Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

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a windows-open weekend


Sunday night went long at a social event, so I didn’t get time to do my normal writing nor my normal posting of pictures. This didn’t bother me. In fact, as the clock approached midnight and we were just settling down to a dessert of apple pie and ice cream, the realization hit me: “I’m not writing tonight.” Usually, if I’m out somewhere and know I haven’t written, I’ll get preoccupied thinking about having enough time to get something posted after getting home. Letting it go, so to speak, is nice. As soon as I square my OCD-self with going outside of routine, I get all rebel-proud and cool-calm. Yeah, so, being that I didn’t post Monday I suppose I can do the in-brief weekend roundup right here and right now:

It was an “open windows” kinda weekend, with the weather pleasantly warm and sunny. (This was a stray sentence, but I like it so it made the cut.)

There’s no more sleeping in at my house. When Keaton gets up, the family gets up. This new trend often finds me up and about before 7am on weekends, something that, until now, was rather foreign to me. In fact, I’m writing this paragraph right now early one Saturday morning. Sharaun left for Wal Mart at 8am, as by that time we had both been up and ready for some time. Strange, you know, how things work like that.

Changed the brakes on the Ford this weekend, and flew completely solo for the first time ever. I know, changing the brakes is literally six screws and a jack – but I was extremely proud of myself nonetheless. Being incredibly not mechanically inclined, any successfully mechanical task is belt-notch worthy for me. In fact, my success in this simple task has ignited a small fire of desire within me to get to know my vehicle more intimately. Indeed, I find myself pursuing the Chilton’s manual and trying to “learn,” soak up some information. I go back to the long exhaust manifold job that’s been in “I gotta get that done” phase limbo for a couple years now, I catch myself checking local Pick-n-Pull hours of operation and thinking about scavenging a new bucket seat or center console lid or passenger-side mirror. Some day I’d like to know what a differential does, or how to realign a transaxle (I have no idea if you can “realign” a transaxle… it just sounded all “gear”). Hell, I even added a TiVo season pass for Two Guy Garage I was so passionate about the grease under my nails and finally getting to use that economy-sized jug of Fast Orange I bought years ago.

Switching gears to Keaton, she had her six-months checkup at the baby-doctor last week. And, in case you were thinking of picking her in the fantasy baby draft, here are her latest stats: weight: 25th-50th percentile; height: 50th-75th percentile; head: 90th percentile. So, if she can manage not to pull her neck holding up that massive melon of hers, I think she’s got the makings of a strong season ahead of her. She’s definitely got the head-size advantage over most of the field… although she could stand to put one some pounds.

I also got her gallery updated, albeit a day late. Unfortunately, I moved to allowing only registered users to comment until I can create a better spam filter, so you’ll have to register (one-time only) should you desire to comment. You can check out the new pictures right here.

Today the iPod did some bizarre “random” shuffling. Back-to-back I heard Donovan’s “Lalena” and Deep Purple’s cover of the same song. And, as if to mock the rand() function even further, later in the shuffle set I heard Al Kooper’s “Season of the Witch” followed (no joke!) by Donovan’s original version. Insane.

In closing, did you know that, per capita, if America’s national debt were spread across the population, each person would carry a balance of -$2778.07 (balance/per capita and balance/GDP data). Ouch. The logic of us being dead-last on the “balance sheet” of all the countries in the world confuses me. Someone care to explain?

Oh, and this just in, LG15 is busted. A 19 year-old New Zealand born actress who recently moved to LA to jumpstart a career. Looks like it worked.

Goodnight.

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officially good


Three-day weekends are officially good. Managed to mow the lawn, do some long-waiting-to-be-done “fix it” stuff around the house, and attend three barbecues. Back to work tomorrow, not something I’m looking forward to at all. I keep thinking about my weeks upon weeks of state-funded “bonding leave” coming up in December, and the blissful days spent not going into the office. Yeah, I’m way ready for that. Mostly music; deal.

Oh, I did update Keaton’s gallery Monday, check it out (and yes, I added this sentence late, post-publishing).

I am chomping at the bit to see the movie Jesus Camp ever since catching the trailer on YouTube and reading David Byrne’s blog entry on his thoughts after seeing a screening. I have to see this movie, it looks ultimately compelling. Hopefully, it’ll make the rounds at one of the local artsy joints here in town.

