Monday Cat Blogging

Nikon D100, 50mm

Tricksey, looking very stylish, wrapped in ribbon.

IDiot

A sport at which nobody, or everybody, can excel isn't much of a sport. A game where everyone stands an equal chance of winning is probably a game that depends entirely on random probabilities, coin flips, and isn't much fun. So, the rules of sports are constructed around normal human abilities with a small but important amount of random unpredictability tossed in so that players have to respond to things they can't exactly predict (ex. our inability to throw, roll, hit or kick a ball exactly where we want it to go keeps everybody guessing). When you get right down to it, most sports come down to getting enough control, though never perfect control, over the throwing or hitting so that you can put the ball pretty much where you want it to go, or betting that your opponent can't so you can take advantage of his innacuracy. And, even without spending years mastering that control, the basic skills are nearly always within the range of normal human performance so that most people can play any sport with a little memorization of rules and a little training to get used to the specific physical skills. Not everyone will be able to be a professional, of course; natural physiological variation separates the pros from the hackers. But at its core, a game has to be playable by the average person to be a good game.

If you buy that, you might agree that it's strange to think that some people are designed (as in "Intelligent Design") to be better at sports.

First of all, Intelligent Design, silly as it is, isn't about a Designer who crafts each individual one at a time with skills designed to fit the current culture: I.D. is about the ultimate origin of man as a species. An active super-natural entity that fiddles around with individuals at that level isn't called a "Designer" - that's just plain ol' "God".

Secondly, every sport is designed by humans, to be played by humans (possibly with other animals as game pieces), with full knowledge of human abilities; we don't make games that require super-natural intervention to be good at. Humans make games for humans.

And finally, of course some people are going to be better at doing some things. The idea that some people are better at things that nearly everybody can do to to one degree or another isn't a radical one - it's the basis of pretty much everything humans do.

So, I'm with Atrios, this Washington Post article may be the stupidest thing I've ever read.

Katrina

I'm a little surprised I haven't seen anyone make any "Katrina And The Waves" references .

Maybe after the storm passes...

Start Your iPods

The iPod starts the work week with:

1. John Coltrane - My Favorite Things (live... 25 minutes)
   
2. Sunny Day Real Estate - Roses In Water.
   
3. Rogue Wave - Be Kind & Remind
   
4. David Bowie - Suffragette City
   
5. Spoon - 30 Gallon Tank. the iPod loooooves this song
   
6. Big Star - The Ballad of El Goodo
   
7. Sleater-Kinner - The Professional
   
8. Makers of Smooth Music - Jimmy Carter Says Yes
   
9. Lilys - Leo Ryan (Our Pharoah's Slave)
   
10. The Breeders - Do You Love Me Now?
    

Good deal.

Kill da wabbit

Izzle pfaff: FUDD CALLS FOR "ASSASSINATION" OF BUGS BUNNY

'We've got the wesouwces,' explained Mr. Fudd. 'I think we should do it. Mr. Bunny has been a continual thweat to many of the things we hold deaw. He is a weading cause of decawwotization. He is a poisonous pwesence in the opera world. And his twack record with the env--env--env--enviwo-env--it's terrible. He has wuniously distuwbed gopher habitats between here and Albuquerque.'

Work

Nikon D100, 50mm

(repost)

Turn off you mind, relax and float downstream

Stare at the center of this. Watch the green dot (there is no green dot). Watch the dots disappear (they don't disappear).

Smush

In the words of tbogg, God hates convertibles.

Yikes.

Butterfly

Nikon N80, 105mm macro, Fuji Neopan 1600

(repost)

Remastered

Over at The New Republic, Michael Crowley writes about the possible demise of the "Rock Snob" - the guy who has dedicated many hours to searching-out and acquiring rare musical gems that he will only share with those special people who deserve to the honor, and who feels a certain smug pity for those uneducated in the details of 70's punk geneology: ex. the High Fidelity guys. Rock Snob is doomed because the sense of exclusivity you could get from knowing you're the only one you know with a copy of The Feelies first album is no longer available: "[t]hanks to the iPod, and digital music generally, anyone can milk various friends, acquaintances, and the Internet to quickly build a glorious 10,000-song collection." And even worse, "...when everything's instantly available online, the thrill is gone."

