Death in the family
2006-09-30— Posted by: allegra
My auntie Jackie’s mum passed away yesterday. I light a candle for her transition, and the transitions of her kin and friends.
Quick news blast
2006-09-30— Posted by: allegra
1. Finally signed up for del.icio.us.
2. Everybody in the household slept here last night.
3. Whipped cream on oatmeal is delicious.
4. I am insufficiently caffeinated for the performance of my duties, but Keith is fixing that even as I type.
5. I am working my way through Suzette Haden Elgin’s The Last Word on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and I keep wanting to loan it to my pOp as a model for whatever book we’ll try to squeeze out of him when the Province of BC drop kicks him through the Goal Posts of Retirement.
6. Janice left so many books that I am alternately grinning and looking consterned. I mean, there’s consternation, but where’s the consterned?
7. Katie is taking two pans of brownies to a baby shower that she will not be able to attend. My attempts to console her were met with a wan smile.
8. Katie says that washing dishes is good for meditations on heat transfer.
9. I light a candle for John M. in Afghanistan who narrowly missed being killed in a roadside explosion. He is the eldest of one of my family’s closest friends. 10. I light a candle for the Queen of England, who has given over a portion of Windsor Castle to be a Mosque for her Muslim servants. This is by no means a new thing; the shrine at the base of Gebel Musa has places of worship for Muslims and Eastern Orthodox and Catholic celebrants and it’s been that way for over a thousand years. The places of tolerance are not hard to find if you look; the heart is still the hardest place sometimes.
11. I gotta get off the computer, Paul needs to fire off some emails before we head out to Harrison Hot Springs to look at the sand castles. It’s raining, but I don’t mind.
Joke
2006-09-29— Posted by: allegra
What does a Congressman use for a bookmark?
Bent over pages!
Damn that Wackypedia
2006-09-29— Posted by: allegra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisneySpeak
Hey Alan, scroll down about half way.
The man who had 14 wives
2006-09-29— Posted by: allegra
This guy is a realllllllll creep. And he lived in Toronto, too! I wonder what his children have to say about him.
Convertible
2006-09-29— Posted by: allegra
Janice picked me up in the convertible last night and whisked me away to the Keg, where we had very very good steak and ate a LOT of mushrooms. Yum.
I think Katie is home, her door is closed.
Scanged from fark.com, it is to giggle. http://kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=135536 The gist is a teacher took out a full page yearbook ad messing over the students, administration and school district. If the pic of the teacher is still up, be prepared to wonder when Harlan Ellison got so fat.
Dr Filk has been practicing up a storm for the various cons he and Filkola are playing this fall. Filkola is trying to get him to wear a dress for the Mad Scientist’s Love Song but so far no dice. We shall see if her powers and persuasions and general cussed wiliness will win the day.
Worksibling Mohammed sent me this
2006-09-27— Posted by: allegra
http://www.breakingranks.net/weblog/20-ways
One more thing……Okay, three more things.
2006-09-27— Posted by: allegra
Little more follow up…. that is an extremely athletic Donny Osmond doing the background dancing in White and Nerdy. Goshwow. I mean I loved it the first time I saw it, but this has LAYERS of ARTISTRY that leave me SWOONING.
I haven’t commented on Uwe Boll (pron. oova bowl) and his fight night, but that’s just because I am waiting for somebody more clued in than I to comment, so I can crib the remarks. To set up the comments in a later post, two facts: Uwe Boll makes horrifically, mind numbingly, bone crushingly bad movies. He recently had a fight with some of his worst critics and beat the wooglies out of them.
Here’s how pink I really am
2006-09-27— Posted by: allegra
Okay, I make no secret of the fact that I am one of the pinkest people you ever met. I refer to myself as white, but it’s the same way brown people call themselves black . .. .. it’s a weird thing. I am pink. Anyway, I am so frikkin pink, that when I found out Seth Green (Oz from Buffy, he-man of Robot Chicken, film ecktor and all around cool dude) was showing off HIS OWN cherry collection of action figures in Weird Al Yankovic’s White and Nerdy, I immediately popped back onto Youtube and watched it again. As if obeying some inner law, the playback stopped HERE. I did a screen cap and just about lost control of my bladder. This was on screen for a tenth of a second, but he had to do this!!!!!
Oh, and google Weasel Stomping Day, but not if you a) love animals and b) hate Weird Al Yankovic.
Taking a hint
2006-09-27— Posted by: allegra
I picked up the phone last night and called Tish and Terry. Terry answered, in his usual sephulchral tones, and within about ten minutes I was laughing my ass off, which I was not in the least expecting. I congratulated him on being an empty nester. Sophie, his youngest, who was born within a few days of Katie, has left home for University. We talked about a number of subjects, including canoe paddles, car maintenance, the possibility of a joint jaunt to the Maritimes, what’s really important in life, & in-laws, and then I asked to speak to his charming life partner Tish and he moved off the mike and said (so I could hear him) some variant on “She won’t take a hint, you come and talk to her,” which left me wheezing with laughter, because he came within a hairsbreadth of sounding like he meant it.
Janice arrived shortly thereafter, and all hail fandom! If a friend shows up with a pile of books, she’s not offended if you dive right in and start with the print-lovin’. Unfortunately I’ve been feeling Just East of Dreadful (there’s folks sick at work right now, and I’ve been off color for a while) so I crashed out almost as soon as Paul got home from work, but it was fun piling through the book boxes with frequent squeals of glee.
