Tag Archives: Nerdery

Shakespeare got to get paid, son*

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 5, 2010 - 11:43 am |
34 Comments

Last week a national magazine asked me if I’d write a short piece for both their print and online versions that would include quotes from my readers on the topic of pregnancy. The day before it was due I thought, Hmm, I wonder how much they’re planning on paying me for this? (I’m known for my guilelessness and trusting nature.) (No, really, it’s true.) Surprisingly, National Magazine revealed that they intended to pay me in “blog hits” — links to my site(s) from their web page. I perceived no malice in their request, their rationale was merely that I wasn’t writing that much anyway, that most of the piece would be quotes culled from my not-terribly-vast-but-highly-intelligent-and-also-stunningly-attractive readership, and that being in their magazine would get me noticed.

Despite their poignant logic, my next thoughts were as follows:
(more…)

The Kindle Swindle!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 4, 2010 - 11:15 am |
57 Comments

So I got a Kindle for Christmas last year, and I have to confess: I don’t really love it.

Lord knows I’ve read the effusions of converts across America, people who can’t believe how much they don’t miss holding an actual book in their hands. People who could give a shit about cover art, whose singular joy comes from text alone, from the story that gets planted and flourishes in their head. And I’ve mulled it over, wondering what’s wrong with me that I don’t like clicking pages as much as turning them. Certainly I’ve enjoyed the advantages of traveling with eight books loaded into a machine the size of a single trade paperback, and of being to download something new to read while standing in a 45-minute-long line for airport security. There’s no disputing the miraculousness of literary instant gratification, if you can afford it.

It’s just the act of reading on the stupid thing that bums me out.
(more…)

Halloween

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 2, 2010 - 12:05 pm | ,
12 Comments

Halloween this year was unexpectedly awesome. Jackson has officially transitioned from cute and/or superhero costumes to spooky ones, and though we thought he’d achieved this milestone last year, we too-late discovered that 2009′s skeleton zombie costume actually frightened him so much that he gave himself nightmares by wearing it. However, 2010′s pulsating, bloody Scream mask was by all accounts a spectacular success, both socially and psychologically. (more…)

Bliss, I say

  By Eden M. Kennedy | August 15, 2010 - 6:17 pm | ,
21 Comments

I was in New York City last weekend for a couple of . . . all right, maybe seventy-five reasons. Each of them was a compelling one! Behold the dearth of my photography!

1. The annual BlogHer conference which, as you probably know, is a conference for bloggers. Mostly women, but also men, a fair portion of whom seemed to be parents. BlogHer is awash in parenting bloggers, of which about 71% rarely get out of the house (including me). So when you then take these rarely-out people and put them in giant rooms filled with disco balls, unicorns, art, and cheeseburgers, magical things happen. And as long as I have a brain cell to my name I will treasure the memory of Luvvie stomping her feet and shouting while Jenny worked the entire Single Ladies dance at the end of the Sparklecorn party. (That is a video of her SECOND shot at doing the dance, at the subsequent CheeseBurgHer party, which you might have already figured out because of all the people wearing McDonald’s bags on their heads. I can’t explain that. It’s just a thing.)
(more…)

13 Ways of Looking at a Hamster

  By Eden M. Kennedy | August 3, 2010 - 10:38 am | ,
26 Comments

I

The house was dark.
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the hamster.

II

I was of three minds
Like a habitrail
In which there are three hamsters.

III

The hamster whirled in its spinning wheel.
It was a small part of the condominium.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a hamster and a tortoise and a bulldog and a nine-year-old boy
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of wanting seeds
Or the beauty of having them,
The hamster digesting
Or just after.

VI

Incomprehensible things were written.
The hamster ignored them.

VII

O tan men of Hollywood,
Why do you imagine golden beavers?
Do you not see how the hamster
Scampers around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know Mexican accents
And lucid, unrepeatable curses;
But I know, too,
That the hamster doesn’t care
What I know.

IX

When the hamster burrowed out of sight,
It marked the beginning
Of one of many sunrises.

X

At the sight of hamsters
Flying in a green light,
Even the neighborhood weirdos
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over California
In a glass hybrid.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his Prius
For a swarm of hamsters.

XII

The wood chips are moving.
The hamster must be breathing.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
The hills were burning
And they were going to burn.
The hamster sat
In his food cup.

Apologies to Wallace Stevens.