That's basically true, but as my multi-year search for a digital copy of The Colorblind James Experience's first album proves, not everything is available on line, or even on CD. Even in their hometown, even asking members of the band, even digging through the stacks at the record store where I first bought my casette copy of that album, 15 years ago, no luck. There are still gems out there that require patient excavation.

And, if everything is available for sharing, the Rock Snob can still find joy in pointing to the things people should pay attention to, and what they shouldn't waste disk space on - a self-proclaimed filter. After all, not everyone wil have the specialized knowledge and discriminating taste that he does. Or, even better, he can sit smug and quiet, sharing the knowledge of what's hip with those few who already know: elite, self-satisfied, correct.

Milkweed

Nikon N80, Fuji Sensia 100, 105mm macro

(repost)

Hmm

Nikon N80, Fuji Sensia 100, 75-240mm. Grayscaled in Photoshop

(repost)

Computer Space

Behold, the first coin-operated video game. 1971.

Let's Make an Offer

I was at a job interview and the interviewer gave me two logic puzzles. I'll repeat them:

1. You are on a boat in a lake. You have, in the boat with you, a rock. You throw the rock into the water, it sinks. What happens to the water level on the shore?
   
2. The classic "Let's Make a Deal" paradox: Suppose you're on a game show and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
   

Any takers? Assuming you haven't seen them already, of course.

Drives

A relative of mine is running a series of posts describing some of the roads he took in his latest adventure: driving to Alaska, and back.

Lasers, bugs, aluminum

No, it's not a Jared Diamond book, it's the story of a guy who takes pictures of flying insects with a home-made laser-activated, multi-flash, external-shuttered, computer-controled flash setup for his Nikon D100.

After ten pages describing all the work he went through to build his device, there are eight pages of images - some of the are spectacular.

Start Your iPods

This week, we start with:

1. Spoon - The Beast and Dragon Adored
   
2. Robyn Hitchcock - Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl
   
3. David Bowie - Five Years
   
4. Shellac - Mouthpiece
   
5. Robyn Hitchcock - English Girl
   
6. The Strokes - Barely Legal
   
7. Flaming Lips - Do You Realize??
   
8. Cowboy Junkies - Love's Still There
   
9. 3Ds - Philadelphia Rising
   
10. The Cure - Why Can't I Be You
    

If not for the 3Ds, this could've been a solid set of songs featuring Charismatic Lead Singers - well, I don't know anything about the Strokes' singer, but he has a unique style. That 3Ds album is now officially on the list of records to remove.

Monday Cat Blogging

Nikon D100, 105mm macro

Old time food

Halibut heads and backbone.

Note:

Halibut-heads are not food for the morning, for they are too fat. They only eat them at noon and in the evening, because they are very fat; that is the reason why they are afraid to eat them, that it makes one sleepy.

A challenge!

Boing Boing issues a challenge

We are willing to pay any individual *$250,000 if they can produce empirical evidence which proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Pedo

Mrs Cleek got a pedometer from her employer. This is part of the instruction sheet:



This is useless, since Mrs Cleek moonwalks everywhere she goes.

When gas was cheap and people were valuable

Mr Belvedere remembers when men were men and life was great and everybody made do and there was one goddamned "right" and no loony moral relativist is gonna tell him otherwise, so take your pursuit of happiness and hit the road, Jack, else his moral clarity will fuck you up! And if gas hits $5 a gallon we'll have to fucking cope with it, cause that's what they pay in Europe and don't fucking even talk about public transportation cause that's for pussies - you'll just have to walk to the store or die trying, just like he had to do and nobody fucking cared! Nobody! And he just payed $51 to fill up his car, and no it wasn't no goddamned SUV, it's a 1973 Delta 88 with plastic on the seats and the original tires, and it's got 645 miles on it because he only drives it on Veterans Day, so fuck you and your greedy indulgent lifestyle. Think you can handle $5/gal ? Can you? Bet you can't, pussy. And GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN!

Bye Bye Beetle

Bye Bye Beetle:


Hello Solara:


The Beetle, though cute and fun to drive, had issues. The doors were constantly squeaking - after a while the WD40 injections stopped working; putting the boot around the convertible top was a hassle; the seats had no lumbar support at all; Mrs Cleek doesn't dig standards; etc..

