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Back to current entries
| June 20, 2005 |
In this week's New Yorker we learn that
the trilogy of Godfrey Reggio's "-qatsi" films
was just screened at Lincoln Center, with live
accompaniement, in the Alex Ross
article about Philip Glass music and the art of
film scoring. Also, Hendrik Hertzberg
comments
on the Supremes' decision. (Related:
the
NSDUH report -- scroll down for the red-white-blue
usage map.) Finally, To
Boldly Go concerns Leonard Nimoy's photographs
of the "full-bodied."
The
First Bus to the Road to Death.
|
| June 19, 2005 |
|
During a luncheon I learned that a co-worker's brother is
nicknamed "Lumpy" and somehow the resulting conversation
(rapid exchanges with cultural peers derailed by
distracted attempts of explanation to curious foreigners)
concluded with my comment of "Well, if they
have ever marketed an Eddie Haskell action figure,
I'd like to know about it." Doesn't appear that such an item
has ever existed -- logging it here to get the string's Googlewhack. (And for effectively matching the source, the
doll would have to be tinted in shades of gray.)
|
| June 18, 2005 |
Cartoon weekend. Today: "Howl's Moving Castle" (the
new Miyazaki), tomorrow, something never-heard-of at
The
Art of Anime: Studio Ghibli retrospective
at the Pacific Film Archive, a venue just inside
the UC Campus at the end of Telegraph Ave, meaning
another schlep out to Berkeley. The series is
discussed in a new biweekly column at SFGate called
Asian
Pop. And at home, I'm reviewing Disney's "Lilo and
Stitch" (incidentally, the Spanish version, the only
available at the library). This was their last,
right? One of 'em, anyway. Afterwards, Disney laid off
all of their old-fashioned, hand-drawing artist-animators,
relying from now on only on computer animation (even as their
relationship with Pixar ends). Maybe just as well, IMO,
after viewing this recent contrast between Disney and Ghibli's products.
One of the Goodyear blimps crashed in Florida, in a storm:
slide
show. All that blue sky in today's image is the view
due east looking down Stevens Creek Blvd, where it's Santa
Clara to the left and San Jose to the right, and the
mountains off in the distance.
Turn
On, Tune In, Veg Out: Neal stephenson on
Star Wars: Jedi as Geek.
|
| June 16, 2005 |
The official site reveals the
Star
Wars: Episode III Easter eggs. The second
page is all about the Opera Scene, many notable
guests inside, during; but it was the exterior shots
of the entertainment district which floored me. Same
as with all scenes on Coruscant -- just want to see
the big picture, so annoying how protagonists are
always standing around in the foreground, blocking
the view.
Underwater
pyramid off the coast of Okinawa, much older
than those built in Egypt.
Google
hacks -- very interesting.
|
| June 14, 2005 |
Cool Biz: the
Japan
Times reports that
Koizumi has requested casual dress, all summer long,
as a means of reducing air conditioner use, thus
saving energy. Will this relaxation of the suit-and-tie
rules spread throughout the ranks of all Japanese
salarymen?
More from David Michael Green, who just saw
Der Untergang,
and wonders about our hard-core 40%:
In
the American Bunker. Also,
Howard Zinn on the
Scourge
of Nationalism.
|
| June 12, 2005 |
The sign of a long-defunct restaurant, the 5 Spot,
in downtown San Jose.
Bring
It Down. Now by David Michael Green --
why the Bush administration may finally find
itself in the deep trouble it so richly deserves.
Shame
is for Sissies by Hal Crowther, concerning
John Bolton and Prince Abdullah.
Losing
Our Country -- Krugman on the class
warfare which has become relentless.
When it's time to change your seat:
Turbulence
by David Sedaris. Another Crumpet short story, also
in the New Yorker (but from a couple years back):
The
Girl Next Door.
Logo
Design trends (a blog?) Also, an exhaustive
directory:
AllTheLogos.com.
|
| June 9, 2005 |
Der
Spiegel on the growth of neo-Nazi youth in
Germany, the related new
Volksdeutsch
influx from the East, and how this
new immigrant community is resisting assimilation.
