Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy interview.
Well, maybe not so much bumpy as meandering. Wayward? Erratic? Not your straightforward point A to point B, that’s for certain.

Greetings, Tild fans! I am an imaginary interviewer, a hypothetical composite of the typical readership of Tild’s blog, aka Tild~, or tildology.com to be exact. I’m a mashup of all the folks who tend to show up here:

…The woman in Georgia with a cold who’s looking for information about nose washing;
…The guy in Dubai who wants to read about bad girls who don’t keep their tape sticky;

…The She-Blogger fan in Toronto;

…The folks in the UK who can’t get enough of Laurel & Hardy’s “Way Out West” dance;

…One of the hapless clods who keep trying to hotlink to the wily strawman picture so that they can add it to their comments and thereby look totally super-bitchin’ in those endless flame war threads at FARK or the Something Awful forums; .

…The many admirers of Easter Jesus’ chocolatey goodness;

And the people who come here looking for Meerkat Manor family trees

or for a bit of Minnesota-specific political snark , be it about prominent local prig Katherine Kersten , Minuteman-wannabe Dick “Rambo” Day, or notorious now ex-MnDOT commissioner and fandancer Carol Molnau,

…or maybe just for a little cheesecake.

Whatever you’ve come here for, you’ve no doubt noticed that it’s been pretty quiet around here for quite a while now. We’re lucky to get one new post a week. What’s the deal with that?

Look! There’s Tild now. Let’s ask her.

Imaginary Typical Tildology Reader: Hey! Tild! It’s 4:30 in the morning. What are you doing up?

Tild: Oh, hi. Hey, if you’re one of those idiots looking for the strawman picture, goddammit will you PLEASE learn how to save images to your own server?! Use your own bandwidth for a change, asshole!

ITTR: Umm, excuse me Miz Tild, but I am most certainly not one of those idiots. What I am, in fact, is an Imaginary Typical Reader of your blog, come to interview you and find out what’s next in the exciting ongoing history of tildology.com.

Tild: You are? Hmm. Do you mean to tell me that the typical reader of my blog is the disembodied head of Agnes Moorhead’s even snider younger sister inexplicably floating in the stratosphere next to a “flying wing” airplane?

ITTR: You tell me. You picked this image to be the ITTR avatar.

Tild: Oh. Yeah. Well, alrighty then. Never mind! What was the question again? Why am I awake at 4:30 AM? Well, my youngest kid the high school senior is in the high school’s Concert Choir which is going to Washington DC for four days, and they needed to be at the high school at 4 this morning to board the buses to the airport. I’ll never get back to sleep now, so I guess I’m up for the duration.

ITTR: Aha. So then. Please tell us: What have you been up to lately? Sure hasn’t been blogging.

Tild: Well, you do know that I have a full time day job, right?

ITTR: Yes, I’ve gotten that impression over the years, but you’ve never really described what it is that you do. So, what exactly is it that you do?

Tild: I work for a large corporation; a big player in an industry that’s run for profit but really shouldn’t be. The mitigating factor for me is that the particular division that I work in is more or less a watchdog unit. We investigate the billing habits of the purveyors of our industry’s services. Our work is to keep those purveyors honest — or, you could say that in an ethically challenged industry we try to make sure that its practitioners adhere to the laws, such as they are, and to industry standards, imperfect tho they may be. That fact helps me sleep at night, I gotta admit. You know, because I feel like in my little corner of the industry I’m more a part of the solution and not so much a part of the problem.

ITTR: Wow, that’s quite discreetly phrased, I must say. Can you describe what you do there?

Tild: Sure. I gather data from various sources, convert the data into the formats used by several databases, and upload that data. One might say that I’m a data wrangler.
Yeehaw!

ITTR: Gosh! Sounds fascinating!

Tild: Uh huh. You said it, not me. I’ve also been working part time at a book store since last fall. The end result of all this toil and trouble is that I haven’t had huge amounts of free time to devote to blogging. Or when I do have some time, I often don’t have any energy for it.

[TO BE CONTINUED...]

Posted: March 10th, 2008 under Blogistan, Chez Tild, Meta, Personal History.
Comments: 1

Naah, not that kind of vamping. Are you kidding? Tild don’t play that.  (Knowledge, I’m sure, that comes as a great relief to everyone.) 

I mean vamping for time, as in:

Oh jeez I haven’t posted anything in weeks. Better put something, anything up while I continue to fritter away my days

• working 48+ hour weeks
• retiling a bathtub/shower enclosure
• weeding my garden
• saving for a new laptop
• reading animation tutorials 
• sleeping 

or in other words: doing everything but blogging..

And what do I have to show for it?  Well, for one thing: Blinky Theda Bara, above, my first attempt at an animated gif.   

And then there’s my second animation production, which can be found here.  

(If you need help putting names to the faces, ask me in the comments and I’ll help you out.)

I’ll be back to what I laughingly call regular blogging sometime soon.  In the meantime I’ll be putting up the random gif or video now and then just to make the place look lived in.