So, we upgraded to a convertible Solara. It's not quite as trendy and eye-catching as the little beige Beetle, but it's a hell of a lot more car and hopefully more solid.

One thing about the Beetle that I found interesting: probably 75% of the compliments I got on it, from people I didn't know, were from black men. Guys would be walking on the street, standing in a parking lot, driving next to me, and they'd find a way to compliment the car - old, young, in groups, single, whatever; black men dug the tan Beetle convertible. It got a few compliments from white women, a couple black women, and very few white men (can't remember any, honestly). I don't know why that would be, but that's my experience. We'll see what the Toyota brings.

iPeed

A rush [...] turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.

...

People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl's stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.

In line for what ? Used laptops.

Voice of Chucky

Skot describes watching "Bride of Chucky" and mentions that Chucky's voice is done by Brad Dourif. Who? Brad Dourif (no, not Joni Dourif).

He's a character actor, probably best known these days as Grima Wormtounge, the slippery advisor to the spellbound King Theoden, in "The Lord Of The Rings". But, he's been in dozens of other movies and TV shows. He had a big role in "Mississippi Burning" (which my wife and I watched this weekend - good times!) where he plays the deputy sheriff / KKK member who gets some nasty razor burn and a well-deserved pounding from Gene Hackman. He's also done a few Star Treks, an X Files, he's the doctor on Deadwood, and got an Oscar nomination for his role in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".

Despite a long and active career, he's managed to keep a pretty low profile - like, he doesn't seem to show up on the cover of People very often. And yet, he's got a fan base who likes him well enough to have designed Brad Dourif wallpaper for your computer. He even has a Japanese fan site!

So, here's to Brad Dourif, player of "demented, deranged, or disturbed characters" !

( I suppose we can forgive him if he used to look a bit like Chris Kattan )

My goat, she needs scaping

Iraq's in trouble? Rumsfeld is the problem! It's not his boss, the guy in charge. No, it's the fault of guy who carries out the orders of the guy in charge. It's the inversion of Intelligent Design; instead of everything being due to the hand of the omnipotent being in charge, in this world, nothing is the fault of the idiot in charge.

Leon

Went to the Cat's Cradle last night. Here's the men's room:

Sony P7

We saw the legendary Leon Redbone, the deep-voiced man of mystery who sings tunes that were popular 70 years ago.

Sony P7

He did a set full of standards like My Blue Heaven and Shine On Harvest Moon. And, he whistled one song over a pre-recorded track of someone playing the zither; he's an amazing whistler (not that I've ever seen anyone whistle on stage before) - I had no idea people could make those sounds, or hit notes so accurately, without an instrument of some kind. Most of his songs, though, were him on guitar, a trumpet player and a pianist - all excellent players - funny, too. Good show.

There was an alarming number of middle-aged men in Hawaiian shirts in the crowd.

The Start Your iPods

The iPod starts my work week with:

1. The Robyn Hitchcock - Maria Lyn
   
2. The Radiohead - You
   
3. The Pretenders - The Wait. i wasn't sure the verses in this song had actual words. But, a quick google shows me it does:
   
   
   (first verse)
   said the wait child magic child work it on out now work it
   the wait child pinball child pool hall child hurts
   the wait child pacing child forth back now hurts
   the wait child neon light late night lights hurt
   
   
   
4. The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want. I'll just skip this one.
   
5. The Iron and Wine - My Lady's House
   
6. The Big Star - You And Your Sister
   
7. The Stereolab - Peng! 33. One of their happy bouncy songs. This is the Stereolab I love.
   
8. The Cowboy Junkies - Thousand Year Prayer. From their live DVD/CD set, Open Road.
   
9. The Pixies - Brick Is Red.
   
10. The Iron and Wine - Sodom, South Georgia. Nice little song. Ah.
    

Monday Cat Blogging

Nikon D100, 105mm macro

Whenever I See Your Smiling Face

Nikon D100, 105mm macro

60 Seconds from porch to web.

Aggressively Bad

Roger Ebert lets loose on Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

'Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo' makes a living cleaning fish tanks and occasionally prostituting himself. How much he charges I'm not sure, but the price is worth it if it keeps him off the streets and out of another movie. 'Deuce Bigalow' is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes.

Read the rest.

(via Patrick Hayden)

Walken 2008!

