anyways (I say this as someone who is deeply critical of the united states government, military, unchecked capitalism, police, etc) I am SICK of people treating america as if it has no cultural value or positives so..... I love u 85 million acres (bigger than italy) of national parks. I love u harlem renaissance. I love u groundhogs day. I love u sweet tea and fried chicken and jambalaya. I love u apple cider donuts and maizes on crisp autumn days. I love u 95k miles of coastlines and new england fisherman and hand knitted sweaters. I love u halloween where millions of people dress up and give candy to strangers and carve jack o'lanterns. I love u small talk and small towns and potlucks and bringing over casseroles to your struggling neighbors. I love u cowboys and ranch hands and arizonian cactus. I love u appalachian trail and dirtbikes and divebars. I love u sparklers and fireflies. I love u mark twain and toni morrison and emily dickinson and henry david thoreau. I love u rock n roll i love u bluegrass and hippies i love u jimi hendrix and nirvana and CCR and janis joplin. I love u victorian houses and jonny appleseed and john henry and mothman and bigfoot. I love u foggy days in the pacific northwest and neon signs and roadside attractions. I love u baseball and 1950s diners and soft serve. I love u native american art and pop art and poptarts. I love u blue jeans and barbecues and jazz musicians
On this Memorial Day consider what Minnesotans did to capture the battle flag of the 28th Virginia Infantry which the state still holds.
It's why I love when my band plays "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Solidarity Forever" - it's pro-Union and pro-union!
Went back to my old tropes of having kids direct a virtual toy I code up - in this case a lil' fish..... Cole designed most of the fish and bubbles, his brother Carter suggested the seaweed.
Also, the boys kind of like folding paper in general (like just casually) and really got into those old school "fortune tellers" I showed them...
There is much happening, but there is not much going on.
Most of them were in a line art style like that, I wish I knew how to reproduce it. I feel like it wouldn't be hard for an app to make a brush for, if I could just find it.
Bought some new jeans at Old Navy last night, dark. And "Slim". Historically I don't think of myself as a "slim person" and always slunked off to the seemingly more forgiving, looser cuts (especially "Levi Silver Tab Baggy" which was my go-to through most of the 90s) but now as I acknowledge my familial bodily legacy - specifically the "Scheinfeldt No-Ass", maybe Slim makes sense, vs various flavors of Loose or Baggy.
Grandma's house has a green gate that opens on a courtyard with brick-red tiles from Mexico. Bright blue and yellow pots, filled with cactus, sit on the adobe ledges. Birds of Paradise border the patio. Grandpa's handcarved gourds, painted with Indian symbols for rain, hold mounds of walnuts, figs and peaches from the backyard trees.This story was in "Word of Mouth: 150 Short-Short Stories by 90 Women Writers", a book I semi-stole from my Aunt a long while back, probably in college-- one of those books you reread and realized hit you at just the right time to be a big influence on you.We sit in wicker chairs, in the summer sun, drinking Postum from tall orange mugs with wooden holders. I pretend it is coffee. I always feel like I'm on vacation when I visit, even though we live in the same city.
Grandpa leaves to work in his garden. When we're alone Grandma tells me stories about her family. She's proud to be Indian. She's descended from three different tribes, one's called Mohawk. Whenever she says Mohawk, I think tomahawk. I know what a tomahawk is; I've seen them for sale in souvenir stores in Yellowstone National Park. Indians used to scalp white men with them. Grandma says tomahawks were the first axes. She says that if white men had minded their own business instead of poisoning Indians with alcohol, shooting them and stealing their land, the Indians wouldn't have had to scalp them.
She sighs, "You'll never find the truth in your school books, honeygirl. It's all been turned to lies. Same with religion. Got to look real hard for the truth nowadays."
Grandma calls me honeygirl. So does Grandpa. Every morning he gets up before dawn to grind wheat in the basement for his breakfast. Grandpa cooks all his own meals. That's because he likes to eat his supper when most people have breakfast, and have milk and fruit in the evening. He even washes his dishes and puts them away.
Grandma and Grandpa love each other more than anybody I know. He brings her flowers from his garden and they hug and kiss a lot. I mean real hugs and kisses, not the quick dabs my father gives my mother before he goes off to work. Grandma scratches Grandpa's back too. Lucky Grandpa. Having my back scratched is just about my most favorite thing. Grandma says love is the most important thing in the world.
"That's why we're born, honeygirl," she says. "To learn how to love each other. And it takes all the time we've got. Some folks never get the hang of it."
We finish our Postum and Grandma says it's "siesta" time. She and Grandpa nap together every afternoon. Today she has promised to nap with me.
