Cleolinda everywhere

I am an alarm clock.

Sister Girl dropped her phone. (Again.) And broke it. (Again.) So she's borrowed my phone. (Sing it if you know the words.) The only problem is, she uses her phone to wake up in the morning, and apparently the alarm function on my phone isn't sufficient to wake her up. So could I wake her up at two am (so she can take her meds), three-thirty (so she can sleep in an extra half hour) and four (so she can actually get up)?

Yeah, sure, I guess so. Or I could just unplug my clock and lend it to... no? You sure? I mean, it's really loud. You're not going to sleep through... really? Well... okay, I guess.

Thus I got about three hours of sleep, and found myself doing random things on the internet in hours so wee that you'd step on them if you weren't keeping an eye out. I got addicted to flickr. (You can look at pictures of anything! And they're all pretty!) I ended up wrestling with LJ for far too long at five in the morning because my account expired and I DO NOT WANT TO MAKE AUTOMATIC PAYMENTS, LIVEJOURNAL. I would like to be able to make sure there's five dollars in my account for you to take every two months before you do, in fact, take it. I felt like LJ was pushing the auto payments a little hard, to the point where it took me five minutes to figure out how to get around that, although you do have to take into account that I have had, after all, three hours of sleep because I am, in fact, my sister's alarm clock and do not, therefore, make a large amount of sense.

(Oh, icons, never leave me again!)

My parents were watching 60 Minutes, as is their wont, and they just happened to have a segment on Stephen Colbert. My mother went from "Who?" to fangirl in the space of ten minutes. It was glorious to behold. I think "Trollop Islands? The Been Around the Block a Few Times Islands?" was the part that broke her, although it might have been the Stone Phillips impression before that. "I'm going to act out some Italian stereotypes" just sealed the deal. I think the Colbert Report is perfect for her, though, because my parents are the kind of people--Republicans, no less--who watch Bill O'Reilly because they hate him. They played a little Bill to show what Colbert is actually mocking, and "Plantations were very efficient" prompted a tandem "OHHHHHHHH" of Oh No He Di-in't proportions. And then she asked five times when the Colbert Report comes on. And was really, really excited to find out that it reruns at 6:30 pm, "which is exactly when we're looking for something to watch!" Hee.

Ten Things You Should Not Send to Your Favorite Writer, by Neil Gaiman's assistant, featuring things that she has actually intercepted. ("Silver pen on black paper is not nearly as cool as you think it is." Also: "Things with blood on them. I don't care what they write, they don't want it." Which conjures terrifying images of what Stephen King's assistant must deal with.)

Bookstore speed-dating: A good idea until it turns out that the speed-dating company simply imported its usual barflies, rather than seeking out new daters who actually, you know, read.

I forget who I was talking about this with, but I made a certain assertion, and the other person wanted to know why I thought that. And now I have visual aids. This is why I think Nicole Richie is going to die from anorexia. There's a starving Ethiopian child with a bowl of rice somewhere who's like, "No, seriously, you need this more than I do."

What to Do When You Can't Win An Argument. The reason I really love this entry is because it lays out all the classic logical fallacies in terms I can understand."Ohhhh! 'The lurkers support me in email'!"