"The way your dad looked at it, this watch was your birthright. He'd be damned if any of the slopes were gonna get their greasy yellow hands on his boy's birthright. So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass. Five long years, he wore this watch up his ass. Then when he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable piece of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you."

Christopher Walken, for President.

The Listener is Listening

And what does he hear ?

• Twin A - Disappear . My wife and I saw them in Rochester, NY a few weeks back, at a club called Milestones (where, back in the day, many of my old bands played). I assume they're still a local band, because I haven't seen much about them on the net. They were loud, the sound was crap, but we could make out enough of it to know we liked it - so we bought their CD. And, it is good. They sound like a band that could get a lot of college/alternative radio play these days - emotional guitar pop.
  
• Madeleine Peyroux - Careless Love. ... ... BILLIE HOLIDAY!! Ok. There's no getting around it, the woman sounds like the reincarnation of Billie Holiday. She does very approachable blues/jazz versions of standards new and old (including, to my surprise, Elliot Smith's Between The Bars). The whole thing has a nice, slow relaxed vibe - with the vocals up front and clean. I like it, but I just can't shake the feeling that I'm listening to Billie Holiday - which is a compliment, of course.
  
• Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed. What's to be said... it's everything you'd expect from a record that starts with Gimme Shelter and ends with You Can't Always Get What You Want. Well, there is a problem... the problem with buying Rolling Stones records these days is that all of them have two or three songs that you've already heard a skrillion times - why would I want to pay for a copy of You Can't Always Get What You Want ? Especially since I already have it, and all the others, on Hot Rocks. Luckily, iTunes lets you buy tracks individually, so I just bought everything but the first and last songs, then told iTunes that the Hot Rocks versions are actually from Let It Bleed (can't have a song on more than two albums ? WTF ?). Problem solved.
  
• Andrew Bird - Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs. An great blend of styles (folk, rock, swing, jazz, etc) with intelligent, oblique, and often dark lyrics that are delivered in a voice that reminds me a lot of Beck's quieter moments - or maybe John Mayer (gasp).
  
  
  Overprescribed
  Under the mister
  We had survived to
  Turn on the History Channel
  And asked our esteemed panel
  ‘Why are we alive?’
  And here’s how they replied:
  ‘You’re what happened when two substances collide
  And by all accounts you really should’ve died.’
  
  
  I like it quite a lot.
  

Relative Timeliness

Clifford, at Cosmic Variance discusses his hope "to have science education and awareness so much the norm that everybody will casually - and without apology - sprinkle science facts, science reasoning and science humour into their everyday conversations just like they would sport, politics, or popular culture."

Here's my observation:

Time runs faster for the person who has to run to the store for a couple of six packs when the beer runs out ("the store's like three minutes from here! it'll only take a sec'!") than the people back at the party waiting for him to deliver said beer ("how long has he been gone?").

I'm not sure if this is because the people at the party are stationary, compared to the the person sent to get beer, or if there are non-relativistic explanations.

Lucinda

Sony P7

Saw Lucinda Williams last night, outdoors, at the NC Art Museum. Though I couldn't see her from where we were sitting (damn lawn seats), she sounded great. Part of it was the sound system itself - I don't know that I've ever heard a concert sound so good. But mostly it was her : her voice is much more expressive, live, than it is recorded. I always had the impression that she was just kindof an O.K. singer with a lot of attitude and a strong accent. All those little gravelly bits and rough edges in her voice came through loud and clear, but what surprised me was how strong and controlled her actual singing was, underneath the grit and growl.

I got a couple of recordings from my little camera. Maybe I'll post them someday.

Dr. Dobson's Newsletter: June 2002

How to make your young boy growup to be a man, not a diseased homosexual, according to Dr. Dobson's Newsletter: June 2002:

Girls can continue to grow in their identification with their mothers. On the other hand, a boy has an additional developmental task—to disidentify from his mother and identify with his father. At this point [beginning at about eighteen months], a little boy will not only begin to observe the difference, he must now decide, "Which one am I going to be?" In making this shift in identity, the little boy begins to take his father as a model of masculinity. At this early stage, generally before the age of three, Ralph Greenson observed, the boy decides that he would like to grow up like his father. 16 This is a choice. Implicit in that choice is the decision that he would not like to grow up to be like his mother. According to Robert Stoller, "The first order of business in being a man is, 'don't be a woman.'"

