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b-to-the-l-to-the-o-to-the-g


Late Thursday night, didn’t plan on writing at all – no inspiration. Sometime around 10:30pm I killed the lights and decided to head to bed, Sharaun pre-sleeping me by about 30min already. Tomorrow’s her birthday, you know (today, as you read this). Anyway, I ended up in the computer room sitting at the desk – sometimes that works better for writing than the laptop/couch combo. Queued up the Andrew Bird album, longing to remember last Christmas – what it reminds me of. So now I’m listening to it, sitting here without a shirt on, my hair freshly cut. I’ve noticed I started going shirtless around the house more in the evenings. This is a good sign to me that my old age is beginning to blind me to the true shock-value of my body hair. I always wondered if the hairy dudes at the beach had an iron-clad sense of self assurance, or were just oblivious. As I get older, I’m thinking it’s more than likely oblivious… as I am slowly ceasing to care. I could talk about this forever, you know. Let’s not let that happen, for the good of the… b-to-the-l-to-the-o-to-the-g.

Not a bad week in terms of stuff-done-getting, or something. Mowed the lawn Wednesday, got my hairs cut Thursday, and on top of it all had a prideswell of a week at work. Y’know, even though it’s a good chance to get to listen to a couple hours of unadulterated music with ample time for a wandering mind, I still think I hate mowing the lawn. Oh sure, I talk about secretly liking it somewhere deep within me – but mostly I hate having to do it. I wish my lawn was goth, so it’d cut itself.

It freaks me out when I look at myself in pictures and I realize I actually brush my little tuft of bangs to the right, instead of how I see myself doing it every morning in the mirror.

More on photo fraud (you’ll need sound).

The more I look at Keaton’s face, the more I’m convinced I’m getting closer to seeing what she’s going to really look like. You know what I mean, baby’s faces are poor indications of their aged appearance – but I’ve almost convinced myself I can catch a glimpse of the bits of permanence hiding under all the furiously growing bone and muscle. Sometimes, when she smiles, I can almost picture it – catch a glimpse of her as a young woman: strong-willed and intelligent, athletic, impeccable taste in music and well versed in its history, cautiously optimistic. Then I think, “I have no idea.” Nothing I think I see is any real indicator, most of those traits are more like projected hopes. But man, when I hoist that little girl overhead in a Superman pose – my huge hands wrapped around her body where I can feel her tiny ribs under my thumbs – and she lets loose with a smile so pure it opens her mouth pelican-wide, stretches her pink lips thin, and pushes her cheeks up into her eyes… it’s magic in my heart people; pure magic.

You’re smiling at me, aren’t you?

Happy birthday Sharaun, I love you. Goodnight.

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at least i got the blog


Wednesday night and I’m sitting here trying to be anything but unimpressed with the new Dears leak, so far it ain’t workin’. I’m also fast at work grabbing the new Decemberists LP, which I learned also leaked a couple days ago while searching for some new song about “ghostriding the whip” for Sharaun. Speaking of workin’, I put in a good effort today – felt like I dug around and made some stuff happen… I like that feeling. Now Sharaun’s watching some eight-hour dancing-show extravaganza and I want to tear my eyes out – but at least I got the blog to keep me busy.

Got my unopened box of 15th series Garbage Pail Kids the other day, and promptly violated the collector’s code by tearing open each and every still-sealed pack. When it was all over, I had one complete set, one nearly complete set (lacking two cards) and one complete ‘B’ set, not to mention a pile of wax pack wrappers and a neatly stacked tower of twenty year old gum. I’ll sell the extra sets on Ebay to make back my outlay. Then there’s the gum… what do you do with twenty year old gum? You wonder about how it tastes, that’s what you do. You wonder and wonder and wonder until, finally, you just pick up one of the brittle pink sticks and poke it into your cheek. It won’t chew like regular gum though, it’s more accurate to say that it shatters like peanut brittle. Moreover, it’s age has made it impervious to saliva, and it never quite “gels” into one mass – remaining, rather, as a thousand tiny shards. Then you taste the bleu cheese, and you know it’s not right. Something in this gum has got the mold, and it’s like a fragrant fungus just bloomed on my tongue. Ick. Don’t eat twenty year old gum.

