Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in William's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, May 5th, 2012
9:25 pm	Internationalism Am American. Am enjoying Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican holiday. Commemorates victory over the French. Am having traditional Korean food, kimchi. Bought from Chinese supermarket. In immigrant section of capital of Portugal. ... All humanity is one. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 21st, 2012
9:36 pm	My conversation with the voices this evening. "You know I wasn't the kind of undead that went looking for trouble. All I wanted was to bone who I wanted to bone, eat who I wanted to eat, not make any waves. Was that to much to ask out of undeath? But no, here I am stuck taking care of a bunch of living people. Talk about a waste of energy, am I right? It's just delaying the inevitable. It's not like I really-" "Dude, if you do not shut up for the next fifteen miles I swear I will burn and banish you myself!" "No need to get pissy about it. Guy's got a right to complain." "He's got a point." "He gave up his right to complain when he stopped breathing." "Now that's just speciesist." "You're the same species-! ...you're just dead." "Undead. If I were dead, I wouldn't be moving around, would I? You should call a man what he wants to be called. It's just basic respect." (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
12:45 am	Two enjoyable pieces I've recently encountered. http://apex-magazine.com/2012/04/03/the-second-card-of-the-major-arcana/ and "The Melancholy of Mechagirl," at http://www.mythicdelirium.com/index.htm#feature . (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 12th, 2012
9:54 pm	Dogs and babies. People talk to dogs and babies. Moving to a country where you don't know the language gives you some insight into what the listener in that communication is hearing. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
11:43 pm	White Coats Actually give Plusses to Intellect, Researchers Find No, really. If you wear a white coat that you believe belongs to a doctor, your ability to pay attention increases sharply. But if you wear the same white coat believing it belongs to a painter, you will show no such improvement. ... The effect occurs only if you actually wear the coat and know its symbolic meaning — that physicians tend to be careful, rigorous and good at paying attention. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
12:28 am	Easily misunderstood sentences "Trilling had been teaching his students Kafka and Blake, Nietzsche and Freud." Talk about the lit class of every teacher's dreams. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 30th, 2012
2:22 pm	*takes a bite of lunch* *stares* Seeds? Who makes raisins with the seeds still in? (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 24th, 2012
4:29 pm	A quote I found amusing From the New York Times, a New Orleans resident's commentary on disaster tourism. Obviously, it's not the man's frustration, but rather the journalist's presentation I'm mentioning. Harris spit out his sunflower shells in disgust. A luxury motor coach, filled with tourists behind tinted windows, trundled down Florida Street toward the Make It Right houses. Seventeen expletives have been edited out of the following paragraph: "Every day 20 tour buses come down this street to look at this neighborhood and take pictures," Harris said. "Don't tell me they're just touring the city. If you're trying to tour the city, then you're in the wrong neighborhood. They just ride around in the part that's been devastated. Lower Ninth Ward ain't receiving a single penny for that. Why can't I get something? Why does the man driving the bus get all the money? I ain't a guinea pig. I don't want to be put under a microscope. We're the ones that suffered down here, who lost everything. There are still dead people that they haven't accounted for. It's frustrating. It took almost seven years for the Ninth Ward to look like what it looks like now, and it still don't look like [anything]." (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
2:39 pm	Happy ∏ Day, everybody! You didn't think I'd forget, did you? :^) (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012
12:14 am	A site full of free Flash games that I browse for timewasting popped up a golf-themed solitaire game. Despite these being two things I separately have little interest in, the variations on the basic rules were interesting enough that I spent some time on it. For instance, "Chaos Club" involved an essentially random scatter of the cards, with only the entirely uncovered cards face up. One of these, "Jungle Brook," is harder than it looks. Eventually, I began narrating my attempts at the course internally as a group of golfers kidnapped by a mysterious madman and forced to play the world's most dangerous, difficult golf course on a jungle island filled with deadly traps, given the likely-fictitious hope of escape should they make the ridiculously difficult bar, as the villain philosophizes via loudspeaker on golf as the metaphysical outline of life. There were the grizzled veteran, the scared amateur duffer, and of course the young prodigy with the secret mystical intuition. At this point I realized I was just bored with the game and quit. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
