Saturday, January 29, 2005
Last week's full moon looked strange to me, but I guess it looks different when you're out howling at it.
And here's some new experimental stained glass I'm working on. No, really:
Totally unrelated, petrified hot cocoa left in the bottom of a shiny black mug for a month looks interesting when photographed with a cheap Pencam or a scanner.
~
(Not Photoshop, actually just basic MS Paint used to crop and add black to the first two images.)
1/29/2005 04:59:00 PM
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
There must be a thousand interesting ways of writing this and I'd love to experiment with them, but I'm busy and I'm just not getting it done, heh. So here goes:
Hawk Loses Bladder Control; Flies Away Sans Lunch
(...as reported to me by Mom, who witnessed the event.)
1. Chipmunk grabs sunflower seeds, packs cheeks with them until it looks like Satchmo blowing his horn, then dashes across porch.
2. Hawk swoops in from above at sharp angle and grabs Chipmunk.
3. Hawk, flying at extreme speed with Chipmunk in claws, has mis-estimated his trajectory and is now headed straight for house; Hawk decides to fly through sliding glass door, which appears to bird-eyes as an open portal.
4. Hawk slams into glass door, drops Chipmunk, "staggers" (still in flight) away, somehow managing to perch on tree limb 20' above ground.
5. Hawk urinates long and hard like a firehose aimed straight down at the ground. How undignified! Hawk rests and regains strength, if not composure, and flies awkwardly away, obviously shaken and humiliated.
6. Deceased Chipmunk slumbers on porch, sunflower seeds still visible in tiny mouth.
7. Later that night I bury Chipmunk deep, safe away from hungry Raccoon and Possum. I say goodbye and stroke Chipmunk's fur briefly; it is the softest, silkiest fur, possibly the softest, silkiest anything, I have ever felt.
8. Goodbye, Chipmunk. Better luck next life.
9. Thank you for the amusement, Hawk, O Swift and Graceful King of the Avian Predators. I hope you didn't break anything.
~
1/26/2005 11:52:00 AM
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Cat Tracks, Cardinal Feathers
Early morning, cat tracks in the frozen snow lead to cardinal feathers strewn like bright wrapping paper torn from a gift. But I feel sorry for the stray cat; it was a very cold night.
~
1/25/2005 01:04:00 PM
A Busy Day in Iraq
Baghdad is eight hours ahead of New York. Today, Tuesday 25 January 2005, the following has already occured, probably before you had lunch:
*11 Iraqi police killed by insurgentsToday Human Rights Watch also reported widespread abuse of detainees by Iraq's U.S.-trained security forces, saying international police advisers, largely funded by the U.S. government, "have turned a blind eye to these rampant abuses."
*1 Iraqi senior judge assassinated and his driver wounded
*1 videotape released of an American hostage with a gun to his head
*1 Iraqi district council member shot and killed on his way to work
*1 son of an Iraqi translator working with U.S. troops shot and killed
*Multiple shots fired by police on insurgents handing out leaflets promising to "wash the streets with the blood of voters" and their families
*1 five-year-old daughter of an (aforementioned) police officer killed along with her father
*3 staffers from the Communications Ministry wounded in a drive-by shooting
*1 senior official in the Iraqi Communist Party kidnaped
*1 school to be used as a polling station sprayed with machine gun fire (no injuries)
*1 U.S. soldier killed by a roadside bomb and 10 others killed in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle accident.
*1 gate blown off of a secondary school and multiple shots fired on Iraqi and U.S. forces responding to the explosion
*8 Chinese hostages flown out of Baghdad for home after being kidnaped for five days last week, released when Beijing promised to discourage citizens from traveling to Iraq.
*ETC.
President Bush is expected to announce today that he needs another $80 billion dollars for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year, although the Army said yesterday that the troop level in Iraq will stay the same at 120,000.
Oil prices are again nearing $50/barrel today.
The Congressional Budget Office today projected this year's deficit to be $427 billion, a record, predicted also to rise to $855 billion over the next decade.
