Category: Cute

Put on a very very sad face

Now try to watch this video without changing your expression. Ha!  Knew ya couldn’t.

I’m still in full bore freakout mode about today’s service, but oh well.  I ran through the new songs last night (new as in I don’t recollect them ever having been sung in church before).  Four old standards and three new ones.  We’ll see how it goes.  At least I know I have a sound man now, up until 11 am yesterday I didn’t know I’d have one.  Yup, nervewracking, exciting and amazing.

Briefly

Ziva is running on six but hesitating.  Fuel filter?  Spark plugs?  Check engine light comes on within about a two block stretch of 10th Ave and goes off about halfway up Gaglardi hill.

I had a lovely long talk with my mum last night.

Jeff sent me flowers at work, by which one might infer what a joy to be around I’ve been over the last little while.  I don’t care, and my coworkers sure appreciated it, and Jeff is defending his title of World’s Most Awesome Roommate with considerable aplomb.

Tom M at work photoshopped his two tortie cats into Borg costumes.  Unbelievably cute and I’ll post the link to his flickr stream if I can find it.

Betelgeuse ISN’T going to blow up.  Sad face.

I’ve been playing “Mama Got Skills”, my 6 song EP, in the car, and I’m enjoying it past the point that makes sense.  Oh, to have such a very loud sound system!

Saturday round up, occasionally unsafe for work

Religious persecution quiz, scanged from a facebook/filking buddy.  Who himself was reposting it.

Statins have much worse potential side effects than was previously believed.

Wretched excess meets explosive cuteness.

I’m not posting a link, but one of the church women posted a youtube link to her toddler doing the Hokey Pokey with her, and I just wanted to mention that that’s what it’s all about.

We live in a culture which has little use for our basic instincts, and is thus breeding / punishing their existence out of us as fast as it can.  One can only wonder what the hell will take its place.  These days I wonder how some people manage to feed themselves.  As long as we are where our instincts don’t serve us, many of us will feel alienated.  I think church is a kind of hamfisted way of addressing that alienation. I can’t help thinking that we’re a step away from ‘customized religious experiences’ and I’m not just talking about going to rural Peru to have a drunken shaman pour ayahuasca down your throat and then count his money while you trip endlessly into a brightly painted bucket of existential horror.  I’m talking about thinking, “I want a religious experience that includes singing and labyrinth walking and drums this Sunday,” and if you live in a big town, actually being able to get it.  Virtually, perhaps.                  but if we do not breathe together…. if we do not conspire….. what are we?  That’s why we live from con to con, from dance to dance, from concert to concert, from gig to gig, from (please do NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK AT WORK or IF YOU THINK Lesbian or BDSM sexuality is icky) hookpull to hookpull, from Sunday to Sunday (or whatever your religiously mandated gathering day is).  Re hookpulls, I personally know two people who have attended and participated in these events, and I like ’em fine, so if you want to remonstrate with me about how sick it is I’m just gonna make a sad face and change the subject. You wouldn’t catch me dead at one of them though, I ain’t going anywhere like that just to be a voyeur and I don’t need any additional pain in my body at the moment, thanks.  My complete incomprehension does not include disgust.

Extra solar planets for the win. Every time I look at it, there’s more.  Everything is on fast forward.

Of course, if I fail to mention the artificial life, people will wonder if I dropped off to sleep.

As I type this I am looking at the handwriting of my ancestor Henry Thomas Wake, and wishing I could have handwriting like that.  Copperplate. He actually made money from designing lettering.  mOm says he would be a blogger if he was alive today.  He records in his diary, March 1859, that we went to Euston Square Station to determine the cheapest way to go visit Carlisle, and also that a friend has kindly lent him a book on double entry bookkeeping.  (He was demoniac about self-improvement).

I’m going to take my chalky and somewhat premigraineous brain out for a drive now.  I want a drum.

And every word of it is true

I am Allegra Sloman, and I subscribe to this management decision.

An extremely rare kitty photo for Jeff.

Glenn Close has her genome mapped.

Snails are gonna eat Florida.  Here’s a pic of and article about the critter in question.

When is a species extinct?  You’d think it’s a dopey question, but apparently it is not.

Aggressively massaging its books. Great expression for part of what preceded the collapse of Lehman.  And since there’s been no meaningful regulatory reform, it could all happen again, how very cyclical.