RIP General Burkhalter --
Leon
Askin, age 97,
dead
in Vienna.
|
| June 8, 2005 |
Godless America, last weekend's This American Life, was one of the
best I've heard in quite a while. The first half dealt with current
influences of the Christian Right, and featured Isaac Kramnick,
who wrote The Godless Constitution, which is being
re-released soon -- here's the original's
Chapter
One. The second half was an excerpt from
Julia Sweeney's latest one-woman show ("Letting Go of God").
We've met Ms Sweeney in these pages previously, in a
'99 journal entry -- I
realize you may recognize her from SNL but I've never seen
her on television; instead, my first exposure occured in '95
when instead of doing 'In The Dark' Joe Frank substituted a tape
of her doing some stand-up, material she later used in "God Said
Hah!" You can probably get more info (if your Flash is working)
at her annoying
juliasweeney.com.
(Speaking of Flash, my browsing experience is much
improved since I installed Firefox's
Flashblock
extension.)
Yesterday in Slate, Judy Rosen posted an enlightening
article about 'chill' music,
The
Musical Genre That Will Save the World. Of the nine
records pictured, I have two, so I guess I'm a fan.
Chillout really is just the latest brand name for easy
listening, a genre that gets reinvented every decade or so.
Lounge, soft rock, adult contemporary ballads, smooth jazz:
As successive pop generations have rounded the corner toward
age 30, each has lowered the volume, embracing music geared
toward relaxation in the home.
Some of the annoyed
responses
this article generated... it is rather indefensible,
suggesting that ambient is 'like' smooth jazz -- myself, I
can't deny enjoying some classic 'Living Strings'
elevator
music (but Kenny G and Chuck Mangione are intolerable).
According to the Guardian, a study reported in the
British Journal of Social Psychology has identified
Nine
Types of Love. The seventh depends on Lady Diana's
favorite film ("Brief Encounter") as a metaphor.
|
| June 6, 2005 |
During the usual visit to the Sunday-morning Mountain
View Farmer's Market yesterday, spotted this electric
moto-trike parked nearby, on Castro. Didn't
see it move, unfortunately; was gone when I came
back, the other way. Not obvious from these angles
but that whole roof canopy is irridescent blue solar
cells! To augment the thumbnail's detail (notice the
street-legal license plate and battery array),
here's
another view, from the side.
Across the bay is Fremont, named of course
for Governor/Senator/General
John
Frémont -- first white man to see Tahoe, namer
of the Golden Gate, etc. In the 1950s, Fremont
was cobbled together from several towns, including a
place called Niles, where some guy built a
monorail
in his back yard.
Since it's D-Day, let's recall the code phrase
the French underground was waiting for, which they
finally heard on BBC radio, indicating the Invasion
was on:
The long sobbing of the Autumn violins
Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor.
|
| June 5, 2005 |
Remember in
Risky
Business, when Tom Cruise used the flat of his hand
to max out all the slides on his Dad's equalizer? (It was
the beginning of the Bob Segar scene.)
This
Analysis of 'evergreen' (or classic) LPs using a
sonogram has been making the rounds, but I don't get
it. I've no doubt the practices of mixing board folk
follow certain trends (and it's surprising how they're
not exploiting digital's superior dynamic range),
but the author's contention seems to be, all it takes
to make a hit record is to mix it the way they used
to, but unfortunately nowadays, they all make like Tom
Cruise in the recording studio. Er -- doesn't the
talent make some difference?
Old and new mp3s:
Turtle's
Jukebox, and Paul Slocum's modified
dot-matrix
music.
|
| June 4, 2005 |
Cover
story in this week's edition of our weekly rag (the
Metro) features an excerpt from John Markoff's
What the Dormouse Said about The Whole
Earth Catalog's Stewart Brand, who assisted with
both Ken Kesey's acid tests and Doug Engelbart's
revolutionary 1968 demonstration of networked
computers in San Francisco.
