❮❮prevnext❯❯

Liz came over and Melissa and I and her tackled a project where, since Melissa and I will be vacationing, we need to make a way to block the cat from hiding under the couch when the cat sitter needs to give him medicines. (the couch is a mid-century modern IKEA modular L thing)

So our first approach with weather sealing tape was obviously not going to hold, so we ended up with low cardboard pallets (from Dean's canned food, plus a few misc boxes) all around blocked by black duct tape. It's not great if you look close but we did a neatish job of it and you might not notice if you weren't looking for it. And most importantly I think it will be enough to dissuade Dean.

But it's another one of those "dang I'm glad I never got around to throwing those cardboard pallets!" situations, like those stupid rebuttals to the decluttering I would like to be doing more of...
X-ray of Gymnast doing full Scorpion

from this Pleat Jeans of Fascinating X-Rays

---

Society collectively forgot about the selfie stick

---

---

Semi-binging Lego Masters Series 2 (US version- I've heard the other countries' might be better)...I really wish they'd dive into more technique, like when the judges complement a clever bendy-bit or what not, do a side panel showing what pieces it used and how they were applied. At least the judges' decisions usually make sense (and they don't say it but I think the results from previous episodes weigh in)

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like "socialism" and "capitalism." Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the "free" world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

via

---

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity.

I know some of my fellow lefties might differ with me on this but I think my epistemological make up weakens my grasp of the importance of "identity". The self is an illusion. Meaning is an emergent properties from groups, and how things interact is leagues more important than their respective interior lives. On the other hand, "identity" is often a stand in for "group via group" and not personal identity, and I recongize that a lot of interaction IS determined by the character and perception of groups.

---

It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime, and ending with the hard facts of autumn. It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness. Speed and grace. Failure and loss. Imperishable hope. And coming home.

from Sally Rooney's "Conversations with Friends":

I felt restless, the way you feel when you've already done the wrong thing and you're anxious about what the outcome is going to be.

I knew Bobbi would know what to say in this situation, because she had a lot of opinions about mental health in public discourse. Out loud I said: Bobbi thinks depression is a humane response to the conditions of late capitalism.

All I could decide was whether or not to have sex with Nick; I couldn’t decide how to feel about it, or what it meant.

At some point the chocolate cake was gone. I looked into the box and saw crumbs and icing smeared around the paper rim that I had neglected to remove. I got up from the table, put the kettle on, and emptied two spoonfuls of coffee into the French press. I took some painkillers, I drank the coffee, I watched a murder mystery on Netflix. A certain peace had come to me and I wondered if it was God’s doing after all. Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.

I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.

After enjoying Normal People I went back and read this, Sally Rooney's first novel. I guess I enjoy reading stories of the romances of academic people. (heh... I guess to be honest I ended up treating my undergrad degree in computer science as a high-end trade school... and the English major I kept up to go with was a bit perfunctory...) This one told some of its story in quoted emails and going over old text messages, I really appreciate when stories do that... maybe it gives a smidge of validation to my own archiving with very occasional review.

FWIW The scene of people hanging out at a wealthy european's beach dwellings reminded me a bit of Martin Amis' "The Pregnant Widow"

---

--Panel from this Oglaf comic riffing on Hamlet - Oglaf is such a raunchy, fun, goofy, R-rated romp (maybe even NC-17) of a fantasy cartoon. I really like how it celebrates the joy of gettin' it on across a wide range of genders and sexualities.

---

French Inventor Totes Rifle While Flying Turbine-Powered Flyboard at Bastille Day Celebrations - word is previous Bastille Day stuff inspired Trumps' Campaign-Rally-With-Thanks July 4th ambitions. How long 'til he says we need one of these?

---

School of Honk on parade with "Rock Anthem" - at 4:06 you can hear me leading the call in the call/response:
Read this "Thought from the Shower" the other day and it startled me as being such an excellent point:

Sometimes, your parents just want to know you're just as proud of them as they are of you.

So, disconnected from any holiday or birthday, and know I'm to sure to miss or gloss over many admirable things my mom has done: I'm very proud of my mom.