Yes, that Nascar crash was no accident.  To keep ratings high, the Nascar management is encouraging it.  Hope nobody dies.

Yesterday I made spare ribs, and that, candidly is about it.  I hope to have a marginally more productive day today.

I thought today was Pi Day, but apparently there’s some dispute about that.

Sunday miscellanea

Dug out one fifth of the garden yesterday, after an entertaining visit chez Tom and Peggy (Peggy was working) to borrow gardening tools and drop off the busted mandolin.  Anybody who has seen Tom’s garage knows how this is possible.  Paul accompanied me, and there was much mirth and mocking; personally I found the image of the concrete bags which had turned solid enough to form gun emplacement material very happy making.   Tom offered four substantial pieces of wood to frame the garden plot with (I am not turning down ten foot lengths of six by six treated aged cedar for this purpose).  I didn’t need a mattock, but it was so axe murder-y I had to borrow it.  Also, I now have a picture of myself cuddling a meter long spanner, this also being the kind of thing one finds lying about in Tom’s vicinity.  I was also thinking of asking him for sand as I was thinking of doing the potatoes grown in tires thing, but really I only have so much energy, and Jeff has already registered misgivings about my ability to keep up with a garden, which is only reasonable. I volunteered for various of Tom’s plans (mostly holding the ends of things, this being a requirement for most of Tom’s plans).  Tom and I also agreed to split a cartload of topsoil; Paul is going to investigate manure for his little garden plot.

I stopped digging after I twisted my knee.  It appears to be okay this morning, so back to the grind after church.  The dirt I’m pulling up is full of earthworms (also those nasty lawn chafer larvae, which I carefully threw onto the concrete so Margot could mishandle them).  Margot croaked in excitement when she saw the measuring tape.  So shiny ! So crinkly ! So making a wonderful noise as it disappeared into its hole !  She pounced on it but I was able to wrestle it away from her.

Great church meeting yesterday.  Various matters arose and I slept on them; I will be taking a decision later today.  It’s not particularly earth shattering.

It turns out the migraines were hormones.  As my career as a breeder staggers to a close, I suppose I’ll get this crap happening occasionally.  Grr, the mama bear said.  Grr.

When I was a kid I thought my dad was the coolest man who ever lived; he let us watch Laugh-In, he bought gouramis and lizards and four eyed fish (anableps anableps) and painted a stick man on the side of the house and he had a beard and he put up a geodesic dome in the backyard and he had trophies for shooting and he’d been in the Air Force and he could fix anything and he had a succession of unusual cars (Simca, anyone?  original Mini Minor?).  One of the many cool things about him was his taste in music.  (This is no longer the case.. he listens to Muzak now, but we all get old and tired, so I won’t repine).  I used to love it when he played the soundtrack from the early sixties show “Checkmate” – he had the soundtrack album – and it wasn’t until last night that I realized that the Johnny Williams who wrote that score (which is MADE OF OSSUM) is the same John Williams who wrote the Star Wars theme, and many many many others.  Prescient dude, mi papa.

Steak and eggs and coffee for breakfast.

Biscotti are on for the first bake…. I promised some to Tom this morning, and given his many kindnesses I’d better get on the stick.  Can you tell I’m feeling better?

CUte OVerloading warning

A lot of very cute interspecies animal friendship videos. The Boston terrier and the pig video is my fave.

I met Caroline last night to watch Awake My Soul; she’s the gal trying to put together a Sacred Harp sing here in Vancouver.  This is a worthy goal.  I also met her cat Tully, who is a Superior Creature and who trained me in door management within minutes of meeting me.  Sacred Harp or shaped note singing is a kind of Xtreme congregational singing.  The trebles, altos, tenors and basses sit facing each other in a square and the song leader (who can be anybody in the congregation, and it alternates among congregants) keeps the beat.  The music is upwards of a couple centuries old, or as new as the Nineties, because the singing tradition has had a revival in this past century. It is, among other things, intense, loud as blazes, polyphonal in spots, fugue like in spots and entirely weird and strange and although it’s a total piece of Americana, it seems almost too spiritual and pure to be part of the American worship tradition.

It would be bloody amazing at Beacon, but I ain’t the choir director.