, in response to this, he could have been like, um, rounded up all the Native Americans that like his books/help his books, like some other people we know.

Knowing how these things usually go ("I didn't do anything wrong/I didn't know/That's just the way the story is/I'm sorry if I offended anyone"), I didn't expect much. So I was surprised to got a mention on page 33 of The Lost Hero:

"A safe place," Annabeth said. "The only safe place for kids like us. Camp Half-Blood."
"Half-Blood?" Piper was immediately on guard. She hated that word. She'd been called a half-blood too many times - half Cherokee, half white - and it was never a compliment. "Is that some kind of bad joke?" 

 Is it good to show that kids who are of mixed-blood/race are awesome, too? Or is this just co-opting an experience while just giving a brief nod to it?

What I can say is that most of the characters in the first series were white, and in the new series, Piper is Cherokee and Leo is Mexican American (the leader, though, Jason Grace, is white). To have adventures in this new series, you don't have to be white. And it proves that having diverse characters in a series is very compelling.

[I'm an Amazon Affiliate, so if you follow a link from here to Amazon and purchase something, I get a portion of the price at no extra cost to you. I checked out The Lost Hero from the local library]