Christine Daae

What's your favorite song to sing karaoke-style?  If you don't have one, why not?

LOL at these questions of the day. I had a dream about this recently, except all the songs on the karaoke machine were bad 70s French pop songs I didn't know.

I've never sung karaoke in a public place, and dare say I never will. In the car though, I'll sing along to anything. What I like to sing along to depends what mood I'm in. Quite a few Poe songs. Quite a few David Bowie. "Give Me Something to Sing About" from the Buffy musical episode. Meat Loaf. Pulp's "Common People". Bonnie Tyler, what's that song called? "Total Eclipse of the Heart". It reminds me of a time when I was driving down to the south coast a lot and playing a mixtape sent to me by a penfriend, of Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman songs. Dunno why that's a good kind of nostalgia... good that I'm not now where I was then, perhaps.

I used to sing along to a lot of musicals songs and certain operatic arias (not in a manner that would pass any muster with a real singer, of course!). Particularly a couple of songs from Chess.

Tell us a little something about your first car.  Do you have any photos you can share? 
Submitted by tamara.

The first car I drove was boring, an old Metro my parents got for us to learn in and use. A year or so after I'd learned to drive though, I got myself a new Mini Cooper - cheaper than brand new, because someone had won it in a competition but it was too small for her to use as a family car. It was British Racing Green, with racing stripes. I loooved it.

It was called, predictably, Erik. It had a name because my sister and a friend were Mini freaks, competed in the British Rally Championships in them, and habitually named their cars. Grace's car, Tristan, represented 1977 at the Mini's 35th anniversary show.

I don't have any photos of my car on this computer, but I've got one of Tristan, and of Grace and Ali in action in their rally car.

Voila.

Looks like I'm going to use this as kind of a photo blog.

There was a stunning rainbow stretching across the sky today - a full arc, double when the sun was bright. I love rainbows, so I ran out into the rain to take pictures.

I've added a bunch of photos from the weekend, taken in Walberswick, Suffolk. My grandfather used to have a cottage here, and we'd go there for summer holidays and the occassional weekend.

Here's the village green. Red brick house used to be my grandfather's, though they've added an extra storey to it now. Also, there used to be a slide that was twice that size, and more swings. I loved that slide, but obviously they decided it was too scary for little children or something. We used to spend hours and hours playing there, and would tell other kids it was our front garden. Ha ha ha.

I took excessive numbers of photographs of pretty English village houses and cottages, as well as a few of the beach, and lots of the dogs. See magical photo album thingy. --->

This is an interesting house because it's 400-ish years old, and was moved from another East Anglian town which didn't have such good historic building protections.

Walberswick used to be referred to as "Hampstead on Sea", and now gets called "Notting Hill on Sea" by the press, because famous media types go there a lot. The Freuds used to have a house there.

I love Walberswick beach. It has swathes of sand and then swathes of stone and pebbles, but they're beautiful stones. I used to collect them all the time, and we had a stone polishing thingy and we'd tumble and polish them. For some reason you find a lot of stones with holes worn all the way through them, which are known as "witch stones" in local lore, and supposed to be good luck.

I went for a swim in the sea (the North Sea, Suffolk is on the east coast of the UK), and Danae kept me company. She's an English Setter. She's very, very cuddly.

She's also a bit lazy, and wasn't thrilled by the length of the walk I'd taken her on. There's loads of national forest land, footpaths, bridleways, and protected nature reserve land around there.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the nuclear power station in the distance.

Six Apart forgets censorship is bad... but it's okay, so long as you're an internet CEO, they'll admit they screwed up. "Maturity leave" - sounds what LJ Abuse could use some of.

On LiveJournal, using someone's full name (even when it's public information) counts as "invasion of privacy", against all common sense and not to comply with any law. On TypePad, another Six Apart service, it was deemed an invasion of privacy for a blogger to mention the first name and surname of someone he was writing about. But he's the founder of Tribe.net, so when he said this was nonsense, the CEO of Six Apart agreed, and VP of Customer Service Doug Bryan assured him that "Six Apart will only interfere with your content if we possess a legitimate court order or if there is a reported DMCA violation". Furthermore, "In this particular situation, as Barak replied in his email to you, the Six Apart employee who initiated the request to you was filling in for our normal TOS person who is out on maturity leave. They simply made a mistake and completely misread the situation. Your post is not in violation with TypePad terms of service. We apologize for the misunderstanding."

Of course, TypePad is not LiveJournal. It's fair enough for them to have a different TOS. Is it equally expected that they get such a different level of customer service? Still, I'm sure that's not an experience particularly common amongst TypePad users who aren't involved in social networking and internet businesses.

I also got a reply from LJ Abuse today, about shamanix's claim that they only look at friend-locked posts in reports of copyright violation, or serious violation of US law. His statement was "not entirely correct". Oh, LJ Abuse people giving users incorrect information? What a first!

The rest of the email misses the point. It repeats that they confused me with cdaae13, then says that they only ever look at friend-locked entries in order to investigate specific reports against specific posts. So what were they doing investigating a complaint about a public post on one journal by looking at locked posts on another? Even if they thought we were the same person, it's still not consistant with what they say their policy is.

Sending this off to the LJ abuse blog now.

How po-faced of someone on Wikipedia to want to delete the Mini Mammoth entry.

The multi-purpose Mini Mammoth also is suited to varying tasks such as house cleaning mammoth, seeing-eye mammoth, dental hygiene, and as a guard-mammoth. Potentially the greatest invention since the computer, the mini mammoth is set to be the leader in purchases, both commercially and domestically, once on the market, whenever that may be.

Traditionally, they have been a delicacy item. Due to a slump in sales of roast mini mammoth, the advertising slogan 'It's not just for Christmas, it's also for lunch' was coined. [citation needed] Indeed, it was this advertising slogan that caused their extinction in the first place.

While not a separate breed, mini mammoths have an above average birth rate of albinism. Albino mini mammoths are a preferred food production animal due to their "Self cooking" nature in the tropics. However due to spontaneous combustion, they have a tendency to be over cooked.

Playing with Vox interface.

Christine Daae on the Web
the real cdaae - livejournal

I'm so used to typing HTML I find having to click on something to input links rather tedious.

Okay, I have to confess that I instantly like Vox's ease of use, even though I don't expect to use it as much as LiveJournal.

If I know you from LJ or elsewhere, add me and all that.