Some time ago, I realized that my pneumatic PVC-frame scarecrow prop I had planned for this Halloween was unrealistic. It’s not that the idea isn’t good, because it is, it’s that using air to power a prop that simple is just overkill. I guess I just wanted to do something more with pneumatics this year, but running a hose and buying a push/pull cylinder and solenoid seems like too much investment for an effect that could that could be realized with a small electric motor. All that needs to be done is to jiggle the joint strings to get the desired “electrocuted” effect, and I could do that with a windshield wiper or washing machine motor… something really easy. I mean, if I have to run power to the prop to trip the pneumatic solenoid anyway, why not just run power to a motor? The thought was that I was making the prop unnecessarily complicated just so I could use pneumatics.

Then… I stared researching it some more… and I’ve almost flip-flopped again. Air’s more reliable, and all I have to do is power a dead simple solenoid – no relays, no gear motors, etc. Still though, I run up against my long-time Halloween prop nemesis: timing/automation. I can buy a solenoid, I can get sound to come out of a speaker, but how do I make them happen on-cue or in sequence? This year, I debated buying a professional prop controller/timer – and I’m still undecided on that, although they are pretty affordable. Something else I stumbled on the other day, a Windows application that you can use on cheap PC-controlled timer/relay board. $50 for the software and $30 for the hardware (not counting the PC which will control the timer board) and you’ve got an extremely flexible complex prop automator.

At first I was excited, when I saw that the DIY jobs can support five inputs instead of the PicoBoo, where one PicoBoo = one input. This means that one PicoBoo could likely trigger only one prop (maybe two if you’re creative), while the Haunt Controller PC board could potentially power up to five. But, all is not as sweet as the first impressions, as those relays seem kinda weak… 12V and max out at 3-5 amps, and the PicoBoos have two straight up AC outlets on them (albeit offering only 8 amps combined). For my money, then, the AC-outlet F105 PicoBoo controllers are more versatile for amateur-type haunt automation.

Whew, glad that’s over, I was getting bored.

Before I go, here’s an interesting note written by a chemistry nerd on the plausibility of the London plane terrorists mixing and detonating TATP on a commercial airliner. Regardless of the plausibility of using this particular explosive, there’s always something that’ll work. I don’t remember who I heard say it but, if we can’t keep weapons out of prisons – how can we expect to keep them off airplanes?

Goodnight.

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floor ice cream


Tuesday, and I’ve got a mixed bag for ya. Had a lot of time tonight… thought about breaking this up into multiple entries to ensure a wall-to-wall week, but sometimes it’s good to knock down the cobwebs, clear house so to speak. If you could try and not get too wrapped up in any one paragraph, it may help ease the awkward transitions betwixt varied topics. Y’know, I don’t normally comment on my own blogs, but I got a comment yesterday from an old friend. I love getting comments from people like this – makes my day, actually. Thanks for the comment Sheila, I’m sure Andy will be interested to hear you’re still dreaming about him. Oh, and maygsters yes it was your husband – and… 12:16am? Sheesh.

Making a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream some time after dinner this evening, I spooned in a scoop and lost the bowl to the principle of physics known as “lever action.” The bowl tipped first up, then over, as it jumped off the kitchen counter and headed towards the floor. I watched in slow motion as it turned over, and braced my ears for the sound of shattering. When I heard nothing, I moved my eyes to the point of impact – thankfully the bowl had landed, upside down, on a pair of Sharaun’s flip-flops. The foam rubber providing a soft landing pad for the bowl, and the ice cream falling gently to the faux tile floor below. I did what any discerning ice cream fan would and snatched the scoops up back into the bowl. Floor ice cream is good.

Did some WordPress tinkering tonight. Added a plugin to give some simple Google Analytics reports in my admin panel (helpful quick-glance stats without having to login to stattraq), and added a “most viewed” plugin and report-out data to the sidebar. The most wanted is interesting, as it tracks which of sounds familiar’s posts are visited most often (you can see how many visitors per post by hovering over the links). Also took the opportunity of mucking with the sidebar to remove the long unused audioscrobbler/LastFM link – as I listen to nearly all my music on the iPod now and Winamp tracking just doesn’t make sense anymore. Anyway, just another step in the embetterment of the blog.

