I was just trying to force a LiveJournal post to the very back of the archive, and discovered a curious thing: LiveJournal will only let you date things back so far.

I was attempting to date something February 3, 1468. (Internet cookies to the first person to guess why.) It also kicked back an attempt to date something November 21, 1969, and an attempt at March 25, 1925, but it was totally cool with March 8, 1979. Further investigation narrowed down the acceptable dates to anything in or after 1970.

For LiveJournal, as for Unix operating systems, the world apparently started on January 1, 1970.

Presumably that also means that LiveJournal will wig out in 2038, when the epoch rolls over. If I'm still here, I'll let you know -- some other way.

Miyavi cracks me up. I started reading his blog on the basis that he likes to switch languages randomly while he's writing it, and I need to keep practicing my Japanese lest I lose it. As it turns out, he doesn't actually write in "English" and "Japanese" so much as he writes in "Internet" and "Miyavi". It's weird reading, partly because he's from Osaka and they have their own dialect there (grammatical particles? standard vocabulary? why would anyone need those?), but mostly I think just because he updates randomly when he feels like it, and that's how it all falls out of his brain. About half the time he translates himself from one language to the other; the other half, the two say totally different, and usually totally random, things.

His fanclub people have taken to translating and re-tweeting his Twitter stuff, so the English-only crowd can see just how weird it gets. Their main translator finally decided not to bother with anything where the English and Japanese halves say the same thing after a recent spate of tweets when he was home with his baby daughter, his iPhone, and nothing more compelling to do with his time than give the entire internet a play-by-play account of his afternoon. I have no idea about the rest of the world, but in Miyavi-land at least, the Japanese equivalent of OMG is apparently spelled ｵｰﾏｲｶﾞ.

One of Miyavi's favorite hobbies is folding, spindling and mutilating language until it does what he wants. His song lyrics are basically "clanging on a theme"; rarely if ever do they have any kind of serious, coherent message -- seriously, he's got ones called "Gigpig Boogie" and "Koi wa Push Phone" ["Love's A Touch-Tone Phone"], and one of my favorites is "Pichi-Pichi Chappu-Chappu Ran-Ran Blues" -- but they all sound terribly cool. He makes it a point to learn enough of the local language wherever he goes to speak some on stage, and evidently got on fine in Europe when last he went.

A lot of the truly silly things he does are cross-lingual. Miyavi's English has crested "excellent" and is now sliding down the other side of the hill into the miserable jumble you get from native speakers and silly cat macros. He's got this strange fixation on the letter V. He spells his stage name Miyavi with the kanji 雅, which actually says "miyabi", and his backing band is billed as the KAVKI BOIZ ["kabuki boys"]. There's no V sound in Japanese, and although there is technically a way to make V-syllables in katakana (they go ヴァ　・　ヴィ　・　ヴゥ　・　ヴェ　・　ヴォ), it's rarely used and most of the time you just substitute one of the B-syllables instead; further, the structure of Japanese (usually) doesn't handle two consecutive consonant sounds very well, so usually a dummy "U" is inserted between them. He's just intentionally hypercorrected the other way.

The latest one sent me to Wikipedia in an attempt to work out WTF. He's been picking up Chinese -- the first time he went to China, he posted a blog entry to the effect of OMG BEIJING IS AWESOME, IMMA GO LEARN CHINESE NOW, 'K?, and then he went and did just that. I get the impression his Mandarin is still a bit squiffy, but my Mandarin is probably even squiffier, so I couldn't say for sure. He's recently gone back to Taiwan to do a show and was ridiculously happy about this, because he would once again get to eat something that the translator over at his fanclub blog rendered as "xiao long bao". I know "xiao bao" is the generic term those little steamed dumpling things, but I'd never heard the variation "xiao long bao" before. Cat said that the hanzi stuffed in the middle would normally tell you what the filling was, so I went off to look it up. It turns out that in this case, it's not -- this "long" means "basket" and "xiao long bao" seem to be specifically the kind of dumplings you get from street vendors, who cook them in bamboo steamer baskets on carts.

Except Miyavi is not spelling it right. I have no idea whether it's intentional -- most likely; despite all the LOLcat, I know he can spell in English and Japanese, well enough that if he can't find the right kanji for something he'll write it in English rather than spell it understandably wrong -- or some quirk of his iPhone's character converter that he overlooked, but the right spelling is 小籠包, which literally says "little basket bun". He keeps spelling it 小龍包, where the middle character is the very similar, but not quite identical, 龍, which means "dragon". (The two say the same syllable with different tones in Mandarin.) Which would make them little buns filled with dragon. No wonder he thinks Taiwan is such a cool place.

