What was Milo doing last night:
1. Experiencing Kundalini shakti
2. Taking an odd sort of nap
3. Hiding his face so he didn’t have to watch “Snakes on a Plane”
You tell me.
Li’l LoLo rides again
April 15, 2009 by
Endless airplane
April 15, 2009 by
So I found out today that one of my photos was used on a Wired Blog post (don’t worry – it’s creative-commons licensed. Happy for them to have it, just wish I had been able to take it with a better camera – I didn’t have the SLR then).
So now I’m posting about a posting that used a photo I posted.
Funny old world.
Today’s moment of surreality
April 8, 2009 by
Today on the Metro, there were a bunch of people all carrying boxed sets of the works of Edward Tufte with handles on top.
It was like a Magritte painting — dozens of people all carrying identical little white briefcases.
Overheard at our house, post-party edition
April 5, 2009 by
Me: Are you using Henry* to drain the cooler?
John: Yeah.
Me: Poor Henry.
John: He volunteered.
Me: He’s a giver, Henry is.
John: Yes, he is.
*All fake turtles in our house are named Henry.
I could swear I used to know how to do this
March 22, 2009 by
I recently scored a nice, inexpensive, refurbished sewing machine. I hemmed a pair of pajama pants that were about four inches too long for John, then thought, “Hey – pajama pants would be a nice, easy project in general.” Cheap, cheerful – great weekend project. I even found this Instructables article on using your own favorite pants as templates for making your own. Cool. We kind of live in pajama pants around here, so this makes all kinds of sense. John is especially in need of a few new pairs, so he was to get the first fruits of my labor.
John and I had an errand-running day, and we fit in a trip to the biggest local fabric emporium while we were out. I said, “So what were you thinking about for fabric?” Poor John looked like realized he was an inadvertent contestant on “Who Wants to be Asked Questions They Never Considered” – a new game show we apparently have in development at our house.
“Um… I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Well, look around. See anything you like?”
John almost immediately gravitated towards azure fabric with sharks on it. “I kind of like the sharks,” he said, fingering the fabric uncertainly.
“Okay, you want the sharks?” I asked.
“I dunno,” he replied. At this point, I realize that the woman helming the cutting table in this department is trying hard not to laugh.
“Do you want Wookies, maybe? Tie-fighters?” I glance over again. The clerk is doing a fair impression of stoicism, but there’s some quivering of the lip going on. Her eye is twitching. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “Everybody laughs at us – go ahead.” She dissolves.
We got the sharks.
Upon arriving home, I throw the fabric in the wash and grab John’s favorite pajama pants to trace out a template on craft paper. A few hours later, when John comes back from a bike ride, I have him try them on before I do the final hems and install the elastic.
They don’t fit.
They don’t fit HIM anyway.
I’m going back later this week for more shark chintz and a proper pattern.
A real-life Ann Eliot? Well…
March 10, 2009 by
Persuasion is my favorite Jane Austen novel. Which makes it my favorite novel, since I could take Austen's complete works with me to a desert island and never count myself bored.
I have identified with various Austen heroines in various ways over the years, but only in pieces. Recently, I have been re-reading Persuasion and realized that despite differences in temperament, Ann Eliot and I have the most in common.
While the Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth miniseries of Pride and Prejudice is probably the best and most faithful adaptation of Austen's novels for my money, if you want something of a normal film length, the movie of Persuasion starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds is a beautiful adaptation.
Ann and I both found our love early, but had to let him go until a later date. We differ in that Ann yielded to the titular persuasion of family and friends: her loved ones did not approve of the match. In my case, I knew that it was the wrong time: John and I were in different places in our lives, and trying to make the pieces fit would probably have resulted in a broken puzzle.
As it is, both Ann and I had our happily ever after – but not in the grand Disney fashion. More in the quiet, real-life kind of manner.
…and now, the weather. Over to you, Bob.
March 3, 2009 by
It is very fashionable to freak out about the weather in DC. An inch or two of snow never fails to make the local news people completely lose their bananas, and school is often canceled the night before a prospective storm, without ever seeing so much as a flake (other than the aforementioned news people, that is).
However, it is unwise to ignore the peril that is the DC local driving in snow. Rich lobbyists from Georgia in massive SUVs seem to think that four-wheel drive and ABS cancel out the effect of snow and ice. Other people in more plebian vehicles drive in a manner that would be considered dangerously stupid on dry roads, rendering them criminally insane when there is ice present.
And don’t get me started on the “plowing” that is done around here. On some roads, you will see three giant snowplows in a single-file line, the first doing some work, the other two… I don’t know what they are for. Backup, in the event of possible gang warfare? On other roads, the plow may trundle through, with the blade held delicately aloft – about an inch or two from the road’s surface, thus ensuring that passing traffic creates a nicely packed layer of ice all the more rapidly. Or they may never come at all, leaving your local street a lunar landscape of icy potholes.
John and I saw all of this yesterday as we went in for a half day. We had somewhere in the neighborhood of eight inches fall on our house (we have learned that we live in a funny pocket weather-wise: there were probably only three inches just a few miles to the southeast of us), and we decided to wait out the morning snow and see what happened rather than hurling our bodies into the scrum. He gave me a ride to the Metro in his four-wheel-drive wagon, and what fun we had. Who needs a gym when you can have the adrenaline rush of someone in an Infiniti sedan diving in front of you at 40 mph with a half-carlength to spare? And why go to the ballet, when you can watch four enormous snowplows weaving complicated patterns in front of you on a local multi-lane road?
And people think that politics are our great amusement around here.
Overheard at our house, evening edition
February 24, 2009 by
“I shall go upstairs and change, and then I shall be returned.”
“You will be returned? Do I get a refund?”
“Minus a 15% restocking fee.”
Dear Comics.com
February 13, 2009 by
I realized a while back that my daily dose of “Get Fuzzy” wasn’t arriving in my RSS feed every day any more. Figuring that some dope had meddled a bit and broken the thing, I went to your site today to re-subscribe to the feed.
Now, before I go on, nice job on the new site. It’s still a little cluttered (understandable – you’re running a comics site), but the colors are lighter and the design is a lot cleaner and less intrusive. So, well done to you.
Now here’s the rub: when you click on “RSS,” here’s the message that appears:
Login or register now to personalize your RSS feed with all your favorite strips and editorial cartoons!
Um… no. Someone has a shaky grasp of the acronym. Let me explain: “RSS” stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” As in, “click to sign up, and have Bucky, Satchel, and Rob arrive automatically in your Google reader until you say nay.”
What you have here is, “click to create an ID and password, type the password twice to make sure your valuable comics-reading data is secure, enter a bunch of personal information, type a captcha,* log in, click to ‘add to my comics page,’ click….”
Are you starting to get the idea? This is starting to look not so “really simple” anymore. If you want to collect information about your readers, fine. But you might consider that you’re getting fewer of them as a result.
*I’m assuming based on standard protocols, I didn’t actually sign up.
I think we have one of these around somewhere…
February 11, 2009 by
Yet again, The Onion nails it (NSFW due to language, but deeply hilarious):