Every evening, I’ll usually do a quick scroll though the blog comments that Akisment has branded as spam – just on the off chance it’s ID’d something incorrectly (almost never happens anymore). Tonight, I found a series of spams that intrigued me. For some background, there’s an oft-used spam technique where the spammer uses copied-and-pasted strings of text from pieces of literature in their missive. Sometimes the spam comment is just a few sentences from a book, sometimes the spammer replaces random words in these strings with the spam subject – yielding funny results like this:

All this obfuscation is merely an attempt to bypass the Bayesian style spam filters which are so successful in weeding out the comment wheat from the comment chaff. The random string of words is meant to fool the filter into passing the comment as legitimate. It hardly ever works.

The comments that caught my eye tonight, though, were hawking the comment-spam staple Human Growth Hormone (HGH, for short), and read like this:

I just realized that the whole point of doing interviews was to promote this movie, so see it three times.

I have a lot of real life experience with hustling and doing stupid stuff.

I had had a troubled past, but like most rappers they go out and talk about it to kind of help their career.

I had been approached by a couple of people as far as making movies because of my success in music, but it was always to play the white rapper in Sister Act 2, or something that would just kind of put the final nail into my coffin of my career.

To me, those sounded like real-life quotes. Indeed, copying and pasting one into Google revealed that there were quotes from Mr. Mark Wahlberg. That’s the once-famous “rapper” Marky-Mark, for those who don’t remember. Back in the 90s, he could be seen curling cinderblocks and parading around in his underwear while trying his best to sell a menacing swagger. Now his quotes are being misappropriated to sell Human Growth Hormone. Apparently, this stuff is marketed as being able to help you burn fat, build muscle, and prolong your life. Doesn’t sound like something Marky-Mark would need at all, I can remember how in shape he is because of the chin-ups he did in the “Good Vibrations” video. I’m still waiting for the C&C Music Factory spam hawking cheap propecia, or, Things That Make You Grow Hair.

Tech related, in an attempt to go completely anonymous with regard to my online activities, I once again tried installing Tor the other night. I have to say, the installation procedure and GUI are much nicer than the last time I tried out the applications. Firefox and µTorrent were setup and using Tor/Privoxy in mere seconds. Only one problem, the dang thing still slows your connection down so much it’s just not worth it. Yeah, I’d like the anonymity, but not at the price of my connection… sorry.

Let’s do some music talk, eh? Eh.

I’ve been eating up PF’s new 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s feature, these lists always give people a lot to talk about. So far, they’re doing pretty good by my judging – even throwing in some obscure tracks that I’ve not heard of. My goal now is to create an iPod playlist of these 200 tunes, just for the sake of doing it. I have a lot of them, and can “find” the rest with little effort I’m sure. Heck, I bet there’ll be a torrent of the whole thing up on the major trackers before too long – such is the age of digital media.

I loved these two posts, here and here, over at marathonpacks a while back. What a great idea. One of the bits that really intrigued me was that this guy actually took a college course called “The Music of the Beatles.” Man, I would’ve killed for that in place of COBOL or Statics or something equally as gay (no disrespect, it’s not my fault the word is slang for “dumb”). Anyway, when I first read them way back I decided I wanted to do my own list – but soon gave up. It’s too hard, and anyway, it’s already been done. Besides, I’ve already covered music that gives me chills – so I think I’m good.

This post is spiraling out of control fast… I’m not sure I can reign it in anymore… Maybe we should poke fun at some of the recent search strings leading people to sounds familiar? OK then, why the eff not… we’re already past the point of repair with this mess:

masturbate with prosthetic hooks
Y’arrgh… don’t ye be doin’ that.

andre the giant penis when erect
Who is researching this statistic?

Easy South Florida Crack Whores
Yeah, I’m sure there’s a list of these on the internet.

there is someone in this school is it a human what is it
This one just gives me chilling visions of someone squatting in an old abandoned school building. An old abandoned school building with an internet connection.

“dave is a pussy”
WTF?

how do birds do it
I’m not the only one.

That’s it, I’ve wrecked it. I’m outta here. Goodnight.

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wolf!


Monday night. I desperately need a haircut, but I didn’t feel like going to get one. I also need to mow the lawn, although not quite as desperately, but I didn’t feel like doing that either. Was supposed to fly to Oregon today, but that didn’t happen. Instead whiled away the day working at the same old desk.

