Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Still not Faustus.

…okay, so now we know why one should never try to post to someone else’s blog while a different person is ranting to them about Batman smut over instant messenger. Which is also not 19th century, and therefore tragic.

I read through the Drama-Generating Techniques section on the Encyclopedia Dramatica looking for ways to further mess with this blog, but got distracted by making a checklist of all the techniques I’ve already used in the past on my own blog. And on instant messenger. And in everyday life.

Hmm.

This is not Faustus, this is Lauren.

Twenty increasingly drunk psychiatrists singing the song from Titanic is much less frightening than one sober psychiatrist deciding that applying leeches to the vulva is a good way to cure female nymphomania. (See also: “Dr. Wigan puts the matter in a way that may seem more extravagant than it really is when he says: I firmly believe that I have more than once changed the moral character of a boy by leeches to the inside of the nose.”

N.B.: This is my second post today.

Surely there are things more likely to make you doubt the existence of a rational universe than spending an evening in a private room in a Japanese restaurant cum karaoke bar with twenty increasingly drunk psychiatrists singing the song from Titanic.

But I can’t think of any of them at the moment.

In other news, I am leaving town tomorrow for three weeks. I will be in parts of the country where internet access will be spotty at best and dial-up at worst. For two weeks I’ll be in Connecticut at the National Music Theater Conference. Check the schedule for Blood Drive if you’re interested in coming to a public presentation of what I’ll be working on. After that’s over, I’ll be on a top-secret mission below the Mason-Dixon line for a week.

In my absence, you will be in the hands of three supremely capable guest bloggers; the unifying thread is that I wish I could sleep with each one of them. (The unifying thread was going to be that I wish I had slept with each one of them, since I knew them all when I was single, but as one of them is a girl I ended up having to adjust.) Let me hasten to assure you that, if you’re not guest blogging, I probably wish I could sleep with you all the same. The set of guest bloggers for the next three weeks is simply a proper subset of the set of bloggers I wish I could sleep with.

You’ll be in very good hands, I promise.

Can anybody help me figure out how to restore the lovely font I used to have in these blog posts? It’s still there in the archives, but the main page seems to have mutinied. I am a computer mongoloid but still a look at the template indicates that nothing should be out of order–that is to say, the style section contains this:

p { font-family: georgia, verdana, arial; font-size:12px; color:#666666; line-height:18px; text-align:justify; }

and the section that defines how posts are done seems to put them between p tags.

This will all soon be moot anyway, as this whole enterprise will be moving elsewhere shortly. But still: why allow ugliness to exist in the world for even the briefest of brief moments?

I don’t understand my fascination with Tom Cruise and his slow but certain decline into madness.

Those of you who share this inexplicable obsession would do well to take a look at Tom Cruise Kills Oprah. You have to have the sound on to get the full effect. It’s safe for work, at least as far as thinking about such disturbing matters is safe for work.

I love the Reverend Brendan Powell Smith. I love him because I love his creation, The Brick Testament, a pictorial Bible done with Legos.

Here, for example, is a scene from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah:

Tell me: how could anyone not pant for the author of such a work?

A while ago there was apparently an article in The New Yorker about a new book called Popstrology, which describes itself as “a revolutionary method for gaining self-knowledge by examining the alignment of the pop music charts at the moment of your birth.”

My brother told me about this when it came out, and naturally I pooh-poohed it; if I had any more self-knowledge I would explode.

But then I went to the Popstrology web site and realized that it is 100% accurate.

Because, though I was born in the Year of Roberta Flack, my Birthsong is Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.”

I guess this stuff really works, huh?

Sometimes I think that getting to live the life of a vagabond artist, making my way by my wits and leaving so much to fate and everything else to luck and also having to pay for my own health insurance, is the most wonderful thing in the world.

And then sometimes it just so totally sucks.

Two orders of business today.

First, if you live in New York and you’re looking for something to do tonight, tomorrow night, or Saturday, let me highly recommend this show, produced by a friend of mine:

I saw it last night and it was the most enjoyable evening I’d spent in the theater in a long while.

And can that girl dance!

Second, I am so making myself these Rainbow Hotpants and teaching step class in them:

Except my abs are totally better than his.

[Edit: I emailed the author of the pattern asking about resizing, and it turns out that yes, that is a woman’s body, though the pattern described the hotpants as “totally gay” so I hope I can be forgiven for assuming that it was just a particularly bottomish guy. It’s not really fair to say that my abs are better than hers, as men’s and women’s bodies are very different when it comes to body fat percentages. Perhaps I’ll just post a picture of my bare midriff in those shorts when they’re done, and you can all weigh in.]

Can anybody help me?

Actually, let me rephrase that question so that it’s a touch less broad and the answer is less obviously “no.”

What I mean is: the posts between June 13 and June 20 inexplicably show up as being written by “Faustus,” with no “MD” after his name. The horror of having people think that I think it’s appropriate to have a moniker that ends in a comma is really too great to bear and I’m considering booking a flight to Florence and throwing myself in the Arno, just like Lauretta threatens to do in Gianni Schicchi if her father disapproves of her relationship with Rinuccio, though between you and me I believe she has mild borderline personality disorder.

But before I take such an extreme step, I figured I’d ask if any reader is computer-savvy enough to make a suggestion. My display name used to be “Faustus,” (first) and “MD” (last); I’ve already gone into my profile and changed the first name to “Faustus, MD” and left the last name blank. So posts from here on out should be fine. But I also republished after that, which should mean that all those posts show up with the new version of the display name, but on my screen they don’t. I even started deleting posts and reposting them until I realized that of course the comments would then disappear and I would have no evidence that anybody realized I existed at all over the last two weeks, and my therapist really has enough to deal with already. So if you have any ideas about how to fix this, please email me.

Oh, my God. I used to post about orgies on this blog. Now I’m posting about the minutiae of programming. Maybe I should book that flight to Florence anyway.