I am supposed to be getting a replacement computer from Spork very soon. I have been in the state of supposed to be getting a replacement computer for some months now. There has already been the ritual grovel at the IT office, and a lengthy discussion of voice recognition software. There has been no communication from the IT office at all, though, for about six weeks. Time for more grovelling, probably.

Meanwhile, this computer on which I am now typing, which is my own and not Spork's, and is elderly but has a newish hard drive, is not getting any younger. It has taken to crashing, but only the screen crashes; sounds continue to come out. Today this happened in the middle of a YouTube video of Chumbawumba playing Tubthumping at Glastonbury, which I had clicked on by mistake. Tubthumping continued to play from the speakers for some minutes even after I had closed the computer, and when I turned the computer back on, it had deleted four Word files I had been working on. I blame the anarchists. Seriously, I had better go grovel some more at the IT office.

Also on YouTube today I learned that at some point in the last presidential administration, Billy Bragg had rewritten most of "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward" in ways that I found unfortunate. Not much rhymes with Rumsfeld, it turns out. So.

Yesterday in the parking lot of the Staples where I park when I am going to the acupuncturist, I found a couple of cds - a compilation of music from New Orleans, and some random Christian rock. I was going to play them, but now I'm wondering if they were put there by anarchists, to crash my computer. What? It could happen!

I am very gradually getting better from my shoulder injury (a combination of bursitis, tendonitis, torn muscle, frayed muscle, and arthritis in both shoulder joints and the elbow, aren't you sorry you asked? martial artists, don't spend too much time with the punching bag, the end) but still taking a lot of drugs, which make me loopy and unable to work well some of the time, so I am on sick leave, which leaves me lots of time for random poking around on YouTube for Billy Bragg videos. But also! I have been reading. And so I say:

Everybody should go read The City & the City right away. And then tell me what you think! I loved it immoderately, much more even than I loved the Perdido Street trilogy, which I loved, but maybe that's just the drugs talking?

Also, twotoedsloth sent me a link to an article from this journal, which looks pretty interesting for you fan studies people out there - http://www.participations.org/index.htm -
in that it seems to position its contents as empirically based in opposition to the overly abstract cinema studies and fan studies schools. Which is to say that there's a whole scholarly wank out there of which I have been unaware up to now. But they seem to agree with me that there are no spectators, as in flesh and blood people watching a movie, in the spectatorship literature and that this is a bad thing, so ... well, anyway, potentially interesting journal, is all.

I've been too crippled to do much gardening this year, but the tomatoes are doing all right anyway. I put them in pots instead of in the ground, so far fewer problems with blight, but we are getting fewer of them so far and they're smaller. Tigerella tomatoes are my new favorite, though.

Hey! I updated my LJ/DW! Whoo!

So I've spent most of the day moving back into my laptop with the nice new harddrive, and this led to updating software, including the iTunes software. That's how I discovered that one of the new! improved! features of iTunes turns out to be a neat little box beside the name of a few songs in my library, whose neat little red all-caps texts warns EXPLICIT. I just noticed it next to the Rufus Wainwright song "Gay Messiah." Prince, Bessie Smith and Funkadelic did not get boxed, which means -- I guess -- that you can be as dirty as you please as long as it's all couched in elaborate metaphor. Or that the people labelling the music figure that innocent youth don't listen to music recorded before 2003.

Yes, yes, I should be more offended by George Bush's comparison, in a speech today, between the Iraq war and the US war of independence. But if I was going to take umbrage at every idiotic remark anyone makes about the past, there would be no umbrage at all left for all the other historians.

Today is one of a long series of jampacked and unfun days, hence the long silence. Though I will, I swear, do an AHA report one of these days. (And mincot, are you okay?)

But I have a problem -- well, I have a series of problems, but there is one which I hope you, dear Livejournal Genie, can solve. And that problem is: my laptop, what the hell?! Or to be more precise about it, I came back home at 11:30 today to find that my laptop (a year-old Lenova running Windows) had shut itself down, but would not power back up. Eventually I realized that it was not off but the screen had gone mostly, but not quite, dark -- if I hold it at a certain angle and squint, I can make out the WELCOME screen. But nothing I've tried so far, including rebooting, has restored it to where it was at 9:30 today. The screen is still dark, and also it seems to have reset itself (though it's hard to tell, since it's dark) to defaults as of a year ago, e.g. it offered me the Windows "tour."

I guess I should just haul the fucking thing in to the place where I bought it, but I won't have a minute available to do that until Saturday afternoon and I really need it NOW. No worries about data loss, because everything is backed up three ways from Sunday, but I need my damn computer.

Help me, Livejournal Genie! You're my only hope!