Go here and make your own South Park character.... [via Random Acts of Reality]
I'm thinking I should have added the shotgun. Hmm....
March 2006 Archives
I received an email the other day via flickr from schmap.com notifying me that one of my uploaded pictures had been "short-listed for inclusion in our Schmap Austin Guide, to be published mid-April 2006." A quick google turned up that I'm not the only one. I decided to let vanity get the better of me, and agreed to submit my picture (admittedly one that could use a quick 'shop job) for "final consideration."
Below the fold, the EULA from the Schmap Player install, which does mention that some content, including photographs, has been licensed via Creative Commons or otherwise, and such licenses should be observed. There's even a whole section just on Creative Commons, which ought to make some people very happy. I'm no lawyer (thank God--sorry Susan, Kirsten, Geoff and anyone else I know with that proclivity ;-) but it seems to me they're being quite upstanding about the whole thing. I downloaded the San Francisco guide, and sure enough, there are flickr photos in it, and the links go right through.
Continue reading And I thought I was special....
This picture popped up in the "latest from everybody" section on flickr this morning and at thumbnail size, I thought it looked like a painting. (Actually, at regular size it is still quite painterly.) Cool picture, but I think it would be really irritating to be in the upper sections behind all that smoke....
P1000646
Originally uploaded by shanghai_ultra.
This is absolutely hysterical. Next weekend, Florida takes out those upstart Mason Jar boys....
MSN Video: The Roach Broach
Rhinestoned roaches. Wrong on so many levels....
(After the commercial and the weird intro about melba toast and soylent green.)
I've added scripts to track stuff via performancing, which is probably overkill but looked like fun, so if you track your cookies and you get a new request from this site, that's what's going on. Mint is cool, and it was expensive enough that I'm not going to get rid of it, but I'm curious to see what other options are available.
I heard the unmistakable drums of "Big Beat" this morning on KTRU but of course it was a sample:
08:20 AM- dizzee rascal / fix up, look sharp [boy in da corner] on the matador label.
I get an automatic win on this song on Metal because nobody else (besides Liz!) even knows the sampled song much less the rapper's overlay.
(Hm. This is interesting.)
The MO is gathering up some music to share with a young co-worker who actually has a clue, and one of the offerings is Basehead's Play with Toys. This is one of my all-time favorite thank-you-for-telling-me-about-this records. (Aside from Morphine, to which I lay full and undisputed claim (thank you, Michelle), the MO has all the cool music. It pains me to admit that.)
Someday he should put together a list of Necessary Tunes. We would have some overlap, mostly stuff that he's introduced me to that I now consider essential listening, but then his would veer off to metal-land and mine would go more ... I dunno, singer-y? Plus Billy Squier, of course. Hm. Might be a fun comparison :-)
Anyhow, here's a link to the Basehead record, just in case your musical education is as lacking as mine was.
We had a kitty scare this weekend. Our feisty Lorax puked all day Sunday (not unusual now and then, but this was impressive in quantity and frequency) and wouldn't even eat a treat, much less real food. By the end of the day, she was only walking a few feet at a time, and then hunkering down on the floor for a while. She wouldn't jump up anywhere, and was obviously unhappy. This morning, she barely protested being put in the cat carrier (normally a huge battle) and the MO took her off to the vet. It took them all day to figure out that she has a urinary tract infection. They zapped her with an antibiotic, and we have pills to try to get down her throat for the next week. She's not back to normal by a long shot, but is definitely more mobile now than she was yesterday. Poooooor kitty, it's just so odd to see her so subdued.