As the nickname (bestowed early by her younger yet more worldly sister) "Betty the Good" suggests, she has led such a highly moraled and principled life, mostly obviously in the context of The Salvation Army.

I don't know that much about her early life, but some of it involves working her way through University with less financial aid than she deserved because her folks were shy of opening their finances to institutions. (And I know she made the decision to go to college rather than straight to The Salvation Army's "seminary", the School for Officer Training, on the advice of elders in the 'Army - a lesson in what it means to be a well-educated and informed person in the world)

And then she became a Salvation Army Officer! That's a life-long commitment, and a job that extends beyond the 9-to-5 - not to mentions insisting you give up deciding where you're going to live, and when you're going to move, and requires vast swaths of dedication to both God and your fellow Man.

Later my view switches to my partnership with my dad. Family lore is that achieving pregnancy took some effort, so obviously I'm grateful for that and proud of whatever persistence that took.

She and my dad had a neatly symmetrical relationship both in their ministry and in the domestic sphere, modeling a kind of feminism-friendly balance that has stuck with me even now. But even with assignments at some very challenging 'Army churches, she managed to find time for local musical theater, always a pleasure for her. And the way the two of them became fixtures in their communities - especially Salamanca - was striking.

Later, she displayed huge courage through my dad's illness and death. And then had the resiliency to go back to school for her master's degree, all while being a single mom. Of course, since I was such an angel in high school it wasn't quite enough challenge so through AFS she hosted *another* 18 year old boy, Marcos, through my senior year.

It was interesting that while I could beat my mom at almost any randomly selected Atari game, with the ones that caught her interest (Bugertime and Pengo come to mind) I couldn't touch her scores. A good lesson in focus and perseverance, there.

(Dang. There's so much past tense in this, it sounds like a eulogy! And it's not meant to sound that way - but it makes me think that the concept of singing someone's praises while they can still hear it shouldn't just be reserved for the elite getting "lifetime achievement" awards or whatnot.)

Back to The Salvation Army. While I think it's a great charitable and religious organization, living its Heart to God Hand to Man slogan (and, encouragingly, seems ahead of the curve on gender roles and racial equality) my mom's politics run reliably a bit to the left of its core, and I appreciate the grace she's shown in those circumstances - and how she's done that and learned to service in NYC, and London, and also many less glamorous places.

Or I think back to her helping me on move-in day at college, when my new hallmates flagged me over just say "Kirk, you know, we really love your mom!" That was typical. Mom seemed to love everyone and often the feeling was returned.

And so even now, my mom is at best able to achieve a semi-retirement, and is as continually active in church work as the regulations allow. I'm proud of that too! (Also, if it's not too impolite to point out, the success she and my aunt have had with sticking to their diet/eating/exercise programs is pretty amazing to see as well and I'm grateful 'cause it means they'll be around that much longer!)

I'm also proud of the room she has given me. I mean one thing I've learned is that parents generally try to avoid re-creating the problems they had with their own folks - and not to speak ill of my Nana, but I know she wasn't always the easiest to be with - exemplified by her application of the classic "look, you've got me so frustrated/worried that I've had to take up smoking again" guilt-trip.

So my mom made it her mission to steer clear of that kind of that kind of pitfall. And even when I shifted into being a bit more of a freethinker, where I went through the adolescent questioning of why on God's Green Earth where there so many religions, she was patient and kind through all of that and confident enough that my upbringing still taught me well and set me up to be safe and morally well-grounded.

Or the conversation we had once, when I confessed I felt, you know, guilty that my course wasn't one of being an uncle-figure and not a dad, and so not presenting her with a grandkid, her reassurance that yeah, while it was a bit of a bummer for her, it was also true that if I lacked the convictions to make family-making and dad-being that kind of number one goal and priority of my life, her strong preference was that I would have steered clear.

Anyway, so inspired on a random quote from social media, I just wanted to say all that.

