#7 Trew Love
Welcome to Corpsetown
I started Pet by Catherine Chidgey while I was eating a snack today and then just read it straight through. I love the "everything is different now, after the thing that happened" hook. First chapter? We're here with the narrator, we're orienting ourselves, then second chapter we're slingshotted into her past and it's all "wait, when is the bad thing what is the bad thing". It's sort of a like a mystery novel in that way. Suspense. And actually, there's an Agatha Christie I listened to a while ago, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, that features a similar sinister landscape: Chekov's windy cliff.
Speaking of islands, I also read Interlibrary Loan which was me want to read more Gene Wolfe (the jacket blurb is Ursula K. Leguin calling him "our Melville." After reading Dayswork, I have a weird little affection for Melville so this blurb carried more weight than it otherwise might have). It was Wolfe's last manuscript and probably not finished, though from just one book I can't tell if this is just his style. It's hard to tell what's going on and there are lots of references to what I learned is the first book in this would-have-been-a-series-had-he-lived that don't really add anything to this book. It reminded me of the His Dark Materials trilogy as it also features a charming-maybe-evil scientist and a two-faced (figurative) woman who turn out to be the parents of the main child in the story who, among others, go to a frozen island where there is a secret thing.
Wolfe's book has lots of compelling bits but it doesn't come together.
Parsing the CSS using regex
I watched the 2019 Dirty Rotten Scoundrels remake starring Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson and the story really can't be gender-flipped and play the same way. Ha-ha the women con artists get taken advantage of by the man! Oh and the con man actually does love Rebel Wilson? That part isn't a lie? Even though they have no chemistry and he looks like Mark Zuckerberg? Ohhhhkkkkaaayyyyyyyy...
But it does contain this exchange and is very funny to me:
Hathaway: When I use JavaScript,
the HTTP crawler is not scraping
the metadata correctly
and I am losing the CSS properties.
Zuckerberg-looking guy:
Well, did you try parsing the CSS
separately using regex?
They deliver these lines like they learned them phonetically from Chinese.
Luckily, I speak Chinese:
Doctor: His blood pressure is 18/900, we're going to have to intubate him if we can't get him on fluids.
Lawyer: Well, obviously the judge is taking it to chambers, it's tort law.
Chef: You can't get a maillard reaction on the soubise?! I've been making mother sauces since I was dish pig!
The other good thing is that Hathaway's outfits are great, lots of verrrry expensive-looking graphic prints.
bonvm experiri
In my casting class, we're making rings out of wax (actually pretty easy because there are tubes you cut from and you just have to hack it down to size - smoothing is going to be an issue for sure). My first one broke so I made another one and carved a very bad Google Translate version of "it's good to try" into it.
I'm lightly obsessed with po(e)sy rings for their extreme handmade-ness and because, as you know, I love words.
If all goes well, I will pour melted silver into the mold and have a janky ring imbued with the spirit of lovers (of trying things). I will update you.