Omar and the Joy of Life

I have to assume that the naked guy trying to fly a kite from his odd little enclosed balcony is Omar and that he's enjoying life. Taken in the Tenderloin, if memory serves. It was a long time ago.

Yosemite Falls

More Yosemite pics on my flickr feed, of course. Also, Pete made a collage, as one does.

The best tilt-shift time-lapse monster truck rally you'll see all day

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

More nature

Or a decent facsimile thereof - I'm not sure that a butterfly colony inside a glass dome inside a museum inside a park can be counted as nature.

Pictures of things

By noon or so it was clear that my clients had all taken the day off, so I decided to get out of the house for a bit. Pictures ensued



More on Flickr

Mashup Time!

Pete (who has a new site), posted one of those Apple silhouette ad parodies that absolutely everybody has seen. Hence this monstrosity - or is it a meta-monstrosity? Anyways, I went and made t-shirts out of them. Buy them, that I may eat.

Even my henchmen think I'm crazy

Jonathan Coulton is teh awesome



Also: Skullcrusher Mountain

My new favorite quote

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Kung Fu Monkey

A worthy cause

An anti-prohibition march, I suspect.

And what do we do when springtime rolls around?

Plants are in - tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and cilantro this year. Hopefully I'll do a slightly better job this time around - last year the strawberries got strawberry mites, the cucumbers got sudden cucumber death syndrome, the onions got acute onion dwarfism, and the tomatoes got birds. The peppers were nice though.

Happy vernal equinox!

Here's your Ostara flower. I was at the zoo yesterday taking pictures and admiring the unique sights and smells zoos always have on offer and, because I'm weird that way, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to take a picture of this one flower. The people walking by must have thought I was quite mad, but that's okay. Cuz I am.

When we were very young

When I was eight, I played outside. I rode my bike to the seven eleven, where I bought comics and slushees. My friends and I built underground forts in a vacant lot*, yet somehow I didn't once get murdered by a stranger. So this struck a chord.

Some days, we’d go exploring in the woods. Our minds full of fantastical stories of bad guys chasing us, we decided we must build a tree house. So we gathered up scrap pieces of old wood, rusty nails pulled out of rotting pieces of equipment, and a hammer someone nicked from their father’s toolbox. Then we’d nail this crap to a tree.
[. . .]
And we survived.
Hell, we didn’t just survive. We flourished.

The world is no more dangerous than it was thirty years ago. The parents bubble wrapping their kids today spent their own childhood playing with discarded building materials and eating bugs. So what gives?

*Pits covered with cardboard, technically, but who's counting?

Patrick Stewart's Magnum Opus

Sesame Street, in case you hadn't guessed.

Death by hanging - the ebay way

ebay's probably cheaper, but I don't want to get scammed. On the other hand, I don't have to leave my house. Then again, Target's hanging deaths may be of questionable quality. So many difficult choices to make, so little time.

This, though, is a thing of beauty

I give you The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, a 2005 animated short that has a marvelous steampunk feel to it. Do click the little HQ button in the corner and watch it in full screen - the tiny window doesn't do it justice.



The official site has some nice desktops and a screensaver.

My First Singles

I first became aware of the existence of popular music in second grade, and I somehow associate each and every one of these songs with carpooling to school in 1983. I and some classmates whose names I simply can't remember would carpool to school in my mother's 1978 Buick LeSabre and I guess these kids - one of them was named James, I think - knew much more than I about worldly things. They somehow convinced my mother to play the local FM rock station. That was pretty much the end of it - within months I had a largish pile of those orange and yellow RCA singles. It was all innocent enough, but little did I know that a decade later I'd be scrounging around flea markets offering to perform fellatio on random strangers in exchange for early Bowie picture discs. And now - now it seems quaint to remember a time when music took up physical space. Anyway - here, then, are my first five singles.

Styx - Mister Roboto

It took me two decades to work out what "domo arigato" meant. All that time I thought they'd lost their robot.

Toto - Africa


The Clash - Should I Stay or Should I Go?

This one actually held up pretty well - much better than the other ones.

