The Muses: Clio

The Proclaimer is the Muse of Historic and Heroic Poetry. Clio holds a scroll or set of tablets in her hands, and is surrounded by a veritable wall of books. She is credited with introducing the Phonecian alphabet to the Greeks. As a consequence of her teasing, barbed sense of humor, she was cursed by Aphrodite: she fell in love with a mortal, Pierus, the King of Macedonia. Clio bore two sons, one by Bacchus and one by Pierus: Hymenaeus, the God of Marriage Ceremonies and Wedding Feasts, and the doomed Hyacinth. She is the patron of historians, epic poets, biographers and all those who wish for fame, reknown, and celebrity status. Her scent is the warm, dry parchment of scrolls, lavender for critical thought and analysis, the solidity of heavy woods, ornery patchouli and glib benzoin, and superstar-splashed orange and amber.

In the bottle, this is a fairly sharp scent. It’s almost a little grassy, and the more I smell it the more I think I smell jasmine too… except there’s not supposed to be any jasmine in this one, so I must be mistaking something else for it. On me, at first it reminds me a lot of Siren, with the earthy chocolatey notes, and all I can do is hope that doesn’t last. Fortunately, it doesn’t, and it dries to a powdery, perfumy floral. Ish. Thing. If I didn’t have so many scents to choose from already, I might wear it sometimes; it’s not bad once it dries, it’s just not great either. As it is, though, I think there are too many other things I’ll reach for first, and I probably won’t wind up wearing this one.

The Muses: Erato

She is the Muse of mimicry, and inspires both erotic and romantic poetry. She is crowned in roses, holding a lyre. Her scent inspires creative expressions of love and lust: a crush of roses with sweet pea, myrrh, ylang ylang, orris and stephanotis.

In the bottle, this one is a little earthy and floral. I think the note I can pick out the best is the ylang ylang, though I can also definitely smell the rose lurking in the background. It’s not a strong scent at all; I had to sniff several times to really pick it up properly. On me, it quickly turns to a heavy floral with a little bit of powder to it. The powdery feel to the scent continues to get stronger as it dries, although it never quite turns to dust the way some “powdery” scents have on me (thank goodness). It’s a middle-of-the-road scent for me; I don’t love it, I don’t hate it.

The Muses: Urania

The Heavenly One is the Muse of Astrology and Astronomy, and guides all those who look to the stars for knowledge. She wears a flowing cloak embroidered with her beloved stars, holds a staff and a globe, and her eyes are skyward. Her scent is that of endless, star-clad space: glittering, cool, vast. Moonflower, Moroccan jasmine, benzoin, white musk, iris, moss and a flash of ozone.

In the bottle, my reaction is, “Wow, that’s a fresh floral.” It smells like fresh-cut flowers. I have trouble pinning down the exact floral, but after reading the description again I think it might be iris. I expected the musk and moss to weigh it down, but they don’t. On me, it starts out much the same but quickly starts to go powdery. An hour later, it just smells perfumy and almost a little dusty. I liked how it started out, but I’m not as fond of the end result.

No Comments »

Various bits and pieces from my SparkPeople entries…

1/8/08: And that’s been one of my big obstacles, I think, and one I hadn’t thought about until reading through some of the stuff on SparkPeople. I keep saying how haaaaaaard it is to resist temptation, especially when I’m so tiiiiiiired and I just want that (fill in the blank) so baaaaad and oh my gosh it’s just so diiiiiiificult. I really need to stop that. Because in doing that, I’m not taking responsibility for my choices, and in not taking responsibility I am taking it out of my own hands, and when it’s out of my hands I can’t change it.

1/18/08: While I do give a great deal of credit to [SparkPeople], though, I think it was just as much about breaking out of the mental space I was in as it was about any specific tool. I’ve said elsewhere that for me dieting is at least half playing headgames with myself. I was in this awful headspace where all I could see was that I wasn’t getting anywhere, and the stuff I used to do wasn’t working and I couldn’t stick to it. A new plan and a new outlook allowed me to break free of that and actually make progress.

1/24/08: This morning, when I stopped to get gas, I picked up a Cherry Coke Zero to drink at work. While drinking it, I realized something interesting. When I’m drinking it, I don’t drink as quickly as I do when I’m drinking water. So not only is it taking up space in my tummy that could be used by water (because I won’t count soda in with my daily water requirement, because of all the junk in it), and whatever nasty effects caffeine has on hydration and stuff, but also I’m not even getting as much liquid to begin with!

