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verdant billboards


Welcome one, welcome all – to the sounds familiar blog. Now with recent-fad relevancy! Sounds familiar is your one-stop-shop for online predator sting operations, drifting, black-haired Britney, and the World Cup.

I don’t feel like I’ve been doing any “good” writing of late. That “Lion” bit the other day was some attempt to make myself feel good about my writing again – to move this blog out of the “went here, did that, had fun” doldrums and bring it back to something a little more interesting. To renew the storytelling aspect, maybe focus a little more on the writing and less on the material (if that even makes sense). I really do enjoy flattering myself by trying to “write good.” I get happy if my words flow well, if the sentences bring across ideas with unique words or interesting structure. I do abuse punctuation, and love a good run-on, but it’s the way my mind likes to see its thoughts put on paper. I can’t promise much, as my writing tends to reflect my mood, and is always a struggle between how badly I want to get the thought down vs. how pretty I want it to sound.

Slightly related, I had another friend ask me the other day how much time “blogging” takes me, “How much time per day,” he asked. I’ve been asked before, and I never have a really solid answer – I suppose because I just don’t think about it too much. This time, the curious friend asked if it was something I had to consciously work at or if it was now a firmly entrenched habit. I guess that one is easier to answer than the “how much time” one, as I’m fairly certain this blogging thing is definitely now a habit – nay, a compulsion, obsession. Even on the days I don’t write, it’s not because I don’t want to write – I always want to write. I don’t write because there’s just nothing I can bring myself to write about, and what’s more I actually feel bad about it. I’ve come to take pride in posting regularly, and more than fearing a disappointed audience, I don’t like breaking my “streak.” Anyway… back to the question of time-spent.

I’d guess I spend, on average, and hour and a half each day blogging. Sometimes less, sometimes more. I write mostly in the evening, while Sharaun and I sit and watch TV. Sometimes, I’ve snuck online during the workday and scribbled down thoughts in outline form, or set a fragmented sentence “to-blog” reminder to pop up on my cellphone and jog my memory. If the mood is right, it doesn’t take long at all. I can knock out several well-formed paragraphs in under a half hour. In fact, sometimes I get to writing so much that a good portion of the stuff ends up in the pre-written “bin” to post later when I’m not so inspired. I usually get an entry done and then spend an amount of time equal to actually writing it in reviewing and touching it up. Fixing sentence structure, flow, spelling, etc. Lastly, I surf the ‘net looking for an appropriate picture to accompany it, upload, format, and hit “publish.”

I like to think about it like this: Were I just taking those couple hours and watching some TV, it’d be two hours out of each day I’d never be able to get back. Spending those two hours writing, I feel like I can get some of that back – by way of reading what those two hours produced at some later date. I can at least revisit the thoughts I took time to put down. I’m going to stop writing this now.

When I was a kid, we had sycamore trees around our hometown. Those familiar with California sycamore trees will likely know what I mean when I say they had the coolest “puzzle-piece” bark. Instead of a solid sheath of bark like standard trees have, these trees had a protective outer shell made up of little cobblestones of hard bark. Being boys, we loved to pick at these scabby things, pulling off the amoeba-shaped flakes of bark to expose the bright yellow-green skin underneath. I can remember staring at trunk and limbs of the tree, looking for potential patterns; purposely trying to pull off the little puzzle pieces to leave behind a green secret message. The tree’s soft layer of protected skin used as a verdant billboard, perhaps advertising the vandal’s name or favorite four-letter word. Sure, the letters were often bubbly and imperfect, but if you took a long hard look at the sycamores in my neighborhood – you’d likely find one or two with a large green D-A-V-E picked off vertically down its trunk.