The house is cool and dark. I follow her into the spare bedroom and climb on the four-poster bed. Grandma looks like a gypsy. Her dresses all feel like silk; she wears scarves and bracelets, earrings and glittery brooches. I think my Grandma is beautiful. Her dark braided hair is rolled in circles on the back of her head and held by two silver clips.
Grandma pulls back the white chenille bedspread, then the blankets. I take off my shoes and socks, jeans and shirt. She lets me sleep naked, says it's too hot for covers. I crawl across the bed until I touch the cool plaster wall, then lift the sheet over me. The cracked yellow windowshade flaps in the afternoon breeze.
"Santa Ana's are blowing again," she says. "Wind's full of evil spirits. They make folks crazy." She chuckles. "Even spirits got to create some mischief now and then."
She slides her flowered dress over her head and lets her slip fall to the floor. ane
Grandma's huge breasts rest on her belly. Blue veins run through them like tiny rivers. I've never seen real breasts before. Mother hides hers. She says women are cursed because of Eve's sin with the devil, and I'll find that out for myself someday. She says I'll have breasts someday too, but I don't believe her. I hate dresses and perfume and patent leather shoes. Daddy says I'm a tomboy. How can a tomboy grow breasts?
Grandma rolls into bed with me. She is naked too. I thought grown-ups had to wear nightgowns or pajamas to bed. That they could get arrested for being naked.
"Someone's been filling your head with foolish notions, Grandma says. "I won't mention any names. Come close, honeygirl."
I snuggle next to Grandma, nestle against her warm breasts, her soft round belly. She holds me, kisses my neck, then moves slightly away and begins to scratch my back with her long fingernails. I feel goosebumps all over my body. Her nipples graze my back. I want to touch her breasts, suck on the hard nipples.
She traces circles round and round with her fingers until I can barely keep my eyes open.
When I wake, Grandma is gone. I have to pee and pass by Grandma and Grandpa's bedroom. Their door is shut and it sounds like they are bouncing on the bed. I want to peek but I'm scared. They are making strange noises that I've never heard before. I know what they are doing has something to do with Grandma's breasts. I just know it!
I go back to bed and pretend I am napping with Grandma and Grandpa. My hands find the safe, tingly place between my legs.
It is almost dark when I wake up again. The smell of stewed rabbit gets me up real quick. I put my clothes on and go out to the kitchen. Grandma and Grandpa are sitting in their bathrobes, smiling at each other. They are smiling and rocking in their rocking chairs, looking like they've got a secret.
"Supper's almost ready, honeygirl. I fixed your favorite: stewed rabbit and dumplings. And Grandpa made fruit salad for dessert. Are you hungry?"
"I'm starving!"
"Well, we all seem to have worked up powerful appetites," Grandma says. She winks at Grandpa, then at me.
"Powerful indeed," Grandpa says.
That's why we're born, honeygirl. To learn how to love each other. And it takes all the time we've got. Some folks never get the hang of it.That's the most important line for me. Frankly with my deeply ingrained habit of plucking out intuitive emotion (in order to leave more room for my best guessed of objective and universal truth) I think I might be one of those that never quite get the hang of it, just a mix of affection and admiration and responsibility.
via
Welp, guess I'm going to be giving up the Hawaiian shirts this summer, because destructionphile "civil war 2" morons are rallying in them? Damn that's like half my summer shirts.
In May 1914, Alexander Graham Bell delivered a commencement address to some high school students in Washington, DC. The 67-year-old inventor of the telephone gave a peculiar speech--a crotchety ode to observation, measurement, and gumshoe curiosity. He spent much of his time proposing areas of investigation for his teenage audience to take up. "Did you ever try to measure a smell?" he asked. "What is an odor? Is it an emanation of material particles in the air, or is it a form of vibration like sound?" he asked. "If it is an emanation, you might be able to weigh it; and if it is a vibration, you should be able to reflect it from a mirror," he went on. "If you are ambitious to found a new science, measure a smell."I had no idea about the "vibration" theory. In either case, it seems like the ratio in a biological nose aren't 1:1 receptor to type of recognizable smell (like a piano that can only play 88 notes) but more like chords (where a piano can play thousands of chords)
More than a century later, no one has yet been able to measure a smell, and there is even still some debate as to whether smell is a vibration or a chemical interaction between particles. (The vibration theory is far more controversial, but no one understands olfaction well enough to dismiss it entirely.)
I used to be bad when I was a kid but ever since then I have gone straight, as I can prove by my record -- 33 arrests and no convictions.
Did you eat a tire, that's on fire? Because that's what your breath smells like.(The answer was no I guess that's just what string cheese and cherry coke zero must smell like. I regret nothing.)
