Two more awards, and a song

I wanted to do a longish post on the whole Barack vs. Hillary thing, but Blogger is going down in a half hour and I don't have time. I'll try to do it tomorrow. So let me encapsulate it: Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, Scene 1. I don't know if the relevant line is contained in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that excerpted this scene, so check out the Branagh version if you can, or just grab a copy or read it online. See if you can pick out what I'm referring to.

Whim has awarded me two awards in the past month, and I have failed to acknowledge them. Let me do that now.

Back on February 18 Whim passed this award along to me. It's very cool to know that I have made someone's day! I'm supposed to pass this award along to ten people, but I've been so slow to even accept it, you can count on me to be at least as slow to pass it on.

Today Whim informed me that she had presented me with this award. (The symbol means "heart" or "love" in l33tspeak.) (I had a longish bit here, but it wound up getting reduced to <3>. Now I can't remember what I wrote. But thank you, whim!)

I have to admit that I don't really "get" what awards are all about. When I first saw awards floating around the blogosphere, they were being presented by groups or organizations (or individuals posing as groups or organizations) and were often presented after a competition or a voting process. But now it seems that lots of people are making up awards and passing them around...which is totally, totally cool. I may actually do some myself. I have one in mind that would be awarded to a single person, and could be awarded by anyone to anyone at any time. But that may take time to cook up.

In the meantime I have another award that has no button: the "Blogs Worth Reading" award. That goes to all the blogs listed along my right-hand sidebar, which are there not because of some reciprocal-link agreement or anything like that, but because these are all blogs that I read, and I wanted a convenient way of getting to them. If I read them, they're worth reading.

And now the song:

"Elvis Presley and America" is from U2's The Unforgettable Fire, and was the last song on side 1 of the cassette if I recall correctly. It was a legendary song among U2 fans: the mumbled lyrics, the strangely familiar music, the non-repeating structure of the vocals. Stories and explanations sprang up around it, most of which turned out to be true, more or less. (The Wikipedia entry on this song has what I believe is the true story, though it omits the bit that I heard about Bono being drunk during the recording.) I spent a lot of time in college with fellow U2 fans trying to figure out just what the hell Bono was saying, and what it meant.

(The video, by the way, is made of edited, mixed, faded, desaturated, and grain-added clips from the film Solaris. If you haven't seen that movie, you should, and maybe you should get the book by Stanislaw Lem to try to figure out what the hell is going on. The video was created by the YouTube user handstoheart, and it's a really nice piece of work.)

I'm out of time. I'll close this post with lines from the song:

You're through with me
But I know that you'll be back
for more

See you when Blogger's back online!