(I also want to say I'm proud of my dad, but I've written about his achievements already - written when I was 28, on the day I was twice as old as I had been when he died. I'm also proud of my Aunt Susan, who is now the other "folk" I mean when I say I'm going to New Jersey to "be with my folks"... her journey in education from "Assistant to the Dean" to "Assistant Dean" is amazing.)

---

"French star Kylian Mbappe gives a member of Pussy Riot a high five" during a pitch invasion protest

---

At work I'm surprised that everyone uses laptops, and many people use external monitors, but I'm an outlier for using the laptop keyboard and trackpad- it's a lot more common to use an external keyboard and then a mouse or "magic trackpad". I understand preferring a mouse, but a trackpad off to the side seems weird to me, at least once you're used to having the trackpad RIGHT there. I guess with external keyboards you don't have to worry about heat if the laptop is running hard, and if you're using the laptop as a second or third monitor you can prop it to a more ergonomically friendly spot, but I still love the arrangement of a laptop with a larger monitor above it, in part because it minimizes the difference from using the laptop in standalone mode.

Any thoughts? Any external keyboard/trackpad/mice users know some other advantage I'm not thinking of?

---

Blender of Love Ugh, this truck attack. A different feel than an attack relying on guns or explosives, because big vehicles are everywhere, yet the casualty count was so astounding.

How any human can see this as being the 'good guys' is beyond me, but that's the power of fundamentalism; for the benefit of never having to question your belief, you have the cost of not being able to question your beliefs.

Not all faiths are as egregious as this, of course, at least right now, but the story of God testing Abraham Faith vs Basic Humanity by seeing if he was willing to go up and murder his own son? With a last minute "Nah, just playin,"? Not a good start to Abrahamic religions.

---

I think I need to check out these Favorite 5 TED talks picked by TED founder... This Amazon Prime Day thing is a bit underwhelming. I think the problem is people (ok, maybe especially people who have the luxury of not sweating most prices too much) are already use to the wacky disconnects between "Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price" and Amazon will charge 'em, or the prices variations you can get from different Amazon affiliates, or even aware of the obnoxious algorithmic flex pricing where different Amazon users might get offered different prices, or even variations at different times. So a big row of "X% offs!" might not be such an appeal.

Then there's the "offer expires" timer feature... I imagine this cranks up the excitement for some folks, but for others it just feels manipulative...

---

For future self-reference, "Manna" is the story about a future dystopia or utopia based on a fastfood automation being extended to take over the world... (Not Leonard Richardson's Mallory which is about video games) http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm I saw this on the "New Girl" episode (the two are excited about meeting Prince) but without the caption i didn't realize what a rich dramatic metaphor it was! (via)

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.

---

'Valleysmen'd not want to hear,' she answered, 'that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too. I know it from other tribes offland what i stayed with. Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.'

Yay, she was prob'ly right.

---

Conducting a book winnowing, my first in my e-reader era. Is that why I'm being surprisingly picky? Still, it's tough to keep my ego out of it -- shaking the idea of the multiplicity of bookshelves as the outward manifestation of being a smart guy. I might kinda hedge by scanning all the books I ditch, right before I ditch them.

---

http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk -- Covered this as my farewell solo in my a cappella group - I still dig the driving intensity of it.
I had kinda missed that whole Petronus thing

---

"Don't think I've ever seen two bald guys hug before."
"Hot, isn't it?"
"Little bit!"

---

I'm on board; pull up the lifeline.

---

1516 Ways to Kill The Romance - Seanbaby can still make me laugh, sometimes.

---

---

(that was based on a bit from http://kisrael.com/2004/08/18/ - putting in different bits from the site, and the author I most frequently write like is Stephen King...)

---

---

Geothermal energy projects cause earthquakes? - Yikes!

---

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Asus-Eee-PC-T91-SwivelScreen-Netbook-Review/ - Asus making tablet netbooks, nice - reviewer wishes screen was conductive, but resistive makes for such better doodling! Glad to see more options for my compulsive need to doodle in a techish way.