Mountain - Mississippi Queen

I still don't know what you mean. I checked wikipedia, but the song has the single most clinically offputting entry ever:

Early in the song, he compliments her lovemaking skills (or admits his lack thereof) by stating "...she taught me everything", then goes on to say she was a dancer who "moved better on wine". The singer continues, saying that she had asked him to be her man to which he replies, "I'd do what I can". He evidently took her up on her offer as the next line says . . .

Steve Miller Band - Abracadabra

My parents always seemed fairly uncomfortable when I sang this - not just because I sing so badly that Amnesty International has formally protested about me doing so in public. It would be a few more years before I worked out why. Frankly I just like the cool noises about halfway through.

A semi-comprehensive list of free museum days in the San Francisco bay area

I couldn't find one of these, so I made it myself. Feel free to contact me if you have a museum to add. Also, not that this list does not contain museums that are always free or only free to certain patrons.

The sad story of the Kings Inn

This blighted property just off Reno's main drag has been boarded up for a while. It's not prime real estate - about as close as you can get though. It's right across from the old Masonic lodge, right off Virginia where it used to cross the railroad, and it's a stark reminder of just how long Reno has been in decay. This seven story hotel and casino - hardly a marvel of architectural invention - was probably doomed from the beginning, though. Constructed in 1973, the place opened in 1974 - the hotel did, at least. The gaming license took another year ^[1].

Only five years later, the place filed for bankruptcy, with the casino closing in 1982 and the hotel in '86. That was 23 years ago. It's looked pretty much just like this ever since. The building is condemned, of course. There were plans to renovate the place a few years ago, but nothing came of it. I almost feel sorry for the poor building. Not that it's especially attractive or worthy of my pity, but to spend two thirds of your existence as nothing more than a cautionary tale to those who wish to follow in your footsteps is not an enviable fate.

What's odd to me is that a place like this, in the middle of a largish city, can just sit there for decades, completely ignored, while land is so expensive these days that a person earning an average wage can't even afford a modest home. The law of supply and demand just doesn't apply here, apparently.

As an aside, if you have anecdotes, pictures or memorabilia from the Kings Inn, I'd really like to hear from you. For reasons I can't adequately explain, I'm fascinated by the place and would like to know what it was like.

^[1]: The Rise of the Biggest Little City. Kling & Melton, 1999

The biggest little hellhole in the world.

I guess it goes without saying that Reno isn't what it once was. The advent of Indian gambling in California has really thrown a wrench in the works of the city that once prided itself on the fact that it was. . .erm. . .closer to the bay area than Vegas, I guess. Look, let's face it. That's the only thing the place ever had going for it in the first place. It was always just a pale shadow of Vegas, and it felt like it was in decline all the way back in the seventies.

It's starting to get really bad now. The number of operating casinos is about the same as the number of shuttered ones, and the ones that are still open are starting to look pretty ratty, to be honest. Some of the closed ones have been boarded up for a decade, and some of them have been turned into condos. Great timing, that.

Still, the fact that so much of downtown hasn't been seriously updated in half a century makes for some pretty cool photo ops. I'll be adding some more as I get them edited.

Happy effing new year

I'm just glad this one's over, frankly. I suppose it's possible that next year could be worse, but that would be some especially fucked up shit^[1].

I have some resolutions that I guess I'm going to share with whichever poor sod amongst you accidentally visits my blog. Of course, I'm no different from you bastards, so I'll stop implementing them in about a week and a half, stop feeling guilty about not implementing them towards the end of January, and forget all about them by the second week of February.

1: I'm going to use my powers for good.
2: I'm going to take pictures of more people and things. Some of them may not suck.
3: I'm going to travel more. Just because business is slow doesn't mean I can't spend money like a drunk sailor^[2].
4: I'm going to stop suffering fools. You know who you are.
5: I'm going to watch more awesome 80s video clips.
6: I'm going to master playing the infected.
7: I'm going to make visiting the library a habit.
8: I'm going to hone my mockery skills.
9: I'm going to write a Fallout 3 mod.
10: I'm going to embrace my inner dadaist.
11: Purple infinity houseboat haphazard.

There you have it. My resultions for 2k9. How about you?

-D

^[1]: Yo.
^[2]: Actually, it does.