1/28/08: The challenge is going to be the two extra cardio sessions [that SparkPeople's weekly goals want me to fit in this week]. I already have three per week, regularly, walking half an hour at a relatively good pace. I seldom fail to do this and consider it a pretty good workout plan already. So part of me is rebelling at the thought of adding two more sessions. At the same time, though, I do recognize that I could stand a little more variety in my cardio. I’m not entirely sure what else to do, though. I don’t really have the time to run off to a center with a pool or a program or something. I might be able to borrow Yourself!Fitness to do a couple of short cardio workouts sometime, I guess. And, if she cooperates, there’s always carrying Nene around; carrying the baby burns 100 calories every 20 minutes! I’m a little concerned that’s not different enough from walking, though. There’s also a desk workout that I could do at work here on SparkPeople, but if it’s the one I’m thinking of, I actually can’t complete the required number of reps of the various exercises (because my muscles just won’t do it). They want 15, I can do… 5. But I’ll take a look at that too.

1/29/08: Theoretically, today should be one of my two extra cardio sessions. Unless I wind up carrying the baby around for 20-30 minutes straight, though, it’s not happening. Here’s why. The only time I have to fit cardio in, really, is during that hour after I get home and before I have to pick up the baby. Last night she woke up just as I was getting to sleep myself and I had to spend a while soothing her back to sleep. As a result, I was two hours late getting to sleep myself. Therefore, I have made the executive decision that I should take a nap during my hour this afternoon.

No Comments »

Star Trek: I’m sort of medium-excited about this and definitely curious, but… I gotta be honest, I’m not a fan of the trailer and it didn’t do anything for me at all. I think the “Under Construction” blew it for me, really. Because before that it’s like, “OK, they’re working on the Enterprise. Cool.” After seeing that, though, it’s more like, “Oh, I see. They didn’t have time to make a real trailer, so they just slapped together some footage of some guy welding and a few words of voiceover from Leonard Nimoy and put it up like some cheap-ass Flash animation on an unfinished web page.” It’s not really the impression you want to make.

The Other Boleyn Girl: This is one of those trailers that first re-piques my curiosity about English history, and then makes me stop and wonder how true to life it actually, really is. And then I suppose it’s probably not very, and then I start wondering if I really want to see it, and finally I decide that if nothing else I want to see Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn, so yeah, I do want to see this. At some point. Maybe from Netflix. I think the trailer lost me a little because it seems like it’s trying to pack the entire storyline into under three minutes, and when you do that it’s going to be a little messy. But it looks good.

Shrooms: After reading Apple’s description, I felt like all I needed was Mr. Mackey popping up and saying, “Drugs are bad, mmmmmkay?” Other information elsewhere sounds less like propaganda and more like horror, but it still sort of comes off sounding like some sort of latter-day Reefer Madness, in a way. Kids take drugs and BAD, BAD THINGS happen. I mean, wow. I didn’t realize we were still making these kinds of movies.

Untraceable: This one’s been giving Tim and I headaches since the trailer started showing up. It’s another case of the trailer completely turning us off a movie; the very idea of someone being not merely “really really difficult to trace”, but actually untraceable, breaks both of our network-minded brains. The point at which it goes from “Do you people know anything about this technology?” to laughable, though, is the point in the trailer at which Diane Lane’s car gets hacked. I mean, the car, y’all. What’s he going to do, reset your odometer? I foresee, some date night far in the future, a double-feature of Netflixed movies we expect to laugh at, featuring this and Shrooms.

In the Name of the King: I… want to like this movie. I really do. Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys-Davies, sword and sorcery and all that… It feels like it should be something I should like. But… I can’t figure out what makes it different from any other generic fantasy story out there. Hero sets out to save his wife and avenge his son, who have been kidnapped and killed (respectively) by the bad guys. Blah. Why do I care again, other than because of the actors involved? (And lest one think that ensures a good movie, let me remind you of Hilary Swank in The Core or Sean Connery and Uma Thurman in The Avengers, for starters.) Give me something, guys; I want to work with you here, but there’s nothing to work with.

Penelope: Back to the good side to wind things up. You know, this movie should bug me. It should look like it’s going to be way too cutesy and feel-good and everything. It doesn’t, and I don’t know why. Instead, it looks fun and interesting and Christina Ricci and James McAvoy look great, and Reese Witherspoon and… I dunno. It just looks like it could really be cute. In a good, quirky way.

No Comments »

(No idea what Rock Band is? I’ll let Wikipedia do my explaining for me.)