---

http://www.theyearsareshort.com/

---

Ha HA! EB and his tape measure was so wrong in his estimation that the loveseat/foldabed was too big to be maneuvered through the hall. JZ and I were able to wrangle it through. Now I should be able to get the bottommost layout I thought of working, with the backroom by the galley kitchen dedicated to entertainment, and the front room a bedroom and office-y workspace.

My whole place is chaos right now, but I'm hoping getting to the layout I was hoping for will motivate me in getting fully settled.

---

Cartoon of the Moment

--from Basic Instruction's How to Complain About Work.

Last day of vacation. Sigh. I'm not dreading the routine of work as much as I usually do, guess that's a positive.

---

Poetry of the Moment

A Mouse that prayed for Allah's aid
    Blasphemed when no such aid befell:
A Cat, who feasted on that mouse,
  Thought Allah managed vastly well.

Pray not for aid to One who made
    A set of never-changing Laws,
But in your need remember well
    He gave you speed, or guile--or claws

It goes on for a few more stanzas, but I like these two the most. (One of the things I know I lost on my drowned Palm are some other references to quotes of his that I wanted to post.)

---

Video of the Moment
Boingboing had a great piece on Sesame Street skits that scared us as kids... and people are a tad unnerved to this day! But mostly I just loved these guys, the Yip yips.



To this day I still go "YUPyupyupyupyupyupyupyuuuup uh-huh uh-huh".

Looking back at these videos, I find myself recognizing voices across characters in a way I don't think I did previously.

---

Article of the Moment
Slate on why the beehive collapse disorder isn't as apocalyptic as reported... and how visions of merry little buzzing bees ducking in and out of a hive (or even those wooden structures some beekeepers use) has been ill-founded for a long while, its gotten a lot more industrial than all that.

For what it's worth, the Impala SS gets my vote for "worst named car ever". What, "Punctura Nazi Trooper" was already taken?

---

Journal Entry of the Moment

Setting: sitting on Loverboy's lap
Loverboy: *pensive* I've never had such a big girlfriend.
Me: I beg your pardon?
L: *Slightly louder* I said, I've never had such a big girlfriend.
M: Yes, that's what I thought I'd heard. What the hell...?
L: I mean, they never quite reached my nose.
M: And that's big then? Not tall?
L: Why yes, you're chunky.
M: CHUNKY?! You think I'm bloody chunky??
L: Well of course you are!
M: Chunky?! I am NOT chunky!
L: But you are! You know you are not thin.
M: Well cheers.
L: Oh please, you know what I mean, you don't look famished.
M: I'll say. Oh wait. Is this universal-chunky or Loverboy-chunky?
[He often uses adjectives in a way that the rest of the world doesn't share, and it's led to some beautiful linguistics-based situations in the past.]
L: Er, mine? But they're the same this time.
M: Really. Please look up chunky and then tell me if it still is what you mean.
L: Don't be ridiculous, I don't need to look it up, I know what it means.
M: If you don't look it up I'll smoke in the living-room.
L: *laughs*
M: *has fag in living-room*
M: Do you think this conversation is going well, would you say? What with the defunct girlfriends and my being a robust farm animal?
L: Honestly, I'll never understand why women are so weird, what's wrong w what I said? See, I've looked it up!
M: Yes?
L: *vindicated-like* "Short, heavy, stocky".
M: Did you hear what you've just said? This is absolutely demented, that's what I am, you say?
L: I've told you bfr, your body is muscled.
M: What, a new one? Muscled! Where the hell do you see muscles and what do muscles have to do w stocky?
L: Maybe you're not quite so muscled now but it's easy to see you once were. That's chunky.
M: THAT IS NOT WHAT CHUNKY MEANS!
L: All right then. Be that way.
M: *Sticks hand all the way down to his stomach, pushes into small intestine and writes THAT IS NOT WHAT CHUNKY MEANS in the lining. In blood.*
----------------------------
He has just walked into the office looking for something and en passant idly remarked But you are chunky.

OY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She has a pretty amazing writing style, sometimes reading it is like taking a sip from a firehose. (She was the girlfriend of our former foreign exchange student's brother and they stayed briefly at my mom's NYC apartment when I was visiting as well.)