Three unrelated links:
Art
Deco Train Stations; the stealthy
Sea
Shadow; and a
Distance
Hugging apparatus (which involves a
teddy-koala-bear controller, and an inflatable vast).
FedEx
blurring
the division between private commerce and public law
enforcement. (UPS, so far, resisting that trend...
noticed how all the MailboxesEtc turned into The
UPS Store? And Kinko's is now FedExKinko's?)
Cover
gallery of Dynamite thumbnails from
the 70s and early 80s kids' magazine. And let's go
further back: several Boys' Life
covers (and
their Tables of Contents) from the 1920s, 30s
and 50s.
|
| June 2, 2005 |
|
Three illustrated pages, identified only by title
text -- you'll just have to click 'em, to see.
|
| May 28, 2005 |
Another snap from my recent road trip south, a
streamlined-modern storefront in Taft, down in
Kern County. Almost a hundred years ago near here, the
Lakeview
gusher was the biggest such ever to happen in
California -- it spewed oil for eighteen months!
Of
Cabbages and Kings by William S.
Lind, concerning the recent aerial
breech of the security zone around
DC -- excellent!
At the Onoweb, Keith Samarillo
talks
with Yoko about Canada, and
their Bed-In For Peace.
1996
Q&A
with Brian Eno gets into The
Microsft Sound.
|
| May 26, 2005 |
A vacant storefront on Fairfax, in LA.
I
Like's Metro
slideshow -- she
really enjoyed it, as many DC visitors do. Always
interesting, tourists' reactions to a
vacation destination where you've actually lived.
Check those adjectives she's using in her captions -- if
I'd composed them, you'd see words like dim,
oppresive, crowded, monotonous, and slow.
(Well, not slow, but not near as fast as
it could be.) Elsewhere on her site, she put up a
web-shrine to
John
Hinde, a photographer I just discovered while
browsing the stock at the great Taschen store in
Beverly Hills, discovering the book she mentions, of
his postcards of Butlins Holiday Camps.
CNN
report on NORAD's new warning system,
which beams red-red-green laser bursts at pilots
entering restricted airspace. However, in
Weather
Impairs New DC Warning System, the Washington
Post reports how the region's common white
sky-overcast-cloudyness means it won't work, half
the time.
|
| May 24, 2005 |
Back from another long weekend roadtrip to LA.
The photo is inexplicable, a sighting at a crossroads
in the middle of nowhere, out in oil country.
Roadside memorial, perhaps?
Do you know this new breed of feline pet, the
Savannah
Cat? Some more new products: The
Roly-Poly
Backpack converts to a hard-shelled storage
object, easily locked to a lamp-post, like a bike.
Unlike a bicycle, however, I bet it would alarm any
security personnel who couldn't identify it, thereby
provoking destructive action. Two new coffee
cups do more than merely hold your beverage: the
Global
Warming Mug is the kind whose design reacts to
temperature (but it seems to show Greenland
unchanged -- that can't be right) and also, the
Chalk
Mug, which is actually a blackboard -- personalize
it with chalk. 360 Electrical makes
twisty
electrical sockets that would be quite useful,
in certain tight situations. And finally, not an invention,
but if you try distilled water, perhaps you'll wind up with some
Ice
Spikes in your freezer.
An exploration of
Breakfast
in China has titles in that American traditional,
never-seen-in-Asia "Oriental" font called
Won-ton.
|
| May 19, 2005 |
At
Dive
into I learned about Greasemonkey, installed it today.
More Firefox Power! These are what I've installed so
far, from the extensive
collection
of scripts: BoingBoing de-Xeni, Google Images Re-Linker,
IMDb Remove Ad column, and the Salon Auto-Pass. (That last one,
allegedly tricky, didn't work for me.)
