Pages

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Fun Teenager Ketchup Party (The Follow-Up)

I'll bet you four thought I forgot about this. In case anyone wasn't reading for the introduction, the rules went as follows:
Rules:

1. You guys tell me what kind of music you want.

2. In a few days, I'll post one mp3 for each of you.

You can't request music by band name or genre. You have to describe, in terms of color, mood, texture, taste, or any other creative way you can think of, what you're looking for in a song, and I'll do the best I can with what I have. Yes, that means that I may end up posting a song that you wouldn't normally listen to. That's part of the fun.

I can't use more than one song by any given band. The point of this meme is to give you a taste of new stuff, not to pirate whole CDs. If you like what you hear, you'll still need to buy it yourself. If two of you come up with identical descriptions, I have to find two bands that both fit, or use one song for both of you.

I can't make the song permanently available. Unless the song in question is already available on the band's website (in which case, I'll provide a link to their site instead of posting an mp3), I'll be taking the songs down in a few days, or posting them on a temporary host so that they'll expire after a few days.
I've been doing a thousand other things, but that doesn't mean I had forgotten about the arrangement. Bri (Bri!) responded first, with this: If Twin Peaks were set today, what song would Audrey find to dance to in a contemporary jukebox?

My answer: The Gossip, "Listen Up." Like Audrey herself, this song has a retro vibe. I could honest hear Aretha Franklin singing in as well as the girl who does. Besides that, the message of the song seems to be one that a popular rich girl like Audrey would agree with. I'm not 100 percent comfortable with this recommendation, however, so I'm going to double-up with Andy Votel's "The Return of the Spooky Driver," which may not be imminently danceable but at least matches the formal structure of Audrey's theme. Besides, I doubt anybody but Audrey herself could dance to Audrey's theme.

The Gossip and Andy Votel are both available through iTunes, though less legal downloading programs could probably snag the songs as well.

Next up: Dina (Canklesaurus!). She responded with this: I would like to hear a song that you can dance to, but awkwardly. I would like to not quite know how to move because something odd but fun is happening so I must just hop around and smile a lot and wave my arms like a European. I want it to be bubbly like icecream covered in bubbles — inedible but still delicious.

My answer: Soviet's "Candy Girl." It's dance music, but in a very New Wave sort of way. (And no, I didn't just recommend this because I associate a band called "Soviet" with you, my little Russkie immigrant child. If you didn't know better, you'd probably think it came from that era, but it oddly came from the 90s, neatly between the two time periods where such synthy music was in style. It's poppy as all hell, but the singer's voice is so low that it always seemed to me that the vocal track had to have been recorded separately, in the basement of a shoe polish sandwich shop in some country that didn't exist before the U.S.S.R. fell.

Next up: Meg (Meg Horesxhkji!). She shot me this: I'd like to hear something synesthetically red and orange and outlined in thick black lines, something that expresses existential discontent in a cheerfully palatable manner. I'd like it to generate the kind of weirdly nostalgic, mixed up and distressed and simultaneously exultant feelings that you'd have if you accidentally came across your tattered, childhood teddybear up for sale by some stranger on eBay."

My answer: Woof. That's a lot to chew on, but I think I can give you something that captures most of it. The Magnetic Fields' "I Don't Love You Anymore" could probably work on the grounds that it presents a title that ostensibly explain a man's now-dead love for a woman. However, it's very clear from the song that he still carries those feelings. It's a fairly simple song in that it sounds like something a child might write or sing, however, the meaning goes deeper than that. It may not be especially red and orange with black lines, but I'm not sure what would be.

The Magnetic Fields are available on iTunes. But if you download one, you should really get the rest, too. I think you'd especially dig this band.

Next up: Pedro (Pedro!). He spat at me the following: Because you know enough about art history to have a chance at pulling it off: I'd like to hear something Baroque. Not the cats-banging-against-a-trashcan that they came up with themselves, but something that sounds like Baroque sculpture and/or architecture looks.

