The Letter L

Lemons

My favorite fruit - so bold and yellow on the outside, so wonderfully tart on the inside. Diluted in water or tea, dipped in sugar, infused into curd and sprinkled over cookie bars... lemon beats out it's yellow step-cousin, the banana, in versatility, and it's red-purple pal, the pomegranite in ubiquity. A wedge of lemon will wake you up, tart up your fish, add zip to your water, and brighten your day.

Letterpress

Number Two on my list of items I must have. I miss setting type. I miss the way the paper peels up off the ink, the upside down a in the third row, the layers of wooden blocks that anchor the type into a compact whole. I miss the first smudged print off a proofing press, and the perfect overprint where all lines up perfectly.

Letters

Of all of the arts I've let slip through my finger, the art of writing letters is the one I regret the most. E-mail just isn't the same as an expanse of ink on a page, folded in three and sealed with a stamp.

Little People

In the mid-eighties sometimes, someone in the "Braintrust" over at Fisher-Price decided to redesign the Little People. They made them ... Chunky. Bigger. Wider. Prone to pastel and pastel-friendly colors. More detailed (and therefore limiting) pre-set scenes. Less appealing on every level. As a child, I had the circus little people set (not the train, the circus!) and the houseboat. Various neighbors had the farm, the plane, the A-frame house. I recently came accross a baggie of Little People Animals at a Big Flea (monkey, chicken, donkey, cow....) and had to buy them. After a little exploration into the world of eBay and the 'net, I'm now lusting after the airport set, a complete set of animals, the castle set, the circus train (and a complete big top circus set...) - and I'm going to use them to re-enact great scenes from great movies.

Livia

A personal hero. Wife of Augustus, Mother of Tiberius, Powerful, Charming, Murderous. Hell on Wheels.

Llama Queen

I was a freshman at Smith, and Wendy Feldman showed me that the VAX was more than just an e-mail server and a launching off point to connect to my unix accounts at UVa. One of the first was to change the name associated with my login handle to something more ... interesting than my name. Almost immediately, I began using Llama Queen (I used to occasionally non-seq on Quartz, "I am the Llama Queen!" during that era, as well), and it stuck. It weirded out most of the Amherst Boys (except for a couple of cool ones), thank goodness!

Lonely Boys

Between 1991 and 1994, I must have gotten 12,000 TALK requests, 90% of them from young men who felt I was in desperate need of a lewd come-on(either immediately or after a few moments of insincere chatter). This inspired my first on-line rant. This rant used to live in my .plan. .plans were the precursor of the personal home page; I had a friend whose plan scrolled for over 200 screens.

More: The First Rant