Clear Blue Dei

Ever since I found the “Bigfoot” (at best guess) version of my post How to Redirect your Blog to a different URL Part 2: Wordpress (titled “How to Airt your Blog to a different URL Portion 2: Wordpress.“)  I have been thinking of Bigfoot.  Here is a note from my original post that was translated on the “Bigfoot” page:

“NOTE: you will cognize if it is not putted upwards right because you ‘ll get an mistake when assay to add the domain name to your blog.”

Oddly enough, Bigfoot may be Scottish (or thereabouts) since he uses “airt” and “ain” which at least resembles that accent. But he uses it wrong, which is not surprising for Bigfoot, the fact that he speaks and writes at all is pretty amazing (although he does use Windows Live for his blog). Heck, the fact that he exists is pretty incredible, although some people dispute even this.

Bigfoot claims his name is “Dennis”, but then again, he claims to have written my post, too. As a matter of fact, he (or a relative) has a Vox blog called “Alabama Restaurants Info“. There is only 1 post written (copied) so far, but it is a good one and I look forward to more. The post is called “Has anyone ever interrupted into a Eatery to do their ain nutrient?” and here is a sample of the Bigfoot review of a mexican restaurant (near as I can tell):

“here was this Mexican eatery that we seed and we discovered that concern was not good. So we sayed a couple of dishes we believed we would wish. The nutrient was horrific!! The refried beans savour like they came out of a  can, the rice was mush and the carnitas savour like they were a hebdomad old. No Good!!!!”

Who knew that Bigfeet (foots?) not only eat mexican food, but critique it. And in the same post we get some of the Bigfoot wisdom:

“I well-nigh interrupted into McDonald ’s to do a late nighttime Collation Wrapper but i chickened out. Plus they were unfastened.

Nope, I havent have sex….does brand ya wonderthough..I wonderment which resteraunt would be the one that everyone would desire to interrupt into? peace

my friend once assay that. luckily he was simply bluffing about the gun so his sentence is very much lower than it should be.”

After pearls like that, who wouldn’t be interested to know more about Bigfoot? Well, Bigfoot has written several books. The first one I became familiar with is Bigfoot: I Not Dead with this review:

“In his eagerly anticipated follow-up to Me Write Book, Bigfoot returns from exile to share his inspiring, hilarious, and often deeply disturbing experiences as a misunderstood forest gentleman and tragic media darling. These entertaining and often grizzly stories stand not only as a testament to the greatness of the legendary man-beast, but also as a chilling cautionary tale of the downside of a life of celebrity, cannibalism, celebrity cannibalism, wanton violence, and lack of toilet training. As in Me Write Book, full-color glossy spreads depict every intimate, disgusting, and downright insane moment of Bigfoot’s life. Bigfoot: I Not Dead is an unforgettable memoir that will stay with readers long after his foul scent has dissipated.”

I read this out of order, Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir was his first book and he sounds like he was more naive and lovable back then. From Amazon:

“Like many reclusive celebrities, Big Foot is misunderstood. In his touching memoir Me Write Book he wants to set the record straight, proving that although he’s larger, hairier, and more foul-smelling than most of us, he’s really not so different underneath.

Only the most cold-hearted among us could look on without compassion as this hirsute Everyman struggles bravely with parental abandonement, Pringles potato crisps, embarrassing moments with peach schnapps, the desperate loneliness of personal ads, and ‘roid rage.

Readers will never forget the plaintive voice from the wilderness that howls from every page of this searing, intimate account of a man-beast in the promised land.”.

And he also wrote In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot.

Here is a Bigfoot Action Figure which may or may not be what Bigfoot really looks like but “Intricate articulation allows it to be posed just like frame 352 of the famous film footage.”

If you want to see if you can find the elusive Bigfoot, here’s the Bigfoot Observer’s Field Manual: A practical and easy-to-follow step-by-step guide to your very own face-to-face encounter with a legend. If he was a human celebrity, this would be stalking, but I guess all’s fair for a Bigfoot. And like any celebrity, it appears he has moved to California: The Hoopa Project: Bigfoot Encounters in California. I would suggest looking in L.A. first.

