June 28, 2017

I'm grateful that our new place has a dishwasher... but damn the Finnish habit of putting drying racks OVER the sink hits my "why didn't that ever occur to me?" hard.

Heather's adventures in Spain indicate that it's suboptimal for less tall people and also precludes a nice window-behind-sink. BUT STILL.

Arkansas Man Topples Ten Commandments Monument.

June 27, 2017

Hahaha, Trump Golf Clubs sport fake TIME magazine covers. So awesome that this blowhard has the same quality Fake News magazine covers that the rest of us plebs could only buy during amusement park visits. Seems like sucking up ("TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS...EVEN TV!" AND "The 'Apprentice' is a television smash!") is the way Trump likes to be dealt with.

June 26, 2017

Ugh, Ticks. Reminds me why I hate nature.

"Beanbender's beer was nothing like the stuff in cans that my father drinks. It had a nutty taste, and it was cold and good. The guy at the bar was Ben Beanbender, the owner of the beer garden. He didn't ask us for identification or anything. He just filled mugs from a big barrel and handed them to us. I also got a baked potato. Ben Beanbender poked a hole in one end with his thumb, slapped in a hunk of butter, salted and peppered the potato, wrapped it in a napkin, and handed it to me. It was great! The potato was almost too hot to hold, and the salty butter dribbled onto my sleeve. It tasted just fantastic with the beer. The beer and the baked potato cost fifty cents. It's the best deal in Baconburg."
--Daniel Pinkwater, from "The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death". For some reason this passage, (set in a venue inside Tintown, Baconburg's hidden underground city) has stuck with me. (I remember Mo being obsessed with this book, and delighted we managed to scrape up a copy in the late 90s. It's a great YA read.)

It used to be harder to scrape up books. This one is now a $3 Kindle book, but they must have lost the rights to the great cover art of the original...

Yeesh

June 25, 2017

I'm looking over
My dead dog Rover
Who I overran with the mower...
One leg is missing
The other one's gone
The third is in pieces
All across the front lawn-
No use explaining
The one remaining
It's stuck to the kitchen door!
I'm looking over
my dead dog Rover
Who I overran with the mower...
--Man, hadn't thought of that camp song for ages 'til I was at Cora's dance recital today and one of the groups used the more traditional "4 Leaf Clover" version.

June 24, 2017

Jim Coudal describes this as : "Poetry, in data":

"Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching."
--Fran Lebowitz

June 23, 2017 videogames

Jeremy Penner has started a podcast about hyper-indie games, the art of the small, personal game project and the communities that support them... and I was his first interview, talking about my perennial mashup JoustPong, but ranging from programming home computers in the 1980s to online things like Processing now.

We talked a while back, and I was worried I would find my own voice unlistenable now, but it's not as awful as I had feared. It's kind of weird that I slip into the cadence that I can now recognize from some podcasts I listen to, even though I just started listening to them in general.

via I Want This 1923 Prediction For the American City of the Future To Be Real

via

June 22, 2017

Was hacking on Porchfest maps late at night when Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know"... great breakup song. But I was suddenly really struck by "felt so lonely in your company"... it's a feeling I'm sensitive about having provoked in relationships in the past and try to be on the watch for now... but just now it hits me that maybe 'cause I was an only child (whose family got moved every couple of years) it's something I can only be sympathetic to, not empathetic; only kids are often ok with just their own company, and while connecting deeply with someone is rewarding and important, there's a... not independence, but lack of dependence... self-sufficiency, I guess... that's hard to shake, and so reading loneliness in others, even people we're close to, requires a lot of focus, because it's not written in our native language.

(On facebook Johnny from Portugal commented " I'm an only child and l can spot it very fast, so maybe it's a mixture between being an only child and the way our own personality is structured?", I wrote her back " yeah, I hope it's a mix. Not just me looking for an excuse to say 'hey I'm not JUST self absorbed.' -- Also when I'm playing armchair self-analysist, it might have been synergized with the loss of my dad when I was young, the idea of not really counting on anyone else.)

The pet of the future?