Meanwhile, the boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

Hey, son! Betcha couldn't help but notice my giant penis!

via Bradford Plumer.

War Pigs

TBogg has a good thread going about songs they won't be singing at the Pentagon's September 11th Concert.

Crapslugmoth

As I was walking out to get the mail yesterday, I saw a splat of black, brown, yellow and white on the side of my house. "Oh great," I thought, "some bird crapped on the side of my house." But, it wasn't bird crap, it was too symmetric to be the work of a bird. I looked closer and thought it must be a slug of some kind, the things on the front looked a lot like antennae, and it was roughly slug-shaped. But when I got closer, I saw that it was only slug-shaped in two dimensions: it was slug length and slug height, but laterally, it was very thin. Hmm. I looked closer still and saw that it was covered with fuzz, like a moth, and that there were two little legs poking out from underneath. It was a moth. It was the ugliest moth I'd ever seen, in fact. It was a moth dressed like a gaudy slug or a splat of bird shit.

Here's what I saw on my porch:

Nikon D100, 105mm macro

I showed my wife, and she poked it. It flew down to the ground, where I poked it and it flew into the bushes. It landed with its wings spread, so that I could get this picture:

Nikon D100, 105mm macro

It's not quite so ugly like that, though its head still looks like bird crap.

Update: and after looking at hundreds of moth photos, I've identified this guy. It's a "Beautiful Wood Nymph Moth" Eudysas grata (#9301). Err... I guess moth people have a different concept of beauty. And, I can now say that this guy isn't the ugliest moth I've ever seen; there are some critters there that beat this one by a mile.

Uncorrected Personality Traits

Reading this (Is My Child Becoming Homosexual?), I'm reminded of this classic Robyn Hitchcock song:

Uncorrected personality traits
that seem whimsical in a child
may prove to be ugly in
a fully grown adult.

Lack of involvement with the father,
or over-involvement with the mother,
can result in lack of ability
to relate to sexual fears,

and in homosexual leanings,
narcissism, transexuality
(girls from the waist up
men from the waist down),
attempts to be your own love object.

Reconcile your parents to you
by becoming both at once!

Even Marilyn Monroe was a man,
but this tends to get overlooked by our
mother-fixated, overweight, sexist media.

So:
Uncorrected personality traits
that seem whimsical in a child
may prove to be ugly
in a fully grown adult.

If you give in to them
Every time they cry
They will become little tyrants
But they won't remember why
Then when they are thwarted
By people in later life
They will become psychotic
And they won't make an ideal husband or wife

The spoiled baby grows into
the escapist teenager who's
the adult alcoholic who's
the middle-aged suicide.

Oy. So:

Uncorrected personality traits
that seem whimsical in a child
may prove to be ugly
in a fully grown adult.

-- Uncorrected Personality Traits

Of course, Robyn is clever, ironic and funny, not scary, unlike the nuts who want to send your kids to fag camp.

March of the Pinheads

The reviewer over at Plugged In (part of Focus On The Family, ie. home of James Dobson, a.k.a. the guy who thinks SpongeBob is a big gay sponge who's gonna suck all the Hetero out of American youth) loves March of the Penguins. Still, he knows one way it could be a little better:

The movie doesn't credit our Creator with the masterpiece of nature known as the emperor penguin. But if families will make a small effort to do so on their own, March of the Penguins transforms into an exhilarating exhibition of God's grandeur and brilliance. Psalm 19:1 says, 'The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.' So do the penguins.

Damn that secularist agenda.

Down By The Sea

Mrs. Cleek and I went down to Beaufort, NC a couple of weekends ago, for our yearly Beaufort weekend.



We stayed at the Pecan Tree Inn (brown-roofed building in back of the big hotel on the waterfront, right side of the picture). We've stayed at almost all the B&Bs Beaufort has (not many, given that the whole "Historic District" is just 2x4 blocks) and this one is pretty typical: old house, redone sometime in the past decade, hit-or-miss breakfast served too early for young kids like us, sign near the toilet asking that we be kind to the pipes, birds nest behind the metal plate in the unused chimney on the wall by the bed full of screechy little birds, etc.. Though they usually cost a bit more than a hotel, I much prefer having a room in an actual house, instead of one of a hundred identical units in a hotel. There's something about those fire-proof doors, industrial carpet and omnipresent disinfectant smell that rubs me the wrong way.