Sitting there, at that desk, I got an e-mail from a friend with no subject and no text – just a link. The link? A case study on Biointensive Agroecology on a Community Farm in California, USA. I took the lack of any explanatory text as a silent attempt to get me to realize my dream of a self-sustaining, off-grid, cooperative community with friends – goading me to drop out. One day maybe… but not today: I worked until 5pm and headed home to my mortgage. Two-paragraph intro; let’s do this thing.

Today’s political rant inspired by this article. (And I swear I wrote this before it hit the Digg frontpage.)

As time goes on, I find myself more and more willing to accept some Leftist theories and ideas which I used to relegate to paranoia and nutjob-conspiracy. The one thing I’m thinking about in particular is the current administration’s need for the occasional terrorist threat to clear the voting public’s mind of its many missteps and once again unite them through fear and misguided patriotism. Six months ago I would’ve refused to believe that news of foiled terrorist “plots” and elevated DHS threat levels were simply products the political machines. I had a hard time believing that these bits of news were purposely revealed for public consumption in times of sagging polls or increased anti-war or anti-administration sentiment. Lately, though, I’m not so sure.

I haven’t taken this to the next conspiracy-theorist level, where you’d begin wondering if the events or busts themselves are fabrications – but I am starting to wonder about the timing. The notion that the powers that be may sit on news, exaggerate the reality of a threat, or strategically time the swooping in of authorities, isn’t all that unbelievable for me anymore. Part of me is still hesitant to admit that, afraid I’ll be seen as increasingly gullible in what I believe, but another part of me feels like I’ve simply finally let go of idealism and accept what’s been plain to see for a while.

I’m sure lots of Democrats might say that the war is breaking the current administration, and the approval ratings would seem to back that up. However, if you take some time to look at the approval trends for wartime 2nd-term presidents, Bush’s declining numbers are pretty much on-track – the only real difference being his initial approval rating at the beginning of the 2nd term (the lowest of any 2nd-term wartime president). Despite the trending suggesting that the drop is expected, I think the overall frustration with the ongoing war is increasing. I’m still not quite sure how much import to assign to Lamont’s anti-war platform’s victory over Leiberman’s Republican-in-sheep’s-clothing one, but I do think at the most basic level it demonstrates the party’s position on the issue. On a larger scale, it reminds both parties that the war is going to be perhaps even more divisive than in the last election. Big revelation though, right? The left is against war, terrorism is going to be an election year issue; you don’t say.

Anyway, I’ve gotten off-track. What I meant to say with all this was that I’ve decided to not let the threat or fear of terrorism influence me much anymore. Terrorism is here to stay, it’ll be something I live with for the rest of my life, and something my children will also live with. But, living with terrorism doesn’t have to mean living in fear under the shadow if terrorism. We live with life and death duality all the time, but not all those “what ifs” dictate our political leanings. I’d no sooner vote for a candidate who promised to protect the nation against car accidents than I would the guy who promises less hurricanes. Fear of the unknown may motivate voters for a while, but it simply does not make for a sustainable platform – sooner or later what was once new and fear-inspiring becomes old as people adjust.

Fear-based politics just take time to be absorbed and ignored by the populous, especially when the impetus for the fear is by and large inescapable. Soon enough, people will “get used” to the threat of terrorism – this doesn’t mean they’ll be comfortable ignoring it or cease to take steps to defend against it, they just won’t jump as high when they see an Arab on a plane. Eventually the sensationalism of terrorism will give way to the simple reality that it’s not going away and you’re more likely to be killed by lightning than by a terrorist. When that happens, people will be less likely to act irrationally out of fear, and will likely stop casting votes in a futile attempt to “eliminate” it. Who knows, maybe they’ll even began to cast a doubtful eye at the timing of plot foilings and cell arrestings…

Common sense precautions are the new hotness, while heavy-handed presumptive offensives are old and busted.

To all my hawk friends – tomorrow will be less liberal, I promise. Goodnight.

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salt, pepper & memories


Sunday night, my folks were in town for the weekend.