---

Hedbergism of the Moment

I get a cold sore. I hate to say it, Minnesota, but in a cold sore I put Carmex on it 'cause Carmex is supposed to alleviate cold sores. I dunno if it does help, but it will make them shiny and more noticeable. It's like cold sore highlighter! Maybe they could come up with an arrow that heals cold sores.

Lately I've been cleaning up kisrael.com in preperation for transferring to a new webhost. (Hi FoSO!) It's a generally pretty satisfying exerience..my goal has kind of been simplifying what's in the "root" directory of my site.

But there was one other task that I brought on my self...clean up the tens of thousands of spam links that were clogging up the comments for much of 2003 and 2004. The dirty rotten spammers like to have lots of links to their sites so they gain prestige with naive search engines that follow a bastardized version of the Google-esque ideal that incoming links = good sites, and they seem to prefer filling up old comments pages that search engines see just fine but some site owners won't notice for a while. They'll take a day, then, and have their scripts fill it with like 35-30 entries of 20-30 links each. I found out the scale of the problem when I made that view delayed comments feature a few months ago, and spent like 5 or 6 hours last night cleaning...and using a lot of custom scripts and macros to help that.

For now I'm using a simple filter...if you don't have a link in your comment, no filtering. If you DO have "http://" in your post, then the following is a list of forbidden words:

high low
betultimate
blue deer
purple bike
slot machine
loans
blackjack
bingo
craps
stud
texas
baccarat
pills
slots
888
drugs
black jack
keno
viagra
credit
backgammon
poker
health insurance
casino
roulet
gambling
pharmacy
phentermine
debt
wsop

Pretty brutal, but, maybe a temporary message (more on that below.) A message will come up repeating this list if you trigger the block. Cleaning out the old comments, there were only like 4 or 5 "false positives" of non-spam comments that would have triggered a block.

I have a (possibly) better idea for a block that, after a few days of seeing how this method works, I might install. It's tough thinking of good blocking methods that won't block people as well. One assumption I was making before is that the spammer downloaded my comments form once, and then just had their slave botscripts run the "submit comments" feature. If that were true, then I could use a simple token method. Loading the comments form generates a special one time key, the key is stored on the server, and then passed back to the server on the submit. Two downsides: one is having a lot of disused keys on my server, for people who just view comments and/or the form without entering a comment. But there's a chance that the assumption that the dirty rotten comments spammer is use a "stale" version of my form might be wrong...maybe they're downloading a fresh form each time, so they'd get a fresh token for each of their nasty, stinking, grasping writhing cesspool chunks of spamlinks.

Other people try to use javascript cleverness, but there's nothing stopping a spammer from always running your filter through a javascript engine.

So one idea is this; there's a good chance the spammers look for a field labeled "comments" or "name", or just look for a big textarea followed by a smaller one line text box, or something like that. But what if each time you generated a random name for your textarea, and then have some other hidden variable tell the script which name to find the comment in? It seems like a spammer might not bother to follow that kind of indirection, and it can be made a little stronger by increasing the levels of indirection (you always have one variable "foo" that tells it the first variable to look in, which carries the name of the second variable (randomly generated), which carries the name of the the third, which then points to the actual name generated for the textarea. This method won't stand up if they're just looking for "grab all variables and fill the textarea variable", though I'm not sure if they're that clever...maybe I could include 3 textareas, and hide the other 2 with CSS. That too could be scripted away...in which case I'm back to simple content filtering.

Ugh, what a mess! Comment spammers are an incredibly low lifeform. I'm lucky, since I do all the coding myself, and am just one site, if I come up with a clever idea I'm a low-value target, relative to an attack that works on bajillions of blogs using the same scripts.

UPDATE: in September I started getting odd, no-link one liner comments. They might be test mesages or something. So as a patch, I've added some phrases that get rejected if they're the sole content of the message. See this day's entry for a bit more info. Admittedly this is very much a "one off" kind of response, but we'll see how it goes, since so far the href+buzzword filter has done well.