Melissa wanted to watch Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, so we are. (She had watched the old series some but not the movies) So far the hardest thing to explain is McCoy's pants in this scene.
http://www.zagat.com/b/50-states-50-sandwiches Man. Sandwiches are the best.
I am increasingly amazed at the Listicle-sites having great big, flat-color, inviting arrow buttons by all the ads, and little tiny "next" buttons to get through the content. The makers of those will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
So some companies have N.I.H. syndrom, "Not Invented Here", a reluctance to use pre-existing code from outside groups. I certainly suffer from that sometimes, because coding things is fun, and generally my homebrew solutions are compact and focused and you can understand the codepath without having to know how it tries to solve 8 other dudes' problems as well. But sometimes I think my company suffers a bit from N.I.S.E...
An article supporting that view, a bit: http://prog21.dadgum.com/158.html
Spooky sleepover game: go into a bathroom, turn out the lights, look in the mirror, whoa, you're 37, what are you even doing with your life.
I'm not sure this commercial from the 1968 would really have explained things. It kind of reminds me of that old Simpsons bit of faux-agitprop Worker and Parasite... via
What will survive of us is love.
We must love one another or die
When we were in England, Amber pointed out this rather awkward-looking photo from a NY Times article Badminton's New Dress Code Is Being Criticized as Sexist. I think we were most startled that it seemed to be the lead story. Slow news day?
Giant DDiced coffee with a "turbo" shot. Good to be back home!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html Twins with physically overlapping brains - astonishing to ponder.
The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.
http://is.gd/2x0LMZ - wordless video message to myself from the Tate Modern... touch screen for ending the msg was a bit wonky.
--Continuing yesterday's theme... I didn't realize how awesome a theme song and montage that was.
App of the moment- "Find in Page" is a brilliant bookmarklet that makes up for a serious lack on Apple gadgets, lack of "ctrl-F" find.
In NJ for a wedding. Irritated that the Dunkin Donuts iced coffee is all mucked up with Yankees logos. Least it's not "New Yorke Kreme" eh?
| --via horklog |
Note to future self: Tomcat context tag might be lurking in server.xml, where it will override that conf/Catalina stuff, and/or context.xml. This was hard-won knowledge today.
Is there a movie with dialog "You shot him!" "What do you care, you're a nihilist" "But... you shot him!" - I thought Big Lebowski, but no-
6 years ago today I mentioned "heomald" (a possible Palm typo) appeared no where on Google. Still my site is the only source of this word.
http://www.thepostgameshow.com/?p=658 : Prop 8 PLUS: Lets Defend Traditional Singing By Defining Songs As "Music Of and By Heterosexuals"!!
I guess I shouldn't cast
Convenience Store Item of the Moment
Hannah Montana-branded Birth Control Pills at the local 7-11?
(That was my first thought. Then I realized it looked more like pitch pipes. "Cookie CDs"? I would have loved to been at the design meeting for that one. "Well, Hannah Montanna makes CDs... and cookies are round... are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "Brilliant!")
that dark-chocolate-covered -cinnamon and -peppermint altoids prevail over -ginger is a damn shame
apple's big boston store has a giant billboard showing someone using iphone's notepad for a to-do list. palm had a to-do application. bleh.
ok, boingboing, i get it. cory doctrow has a new book called 'little brother'. maybe it's a "wonderful thing" BUT SHUT UP ABOUT IT ALREADY!
I sort of like when these "for Dummies"-style titles take on weighty subjects. "Rocket "Reconciling the Fundamental Contradiction of Free Will and a Deterministic Universe for Dummies", "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Coping with your Crushing Sense of Existential Dispair", etc etc. (Hmm. If I were feeling a bit more ambitious it would be amusing to make an automatic cover-layout generator for faux titles such as those.)
The books generally are pretty good. I kind of mentally rewrite the titles to "...with few assumptions about what you already know of the subject", which I think is the real crux of what they're getting at. The first ones, like "DOS for Dummies", capitalized on a self-deprecating feeling that PCs of the era brought on.
So I just started "Zen Living". I think I might have some trouble keeping the concepts of Zen's un-ness seperate from what I know of Daoism's "uncarved block", at least in terms of life application.
It also raises the issues of whether you can have relative degrees of Zen. Is it a problem that I'm not looking a moment of "and thus, Kirk was enlightened" so much as improved general clarity and definition in the flow of my life?
Sports of the Moment
Indians played (and lost to) the Red Sox last night. Both are division leaders, likely the current two best teams in baseball, and these games are kind of "win-win" for me... my deeper loyalty is with the Sox, and every win makes life more difficult for the Yankees, but the Indians are in a tighter division race.