So… somehow I ended up at an old Stereogum post the other day, one centered on a Hilary Duff photoshopping contest. And, reading through the comments I found this gem tucked away at the very bottom:

HILARY THIS IS KATE. I AM A HUGE FAN I DO NOT WANT YOU TO BECOME ANOREXIA YOU ARE MY ROLE MODEL, YOUR PRETTY YOU ALSO HAVE A WOUNDERFUL VOCIE AND I DO NOT WANT YOU DIE. PLEASE DONT BE ANOREXIA BECAUSE I KNOW THERE ARE MANY MORE FANS THEN JUST ME WHO LIKE YOU AND FEEL THE SAME WAY. SO PLEASE DONT CONTENUE TO BE ANOREXIA
GET BETTER SOON
YOUR FAN KATE R WRITE BACK

Excellent. You hear that, Hil? Don’t be anorexia, OK? Reminds me of some of the fan “mail” I’ve gotten on my ? and the Mysterians page.

Goodnight.

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lion’s paws are made of rubber


An action-packed weekend, that’s what it was. Yup… action-packed. Saturday we woke up early to get some professional-type photos taken of our burgeoning family. I claimed Keaton post-photos so mom could join friends on a rafting trip down the river. Meanwhile, while her mom lazed her way downstream, Keaton and I headed over to a friend’s place to watch Mexico and Argentina foot it out on the pitch. Later, the family reunited briefly at the follow-up to rafting – a backyard BBQ. Then it was mom’s turn to fly solo with Lil’ Chino, as dad joined some of his friends and headed up the mountain to do some skywatching. Anthony bought a fancy telescope and four of us headed up into the darkness of the mountains, escaping the light-polluted city, to gaze aloft. And, although the watching part was, for the most part, obscured by clouds, it was nice; especially since I’d had the presence of mind to fill my hip flask to the brim with a stout port before leaving. Seven ounces of that stuff will do a body right over the course of a night, y’know. Sunday we spent the day with friends, chowed on grilled salmon and mashed ‘taters… we have a hard, hard life.

And, even in the midst of packing all that action, I was able to upload a small set of pictures to Keaton’s Gallery. Check them out here, and watch as Keaton finally truly “discovers” her feet, and takes her first swim with mom.

Lion: Lion’s paws are made of rubber; primary colors: red, blue, yellow, and green. Lion has beans in his belly and rocks in his head. His purple mane crinkles. Lion is covered in invisible DNA, dried spit. His limbs sag under the weight of his oversized hands and feet, but he can sit up on his own and he never fails to get a smile. Lion goes places; lion is a man on the move; lion’s on the move.

Goodnight.

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the sandman always wins


Thursday night and still coming down from a triumphant sprinkler repair earlier this evening. For dinner, Sharaun got all adventurous and made turkey and cheese sandwiches with blackberry jam on powdered-sugar topped waffles. Some kind of bastardized take on the Monte Cristo, but it was excellent and made my belly feel good. She and Keaton are back in the bedroom doing Keaton’s bedtime routine; I can hear Keaton crying from here, she must really be fighting it tonight. That’s a funny thing about babies, at least ours: how she seems to not want to go to sleep, despite being obviously tired. She’ll begin to drift off, her eyes will start to close, and she’ll bolt awake and begin crying – almost like she’s mad at herself for nearly losing the battle with the Sandman. Maybe it’s a kid thing, I can remember nearly always asking for an extra few minutes when my bedtime rolled around – never wanting to go to bed at the appointed hour. Now, man… I cherish my sleep.

Ever since I started thinking towards Halloween the other day, it’s been on my mind a lot. Each Halloween, I customarily get one “big ticket” item. Last year it was my air compressor, the year before it was the ridiculously overpowered fog machine, and this year I think I know what I want. Since my two new prop ideas are relatively inexpensive, I’m thinking of getting a real-deal prop timer system. The picoBoo looks awesomely promising. There are three different models, the major differentiators being the ability to record and playback audio and whether or not you want AC or DC outputs. To me, the the low-end model with DC outputs and no sound seems like a good option as the models with sound only have line out and still need to be amped, and they tout the audio quality as “similar to AM radio.” Prop activation and timing has always been a tough nut to crack, and I’ve always wanted a real-time programmer – this may just be the year to take the plunge. Oh, and by the way, all the talk of the ghosts of Halloween past and future made me nostalgic for the old “teaser” videos I’ve made. So, I put up a section in the Halloween galleries dedicated to past teaser videos, enjoy it here.