According to Jeff Cohen, you should
Buy
Your Gas at Citgo. Since their stations aren't
all that common, here's a handy
locator
(which also shows 7-11s, not sure why). If you're just
seeking the cheapest fuel, the easy Google Maps
interface has been
integrated
by some kindly soul (whose handle is 'ahding') into
the GasBuddy
database, continuously updated by a mobile army of
nationwide volunteer price reporters.
In the Arab News:
Coffee
Raises Storm in a Teacup -- the beverage is all
the rage in Saudia Arabia, which is "conventionally a
tea-drinking nation." Also,
Britons
falling out of love with traditional cup of tea,
"although green tea is becoming increasingly popular."
|
| May 17, 2005 |
Don't
Blame Newsweek, by Molly Ivins. (BTW
Molly, Riley's line was actually "Wotta revoltin'
development THIS is!")
From Bill Moyers'
speech
he gave Sunday at the National Conference on Media Reform,
in St. Louis:
One reason I'm in hot water is I didn't play by the
conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules
divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals
and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they've
done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the
news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the
news.
I came to see that news is what people want to keep hidden, and
everything else is publicity.
His speech was also
summarized
in The Nation, with annotations by Mike Nichols.
|
| May 15, 2005 |
The sign for Elite Cleaners, in the trendy Willow Glen
section of San Jose.
|
| May 9, 2005 |
In the Economist,
Profiting
from Obscurity explains this 'long tail' I've
been hearing about -- and in today's column,
The
Final Insult, Krugman explains the shrub's Social
Security plan.
AP headline:
Study
Shows Traffic Keeps Getting Worse. I have a plan to
reduce traffic -- since we have too many vehicles
on the road, the solution is to shut down their factory's
production lines for a while -- a year or two, tops.
(Sure.) One of the report's authors is named Lomax,
that name always points me to a
key
episode of the
Outer
Limits where the Lomax character (actually an
alien, engineering a takeover) proclaimed that
The machines are everywhere!
when he's unmasked at the end.
Günter Grass:
The
High Price of Freedom -- he examines today's
Germany, and concludes that reunification failed.
|
| May 6, 2005 |
Today, a scan of my knitting, a square of alternate
knit-and-purl, the first time I performed the finishing
move of "binding off" the final edge. The techniques are
bewildering, mysterious -- who invented this? How in the
world? It seems magical, these windings and nudgings of yarn,
manipulations with sticks which convert a string into fabric.
In an unmentioned homage to Cinco de Mayo, a beautiful composite
of visible Hubble and Spitzer IR images was released yesterday, of
the
Sombrero Galaxy. Also, Hubble's
Top
Ten Discoveries.
Scalzi
holds
forth on My Jesus and Your Jesus.
|
| May 4, 2005 |
Blooming red bottle-brush plants run along Central,
forming lengthy walls. This was a few days ago,
actually -- it's raining now, hard -- unusually
long wet season, this year.
Another survivor from the bunker discovered: Hitler's
nurse, Erna Flegel,
interviewed
in the Guardian (and don't the footnotes
to their own reports, from sixty years ago). Speaking
of der Führer,
the
many moods of Adolph Hitler collects LiveJournal
user-icons used by members of that community for their
online persona.
Judge
a Book -- By Its Cover! A rich selection of
vintage paperback cover-scans, along with the text
from the backs. Fantastic!
An
Open
Letter to Howard Dean from Dennis Kucinich,
some
Q&A
with George Lucas, and the unofficial Joe Frank
Wiki.
|
| May 2, 2005 |
Since I'm still operating through a dial-up at home, I actively
discourage folks from sending me big email attachments (as it locks
up my machine, until the receiving is complete). Ideally, they'd
upload the file to their web-space, just sending a link that I'd
then download at my leisure (like, when I'm in the bathtub). But
often, the people sending don't have publicly-accessible space,
or lack the knowledge to utilize it.
YouSendIt.com
to the rescue!
Kitchen
Myths -- Excellent! (Excuse me for a moment, as I remove
that old box of Arm&Hammer from my fridge -- always had
a sneaky suspicion...)
|
| April 28, 2005 |
It's doubtful that you'll ever get me on one of these
things, ever again (except for maybe an old wooden
traditional), but since some of you are interested, the
Internet
Roller Coaster Poll of 2004 lists all the
latest, extreme variants (and there's some doozies).
