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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.

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whoofin’ on cheeba


Hey friends. No blog yesterday, had a packed night with some old friends – a long-needed reunion of sorts. Now it’s Wednesday night, and I worked from home again today while Sharaun taught a guest art lesson to her old class. It was good being with Keaton again, and, despite having to tend to her baby-type needs, I was able to get a tone of workish junk done. Was gonna mow, decided against it, and that pretty much sums up the day.

I wonder if CNN knows how much humor I derive from their webpage sometimes. It can’t be intentional on their part, but I’ll be danged if some of the stuff they write isn’t hilarious. Take for instance this quote from their lead article sometime Wednesday morning:

A couple of Massachusetts construction workers picked up some bathroom cabinetry and discovered some illegal extras with their purchases. One contractor found ganja ‘bricks,’ and a plumber found a stash of cocaine.

Ganja bricks?

OK, who gave “the man” the weed-slang dictionary? What’s next, Fox News reports on the chronic found at Lowes? MSNBC runs a headline about the sticky-icky-icky discovered at Ace Hardware? It’s cool though, because CNN will probably run a follow-up about how the Home Depot doja was seeds ‘n stems shwag anyway; just weak shake – not hydro, buddah, or nugs.

If you’ve been reading this page for a while, you’ll know that I have a fascination with religion – more specifically with some of the amazing things humans will believe when it comes to religion. Without getting into my religious notions, I just wanted to share this awesomely concise “illustrated history of Scientology” with you. A series of animated GIFs which originated from the ‘net-famous “you’re the man now dog” site, it tells the story of Scientology from Xenu to today in a slideshow of cartoons. Well worth the time if you’re unfamiliar with the “religion” and what they believe, and likely won’t be up long since Scientology employs a stable of notoriously oppressive lawyers who make it their life’s work to remove any content from the world which might portray their sacred beliefs in a negative light. So, check it out, and get a god chuckle. This stuff is better than magic glasses and reformed Egyptian: An Illustrated History of Scientology.

Sorry for the short entry, got all creative feeling and made a new index page again – I never did like that “on the plains” one with the growing trees all that much, I think this one is much nicer. Thought about actually taking my 96 Tears page of the index links, like I did a while back with my music pages, since it’s such a terribly designed page (but, I’ll admit, it’s a neato window into my premillenial HTML skillz). But, it’s still there…

Goodnight folks.

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tomorrow’s yesterday


I finally motivated myself enough to get out in the front yard and pull the weeds from the planters after work today. Turns out it wasn’t that bad a job at all, I was finished in well under and hour. Some live Dead shuffled on while I worked, and it sounded so good. Sometimes there’s nothing better than a noodling Garcia guitar solo in the sunshine. I stopped short, however, of busting out the hedge trimmer and trimming me some hedge… not because I ran out of daylight, but because I ran out of caring. Tomorrow, maybe…

The more I analyze my trends in motivation, the more I’m convinced I have an excellent intuition. Historically, it seems I’m almost prophetically unmotivated – slacking most on things that end up being unimportant in the long run. I seem to “know” what to apply my resources to, and what to push down to the bottom of the pile. In the moment, my choices often seem damning – deprioritizing something that, it seems, would put me behind or cause my overall performance to suffer. But usually, later down the road that item I put on the back burner falls off the edge altogether from some directive on-high, and I look awesome for having diverted resources to other things when all the while I wasn’t paying attention to begin with. I’m convinced that this psychic ability to know when and what to work on, coupled with my ability to apply methamphetamine-like speed and productivity to important immediate tasks make me the ideal worker. I’m thinking of bulletizing this and putting it on my resume:

Personal Traits

  • Team player; works well with diverse groups.
  • Experienced in conflict resolution and teambuilding.
  • Possess a psychic “tasking” ability; can prioritize current tasks by future relevancy.
  • Fastidiously groomed; sparkling teeth, very little dandruff.
  • Well-filled shorts.

Yes… well then, let’s move on.

No sooner did I decide to make Wolfmother’s eponymous album my #1 pick of 2006.5 did I catch their single “Love Train” on the new iTunes ad during prime-time. Great, just great. How is one supposed to stay elite when iTunes and M&Ms and Chrysler keep employing good music to appeal to consumers? No longer will people stare blankly when I tell them I’m listening to Wolfmother, they’ll instead go, “Oh, you mean the iTunes band? I heard they fucked Lindsay Lohan with a trout… or something.” Nah, I’m only messing with you guys… the more people at the good-music party the better, welcome to what’s rad world, welcome.

Lately, I’ve been fascinated with the Swapatorium blog – which I ran across via this mysterious and super-interesting (to me) BoingBoing post. I have my own personal obsession with wading through inconsequential history, whether it be mine or someone else’s, and Swapatorium’s posts are right up that alley. While browsing the archives, I ran across the “Diary of a Girl” feature that ran from January through February this year: An entry from a young girl’s late-1960s diary, which covers everything from sewing dressed to the sordid affair between her older brother and her best friend. There’s no easy way to link the entire thread as a cohesive story, but if you’re interested in reading it (and why wouldn’t you be?), the best way is to start here at the January archives (scroll to the bottom of the page and read up), and continue on here to the February archives (again reading from bottom-to-top). What a great feature.

Goodnight.

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just us


I really don’t have much to write tonight. Spent a good bit of time today working on a more “artsy” blog entry which’ll likely show up sometime next week (as it’s code-complex). Problem is, I blew most of my inspiration working on that, and not I’m not much in the mood to hammer something out for Monday. But, I shall press on… for you, dear friends; for you.

Saturday it was just Keaton and me, just us. I put her in her my favorite dress (not my favorite dress, mind you, but my favorite dress of hers), slid a yellow bow around her head, and we set out on a daddy-daughter trip to the local chili cookoff. I’m not going to lie, I “cruised” up and down the street, past the same chili booths over and over, just so new passers-by could peek into her stroller and stop me to fawn over her. I stood with glee, smile beaming broad across my face, as a man from whom I’d just taken a sample cup of chili told me, repeatedly, “You have a beautiful daughter.” I act shy, pretending to shuffle my feet and direct my eyes to the ground as a woman tells me, “She looks like a Hawaiian princess,” but I’m not shy – I’m eating it up, loving every compliment. And Keaton, she’s hamming it up like she knows she has a captive audience. Smiling, trying to fit her entire fist into her mouth, and making cute baby sounds for her patrons. Having a day alone with her, taking her out and spending time together… I had the best time.

Sunday I did a repeat performance, manning the mommy helm while Robin and Sharaun did a wine tour in Napa Valley. Although she wasn’t as sunshine-and-roses as Saturday, she did manage to enjoy some time at a World Cup party at Ben and Suzy’s place. After that, we headed home and fell asleep together on the couch while the iPod shuffled away. It was a good weekend for daddy-daughter bonding. And, in keeping with my Sunday night schedule, I did manage to post some pictures to Keaton’s gallery – it’s not much, but they’re there. Check them out here.

I’m getting one of those “underground” zits on my nose, those really painful kind that never even turn into a real zit – I hate those. Goodnight.