i and i

2008.05.03
Keeping up the ASCII art theme, I've recently started going back to some of that in my .sigs on some message boards. .Sigs I have used:
the self-portrait: (mid-90s usenet)
_____
-O\O
( = )

the pac-man: (atariage)

(< o o o

the alien bill: (TGQ)

=/ \(<D)_/
==/\/  >_

I don't know if the color counts as cheating.


Vocabulary of the Moment
A character in GTA4 made me wiki up the vocabulary of the Rastas. It's intriguing how so much of the special vocabulary was deliberately made, a purposeful break from the past that shuns words that even sound like negative things. Sometimes it's a little corny ("Overstanding" or "Innerstanding" to dodge the "under" of "understanding", "livicaton" to avoid the "dead" of "dedication") but often it's kind of cool. I dig "I and I", which (I think) can mean "you and I" as well as "Me, spirit and body" (and overall they use "I" rather than "Me", because of the subject/object preference.)

It might be easy to over-romanticize the outlook. If memory of my parent's descriptions are right, when we were living on St. Thomas we got the feeling that not all of them shared the move-beyond-racism outlook of some of them, and there was a lot of expressed distrust and dislike.


Quote of the Moment
Then there was this girl, Ava Cleveland, and her brother Larry. Larry had It something terrible, and also had a little way of taking opium. (Oh, please wait a minute. I think I'm going to be able to use "opium" in a sentence. I opium mother is feeling better. No, I guess I'm not, either.) Ava was young and slender and proud. And she had It. It, hell; she had Those.
Dorothy Parker

"why is a cow?"
just found out this, my grandmother's koan-like answer to annoying "why?"

cross your legs, the fight is on