Seriously, all the hubbub about the Pitchfork leak of Joanna Newsom’s new album made me positively itchy to hear the thing. The indie crowd is in a state of multiple-orgasm over it, leaving me perplexed. See, I couldn’t for the life of me get into her previously lauded effort, The Milk Eyed Mender. I’ll say up front that I’m not a huge fan of this whole “psych folk” or “freak folk” movement that’s been so hot over the past years – the sound is just a bit too “weak” for me. Anyway, I used my leak-locating superpowers and tracked down a YSI link for the album (which was just a rip of the “oops’d” shared PF directory).

What do I think about this album? What the hell? The message boards of the thick-rimmed set are lighting up, already proclaiming this five-track effort “album of the year.” Seriously? I’ll admit it’s interesting, the lyrics are somewhat engaging and there’s no denying an abundance of songwriting talent here, but it’s about as unapproachable to me as Natalie Portman – I’ll never get it. With lush orchestrated background approximating a Disney score and Newsom’s fragile annoying voice warbling out in a worse-than-Bjork timbre, I just don’t get it. Best album of the year? You’ve got to be effing kidding me. You guys can have your gay-ass freak folk, or whatever you call it. Give me something like The Figurines or Midlake or The Islands or The Decemberists… you can have this pansy crap.

By the way, I’m gonna get like tons more chicks than you when I’m blasting Wolfmother from my open car windows in response to your dainty Newsom “Monkey and Bear” harpischord balladry. That is, unless you want to date the Lilith Fair. Personally, I’d rather date Ozzfest.

Goodnight.

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no tears in sleepyland


Eating dinner tonight, I brought my fork down on a yellow pepper to cut it for easier eating and some pepper-juice sprayed in my eye. Sucked. Poor Keaton had a tough time tonight, teething and screaming. So, we cancelled our plans for the evening and got her to bed instead (no tears in sleepyland). I just got done whipping up some brownies to fix Sharaun’s sweet craving (I’m the baker in the family), and in 20min we will eat them. Small blog today, not much in a writing mood… suppose I shot my wad over the course of the multi-thousand-word week. Here we go.

My tiny blog experienced a small bit of increased exposure today due to a rash of internet searches for the word “crumbelievable.” A search for said word, which is a Kraft cheese marketing campaign, on Google turns up my January entry on it as the 3rd return. Not bad. The “crumbelievable” search has always been a leader in the blog stats, but I didn’t have a good explanation for yesterday’s spike – that is, until I went home to make a sandwich for lunch and instructed the TiVo to serve up Wednesday’s Colbert Report. Turns out Colbert did a bit on American “cultural cohesiveness” in which he cited the Kraft Crumbles crumbelievable television ads as the campaign which can bring people together, a sort of “Where’s the beef? or “I’ve fallen…” for the modern age. Ahhh… the ebb and flow of pop culture, at least it’s good for copy.

Time for brownies, goodnight.

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hairyguy30


Wednesday! The day I take my trash down to the curb at night, and wake up to it being gone! America is great, it’s that kinda freedom-magic that makes terrorists hate us so much. Sitting here rooting around my super-secret leak-friendly haunts like a pig hunting truffles, looking for some new Justin Tenderlegs songs for Sharaun. She’s always so happy when I can grab a couple more tunes off his upcoming album – tonight I got two, maybe I’ll get laid. Keaton fell asleep on my chest tonight, I didn’t want to put her in her crib – but my arm fell asleep and I figured she’d be more comfortable there anyway. Good dad.

First off, let me say how happy I am that yesterday’s co-op mega-post drew the comments it did. You guys had some great input. Hunting, fishing, biodiesel, and a ram pump are great “misses” on my part and make me think that one of the requirements for my “ideal” fantasy scenario should be a piece of property with flowing water. Now, having rights to fish or impede that water is another thing altogether, but, who knows, I’m sure there are still parcels of land available somewhere in this great country that come with limited water rights.

I found the biodiesel and ram pump comments most interesting. In fact, I’m somewhat ashamed to say I’d never heard of a ram pump prior to stinkmeat’s comment yesterday (go here for more info on this beautifully simple piece of engineering). These things have some impressive specs, from the Ram Company website:

We have a customer in Montana using our 3″ cast aluminum pump ($2100), pumping water 270 feet vertical lift and over 1,500 feet from the pump and is getting 2 1/2 to 3 gallons per minute. They have a 33 foot drop into the pump with a 100 foot drive pipe.

After reading about them, I’ve now decided I want one for the co-op. Also, the biodiesel thing was something I initially chose not to touch, but it’s conceivable to just go all-out and spend the cash up-front to convert vehicles and equipment (the notion of a biodiesel generator is very interesting). While I’m not 100% convinced on the ease of manufacturing biodiesel (my hangup comes mainly from the source of raw, unrefined material), I think it’s worth considering (not officially part of the fantasy, but flirting with it pretty hard).