Anyway, I was reading the Indians' wikipedia page when I came across this gem:
In April 1962, the Indians sold Harry Chiti to the New York Mets for a player to be named later. In June 1962, after playing just 15 games for the Mets, Chiti was named by the Mets as the player to be named later.Plus, I was reminded of another reason to dislike Edgar "Rent-A-Wreck" Renteria... besides extremely spotty play for the Red Sox he scored the run that made the Indians lose the '97 World Series to those Punk-ass Marlins.
Band of the Moment
One of the side effects of Netflix is that the barrier to entry for "guilty pleasure" movies is that much lower. Case-in-point, "American Pie Presents: Band Camp". It definitely harkened back to the old "teenage sex comedy" tradition, plus there were enough semi-realistic marching band references to keep me entertained.
It got me to googling, where I found the old rec.arts.marching.band.college FAQ. My favorite section was 2) Which band was banned from where? and my favorite incident listed in that section was
1972 Columbia is banned from West Point for "forming" the napalming of a Cambodian Villiage, complete with flaming villagers.That, my friends, is chutzpah.
 Me and my mom at Tufts Pep Band, Parents' Weekend. I like how she's sporting some major Jumbo the Elephant (Tufts' mascot) Bling. |
In trying to track down a factoid that some Ivy League bands play in suit and ties, I found my way back to the site for the Columbia University Marching Band, aka CUMB, aka "the cleverest band in the world". (In Euclid we called ourselves "God's Favorite Marching Band", as evidenced by a sudden downpour erupting with the opening gong strike of "Carmina Burana" and being finished by the time the piece was done, but I suspect the "God's Favorite" moniker isn't too original.) Anyway, I didn't see a reference to the West Point incident, but I liked their list of other scramble bands, all that intra-Ivy snarkiness. I wish Tufts had had its act together to have a scramble band rather than just a stand band, we'd only take the field once or twice a year.
I'm still trying to figure out where I could borrow a tuba or sousaphone from for a day or two, or even rent. Ksenia's dying to hear it. Or more likely, see it. Tubas are meant to be Seen as well as Heard.
I've found out there's a similar game in Russia, where if you have a coughing spell (as opposed to choking on liquid) you can say "damn workcamps!" as if you were sentenced to hard labor at a Soviet Siberian workcamp and now had TB. Ksenia told me her friend Efem taught it to her then 4-year-old brother, and it was the cutest thing in the world when he'd cough and then try to say it.
Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. Think about it: although more grocery stores in Paris are staying open until midnight, few writers are actually becoming more spiritual.
But as Brillat-Savarin has correctly observed, coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects. It is on this last point, in particular, that I want to add my personal experience to Brillat-Savarin's observations.
Coffee affects the diaphragm and the plexus of the stomach, from which it reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape complete analysis; that aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts an electricity emitted by coffee when we drink it. Coffee's power changes over time. [Italian composer Gioacchino] Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.
For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.
For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thoughthe'd been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part, a failure of observation.
When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more, even though you make it of the finest ingredients and take it perfectly fresh, you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counseled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored, one must begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other white meats: finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns to the relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of the retired bourgeoisie.
The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.
- Major Tom Shenk (is that spelled correctly?) made a mix tape of Dr. Demento stuff for my dad when he was sick, and one of my favorites on it was Dead Puppies Aren't Much Fun. Especially now that I'm on a dart team called "Dead Yuppies". (No relation.)
- One of the cutest anecdotes from my childhood: I was like 6, and decided to give a funnel as a wedding gift to some friends of the family. I wrote a card too, explaining how it was just someting I had found floating around my room...
- Did you know the word "heomald" isn't (or wasn't, at least) in Google? So I have no idea what "heomald matthew" written in my Palm means.
- This American Life talked about the Hartman Value Profile which you can take online though the results aren't the easiest things to grasp.
- I have no idea why monsterism.net was in my palm. Can't really figure out what that site is all about, actually. Same deal with foodtastesgood.com.
Middle school, for me: the band was having a special performance for some elementary schoolers, to show off a saxophone the player played "Twinkle Twinkle" and I was floored when all the kids yelled out "Alphabet Song!" when asked to name that tune...
Link of the Moment
The NY Times thinks Athanasius Kircher was pretty cool for a guy from the 1600s.
That's some cold shit, throwing my man Leroy out the window. Just picked my man up and threw him out the Goddamn window.
Link of the Moment
The site for Mario Party 3 has a number of fun little shockwave minigames. The N64 game itself is a lot of fun, I've always felt that it was a revival of "classic" style (i.e. like the old Atari) gameplay with modern graphics. Sort of like having a mini-Atari cartridge collection, so you don't have to keep playing the same simple game over and over.