Tim does not own Rock Band, but has rented it from Gamefly and discovered that the guitar and bass portions work quite well with the two guitars he already has from Guitar Hero III. (Well, I mean, from all three really, but you know.) Last night, he managed to convince me to give it a try, with him on guitar and me on bass.

I was initially a little dubious, because singing passably is about the extent of my musical ability and I wasn’t really sure how well I’d do. (And while you can sing in the game, we don’t have the microphone.) Tim insisted, though, that it was more a matter of rythm and timing than coordination or actual talent, so… OK, I’ll give it one try, you know?

I did better than I’d thought I would. We played a few songs, and I flubbed quite a few notes on some of them, especially when the bass line got a little faster and I lost it for a few bars, but mostly I was hitting 90% or better. (OK, yes, on easy mode.) I also liked it better than I’d expected; I’d expected to feel sort of awkward and weird, but once I got into it, it was really pretty relaxing. So I guess we’ll keep on with it and see how far we get as a “band”.

In a nod to our geekiness, I suppose, our band is The Final Fantasy, with Tim playing lead guitar (in expert mode) as Aerith and me on bass as Celes. Except neither of our characters look anything like Aerith or Celes, and somehow I just don’t see Aerith as the lead guitar type anyway, and I’m not sure about Celes and bass, but…

Right. Overthinking it. Geek card earned today, I guess.

1 Comment »

Well. My nose seems clearer today, so I can finish up this round after all. Continuing, in no particular order…

Sudha Segara

Named after the primordial ocean of milk where Lord Vishnu reclines upon the thousand-headed Naga. Sweet milk and warm, healing ginger with a touch of golden honey and our blend of Ambrosia.

In the bottle, it smells primarily of ginger. I can’t pin down any other notes specifically, but at the same time it’s not as strong as you’d expect from pure ginger, so obviously there’s something else there. On me, mmmmmmm. Warm and sweet, just a tiny bit floral and fairly spicy, with the milk and honey enveloping it all. Soothing and comforting. I like it!

New Orleans

Reminiscent of hothouse blooms on a humid night, ripe, but touched with decay. Sweet honeysuckle and jasmine with a hint of lemon and spice.

In the bottle, all I smell is jasmine. Maybe a hint of honeysuckle, but it’s definitely all light florals. On me, at first the jasmine is again overpowering. As it dries, though, the scent changes. Tim says it smells like soap to him; I think it smells almost like freshly cooked rice. Thereafter, the florals start to come out too, but that ricey scent is always there too. I’m not sure the components blended quite the way they’re meant to with my skin chemistry. If I really try, and if I’m keeping in mind what I’m looking for, I can pick out each of the notes listed in the description. They just don’t quite come together right on me, is all. After a while it goes all honeysuckle, but it takes a while. I don’t think I’ll probably be wearing much of this one.

Siren

Bewitching, tantalizing and dangerously seductive. A thrilling, exotic blend — deceptively sweet, but spiked with malice. White ginger, jasmine, and a touch of vanilla and apricot.

In the bottle, this one is not at all what I had expected. It smells a little of chocolate, actually, with a bit of an earthy undertone that I think might turn out to be the apricot if I really tried to pin it down. On me, that chocolate/earth combination intensifies, and it’s not pleasant. As it dries, it mellows somewhat, though. The chocolate goes away, and I think what’s left is mostly white ginger with a touch of apricot. It’s not… a bad scent? Especially after a couple of hours? But it’s still not really my favorite, or even one I like particularly well. This one’s going in the “not going to really wear” pile.

No Comments »

Yeah, another “misc” post. I know.

I’m going to have to postpone BPAL sniffing notes. My cold has gotten worse and now I can’t even smell the stuff I’ve got on right now. (Sudha Segara, in case you were wondering, which I’m sure you weren’t.) I do have two ready to go, New Orleans and Siren; the short story is that New Orleans was a little disappointing but not a total loss, and Siren just isn’t working out on me the way I’d like it to.

I’m down five pounds as of yesterday morning! Go me, go me… I mean, hey, I’m 1/5 of the way there. I can do this.

On a related note, I was looking at myself in the mirror last night just before bed and realized something. I’ve still got my curves. Interestingly (and perhaps unsurprisingly) enough, pregnancy weight gain is apparently not the same as normal weight gain. The last time I was this weight, my waist was kind of a little undefined. Only as I lost weight did I see it begin to curve nicely inward and then back out to the hips. I appear to be carrying the extra 20 pounds on my tummy and maybe my butt, where it doesn’t actually affect my silhouette that much.

