I haven’t had the time… okay, scratch that: I haven’t had the energy to do any constructive preparation for a really relevant blog entry here in the past three days, having spent some time on the couch shaking away the rest of my cold while watching the first season of Monk with my parents (yes, this is the mysterious place I’ve been to, stranded a good 250 km from my house! And Monk is a really great series, by the way.). As a result, I think I can safely answer the call of tagging placed upon me by Lee lately, although I really don’t know as of yet who I’m going to tag. It looks to me like every and each of you have already been tagged in this. So here are the rules:

1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Ponder it for meaning, subtext or hidden agendas…
5. Tag five people to do the same.

The sentence is: The English version of this blog remains here, where it has always been. (You can also access it through the domain name ylogs.com.)

Yep, it was about having created a separate French version of this blog, and to be honest, I’d better had shot myself on that day rather than putting my foot in my mouth and bragging about it, since this proved a bigger task than expected. I don’t regret it, I like having my blog in two different languages, but it’s like having to write every post twice, and it often discourages me from thinking of longer, more detailed entries that I don’t want to completely translate. Well, at least it forces me to not gloss and babble for pages on end, which is probably a good thing in the end.

Now to find someone to tag… My mind is completely blank. Really.

This could almost be a story in itself. No, it’s not about writing, but it’s one of these events in life that make you happy that you took action on the day they happened. One month ago, while walking to the mailbox to retrieve the day’s mail, I noticed a pack of huge flies gathered around some tiny thing wriggling on the ground. At first I thought it was a half-dead mouse, but looking closer, it turned out to be a kitten, a very young one—one day old at the most, and I somehow doubt it, she probably couldn’t have spent a whole night outside already. She was still wet from birth fluids, and pretty much trying to get away from the flies around her.

The reason why I haven’t blogged about anything insightful since Thursday is the image on the left, and I must simply admit that s much as I wanted to finish my next planned entry yesterday evening, I’ve been too dead tired to go on with it. In any case, I’m glad I went to the European Fair no matter what.

Here’s one of the interesting things we found here: a little series of brain-teasers called “Bozo-Bozo” (nevermind the weird-sounding name, really). Its principle of course caught our interest, based as it is on actual scientific matters: a wooden stick with indents in it and a propeller on its end. Rubbing another, smaller stick on the indents will make the propeller move. No problem here, except that when you say “bozo”, the propeller rotates backwards, which in theory isn’t possible by itself.

Of course, there’s a trick, and I’m not going to give the solution here (a shame we figured it out quickly). Who knows, perhaps I can one day use the theory in a story, too. Everything is worth being investigated when it comes to imagination.

Y Tags: fair | games | science

This one’s been up for more than one month. Time to change the playlist again.

I’m in a bit of a nostalgic mood these days, as some of the songs may betray it.

Just a short FYI: I’m testing a new redirection for the http://ylogs.com domain name, which may make it unavailable some time during the next 24-48 hours. If this works well, permalinks will also work with the ylogs.com structure, and not only the yzabel.paradygma.com one.

Sorry for the inconvenience. The blog remains available at http://yzabel.paradygma.com anyway.

[UPDATE]

That was fast! I updated the nameservers just after posting this entry this morning, and barely five hours after, everything was already up. Which means, back in action the normal way!

The only change I had to perform was in the permalinks’ structure (I needed to add /index.php/ in front of them, else they wouldn’t work). As for the old permalinks, the ones pointing to yzabel.paradygma.com, they still do work.