25 January, 2005: a busy day.
~
Addendum by way of kirkaracha at MetaFilter: 31 Marines died in a helicopter crash yesterday as well, the 33rd helicopter down since the beginning of the war.
1/25/2005 07:41:00 AM
Saturday, January 22, 2005
1/22/2005 07:47:00 PM
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Blackout
I shouldn't post today. There's a blackout on posts. Today's coronation will probably cost more $$ than the U.S. gave in tsunami aid. Well, it might've if the U.S. hadn't given in to pressure to up its initial gift of $35 million.
The unprecedented inauguration security has gone way overboard from any sane perspective, unless you're viewing it from the perspective of a greedy defense contractor with White House connections.
Actually, initial estimates for security alone were $11.9 million, which the Bush administration refused to pay out of the national budget, instead telling Washington D.C. to pay it out of its homeland security budget. No, wait, it's up to $17M six days ago, and the Feds might pay D.C. back, backing down again after criticism.
So I found nostalgic.net, the cool website of Dave's Vintage Bicycles, home of the charming two-wheeled technology of yesteryear.
Here is an old rear bicycle hub made by the Blackout Bicycle Co.:
But today it looks strange and ominous, like an odd medieval weapon or instrument of torture.
~
1/20/2005 11:34:00 AM
Sunday, January 16, 2005
1/16/2005 03:23:00 PM
Friday, January 14, 2005
National Pig
The company I currently work for, my day job, my endless hell of paperwork that can never be caught up even if there were three of me, my daily nightmare that leaves me clutching my coffeecup like a security blanket, wishing I could get ahold of enough Xanax anti-anxietant to make a charging elephant sit down in the grass and sniff daisies ...
... anyway, my job orders materials from a company called National Pigments ...
... which we naturally shorten to "National Pig."
And the whole idea of a "National Pig" just got me to pondering, and even giggling a little, which is a sure sign that this here office-space lemming is close to the edge of that cliff.
(But lemmings don't naturally run suicidally over cliffs, did you know that?--they were actually herded over that cliff by the film crew that produced the famous footage that became an icon of sorts, a symbol of the human race's rush towards destruction, as well as a false damning of lemmings in general as a moron of a species. It's nice to know this doesn't really happen in nature after all, and the only idiots hastening their own doom and the doom of the entire natural world are, naturally, US.)
So, again, ANYWAY:
The National Pig.
A huge, proud creature, pushing out its massive chest in an ineffectual atempt to hide its monolithic gut, which is twice the size of the rest of it and drags in the dust when it walks, scraping the earth beneath it like an industrial sized dumpster carried by a helicopter that can't get more than six feet off the ground.
It eats everything in site--EVERYTHING--whether it be trees and plants and any sort of flora OR fauna, mountain-tops, indigenous peoples, entire third-world countries and their cultures, archaeological sites of immeasurable value, sacred Native American burial grounds, endangered species, forests and fields of grass that once were home to hundreds of thousands of creatures and contained entire ecosystems in every square inch ...
It just consumes. Greedy gluttony, appetite made flesh as a juggernaut force of UN-nature.
And it defecates concrete, which then somehow magically morphs into parking lots and factories and corporate headquarters and strip-malls that make obscene sums of money for about 1% of a certain population.
It's The National Pig. I think its name is Sam.
And it's not REALLY a pig. That would be an insult to pigs, and to animals in general.
~
1/14/2005 09:42:00 AM
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Two dreams I had this morning...
...during the best time to sleep, when I should've been getting up for work.
1) I dreamt Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez starred as Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler in an alternate version of Gone With The Wind.
Personally, I'd pay to see that. I'd get started on the script right away, if only it were 1969.
2) I dreamt about a superhero named The Fog. Or maybe Blue Fog. Either way, he's short, or maybe just has really short legs, so short that he waddles slightly; he has blue skin, wears nothing but blue swimming trunks, and blows great billowing clouds of blue fog out of his mouth. See, with his blue skin, he's camouflaged. Genius, no?