I was up at quarter to four and now I’m twying to be vewy vewy quiet so I don’t wake everybody up.
The latest Fantasy and Science Fiction has some great stuff in it. Yeah, I could be more specific, but rather than go into full blown review mode, I think I’ll quit blogging and work on transcribing The Dream in Fragments, the song I wrote last Friday morning.
Katie hasn’t been home in three nights. Or I should say she’s dropped in but not slept over. She’s apparently going to school, and I imagine she’ll come home today long enough to grab some clothes, shower and head off to work. I won’t see her, of course. Sigh.
Bettie Rules
2006-09-26— Posted by: allegra
So (scanged from NBC30.com), look what a really fine friend of the owner of the house painted on the side facing the highway!?
The roof beam is strategically placed, wouldn’t you say?
Technobabble runs wild
2006-09-26— Posted by: allegra
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5125780462773187994
Skunkfest
2006-09-26— Posted by: allegra
Is anybody surprised that the sixth annual Skunkfest just took place in North Ridgeville?
I useta know somebody with a pet skunk. It takes all kinds to make a world.
enough sleep
2006-09-26— Posted by: allegra
I could fill 10 column inches with descriptions of my physical woes, but that’s just boring, so to the mail bag, Alichino!
For those of us who identify as Cucuteni, a link – http://www.trypillia.com/info/index.shtml. I especially like the useful pots to put things in.
Along the same lines, http://www.barbaratedlock.com/excerpts/old_wisdom.htm
Janice arrives today. If the winds be fair and the border sane, she will arrive in time to pick me up from work, which means I might have a ride home in a convertible to look forward to.
I’m going to have to stop reading feminist literature, it’s exhausting. I’m being sarcastic, of course. Is that all right?
Executive compensation
2006-09-25— Posted by: allegra
As I was traipsing through eurekalert.org, I ran across this article on the effects of executive compensation on an organization.
http://www.informs.org/article.php?id=1232&p=
for me mum
2006-09-25— Posted by: allegra
http://www.theanticraft.com/materialism.htm
Hey mOm, go here and scroll halfway down. But take cough syrup first, because this WILL make you laugh.
Bones as art
2006-09-25— Posted by: allegra
http://www.ludd.luth.se/%7Esilver_p/kutna.html
Weird you want, weird you get. But I swear, officer, I did NOT melt that man’s lug wrench.
Mother dear Mother
2006-09-25— Posted by: allegra
My mother, despite the fact she’s feeling like somebuddy flung her down some stairs and picked her up with a red hot shovel, is working on my DNA scarf.
Neener, neener booboo.
John M (Mike) Ford is dead
2006-09-25— Posted by: allegra
John M Ford was only a year older than me. He’d been in poor health for a while. Pic is of my favorite book of his.
Smelling the Linden Dairy Air
2006-09-25— Posted by: allegra
Poor Doc Filk. He was heading north to Kanada on a motorcycle when the border guards all jumped on their chairs. Now let me get this straight; how is getting a gun (and requalifying once a year in broad daylight, harumph, harumph) gonna make the Canuckistani border guards safer? Right now, if somebody comes through with a gun, you smile and wave them through and let the Horsemen deal with it, that’s what they’re paid to do, right? Once the border guards have guns, I know that I’ll feel ever so much safer as a regular citizen, knowing that a bunch of underqualified weenies will have service revolvers that they will be LOOKING FOR EXCUSES to wave the frikkin’ things around. Bozoid thinking of the finest water!
I think Doc Filk’s pun was pretty damned funny though, as well as being accurate. Linden Dairy Air indeed….
Dreaming
2006-09-24— Posted by: allegra
Last night I had not one but several work related dreams. One was me walking up to a worksibling’s desk and realizing that the reason I couldn’t see him was because he was napping next to his desk. I was immediately overcome with tiredness and lay down next to him (there was nothing remotely sexual about this) and the two of us ended up sleeping like puppies in a blanket. The second part of the dream is that my work group all went to a training session and during the training session my boss fired an Uzi, but believe it or not it was all in good fun and to a point that he was making in the presentation, so nobody was upset. And there were two other little work minidreams, being stuck in a very bad elevator with three of my least favorite coworkers (all men) as the cable snapped and we plummeted; and having a live minicam on in the car of one of my overseas coworkers while a spectacular bus/motorcycle/car accident happened in front of them. All I saw was the motorcyclist go flying past the car; the rest of it was all reaction shot of the folks inside the vehicle as the dodged debris.
Baby animals
2006-09-23— Posted by: allegra
This is a less-than-a-week-old otter. Photo credit Heribert Fischer.
