July.

I failed JunNoWriMo big time. Even worse than Script Frenzy.

I am accepting reviews for Paul Dies to put on the back of Ethan Dies. If you want to give one, e-mail it to me. It would get you a discount like last time, only I got tired of charging so they're free. (That doesn't mean one person can take all of them, though. I'll start charging again if you get greedy.)

Since Sita came I've started memorizing classic Disney songs. So far I know

1. Once Upon a Dream — Sleeping Beauty
2. Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo — Cinderella
3. part of Cinderally, Cinderelly — Cinderella
4. A Dream is a Wish your Heart Makes — Cinderella
5. Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho — Snow-White
6. Someday my Prince will Come — Snow-White
7. I'm Wishing — Snow-White
8. Pink Elephants on Parade — Dumbo
9. Baby Mine — Dumbo
10. Little April Shower — Bambi

Unfortunately, the book I'm using was published in 1979, which means it's missing some great ones, like Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

italicsitalicsitalics

Zub died.

also

I'm doing JunNoWriMo.

Spammers are idiots.

Well, they did confuse me with the subject line; I thought it was something else.

Nope, it was idiocy.

Concerned,
The united nations development program (UNDP), in conjunction with the society for family health (SFH) and the European Union (EU), is giving out a yearly donation of US$1,000,000.00 (One million united states dollars) as a specific Donation/Grants to 5 Lucky international recipients worldwide, this is to assist against terrorism Note: All beneficiaries email addresses were selected randomly from over 100,000 internet websites, mini mart shops cash invoice around your area in which you might have purchased something from. Be Informed that no ticket were sold, you are required to fill the form below and email it to the office of our Executive Secretary with the below contact for qualification documentation and processing of your claims. You are to contact the EXECUTIVE SECRETARY with your Qualification numbers (N-222-6747,E-900-56).
=====================================

FUNDS RELEASED AND VERIFICATION FORM
=====================================
1.FULL NAME ............................
2.CONTACT ADDRESS:... .........
3.CITY/STATE:......................
4.COUNTRY OF ORIGIN:..................
5.PRESENT COUNTRY:..............
6. MARITAL STATUS :............
7.NATIONALITY.............
8.SEX...........
9. AGE /DATE OF BIRTH: .............
10.TEL/FAX NR:.................
11.OCCUPATION :.....................
12. WINNING EMAIL ID:..............
========================================
CONTACT PERSON,
EXECUTIVE SECRETARY: Mrs Emmanuella Dickson
E-MAIL ADDRESS: mrselladickson_undp01@yahoo.com.hk
========================================
Respectfully
Mr. Ban Ki-moon
UN Secretary General
NOTE: SEND RESPONSE TO (mrselladickson_undp01@yahoo.com.hk)

I didn't even read past the part about giving me a million dollars to stop terrorism. Yeah.

Also I'm doublechecking any subject line in the future. Spammers may be idiots, but they're getting smarter.

P. S. Also the grammar isn't even correct. Ha ha ha.

What is wrong with me?

You know how people talk about how one scene in a particular movie—be it Bambi or Pride and Prejudice—that made them cry? (Granted, almost entirely females.) And if not a movie, then a play, piece of music, literature, or something of the like?

Never happened to me.

Never.

It's not like I'm an overly dry-eyed individual in other respects. So why don't I? Am I not drawn into the story the same way? Is my heart a dramatic chunk of ice when it comes to fictional characters?

So a big fat prize goes to whomever can find/create something that will make me cry. (Out of grief for something in the story, not something it reminded me of, or out of happiness (good luck with that one, though; it's taken marriage and birth of immediate family members to do that in real life), or beauty, I suppose, and the like. No cheating.)

Look at the button!

Adventures in baby-sewing is having a pattern giveaway.

Margaret wins at the game of Library.

I went to the library yesterday, and

1. I brought my bike lock!
2. I brought my books to return!
3. it was open!
4. no assassins!

I had a lovely time browsing books, and I even was brave and talked to three librarians. I asked one about looking up what prize I'd won in the bookmark contest (I didn't go to the ceremony), but he had to do something else so I talked to a perky lady. After that I asked the perky lady about volunteering, and she got perkier and gave me an application and a list of things I might be asked to do. A few minutes after she left, the third librarian approached me with a hopeful look on her face and said, "Are you volunteering? I have a special craft that you could help with, and even if it was just a few hours for a few weeks, it would be a big help."

And then I sat on a couch for a while and half read, half watched a boy (about one and a half, I'd guess) playing with his parents. (Or his kidnappers, I suppose, but I hope not. He was cute.) His mother was expecting and looked quite far along.

Anyway. Success! I am happy with this library.

