"Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious."

As Fosco has mentioned previously, Fosco Lives! gets a lot of traffic from the "playboy pubic shave"-loving perverts in Korea. But yesterday, he saw something in his Korea traffic he's never seen before:

That would be the "word" which follows the IP address. This is the place that, in Fosco's other traffic reports, the name of the Internet Service Provider (e.g., "comcast") appears. Apparently, that "word" is the name of an ISP.

Fosco's curiosity was piqued, so he had to do a Google search. Here's the result:

This isn't very illuminating. However, my favorite part is the "did you mean" recommendation here.

Any Fosco Lives! reader who can explain this "word" to Fosco (or who can pronounce it) will win a Fosco Lives! prize!

500

This post marks the five hundredth here at Fosco Lives! It feels like just two months ago, Fosco was celebrating his 300th post. Oh wait. Wow, Fosco's been on a hell of a blogging jag recently.

Just as Fosco did for his three hundredth post, he would like to call attention to some notable five hundreds:

• The Fortune 500 is an annual listing of the top 500 US companies. Will they be able to find five hundred this year?
  
• 500 is apparently a card game similar to Euchre. That's all Fosco know about it, except that Todd is probably good at it because he's a wicked skilled Euchre player.
  
• The year 500 BCE is one possible date for the Battle of Mons Badonicus, which sounds filthy but isn't.
  
• Pat Sajak's wardrobe is provided by Botany 500.
  
• The Indianapolis 500 now allows lady drivers.
  
• Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) will turn five hundred next month! Happy Birthday, Mr. Senator.
  
  

Thanks again for your continued support, Fosconians.

Fosco Lives! News

Some titbits of news that relate to this blog...

First, Fosco wants to announce the winners of his Grammar Challenge. In a recent post on split verbs, Fosco intentionally buried six split verbs in the post. Two regular readers attempted some portion of the extra credit: The BeeMaster and Fosco's boyfriend Ozias "Oz" Midwinter. The BeeMaster sent his guesses via email; Oz posted his in the Comments. Oz got all six correct:

• "to slightly spoil"
  
• "would otherwise be played"
  
• "to subtly draw"
  
• "to strictly adhere"
  
• "to adequately express"
  
• "will happily split"

The BeeMaster correctly identified four of these, but also did the "Extra Extra Credit" assignment: to find a split verb in another Fosco Lives! post. He identified this one: "Unfortunately, workers are removing the stickers as we speak. However, maybe this will spur the city government to permanently change the street name. Wouldn't that be cool?"

What do The BeeMaster and Oz win? Well, for one thing, they get their pictures displayed as "Grammar Superstars" (over there, on the right). I'm not sure what else they win. Well, Oz wins a kiss. I guess The BeeMaster can have one too, but I don't think he'll take me up on it...

Second, Fosco is pleased to report that last week Fosco Lives! received its first two visitors from China. On the same day, the site received a visit from an IP address in Beijing and one from Shanghai. This is very pleasing to Fosco; usually, he gets most of his Asian traffic from South Korea (apparently, the search "playboy shave pubic" is popular in Korea--and that search inevitably leads here. Sorry, you pervy Koreans... I don't think Fosco Lives! is quite what you're looking for.).

Hey, I bet I could make it so that Fosco Lives! never gets another visit from China:

Tibet. Human rights. Tiananmen Square Massacre.

There, that should be enough to get Fosco Lives! blocked. Wait, why would I do that?

Third, you may have missed the news (as it was buried in a post on torture, and not even Fosco's boyfriend reads his posts on torture) that Fosco Lives! will be cutting down on politics for a bit. Which is not to say that I won't run the occasional funny picture... But for a bit, Fosco doesn't feel like getting too earnest about politics.

Fourth, Fosco has some exciting new features planned for the blog. You saw "Saturday Story Hour" yesterday. Stay tuned this week for several new weekday features.

And, as always, thanks for reading.

New Look

Inspired Christian Dior or perhaps by Josiah McElheny's blown-glass homage to Dior, "From an Historical Anecdote About Fashion" (2000) [see below], Fosco Lives! has a New Look. Hopefully, you will find the new Fosco Lives! to be a little sleeker, a little more chic, and a little less "template-y." And there are still some tweaks to come.

The new header is an engraving of the character Count Fosco from Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. This engraving is from an 1861 American edition of the novel (published by Harper & Bros.) held by the NY Pubic Public Library (thanks to Google's Library Project). The illustrator was John Lennon McLenan.