Contrast these close-up
photos
of that absurdly tall
Top
Thrill Dragster "strata-coaster" in Cedar Point,
Ohio, with the
photos
of a rusting roller coaster in Japan(ese) at an
abandoned amusement park in the forest.
(more)
I'd been able to manage one dimension ("casting on")
by studying various books, but it wasn't until today
that I was finally able to knit into the second
dimension, learning the basic needle and finger
manipulations from a patient lady who leads a group
at work, who meet during lunch. Naturally, scarves
& such will be the first projects, but my
ultimate goal in this endeavor (besides meeting
girls) is making socks.
|
| April 27, 2005 |
This
is great -- Heavy Trash installed viewing platforms at
the perimeter of three gated communities in LA, so
concerned or just curious observers can monitor what's
going on inside (similar to what was built along the
Wall, in West Berlin).
Photos and story of the now-demolished
Coral
Court Motel at an extensive site called Built
St. Louis. Each room had a garage, to ensure
privacy, like the discreet parking at love hotels in
Japan -- but the Streamline Moderne style is the
reason it gets a mention here.
The 25
best American comic book covers -- be sure to
follow the "Rejected" link at the bottom, to see
a dozen of the worst. (The best were chosen on artistic
merit, whereas the worst, more for their content.) The
only match with my collection is one of the best, the
Silver Surfer, with Thor, by John Buscema.
|
| April 26, 2005 |
Big
Boy Graveyard discovered, near Detroit.
Ever wondered what it would be like, working at
Barnes & Noble? Adam
logged
the most entertaining anecdotes, while dealing with the
public there over a two-year interval (and it's all on
one page -- I love that. Don't make me click and wait,
when I can just scroll down.)
Great designs -- Frankie Flood's radical
pizza-cutters.
|
| April 25, 2005 |
An assortment of new products and technologies:
First, in keeping with today's picture (a
lichen-encrusted grave marker I noticed yesterday
in a Japanese section of an ancient cemetary
near the
Vertigo
Mission of San Juan Bautista),
Glass
Tombstones. Wired reports on a
revolutionary source of power: remote-controlled
Flying
Windmills. The
Popcorn
Fork reminds me of that character on a "Seinfeld" who
used a knife and fork to eat his candy bar. Rural nomads
will be interested in Uncle Booger's
Bumper
Dumper. Finally, for the cyclists, a company is
manufacturing
shaft-drive
bicycles. (I remember, at least once upon a time,
that BMW motorcycles' claim-to-fame was their non-chain
powertrains.)
What
Kind of American English Do You Speak? is one of
those too-simplistic but mildly diverting web tests.
Some of the multiple-choice questions lacked the answers
I'd pick (like "wrapping" for #4 and "running shoes"
for #14) so my score, 55% General American, 20% Dixie,
and 10% Yankee, doesn't add up to 100.
Excellent:
The
Oblivious Right, Paul Krugman's latest column.
Since November's election, the victors have managed to be
on the wrong side of public opinion on one issue after
another: the economy, Social Security privatization,
Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay. What's going on? Actually,
it's quite simple: [the
shrub] and
his party talk only to their base -- corporate interests
and the religious right -- and are oblivious to everyone
else's concerns.
If they're lucky, through-hikers get to experience some
Appalachian
Trail Magic.
|
| April 22, 2005: Earth Day |
Snowed
by Ross Gelbspan (in Mother Jones) delves
into why US media ignores global warming and climate
change. And -- is it changing?
Study
finds Antarctic Peninsula glaciers in widespread
retreat.
A couple of those political essays I'm always
linking to -- in
What's
the Matter with Liberals? Pat Frank discusses class
backlash, the election, and its aftermath; and in the
much shorter
Fake
Fights, Sleights of Hand and Sucker Punches
Dave Lindorff analyzes recent actions by the shrub
regime, for motives -- all the recent Social Security
hoopla may be a smoke-screen or red herring of chamberlain
Turd Blossom's design.