I love crap like this
2006-09-23— Posted by: allegra
Fever
2006-09-23— Posted by: allegra
Chipper called “for five minutes” Like Such a Thing Is Possible. Fortyfive massively entertaining and information packed minutes whiz by, and then I’m thinking, man, I took a nap today and I still feel like “my parachute didn’t open” as pOp says. I think… Maybe I should take my temperature? And I did, and I’m running a degree of fever. Despite it all I had such a productive, me oriented kind of day; worked on Gossip, one of Dr. Filk’s faves (although not because I wrote it for his ex-wife, at least I don’t think so), wrote another tune called The Nothing Doing Vacation (song title not yet fixed, but I sang it to Chipper over the phone and she squee’d in a MOST gratifying fashion (then she sang me a Bjork song that she’s done some clown choreography to); worked on the song I wrote yesterday morning (like at 6 in the ayem, can you credit it?) which still doesn’t have lyrics; got a haircut (phoned the shop “When’s my appointment?” “Five minutes hence, dumbass!”); went shopping for Welding, this amazing AG haircare product that performs PRECISELY as advertised; bought Cobbs Bread for Keith; walked all the way back to the meat market and got schnitzel and bacon and other yummy things and then walked all the way home; I was footsore but very cheerful and who should greet me but Keith. I cooked lunch and then lay down with that book of Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism Janice loaned me which is alternately hilarious, low key, scholarly, incomprehensible (and happy to be so), in your face and aggrieved. My eyeballs started feeling very hot and pressured, not just because of the reading material so I napped. I woke up and it was like three o’clock in the afternoon and I had the house to myself. Every time I tried to do something harder than laundry or dishes I’d feel kinda spacy, and I thought it was just me. Now I know I’m running a temperature and I’m thinking GREAT! Now I take painkillers and lie in bed! And I already got out and stirred my stumps in this beautiful fall weather (by myself, so I could write a song, because I didn’t have to pay attention to anybody else!!), so it’s not like I didn’t get any exercise today. All in all, I picked a great time and place to get mildly sick. We shall see if it turns into something more disgusting or whether a good night’s sleep turns it over. Mind you if my parents gave me double pneumonia over the phone I’m gonna be really mad at them.
Rub my tummy
2006-09-23— Posted by: allegra
Imagine someplace where you get to pet tigers for a small fee. (Or so I assume – wouldn’t YOU pay for the privilege?) This is from Kanchanaburi, Thailand, pic scanged from the BBC.
Vincati
2006-09-23— Posted by: allegra
Believe it or not, I have been a passenger on both a 1951 Vincent Black Shadow (I joined the 100 mile an hour club that day) and a Ducati (can’t remember the year, it is one of Dr Filk’s lamented bikes), so when I found out that some crazy dudes were mashing these two bikes together, I HAD to find and post a pic. This scanged from the Cycle Canada website, thanks guys.
Living in Paradise II
2006-09-23— Posted by: allegra
There’s Carly communing with the seals.
Living in Paradise
2006-09-23— Posted by: allegra
This is Carly, taken Labour Day weekend. Happy sigh. But wait! There’s more!!!
Eating and drinking and talking and planning
2006-09-23— Posted by: allegra
Worksibling Scott and I, joined by Kate, after she got released from the kitchen, ate and drank beer and whined about relationships, work and other stuff. Katie didn’t actually drink beer but she poached nachos and dry ribs from our plates. It was a very pleasant way to end the week. My last glimpse of Scott was of him trying to get a picture of the sunset from the west end of Sperling Station; I’m hoping he did get something interesting, because it was a spectacular sunset and I want to post it.
Paul’s doing his yoga. I should do my exercises as soon as he clears the floor space.
Paul in preparation for winter has hacked down the figs, cleaned out the electret filter for the furnace, and resealed all the doors. He was ably assisted by Keith in the fig trimming, and it was a pile of work. Sometime yesterday one of the hideous, disgusting mirror tiles in the downstairs front hallway fell off the wall. Yay! Now we have a sign that it’s time to rip it all down and replace it with a nice big piece of float glass. Or maybe a nice big piece of cork.
Katie came home last night and has to start work at 10 this morning, lucky her.
Every time I make fun of Chipper for not being able to find things on the internet, it’s because I’m forgetting she’s got dialup. Dur… sorry.
If you have a 2007 IKEA catalogue, make sure you have a good look at the dog on the inside of the front cover. Oopsie. Let’s just say that the dog, which is looking knowingingly at the camera, is ‘happy’.
Yes! I get a haircut today. I was going to say trim, but knowing the mentality of my readers I figured I should make it more specific. The weather looks gorgeous, and it’s just another day in paradise. As all of us Saskatchewan scions know….
State religion in the US?
2006-09-22— Posted by: allegra
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/21/opinion/edbill.php
I read about it in the blogosphere and then tracked it back to a ‘legitimate’ news source. Gulp. I feel nauseous. I just don’t want to believe this is true. And then I read that there’s a debate about legalizing torture in the US.
First they came for the Jews, and I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t Jewish….I have to stop reading the news, it’s making me sad.
Jason Fortuny
2006-09-22— Posted by: allegra
It isn’t even 5 in the morning, and I feel compelled to get up and rant already. I guess this is what happens when Paul and I, contemplating all the things we COULD be doing, vote for sleep at 8:30 in the evening. So while Paul does something socially useful, like his morning yoga exercises (how I enjoy listening to him do his yoga breathing) I’m gonna rant. From each according to his abilities, to each according to her needs. Note how a slight gender shift moves the meaning of that statement from high flown drama to a fly blown joke….
Anyway.
Today I’d like to rant about Jason Fortuny. I was waiting for a sign from the heavens before I should join my opinion to the mighty river of obloquy that is (crikey! I had to LOOK UP obloquy to spell it correctly – that a ranter must look up obloquy!?) the blogosphere these days, and I got it in the form of Dan Savage’s column last night.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Jason Fortuny took a picture of a woman’s ass, and posted it on Craigslist in the “looking for sex” column as if he was a hot 25 year old submissive, ah, woman. Well he isn’t. He has had a hard life, and he recently had to sell all of his action figures (considering I’ve been reciting Weird Al Yankovic’s lyrics for White and Nerdy for the last three days, I nearly fell off my chair when I read that) to pay some debts, and he has a history of cruel pranks to look back on, but he’s not a woman, submissive or otherwise, he’s a sad boy child of 30 with a bad temper. His upbringing left him with a tragic inability to be sympathetic to anybody outside a very narrow band, so that means that any and all of us could have been on the receiving end of his bile.