---

Link of the Moment
After all that crap, you deserve a nice link: la Pate a Son is a lovely applet for making musical Rube Goldberg-meets-that-old-"Pipe Dreams"-game setups. I think that it is tweaked to make it almost too hard to make ugly sounds, but it's still pretty cool. (Makes me think that I should try to do a Java or other technology port of that old SimTunes game.)

Oh, I blogged this a long time ago, check out their main site, especially experimental zoo, especially the giraffes. (A bit like that woman falling through bubbles, come to think of it, but years earlier.)

So my 1,292-day streak (Dec 30 2000 - July 14 2004) without a missed entry comes to an inglorious end, when my webhost provider got cut off by their upstream provider Qwest for a bit under 48-hours. So I'm writing this in a post facto kinda way, just so that the run of entries doesn't have a hole in it.

While I think I'm still gonna be pretty religous about the daily updates, in a way it's kind of nice to not be pressured by the spectre of missing a day. Kind of how like Cal Ripken Jr. beat Gehrig's "unbreakable record" of 2,130 games without a miss, played a few hundred more, and then just took the day off so it was no longer an issue. With my extended family today. A blast from the past, a ramble I wrote for the June 1999 Blender of Love and forgot about. But I'm glad to have it here on this site.

I've already written about how inanimate objects can take on new significance in the context of romance. (An idea wonderfully explored in Tom Robbin's "Still-life with Woodpecker") One of these tokens is on the verge of leaving my life and it's sad, in a goofy sort of way.

My family has had this Sony "Dream Machine" clock radio for years. It's a practical, almost feisty little cube. Throughout high school it dutifully sat in the bathroom, its turquoise LED showing the time to anyone who took the time to look, and tinnily playing the Cleveland Oldies station for me and the NPR station for my mom. (Since then, I've realized that my mom had much better taste in radio programming.)

This service, however faithful, wouldn't be enough to earn this memorial in the Blender of Love. Not until college did it the clockradio play a role in my romantic life. College was where I first got the chance to sleep with (in the non-biblical sense) the people I was in love with, and the Sony Dream Machine was there to wake me and my beloved so that we could face another day of classes. The fact that there is more than one woman I woke up with during this time somehow strengthens my bond with this little machine: it proved to be a more constant companion than any romantic interest. In fact, you could say that I was fairly intimate with that clockradio (in the non-biblical sense,) able to set its alarm in the dark, able to turn off its alarm while still slumbering. I'll remember some of those early morning tableaus for the rest of my life.

But now, it's time to move on. The clockradio is looking pretty grungy. Years ago the plug for its 9-volt backup battery broke- when the power goes, so does its sense of time. When you shake it, there's a very suspicious clunk and rattle. Still, I would probably be able to squeeze more years of service from it, but currently the bedroom has no room for a bedside table, so I had to get a new alarmclock, one with a giant readout that I can easily read from a distance, even without my glasses. I'll miss the little cube, however, and am grateful for the job it's done, and the role it has played in my romantic history.

---

Link of the Moment
Enigmatic Cartoons from Japan... dada-esque strangeness and wonder? Or just some really bad translations? Why not both?

They have a odd elegance and beauty.

---

Funny of the Moment

My efforts to say nothing but positive things to my son have become desperate. 'You're the best, smartest, cutest, friendliest baby, you're...telekinetic. You move objects with thought and start fires with your brain.'

Thanks to Bill the Splut for pointing out the following cut and paste typo (since corrected) in yesterday's entry:

You experience free fall for a few seconds. The kids
cream. You land safely.

Heh heh. Whoops.

---

Navel Reserves
This commercial for Levi jeans is one of the most disturbing I've seen in a while...yet strangely alluring. (I guess the allure comes mostly from the taut female tummies. (Though there may be yet another subconscious level from The Soprano's Jamie-Lynn Sigler singing "I'm coming...I'm coming (out)"))

---

Quote of the Moment

Never buy a secondhand camera from a pornshop..........trust me.