A DVD rent-by-mail site called GreenCine has all
sorts of informative text files, including
the
Primers Directory which links
to their collection of excellent articles
about all kinds of film genres -- for example, Film
Noir, Weepies, and Westerns.
The
Weird World of Jimmy Olsen has scans of complete
stories from his 1960s DC comic book. "Golly
Mr Kent!"
|
| April 20, 2005 |
Urgh. I've been handicapped for like twelve days now
with a cold. It seemed to be ebbing but then came
back with a vengeance, and the ol' web site hasn't been
receiving its usual measure of attention. Even so,
I must be doing better, for what's this? A photo
du jour, some local color: a couple skateboard
dudes, laughing and practicing with a bus-stop bench.
Paper
CD Case pipes your input into a template which
generates a PDF file, easily printed, then cut &
folded. It also produces jewel case inserts.
SeaCode
will be an offshore, software development "sweat ship,"
to be moored near San Diego.
Finally, a follow-up, before I crawl back into bed: on
April 6 I linked to instructions on how to thwart sites
which inhibit the right-click -- well, today I tried
them, without success, on a corporate site I was
compelled to visit for that tiresome annual ritual of
the Performance Appraisal.
|
| April 18, 2005 |
Unrealised
Projects at the Architecture of Moscow from the
1930s to the early 1950s -- huge buildings with no
traffic.
Googie OD: Synthetrix has a bunch of
Photos
of the Forgotten. Don't miss the
postcards (he grew up in Anaheim).
Recently, I've posted links about Ward Churchill. He
made an appearance at a Golden Gate Park event called
the Anarchist Bookfair a couple weeks back, and a
less-than-sympathetic photo-blogger with the handle
"zombie" was there and
posted
some photos and commentary.
|
| April 14, 2005 |
The
EKIP
screen-plane lands on an air-cushion -- it's a
Russian development which seems to be moving beyond
the flight-model phase. Also,
the
Flying Man.
Lots of fun stuff at the Museum of Retro
Technology, including a comprehansive entry on
monowheels.
Fans of these will be interested in "Steam Boy" -- the
film's first big chase scene involves the initial
ride of his steam-powered invention, where he
eventually overcomes "gerbilling." (However, don't
interpret this as a recommendation -- long film,
beautifully animated, but.)
Mr Sun
reviews
a new DEA magazine. Remember,
Mr Sun = Fun!
|
| April 13, 2005 |
|
In today's news: Baltimore County police, still
a
little nervous in the post-9/11 world, arrest
a Best Buy customer paying with $2 bills and put him
in cuffs and irons until the SS arrived and verified
his legal tender.
|
| April 12, 2005 |
Buttocks
with Everything is a review of a new compendium
called The R. Crumb Handbook. Haven't
seen it yet, so I can't comment, but a niece-related
Archie query propelled me into the comic shop where I noticed
the latest issue of Zap Comix, #15. I picked up some
media chatter when that title last appeared, in '98, since
Crumb had declined to participate in the 'jam' pages -- a
Salon
article from the time featured long extracts (click
the thumbnails atop page two); but this time 'round, he's
playing with the other fellas again, like old times (my
own favorite 'jam' is the apocalyptic "Souvenir of the
Carnage" from #8). Unlike the stories he and his wife
have been drawing for The New Yorker (sample:
How
Sweet It Is) which concerns the present day, and
their idyllic life in France; his lengthy later
Zap pieces are ruminations about his dreary
past, and this installment, "Walkin' the Streets,"
doesn't disappoint. Publisher Last Gasp hasn't updated
their
cover gallery with the latest yet, but it's
good for memory-triggering (even though #5 is missing).
For more info, read
a
detailed review of the new one.
Intrigued by Conspiracy
Thrillers of the 1970s:
Paranoid
Time, I'm watching Warren Beatty in "The
Parallax View" -- fascinating.