Our rats are weird. One of Amber's bras finally died, so she pitched it into the bathroom wastebasket before having her shower a few days ago. The rats, who get their daily rat-ercise chasing each other around the bathroom floor while I shower -- I happen to get home from work around normal rat active time -- dragged the ruined bra out of the trash again. Two days in a row. And fought over it. They like curling up into a ball and sitting in the cups, and they will head-butt and shove one another as hard as they can to get the chance to do so.

They seem strangely determined to possess a piece of fancy women's underwear, so I finally gave up and gave it to them. I cut it up, stitched some ties on so we can attach it to the cage bars, and threw it into their toy pile. Nick and Miles are now the proud owners of a pair of very expensive corner-mount Victoria's Secret rat hammocks. I have never before run into a cross-dressing rodent, but according to the vet, most other rats hate hot curry, as they are just smart enough to not eat things that taste like burning, so I'm also not really surprised that our rats are somewhat off-kilter in other ways as well.

If anyone's curious, apparently they are double-Ds.

Bonus game: How many words can you make from the letters in I SQUASH A TRANSVESTITE RAT?

Gathered rats, camera and charged battery in the living room this morning. They're probably badly over-lit, but the only way I can figure to cut the exposure time enough to get sharp photos -- rats do NOT sit still -- is to turn on the flash, so the camera does it automatically. I'm sure there is a way to do it manually -- it's just that none of my Japanese classes covered "obscure kanji that may someday be in camera menus", so I have no idea how. I did get some nice close ups, though.

Ours are, like most pet rats, Rattus norvegicus, instead of the smaller Rattus rattus; for size reference, the squashy part of the rat, minus tail, is about as big as one of my feet, and I wear a US ladies' 6 shoe. Miles weighed in at 1.1lbs and Nick at 1.25lbs the last time a vet tech plopped them onto a scale, which is on the tubby side even for pet rats. Both are Berkshire agoutis, which means brindle/mutt-colored on top and white on the underbelly.

Someone on another blog where I periodically comment just brought up the old "kids who spend more time online are more likely to be unhappy!" thing. I hate this. First, I've never gotten anyone to cough up a good reference to the orignal study, so I don't even know if it's true, and if it is, whether it's statistically significant. And second, assuming it is, they're ignoring a HUGE confounding factor:

Nobody takes kids whose preferred communication style is face-to-face and makes them spend eight hours a day swimming in the internets, but kids whose preferred communication style is through an intermediary are legally required to spend eight hours a day penned in with a whole shitload of people.

If you spent your entire day surrounded by people who spoke nothing but Martian and constantly made fun of you for not knowing any, you'd be happy to go home and spend hours on end chatting with people who spoke English, too.

I work stocking shelves overnight in a department store. The store is invariably a wreck when I get there. Everything is on random pegs and I have to run through and fix it all before I can even start putting stuff away. Partly this is because someone in the chain of command has arbitrarily decided that five minutes per department is totally enough to undo everything our customers have done during the afternoon shift, but after grumbling about this for several months, I have come to the conclusion that a lot of it is genuinely good-faith efforts gone completely awry because most of them have no idea how those mystery words on the labels apply to the garment they're holding. They see things like "houndstooth" and look at their cart full of crap -- which has all been playfully "hidden" by our customers, usually two or three departments away, behind something totally unrelated -- and jam the first thing that catches their eye in the empty slot.

If the people who organize clothing for a living don't know any of this stuff, I hold out little hope that the shopping public knows any of it either. (Well, the public that shops at my store, anyway. We're several steps above Wal-Mart, but we're still a place that sells $50 dresses and $35 boots -- not exactly designer.) As it happens, I do. Since this is my journal, I get to stand here and share.

Winter Gear

Hats are big this year, apparently. Coats vary from big overstuffed parka things to hip-length cloaks. As usual, the most obnoxious colors of scarves and gloves are meant to be given as Christmas gifts to unsuspecting friends and relatives.

Skullies and beanies are simple hats made of stretchy stuff, usually knit, that you are meant to jam down over the top of your head. Done. These are unisex and can be found in pretty much all departments -- mens, womens, childrens -- in a variety of colors.

