penguin humor

thanks to Al for this one

fifteen

Thanks to a friend's suggestion, I've found a new fantasy author. New to me at least. I have finished the first book in a series of FIFTEEN by Robert Jordan, and have already started the second. The fifteenth has yet to be published (early 2012, hence no image), but I have thirteen others to keep me occupied, at least for a few more months. It's very satisfying to start a series that has almost completely been published already because I don't have to wait between each new release, nor do I have to buy the books as they are all held by my local library. Sweet!

Today, I am proud to be an American

(But ashamed to be a Californian)

it's in the mail

I sent off my vote-by-mail ballot this morning.
I said "GO O!" and "NAY 8!"
Fingers are crossed.

back on track

[Bicycling in Yosemite, Oct. 2008]

My new hard drive is installed (I was computer-less for nearly a month, hence the radio silence) so I'm gearing up to re-enter my blog world. Check back soon for updates on Yosemite, a queer wedding, visiting family, visiting friends, the house, Alex's "spill," recent collages, Facebook, Europe, the crib, and more...

Happiness...

...a happy, hoppin' music video by the British band, Goldfrapp.
See it on YouTube here and smile.

those fabulous penguins

Don't be fooled. Penguins are some truly amazing creatures.

Catch them here on this BBC commercial.

Then watch this behind-the-scenes video and get the whole story.

guest poet

Lazy Boy's Lament
by Jack Arnold

Fiendish felines ferment fury
by dropping bloody body in a hurry!
Jack's Lazy Boy was their place of choice
which caused its owner to be loud of voice!
Little Squeaky meowed with feline pride
with parts of prey deep inside!
Lord Katz and Lady Mewer joined the fray
by flipping the pack rat every which way!
Oh! What is a distraught owner to do
but to scold his cats and throw his shoe?!
Let me warn you long-tailed rodents that gnaw
here awaits an unspeakable fate of tooth and claw!

two ads.

One sublime. One provocative.
Take a look:

BURST

DO THE TEST

guerrilla musical

Imagine a troupe of actors spontaneously performing a mini-musical in a shopping mall food court. Just that happened in an LA mall earlier this month, when a troupe named Improv Everywhere ("We cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places") staged a musical number amidst the unknowing patrons in a food court. The performance is hilarious, uncomfortable, moving, and catchy all at once.

Check out Food Court Musical at Improv Everywhere's website.

garfield revisited

Garfield Minus Garfield

VSL writes:

For some of us now (cough) heading into our forties, no comic strip was more an ingrained part of life than Garfield. Begun in 1978, Jim Davis’s über-middlebrow strip — about a lazy, lasagna-loving cat who torments his hapless owner, Jon — captured a certain Generation X type: a single, slacker guy who attempts to lure the ladies back to his pad but is always thwarted by his mischievous cat.

Now, thanks to the anonymously authored website Garfield Minus Garfield, the comic strip has taken on a totally different, complex tone. On the site, the title character has been digitally removed from the strips. The result isn’t a chuckle at the cute, simple-minded three-panel narrative but an often-actually-funny look at the frailties of man (“I’m an empty grocery sack”) combined with a series of Zen-like bons mots (“Life . . . this is it”).

If you haven’t looked at Garfield in the past 20 years, now might be the time to see just how fun and brilliant it can be — in an altered state.

quizzical diversions

Test your cultural acumen with these so-called "reverent" quizzes. For obvious reasons, I gravitated toward the quizzes on visual art, which I found to be surprisingly challenging. Worth a few minutes of your time, perhaps.

shopping subversion...


...the real thing

Eat, Pray, Love

I ended up enjoying this autobiographical tale, of one woman's journey of the spirit and the senses, much more than I thought I would. The author chronicles a year spent searching for the "balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence." Her prose is fresh, charming, humorous, and reverent all at once. I found myself identifying with Ms. Gibson on a number of levels: I'm a divorcee; I'll be traveling in Italy later this year; and perhaps most significantly, for me, is that her Guru is my Guru. In fact, the middle third of the book details her four-month residency at the ashram in India where Siddha Yoga took form. So, naturally, I had an immediate fondness for the book. Among recent books I have read, this story of self-discovery ranks quite high, and I feel confident recommending it to others.

Incidentally, I came across this work of art by an artist named Julie Blackmon. (Check out her website.) Note what the person in bed is reading. I chuckled.

Zipskinny

Wanna get the lowdown on your (or anyone's) zip code? Go HERE. You can check out demographics for your own zip code and compare them with up to 19 other zip codes in the U.S. It's educational and entertaining, both.