Something to get addicted to: The Kingdom of Loathing. It’s kind of somewhere between “MMORPG for people who like text-based games” and “MUD for people who wouldn’t mind a little graphical representation”. “Graphical representation” here being stick figures. Also, there is a really quirky sense of humor required to appreciate this game, I think. I find it handy to play with the KoL Wiki open as well, for information on items I pick up or a quick hint when I just can’t figure out what to do next on my current quest. (Being as I mentioned MMORPGs here, I feel like I should also mention that this game is free, though donations to support it do buy you special in-game items.)

I have come o’er moor and mountain
Like the hawk upon the wing
I was once a shining knight
Who was the guardian of a king
I have searched the whole world over
Looking for a place to sleep
I have seen the strong survive
And I have seen the lean grown weak
–Gordon Lightfoot, “Don Quixote”

No Comments »

So I speak to you in riddles
‘Cause my words get in my way
I smoke the whole thing to my head
And feel it wash away
‘Cause I can’t take anymore of this
I wanna come apart
Or dig myself a little hole
Inside your precious heart

‘Cause it’s always raining in my head
Forget all the things I should have said

–Staind, “Ephiphany”

No Comments »

They’re here! They’re here! Time to start sniffing. I have a tiny bit of a cold, but my sense of smell seems to be working OK, so… Time to start digging into the yummy goodness that is my latest BPAL order. You know the drill; I’m trying one scent per day and grouping them into three scents per post. I’ll start with the three I was most looking forward to smelling. (Outside of the full bottles of Delphi and Rose Cross, of course!)

Belle Epoque

“The Pretty Era”, France’s Golden Time: an age of beauty, innovation and peace in France that lasted from the 19th Century through the first World War and gave birth to the cabaret, the cancan, and the cinema as well as the Impressionist and Art Nouveau movements. Sweet opium, Lily of the Valley, vanilla, mandarin and red sandalwood.

In the bottle, it first smells a little bitter and a little sour; the mandarin (orange, one presumes), I would guess. I get a definite earthy note as well, perhaps the sandalwood. On me, it’s mostly… sandalwood! Yes! I’ve had some trouble with BPAL’s sandalwood scents, and am happy to have finally found one that does smell like sandalwood on me. There’s also the orange again, and just a hint of floral scent hiding behind it all. It kind of floats back and forth between orangey and sandalwood. All in all, it’s not going to beat Delphi or Rose Cross for me, but it’s a very good scent and I’m very glad I gave it a try. (This also seems to be Tim’s favorite of the three I’ve had him smell so far.)

Hymn

A paean to true holiness, spiritual purity, and sacred enlightenment. Based on an incense blend sacred to the Virgin Mary: perfect rose absolute and Palestinian Lily of the Valley with olibanum, labdanum, frankincense and myrrh.

In the bottle, the dominant scent is the lily of the valley. It’s more floral and lighter than I’d expected from a scent with incense notes in it. Unexpected. A little astringent, maybe. On my skin, though, the incense comes out and it smells much more like I expected it to. It’s a lot like Rose Cross, but with a more complex floral tone over the incense… which is exactly what I expected and hoped for, from the description. As time went on, though, it started to get a little perfumey for my taste (and Tim’s, when I had him smell it). But it’s still a good scent.

Eve

The spirit of temptation, the essence of lost innocence. Apple blossom, rose, ylang ylang and golden honey.

In the bottle, this one smells like… apples. Mostly, it just smells like apples. I can smell something behind it, maybe the rose or the ylang ylang, but the apple is definitely the dominant scent. It’s a sweet-smelling apple, and I can’t decide whether that’s the natural sweetness of the scent or whether the honey note is playing into it. On me, I can smell the honey almost immediately when putting it on. After a minute or two, though, that melts back into the apple, but having picked it out once I can do it again. The rose also starts to come through more, though everything is still secondary to the apple scent. I like it well enough, but it’s probably not the first thing I’ll reach for all the time. (Of course, I said the same thing about Rose Cross and look where that got me.)

A good beginning to what I hope will be a good run, I think. For the next post I’ll be testing the remainder of the ones I actually ordered: New Orleans, Siren, and Sudha Segara (which I may have just misspelled). Then I’ll move on to the six free bonus samples they sent me, which also ought to be fun.