Here, watch me ruin something funny by trying to explain it

  By Eden M. Kennedy | July 5, 2010 - 2:46 pm |
37 Comments

I know that not everyone digs Kate Beaton (DANIELLE), but I am not one of them who doesn’t.

I’ve been reading a book about comedy writing that Alice recommended, so I thought I’d take a minute to try to figure out what makes Beaton’s cartoons so funny to me. In this one, it’s when she lets the king get over-serious about total nonsense, in the exact same way that I am tempted to get over-serious about these cartoons. Irony!

She’s also really good at undermining great authors that we’ve been taught to respect so much that we’re afraid to breathe when we’re around them.

That appeals to me, as someone who’s been somewhat oppressed by higher education, and who read just enough Kierkegaard to make me dangerous at cocktail parties, but not enough to earn more than a C on the final.

The rest of the time, it’s the way she has old-timey people speak in the current vernacular.


So, hey! That was uneducational, wasn’t it. Sorry, I’m still getting used to this blogging thing again. I’ll get it worked out. Don’t you worry.

Yesterday Evening in the Grocery Store

  By Eden M. Kennedy | June 17, 2010 - 7:13 am | ,
11 Comments

Twentysomethings with tattoos and creative facial hair,
when did you discover my neighborhood?
It used to be just middle-class families who went to bed at ten
and leathery beach rats who kept our one bar open.

Now here you are in the cat-food aisle, beaming at all the Fancy Feast.
Cuddles will enjoy whatever flavor you pick.
Don’t forget to buy kibble, though,
or she will lose all her teeth.

Ignore my son as he runs past you shouting, “Dipthong!”
He enjoys saying the word.
If you ask him what he wants for dinner,
he’ll say, “dipthong.”

It was funny the first seventeen times.

I looked it up

  By Eden M. Kennedy | May 11, 2010 - 12:49 pm |
35 Comments

When I was in second grade I read “cousin” as “cow-sin” and I hid in the coat room fighting back tears, trying to figure out where Mrs. O’Neill was finding “cuzzin” in my borrowed Dick and Jane.

And until last night’s Antiques Roadshow I didn’t know how to say chalcedony. I’d only ever read the word, so in my head I pronounced it “CHAL-seh-doe-nee,” but apparently to gem specialists and lovers of spoken English alike, it’s “chal-SED-nee” (or more to the Greek, perhaps, “kal-SED-nee“). I spent the rest of yesterday evening and a good chunk of this morning distractedly trying to reconfigure the neural cow paths in my brain to accommodate this new and vital information. I’ll have you know.

And like the other day, when I was wondering whether licking the chocolate frosting off a dull chef’s knife wouldn’t be the act of an untrustworthy woman, I felt myself eerily cautioned from beyond the grave by H. W. Fowler:

The English speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive* is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; (5) those who know and distinguish.

1. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes. ‘To really understand’ comes readier to their lips and pens than ‘really to understand’; they see no reason why they should not say it (small blame to them, seeing that reasons are not their critics’ strong point), and they do say it, to the discomfort of some among us, but not to their own.

2. To the second class, those who do not know but do care, who would as soon be caught putting knives in their mouths as splitting an infinitive but have only hazy notions of what constitutes that deplorable breach of etiquette, this article is chiefly addressed.

*It strikes me as very funny that you can substitute the word “mommybloggers” for “split infinitive” and it makes a whole new set of sense.

And I’m terribly sorry, but if you want to read another 1,500 words about split infinitives you’ll have to find a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Second Edition, 1965, because as someone who’s wantonly eaten peanut butter straight from the jar using a Swiss Army knife, I’ve never been able to read further than that.

BRING IT

  By Eden M. Kennedy | April 15, 2010 - 3:01 pm | ,
9 Comments

The theme of this week’s posting on Fussy seems to be Close-up Photos in Natural Light Taken In My Kitchen, and in view of those boundaries I present to you some Easter Eggs from whenever that was. The egg on the left was decorated by Jackson, he took a red crayon and wrote bring it on (lowercase) on his first egg before choosing another and scribbling the hell out of it. (Eventually he got bored and just wrote SUCK IT on his last egg before commencing with the dyeing, already.) Me, I chose to reopen an old wound inflicted upon me by M!ffy’s profoundly humorless lawyers by creating YET ANOTHER unauthorized likeness of the beloved Dutch bunny (see here, here, and here), which has been dyed orange in compliance with the internationally binding order that all things Netherlandish should be colored so.

And then we ate them, and lo, they were tasty.