Berets are circular hats made out of something soft and pliable, often wool or something pretending to be wool, or knit/crochet. You wear these perched atop your head like a beatnik, or tilted to the side or the back as per military dress uniforms. These are predominantly worn by women, but other than the range of colors being mostly girly there's nothing stopping guys from wearing them too. Berets in plaid with puffballs on the top are called tams.

A cloche is a brimless felt hat that forms a smooth dome over the top and flares slightly at the bottom. (Cloche is French for "bell", which is exactly what they look like.) Superficially similar hats made of floppier stuff like fleece or canvas are called bucket hats. Bucket hats are unisex; cloches are ladies' hats. A round hat that is cylindrical instead of domed is called a toque. Although technically "toque" is unisex and covers pretty much any cylindrical hat, with or without a round, bubble-like top (chefs' hats are also toques, with or without the bubble starched upright), fashion-wise these days they're usually faux fur, and they're almost always in the women's section.

A fedora is a brimmed hat, usually with some kind of hatband, with a deep groove in the crown and a moderate point pulled in the front. These are the things you see reporters wearing in old movies, their press passes jammed in the bands. Indiana Jones wears a fedora. A similar hat is the porkpie, which is distinguished primarily by being circular instead of elongated front to back. These used to be mens' styles, but Marlene Dietrich wore them back in the '30s and they've come back into vogue for women periodically since. Fedoras and porkpies can be made of anything stiff enough to hold its shape, including felt, woven fabrics like fabrics and twill, or straw.

There are several kinds of hats with flaps. A Peruvian hat is a knit or fleece hat that has a puffball on top and a set of pointed earflaps that end in tasseled braids that can be tied under the chin. The trapper's cap and aviator's cap are similar, and differ mainly in the fit -- an aviator's cap is fitted much more tightly to the head, as previously, when worn by actual aviators, it was meant to go under a crash helmet.

A baseball cap has a rounded crown and a rounded brim. A cadet cap or a conductor cap is similar, except the crown is roughly cylindrical and the brim is generally straighter. A newsie cap mushrooms on the top instead, and a driver's cap looks a lot like a newsie that's had the mushroom pushed forward to rest on the brim.

A muffler is either a short, plush scarf just long enough to go around the neck and cross in the front, or a short, plush cylinder you're meant to jam just your hands into. An infinity scarf is a long circular scarf with a silly name. A pashmina is an uncommonly large scarf (usually 2' x 5' or thereabouts) made of thin, soft woven material with fringe on the ends that borrows its name from a kind of delicate scarf made in India. Knitted scarves can be made in any one of a thousand different materials (mohair and angora are fuzzy like animals; chenille is fuzzy like velvet) and patterns (fair isle is an intricate, multicolor pattern involving geometrics and snowflakes; cables are those things that look like twisted rope).

Driving gloves are fingerless, and usually have grip material on the palm and a cutout on the back. Arm warmers are just what they sound like. Gauntlets are short arm warmers, with a gusset for your thumb so they can come all the way up to the base of your fingers. Convertible gloves or glomits are fingerless gloves with extra flaps that flip up to cover your fingers, converting them into mittens. Elbow-length gloves are meant to be worn with cloaks or coats whose sleeves don't come all the way to the wrist, both of which I've seen this year.

Single-breasted and double-breasted describe the way a coat buttons up the front. Single-breasted coats have one row of buttons up the front, like USAF uniforms. Double-breasted coats have two rows of buttons. Pea coats are double-breasted coats that have wide lapels, big buttons, and vertical openings for the pockets. They have nothing to do with peas and everything to do with the inability of English speakers to spell in Dutch, where "pij" is the kind of material the coat is made of.

A trench coat, so-called because it was worn by WWI soldiers in the trenches, is a lighter coat that sports epaulet straps and usually a back yoke, meant to provide extra waterproofing for the shoulders. Trench coats can have lapels, which are those pointy collar bits with a notch between them, or a stand collar, which is a wide band that stands upright around the neck when the coat is fully closed and fastened. A shawl collar is a collar that curves smoothly around the shoulders with no notches, and disqualifies the garment from being a trench coat.

