The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

Hah. I remember this experience. When I was in 7th grade or so, my clothes didn’t fit and I was wearing the same stuff all the time, so my mom and I went shopping for school clothes.

A combination of factors make shopping with a 12 year old particularly frustrating:
- At that age, you’re in sort of an in-between size. Too big for children’s clothes, too small for adult clothes, you’re growing all out of proportion with yourself so your hips don’t match your legs and your shoulders don’t match your breasts.
- Junior highers will use any excuse to pick on each other, and clothing happens to be the obvious choice. I spent junior high picking my clothing based on what I thought was going to get picked on least.
- When you’re 12, your mother has the lamest fashion sense on the planet. After all, she helped you pick out all those clothes your classmates are mocking you for.

We wandered the mall for 3 1/2 hours. We bought: One blouse and one skirt.

My dad was pissed. Men.

The experience was repeated when it came time to buy dresses for semi-formals and proms. To this day, my mother teases me by chanting my litany of requirements for any dress I would try on, much less wear to an event:

“No beads, no bows, no buttons, no sequins, no contrasting lace, no glitter, no ruffles…”

Can I help it if I like simple stuff?

And can I help it if one of the dresses she pointed out to me bore a striking resemblance to a maternity dress? “Mother! That collar is so… so… maternal!”

I caught the end of True Lies, which, while not a great movie, was underrated and mispromoted. The fight scene on the fighter jet is high-quality cool, Jamie Lee Curtis did her own stunt work in the scene where her character is dangling from the helicopter, and at the end, it has one of the two greatest tango scenes I’ve ever scene.

The other one was in Scent of a Woman, and the two scenes use the same music, “Tango por Una Cabeza” by Carlos Gardel. That’s your trivia for the day.

I need to learn to tango.

I also need to look as good in an evening gown as Jamie Lee while I do it.

OK, I wasn’t going to say anything, because I have many friends have a rather fanatical devotion to the show and I don’t want them to feel like I’m belittling them for their entertainment tastes. Heaven knows my tastes are weird enough. But this is my blog, and I just need to get this out of my system.
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There’s another organization a few blocks away from the Two Bits HQ which, for many years, used the same acronym as us. We get their phone calls regularly, and since their mission and ours, while not the same, are easily confused, it often takes several minutes on the phone with some poor clueless soul to figure out that they’ve called the wrong number.

When Two Bits entered the 20th century and reserved a domain name, it reserved nacaanet.org because this other organization already had nacaa.org. No problem.

Since then, the organization that owned nacaa.org has stopped using the acronym and changed its domain. Of course, the registration on nacaa.org lapsed.

So I get this email this morning. “I’m the webmaster for [a state public service commission]. Are you the group that used to be called [Other org’s old name] and had the domain nacaa.org? I had a link to it, but now it’s a porn site.”

So I check, and don’t you know… nacaa.org is now Not Safe For Work.

*rofl*

I told Nancy, and her reaction was sort of an amused and astonished, “Oh shit!” I could see the thoughts forming in her head: “That’s bad, because people will look for us and find porn- oh wait. What do I care?”

So I emailed the guy back with the other place’s new address and told him that nacaa.org had never belonged to us. If I decide I’m going to be here long enough, I might backorder the domain just to be safe. It’s not as though the Quebecois pr0nmonger is depending on that acronym for anything.

Slate calls the new iTunes Music Store the 10-10-220 of music- all your songs for 99 cents. Also, Jen Raj rhapsodizes about the new iPods. (Permalinks broken, it’s the 4/28 entry.) Tom captures my thoughts exactly on per-song music purchases.

Michele is forming the Slutpublican party- conservatives who also believe in the rights of consenting adults.

Julian has some interesting and rhetoric-free thoughts on bad reasons to hate capitalism.

When I take my PowerBook on the plan to Austin next weekend, if I turn it on but forget to turn off the Airport card, will it really be that dangerous? And if airlines decide they’d like to ban electronic devices from airplane cabins, what guarantees are they willing to provide that my $2,000 laptop will not be harmed by a baggage handler? I’ve seen a Titanium PowerBook after being checked as luggage- it was not pretty.