And what prank did Jason Fortuny play on the almost two hundred, I’m assuming mostly men, who answered the ad, including some with their work email addresses and ‘candids’ with their faces and full frontals?
He reposted their emails and pictures to a location which became Schadenfreude’s number one hit URL.
Now, I am vanilla. I’ve always been vanilla. I will always be vanilla. I don’t like spanking or getting spanked (or being tied up or humiliated or ****** on). Causing or receiving pain during adult oriented fun and frolic is icky to me. But, like a true white liberal, I’m gonna get up on my hind legs and bleat “Some of my best friends are kinky!” and say that the thing I object to most emotionally is that Jason Fortuny didn’t pick a very useful target. Why not go after pedophiles? He claims to have been molested himself. But noooooo.
Most of the blogosphere thinks the people he picked on were scumbags who deserve to lose their jobs. Dan Savage, may he nestle in the bosom of the Parking Goddess forever, commented that most of us would not withstand a really close look at our lives. As in, “You would be hopelessly screwed if somebody took a close look at your cookies, your DVD collection, and your email history”. Amen.
I had to back up and delete a paragraph that detailed some of the bad bad things I’ve done with the company email, so let’s just take it as read. Too gross for public consumption, alas. But like Mr. Fortuny, I may be called to account someday, and I am ready.
So what precisely did Jason Fortuny do wrong? In the last analysis, nothing that isn’t self-correcting. The kink community has been served notice that if it wants to keep on trucking, it has to control its own media and messaging services, and practice ‘safe hex’; Jason himself may or may not get his head busted in or face legal consequences for his misuse of public waters, being Craigslist; self righteous Aholes with time on their hands may parse Jason’s livejournal for clues as to the motivations for his behaviour (fortunately I don’t have to, because somebody’s already done it for me. Google Jason Fortuny and you’ve got an hour’s worth of reading, some of it very disturbing indeed, in front of you); civil libertarians can bite first one hand and then the other
I for one, with my own little mind, am thinking of this as being, in a small but very real way, the beginning of the end of the free internet (like it ever was, but you know what I mean). Unless those of us who are willing to PAY for the privilege of communicating freely and without intervention using ones and zeroes get together and make a secure, distributed and functionally paranoid place to exchange information, something not susceptible to foreclosure, political pressure or theft by the Russian Mafia, we’re going to lose every inch of the pipeline we’ve come to be addicted to. Net neutrality is a chimera; anything that can be used steal your identity, clean out your bank account, sic the cops on you for no good reason, and send strangers to your door thinking they are going to be partying with your 12 year old daughter is not a NEUTRAL PLACE. It’s time for those of us who cherish liberty to REALLY pay to play, and not just fork over more cash to the US Telcos for DSL. That’s the lesson of Jason Fortuny.
I’ve found something else for my mother to knit.
2006-09-21— Posted by: allegra
I emailed my mother the link to this scarf pattern. Once she recovers from her terrible cough, maybe I can bribe her to knit it pour moi.
enough sleep
2006-09-21— Posted by: allegra
Last night I dreamed we all lived in a big old Victorian house (like a mirror image of the old house on 74, but about 2 metres wider) and a short man about Paul’s age with a beret and cropped grey beard and a boy of about seven in a beret with a blue star painted over one eye came to my door and dropped off a magic book. The pages were the colour of the Virgin’s mantle and the ink was in all colours, mostly gold, and the words and the pictures moved. It was a directory. I called somebody to find out who they were and they were in town from the States (from Auburn) here to see the plastination exhibit at Science World and they had agreed to drop the book off to select Unitarians.
Weird you want, weird you get. But I swear, I did NOT melt that man’s lug wrench.
After the fact……..
2006-09-20— Posted by: allegra
Never ever ever feed your cats anything with onions or garlic. It can make them very very sick. I suspect that’s what happened to Zeek! after he plowed through some spaghetti sauce.
I have no idea what kind of deer that is
2006-09-20— Posted by: allegra
This picture was sent to me under the rubric “Are You My Mommy?”
Need a lift?
2006-09-20— Posted by: allegra
http://www.dorks.com/html/Funny-Cats-Video.html
If you hate cats, don’t watch it. If you do like cats, you’ll pee laughing. The Japanese children’s chorus in the background adds to the charm of it, strangely enough.
Katie finally came home. With A F)CKING BIG TATTOO. After I finished twittering about health issues, she drily said, “I watched Kat take the needle out of the package.” You can see it’s a bit red, but it’s not a bad piece at all.
Carolyn Porco sent me an email
2006-09-19— Posted by: allegra
Who is she? Well, apart from a brief correspondence regarding atheism and other issues, I don’t know her any better than you do. But she’s a world famous astronomer, and I’m on her mailing list, so without further ado and before the press release rolls, here’s a pic showing a new ring of Saturn. Visit ciclops.org for much more, including a new image of the blue Earth!
A question answered
2006-09-19— Posted by: allegra
It drives me nuts sometimes that I see native words and can’t pronounce them. Then I trip face down in this – while I was looking for something else. http://smalgyax.unbc.ca/
Appropriate technology
2006-09-19— Posted by: allegra
Here’s the son of a coworker with one severely phat chair.
It’s talk like a Pirate Day
2006-09-19— Posted by: allegra
I can’t talk like a pirate, but I can squeak like a rubber ducky.