Out of this list of a
Hundred
Things to Do in California I score only 15
definites and 14 partial/maybes.
|
| April 7, 2005 |
|
Earlier this week the government announced that
border controls will be tightened such that
Canadians, Mexicans, Bermudans and even US citizens
will be required to show passports in order to enter
the country from Mexico, Canada or the Caribbean. In
a few years, then, motoring or walking across the
frontier with merely a drivers license for ID will
just be a memory. For more about these new border
regulations (with a northern perspective), see
this
Buffalo News article.
|
| April 6, 2005 |
Sunday's NY Times Magazine had a few articles
on things Japanese, including a
column
by Pico Iyer on kombini. (My own page
about them lives
here.)
In San Francisco, concerning the
historic
streetcars. (These are the trolleys which run
along Market Street and the Embarcadero, NOT the
cable cars.) Also, an extensive
Neighborhood
Guide.
At a photo-intensive blog called "Too Much
Information" (which is actually kinda dumb), a
lengthy
post documents the purchase of a big, live
fish in Chinatown, and its subsequent dumping in the
East River. In the curious film called "Miracle
Mile" they did this with lobsters off the Santa Monica
Pier and both liberations made me wonder: didn't
anybody involved have actual aquarium experience? They
seem like potential death sentences and wastes of
money, since the aquatic organisms weren't given the
requisite period of gradual temperature adjustment.
At Tech Recipes,
How
to re-enable right-click when web-pages turn it
off. I haven't tried this yet, so can't vouch for;
but since it's a reocurring irritation with my
company's internet 'portal' I'm sure I'll be getting
a chance soon.
|
| April 4, 2005 |
Back troubles have been causing my mother steady pain
for months now, but things took a turn for the worse
recently and she wound up in the hospital, where she
stayed for a week (!) but saw steady improvement and
on Saturday she checked out, but hasn't quite made it
home, yet -- first, a brief stay in a kind of
therapeutic halfway house. The concern has been a
too-low sodium level, but that's been rising along
with the general state of her health, thankfully.
Since she's fond of good sunset,
this
link's for her.
Also this weekend, I suffered a hitch in my Internet
getalong, specifically involving at-home email. My
Monorail took another
hit, again induced by this now-archaic email program
I favor, "Internet Mail" (which was bundled with
Windows-95 and IE 3). Something happens after using
it for years, maybe because I let the inbox get too
big -- suddenly, all of the program's message queues
lock up, and I lose their contents. Last time this
happened I rebuilt the entire machine's software -- I
should maybe just ditch it now, since I'm courting
disaster, relying on an eight-year-old hard drive. A
result of this: since most of my recent email's gone
missing, that probably includes your
current address, as well as whatever we were talking about.
Stoked is for girls and Wired is for boys.
According to USA Today,
14-year-old surfer and shark-attack survivor
Bethany
Hamilton is
launching
two fragrances that smell like the ocean. Hmmm...
there's a lot of smells associated with the sea,
not all of them pleasant.
|
| March 27, 2005 Easter |
|
Been over a week since I've seen the white cat -- the
annoying neighbors who just moved out must've taken
him with.
|
| March 25, 2005 |
|
Former computer programmer switches gears, now he's
a bike messenger in Toronto:
A
Coder in Courierland.
|
| March 23, 2005 |
The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a book of
Ernest Hemingway's short stories, which I read a long
time ago. The title story concludes with a dying man's
dream of flying up and over said mountain, in Africa.
Alas,
its
snows are melting away.
The clever folk at MetaFilter answered my old
question in record time, about why certain taxicab
and truck companies named "Yellow" paint their
vehicles orange. For the answer read the
complete
thread, or just do a search on 'Swamp Holly Orange'.
|
| March 21, 2005 |
|
Russian
site compiling news photos of the shrub
indulging his bald-head touching urge.
|
|
|
30 years ago today, John Valdez was the last man out -- Kirsten
Scharnberg of the Chicago Trib