Typically a jacket is hip length or shorter, and a coat is hip-length or longer, but few retailers reliably preserve the distinction nowadays. A topcoat is a heavy coat specifically meant to be the top layer of winter gear, as opposed to things like sport coats, which are often part of a suit and not specifically meant to provide insulation. A cropped or bolero jacket is a jacket that ends above the waist.

A swing coat is a ladies coat with no belt and no waistline, which falls to mid-thigh and is cut full enough to flare out into a cone shape if the wearer spins. Swing coats often have three-quarter length sleeves (sleeves that end halfway down the forearm), requiring longer gloves if the wearer wants to keep their entire arm covered.

Sherpa trim describes a garment, usually a coat or hoodie, which is fully or partially lined with fur or lambskin such that the fuzzy stuff shows around the edges of the collar and cuffs. A lot of cold-weather cultures wear these -- the stereotypical cartoon Eskimo is usually wearing one -- but the name comes specifically from the coats worn by the Sherpa guides that helped Sir Edmund Hilary reach the top of Mt. Everest in the 1950s.

Puffer jackets/coats are those things made of waterproof, wind-resistant nylon and stuffed like a pillow.

A motorcycle jacket is made of [p]leather, with an overlapping front close that zips up one side and a collar that will stay standing. They are meant to keep out wind and rain when riding at high speeds in inclement weather, and to protect the rider as far as possible from road rash if he wipes out. A bomber jacket is superficially similar, but has a front center zip, ribbed cuffs and often a sheepskin lining. They are meant primarily to retain warmth -- they used to be standard issue for aviators that flew bombing raids, back in the days when it was far more cost-effective to insulate the flight crew than the entire B-52.

Tights have feet. Leggings don't. Tights and leggings are opaque; hosiery is translucent. Knee socks come to just under the kneecap; over-the-knee socks come to just over the kneecap; thigh-high socks come to several inches above the knee.

Riding boots have low block heels with a squared-off front. Go-go boots come up to just below the knee and are usually either made of something stretchy or have long zippers up the side. Duck boots are snow boots where the rubber of the sole comes all the way up over the toe.



So now if you want winter gear, you don't have to be one of the people who walk into a store and ask the poor overwhelmed sales biscuit for "One of those things, you know, with that sort of a thing here, and the other thing that goes like this"! These cover most of the mind-bendingly wrong things I keep seeing while rearranging pegs at three in the morning. Hope it helps -- If I've left anything out, let me know.

Ahoy, internets!

I am looking for beta-readers and editors. I have been slowly putting together material for the book people are always telling me to write, and I need someone to look it over and make sure I make sense to people who are not me. Some of it is revamped versions of material that appears here, some of it is new. As you may have noticed, I can in fact spell and punctuate correctly -- not only in my native language, but also in several others -- so mostly what I need is someone who is outside of my brains to check for typos that elude the spell-checker, and alert me to stuff that sounded better in my head than it does on paper.

I will warn you that I am s-l-o-w. I write when I feel like it, which really does mean when I feel like it. This is why I don't do NaNoWriMo. Inspiration is a fickle thing. I also have a day job, or more accurately a night job, which, while boring, does pay the bills, and requires me to be physically away from the computer for several hours at a time.

Please don't apply unless you're really willing to read things and make detailed notes and corrections. I dig getting praise when you guys think I deserve it, and the validation is a large part of why I bothered attempting a book in the first place, but I need editors who are willing to tell me when my essay has wandered off into east hyperspace and needs to be forcibly dragged back by Imperial Stormtroopers (or, perhaps more scarily, CorSec). You'll get another chance later when I pass the finished MS, assuming there ever is one, around to fresh eyes to double-check before I mail it to anybody.

Also, if anyone has any favorites on the blog that they think would do well in physical print, please feel free to make suggestions. The topic is unimportant; I know myself well enough to know that I can't write 200 pages of nonfiction anything without rocketing off on interesting tangents, so I'm not even going to try. If you'd like to see me write on a particular thing, feel free to suggest that too -- for reader suggestions, I will post at least an alpha version on the blog, because it would just be silly of me to do the Q part of the session without any A to follow.

It's the holidays, so of course Cat has bought marzipan. She gets it at the world market. Marzipan is almost completely unknown in the US, for some reason, even though they grow almonds in California now. It occurs mostly as a filling in imported chocolates -- we carry Ritter marzipan chocolates at Target. (We also carry Ritter cornflake chocolates. WTF, Europe?) The Germans have this puzzling habit of shaping and painting their marzipan to look like other foods, and we cannot decide whether her half-kilo of little marzipan balls are merely rolled in a light cocoa coating, or if they are actually intended to look like potatoes. We find ourselves disturbingly unable to come to a conclusion.