Alistair Cooke lives on
2006-09-19— Posted by: allegra
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/19/cooke.ap/index.html
Now, I know I have a fetish for zombie films, but this is both rude and ridiculous. He may be dead, but the lawsuit will be forever.
Waxing my psychic car
2006-09-19— Posted by: allegra
Katie didn’t come home last night, but she did call to say so, so I am content.
If you want tobacco seeds, just ask me. I have lots. Tobacco seeds are the size of flyspecks and an amazing… uh … tobacco brown.
Paul just said to me that he had a totally screwed up night at work, but he sounded too brighteyed to have been summarily dismissed. I quizzed him, and he said something mysterious and interesting so now I can hardly wait for him to get home for some OTHER reason than that I can’t get to work until he brings home the car..
Last night, I dreamed I was somebody else, but when I woke up, I was still 40 pounds overweight. (Actually, I’m down to 180 pounds, which is amazing considering I’m not actually trying to lose weight and it’s fall.)
Had a lovely long chat with Janice last night (I was reading a book she gave me when she called, which I found a wonderful coincidence) and SHE’s going to the SmithSONian today, and you’re not. My mother is blowing her nose in purest envy, I betcha, and I’m envious too, but in the nice way of appreciating cool things happening to your friends rather than wishing that nothing nice ever happened, except to you.
Janice is coming to visit us soon, and THIS TIME we’re going to a poolhall AND a bookstore. I hope. I’m really a lazy layabout these days. Maggie and Chipper also both play pool, why shouldn’t I? Well, apart from the fact that I’m about as coordinated as a drunken binge, nothing, really.
Brother James has forgiven me for trying to part him from his livelihood and expressed his forgiveness by providing Paul and me with exceptionally good advice about buying appliances. He used to sell them, after all, so he has that secret handshake thing down pat.
Have a good day y’all. The blessings of the Divine Wow attend you….
House of Plague
2006-09-19— Posted by: allegra
First mOm sends me an email saying pOp is feeling so lousy he may not go in to work. Now, you must remember ‘work’ for my dad involves Getting Out of Bed, Donning a Bathrobe, and Walking to the Computer Room to Answer the Phone and Empty out the Fax Machine. This means, of course, and I swore like a stevedore when I saw it, that pOp is on the point of expiring. So the NEXT email is that pOp has double pneumonia (I have had pneumonia once, it SUCKED; I tend more to bronchitis and I haven’t had bronchitis in ages thank Guh).
If he doesn’t markedly improve on the drugs he’s been given, he’ll be into the hospital for an IV, and if you are one of those people who rushes the exits when a needle appears, believe me, my pOp’s out the door so far ahead of you that there’s nothing to see but the scorch marks he left in the linoleum. My mOm’s still feeling like animatronic scrap.
I light a candle for the Plague Victims.
Confidential to Swampy… could it be adhesions?
It’s been bally ages since I posted a moose pic
2006-09-18— Posted by: allegra
Ah, a moose picture, from Norway. Moosiness. Ah.
scanged from somethingawful.com
2006-09-18— Posted by: allegra
It’s been bally ages since I posted a decent vampire pic. Stolen from Something Awful.
Burt Rutan interviewed
2006-09-18— Posted by: allegra
Burt Rutan is the very model of the modern libertarian.
http://www.reason.com/hod/tb033105.shtml
I’ve thought this many times
2006-09-18— Posted by: allegra
I stole and mashed this.
To take the taste out of your mouth…….
2006-09-18— Posted by: allegra
So after the “you’ve got a purty mouth” bear kiss, how about a 1700 pound chocolate moose?
http://www.lenlibby.com/lenny.htm
And now for something completely different…
2006-09-18— Posted by: allegra
The ceremonial shooting of the florists. Alan, I saw this, and I thought of you, but I don’t think you and Janice went trapshooting right after yuz got married.
Lucky Number Slevin
2006-09-18— Posted by: allegra
I just watched Lucky Number Slevin again, this time all the way through. It’s a good movie, an interesting collection of surfaces. The script is quite remarkable, likewise lighting, editing, score, set decoration, costuming and the insouciant way the film abandons reality when reality stands in the way of the story. Oh, and the wallpaper. If ever an auteur ever announced his presence with authority, McGuigan sure’s-hell does in this film. The bloody wallpaper is a movie in itself. And the film references. Instead of being shyly deferential and subtle in its film references, the movie dances on your toes and says, “Didja feel that?” The Bond references, the Cary Grant reference. Don’t forget Bond shoots people – or whatever it takes to do the job – although admittedly the job is never revenge as it is with Slevin.
Now, Paul’s take on the movie is that the body count is REALLY REALLY HIGH. Being 1 guy, and then another guy, and then another guy, and then a couple of guys, and then another couple of guys, and then another other other couple of guys. And like that. And then a woman. So yeah, there’s lots of dead guys. Dead losses, most of them.
Josh Hartnett goes from being likable and cuddly to being pure evil by very slightly narrowing his eyes. And I’m sure they messed with his vocal track in that scene. It’s just… eerie. Lucy Liu is so adorable you want to pick her up and take her home, and then maybe (ed. knock it off). Bruce Willis makes one expression last a whole movie without it ever getting boring. I have no idea how he does that, but the effect is amazing. Sir Ben Kingsley does a wonderful job messing with a New York accent; the various hired thugs and bit parts are well cast. Morgan Freeman doesn’t chew scenery so much as he allows himself to be heaved in the air from a blanket of support held by his costars. He obviously loves playing the Paternal Figure of Businesslike Evil.