So for those of you who love the kitties, please think some happy thoughts for the Lorax over the next few days as she recovers. She will reward you by returning to her perch on top of the MO's monitor for more glamour shots ;-)
I finally finished stitching together the scans from Rob and Cindy's scrapbook (note to self: next scanner will handle 12x12 pages in ONE SCAN, not four) and uploaded them to flickr. The set is here: http://flickr.com/photos/txmagpie/sets/72057594086892949/
I test-drove the QOOP photo book service, and the results are nice. I ordered an 8 x 10 book of the scrapbook pages I made from our Washington DC/Pennsylvania Memorial Day trip a couple of years ago and I am pretty happy with the results. I wanted to do it on lulu.com, because they have a square book format, and it's saddle-stitched instead of perfect bound, which would mean I could take the cover off and rebind it myself, but I never could get the pdf conversion to work, so pfft. The QOOP images come out just over 6 1/2 inches square, so that's okay. And the image quality is good, so I'll live with the format. It's a tad expensive ($15 + $5 s/h for 24 pages) but it really does look nice.
Speaking of bookbinding, I've signed up to take a case binding class from Myssie Light at the Museum of Printing History early next month. It's a full two-day class and I can hardly wait.
Shit if I know what this says, but it's got cats and beer, and that's good enough for me :-)
Dunkel on, and good night to all....
Hey internet, my dad is on the web!
Here he is rebuilding the generator in his GMC motorhome (scroll down to March 15, 2006). If you just happen to have a GMC coach lying around, this is the place to take it. Dad says they do everything from insane engine rebuilds to custom slide-out additions. My dad was a salesman, so he can detect bullshit from miles away, and he has said for years that these guys are the real deal. At this point, I'd practically (but not quite ;-) trust them with my BabyCar.
Hey Dad, tell Jim he need an RSS feed ;-)
The Oakland Nature Preserve (a worthy project that Mom & Dad are involved with) will be the beneficiary of a very different kind of wine-tasting next weekend. (Scroll down and click on the different varietals--pretty cool.) I have to admit that I was skeptical, primarily because jelly bellys and wine do not mix well in my tummy, but after reading the website, I kind of see where they're coming from. I think it's very interesting that all the "over-oaked" wines include vanilla and buttered toast jelly beans. EXACTLY why I don't like oaky "furry" wines. Hmm.... (Check out un-oaked un-manipulated Semillon for an example of yummy goodness.)
In an article in today's Chronicle, I find this sentence:
In the classic play Pygmalion, the importance of an accent is proved when character Henry Higgins alters Eliza Doolittle's speaking style and changes her life.
Wow. I have to admit a gap in my cinematic education regarding Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle (yes, I know Joe and Marianne are just dying inside right now ;-) but I do know that they weren't named by the ancient Romans. (I'm sorry. 1910 is not "classic" when the original story goes back this far.)
Prime Time Lou is one of the most generally-knowledgable sports fans I know, so this makes me feel pretty good:
Naturally I don't expect it to end this way, but for now, let's hear it for the Deambats who pick brackets based on emotion and linguistics!
Update:
Ooh!! Thank you, Georgetown!
Update:
OMG, this is just too funny!
I know PTL will win in the end, but at this point it sure is fun ;-) (Hee hee, I sure am glad I didn't pick Ohio State to the finals! What was I thinking, picking Georgetown? Pure dumb-bunny luck. That's okay. I expect it will all go horribly wrong in the next round. But I've had my moment!!! And I got like six songs on Metal yesterday (including Billy Squier (dammit, need that link-in-link thing), thankyouverymuch) at the Houser House, which is an all-time record for me, so maybe I should go play the lottery or something...)
You could easily write everything I know about basketball on a post-it note. So of course I set up a bracket when invited by the intrepid Fiberglass Badger to join the Collegiate Metal group on the ESPN site. I picked based on whether or not the school was UF and how much I liked the name, thus Gonzaga will lose by a mere two points to Florida in the championship game.
I have been informed that this was a very silly way to pick my teams, and all I have to say to that is
(I found Lettering Delights today and for a dollar, I could not resist the funny gator alphabet. You have to use their proprietary browser hickey to access the stuff you download, but you can copy it out from there to other programs, so I guess it's not too restrictive. Kind of a pain in the butt, but they have some realllly cute stuff, and pretty much everything is only $1 this month.)