When I was a kid, I can remember going with my parents and brother up to my grandparents’ house in Southern California. Being not far removed from Santa Maria, my grandfather was a great fan of what’s known in Southern California as Santa Maria style barbecue. I can remember watching my grandfather cook trip-tip, burgers, and hot dogs for the kids over split red oak on a brick barbecue (or “grill,” for you crackers). The barbecue was a large brick installation with a simple grate that could be raised and lowered via a chain pulley system – really just a brick and mortar housing for cooking over an open woodfire. This chain-and-grate adjustable-height grill is typical to Santa Maria style barbecue, you’ll even find this style grill in some public parks in and around Santa Maria itself. And on the weekend you’ll find folks cooking tri-tip and serving it with its must-accompany side item, Lompoc pinquito beans.

An aside: For my entire Southern Californian childhood, I used the term “barbecue” to refer to the actual act of cooking meat over wood. When I moved to Florida around age twelve, however, I learned quickly that Southern folk consider that very same act of cooking to be “grilling,” and it’s only referred to as “barbecuing” if there’s actually barbecue sauce involved in the cooking. Since Santa Maria style barbecue doesn’t involve barbecue sauce at all (you’re apt to get shot by a vaquero if you put anything other than salt, pepper, and garlic on a Santa Maria style tri-tip), the two coasts have incongruous definitions. Now then, back to the point of this whole thing.

Semantics aside, though, I’ve long desired to grill like my grandfather did. Tri-tip over a dead simple woodfire and, preferably, on a barbecue built by my own hands. It was this desire that had me eyeballing potential brick barbecue installation spots in the backyard this weekend, and scouring the net for plans. I found lots of plans, some that looked perfect for the backyard. However, considering the flirtatious nature of my love for the next “project,” I decided maybe I’d be better off not adding another unfinished masterpiece to the list. So, I instead began the search for a pre-made unit that I could buy. Slowly, I uncovered a few sites – finally ending at a place called the Santa Maria BBQ Outfitters, which specializes in Santa Maria (also sometimes referred to as San Luis, short for San Luis Obispo) style “pit” grills. These are just like I remember, crank-operated grates suspended above a pit for a woodfire. Sharaun has made some small protest, but I’ve pretty much decided this guy will be in our backyard within the month.

Once I get her set up, and find a local supplier of red oak – I want to throw an old style barbecue, reminiscent of the kind my grandfather threw for his family. Heck, I’ll even complete the picture with a bloody mary in-hand.

Goodnight.

(Thought I forgot Keaton’s weekly pictures? Wrong!)

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terror!


Thursday night, blessed weekend but a day away. Again I’m home alone, Sharaun having joined friends for the evening. Keaton fought sleep, but I eventually won because I’m bigger and stronger and wasn’t the one who was sleepy. Listening to some All-Time Quarterback, flashbacks from years ago when I first discovered Death Cab. Sitting at my desk in the back room, on my butt in front of a CRT again – as if I don’t spend enough time atrophying like this at “work.” Had beer tonight, at the watering hole after work to honor one of the fallen… work is still headmen and axes. Shirtless.

And now, one liners (or, taking out the trash):

The internet has everything, you know? Read how to synthesize TATP using only three things – all of which you can buy at Wal Mart right now. This is the very same uber-unstable explosive, referred to as “The Mother of Satan,” that terrorists were planning to use in the simultaneous detonation of planes from England to the US. This is nasty, but dead-simple to make, stuff – and is what was used in the 2005 London bombings and what filled the “shoebomber’s” clog on his failed suicide attempt. The internet has everything, you know?

Was in the restroom at work this morning trying to “blot” out some coffee I’d dribbled on my shirt when a guy walked in with his own coffee cup in-hand. I watched him in the mirror as I continued to dab my brown stains with a damp paper towel – watched him walk right into the john with his cup still in-hand. I saw him set it on the toilet paper holder affixed to the stall wall, close the door, and drop his pantaloons. Then I heard him pick up the cup. Taking your coffee into the shitter seems nasty to me, right?

Downloaded and ran a Ubuntu linux “LiveCD” the other day, allowing me to experience the OS without installing it. There’s so much noise about Ubuntu being the real Windows desktop OS killer. My impression, it worked great and looked slick and fancy, no problems IDing and installing drivers for all my hardware. But, when I couldn’t get my wireless to work with my WPA encryption and a websearch on the subject had me opening a command window to edit config files manually – I gave up. I’ll pay the couple hundred bucks for Windows.