Stanley Tucci is hot. Okay, I’m sick. But it’s not a bad sickness. I think Brian Dennehy is hot (like, 20 years ago). I think George Clooney is his own class of hotness. I think Sam Waterston is hot. (Now that is sick). I think Dylan Moran has his own temperature scale. And just to prove how sick I am… this picture.
Brayden napping
2006-09-17— Posted by: allegra
Don’t you wish you could still sleep like this???
Various
2006-09-17— Posted by: allegra
One of my aunties is in town for medical treatment. She has the same thing my ma had but the course of treatment is different. Get well soon Auntie D.
mOmandpOp are both feeling under the weather with a range of symptoms I am too squeamish to post, so I am lighting a candle for the rapid resolution of their quartain ague (or whatever the hell you want to call it).
My granny seems to be as fine as you can be when you’re casually sneaking up on your second century of life.
Dax slept over; he’s gone home and Katie’s off to work.
Pic is part of my ongoing effort to post as many pictures as possible of dogs riding horses.
Paul has a nice birthday and so do I
2006-09-16— Posted by: allegra
http://planetgonecrazy.blogspot.com/2006/09/opera-fans-prefer-magic-mushrooms.html
mOm, just read down to the third last paragraph and be prepared to giggle. Make sure you read it to pOp.
Paul had his nicest birthday in years. We feasted him last night at Chong Lum Hin with friends, family and flying buddies; we ate breakfast together this morning at IHOP with the kids (they had been working the night before); and he and I went for a walk in Deer Lake Park and we saw FOUR TURTLES sunning themselves on a log. Happy sigh. Killed ourselves laughing overhearing other people insisting that they ‘weren’t real’. Watched folks get ready for the Lantern Festival tonight.
Then I tried to buy him a birthday present but he insisted on putting it on the household account (!?) which was great because I had also found Three Kings and Bells are Ringing for the kids and he found Bitches Brew (and this is the SECOND time we’ve got the album because it’s been stolen once before) so we ended up buying a lot of media today. Then I treated him (and he let me) to an early dinner at Pho Hong on the Kingsway and then we came home and snoozed.
I finished Lucy Sussex’ The Scarlet Rider and loved it; now I am trying to balance it by reading some more Dale Spender but it’s heavy sledding. I think I will just go back to reading Through Alien Eyes; I’m in a fictiony kinda mood right now.
The kids are home from work, and Paul has gone into work on midnights, and it’s all very peaceful; in about ten minutes Katie is going to a party downtown with Dax and Justin, at which point I suspect Keith and I will be ripping the wrapper off Three Kings. George Clooney, happy sigh.
My heartfelt thanks to the folks who came out to the birthday party; Paul really really enjoyed it.
Please provide caption
2006-09-16— Posted by: allegra
Isn’t this a great picture? Pope Benedict and his ongoing headgear monkey show.
Buying an appliance
2006-09-16— Posted by: allegra
So we figured out which dishwasher we wanted, and, as you may have noticed, Canadian retailers are very grudging about taking your phone calls to give you information. After being on hold for 10 minutes calling a retailer in Bellingham, Paul hung up. Then we called Coast, and they cut me off. Then we called the Bay, and a very nice young man named Afshin took the model information AND CALLED ME BACK within 10 minutes with price and availability, for ten bucks less than the Coast guy had quoted (with no availability). So screw it, if and when we buy a portable dishwasher, it will be from the Bay, because in addition to being less expensive, they gave way better service.
In my continuing efforts to fill the immense demand of my public for more great pictures of Pope Benedict feeding his headgear monkey, I provide you with this “Pope dons Riot Gear” pic. He can come to Fetish Night an-y-time if he’s gonna go for that “aging yuppie biker in a dress” look. It’s from a website which disses the last two Popes as being too worldly. Oh yeah, too worldly. There’s always somebody out there who can out-arch-conservative the Pope; is that a scary thought, or whut? Let’s get something straight. I diss the Popes because they are wily old guys who love me and hate my sin (thanks, fellas) who spend enough on clothes each year to buy school lunches in the City of Vancouver. Hey, did you know people yelled “Santo Subito!” at Pope John Paul II’s funeral? By the will of the people he will be getting his fitting for a halo quite a few years early. Also, Wikipedia reliably informs me (for some reason they’ve locked the Pope’s entry, can you credit it???) that Papa Ratzi will be fast tracking the beatification of the Italian priest murdered in Turkey this past year by a pistol packing teenager who wanted to provide a somewhat percussive commentary on the Catholic Church’s missionary activities in Trabzon. Yeah, all in all, I think the Pope’s visit to Turkey later this year should be a smashing success, although I have spared many a thought for the poor son of a gun who will be running security for the Papal visit to Turkey. My thoughts are with you, whoever you are.
Late breaking tip. If you are collecting tobacco seeds, don’t bite your fingernails afterwards. I’ve accidentally ingested so much tobacco juice that my eyes are blurring and I feel quite light headed.
Here’s an Indonesian volcano called Mt. Bromo.
Pic is HIDEOUS new 747 Cargo plane. It looks like a corpulent banana slug with wings.
Pic credit AP, a perfect depiction of the age old question.
Stakeholder engagement — the state of being betrothed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
They’ll be a whole 3.5 ounces when they’re grown. Photo Reuters.