11:48 pm	Mistaken Identity, again I got my gmail address relatively early, so it is a simple version of my real name: first.last@. This leads to a relatively frequent case of accidental emails. Over the years, I have been privy to the business plans of Carolina Pool Management (a fine bunch of people, you should hire them if you need maintenance and supervision for high-traffic or public pools in North Carolina), crossed paths with the much more famous than me William H. Keith (author of the Bolo military sci-fi series, give it a whirl if you like that genre), seen photos from someone's state Senate campaign, and received numerous test emails which, I presume, were marked as failures. I also have gotten the occasional indiscreet account information. The latest one is for Ashley Madison -- the site that sets up married people to have affairs. It's the first time I've had more than passing thoughts about requesting a password reset. However, fraud is fraud, so I'll keep my electronic mouth shut. Perhaps realizing that some random mathematician knows that profile number mumblemumble has been setting up dates with married women will make the holder think twice about it. (Comment on this)
Monday, February 13th, 2012
12:57 pm	Believing what you can't see It’s not like skeptics go around insisting there’s no such thing as germs, microscopic parasites, atoms, quarks, radio waves, or isotopes. The above was posted on a blog I read, concerning the charge that skeptics "don't believe in anything they can't see." I rather liked the rhythm of it, and posted the following doggerel as the doomed consequence thereof. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Saturday, January 14th, 2012
3:51 pm	One screw left. Stripped as cleanly as if I'd taken a lathe to it. Grarrgh. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
12:55 pm	Dream narrative -- the MMORPG/pony mashup It's said that one of the most boring kinds of stories anyone can tell is a description of his own dreams, and yet we're often compelled to do so. Hopefully this one ends up funny even if you didn't dream it. Below the cut for those who really don't want to hear it. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
10:21 pm	*get home for Christmas* *purchase wireless dongle for connectivity, $30* *purchase short-term access, $40* *install software* *grumble at reception for a while* *pause thoughtfully* *take Ethernet cable from modem to 'rents computer, apply to own* *connect flawlessly* *facepalm* (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 11th, 2011
2:35 pm	Echoes of Asturias The following video is a guitar arrangement of Asturias, from the Suite española for piano by Isaac Albéniz, played by Ana Vidović, as drawn to my attention by Popehat. What interests me about it -- besides the fantastic playing -- is that several of the passages remind me somewhat of a modern power ballad, if not precisely a four-chord song. I draw your attention to the passage beginning at 3:20, for example. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
11:37 am	So much yuck. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/connecticut-asset-managers-win-254-million-powerball-lottery/ Three rich guys (they don't do much productive, just asset management) bought one (one. Stinking.) lottery ticket (the lottery is a tax on bad math skills, levied mostly on poor people) and won $151 million. (Thereby promoting the continued existence of the damn thing among those who can least afford it.) Where is your God? In Mark 4:25, that's where. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
4:40 pm	Now that's a Thanksgiving food. I have several friends who enjoy the occasional truck food, and also several who are sufficiently geeky to be amused by an eatery named Pi Pizza, so this article about a truck in Houston was tasty-looking enough that I thought I'd drop a note about it. The guy serves cheese, pepperoni, and one daily-rotating specialty pizza with variations like venison sausage, "the Drunken Peach" (goat cheese, habanero peppers, and peaches soaked in whisky syrup), and a few others.  He also has the following dessert pizza: "seasonal dessert pizza: ...pumpkin-pie sauce as a base, topped with chocolate-covered bacon, white chocolate shavings and ancho-chile roasted pecans" Now that sounds tasty. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 4th, 2011
12:01 am	Crossculturation I have in my hands a flyer of the standard mailbox-stuffing type, advertising Pizza Hut here in Lisbon. Prominently featured on the front is a limited-time specialty pizza, this one with three cheeses and cheese in the crust. The name of the pizza, I tell no lie, is: Rolling Cheesy. (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 20th, 2011
9:27 pm	Two in one day? *shock*! http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2011/10/20/florence-king-on-john-updike/ In one way or another I think every single person on my flist will enjoy that post. Possibly quite different ways, some of them. (Comment on this)