This is also a good time for Fosco to thank you for your devoted reading. If it weren't for you, Fosco would be lonely.

Onward!

Suck It, Jesus.

Fosco is one gin and tonic away from renaming this whole damn blog... Seriously, by tomorrow, you may find yourself reading "Suck It, Jesus!"

In related news, did you hear that the HI-larious Kathy Griffin won an Emmy and then said something wonderful? As per Reuters:

"A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus," an exultant Griffin said, holding up her statuette. "Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now."

Can we just say that once more? Suck it, Jesus. Suck it, Jesus! SUCK. IT. JESUS.

It's like a beautiful dream.

[No matter what my boyfriend Oz thinks, I think KG is grand. GRAND.]

Every silver lining's got...

a Touch of Gray.

We're trying something new this weekend at Fosco Lives!: color scheme tweaking. Fosco is a fan of the ol' black background, but it has started to look a bit like the standard Blogger template that it is.

But drastic change is not the place to start--especially since Fosco prefers content to style... So here is the first tweak: a gray blue red background. Let's see how that works.

[N.B.: the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site in the link above is hosted at UCSC. Go figure.]

Four Excuses

Fosco recently hinted that he has been a busy little bee for the last six months and promised to tell you what he was doing instead of blogging. He's already offered two excuses . In the interests of not dragging this out, here are all of the other things that prevented Fosco from blogging for most of this year:

• in the past, Fosco has occasionally complained about being single. Well, somehow the previously unlovable Fosco has found himself a boyfriend. For our purposes here at Fosco Lives!, we're going to call him "Ozias Midwinter" or "Oz" for short. Oz is (if you'll permit me to say) quite adorable. He hails originally from the Sandwich Islands. He works at the corporate headquarters of a trendy company located somwhere between San Jose and San Francisco (psst: it's not MMM Carpets. Mmm... carpets...). He is fun and things are going really well. Oh, and he thinks blogs are pretentious and narcissistic. Well, yeah.
  
  
• Fosco's a little embarrassed about this one... but he got himself a Second Life. You've maybe heard of Second Life: that virtual "game" where you just sort of live a life instead of actually going on a quest or something. For gay men in Second Life, this means three activities: sex, dancing, and shopping. (Wait, is that just Second Life?) Fosco is proud to say that, while he did indeed explore the Big Three, he has moved toward a more productive second life: as the owner and curator of a contemporary art gallery! Apparently, that's what Fosco would be doing if he lived in a world (like Second Life) in which books and food are totally irrelevant. Right now, Fosco's gallery is showing works by artist-of-the-moment Jeff Wall. I'll probably blog more about Second Life at some point in the future.
  
  
• since discovering Arrested Development during my recovery from The Accident, I've been hooked. In my spare time over the past eight months, I have managed to watch the entire series (two and two thirds seasons) FIVE TIMES. Five whole times! It's heaven... for crazy people.
  
  
• here's a time waster extraordinaire: Facebook! As an old-timer Harvardian, Fosco remembers when the facebook was a book. It was called the Freshman Facebook and it was sent out to all members of the firstyear class the summer before they arrived at Harvard (or did they give it to us at orientation? Well, whichever.). It had the high school pictures of every member of the firstyear class. It was indexed by first name! It told you where each student was from and which freshman dorm he or she lived in. It was the perfect guide to getting to know one's classmates.
  
  The online version is useful for different reasons: it's a great way to catch up with your old friends, you can explore your social networks, and the interface is very clean and fun and appealing. It doesn't look cheap and vulgar like MySpace. Here's the key to Facebook: Facebook is the Target to MySpace's WalMart. And who doesn't love Target?

Places to Go, People to Meet

You may remember Fosco's sister, Maggie Tulliver. She has recently moved to Hyde Park in Chicago. Well, allow me to direct you to her brand-new blog: Tyrannical Whimsy. If you give her all the love and support you've given me, she's sure to reward you just as I have: with six month "hiatuses" and frequent typos.

Also, I would also like to note the addition of several other new blogs/links to the sidebar here at Fosco Lives! Fosco's former student Mere brings her cynicism to your table at Connoisseur of Human Folly and members of the multi-talented Goddard family can be accessed here and here.

And, if you ever think the patient on "House" has lupus, please remind yourself of your folly by visiting this site.

That is all.

Getting to know me...

Fosco's been tagged again. As far as blog memes go, "Seven Things You Don't Know About Me" isn't a bad one (although it does raise some epistemological questions that I really don't know what to do with... I mean what do "you" really "know" about me anyway? But let's bracket those issues). It's certainly a preferable meme to

• Ten Things I Hate About You. (N.B., #3 is the way you always try to embarrass me at cocktail parties.)
  