His mouth is large and forms a huge 'O' when he blows smoke. In the confusion and poor visibility that follows he sneaks (waddles?) around behind his enemies and clubs them over the head with a blackjack (a blue blackjack, for the sake of irony and further camouflage.) Somehow Blue Mist can see in the mist, you see ...
Maybe he has really cool-looking goggles that give him fog-vision, invented by his elderly, genius, inventor partner/sidekick at their secret base. The secret of the goggles must be guarded at all costs ... An inevitable plot involves Blue Fog's enemies kidnaping his partner, who of course will not divulge the secret of the goggles no matter what they threaten to do to him ... The rescue is foreshadowed when blue mist begins to seep into the villains' hideout through their ventilation system ...
It'd be nice if Blue Fog's goggles glowed eerily, but of course that would continually give away his position ... Still, a good Kirby-esque artist could come up with some dramatic panels, what with all that spooky mist around all the time and Blue Fog himself rising dramatically out of it to whack the bad guys with explosive WHACK!! sound-effects.
My unlikely Blue Fog superhero becomes the best seller of Marvel Comics. Eventually one of the post-post-modern comic writers, maybe Garth Ennis, gets ahold of him and goes for the inevitable grossout: Blue Fog's enemies slip him a virus that makes his throat sore and swollen and his nose clogged with mucus; unable to blow smoke in his usual fashion, Blue Fog must find an alternative way of ejecting his cobalt-colored clouds ...
~
1/11/2005 10:08:00 AM
I guess I didn't like Santa that year...
...I think subconsciously I suspected this one was a fake. Something just didn't seem right... note also the thick, padded, nylon "snow pants" I'm wearing. They kept me warm when I played outside for hours at a time, even though my knees became soaked from kneeling in the snow, digging snow-forts with my hands...
~
1/11/2005 09:52:00 AM
Friday, January 07, 2005
The Liner
"The entire graduating class of Hamline University, 1925, in drawings of varying quality made semi-nightly in about one hour each. Drawings are actual size, and are done in pen and ink and black colored pencil and watercolor. Comments are welcome, and encouraged. Alphabetical errors of order, name-spelling, and affiliation are from the original."Hortense Pemberton
HISTORY AND EDUCATIONA work-in-progress by John. Um, John. You know: John!
Alpha Phi.
French Club.
Politics Club.
Pan Hellenic Council 3, 4.
W.A.A. Board 4.
Very cool art, inked the old-fashioned way with (non-speedball) nibs and Winsor and Newton ink. Here's a fun step-by-step example.
A magnificent obsession, maybe, but probably more a way for John to practice and produce art regularly. It's fascinating to peruse, noting the hairstyles (all roaring-'20s bobs for the ladies, of course) and appearance and the extra-curricular activities of the classmates. I find myself wondering whom I would've dated (or tried to date) if I'd lived then and gone to school at Hamline. (I'm thinking it would've been Ruth Lundeen, who probably would have thrown me over for the school quarterback--maybe not, though, as she looks kinda low-key and fun, not too preppy and gung-ho, and has minimal extra-curric's.)
Ruth Lundeen
LATINHamline: Whatta name, too.
Athenaean.
Latin Club.
John also drew me this grackle, which I totally love. A grackle is a member of the blackbird family, who, you might notice, walk upright instead of hopping. One of my favorite birds. More about grackles later, maybe, though.
Thanks, John! You should be a commercial artist. Fantastic stuff!
(Click the images to see the actual-size pics.)
~
1/07/2005 11:22:00 AM
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
The visiting ghost who floats down the hall toward me at night ...
... looks very much like a photo of light reflecting off the neck of a beer bottle.
~
1/05/2005 11:10:00 PM
Widget stalks his prey ... which is probably one of my socks.
(Catching up now after the holidays, one post at a time...)
~
1/05/2005 08:07:00 PM
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Happy New Year!
Dinosaurs celebrated by doing their best to stave off extinction, evidently.
~
1/02/2005 07:07:00 PM
