MuseBlog

She Who Must Not Be Named reports that only 1/10 the usual number of letters have arrived this month. So if you want your name (well, first name and last initial) to be immortalized in print, now’s a good time to try for it. You listening, Pheebs?

So many ways to procrastinate, so little time.
How do you procrastinate? How do you not procrastinate?
Per ebeth’s request, a thread on procrastination.

By special request of Queen Julietaini the Flamablamablous of Kiador

You’re already talking about them on the September Free-for-All. Now, thanks to Elassë~Adæl, they have a thread all their own.

How-to #33:
How to be an obnoxious teenager

1. Get some pants that are way too big for you.
2. Have them hanging down. Don’t worry, people won’t see your skivvies, because you’re going to have a baggy T-shirt untucked.
3. Wear dark glasses so you won’t bump into things. This probably makes no sense, but you don’t move. You just hang around.
4. Be sarcastic about everything.
5. Say “like” at least, like, 5 times in a like sentence.
6. Have a surly attitude and talk back to your elders. Heck, talk back to everyone!
7. Refuse to do anything that wasn’t your idea in the first place, even if you really want to.

How-to #57:
How to make a hopeless mess

1. Get a whole lot of junk, including model glue, sawdust, string, newspaper, pine cones, raisins, orange peels, gravel, vines, rubber cement, shaving cream, old socks, lint, paper clips, paint, wire, little bits of plastic, grease, cans, and an aardwolf. Ok, not an aardwolf.
2. Find an area that no one will care about it if you mess it up. This may take awhile.
3. Start by pouring the rubber cement on the floor.
4. Put down a layer of newspaper.
5. Pour lots of model glue on the floor. Add paint.
6. Randomly throw your other supplies onto the mess.
7. Come back an hour later and top the pile off with 10 gallons of egg white and sand.
8. Now attempt to sell it as a work of art. Good luck.

How-to #56:
How to improve morale at your business

1. Put espresso in the cappuccino machine. People are happier when they’re buzzed.
2. Every month, have a party for no reason.
3. Give people the assignment at least 2 weeks before the deadline, so they have more time to finish it.
4. Give random and silly awards to people for no reason. Or better yet, reasons they don’t want displayed. “Most Inconspicuous Nose-Picker for 2009!”
5. Skip around the office rather than walk.
6. Provide your staff with water pistols or Nerf guns.
7. If all of the above methods fail, try the direct solution. Fire all of the unhappy people.

How-to #53:
How to lose ten pounds of ugly fat

1.Cut off your head.

Avast, ye scurvy scalawags! National Talk Like a Pirate Day be coming up on Monday, September 19. So look lively, ye bilge rats, and practice yer lingo here. We’ll want full reports later. Arrr.

Is anyone here familiar with Cicada magazine or its online forum, The Slam? Muse‘s publisher puts them out for people who like to read and write fiction.

Also, any past or present Cricket readers on the blog? Just curious.

What if the Muses wandered into the pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?

WARNING: Longer-than-usual post. May eventually contain spoilers. Not approved by Larry Gonick or J. K. Rowling. Etc., etc. Read more »

Just a little way over there at upper right. See it?

Now we need dates. All the recent summer birthdays are on the list, but they won’t be back around for a while. Is anything else noteworthy coming up?

Share your “wow!” and “aawww!” moments with the rest of us.

This all-purpose non-threaded thread for September might continue the themes in Welcome, Musers! (see far, far below). Or it might not–it’s up to you. As always, suggestions for new topic headings are welcome.

If you’re here for the first time, please click the Info & Rules tab at the top of the blog to learn how to behave. Otherwise, just plunge on in. After all, … it’s mostly harmless.

A thread by popular request. OK, Phoenix & Co.–over to you!

In the February 1999 “Muse Mail,” then-13-year-old Dana Mannino suggested that Bo should eat Kokopelli to give scientists an inside look at a cow’s digestive system. She’s been writing to the magazine ever since. Here’s her latest note, e-mailed to MuseBlog as she starts her sophomore year at Gonzaga University:

I’m loving/hating college. Right now mostly hating because it starts on Tuesday and I had a really great summer in which I did nothing but read books that I like, at my pace and without having to underline for quotes in a paper. OK, so I also played with my sisters, spent six weeks studying Spanish in Mexico, and went on my first backpacking trip with my Dad, but I still rate my summer in time spent reading for pleasure.