The plan seems to be that the president of the Two Bits board is going to be here on Thursday to inform me that my boss is being fired and that I’m going to have to pick up a whole lot of slack.

Nancy doesn’t know if they have any kind of transition plan in place, but she told me I should be ready to ask for a raise while the pres is here. Gotta figure out how best to approach that one.

Great.

The new Apple music announcements look cool. iTunes 4 will finally have the Rendezvous functionality we were promised, and will be integrated with the new iTunes Music Store, which looks to be downloadable music purchasing done right- a buck a track, reliable files, and a nice reasonable compromise between copyright protection and fair use rights. When Steve Jobs outlined everything wrong with current music download services and pointed out that they treat customers “like criminals,” my heart skipped a beat. Yay Steve! The anti-piracy measures are designed in such a way that they shouldn’t be burdensome to people who aren’t stealing.

The slimmer iPods are pretty sexy too, and will be compatible with both Windows and Macs right out of the box. There’s a firmware update for existing iPods to make them compatible with the Apple Audio Compression format used for the music store. There’s been a product shift- no more 5 or 20 GB iPods- they’re now 10, 15, 30 GB. I was kind of hoping there’d be a $200 iPod option, which would put one into debit card rather than credit card range, but I suppose I’ll just have to save up.

And no, Apple didn’t buy Universal, so no Apple membership in the RIAA. But that’s okay- if the service is successful, it might cause the labels (all 5 major companies are participating) to sit up and take notice.

Tonight, as I was trying to get into my car after an evening out with Tom, Romeo insisted that I adopt her. Every time I tried to extract her from my passenger seat, she dug in with her rather impressive claws. Finally, I got fed up and called the number on her ID tag.

No answer. Just a voicemail box that hasn’t been customized.

We theorize that this cat belongs to the houses across the street from Tom’s, which had recently been demolished. I came home and Googled the telephone number- according to Google’s records, it belongs to a house THREE MILES from where Romeo hangs out. Google seems to lag a bit- for our former land line number, it still shows the person who had it right before us- the Indian chick we were always getting calls for- and for my friend Jim who just moved to Florida, it shows someone else…

But that makes even less sense, if Romeo lived on Tom’s street.

In any case, I couldn’t bring Romeo home tonight. Maddie is twice her size, and Romeo has front claws where Maddie has none. I didn’t want to leave the two of them alone while neither Dawn nor I would be home to supervise the feline interaction- I didn’t want to come home to discover that a Kitty Deathmatch had taken place in my living room.

But maybe next weekend… it seems clear to me that Romeo aspires to be a housecat once again.

Anyway, Tom and I had gone out to see Mitch Hedberg at the DC Improv. Always a high-quality comedic experience. The opening comic was good, but the “featured” comic, the one between the opener and the headliner, was just awful. So unfunny. I thought I recognized her name, and I remembered Hedberg doing jokes about a girlfriend named Lynn, so I checked his website. I was right- that crappy comic is Mitch Hedberg’s wife. That explains why she’s touring with him and getting “featured” billing despite being less funny than a stubbed toe.

These are the tulips planted on McPherson Square, about half a block from my office. I had wanted to get out earlier, before they had bloomed fully, but I did manage to get out right before the wind blew all the blooms off the stems.

Last night, as I left Tom’s house, and Romeo jumped into the front seat of my car as I opened the door. I’m about half a step from letting the poor thing come home with me- she seems to want to be adopted. But she has a tag with a phone number on it, so alas, I will probably insist that she stay close to her owner. But one of these days… she might just become Maddie’s new cousin.

I didn’t realize until today that I get TVLand in our cable package.

Dude. “MacGyver” is on now. I don’t think I can fully express the degree of childhood nostalgia I am experiencing right now. MacGyver taught me the many uses of duct tape, as well as any number of useful lessons about how to make a hydrogen bombout of common household items. He was even better than the Professor from “Gilligan’s Island.”

Now, if only I could find my Swiss Army Knife.