~Susan Mellott

I just finished an excellent book by Sheri Tepper called “The Margarets”. Sheri Tepper is one of my favorite authors. She frequently writes about interesting issues from a different perspective, such as matriarchy and women in “The Gate to Women’s Country” (another excellent book). She writes science fiction/fantasy, but from a distinctly female perspective. Being a woman, while I primarily read SF/fantasy, I prefer a female protagonist/characters. That is one of the downsides of SF sometimes, they are overloaded on male characters and the female characters are frequently just side characters or caricatures. That said, there are also many SF/fantasy books (usually by women authors) with female protagonists.

The Margarets starts with a female child named Margaret who has no other children to play with and makes up imaginary character versions of herself, such a Queen Wilvia, Naumi the warrior, the spy, the healer, etc. As she reaches various decision points in her life, one of her makes one decision and one makes another and they off and go on to various different lives on different planets based on their decision. There is a prophecy involved (isn’t there always ) and the Margarets are the key to the prophecy.

Of course, it is interesting how the book resolves and it is done in a way that makes a lot more sense than most, but I especially enjoyed just reading the stories of the different decisions made. That is something I really appreciate about Sheri Tepper’s writing and what I look for in a book. While I like SF/fantasy, I prefer “philosophical” SF over “hard” SF. In other words, I prefer writing that explores different ways of thinking, living, society, etc. rather than the SF that concentrates on new war machines and fighting. I think that is more the male-oriented SF and I’m just not into it as much, although I have read some very well-written stories that I greatly enjoyed. I still like more characterization than I do great battles though. I like reading about warriors and their quests or battles, but not so much about soldiers fighting battles with the battles being the main focus.

In any case, if you think you might like what I like, I highly recommend the “The Margarets” and Sheri Tepper.

List of Sheri Tepper books

Also, on a Web 2.0 note, the links to amazon above were created using my Amazon Associates ID and a widget provided by Amazon. For every purchase on Amazon made through a link of mine, I get some (very small) percentage. I currently have accumulated $2.46 in my account so I’m not going to get rich but it is an interesting concept and someone could really create a good site with interesting Amazon content and make some money. Here’s a link to the Amazon Associate’s Information page.

Take care and enjoy!

~Susan Mellott

I ran across these and they blew my mind! It is called coverpop and it is a website created by Jim Bumgardner, of KrazyDad.com, to house his experimental coverpop project. Per his FAQ page: ”
A coverpop can be a unique work of art, a software toy, or a fun way to shop for stuff.

Each coverpop is an interactive mosaic, made of tiny images, such as magazine covers. These are called “micro thumbnails”. As you drag the mouse over each micro thumbnail, it pops up to a full-sized thumbnail image, and provides some information about the item. For some coverpops, you can click again to produce either a full-sized image, or to go to another website to learn more information about the item.

Some coverpops arrange the images by time, by price, or color. Other coverpops arrange the images into a photomosaic.”

If you go to main coverpop site , you will see a random choice of oneof his coverpop mosaics. You can choose from the list on the right side to see specific ones. He creates mashups using flickr, youtube, amazon and other web 2.0 apps to create really amazing mosaics that you can spend endless time browsing and playing with.

He has a set of youtube video mosaics too. And just plain mosaics that are really interesting. Here is a description of how it works and here is a brief description from that page:

“Data for each coverpop is prepared using Perl and the ImageMagick library. Space-filling is implemented (with visual feedback) using Processing (p5). The interface itself is presented in Flash/Actionscript within a PHP webpage.

I download information about all the covers using various means. I use Amazon Web Services for the Amazon-powered coverpops, and I screen-scrape websites, such as the Visco archive for the Science Fiction coverpop. This is done using a Perl program. Then I download all the thumbnails (again with Perl), and analyse them for color, using ImageMagick to reduce each image to 1×1 and recording the color of the remaining pixel.”

You can also generate banners to put on your website with various mosaics like Harry Potter on Amazon or Time’s Top 100 Novels. These are linked to amazon and you receive credit when someone buys through your site except he receives the credit every 6 times or so. I created one just to try it out (you can generate the code from his site) and put it on the bottom of my Goggle Blogger blog Along the Path to 2.0. It is at the bottom of the blog. Go take a look at it! Unfortunately I can’t put it on my Wordpress blog yet since it is hosted by Wordpress.com. I hope to correct that soon!

To learn about new coverpop or just to find out more, you can go to his blog. He has a lot more interesting things on there.

He has also co-authored a book called Flickr Hacks – Tips and Tools for Sharing Photos Online that talks about the flickr .APIs and how to do some of these things and sounds VERY interesting.

Check it out! But don’t do it until you have some time to spend because you definitely will.

~Susan Mellott