Yes, my friends, all good points indeed. I wonder if I could take a tax writeoff for traveling around the country scouting plots of land for things like an elevated water source, proximity to hunting and fishing, soil conditions for planting, and average sun-hours and windspeed? Because seriously, when I see this place in my head it’ so awesome. And, before I leave the topic – I stumbled on this link today and found it pretty interesting (and germane). Hippie crap over now, all you conservatives can take off your blinders and start reading again.

The saga of WordPress eating my posts while I’m still working on them continues. It’s so unpredictable now that I’ve been cutting and pasting my posts into a text editor prior to hitting the “save and continue editing” button (the button which seems to shuffle 2/3 of my posts to the nether regions of the internet). It’s actually really pissing me off. Seems to happen on bigger posts more than smaller ones, but I haven’t really “studied” it or anything so I’m not sure. All I know is that it’s been making writing more difficult and less enjoyable.

It got so frustrating when it erased my co-op post the other day multiple times that I started searching for it. After much hunting, turns out it’s a Firefox bug – not a WordPress bug. It’s a known, reproducible bug with Firefox – and the only decent workaround right now is to either use Internet Explorer to edit long posts, or install the Firefox IE Tab plugin and have your WordPress “Write Post” page default to opening in IE. Only problem I have there is that, for some stupidass reason, a carriage return in the “Write Post” window using IE gets automatically double-spaced. What a sucky solution, but I’m now doing it rather than risk losing reams of writing.

I’ll admit it, I’ve been totally engrossed over the past week with the whole lonelygirl15 thing. And yes, I realize I’m about a month late to the party here… what can I say, I’m way out of touch in my old age. I name-dropped her the other day, but was too embarrassed to admit the sheer level of my interest by writing an actual paragraph about it. After watching all her videos, and Daniel’s responses, a week ago – I’m pretty convinced it’s some kind of orchestrated fake. Fake or not, it’s sure been getting attention lately – making the cover of the New York Times website is nothing to poop at.

But just what is lonelygirl15? A viral marketing campaign for the Thelemic Church of Satan? (Don’t worry, you’ll get it after you get rabid enough to start following the LG15 “dissection” threads out there and come to the “Crowley photo” bit.) Some NYU grad student’s thesis project in meta-trends and media manipulation (a theory straight from the pages of stereogum)? Teaser to get the MySpace crowd pre-hooked on a new MTV show? I love this kind of online mystery, in the same way I love the Lost Experience and once love the Smashing Pumpkins Machina mystery. Mixed-media clue-hunting and puzzle-solving have always been fun to me. Can’t wait to see how this one ends up.

Well, sorry I strayed from my normal high standards of academia to scrounge around in pop culture. I promise I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled programming just as soon as I finish reading my brother’s blog (he really has one, I found it last month – must run in the family) and watching the last lonelygirl15 video again to analyze how “professional” the lighting is.

And, as a parting shot – one more interesting post to relay: The Most Isolated Country In the World. Goodnight.

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the camera lives in the diaper bag


Happy Sunday folks! Had a nice long-seeming weekend. Mowed the lawn, hung out with friends, had a slight beer overdose, bought and assembled some patio furniture, pulled weeds… yeah it was a good weekend. Need more like that, or a vacation… one or the other. Not much for writing today, but I did manage to upload Keaton’s five months photos to her gallery (it’s not huge, but it bests last weeks small offering), enjoy! I can hardly believe she’s five months old now, it really has gone by fast (just like everyone said it would, imagine that).

Sunday before I Sharaun and I headed out the door for church, I, for some reason, started thinking about an old “cyber” friend of mine I’d met through my old days of Beatles trading. This fellow, Dave, and I became more than just regular tape-traders (yes, this was back before the days of sub-25¢ CR-Rs. We exchanged e-mail on a fairly regular basis, and eventually met in the flesh at a Beatlefest (kinda like a Star Trek convention but for Beatles-nerds). Over time, our correspondence dropped off, but we’d sometimes get or send a nostalgic “catch up” mail. Searching through my old mail for the last valid address I had for Dave, the best I could do was something from 2004. I figured I’d give it a shot, and wrote a three-sentence “hey there” mail to see if the address bounced. Later that day, I logged on to write Monday’s blog entry and saw a new comment from Dave and his wife. My first thought was that they’d got my mail, loaded my site from the link in my signature, and commented on the blog. Nope. Turns out they found me randomly, also spurred by a random “I wonder what that guy I used to like talking to” thought. Being that we both had this thought on the same day, some two years after our last correspondence – I’m totally convinced we had some of mind-meld going on. Crazy.