~       

 

     

Posted: August 28th, 2007 under Meta.
Comments: 1

O Gentle Reader:

A word, if you please. The blog forecast for these parts is calling for light and variable attention, with intermittent posting for the foreseeable future. IOW: for a while, I don’t know how long, this is definitely not going to be the place to come to every day for new content.

I’m spending most of my online time these days studying various graphics tutorials and attempting to learn some new skillz. Concerning the blog, I’m planning to change WP themes somewhere down the line, plus revamp the blogroll and tweak the site in other ways.

What this all means is: my interests are leading me in directions other than here at present. For the foreseeable future, posting will be intermittent at best. Just sayin’.

Still, since you took the time to stop in, it’d be nice if I had a little something to offer…

(Oop — Apparently I’m channelling my mother again; she of the eternally vast supplies of 5-year-old freeze-dried banana bread and glacial permafrost masquerading as ice cream, all of which she felt obligated to keep on hand for whenever somebody stopped by and of course needed to be offered ‘a little something’ with their coffee. Thanks, Mom.)

So here’s links to the most interesting stuff I’ve read in the past couple days. All of it fairly fresh and not too stale. Best of all: no freezer burn! Enjoy..

~~~

Digby studies in detail the story of the supposedly expectorated-upon (or at least -near) Joshua Sparling, and why the right clings so desperately to the long-debunked myth of returning soldiers being spat on by lefties. It’s a powerful meme that feeds the righties’ need to paint the left as betrayers from within.

Media Matters joins in today with a call for the NYT to investigate Joshua Sparling’s rapidly expanding account of his supposedly shameful treatment by anti-war protesters in DC over the weekend. That would be the shameful treatment that was apparently witnessed by NO ONE except Sparling.

UPDATE 1: More Spittle

UPDATE 2: Civil Freeper counter-protesters:

UPDATE 3: Now Sparling says “They tried to kill me”. –more updates from Digby, including video of Sparling’s appearance on Hannity & Colmes.

UPDATE 4: Now Sparling says he didn’t spit back. What does the NYT reporter have to say about all these discrepancies?

UPDATE 5: MNObserver and the Wege have more, including pictures.

~~~

More mythology : Carpetbagger Report names five conservative myths about ‘Emboldening’ the enemy.

~~~

Avedon smacks around Dinesh D’Souza, and as always, does it so well: “I wish people would understand that enjoying a life of affluence doesn’t make you an American patriot. Appreciating that America’s liberal culture and its liberal style of government are what make it possible to achieve a reasonably comfortable life would help. But these are the things that the Osama bin Ladens and Ayatollah Khomeinis and Richard Bruce Cheneys and George Walker Bushes hate about America, which is why the latter have been trying to get rid of them - with your help, Dinesh.”

~~~

Also via Avedon, Mark Schmitt at Tapped asks:”But can we please, please banish from discourse the idea that people who earn much more money do so because they work so much harder?” Yes, please. Anyone who believes it has no idea how hard other people work and how much they get paid for it. CEOs do not work harder than coal miners or nurses, for example. People go to college to get good jobs, which are called “good jobs” not just because they pay better (they don’t, always), but because they are good jobs - less physically demanding, less dangerous, less demoralizing, less gruelling, and frequently far more emotionally rewarding. Working in a lab is not as demanding as working in a diner. College professors are treated better by their employers than are hotel maids and fry-cooks. If people were really paid by how hard their jobs are to actually do, day in and day out, even the unemployed would be paid better than big corporate CEOs. ”

~~~

Join the troops. Stop the escalation. –Watch the new video from VoteVets.

~~~

Roy Edroso at alicublog explains How Bullshit Works

~~~

Still Standing …Technically –Sadly, No!’s gutbustingly funny deconstruction of the gutbustingly funny Michelle Malkin.

~~~

Via Jessica Crispin, Neil Gaiman is interviewed in the winter issue of Rain Taxi.

~~~

Also via Jessica, Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has an article in the NYT today:

Unhappy Meals.

~~~

This just in: (even more cool stuff spotted by Jessica) for all of you Pan’s Labyrinth fans with newfound interest in the Spanish Civil War:

A traveling exhibition called “Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939″ focuses on journalists like George Orwell and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who changed the way that wars are covered.

~~~

If you want to see the videos that are the primary source of hilarity at my house these days, go to YTMND and do a search for “Turkish Star Wars”. …aka “Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam”
There are several videos; the one to watch is the “training” montage, complete with the styrofoam rocks (that explode!)

~~~

Speaking of all things Star Wars, go take a look (via Boing Boing):

Star Wars space battle re-enacted with hands.

~~~

Lance Mannion: The Day My High School Invaded Iraq

~~~

There. That oughta hold ya for a little while at least. Come on back next week; maybe I’ll have another post put up by then –but I’m not promising.

Posted: January 30th, 2007 under General, Meta, Spanish Civil War, Wingnut Mythology, Wingnuttia.
Comments: 3