A Squirrel is Eating my Outside Christmas Lights
Swear to God–saw them doing it. The chewed up, blue plastic led-bulb cover was abandoned on the porch beneath the cut wires you see in this picture. And this is the second string of lights they have ruined. They sampled several of the bulb covers on the first one (after nipping each free of the wires), perhaps hoping to find a ripe one–much as they used to sample and discard each of the young pomegranates growing out back before I trained our orange cat Timmy to sleep on the shed roof right next to the tree.
The Up Series
Lynn got Amy and me the dvd documentary Up Series for Christmas. If you haven’t heard of it, here’s a description:
The Up Series is a series of seven documentary films that has followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old. The children were selected primarily to represent the full range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child’s “class” predetermines their future. Every seven years, the director, Michael Apted, films new material from as many of the fourteen he can get to participate. The latest film, 49 up, was released in the UK in September 2005 and in the US in October 2006. Filming for the next instalment in the series, 56 Up, is expected in late 2011 or early 2012.
Warning, the series is very addictive. I haven’t checked if Netflix carries it, but I’m sure you can find it on Amazon and other sites as well. I highly recommend it. We just finished 28 Up and are about to sit down to 35.
High-End Everlasting Gobstoppers
Ferran Adrià can make marshmallows that taste of violets, and rich caramels that change colour every ten seconds as you suck them, and little feathery sweets that melt away deliciously the moment you put them between your lips. He can make chewing-gum that never loses its taste, and sugar balloons that you can blow up to enormous sizes before you pop them with a pin and gobble them up. And, by a most secret method, he can make lovely blue birds’ eggs with black spots on them, and when you put one of these in your mouth, it gradually gets smaller and smaller until suddenly there is nothing left except a tiny little dark red sugary baby bird sitting on the tip of your tongue.
Just funnin’ ya. Last night I was speed-reading my way through a stack of four or five unread copies of the Sunday New York Times. The “Holiday” edition of Style magazine featured a neat little article by twelve-year-old Ava Crawford, daughter of globe-trotting foodies. Writing of her family’s evening at El Bulli, she likened Ferran Adrià to Willy Wonka. “The strangest course,” Ava wrote, “was a balloon filled with orange oil that I had to smell while the waiter deflated it under my nose.”
Dennis Hopper, Lesbian
From Aaron?
Fruits of Christmas
I have never taken a single picture until I was given an Olympus Stylus 1000 for Christmas. I think it went well. (Click on the picture to see the rest)
Make Mine a Double
Divshare
Divshare is a website that requires no registration and gives you unlimited server space for sharing files. I don’t know how they do it, but it is incredible.
In which a Flocker indulges his obsession with Vertigo
As I watched Vertigo this summer with one of my classes, what struck me about this passage was not the words but, rather, their sounds–in particular, this phrase:
“madly in love”
In the film, it seemed to me, Judy seems to stress especially hard a couple of syllables:
“madly in love”
I can’t pretend to know how (or even if) Scottie understands those stresses, but here’s what my hearing them made me think:
“madly in love“=”Madeleine“?
Of course, given the fact that Scottie is not only going everywhere he had seen or been with Madeleine but also mistaking any woman wearing grey suits or with piled-up platinum-blonde hair for her, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine that at a subliminal level he could be hearing “Madeleine” in those syllables, too.
MORALE LESBIAN WRIGGLES AND COMING OCTOPUS WRIGGLES
Hanging Saddam
What do you figure this farce will look like 10, 30 or 50 years down the road? A signal of American power or weakness?
It Might Be a Theme…
I love the way you can use a different tone for each person and each type of alarm: call/text/voicemail. So, now that we all know I have Ms New Booty as my telephone call ring, who can guess what my alarm clock will now sound like?
Hint
Thanks to Personal Democracy Forum
Champipple
The only good thing I can think of to say about Champipple (champagne + ripple) is that it made me think that maybe I had been too hard on Sankaccino.
44.
For every 10 successful attempts to climb Mount Everest there is one fatality.
Head-banging Snakes May Predict Earthquakes
China has come up with an earthquake prediction system which relies on the behavior of snakes, state media said Thursday, two days after two quakes struck off neighboring Taiwan.
2006: Year of Inventions
A round-up of the most interesting, surprising and sometimes alarming patent applications covered by New Scientist Magazine during 2006.
Breakup in the Arctic
A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake. The mass of ice broke clear from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole. Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, travelled to the newly formed ice island and couldn’t believe what he saw. “It was extraordinary,” Vincent said Thursday, adding that in 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice.
Veyron
The article contains some pretty astonishing information, such as the small matter of $17,000 for a new set of tyres, and if you drive it at full throttle (around 250 mph), it’ll take just 12 minutes to empty the 26.4 gallon fuel tank.
Flavor
The producers told me if I were to address Flavor Flav, I must say “Flavor” not “Flava”. He HATES it when people call him “Flava”. When he announces his name he happens to say “FLAVOR FLAV!” it just sounds like “FLAVA FLAV!”. It is also acceptable to call him “Flav” if that is your preference.
James Brown at the Apollo
A pained expression came over the woman’s face. “If I don’t come back, please tell James Brown I’m sorry,” she said. Mr. McWhorter said he would try.
Bubba Sparxx is not Syd Barrett
After coming home from a good afternoon of good drinking with good friends, I followed Sheila’s instructions to download a ringtone from RingRingMobile. Unfortunately, my inebriation prevented me from following the instructions to the letter. I now have a new ringtone, but it is the song from this video:
Thankfully the lo’ beeps don’t translate as lyrics.
Texas schools
None actually claimed a dog ate their homework.
“Gossip is . . . “
From “Everything You’d Rather Not Know About Eno,” Chrissie Hynde, NME, 2 February 1974.
“Mexican pornography is an interesting island of thought because they seem to be heavily into excretory functions. The traditional American view is that anything issued from the body is dirty. It’s incredibly puritanical and it resents bodily fluids, so if one is trying to debase a woman, you cover them with that and hence you get the fabulous term ‘Golden Showers’ – the term for pissing on someone, which some well-known rock musicians are said to be very involved in . . . ”
Here come the warm jets?
“That’s certainly a reference.”
Costs
It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms open. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
–Morris West, Courtesy of Gary O’Connor
“Gossip is Philosophy”
Brian Eno, May 1995:
Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them. This is why I can’t use them for very long. Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her. I know this sounds sort of inversely racist to say, but I think the African connection is so important. You know why music was the center of our lives for such a long time? Because it was a way of allowing Africa in. In 50 years, it might not be Africa; it might be Brazil. But I want so desperately for that sensibility to flood into these other areas, like computers.
[snip]
In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that “interactive” anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is “unfinished.” Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a “nature,” and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable – the “nature” of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more “primitive” than ours take this entirely for granted – surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place. Does this make clearer why I welcome that African thing? It’s not nostalgia or admiration of the exotic – it’s saying, Here is a bundle of ideas that we would do well to learn from.
link (a long article, but fascinating in its prescience)