The books I got from the library:

1. Do androids dream of electric sheep? by Philip K. Dick
2. A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
3. Interview with the vampire : a novel by Anne Rice
4. Chalice by Robin McKinley
5. Empire by Orson Scott Card
6. The Host by Stephanie Meyer
7. The Graveyard Book by Niel Gaiman
8. Anne Frank : the diary of a young girl translated from the Dutch by B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday ; with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt

1, 2, 3, and 8 are classics. 4, 5, and 7 are by authors whose other books I've enjoyed. 6 has been recommended to me by several.

There is no doubt that The Host is better than the Twilight saga in many ways, but Stephanie Meyer has not learned from her mistakes. (Perhaps they need to be pointed out to her.) There was a plot point in Eclipse that I could not believe actually got published, and I dearly hoped never to see anything like it again, but lo and behold! It was in The Host, just different enough that you could pretend it was not the same.

If it was only that I would still like the book very, very much, but there was another large flaw I couldn't get past: Mary Sue-ism. Are you all familiar with the term? If a character is labeled a 'Mary Sue,' (or 'Gary Stu' or 'Marty Stu' or whatever variant you like) that means the character is unrealistic.

WIKI TIME.

A 'Mary Sue' (sometimes just 'Sue'), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as "Mary Sues" is that they are too ostentatious for the audience's taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the "Mary Sue" character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an "author's pet".

I made bold the one phrase because that is where The Host's main character 'Wanderer' falls most short. I won't go into detail, but if you've read it I'm sure you can see what I'm talking about. If not, maybe I need to read it again, or maybe we should compare notes.

Anyway, other than that, it's a good book.

Less than success with the library again.

I was going to pick up one more book to replace the one I'd returned, so I prepared for another little bike trip. I had everything: the bike lock/chain, a sweater, a water bottle, my library card, my helmet, shoes worthy of biking, the whole thing.

EXCEPT.

The library is not open on Saturdays.

Maggie went on a trip to the library.

On Tuesday after Oly's and Tinny's piano lessons Anna came over and we biked to the library. (River Park Branch, the roundtrip of which is just under five miles, I think.) I didn't know that library was within biking distance; I kind of got carried away and got eight books. (One of them Anna had checked out before and was lending to me because most of the copies are checked out all the time.)

On Wednesday I decided to do something silly, so on Thursday I biked back to return one book.

I forgot my bike lock. Again.

So I handed the library's book to a lady that was going in with a plea for her to return it for me, and I went home again without much of a rest, which got me a little more tired than I would have liked, but it was fine. As soon as I got home I put a chain and a lock on my bike so I wouldn't forget next time.

I wasn't going to blog about this, but Monica practically begged me. (Are you happy, Potato Head?)

Hello, Dolly!

Louis Armstrong is hilarious.

I got a bloody nose just before the 9:00 service. It was a little surreal, thoroughly annoying, and overall unpleasant. Other than that, though, Easter was simply lovely. It gets better every year.

I am about to collapse. Good night.

I HATE BEING TRICKED

That was real mean, Shannon Hale. Real mean.

:O

http://oinks.squeetus.com/2009/04/hollywood-bound.html

aha!

Now I get it. Maybe.

Sometimes people wonder how our ancestors could be so clueless and unnecessarily cruel, towards, for instance, African-Americans or Jews.

Maybe they just didn't understand that they are people too.

Logic Puzzles

I'm reading a book on logic. It's called "aha! Insight" by Martin Gardner.

Anyway, there's a puzzle that might interest y'all:


Gloria, a young lady from Arkansas, is visiting in California. She wants to rent a hotel room for a week.
The clerk was very unpleasant.
Clerk: The room is $20 per day and you have to pay cash.
Gloria: I'm sorry sir, but I don't have any cash. However, I do have this solid gold bracelet. Each of its seven links is worth more than $20.
Clerk: Alright, give me the bracelet.
Gloria: No, not now. I'll have a jeweler cut the bracelet so I can give you 1 link a day. Then when I get some money at the end of the week I'll redeem it.
The clerk finally agreed. But now Gloria had to decide how to cut the bracelet. She was in a dilemma.
Gloria: I have to be careful because the jeweler is going to charge me for each link that he cuts and for each link that he joins when the bracelet is put back together again.
After thinking a while Gloria realized she didn't have to cut all the links because she could trade pieced back and forth. She couldn't believe it when she figured out how many cuts the jeweler had to make. How many cuts would you make?

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

ANSWER.
Only one link need be cut. It must be third from one end. This makes three pieces of 1, 2, and 4 links. And these are sufficient to trade back and forth so that each day the clerk gets one more link.