• 8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter. (N.B., #5 is not to make me angry, as I have a congenital heart defect.)
  
• Five Places to Dig Up Family Treasures. (N.B., #2 is my pants.)

But anyway...

1. I don't really like movies. The last movie I went to in the theater (excluding art installations) was in calendar year 2005 (hint: there was "no day but today"). There are indeed movies I love (and I do tend to follow which movies are in theaters), but I can always think of about 15 things I'd rather do than watch a movie (including making out with Lindsay Lohan).

2. I've met Pat Buchanan not once, but TWICE. Let me insist that I am not proud of this fact. You know how some people use college as a time to experiment with drugs and lesbianism? Well unfortunately, Fosco experimented with fascism. I have since repented and am working on my redemption--redemption is a long process. I wish I could say the same for Buchanan. And what is that stuff he's covered with? Banana cream?

3. I have been to 41 of the 50 US states. And by "been to," I mean "spent non-trivial amounts of time in." What am I missing? Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas. Luckily, at least five of those states will be worth visiting (guess which won't be).

4. My favorite flower is the grape hyacinth.

5. In one of his former academic incarnations, Fosco published a journal article and a book chapter about nonverbal behavior and deception.

6. In January, I sat next to Florence Henderson at the bar at Jean-Georges in NYC. She looked lovely. At first I thought it was a woman who looked like her, but when she spoke to the obsequious maitre d', it was clearly her.

I guess that was before she started dating that handsome-looking ear.

7. In college, I once worked for an entire summer at Au Bon Pain. Remember: it's not fast food--it's good food fast.

Here's hoping that this list doesn't become "Seven Things You Now Hate About Fosco."

Fosco tags... no one. Unless you want to do it. Then consider yourself tagged.

Fosco Returns

Well, this is a little awkward... You know how apologies are sometimes... Do you forgive your Uncle Fosco? Please?

January is never a good month for Fosco--just ask his longtime pals. He tends to fall out of contact during that month. This year was a bit better, as Fosco remained aboveground for almost the whole month (let's try to forget that whole "Hibernation 2005" thing).

But now it's February, so let's sit down and catch up. What's new with you? Read any good books lately? Yeah, I know: that new Norman Mailer book about Hitler is totally lame. I mean, who writes about Hitler anymore? See, we're back to being friends--it's like I never left! And what is new in the life of Count Fosco? Oh, I have some stories...

It's a new quarter at UCSC and Fosco (thanks to a unexplained Regents Fellowship) isn't teaching and is taking a three seminars:

• "American Renaissance and Expansion"--let's learn about the 19C in the American hemisphere! Or, more interestingly, let's read Moby-Dick. Sailor novels are HOT.
  
• A seminar on Spinoza, taught by the legendary humanist Wlad Godzich. He's like a vortex of knowledge...
  
• A course on 20C French reception of Hegel. Fosco finally accepts the necessity that he has to know Hegel.
  

And you know what? It turns out that this is slightly insane. Two serious theory seminars are testing the limits of Fosco's abilities. It's a great intellectual high, but the end of the quarter is fast approaching and three research papers are looming...

And what about fun? At some point in the next week or so, I will have to update you about:

• Fosco's amazing trip to New York City with his sister, Maggie Tulliver.
  
• recent eating adventures in Santa Cruz.
  
• the beginning of Fosco's physical therapy to repair his damaged right pectoral (remember that pre-Christmas accident?)
  
• Fosco's new car!
  

Stay tuned...

Happy Anniversary!

Fosco Lives! has been around now for exactly six months. As Fosco is a homosexual and therefore unable to be trusted with that most sacred of bonds (i.e., marriage), he isn't quite sure of the appropriate etiquette for celebrating a six month anniversary. Is fellatio involved? I sure hope so.

Or perhaps a brief post about the tiny (yet non-zero) impact that Fosco Lives! has had on the blogosphere in the last six months. How about that?

Most Popular Post: the all-time most popular post on Fosco Lives! is Fosco's meditation on Playboy's "Girls of the Big 12" pictorial. Read it here. Why has it been so popular? Several reasons:

• Composer John Mackey linked to it from his blog and recommended it to his numerous loyal readers.
  
• For a month after the publication of that Playboy issue, it got a hit a day from .edu domains in Texas and Oklahoma searching for "Playboy" and "Girls of the Big 12."
  
