Good Night.
Many changes have been afoot, and much activity has been imminent, so there hasn’t been much typing of late. Just in the last five days I’ve driven to New Hampshire, eaten two Thanksgiving dinners, spent ten hours in transit to a church in Pittsburgh — flying, waiting, flying again, busing, and then walking about fifteen to eighteen blocks — then three changes of company in quick succession, more walking, then busing, flying, weather delays, more flying, and landing and being presented with the unsightly spectacle of a $2,000 vehicle repair and inspection bill for a $1,600 car. Then cake, then more driving.
And all this happened after a week of frantic internet activity. The V announced that it was going to be leaving the chilly embrace of Prospero’s Delphi Forums system in favour of the more flexible and totally free Beehive Forums system. With them went went many of the other assorted WEFugee forums, including those hosted by Dan, Keith, JOSH, and Ted. Which, with the exception of my own little humble Delphi Forum, comprised a pretty comprehensive list of all the reasons why I subscribed to Delphi’s services in the first place. So, I had to figure out how to host a Beehive forum of my own. (Click and join!)
And to do that, I had to download Beehive and phpMyAdmin, install them both, get the rights to create a database on my webhosting, discover that I didn’t have the right permissions through phpMyAdmin, do lots and lots of searching and tweaking of the prefs to try to correct this, try to lean MySQL, contact my hosting service, discover they provided a much better and cleaner version of phpMyAdmin, delete a database, create a new database, install Beehive, delete phpMyAdmin, and then configure the new version of The Brothel. So that was the previous five days before the previous five days. There’s still a missed week of posting in there someplace, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
So, here’s my minor story from Thanksgiving, to help allieviate the long silence: The week before, despite the fact that I have been trying to reduce my spending, I had gone to see George Clooney’s Good night, and good luck. at my local cinema. In part this was because of the immensely favourable review it received from the keen eye of Andrew Wheeler, but also out of the sheer surpise of finding it at my local commercial movie house instead of at the nearby art theatres. A few days later, at the traditional family outing of Going To See A Cheesey Movie In Order To Get Out Of The House After Thanksgiving, the even more commercial movieplex had a pile of miniature posters for Good night, and good luck, with a photocopied flier available for the public to take. However, the flier wasn’t supposed to be there. The flier was actually a photocopy of a letter from Warner Independent’s promotional department, detailing instructions that would allow the theatre manager to download the actual flier, and any additional P.R. materials he wished. Included in the letter was the password that would allow one to download hi-rez images, and other virtual press-kit materials. The flier that the letter asked the theatre manager to photocopy instead of the letter was nowhere to be seen.
Naturally, I snagged one. That’s two major studios I can now get press materials from. Only fourteen to go.
Horn-Rimmed Spectacles
There were a spate of articles in the recent past about Singles Supermarket shopping evenings, that would allow unattached foodees to scope each other out while simultaenously being able to check out what they were planning on carting to the check-out.
New ways of organizing the event of meeting people is apparently good business and therefore good news, and so we have also read articles about speed-dating, internet dating, singles nights at dog-walking parks, and the like. I’ve always felt that if there were enough single people to provide fodder for all these techniques and still keep both personals columns and bars populated, then there must be enough single people out there that it shouldn’t require vast machinations to meet them.
Says the single thirty year-old man. Anyway…
The British Library has recently publicized their second library-based singles evening, an event that is taking place in conjunction with their “Beautiful Minds” exhibit. I very much enjoyed the sales pitch for the event — called a “mingle” — which mentioned that the exhibit is about “the history of the Nobel Prize, focusing specifically on 30 individual Prize-winners, over the whole range of six prizes — Peace, Physics, Chemistry, Economic Sciences, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature — from the past 100 years. What better backdrop for people who are bold, bright, bored and single to meet their match?”
Unfortunately, the event may pall next to the rather ordinary backdrop that the British Library provides for the passionate. Guardian writer Will Hodgkinson claims that one doesn’t need to get dolled up and go to a special exhibit at the library, when it is already teeming with sparks.
[S]exual tension… crackles like electricity throughout the building. In the old British Library, this tension exploded on to the toilet walls, where quivering dons would scrawl profanities too shocking to repeat here, but in the new building it is mostly confined to furtive eye contact and the occasional conquest. “I met my three last boyfriends in the British Library,” says Glaser. “You’re working in the abstract, sharing space with these people who you cannot imagine existing in the world outside, and the sexual and personal life is repressed for most of the day. But believe me, when it comes out, it comes out with a vengeance.”
None of the above should come as a surprise to the students and librarians closer to home. There was a minor flap in 2001, covered by the New York Times as well as Rolling Stone, I believe, when the Yale “Porn and Chicken Club” decided to make a student-produced and -performed blue movie about the not-uncommon phenomenon of students having sex in the aisles and shelves of the library. Apparently, the film was never completed, at least not for public release. And with the vast array of quote-unquote “amateur” pr0n out there, I’m sure that it’s not a great loss to the world. It certainly won’t have much affect on frantic fumblings between mutually beautiful minds in the stacks. One of the many reasons why high school librarians tend to prefer designing their demesnes with half-height, well-lit shelving.
And just because I fully expect this entry to be egregiously blogrolled by automated blogspot traffic aggregators because of my use of certain vocabulary, let’s go for broke: make sure you give a spin to The New Pornographers’ “Mass Romantic“.
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