I figure that the love it part of college will kick back in within the next two weeks. I intend to double major in Spanish and Philosophy, but you’ll be happy to know that I’m pursuing journalistic interests on the side. I’m taking journalism classes and I’m a part of the editorial team for a student magazine. I edit the Faith section, because that’s what I know, but I have ambitions to someday contribute to the highly competitive and campus renown mirth section. I want to do a piece about living at home with my family while I go to college. My peers are tired in class because they pull all nighters. I’m tired because my four year old sister still wets the bed sometimes and I have to get up and change the sheets. I also have to be careful to check the back of my pages before I turn in papers, sometimes they’ve been used for coloring. It gets pretty laughable around here.

I checked out your blog. LOTR freaks, musicians, Muppet fans, other people who spend all summer reading, an administrator who can’t operate a cell phone — gee, sounds like I’d fit right in. We’ll see how often life allows me to check in on it. As for life after Muse, the main change has been that Muse has morphed from a much anticipated semi monthly delight, to a epic internal struggle between scholastic obligations and desire, usually terminating in a tragic metaphor for the relinquishing of childhood pleasure in order to make room for adult stress as I reluctantly hand the magazine to my sister and tearfully ask her to recap the articles for me when shes done. I still get a little reading in on break and before bed sometimes, when I don’t have to tell bedtime stories. Hmm, that sounded pretty good. OK,  ( Dana turns on the fan and types into it so as to attain eerie effect.) Build the topic and she will come.

A fan forever,

Dana

Paul Baker posts:

Having been mercilessly cruel to Pheebs, TWICE, first by insulting her Elizabethan, then by insulting her bagpipes (sorry, Pheebs. I think you’re wonderful really), I thought I’d show solidarity with this very courageous young woman and put up a bagpipe topic to see what you lot think of the magnificent beasts that I spend so much time playing at people. I could start by setting out all my hugely opinionated views (with which I expect you all to violently disagree) but I won’t. I’ll just float the idea and see what comes in.

So, bagpipes – cultural embarrassment or best thing since the invention of yeast?

If the Muses enrolled at Hogwarts, where would the Sorting Hat assign them?

This is for a Fan Page project, to be unveiled in the fullness of time. For now, you know the Muses (in alphabetical order: Aeiou, Bo, Chad, Crraw, Feather, Kokopelli, Mimi, Pwt, and Urania). You know the houses (Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin). Who goes where? Opinions, please.

(MuseBloggers are all Ravenclaws, of course.)

By popular request. But why limit it to Muse?

With new faces appearing on the blog almost every day, it’s getting hard to tell everybody apart. So here’s a place to say a few words about yourself, if you like. No full names or identifying details, please: just things like general location (state, or country if foreign and exciting), grade, musical instruments you play, Hogwarts house, etc. Plus a 10,000-word essay on “What Muse Means to Me.” (Just kidding about that last one–though “Muse Mail” does get letters at least that long.)

Again, this thread is strictly voluntary. We’re all for privacy, as you know. If you’d rather stay mysterious, that’s fine, too.

*Unfinished Gaboomba Business:

In Message 187, some of you launched a plan to write a letter to Muse Mail. Here’s a place to continue that worthy effort.

A thread for sharing your favorite books, movies, music, websites, etc., and adding them to the list in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GABOOMBA.

New policy: at the rate this blog is developing, keeping the HG2Gab updated would be a nightmare. From now on, you do the work. MuseBlog is it. Enjoy!

MuseBlog is open for business. It should be a big improvement over the Gaboomba message board—cleaner, faster, friskier—and it will only get better as Yr. Obd’t. Webmusesters learn more blogging tricks and add features.

A few rules of the road:

We screen comments before letting them go online. They won’t appear right away, but we’ll do our best to keep them moving along.

Your comments may not include your last name, your e-mail address, or any other contact information. If you are in high school or younger, sign your posts with a pseudonym (false name) or with your first name (plus last initial, if you like). If you are college-age or older, you must supply your full name on your comment form. Submissions that break these rules will be zapped.

So much for the serious stuff. Now, how is your summer going?