We've been in this house for several years now, and we're still being surprised by the plants. This really ugly weedy tree thing next to the driveway up and sprouted these incredible flowers. Who knew?!
After a little research (thanks for the links, Mom :-) I found out the tree could get pretty big, so now we're trying to decide where to move it to. It certainly isn't going to get big where it is now....
http://www.emilycompost.com/angels_trumpet.htm
http://mgonline.com/datura.html
Mom's cat had her kittens today! Pix ASAP....
Update:
Day 3 - There's a tiny kitty resting on MommaCat's belly.
Laurence Simon: Let's Ask the Cats about Feng Shui
Sadie: Plants in the northwest corner of the room create positive ch'i for the environment. This positive ch'i is maximized when the sagacious cat makes full use of the plant's energy by eating it.
(That Sadie is one smart cat. She forgot to specify that a great deal of hacking and choking should accompany the
I loaded up Adobe Photoshop Elements, 'cause it came with my tablet (big thank yous one more time, Mom & Dad :-) and I wanted to play with some brushes that I couldn't convert to use in Jasc/Corel's PaintShop Pro. I think I begin to understand the fascination with brushes.
The photo is mine (we had a bumper crop of daffodils this year!) and the brushes are from designfruit.com (Jason Gaylor) and inobscuro.com (Nela Dunato). I didn't spend much time with it but it's kinda pretty anyhow--Mother Nature gave me a good head-start....
Dear Internet,
Last night, I received three compliments from non-friend women (ie, unsolicited, unexpected, unbiased) on my outfit.
Me. Compliments. On my clothing. If the world has spun off its axis, it's my fault. I suspect I owe it all to the heels. You can't tell from this picture, but those are three-inch heels. I was crippled until at least noon today, but it was so worth it.
Let's hear it for the lovely clerks at White House/Black Market in the Village. You rock!
I am still in shock. And the MO is going to explode if I talk about it any more. So that's where you come in, dear Internet. Always there, ready to receive the minutiae of all our little lives. Unable to protest or turn away.... (Although it's taking an abnormally long time to load the photo to flickr. Hmmm.....)
Anyhow, thanks for listening,
Darcy
Almost forgot -- I heard Melvin's theme song on KTRU this morning:
08:17 AM- shonen knife / hot chocolate [happy hour] on the BIG DEAL label
When they sing, "Mel- mel- mel- mel-, mel- mel- mel- mel-, meltiiiiiing" I always hear (and sing) "Mel- mel- mel- mel-, mel- mel- mel- mel-, Melviiiiiiiin" so it's her theme song ;-)
Sadly, the excerpt at Amazon does not play that part....
I could have procrastinated three more days (well, two and a half), but I actually took the initiative and went shopping for something to wear to the Saturday evening wedding that we're attending this weekend. Somehow my cute little turquoise Betsey Johnson didn't seem like it was going to cut it.... So, in a mild panic and with dread in my heart, I headed to the Village to see what I could find.
I have this knack for turning invisible in nice shops, and true to form, the ladies at JoAnn's never even got as much as a "Hi, how are you" out of their mouths in the two full tours around the floor that I took. Nothing looked appealing anyhow, so I went next door to White House/Black Market (on the advice of cousin Kirsten--thank you!) and not only were they friendly, it turns out they have great stuff and reasonable prices.
But the really exciting part was my own personal What Not to Wear moment, when I stepped out of the dressing room in a pair of dress pants, only to have the two clerks who were helping me both descend and tell me the pants were waaaay too big ("you're swimming in them!") and so I went back in and tried the next size down and glory hallelujah, I'm back in the single digits. Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen, all those workouts, 7 point lunches and diet cokes have been worth it. I'm a size 8 again. I mean, it's one thing to think that your jeans are getting looser, but having your butt (or lack thereof) validated in the marketplace, as it were, turns out to be quite an ego boost.
So of course I bought a killer pair of shoes to go with my new outfit :-)
