Katherine Mansfield

"I must laugh or die."—Bertha Young in "Bliss" by Katherine Mansfield

I only caught the tail end of "Storm that Drowned a City." Seemed interesting, but the ending was a little iffy on where responsibility should really lay. The most enjoyable part was a short brow-beating of Tom Ridge (transcription may not be exact):

PBS: Here we are, four years after 9/11, and we still don't have robust, interoberable communications. Why?
Ridge: …It would take time to…develop.

Which reminded me of this funny image I hacked together in MS paint almost three years ago…

Yeah, I know, I know, it's a syndication partnership, not an acquisition—but I had so much fun with this graphic! (And Yahoo!-ified Gawker posts look so funny.)

Anyway, sounds like a grand idea to me. If Yahoo! is going to keep it's cluttered front page, it's better off cluttering it with enjoyable reading instead of just newswire aggregation. Gawkhoo! to your hearts' content.

Vladimir Odoevsky

So AxcessNews ran an article last week on Vladimir Odoevsky's 19th-century take on blogging and referenced my post on the subject from last month.

I'm rather tickled that AxcessNews staff got my gender wrong: "…what AXcess News did manage to find was a blogger who did some digging and came up with who he thinks may have written the story originally for a Russian news site…" [emphasis mine]. I thought the male spelling of my name was usually "Loren"…

They also seem to have not read (or understood) my update, in which I triumphantly announced that my Russian friend Sergei Rublëv had kindly pointed me towards the original Odoevsky post by Ivan Dezhurney (possibly LiveJournal's most elusive and mysterious blogger).

But of course the gender-altering linkage is undeniably pleasing and has pretty much made my week a happier place to be.

What's really funny about all this, though, is that I originally made the post only to complain about MosNews's abominable failure to link to its source—not to dig up more information about the actual content of the article, which is what my post ended up doing…but that's only because of Sergei's technorati habit and extremely informative comments.

I wonder if Odoevsky would've prophesized that blog posts about his blog prediction could have taken on such a life of their own.

I've recently relocated to East Harlem—quite an adjustment from the spacious serenity I enjoyed in Windsor Terrace, but I'm glad to have traded the torturous F train for a much shorter commute to Midtown and suburban sprawl for the convenience of not having to walk into a whole other neighborhood to do my laundry.

I guess this makes me one of the people that this guy despises, but I actually would've stayed in good ol' Brooklyn if I could've found a place in my budget…oh well. You're a gentrifier pretty much wherever you go these days.