Two aha! insights are needed to solve this problem. The first is to realize that the smallest set of chains that can be combined in various ways to form sets of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 links is a set of chains with 1, 2 and 4 links; that is, with numbers in the doubling series. As we learned in the last problem, this is the power series that is the basis of binary notation.
The second insight is to realize that cutting only one link divides the bracelet into this desired set of three chains.

I got this one fine (after a time). But the thing is the following problem:

The problem generalizes to chains of longer lengths. For instance, suppose Gloria had a chain of 67 gold links that she wanted to cut and use in the same way she used her bracelet—to pay for 67 days, one link per day. The cutting of as few as three links will do the trick. Do you see how? Can you devise a general procedure that solves the problem, with a minimum number of cut links, for a chain of any length?

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

ANSWER. Provided by Nathaniel.
Alright. The maximum number of different lengths that can be rendered from one length by three cuts is seven. This is if you cut and remove three lengths, none of which are next to each other or at an end of the chain, and reattach none of them.

Let's figure out how many different combinations we can make with different lengths of chain (not counting zero as a combination):

1 length : 1 possible combination
2 lengths : 3 possible combinations
3 lengths : 7 possible combinations
4 lengths : 15 possible combinations
5 lengths : 31 possible combinations
6 lengths : 63 possible combinations
7 lengths : 127 possible combinations

You can either come up with this list the hard way, or you can realize that each step up necessarily is the previous step multiplied by two, plus one. For instance, the only possible combination for 1 length is:
A
For 2 lengths,
A, B, AB
For 3 lengths,
A, B, AB, C, CA, CB, CAB
And so forth. With each step, it's all the possibilities of the previous step, plus all the possibilities of the previous step with the addition of the new variable, plus the new variable alone.

So. From what we've done so far, it looks like it may be possible. 7 lengths renders a maximum of 127 possible, unique combinations—and we only need 67 combinations.

However, the ONLY way to render 7 lengths from 1 with 3 cuts is if three of the lengths are 1 chain long. So, let's see how many possible combinations we can make with different lengths of chain, if 3 of them are the same:

1 length : N/A
2 length : N/A
3 lengths : 3 possible combinations
4 lengths : 7 possible combinations
5 lengths : 15 possible combinations
6 lengths : 31 possible combinations
7 lengths : 63 possible combinations
8 lengths : 127 possible combinations

1 and 2 don't make sense. 3 is this:
A, AA, AAA
4 is:
A, AA, AAA, B, AB, AAB, AAAB
And so forth. As you can see, it's the same pattern as before, just removed by one place.

So. It is IMPOSSIBLE to make 67 different combinations with fewer than 8 lengths, if 3 of them are identical. Furthermore, it is IMPOSSIBLE to make as many as 7 different lengths unless at least 3 of them are identical. Finally, it is IMPOSSIBLE to allow for 67 different combinations with fewer than 7 different lengths. Therefore the problem is not soluble with as few as 3 cuts.

My question is: WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Can you provide any holes in Nat's theory? They don't have the answer in the book.

In 1999,

My (paternal) Grandma Ann was interviewed by her children so her story could go in a huuuge book called 'The [namehere] Family' which I believe my Mormon relatives made. It has extensive family trees in it.

Anyway, I liked this part about her and Grandpa.

Clint had decided that he wanted to get married, I think, not too long after he was in the service. But he was having those malaria spells, and he was in no condition to get married. He was living with his folks. I know he wanted me to marry him more than I wanted to. I had doubts about loving him, but he didn't seem to have any. When he asked me to marry him, I think I was at my parents' house. I remember saying to Clint, "I don't know if I really love you," and he said, "Maybe you will learn to fall in love."

(They got married in June of 1945.)

Script Frenzy is about to start.

Who else is doing it?

(I have got to start posting real lengths again.)

Shannon Hale just released the cover of Forest Born!

Here! It's one of the ugly new ones, but still!

(She says this book doesn't get a classy-cool cover. I think I might sue.)

children: 6. boys: 1.

Congratulations on Cillian Joseph! I can't wait to meet him!

I got my hair cut Wednesday before last.

Now it's about shoulder length. Pictures forthcoming, I hope.

Happy Friday the Thirteenth.

Well, I've finally done it.

I dreamed Anna's wedding.

It was terrible.

I told her to let me help plan it, but she wouldn't let me, and it was all her fault.

I shall describe the ceremony: I was wearing a suit jacket. (?) To placate me Anna had given me a corsage, but it was kind of smashed. And then Anna came, and her dress was all wrong. It was part black, and it was kind of tight and had excessive lace and it was really horrid. (The skirt was kind of like this, but uglier.) And then, during the service, there was a skit. It was a really stupid skit, too. Pretty much Anna and a bald guy took turns showcasing clothes, presumably made by Anna.

Also in real life my voice teacher gave me a song that would be good for liturgical dancing.

Addendum

to this post.

