3rd August Weekly Roundup

I do have some ideas brewing for proper blog writing. But for now, another roundup is where it’s at.

• My parents are here for their annual visit and we’re having a blast. A chill time, which is just lovely.
• It looks like a summer of Shakespeare is in full swing. We saw the Bard on the Beach production of Twelfth Night on Friday, and laughed so hard it hurt. It’s the funniest production I’ve seen, and was clever to boot. Physical comedy through the filter of 1920s cinema, on the stage.
• On… a parallel spectrum (can you have one of those? Discuss*), we also saw X-Files: I Want to Believe. I loved the show, of course (though I did lose interest toward the end). I was hooked from the start, and fell in love with my college boyfriend over it. David Duchovny was my late-adolescent famous-person crush. So know that when I say this movie isn’t worth seeing, I mean it. And that I don’t even have a tear in my eye when I say it speaks even more to its mediocrity. Everything you’ve read about it is true: it’s like a long, stand-alone episode of the show. So, okay, yes—it’s a good episode. But not a good movie. There was no taking advantage of length, presumed budget, or anything else uniquely cinematic. It would have been fine as a two-part television mini-series. There’s a funny bit when they poke fun at George W., and for us hopeless romantics there’s some oh-my-they-really-do-acknowledge-their-relationship yumminess. Aaand… that’s it. But I am left wanting to revisit the series on DVD. So, you know. In the sphere of long-term merchandising, I suppose the movie was a success.
• Um, Internet Explorer? You suck.
• SiteMeter did some work on their back-end yesterday and broke the internet. Which meant sites that use the most excellent traffic meter didn’t work on Internet Explorer. Lots of IE users consider IE to be equivalent to the internet. I blame Microsoft for that. (Because I can.) A few people emailed me that they couldn’t load CrochetMe.com, and of course I couldn’t replicate the issue. But Sitemeter fixed the problem before I could work myself into a tizzy over it, and, well. (Big thanks to Rachel at Crochet Pattern Central and to Kim Guzman for their help re: this glitch.)
• It was Internet Explorer’s fault, not SiteMeter’s. How do I know that? Here’s what SiteMeter posted was the problem:
  “The error occured [sic] when the SiteMeter tag was not a direct child of the body tag (e.g. if the tag was within a table or div). Recent changes we made created a failure for visitors viewing sites using Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6.”
  I reckon very few sites don’t nest nearly everything in a a div tag. (Tables, bleh.) There’s nothing wrong with doing so. Which means that IE’s failure to play with whatever SiteMeter did was because of its habit of not playing nice with web standards. (Yes, I’m assuming the SiteMeter changes were standards-compliant. Because I can.)
• So, you see. IE = teh suck.
• Install Firefox. Thank me later.
• I started a friendfeed. Neat concept, but I’m not sure how I’ll use it. How do you use it?
• I also joined Propeller, what with Wil Wheaton going on about it. Are you on there? I haven’t really jumped in yet.
• And while I’m on this web-app kick, I’m still much in love with the Twitter.
• Part of my loving of the Twitter is because of the tweets I awoke to the morning the Entertainment Weekly Popwatch blog picked up the crafts-community-wants-a-Joss-Whedon-interview story.
• Speaking of, I’m moving on from pushing it. I’m reasonably confident the crafts love got at least to within one degree of Joss Whedon from two different sources. Which doesn’t mean he heard about it, since those two sources might not have thought it was worth passing on. But I’m not a fan of being pushy, and all along I’ve thought it would be more effective if fans of Whedoncraft did the contacting (more on this in the next bullet). So the story might die. But if it doesn’t die, it won’t die because you, gentle readers, won’t let it, and that would likely be the only thing that would work, anyway.
• Within the small (but really, it’s not that small, is it?) sphere of yarncraft, I find myself occupying a slice of celebrity these days. It’s never been my goal, and to be perfectly honest it fairly frequently freaks me out. But alas. It has come to pass that I am unable to fulfill all the requests made of me, and I know what it’s like to have someone I know and trust ask me for a favour and how that’s often very different from someone I don’t know asking a similar—or even more minor—thing of me. And I’m also keenly aware that no two requests from strangers are alike, and my reaction to a stranger’s request is informed as much by my mood and my to-do list as it is by the tone and other intangibles of their approach. So I’ve been conservative about my request to interview Joss Whedon given my lack of industry contacts. If, say, a foosball site or a Hannah Montana site (both of which I know nothing about) wanted to interview me, I’d be way more attracted to doing the interview if there were strong grassroots support for it instead of just some pleading by the site owners.
• I’m not sure if any of the blog posts I alluded up at the beginning of this post will materialize (like magic! Straight from my brain to the internets!) this week, since we’re going to press on the 13th. But, you know. You never know.
• Finally, the bounty of the garden is beginning to be bountiful.
• First plum:
• Tomatoes:
• And really finally, some Cleo love for you (that’s my dad in the hammock in the background):

* In this sense, yes, I think you can have parallel spectrums. What I mean is, The X-Files is not on the same spectrum of characteristics as Twelfth Night. I mean, they could be judged on the same spectrum of, say, goodness or entertainment value. But I don’t think they should be. Not in the same league.