Got a great idea for the Halloween party this weekend, can’t leak it though – I want it to be a surprise. I love that our Halloween party is going to be four-years running this year. Can’t wait.

Goodnight.

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wasps in the grass


Slow night, spent most of my time and energy making a new short film. Starring Keaton, this one showcases her relatively newfound vocal talents. Go ahead and give it a good watchin’, you know you want to. (Sharaun liked this one so much she urged me to submit it to YouTube, so I could maybe… win money or something…)

Keeping in somewhat of a theme I’ve got going lately, I stumbled on this middle east related link today: an illustrated/annotated “who hates who” matrix of middle east countries/affiliations and other world powers. Good for quick reference when dealing with stories about the incredibly complex and history-rooted relationships over there.

I mentioned yesterday that I mowed the lawn this past weekend, and that was true. What I left out were the gory details of the event. I mowed the lawn at 1pm in the afternoon, at that time wunderground.com said the temperature in Whereilive, CA was 102°. That’s hot. About halfway through the job I took off my shirt in an attempt to cool down (only in the backyard, I’ve not become comfortable enough with my hairy back to go shirtless out front yet). Any outside laborer or nomadic desert dweller will tell you that, in the obscene heat and burning sun, clothes are your friend – and taking them off only makes things worse. But, I didn’t care. Pushing that mower around, baking and sweating, my core temperature must’ve been up there. By the time I was done, I was red-cheeked and covered in sweat. Coming inside I felt like a hot coal, my insides radiating heat, only time and a cool shower able to help my finally get comfortable. Yeah, the sacrifices I make for that lawn…

By the way, did you know that wasps like to hide in long, cool grass? And, furthermore, mowing over them sends them up in angry clouds by the hundreds? As if the heat wasn’t enough, I was fleeing wasps the whole time.

That’s it for today, until tomorrow my friends. Love ya.

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you’ve failed as a firefighter


Wednesday night and I’m having a productive week. I should qualify that: I’m having a productive week personally, but professionally it’s been a complete loss. My head hasn’t been in the game at work, but it’s OK because the environment is currently an unhinged one and I’m not alone.

Let’s do one liners, eh? I know, I know, they’re never really “one line.”

Last night I had a dream that I was trapped in a funhouse hall of mirrors. It was just like all the Scooby Doo and USA Up All Night Horror movies: dim lighting and an endless maze of my own reflection with an evil voice calling out to me from somewhere unseen. Sharaun woke me up because I was making one of those breathy dream-screams in real life (I do that sometimes, I’m a chatty sleeper). What the heck does a dream like that mean?

Noticed that Bush used his presidential veto for the first time this week to shoot down additional funding for stem cell research. I’ll state right up front that I think this is stupid, but rather than try and construct paragraph supporting my opinion I’ll just defer to this outstanding reader comment on the Newsvine coverage of the happening:

Here’s how I view whether an embryo should be considered such a valid life or not:

You are a firefighter, called to the scene of a horrific fire. The fire is in a local in vitro clinic – you put on your mask and rush inside. In the smoke and warmth, you hear a girl crying. You find her, standing next to a refrigerator holding hundreds of frozen embryos. You can only carry one. Which do you take?

The girl of course.

So does this mean that you’ve failed as a firefighter? You have forsaken the lives of potentially hundreds of children for the life of one child.

But when it comes to research, which already has proven more than helpful, suddenly the tables turn, and the embryos at stake are more important than the thousands threatened each year by cancer, Alzheimer’s, spine injuries, and the multitude of other things that stem cell research is working for.

I call BS.

Yeah, and I’ll be right there with you calling BS too.

Found this editorial take on the current Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah thing I’ve been trying to follow pretty interesting. Although it clearly casts Israel as the bigger aggressor, it actually helped me (make sure and read the comments to for some good counter arguments that help round out the thought for those not passionate enough to have picked sides).

Wanna make your brain hurt? Head over to this site and watch the cool Flash animation that explains how to conceptualize a 4th, 5th, 6th, and on up through 10th dimension. Just click on on the zero at the bottom of the twirly numbers on the right of the page. I’m this close to ordering the book, as the Flash teaser is interesting as crap.

Goodnight.