* * *

Someone accidentally gave me an extra tater tot with my fast-food breakfast this morning. It went immediately to the rats. They are so spoiled.

* * *

Oh my god, Sandra Lee is on the Food Network. Cat calls her "the Drunk Lady". We don't think she's shown up for work sober in years. Her instructions are always very vague until she gets to the end of her show and gets to have COCKTAIL TIME! when suddenly she waxes enthusiastic about everything. We once witnessed her mix up a pitcher of 1. vanilla vodka, 2. orange vodka, and 3. Curaçao, from which she poured herself a very generous drink before she set it down in the middle of a "table-scape" that was done entirely in white and the exact same shade of Curaçao blue. Today, she's hosting a Thanksgiving special, wearing a very tight spangled button-down sweater that won't quite stay properly closed in the front. She just summoned up an even blonder, bustier, plastic assistant to chop up some nuts, and then dismissed her again to go get lattes.

There are not a lot of people on Cat's food pr0n network scarier than Sandra Lee. Rachel Ray is, but everyone knows that. Quite frankly, I think the most frightening one is the Giada lady who hosts the Italian cooking show. She looks as if she's made entirely of wax, and she can't possibly actually eat anything she cooks or she would weigh more than ninety-eight pounds.

Alton Brown is, of course, awesome. Everyone needs a Freezer Lady who has nutrition information on everything.

Miles went to the vet yesterday. (Actually, both of them went -- they both like their doctor lady and we weren't sure just what would happen if we took one rat away for an hour and then brought him back smelling funny.) She says the foot problem is probably neurological, probably has to do with a tumor, and there's probably nothing we can do about it.

The vet, I think, was quite a bit more distressed by the news than we were. We know that rats are very little creatures with very little lifespans; this whole business with carting them back and forth to the doctor isn't to keep them alive forever, it's to make sure they're comfortable and happy while they're still living. It's always sad to lose a pet, but the only part of it that really upsets me is wondering if I should have noticed that they were sick sooner, or if I could have done anything else. And in this case -- no, he's a rat, this is what they die from, and we've already taken him in to do what we can, which was a steroid injection to help with the inflammation.

The rat personally thinks we are insane. Primarily what he thinks is amiss at this point is that he can't dig in his ear with his toenails anymore, and that this is annoying. Obviously you, the funny-looking hairless rat, should be scratching his ear for him at every possible opportunity. If you put him down on the bathroom floor for exercise time, he scrambles around and eats mystery objects off the floor and jams his face under the door to smell the hallway and chitters, which is exactly what he did before, except he does it lopsided and gimpy now. We were a bit worried that he couldn't climb the bars of his cage anymore, with only one working back foot, but as it turns out he's a furry little lying bastard and can climb just fine when he thinks we're not looking.

Nick keeps wanting to groom Miles' foot better -- he usually gets a good kick in the face for that, because Miles wants to sleep. Nick is also not very bright, so he gets kicked in the face a lot.

The vet keeps charging us as close to zero as she can get away with. We escaped the Adventure of The Whiffling Rodents with two live rats and two prescriptions for about a hundred bucks; she charged us just the "recheck fee" this time, even though Miles was coming in with an entirely new and innovative problem. If she's this thrilled to see us taking care of our rats, I hate to think what the other rodent owners in town must be like. We are far from the kind of dedicated crazy often seen in rat fanciers -- there do exist people who cook whole-wheat pasta and sautéed vegetables specifically for their purebred, papered rats, and freeze these things in ice cube trays so they can thaw out and feed the rats a variety of different meals in daily rotation. Our four-dollar generic RAT-breed RATs just eat rodent food and random leftovers, we only bathe them when they start to smell funny, and their cage gets lined with costume scraps and old pajamas that we're too lazy to actually walk out to the dumpster.

I learned three things today.

• Attractive girls going to Kinko's to print off modeling contracts get their pages for free.
  
• Two and one-third pounds of rat can fit entirely into a standard Kleenex box to sleep, if all two-and-one-third-pounds of rat are on board with the plan.
  
• No matter how improved the Drano bottle claims it is, the stuff still smells awful, and takes forever to leave the bathroom.