No Comments »

Oh my gods, you guys. I have so much BPAL I hardly know what to do with it. My order arrived today, and there were not one, not two, but six free sample vials included. A whole second set of samples, basically, at no extra charge.

The extras: Clio (parchment, lavender, woods, patchouli, benzoin, orange and amber), Erato (rose, sweet pea, myrrh, ylang ylang, orris and stephanotis), Urania (moonflower, Moroccan jasmine, benzoin, white musk, iris, moss and a flash of ozone), Tum (a honey-based scent I don’t know the exact components of and have a sample of already, and I already know I like it), Vinland (“crisp northern wind blowing over loganberry, wild roses, prairie crocus, iris versicolor Linné, mountain avens, yellow birch bark, mayflower and maple leaf”), and Ahathoor (again, scent components not listed). I look forward to trying them all.

No Comments »

Back in the mid-1990′s, the face of American reality TV was The Real World. And maybe COPS. Then, in 2000, CBS debuted a little show called Survivor, and everything changed.

Survivor is now gearing up for its seventeenth season in eight years. Since its premiere, we’ve seen competition reality shows spring up on every subject under the sun. Living with total strangers. Dating. Marriage. Modeling. Cooking. Design, both fashion and interior. Pirates. Comic book superheroes. Just plain freaking out the mundanes. This season we’ve even got a new one on beauty pageants. People, the shark, she is jumped. And has been for a long time. (I mean, really. Pirates?)

The thing that really amazes me, though, is that after all this time and all those series, people still seem to come on the shows with the exact same attitudes and expectations as they did in 2000. One could forgive Sue Hawk (of Survivor‘s first season, she of the infamous “rat and snake” speech) for not understanding the environment she was being thrown into and reacting poorly when people played the game. It was 2000, and they were breaking new ground. No one knew what to expect. There were no standard conventions of competition reality television.

Now, though, in 2008, contestants continue to appear on reality TV series with the apparent expectations that these are serious competitions. That things will be run fairly, and the judges will never be mean to them, and everyone on the show will be the best of friends. No decent person, of course, would treat the competition as the trumped-up game show it is. And it isn’t a trumped-up game show! It’s a serious competition!

Do the casting directors just manage to consistently find the people who have never watched a single minute of reality TV? Because by this time it should be evident to anyone who’s remotely familiar with the genre that even the most serious reality competition show is going to, at some point, involve things like cruel judges and alliances and schemes and utterly ridiculous challenges like making a dress out of what you can buy for $50 at a grocery store (Project Runway, Season 1) or a fashion show with the theme of “ghost brides” (ANTM, Season… 7?) or digging through a pile of dirt, fruit pulp, honey, feathers, seaweed, fishguts, and animal organs for five “sacred objects” while standing in a hole in the ground (Mad Mad House, and… don’t ask). The judges are not there to help you, the other contestants are not there to be your friends, and the challenges are ultimately chosen to entertain a television audience. And yet there seem to be enough people in America who don’t understand this to cast seventeen seasons of Survivor, nine-going-on-ten of America’s Next Top Model, nine of Big Brother, multiple (though not quite as many) seasons of several other shows, and endless one- or two-season flops.

Of course, what’s more puzzling is a specific subset of shows, the interview-for-a-job types that claim to be searching for the next big fill-in-the-blank. (I deliberately exclude American Idol here, as it’s an entirely different format and doesn’t have as much of the problem I’m about to describe.) What gets me about these is that every season, without fail, the contestants seem convinced that winning the show is the key to their big break as a model, designer, chef, etc. Has anyone who won any one of these (non-Idol, again) competitions suddenly become a shining star of success in their field? Have they, in fact, been any more successful than people who were eliminated earlier in the season? Not that I’ve noticed, and yet the illusion persists. You’d think after nine seasons someone would have noticed that the winners of ANTM don’t tend to start showing up everywhere. Or even really in their promised Cover Girl ads, that I’ve noticed, although I’ll concede it’s possible I’m missing them.

Then again, I suppose if they regularly cast people who understood how it worked and how to play the game and that they were really playing for that $100K check and not for the mentorship or the contract or whatever that isn’t going to wind up getting them anywhere, it would be sort of boring. I did hear that one season on Survivor (I don’t know which one, though) they wound up with a group who really got it and played well, and… it was dull. Because in the end what we really want from reality TV isn’t good strategy and the discovery of undiscovered talent. What we really want, and what the networks give us, is drama and ridiculousness. And a game that runs smoothly has no drama or ridiculousness to it.

No Comments »