I have nothing more to write, g’night.

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girls are hot


Wednesday night coming off a slower day at work

I’ve written before about how terrible I am at “keeping in touch.” Unless a relationship is in my face on a regular basis, reminding me it exists, I tend to let it fizzle. I don’t know how to describe this other than a flaw in me personally. Most of the time, I have no desire to “end” a relationship or disconnect from a person or people – but I just don’t make any effort to keep things alive. You could call it laziness, but I’d peg it more as being rooted in my self-centered nature. I value each and every one of my friendships or other relationships, but in the bitter honesty of self-inspection I realize that I’m rarely the one making those relationships work. I’m usually a willing participant, and rarely the catalyst maintaining things. People call me more than I call people, unfortunately. At various times I’ve tried to address this, and all have met with great results. It’s odd how I sometimes seem to prefer some sense of being aloof, some strategic disconnection. If it makes me seem cold and uncaring, I’m sorry… it’s not that… I promise. I often get lost in my own brain and don’t pay enough attention to the things that keep my truly happy. How’s that for some introspection, huh?

I love girls; always have, likely always will. When I see girls, I want to look at them. Legs and belly-buttons pull my eyes, draw me in, like a cartoon character lifted into the air, nostrils leading, by the visible wafting scents of a pie cooling on a windowsill. Girls are my pies on windowsills. Curves and smiles and hair turn my head, prompting a discrete inhalation a few seconds after passing, perchance to catch a whiff of some sweet perfume. Yes, I like girls – I’m constantly watching and evaluating and assessing them. I can remember sitting in classes when in high school, running through different “I’d sleep with her if” scenarios. Keeping a count of who I’d “stoop to” repopulating the Earth with should we be put in such a situation.

So, girls of the world, please know that when you encounter me – I am looking. I am focusing on your hair, smile, eyes, and legs – in that order (you T&A men can have that, ranks low for me). Not that you care, but you are being evaluated and binned. Should I be lucky enough to be around you for any extended amount of time, I reserve the right to completely redo my initial rankings based on personality. Even if you’re bald, have gaping holes where your eyes should be, hairy legs and a toothless grin – I could fall in love with you just the same if you laugh at my jokes and overlook my many flaws. OK… maybe I’d want you to have teeth… or at least a passable orthodontia replicate… but then again you may want me to have hairless shoulders – touché.

On their current tour, Radiohead has so far played a total of 13 new songs off their yet-to-be-released new album. A while back, I wrote about my most anticipated albums of 2006. Radiohead was #2 on the list. I’ve been hearing rumors now that we may not see an album until 2007. Man… do albums ever leak a year early? And where the heck have the Arcade Fire been? Can we please get at least a press blurb about them “working hard in the studio” or something?

Goodnight?

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my socialist pipedream


Hit the local hardware megastore on the way home from dinner with friends to pick up a new solenoid for a sprinkler valve that’s been acting up. I’d thought I ID’d the issue down to a faulty solenoid, but it turns out the whole valve is bad. Other than that a pretty ho-hum Tuesday… with work and some more work and then some food and maybe a little TV. On the plus side, I did listen to Tommy today, an album that sounds amazing to me every time I put the proverbial needle to the proverbial record. And Tommy doesn’t know what day it is. He doesn’t know who Jesus was or what prayin’ is; How can he be saved, from the eternal grave? Damn, that’s some good stuff…

My vintage 2nd series Garbage Pail Kids arrived from some other Ebayer today – I was ecstatic. Strange how just thumbing through a stack of those stupid little bubblegum cards can evoke such memories of youth. I can remember going through the yellow pages and calling gas stations and comic shops around town asking them if they had Garbage Pail Kids in stock. They were extremely hot when I got into them, which wasn’t until around the 3rd series. I used to have my dad drive me all around town looking for the things. He’d park and I’d run in to check the register displays for those precious wax packs. I was completely fanatic about collecting those cards, and at 25¢ a pop I could afford a whopping twelve packs a week with my $3 allowance, that’s 60 cards! ‘Round about 6th grade, I decided I’d grown tired of Garbage Pail Kids… they’d had a good run, from 2nd grade to 6th. I think I stopped collecting around series 14, and I still rue the day I took thousands of cards up to the local comic book store (after making my parents haul them across the country) and sold them for pennies. Now I’m spending money to regain those tangible memories… a luxury available to us drowning-in-cash Gen-Y kids.