I am pleased to report that after wrestling with it for almost two weeks, I have finally completed Bela Lugosi is the King around here, and can move on to the next song. You’ll have to forgive me, it’s almost 100 bars long, because every verse is markedly different from the others. “I showed her Plan 9 from Outer Space, she said, That’s it, I give up on the whole human race. Have no fear, someone brought more beer, and Bela Lugosi is the King around here!”
Rob of 9 promised me aircraft pictures and didn’t cough up, the swine, so here’s something of Paul’s (a friend’s Yak 18T, taken at Point Roberts) – and Paul DIDN’T get to go flying at Pemberton yesterday, the towplane lost a magneto about half an hour before he and his flying buddy got there. Okay, so they went for a nice drive on a gorgeous day, but even so…
Okay, I broke character many times, because my leg crapped out about 45 minutes in (which I expected, and was prepared for). So I told people about zombie walk as I walked back to the Skytrain with Paul and Katie, and I ate ice cream, because it was a hot day, and I scared little children on the Skytrain.
The horror, the horror! Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Rowan whips out his accordion. That’s Brooke’s elbow and Brainjo, by the way. Zombies … on Robson … but there weren’t any zombie bagpipers, I’ll be really scared when I see me one of those.
Since I can already hear my legion of fans screaming “Show us some cute zombies, you dodohead!” herewith the requested cute zombies. Ain’t they somethin’?
Katie and Paul both made variants on the remark, “Apart from the makeup, how can anybody tell the difference?” (between shoppers on Robson and the zombies). For further details, check out zombiewalk.com and get the full scoop of brains on a global phenomenon.
Katie and Paul both made variants on the remark, “Apart from the makeup, how can anybody tell the difference?” (between shoppers on Robson and the zombies). For further details, check out zombiewalk.com and get the full scoop of brains on a global phenomenon.
This is me in front of the Art Gallery. Don’t I look lovely? I am wearing approximately 10 cents worth of fake blood, and about two dollars worth of skin gunk.
It’s a baby tenrec. It looks like when it grows up it will have a starring role in a movie drawn from the Oeuvre of CS Lewis.
Etna steam ring. 200m across. Ha!
Dame Te Atairangikaahu passed away at 75. RIP.
You would think that writing down all my songs would be a pretty cut and dried project; just time consuming. However, every time I turn around there’s something else that needs doing. The songs are in .MUS format, which is for proprietary musical notation software and no good unless I a) rip it to MP3 b) rip it to Midi or c) rip it to PDF, all of which are formats most other people can use. For my songs to be of maximum usefulness and full of meme goodness (nice pun, eh wot), which was after all the whole point, they have to be in all four formats. This involves a trivial matter called work, and by the time I’m done, I will have written probably another four or five songs, and had to write down 85 other songs, about 30 fragments, and then rip them all into all the formats, and that doesn’t even go to ring tone territory, because I intend to have ring tones of about 30 of my tunes before it’s all done. (F— You Jack as a ring tone? Oh baby!) Oh, by the way, don’t buy the software Ring Factory, it doesn’t work; it doesn’t even install. I have repeatedly emailed the company, but I guess nobody works on Gibraltar, which is apparently where the company is. London Thugs already swapped it out once for me.
This is from the Slat Rat Chronicles, radio.weblogs.com. This actually looks like a stuffed moose, but he’s real all right, and the photographer was smart enough to stay in her car. That moose is less than 3 meters away…
http://echosphere.net/star_trek_insp/star_trek_insp3.html.
Picture my astonishment when my father solemnly and casually announced over the weekend that he is now a deist. (This is right up there with the Pope sending out bris announcements for his firstborn….) And who has pOp’s vote? Loki! So I sent him a link to Thalia Took’s site (which is eyepoppingly gorgeous) and this picture. Artwork credit Thalia Took, may she live forever. I especially recommend her pics of Arianrhod, Bride, Laverna, Hekate, Erzulie and Tzazolteotl. I suspect I’m going to be spending money at www.thaliatook.com pretty soon….
Keith worked twenty hours this weekend, and his reward was to collapse last night with me and Paul and some popcorn in front of Carol Reed’s classic “The Third Man”.
Pic is of a solar flare in July 2002.
I finally have a picture, mental and photographic, of baby Jasmine, who is all and more than reported. Apart from being the standard cute-and-meeting-the-developmental-milestones, she has a distinct personality of radiant calm which is very unlike any other baby I’ve ever met. mOm said she was self-possessed; I would put it that she is the closest in real life that I’ve seen to a baby Buddha. Curt and Darci are over the moon with her, as any sane parents would be with a baby who slept through the night at (I won’t post it, but EARLY).
I always find it much easier to work on other people’s, as this afternoon for example.
And glad it is I am that I’m well enough to go. I slept a lot yesterday.
Didn’t get up until 2:30; feel like animatronic scrap. Paul won his court case – the cop not only didn’t show up for the traffic court case, he didn’t even phone in. What is he, a teenaged girl? Cop not exactly as shown.
Venu left the company which cannot be named for a world class organization with lots of scope…. and we toasted him last night at the Golf Course. I snuck inside and paid for one of his beers. It was good to see the usual assortment of folk, and some folks from the engineering department. It was quite a cross functional showing – not as well attended as Lynne’s but still a damned good showing for almost ten years of employment.
I was all rested up on Sunday… my back was fine, etc. Then I had a horrible nightmare this morning (a torture dream, and the lighting was really bad, so you know it felt real). I’m not going to describe it but sleep afterwards was a theoretical construct so I got up after Kira came and gave me a consoling kiss and gave her some crunchies. Now the dawn sky is pink and gray. I should take pics of the tobacco flowers, they are so pretty.
