Evil Calculators to Strip Searches to Baby Days - Reminiscent of Gorey, But Not Gory! Also more Casablanca references!!

In my wanderings last night, I spent a moment with Lisa at That's Why.

She lists her location as "O'Possum's Drift, Midbartow, Georgia, United States." I had my doubts that this is a real place; however, she announced she's moved to Euharlee, which is a real place. Lisa is funny and writes with a wonderful strong voice. She attracts only the best people as followers. I was curious about my fellow followers, so I checked out a few of their places.

Randal Graves sounded like my kind of smart aleck. His blog is L'ennui mélodieux, which Babelfish informs us means l' melodieux trouble. Thanks a lot, Babelfish. I always thought ennui meant boredom. I bet it means melodious trouble. Or melodious boredom. I could ask him, but that would be too easy. His posts are very interesting and frequently hilarious, although often more clever than I'm capable of fully understanding. He is evil, but apparently not too much so. When you click on this badge:
it takes you to this funky site which claims to be able to calculate the evilness of a website or text passage. It's based on all this mathematical calculation stuff that purports to identify patterns in the Bible which show the spirit of God is present. It's hard to tell where the satire ends and actual true believer stuff begins. The links to Dr. Ivan Panin and the Revival Fellowship seem legit. Anyway, I took my most blasphemous post and checked it on the Gematriculator. It yielded the following analysis:

The text you sent is 29% evil, 71% good
Oh, wait. I forgot about the Jack Black as Jesus video clip post. So these results may be inaccurate. I may be as evil as Randal. But I'm too lazy to check.

Randal has a commenter named Tengrain whose blog, Mock, Paper Scissors, has some great material. There were two posts which particularly caught my eye: one about activism to protect free speech at a local library, and one entitled

8th Grader Strip Searched At School

Yeah, you read that right. Because administrators were tipped off that she had some of this.

I'll give you a minute to go check it out.

Crazy, huh? Or do you think it was okay for the school to do this? If so, I think you're wrong. Explain yourself and maybe I'll change my mind. But I doubt it.

Moving on... let's go back to Lisa's.


Susan has just commented. It takes great self confidence to have a blogger identity that is this simple.

And she uses a cute little crow for her avatar. I am intrigued. She has three blogs. I pick one at random. Adventures, Ink and phantsythat will have to wait. For some reason, I'm attracted to Baby Days.

This is cool! Seriously cool. There are eighteen panels of pen and ink drawings of babies, coupled with a rhyming story which concludes (don't worry, it's not like it's a spoiler or anything)

Baby days, sweet baby days We've all been there you know Hearts are filled with sweet delight To watch our babies grow We hold them for a moment As their childhood slips away We're only catching glimpses of wondrous baby days

It's so pretty, it's like a song. Susan's work reminds me of Edward Gorey's pen and ink drawings. Only hers are less creepy. The girl's got talent! But I discovered something about Gorey I didn't know before while looking for one of his drawings to illustrate this post. He was a William Shatner fan! Blogger Shaenon K. Garrity posts an article about this amazing fact; she drew a whole Goreyesque cartoon sequence about the Star Trek Trouble with Tribbles episode here.

Back to Susan. I note that she is from Portland, Oregon. Or maybe Tuvalu. Her profile is a little confusing. But still, small world, eh?

And I had a John Muir moment (When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.): Remember Jean Reno, from yesterday, who was born in Casablanca? Wikipedia tells us that "One of [Gorey's] stepmothers was Corinna Mura (1909-65), a cabaret singer who had a small role in the classic film Casablanca as the woman playing the guitar while singing "La Marseillaise" at Rick's Café Américain.

That's enough entertainment for today. Go do your laundry.