A perennial joke I have with my close friends is the one about how Dave want to drop out and start a “co-op.” I like to call it a “co-op” as opposed to a “commune” because I think it has a positive connotation, evoking a feeling of people working together to support the whole rather than one of David Koresh burning babies. I joke, but I swear I’m really half-serious. Something about dropping out of society, becoming self-reliant (you know, that theme-of-themes that dominates nearly all my writing). We could do it. Leverage our group assets, purchase some land and basic starters, and proceed to setup a self-reliant, off-grid life. Nothing too avant-garde, mind you, I’d still want to send my kids to school, still want them to have friends; I’d still want the internet, still enjoy modern media. It’d be a triumph over the fetters of modern man’s reliance on luxury and convenience. Instead, we’d be enjoying the hard-won fruits of our own sweat and toil, working together to provide for us all. Oh boy… this is getting a little too Shangri-La, so I’m gonna cut it off now.

Goodnight.

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major player in the cowboy scene


Summer’s here, and our social calendar is filling up appropriately. The weather here has taken a turn for the hot, as it always does ’bout this time of year. Air conditioning has to be one of humankind’s greatest achievements – right up there with flush toilets, beer, and the space shuttle. This entry started out as a “one liners” entry, but a few of them developed into more complete thoughts. So, here are some mostly one, and occasionally many more than one, liners for your enjoyment.

Saw a terrible car accident Thursday morning right in front of work. I arrived on the scene just after it’d happened and no rescue vehicles had yet arrived, but it was clear to me that the driver of one of the vehicles had either been badly injured or killed. Seeing something like that makes me immediately think of my family, and makes my stomach all queasy. Eerily enough, just as I eased through the intersection the song on the Sunset Rubdown LP said, “There are things that have to die, so other things can stay alive.” Creepy.

Why do you think humans, males in particular, get so excited over more exotic methods of cooking meat? You know what I mean? How males love a good pig-burying, or are willing to wake up at 5am to put a pork shoulder on the smoker. Must be some kind of distant connection we feel with our kill-to-survive ancestors.

I keep getting all these spam mails urging me to join a site called BlackSingles.com. Do I pull off blackness that convincingly?

Driving to work the other day and watching the sprinklers water public, or city-maintained, grass. Were you the pilfering type, you’d never have to buy a lawnmower-ruined sprinklerhead at home depot. Just head to the public park and fill your pockets.

I wonder a lot about, should there be a world-altering event that left only a few alive, what modern technologies and items I could recreate from my working understanding of them. Which of humankind’s greatest inventions and innovations do I have a good enough grasp on that I could actually re-invent or re-innovate them? Even with the help of other survivors, if the population was vastly depleted – I’m willing to bet that some technologies and items would be lost forever.

Remember when I talked about reading that article about how men get dumber as fathers, while women get smarter? I think this is based on the same research, but it’s a lot less negative to us dads.

My first Father’s Day was nice, not a lot of fanfare, but nice. In celebration, I uploaded week fifteen’s pictures to the ongoing set in Keaton’s gallery. Check them out and try not to smile to yourself at how dang cute she is.