Jack Warden is dead. He was the fast talking salesman in Twelve Angry Men, which Keith and I recently watched. He was 85.
Cute, hunh? Born to mom Circe at a zoo in Florida
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3736210a11,00.html
Check out Mark Fiore’s Flash today…. http://www.markfiore.com/animation/swear01.html
He was only 60. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
On my brother’s heartfelt recommendation, we rented it. The first thing Keith said about “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” was “Cool, Barry Pepper, the sniper from Saving Private Ryan.” The second thing, which sort of encapsulates why I’d love him even if he wasn’t my kid, is, “Marco Beltrami, what else did he compose for?” That’s the kind of remark I made at his age, happy sigh.
Hey Alan, as mentioned I am reading the above noted, (I – III, V) and what I didn’t mention is that I read one issue – just one – at your house on Montrose – it was in one of the digests. The susurrus of recognition was very Gaimanesque. Hey Janice, I dreamed you were helping me straighten out my library last night. !! I was charmed. Sure wish I knew where that dream house was, it was big enough for you and me and ALL OUR FRIENDS (that’s more like a hotel – the kids were there, don’t know where the menfolks were). Like, I woke up thinking, great house, but I think we’d need professional help keeping it clean….
Cousin Gerald forwarded this…. nuff said.
I guess I like running pictures of weird skull xrays, as well as baby animals and moose.
This picture, taken by Pawan Kumar and scanged from Fark.com, came about because it is very wet in parts of India right now. I am sure the frog has a headache. Isn’t there a nursery rhyme about this? The frog he would a-wooing go, heigh ho Anthony Rowley?
Watched Big Broadcast of 1938 last night. It goes from sophistication to corn so rapidly, and so many times, that I felt as if my critical senses had to be remounted on ball bearings. A remarkable cultural artifact.
from nmherps.blogspot.com
From Gerald, provenance unknown.
Sorry, no.
From a Finnish newspic site.
But unfortunately my back hurts too much. And I had to clean up cat shit this morning. That really didn’t help.
It’s still owie owie owie but Paul dug up some more painkillers. Here’s a pic of Harry and William hungover ‘n stuff at their grans 80th. Can’t sit, must get back to my 80’s feminist sf (Native Tongue, can’t put it down).
These wild deer are licking a dying cat, Sammy. I am assuming that Sammy, having kidney failure, would smell like a salt lick to them which is why they kept coming up to him and licking him. The cat died a couple of days after this pick was taken. Photo credit Margie Scott, Sammy’s owner.
Slate mag commissioned 6 pulp covers for classic works of literature. OF COURSE Melville made the cut. Stolen from the artist, Chris Papasadero/FWIS and Slate Magazine by way of Filkola (Brooke, whom I now dub Filkola, so there).
Well, I got the CT scan results back. I have a herniated disc across L5 and S1. No, those are not my pictures, I stole them off a back site from an American University. SOOOO. I am getting a referral to a neurosurgeon, but if I’m a very good girl and lose 40 pounds and eat my vegetables and do every exercise prescribed by the physiotherapist (whom I see tomorrow in the late afternoon) I will likely not need to have surgery. My bizarre gait is common like dirt among people with the same ailment, so I don’t feel so stupid about my shuffling walk. (I walk really funny these days.)
I hope you can see this picture, and the best typo of 2006 so far.
.JPG)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/story/0,,1766266,00.html
So, she laid a bunch of eggs…. 2 years after the last time she had sex. So either she was storing the sperm up until conditions were perfect, or her babies are parthenogenetic. I look at that face, that tongue, those scales and I’m a-thinking parthenogenesis gets my vote.
.jpg)
Please knit me a nautilus
Well, I wish I could claim that I tore off a couple of new songs last night, helped my daughter with her homework, my son with his career planning and found a cure for cancer growing in my front yard, but I didn’t.
Please knit me a squid
I am happy to report, with a giddy and empyrean glee, that Keith and Kate and Cousin Lexi and Rob went to the opening night of Slither…. only to find that NATHAN FILLION, Captain Tightpants himself, was in the audience watching it with his girlfriend. (She is tiny, and very very cute.) Nathan was wearing a hoodie and jeans.
This snake was found in the women’s can in Sydney Airport. I know a lot of people who are scared shitless of snakes, so I’d say a washroom is a good place to see one.
So a couple of weeks after the picture of the new Abominable snow lobster comes out…. the STUFFED TOY!????
Isn’t this a pretty picture? Its called the DNA nebula, pic credit NASA.
So, of course, here’s an Austrian kangaroo… note the snow.
So as we continue to truck down life’s highway, isn’t it interesting how design is becoming more – naturalistic?
He died on this day in 1937. RIP, you squiddly guy you.
This picture came to me via cousin Gerald, who got it from a coworker, who got it from a friend who lives in Texas. This little creature, nicknamed Powder by the family who got him briefly before the game warden came and got him, was hours old when they nearly hit him with their car. They figured he was a baby goat, but he’s a whitetail deer fawn. Look how small he is compared to the shoe!!! He took to the bottle right away and will probably end up at a game farm or petting zoo.
Paul, Katie, Keith and I got on the ferry to Victoria this morning. I spent the whole ferry trip sorting through my pile of songs and writing out lyrics for songs from memory, and adding cards for new songs; all boring administrivia stuff, nothing as fun as actually getting the songs into sheet music form.
I haven’t posted a pig picture in ages. This comes from the Cleveland Police Department, and brought a smile to my nervous lips.