I don't care how angry you are. If you don't want her to feel like smacking you right in the face, never patronize or condescend. Never.

Adventures of a Babysitter

Freddo told me not to feed him lunch because he wasn't not hungry. I told him that it wasn't lunch time yet, so why don't we wait till then and see if he's hungry? He promised me he wouldn't be.

CONGRATULATIONS

Congratulations Pasto', Mrs, DoRena, Zach, Nick, Monica, Sander, Oly, Tin, Freddo, and Gerhardt, on Katherina Marianna Regina Felicity. (Did I get it?) We can't wait for pictures.

Wordsworth

contrived to eat my entire grilled-cheese sandwich because I was foolish enough to bend down to pick up a candy wrapper he had undoubtedly unearthed from the trash. Needless to say, I berated him with simple insults of "Bad dog!" and, as soon as I got a grip on his collar, put him into his cage without so much as a kind pat. And then I made another sandwich.

I was putting tags on old posts…

When I realized I never fulfilled my promise. So here goes.

It was a mystery about the murder of a princess whose name might have been Juanita. The main suspect was the maid who might have been Caroline, and there was also a cat, maybe Almond. Her name slips my mind, but it turns out the killer was the victim's older sister, for no reason I can remember. I was taking to long to write it and I chickened out by deciding it wasn't very good. Sorry.

Just like Rachel D.

Should I get a haircut?
	No, you should grow it out more.
	No, you should keep it how it is.
	Yes, you should take off a few inches.
	Yes, you should get it medium.
	Yes, you should get it short.
	Other, specified in a comment.
pollcode.com free polls

EDIT: I am going to close the poll now, after a week. The votes stand thus:
Zero votes for each "No, you should grow it out more," and "Yes, you should take off a few inches."
One vote for each "Yes, you should get it medium," "Send 10 inches to LOL =D," and "medium with lots o' layers."
Two votes for "No, you should keep it how it is."
Three votes for "Yes, you should get it short."

I've deduced (with help) that 10 inches would make it "medium," which means medium and short are tied. I guess I'll just see what I get. After all, I didn't vote.

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Rachel D told me to "draw myself". Is this close enough? (I did this in about two minutes, including finding the right symbol, so I really don't care if it's off-center or inaccurate or anything.)

My subconcious thinks (knows) Nat's an idiot.

It started with a wedding. It was either Walter or Michael getting married, and in the past few hours it came to me that it was probably Michael, and Walter was the creep. A great deal of the dreem was taken up with Michael and his bride being happy, something like skipping through wildflowers.

Sita was there, and she was normal except instead of "yes" she said "star."

And finally, it was Sander's birthday. We made him a huge quilt with lots of pockets in which to put his presents, only Nat made me give Sander two pairs of my shoes; my newish brown ones and an imaginary pair of brown church flats, and I liked both pairs very much. I tried to argue with Nat that they were womens' shoes and wouldn't fit Sander, but Nat kept saying, "It's a fashion statement."

Mommy's home!

:D

(I would have posted earlier, but the internet was broken.)

In other news, I found my purse. Of course, I didn't really say much it was lost, so I'll not feel slighted if you don't all congratulate me. Of course, in typical Maggie fashion, I lost it when it was sitting in plain sight… in the spare bedroom. *sigh*

Also the kids/teens in New England are very lucky.

chaotic DREEM

There was a wedding at our house and we had a lot of guests: Mommies with little babies were almost literally everywhere. We had Sita breaking/losing everything and being generally cute. We also had this weird little playhouse for Frederick and Gerhardt, who had inexplicably changed sizes. A random student of Dad's that I met briefly yesterday was there with the salad she had yesterday. (It looked really, really tasty. I mean, this had olives and dressing and fresh mozzarella cheese and everything. (Everything except for tomatoes.)) I asked her for the recipe about four times and she got really annoyed with me. And she left and I still couldn't remember what the salad was called or anything, but then I found I had the recipe in a bookmark on my little computer. (About the size of a binder.) And then Annalise tied her sheets together and climbed out the window.

I saw Jesus on a watermelon!

And the Eiffel Tower.

It's WATERMELON Art!

my absolutely favorite color

Is Crayola's Burnt Orange.
Number 23 on Wikipedia's list of all Crayola colors. (Which, by the way, rocks.)
Second favorite is 76, Mauvelous.

Eighth Contest!

But first, the results from the seventh contest:

GRAND WINNER

• A cat and a bucket of melted ice to use as protection from muggers. (Robin)

(Although don't you call 'melted ice' 'water'?)

So this contest is… a cover for my story!

Might as well, you know.

Don't look! A novel!

Fourteen chapters and an epilogue, available upon request NOW.

For the record, I hate it now.

Remember, any sort of comment at all is helpful.