I love my iPod, can’t hardly think how I used to get along without it. But, some things it does do piss me off:

  • Sometimes it gets freaked out when 1st powered on and playing the initial tune, inserting music-less gaps in playback during what sounds like hard drive spinup or processing time.
  • Sometimes it refuses to turn off via holding down the play/pause button, instead only responds to a hard reset.
  • Sometimes it indicates it’s playing a song, yet the progress indicator does not move and no song is actually played. Pressing play/pause, switching songs, or even jogging to the middle of the track all fail to “revive” this “false playback,” and only a hard reset remedies the issue.
  • Sometimes it takes up to ~20sec to display artwork once a song is played, especially if the thing has just powered on and it’s the first song you’re listening to.
  • Occasionally it skips tracks altogether when in “shuffle songs” mode. A track will flash up as the next shuffled song to be played, and then quickly give way to the next track in the shuffle without ever playing. Maybe there’s an algorithm that enforces a minimum gap between shuffled tracks, and if a song takes too long to seek on the physical disk – it’s skipped and the shuffle marches on? Maybe, but it’s still annoying. Particularly when the song that you’re teased with is a good one.
  • Pressing play/pause after the thing’s been idle only “wakes” it up – you have to press it twice to actually get a song to play.

I found this photo-narrative of a trip into North Korea to be really interesting, maybe you will too.

Setup a TiVo season pass to record the recent VH1 documentary series, “The Drug Years.” Chronicling the history of drugs and their use in the US, the series is extremely interesting. After watching the segment on the cocaine heyday of the late ’70s, I told Sharaun how it almost made me want to run a couple bumps. Turns out that was a mistake, and I spent the next ten minutes explaining how I didn’t really want to try coke.

Drugs have always been enticing to me. Ever since my middle school years, when I adopted musicians three generations my senior as my idols, I became bound and determined to emulate them and try marijuana. Later in life, after I’d satisfied my curiosity and given up recreational toking, I became interested in the more academic aspects of drug use: How drugs have impacted human cultural and spiritual development, how they were used by people throughout history, etc. Reading about shamans using entheogens to experience spiritual nirvana, and the ability to experience concepts like “ego death” almost make me want go out and have my own psychedelic personality-melting experience.

You can do it, you know. There are several highly-potent natural and laboratory-synthesized psychedelic substances sold online by legitimate purveyors. You can hitup so-called “research chemical” shops and purchase any number of yet-to-be strictly controlled designer drugs. At your fingertips are powerful psychedelics like the multitude of phenethylamine variants or 5-meO-AMT/DMT. All of which, and much more, can shipped to your doorstep with nothing but a web browser and a credit card. If you’re not into synthetics, you can go with something natural that has a long history of human use by surfing on to any decent online headshop to purchase a vial of salvia extract or other entheogenic plant-derivative. Point is, there are a number of ways one could experiment with psychedelic mind-altering substances and stay within the law.

Well… the letter of the law, at least… if you don’t count that pesky Federal Analog Act. Actually, I better stop writing about this before I start placing orders and soliciting “sitters.”

Lotta content, if you skipped some – go back, it’s all gold. Goodnight.

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as july approaches


Friday Friday Friday! Dave love the Friday. Burned the better part of the post-work daylight today working in the front yard: mowing, fertilizing, trimming hedges, checking sprinklers and weeding. Yard looks much better for it and I feel like I did something constructive.

While I don’t usually do celebrity gossip stuff, I am willing to link a funny story if it’s related to something I care about. So, continuing the Scientology bashing theme from yesterday, here’s the comical tale about some famous folks’ heated run-in with a dude wearing a “Scientology is gay” t-shirt. Good story, and, where can I get that shirt? Come to think of it, it’s eerily similar to a shirt I still want to make, but don’t have the artistic prowess to illustrate. Anyone who has some basic drawing skills and wants to help me realize my multi-religion-bashing concept tee, hit me up and we’ll do lunch.

As July approaches, and August after, my mind begins to drift to this year’s Halloween prop. Last year, Kristi made a great suggestion to do a backlit scene on the lawn with a large glowing moon and animated wolves in silhouette, complete with scary baying sound effects. I simply adored the idea, and the concept seemed relatively easy to realize: 2D wooden wolf coutouts with hinged parts for movement, some kind of illuminated orb shaped from pipe/wood, and a simple motor to animate the thing (I have an ice-cream churn we never use which I can adapt). Now, don’t get me wrong, I think this is an excellent project – but it sounded relatively “low touch” in terms of effort (of course, I’m probably wrong about that) and that prompted me to start daydreaming about a second, more involved, prop. Two props in one year, can it be done?! As my mind drifted on the 2nd prop idea, I centered most of my concepts around air-power, which I switched first experimented with (quite successfully, I might add) on last year’s “pneumatic coffin-popper” project. Air power is so clean and easy, no electricity to deal with, no AC-to-DC rectifying, no relays or geared motors to wear out – just a compressor hidden away in the garage, a hose, and some cylinders.