Placed a spec bid on an unopened box of 15th series Garbage Pail Kids the other day on Ebay. I need only the original 15th and 1st series to complete my collection. Problem is, complete 1st series sets go for over $100 and complete 15th series sets are right up there too. I just can’t justify spending that much on functionally-useless nostalgia, so I often troll Ebay for sets and place lowball bids on the off chance I’ll end up a winner. Turns out I won a whole store shelf box, 48 wax packs with five cards each (and a stick of decades old gum). I know it’s a shame, but I totally plan to defile the item by opening each and every unopened-for-years pack. Why? Well, #1, I want the set, and #2, I figure on making at least two complete sets from the box. Turning the extra set for ~$80 on Ebay will make back my investment ($40) and then some.

Know what some engineer needs to do? Make a dang laptop that can be used outside. Laptops are great for their portability, but they’re rendered virtually useless in even the most meager of daylight. Sun seems to send the pixels on my screen into hiding; maybe I have goth pixels? Whatever it is, it’s frustrating. Let’s do a hypothetical: It’s 3pm on a Friday and you’re at work, staring at a computer screen, when you notice the beautiful sunlight out the window across the floor. Next thing you know, you’ve gotten the nerve to up and leave and phone-in the rest of the day from the beauty of your wirelessly-connected backyard. Then, when seemingly nothing could go wrong, you sit down to fire up the laptop and can’t see a thing. Stupid sunshine, she’s a double-edged bitch, she is.

Goodnight.

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he that hath an ear


Welcome to Wednesday night. It’s getting harder and harder for me to remember what I’ve written about on this thing. Usually, before I set out to write something, I’ll do a quick search through the archives to see if perhaps I’ve covered it before. I’m sure, though, that if someone printed this rambling mess out and read through it cover-to-cover, they’d encounter a fair amount of repeat and perhaps even contradictory materials. It’s hard, you know, trying to keep track of it… all these words, all the arguably-wasted effort. That’s a good intro, eh? Good enough for me…

Motivated by nothing in particular, I spent some time tonight downloading MP3 versions of both the Bible and Quran. Put them on my iPod as audiobooks, which makes them “bookmarkable” (you can pick up listening where you last left off rather than beginning anew each time) and excludes from playback while shuffling (Matthew chapter 11 as a follow-on to some Kanye could really kill a party). Admittedly, I don’t plan on listening to these very often, but I do think it’s neat to have them at arm’s reach for curiosity’s sake. Used the Firefox DownThemAll extension to speed up the download process, grabbing all the files automagically (i.e. bandwidth-raping) rather than navigating through hundreds of individual links and pages.

As a pleasant second-order effect of my search, I was turned on to several great sites which offer completely free MP3 audiobooks. I think it’s awesome that I can download and listen to all sorts of material on the iPod, from the classics to philosophy. If you’re interested, Librivox and AudioBooksForFree.com both have nice-sized collections of completely free-to-download audiobooks (between the two sites there is nearly 1,000 works of literature available for listening). Most of the works available are older and are now public domain, but there are some original and newer titles as well.

In the process of writing the above paragraph, my mind once again drifted to being stranded on a desert island. How much more enjoyable would being stranded be if you had an iPod chock-full of music and books? Well, providing of course you first have health, food, and shelter. Anyway, the only problem here is the one of power… the iPod battery won’t last forever. But… any person who has irrational fantasies about one day becoming stranded on a desert island who’s worth their salt will have a solar-powered iPod charger with them at all times. All you need is the solar iPod charger, a solar AA battery charger, and a set of AA-powered portable iPod speakers – and you’re the life of the castaway party! Seriously, I’m thinking about getting that solar iPod charger just for the “cool” factor.

Keaton’s hair has almost all fallen out and is slowly being replaced with a new, blonder, quaff. Seeing this happen over the course of weeks tends to downplay how dramatic of a change it really is. In fact, I hadn’t realized just how much her hair had changed until I was browsing some old pictures last night. In an attempt to illustrate this, I GIMP’d Keaton’s hair from a picture taken at fifteen weeks onto the head of a picture taken last week. Roll your mouse over the image below to see the difference (allow a couple seconds load-time on the 1st rollover):

Wow! Goodnight.