D'Oh! How did it get to be 1 AM?...I mean 3 AM!

Okay, so it's true that I got a late start on the day. I had my traditional late Friday night (going to bed at 4 AM, which is better than dawn), followed by my traditional sleep-in past noon. I don't know what time I woke up, but I didn't get out of bed until 2 PM, after reading two Thurber pieces. First there was a weird little comic essay called "Courtship Through the Ages," about how males of virtually all species have to work very hard to impress the female. It was very Thurberesque, but rather dated. The second, "The Whip-Poor-Will," was a short story of psychological horror, in which the sound of the bird drives the main character to an extreme reaction.

When I did get up, John put me to work on a small contribution to his major project of building a library here at the Museum of the Weird, in what had been a storage room completely full of boxes. So far he's painted the walls (after multiple unsuccessful attempts to get wallpaper to stick to them), laid tile, built five bookcases from pine boards, and filled most of them out of our zillion boxes of books. So this afternoon at his request I went through twenty banker's boxes, most of them empty, but some still containing books, magazines, Richard Bach promotional bookmarks, Japanese alphabet flash cards, and holiday greeting card samples from Tucson Audubon Society circa 1990. I broke down sixteen of the boxes and their lids, threw away the cardboard pictures of birdies, and consolidated the rest into the remaining four boxes. Before I go to bed tonight, I've promised to fill a shelf or so of the bookcase John built today.

Another thing I did today was read a few things other people wrote, and give my advice on them. Fortunately, it was all good stuff, and I had few suggestions to made. One friend is on her second draft of the novel she was writing last year. I've always liked it, but there were things that originally weren't very clear about the society she's set up, and some characters made first appearances fairly late in the game. Her new draft is addressing every reservation I had, deepening the characters, establishing the setting without too much infodump, and improving the plot considerably. I only hope I can make as much progress in my own revision of Mages. Yes, I did get some work in on that last night, but basically none today.

Other than those two things, and several IMs with people, a little Round Robin housekeeping and going to dinner with John, I must admit to you now that I blew the rest of the day on Wikipedia. I know, I know. It's sucking up a lot of my time, and keeps me from getting to things like my two-week backlog of FeedBlitz alerts. But someday, somebody will be grateful that Wikipedia has a picture of George Maharis by himself, that his entry no longer mentions him being arrested without citing a source, and that the List of Strange Days at Blake Holsey High Episodes no longer contains some kid's addition: "also juring it Vaughn and Josie have to hold hands and feel very aquward about it." Also: "I think Vaughn and Josie like each other as in fancie each other". Fine, kid. Write all about that on your blog, but don't put your misspelled 'shipper romanticism in Wikipedia articles, 'kay? It's funny. Of all the edits that get reverted, most are either "blanking" (just deleting large blogs of text) or rude or obscene remarks, such as some idiot changing the name "Al Gore" to "Al Gay," or claiming that some celebrity derives sexual pleasure from killing kittens. But there are also large numbers of edits with the opposite problems. Either someone wants to put in some overdramatic, romantic description (usually redundant and misplaced) of her favorite couple, or or someone wants to make an editorial or factual addition but has no sources or even facts to justify it. "Such-and-such is the best show that was ever made or even can be," someone wrote. And he knows this how? And this "fact" was established where?

Someone else claims to have a copy of a 1983 video of A Wrinkle in Time, "with incredible CGI for the time." I've never seen any such thing referenced on IMDB, in published Madeleine L'Engle timelines, or anywhere else. In fact, L'Engle has written about all the people that came to her with treatments and scripts, and why she turned them all down. (She eventually gave in for the 2003 Disney movie, but had no high hopes for it. "I expected it to be terrible, and it is," she told Newsweek.) So I took out the reference, but invited the person to give details. Who wrote, directed, produced, starred in, and distributed this alleged video? It's possible that someone put together a small video production for use at schools, but I doublt it. There sure as heck wasn't a tv special or theatre release, other than the 2003 one.

Enough ranting. I have to wash my hair, put notebooks on shelves and go to bed. Good night!


Karen

Technorati Tags: Wikipedia, Writing, Museum of the Weird