And happy moon landing day, too.

It seems like a whole bunch of famous people have been dying lately. Reminds me of something I glimpsed (probably on Kottke) a long time ago—the author was talking about how media has grown so much to the point that, in a couple of decades down the road, we’ll be hearing about beloved entertainers and such dying left and right. I think we’re at the start of that.

For some reason, the Adam Yauch thing is hitting me really hard. I just started listening to his god damn band, what the hell! Maybe it was the video? They seem like thoroughly awesome people. Also this bit from the weekly Q&A on the Onion A.V. Club about American pop-culture pride:

As three Jewish kids in love with punk and hip-hop, the Beastie Boys embody the “melting pot” quality of America about as well as any act in popular music. (And the “cultural theft” aspect as well, but let’s not dwell on that so much.) For me, though, the Beastie Boys are inspiring for their wide-ranging enthusiasm: for sports, for spirituality, for political engagement, for cartoons, for cheesy ’70s cop shows, and on and on. Listening to a Beastie Boys album is like spending an hour with a funny, big-hearted friend who’s eager to share all the new music and movies and books he’s been digging since the last time you got together. The Beasties are embracers, and so is the America I love.

I burst with joy simply at the thought of something so wonderful.

Speaking of the A.V. Club, though, man, this summer has seen my love for that website just bloom. Reading the articles and message boards, I feel like I’ve found my people. It gives me hope that someday I’ll meet them in person.

In other "shit I do on the internet because work gives me the heebies," I needed a supplement to Kottke, so I looked at the sites he was recommending, and remembering I’d seen "cyn-c" a couple of times in his posts, I went peeking over there and it hit the spot pretty good. This is, indeed, a fucking good time travel story. Maybe more math than I was able to grapple with as far as the junk about dimensions (but last summer I read this math-y short story collection called Fantasia Mathematica which had Heinlein’s "And He Built a Crooked House" so I wasn’t totally lost; on a side note, I borrowed the book for the Kornbluth because the pickings on him in the school library were so slim, but I don’t even remember his contribution because it was only a page long), maybe a little too predictable, but the predictable actually fits in well with how the story works and the end ties everything up neatly and perfectly.

On science fiction, have I ever brought up Tim Pratt’s "Impossible Dreams"? A bit mushy and wish fulfillment-y, but again, it’s like finding my people. Gah, I re-read that story every so often (reading "By His Bootstraps" made me remember this one) and it is always fills me with glee; it’s as if in the interim, most of the details have been wiped out of my mind, so when I come back, it’s like a fresh surprise.

So maybe I lied a bit when I said I only had music to survive on. There are these bits and bobs, too.

It’s also not so bad because one of my chums from back home will be in Iowa visiting a relative for a while, so she (and the aforementioned relative, unfortunately) are going to make a trip to Chicago, which means she’ll be popping by to see me (and also slumming it on the couch which isn’t even mine because they’re cheap/poor). Why is it that in the last two weeks I’m in this fucking city, when I’m probably going to be at my busiest trying to wrap shit up, that people come around and want to do shit? This also applies to my co-workers— since the itinerant cheerful one will be back on Wednesday, they want to go karaoke and probably a whole bunch of other malarkey. All right, I can see I’m being a jackass by complaining about how I’m being "forced" to have fun, so we’ll leave things at that.