• At least once a week, this post gets a hit from someone searching for Tasia Bauman (NSFW). Clearly, websurfers want to see more naked cowgirls (or at least this one). It's fun to watch the domains from which these searches are conducted: the US State Department (could it have been lesbian Condi?), gillette.com, and (interestingly) quakeroats.com. Do you think Quaker is looking to replace spokesgrampa Wilford Brimley with some sort of nude rodeo? Signs point to yes.
  
• Even now, aat least once a day, this post gets a hit from someone who is searching Google for the phrase "shaved pubes." The strange thing is that, much of the time, the searcher actually clicks through to this post and reads at least a portion of it. Most of these searches come from foreign domains, which maybe sort of explains it. But, I have to ask: is it really so hard to find shaved pubes on the internet? Isn't there an easier way than to route through this page? I love the traffic and all, but jeez... Who doesn't know where to find shaved pubes online? Ten-year-olds?

Best Press: Fosco's post on Gay American and former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey (yes, that is his official portrait above). Read it here. The day that McGreevey's tell-all book came out (snicker), AOL Cityguide featured a link to Fosco's post on both its "North Jersey" and "Washington DC" pages. See screen cap below:



That "Sexy Back?" link takes you right to moi. Well, I thought it was cool.

Most Validating: Fosco's review of a Diamanda Galas concert in Santa Cruz (which you can read here). The review got picked up by the official Diamanda Galas website and is prominently featured in the Press page on that site. Now if only I can get Matthew Barney to read some of my reviews of his work...

Hungriest Readers: for several weeks last summer, Fosco was eating at San Francisco restaurants recommended by perpetually chirpy chefette Rachael Ray. Read Fosco's reviews of Chow and Bocadillos. Fosco's reviews were included in the weekly "RR Roundup" conducted by the surprisingly charming blog Everything Rachael Ray. For those two weeks, Fosco got an interesting mix of new readers and he enjoyed the chance to scandalize Rachael Ray lovers with references to Lindsay Lohan's vagina.

That's probably enough self-congratulation for now, so allow me to say "Thank You" to all of you who read Fosco Lives! You have made the first six months a hoot and I look forward to the next six.

Mental Health Minute with Count Fosco

I've recently been enjoying the anonymous blog entitled (with economical precision) "blog." The spectral blogger has pointed me in the direction of a strange little quiz, which helps you to determine which historical lunatic is most similar to you. I recommend it.


Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Here's an excerpt from the description of "me" as the 5th Duke of Portland:

Having inherited the stately home of Welbeck Abbey, you proceeded to construct miles of underground tunnels and a ballroom, in pink, beneath it. The ballroom was complete except for one small detail. It had no floor. Despite this vast home, you lived exclusively in a suite of five rooms, each one also pink.

Having been turned down by your opera singer objet d'amour, Adelaide Kemble, in your youth, you suffered a broken heart and never married. This did not stop you from caring deeply about the wellbeing of your servants. Occasionally you would even help them muck out the stables. However, you did not neglect discipline, forcing disobedient underlings to skate themselves to exhaustion on your subterranean skating rink. Servants were given strict instructions regarding conduct: if they met you in a corridor, they were to ignore your existence while you froze to the spot until they were out of sight; and a chicken was to be kept roasting at all times in case you felt like sneaking into the kitchen for a snack.

To tell the truth, I have started "freezing" recently when people walk by me. Maybe it's a good thing that school is starting again--it helps to calm the mad.

I am Lazarus, come from the dead

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all

You have just experienced, Dear Readers, a characteristic Count Fosco disappearance. But fear not foul play (unless one counts the pernicious influence of Slavoj Žižek as foul play). No--for the last two weeks, Fosco has roamed the Underworld, feasting on pomegranate seeds, and yet... he has been allowed to return to the world of the living.

I have come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.

You see, it all started with Halloween...

Words of Wisdom for Jordan Catalano

Ok, so I'm a little late on this one...

So there's this Jared Leto who used to play a hunk on "My So Called Life" and who now has a band and who, possibly, has experienced Lindsay Lohan's vagina.

On the one hand, he wears eyeliner, which I like. On the other hand, as a serious artiste, he has a beef against blogs:

The blog is yesterday’s parachute pants. It’s here now but it’s gone tomorrow.

Oh Jordan, blogging may be a fad, but remember Fosco's First Rule of Fads (with apologies to Fight Club):

On a long enough timeline, everything is a fad.

The crucial question then becomes: will blogging outlast 30 Seconds to Mars? I think we all know the answer to that one.