Beaufort's a tiny little town, or at least the historic district where we hang out is, and we usually don't bother driving anywhere. We just walk back and forth between the three good restuarants and the three good bars, avoiding the "family" places, cause why would we pay to hang out with screaming kids if we don't have to?

For a few bucks, you can get the water taxi out to a nearby undeveloped island where you can hang out for as long as you like, away from things like life guards and rescue personnel, bathrooms and beer vendors. Just you, some wild horses, and the Atlantic Ocean. A good time, though. Or, you can sit on the boardwalk and point at the huge yachts that people park there; there's always two or three there of at least 100' tied up at the docks (this beast was there this time).

But, that's about it - after you've seen the handful of shops and driven up the Cape Lookout lighthouse, there's nothing but eating and drinking. And that's the way I likes it.

Like, wow

Behold, Hasselhoffian Recursion!

Be a Company Man

via American Rights at Work:

"...a recent ruling by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) allows employers to ban off-duty fraternizing among co-workers..."

Nice.

Start Your iPods

The iPod starts the week with:

1. The Velvet Underground - Sweet Jane. Not really random - I woke up this morning and, don't know why, needed to hear this song; so I made the iPod play it on my way to work.
   
2. The Throwing Muses - Pretty or Not
   
3. The Del McCoury - True Love Never Dies
   
4. The Superchunk - Train From Kansas City. Don't remember ever hearing the Shangi-La's original, but I'm sure it can't compete.
   
5. The Cars - Moving In Stereo. What a great song.
   
6. The Fiona Apple - Limp. "It won't be till you'll be lying limp in your own hand". zing!
   
7. The Pixies - Vamos. "Vamos a jugar por la playa"
   
8. The Kinks - Drivin'
   
9. The Makers of Smooth Music - Resurrection. The story of Jesus' resurrection half sung/half spoken over a sprawling free-form piano/drum jam. Gotta give those MSR guys credit - they tried.
   
10. The Beatles - Blackbird. Love the little bird chirping at the end.
    

Monday Cat Blogging

Nikon D100, 105mm macro

Roar

Quarters

This is an amazing display of quarter-bouncing skill.

Eye

Nikon N80, Delta 400, 105mm macro

(Repost)

Foto Funnies

Just go look

Faux Faulkner

Here's a bit from the winner of the 2005 Faux Faulkner Contest:

We walked down steps to the office. There were paintings of old people on the walls and the room was round like a circle and Condi was sitting on my desk. Her legs were crossed.

“Did you get him ready for the press conference?” Dick said.

“Dont you worry about him. He ll be ready,” Condi said. Condi stood up from the desk. Her legs were long and she smelled like the Xeroxed copies of the information packets they give me each day.

“Hello Georgie,” Condi said. “Did you come to see Condi?” Condi rubbed my hair and it tickled.

“Dont go messing up his hair,” Dick said. “Hes got a press conference in a few minutes.”

Condi wiped some spit on her hand and patted down my hair. Her hand was soft and she smelled like Xerox copies coming right out of the machine. “He looks just fine,” Condi said.

Read the rest, as they say. It's brilliant.

Butter

Nikon D100, 105mm macro, 5T close-up

Start Your iPods

This week, the iPod starts with:

1. Fiona Apple : Criminal
   
2. Alison Krauss & Union Station - Pain of a Troubled Mind
   
3. Junior Brown - Holding Pattern. A sprawling example of extended pun as country song lyric. Even by Jr's standards, this one is impressive.
   
4. Wilco - Radio Cure
   
5. Joni Mitchell - Paved Paradise
   
6. Spoon - Believing is Art. We nearly always listen to Spoon when we drive to the beach. We didn't, this weekend and the iPod is making up for it now - which just makes me want to drive back to the beach. Fuck mondays.
   
7. Death Cab For Cutie - Information Travels Faster
   
8. Tortoise - Magnet Pulls Through. Just love Tortoise's first album. Sure, it's prog-rock with a different name, but it's good prog-rock.
   
9. Big Star - You Get What You Deserve
   
10. Pavement - Home
    

I approve.

Monday Cat Blogging

Nikon D100, 28-80mm