VSL says:

You may think you know your neighborhood, but you certainly can’t beat the information the federal government has collected about it. We’re not being paranoid: The U.S. Census Bureau is a statistician’s paradise — and now Mark Nash, an amateur programmer in Dallas, has launched Zipskinny, a website that renders all that data user-friendly. Zipskinny makes the numbers from the 2000 census searchable by ZIP code, so you can easily see how you compare with your neighbors when it comes to marital status, age, income bracket, even education.

Most people will probably look for where they live (or want to live) first — but it’s easy to drift while browsing for outliers. Take Cougar, Washington (98616), whose total population of 96 people all work in production or transportation, are all married, and all earn between $15,000 and $24,999. But whether you’re in 90210 or 99712 (Fairbanks, Alaska), now you’ll know exactly how you’re keeping up with your local Joneses.

instant gratification

We only get one TV station: ABC. However, CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), one of our favorite shows, airs on CBS. Which means we can only watch it once it's come out on DVD, long after the season's ended. Or so I thought...

We had recently been watching CSI, Season 7, on DVD (through Netflix, which I highly recommend). The final episode turned out to be a riveting cliff-hanger, with the fate of one of the main characters left hanging in the balance. We were completely anguished. We would have to wait for the resolution of the storyline for over a year, when Season 8 (the current season) was released on DVD. That was an intolerable idea!

Motivated by an unquenchable desire for more CSI, I did a little research online and discovered that, lo and behold, you can download the most current CSI episodes from Amazon.com Unbox and play them on your computer. For $1.89 an episode, we'll be as up-to-date as any other CSI fan. How cool is that?!

Pandora's genres

In a previous post, I tauted the amazing features of Pandora, an extensive online music archive where you can create your own personalized music stations.

Since then, Pandora's gotten even better! Whereas before you had to seed your stations with specific songs or artists (if you knew the names), now you can create stations based on different genres. I counted 131 different options! There are broad categories, such as Folk, Hip Hop, and Electronic, and within those categories you can choose a sub-genre station. So, for example, within Rock, I started a station called Punk/New Wave. It's playing Madness right now (brings back memories!).

What I like about this new genre feature is that I don't have to know a particular song or artist to create a station. I can just look through the options and open up a new station that strikes my fancy. What a great way to expand my musical horizons!

His Dark Materials

Normally, I'm exceedingly stoic when it comes to books, television, and film. Oh, I don't mean that I'm not effected by things I read or see. It's just that I do a damned good job of keeping my reactions contained. Particularly tears. (That's largely why I can't bear to watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition; I don't want to cry.)

However, I just finished Philip Pullman's amazing His Dark Materials series: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. I won't give anything away, I promise. I'll just say that the series moved me to tears at times. And that happens oh so rarely, let me tell you!

The series was recommended to me by a good friend, and I know now why it is one of his favorites and why it is often compared to the Tolkien and Rowling books. Pullman's series is an epic fantasy with impressive breadth and depth. It encompasses multiple worlds and realities, and features a plethora of characters and creatures. There are humans and witches and deamons and polar bears and angels and on and on. It is thematically broad, as well. The author addresses, sometimes subtly, other times overtly, a range of themes: childhood vs adulthood; innocence; wisdom vs stupidity; religion; science; love; purpose and meaning; and more. I found the books, engrossing, entertaining, and thought-provoking all at once. I, too, recommend them highly.

Although it wasn't difficult to speed through them, because they are so engaging, I especially wanted to finish them all before Dec. 7, when the film adaptation of the first book, The Golden Compass, is released. (Official movie site here.) I can't wait!

Be Good or Be Gone

I can't help it. It makes me smile. The YouTube video of Be Good or Be Gone, by the Irish singer, Fionn Regan. It's just so catchy, genuine, and sweet. It's clever and refreshingly under-produced, despite being packed with loads of interesting locations in which Regan performs.

Very Short List (VSL) says this about it:

Walk the thoroughfares and subway stations of any major city long enough, and eventually you’ll come to believe that you’re seeing the same street performers wherever you go. But what if the same guitar-toting roadside musician really did turn up everywhere — and we mean everywhere — you went?

That’s roughly the conceit behind the ingenious, endearing video for “Be Good or Be Gone,” by Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan. Over a series of jump cuts, we see Regan perform his gentle folk song, usually standing in the center of the frame, as his environment completely changes every few measures: He’s singing in a casino, then in a church, then on a beach, and on and on. And he’s not just lip-synching: For the few seconds he performs in a barbershop, we hear the actual ambient noise of the salon, and when he reappears in a pet store, we hear caged birds chirping behind him. It’s a three-minute video that probably took months to complete, proving once more that it’s not so simple to make things look simple.

My two favorite scenes are the ones with the cows and the passing bus.
And my favorite lyrics are:

I have become
an aerial view
of a coastal town
that you once knew.

[For a live version of the song, watch this YouTube video.]