Month: March 2006

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Wedding update

It was an ugly/bumpy flight, but we made it into New Orleans! Thanks to benzodiazepines, I was just fine!

Unfortunately, I blistered through the book I brought along with me (Charles Portis’ Norwood), and neither of the others I brought for the trip are appealing to me right now (Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch and Richard III (I inadvertently grabbed this instead of Richard II, which is an even dumber move than messing up the Dermot Mulroney / Dylan McDermott axis)), so I may need to pick up some other reading material while I’m here.

Sure, most people don’t spend the days before their weddings worried about book selection, but we seem to have everything under control: paperwork gets filed tomorrow, DJ gets his musical “guide” in the afternoon (along with a stack of CDs that we want to use), tux pickup is on Saturday, and public drunkenness is scheduled for Saturday night.

My brother plans on shooting video of the wedding and posting it pretty close to live (depending on the wireless setup at the venue). I promise that I will have NOTHING to do with getting that set up. But it’ll likely show up on this site.

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Mind reading

Whew! I found a reading for my wedding on Sunday! Being all literary and such, it was pretty difficult for me to come up with something good (I’ll post it sometime after the wedding). In my neurotic way, I felt pressure to come up with a Really Good Reading. The search reminded me of an article I read once about how difficult real writers find it to do things like write a note for their kids’ schoolteachers.

Anyway, it’s a Really Good Reading. The friend who’s going to read it on Sunday tells me she cried when she read it this morning. Amy sez she got choked up, too. Dames. . .

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Sunday-Sunday-SUNDAY!

When Amy & I picked a date for the wedding, we had to accommodate my conference schedule, the weather in New Orleans, and our magazine & catalog deadlines. We settled on March 12: not too hot and humid, low chance of northeasterners getting derailed by snow, no conference for a week or so. It looked like a good date.

Since then, we discovered that our wedding night overlaps with both the premiere of The Sopranos AND Selection Sunday.

No one in Amy’s family will have a problem with this, but my brother and some of my friends will be praying for the uninterrupted functioning of their TiVos.

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Breathe with me

I’ve long contended that conspiracy theories are a substitute-religion for the disillusioned; it gives them the opportunity to believe in a Greater Power, even if it’s just a power for evil. I think this ties into that Orwell passage I quoted a few weeks ago.

Brendan O’Neill at Spiked has a great piece on the mainstreaming of paranoia:

The rise of the conspiracy theory points to an important shift in journalism and public debate. There has been a move from debating the substance of someone’s beliefs or behaviour to focusing myopically on the motivations behind them; from challenging individuals over their words or actions to trying to uncover some deep, dark ulterior motive. This has had a deadening effect on public debate. It replaces a critical engagement with political developments with a destructive neverending search for the secret agenda. And it means that no one is ever truly held to account for what they say or do. After all, if Blair is merely the puppet of dark neocons forces when it comes to Iraq, then how can we hold him up to public ridicule for what has happened there?

This is not investigative journalism; it is gossip.

Read more, if you dare.

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Update

Sorry I’ve been out of touch, dear reader. We’re closing in on the wedding date (March 12!), and this has necessitated a ton of work at the day job, preparing the April issue of the magazine so that my associate editor can handle what I’m leaving behind.

This will necessitate my knocking out articles on biogeneric drugs and site selection criteria for pharma facilities, and updating our glossary of pharma & biopharma terms. Since one of my associates at a major pharma company just sent me an in-house list of acronyms used in the industry, it looks like I’ll be updating a bunch of the glossary entries for this year’s edition.

And I’ll be getting married in 9 days. So, I’m probably not going to post anything for the next bunch of days, is what I’m saying. Typing. Whatever.