and Robert Plant is hot. This newsflash brought to you by Becker Vineyard's lovely Provencal grenache blush.
June 2006 Archives
I'd have live-blogged the parts of the Miss Texas beauty pageant that I watched this evening whilst flipping channels. I had a couple of glasses of wine, so my catty remarks were quite amusing to me ;-) But really, I have only two questions about the whole thing.
- Who makes up the geographical divisions? Why does River Oaks (a neighborhood--not even an entire suburb--in Houston) get their own contestant while the entire Hill Country (including who knows how many entire counties, if not as much moolah) also gets one contestant?
- Why did so many of them choose the aqua bathing suit over the brown one? The brown one was much more flattering. Maybe they thought the aqua one made them look more tan.
- Okay, three questions. Why do these chickees, presumably young women, already look like they've been botoxed within an inch of their lives?
That's it for the social commentary.
In other boob-tube news (ha, a pun ;-) I've decided that Footballer's Wive$ is pretty much fun to watch. Go tivo!
Oh, I just thought of
- Who taught Miss Laredo to walk? She galumphs. Even I walk better in heels than she does, and that is not a compliment, as I suspect that I look like I'm in mortal fear of breaking my neck. Which I am in anything over 1/2 inch.
Oh. And Jason Varitek, Brad Wilkerson, Juan Encarnacion and Jason Kubel? Collectively, you all SUCK for taking tonight off ALL AT THE SAME TIME, thereby blowing my chance to upset the #1 team in Texas League V. Thanks a lot.
From Joel on Software: My First BillG Review
Bill came in.I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being.
He had my spec in his hand.
(What a great geek story! I mean really, how often do you get [OMG SQUEEE!] and Bill Gates in the same narrative, and it makes perfect sense?)
Tonight I finished up my submission for the Money Swap at the Carving Consortium.
The task was to create currency--pretty open-ended :-) I decided early on that I wanted to make coins instead of paper. It took a while and some messing around to decide just how I was going to accomplish this. After several false starts, I ended up embossing metal, adhering it to wooden nickels, and covering the edges with stained-glass copper tape. I wish they were heavier, but I like the size and especially The Shiny!
I bought some thin metal sheets and started playing. I stamped my pattern on one side and used an embossing stylus to trace the pattern, which makes it raised on the other side. I made all the "bird" sides on the pewter sheets, and then carved my LORAX - 2006 stamp and started on the brass.
Well, it didn't take long to realize that the habit of carving letters backwards so they print frontwards was a bad habit in this case! I'm not a very accomplished letter-carver in the first place, and I wasn't about to try to recarve the stamp "frontways" so I let the project sit for a day while I thought. I finally figured that I could stamp onto paper and emboss through the paper onto the metal. Crisis averted!
Around this time, it also occurred to me that it was not at all obvious that I had actually done any stamping, much less carving. Not only that, I didn't leave myself any space to put my name or the date or any other standard swap-type stuff. Sooooooo, I decided to make an accompanying card. On the front I put a message from Lorax Herself, and I put all that other business on the back, including an impression of the bird stamp.
Then I needed a way to keep the cards with the coins, so I made envelopes. (Like I need much of an excuse to make envelopes. They are so much fun!) And that was that. I think that explains everything in the picture :-)
Off to the PO tomorrow! And off to bed now....
The Generator Blog strikes again, with a link to one of Don Realya's art generators. I poked around and re-found the Real Time Contextual Art Generator, seeded it with "mad, oilman" and got this incredibly appropriate result.
Now off to play some more :-)
Gutenkarte has come up with an idea that would almost make me consider reading a book on-line.
They've sent the book's text through a parser that pulls out geographic locations and plots them on a map. That's pretty cool right there. But then, they also provide the text side-by-side with the map (click the Browse option at upper right once you've selected your text), and when you mouse over a locale, the map adjusts to center on that location.
I don't feel a whole lot of interest for this with fiction, other than general curiosity, but for historical accounts I think it's incredible! Now if someone could figure out how to parse in a timeline, and genealogy charts, I can imagine that I just might be able to retain something from a history book for once.
[via information aesthetics]
As far as I know, I've successfully shuffled around most of my on-line life.
Theoretically, I've moved By the Way and Dot Next to txmagpie.com, so with any luck, if you're reading this, the URL is txmagpie.com instead of bytheway.themagpieinstinct.com....
I've also relocated all my genealogy stuff to ddcurtin.com.
And, ideally, mod_rewrite is automagically redirecting all my hordes of readers to the new locations :-)
From Hog On Ice: I Grow Unfair, I Grow Unfair
He's all pouty now because I canned his link and refused to let him speak TRUTH to POWER!
God, how I hate that expression. You can't "speak to power." Power isn't a person. It can't hear. Speaking to power is like speaking to entropy or size or any number of nouns that represent abstract concepts which have no consciousness and no location.
He didn't actually say "speak truth to power." I'm just drifting here.
Some people speak truth to power. I speak flatulence to width. I speak menopause to arbitrage. Top that, pretentious pinheads who screw up the English language.
(What the web needs now is a "speak this to that" generator ;-)
I'm in the midst of rearranging my on-line life. This blog will be moving as soon as I figure out how to get the #$&% redirects working.... Will post details here before it happens :-)
From The Other Side of Kim:
The answer is not always Yes to the question: Does a bear sh*t in the woods?
(Having a possum (an opossum?) get inside the house was bad enough. I sure wouldn't want have a bear visitor.)
The doves have decided they really like the palm outside my bathroom window
and the cats have decided they really like the doves.
I think they don't quite understand why they can't get the birds, though.... Poor kitties!
and I'll say it again: "That subwoofer kicks @$$." Okay, maybe that's not exactly what I said last time, but it's the same idea. Funny how it's Dieselboy again (and Ibiza--that's kind of weird) but let me just say, if the phrase "drum & bass" does anything at all for you and you don't own any Dieselboy, you're a total pansy.
If your man takes the time to show you a picture of Ernest Hemingway that happens to be in an article in the gun magazine that he's reading, just because he knows you're reading a biography of Hemingway, then he really loves you.