So, air-power on the brain, I began to revisit an idea I’d had a while ago which was based on a “twitching, hanging-from-the-gallows” prop I’d seen somewhere on the net (and has since disappeared, I think). The hanging man always intrigued me, I think mostly because I imagined the hinged limbs moving in a slow-but-frantic, almost electrocution-like, way. Powered the way I imagine it, the whole thing would be quite random, the movements not based on repetitive motorized actions – instead only being “motivated” some force, the actual movements themselves being completely spontaneous and organic. I love the concept, but was kind of turned off by how macabre I imagined the final result. While I love Halloween, I’d like my display to at least remain kid-friendly scary… and besides, in these politically-correct times I’m actually a bit leery to actually place a “lynched” dummy on my lawn.

So, keep the concept but scrap the noose and gallows… what could I do? Then it hit me, a scarecrow. Scarecrows are very Halloween to me, and the scarecrow in my concept is a lot gruffer than your goofy Wizard of Oz variety, I imagine him with a twisted sneer or something. A scarecrow writhing to get off his pole, kicking and flailing… yeah, I love it! Here’s a brief concept description and sketch I made today with all my enthusiasm:

“Flailing Scarycrow”

  • PVC frame with dual-action push/pull air cylinder mounted vertically mid-torso
  • PVC body “jointed” (springs or otherwise) at hips, shoulders, knees and elbows for organic motion
  • Wire attached to each cylinder plunger, and attached to PVC arms/legs near elbow/knee joints
  • Push/pull action of cylinder alternately tugs wires attached to knees/elbows, resulting in a jerky, flailing motion in limbs
  • Cylinder should fire randomly, or perhaps be motion-activated, and be at a lower pressure to sell the effect

Here’s a sketch I did, it was in color, but I don’t have a scanner and the only one I have access to only does black and white. You can probably figure it out anyway.

One thing I do want to do is begin documenting my projects better. I’ve even considered a page devoted to them, with details and through processes like in this entry. Ambitious, I know, but a guy can dream. Anyway… I’m not saying it’s ready to design, maybe a few more weeks o’ thinkin’, but it’s got potential!

Changing subjects… did you see the strange comment yesterday on the “satanic flier” entry? (Remember, the “satanic flier” post is consistently my most read post, averaging 30+ reads per day.) I originally pegged it for a random-letter spam filter test, but was intrigued when a Google search for “zwaml” turned up a ton of hits. Though none of them in English, most of the results were in French, some German, and some still appeared to be a phonetic version of Arabic or some other script. Intrigued, I looked up the IP address of the poster, which turned out to via a system based in Mauritius (it’s OK, I had to look it up too). AfriNIC, the Internet Numbers Registry for Africa, is based in Mauritius – leading me to believe the commenter was commenting from somewhere in Africa. Some more digging, and a few other searches seem to indicate a link between the word “zwaml” and the Kabyle region of Algeria, where they speak their own language: Kabyle, which is a Berber language.

Look, people, I researched this for hours last night. My conclusion? “Zwaml” is a slang word in some Berber-based language, it refers to a type or class of people and is derogatory. I also think it is a semi-localized term, being used primarily in the Berber-speaking regions of North Africa, and can be alternately spelled in English as “zwamel,” don’t ask me why.

Bottom line? I think I’m being called a name.

In other other news, I recently found out that the blog that started it all for me is now back online – and has been active again since sometime late last year. Glad to see it back, it really was my inspiration (oh, and please forgive the linked entry… it was only my 23rd of blogdom – cut me some slack).

Goodnight.