My answer: Fuck. I don't know much about the Baroque anything. In fact, whenever I see the word, I secretly pronounce it in my head as "barbecue." But I have seen it before. From what I’ve taken in from all things Baroque, this song should be elaborate, fancy, vaguely spiritual, lush and largely grand. I think “The Tain,” by the Decembersists, should work well. It’s an epic eighteen-minute song, with four or five distinct parts. It also features various speakers, including a crone, a soldier, a chorus of waifs, a married couple, a sea captain, and a widow.

As always, “The Tain” is available on iTunes, but only if you purchase the full album. If you have any trouble finding a way around this, tell me and I’ll help you out.

So how did I do?

Monday, October 30, 2006

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Carnival of Terror

I find this endlessly entertaining. The music helps.


I'd imagine this is what the children who tortured ants with magnifying glasses did upon turning their malice to more socially appropriate venues.

The Onion Kid

Friday, October 27, 2006

The Cryptkicker Five

Brett Easton Ellis' perfect Halloween mix, as noted in his 2005 pseudo-autobiography Lunar Park:
  • "The Ghost In You" - The Psychedelic Furs
  • "Thriller" - Michael Jackson
  • "Witchy Woman" - The Eagles
  • "Evil Woman" - Electric Light Orchestra
  • "Rhiannon" - Fleetwood Mac
  • "Sympathy For The Devil" - The Rolling Stones
  • "Werewolves Of London" - Warren Zevon
  • "Spooky Girlfriend" - Elvis Costello
  • "Time Of The Season" - The Zombies
  • "One Of These Nights" - The Eagles
  • "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" - Blue Oyster Cult
My additions:
  • "Bad Moon Rising" - Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • "Spooky" - Dusty Springfield
  • "Hush" - Deep Purple
  • "Paint It Black" - The Rolling Stones
  • "She's Not There" - The Zombies
  • "Bela Lugosi's Dead" - Bauhaus

Thursday, October 26, 2006

The Hoodoo Guru

Every so often, I’ll use this blog as a means to share a strange dream I’ve had. When I hear most people recount their dreams, it’s usually a painful affair. By virtue of not making sense, dreams make for an unsatisfying story in which the problems presented are not solved but instead are tacked on one after another. The result is the narrative equivalent of a run-on sentence.

I’d like to think that some dreams — if explained correctly — are worth the time it takes to explain them. I’ve related quite a few here before, but I just realized today that I’ve never written about my most memorable dream.

So I will.

Picture a field. Iowa. Kansas. Whatever gets you there. It’s flat and cropless. It’s a plane, in the geometrical sense, stretching out to the horizon.

Somewhere in this area is a small farmhouse, isolated and without any nearby trees or houses. I am standing in the back porch — an enclosed area where you could imagine rocking chairs and old people and the like. However, the only other people on the porch are two girls, pretty and high school-aged. I should probably note that while I’m “there,” I’m not. The girls don’t seem to see me, so I’m some kind of ghost or floating observer to this little scene. In any case, a young man is standing at the door to this enclosed back porch construction and he’s angry.

Instinctively — or magically, if you will, in the way dreams imbue you with knowledge that you never learned but just have — I know that the young man goes to school with these girls. He’s unpopular for whatever reason, and the girls befriended him as a joke. He screams and yells and pounds on the frame of the door, but the girls laugh at him. For whatever reason, the joke is still funny.

Soon, however, the pounding gets louder and louder until I’m not looking at the girls anymore. I am looking at the angry young man. Despite my status as a floating narrator ghost, this rage scares me. And then I note that the girls have stopped laughing. They’re scared too. The banging continues and panic on the back porch escalates.

Suddenly, the entire scene falls silent. It’s as if someone hit a giant mute button and more than earlier it’s as if I’m watching this interaction in the same way I’d watch a movie. Then a hear a noise that I can only describe as the sound of a hundred men humming at the same time. One loud, resonant note, sung in perfect unison. I can hear it in my memory still, this noise I never actually heard. It gives me chills.

In the distance, I can see a figure bounding over the horizon. A speck growing larger with every Superman-style leap it takes as it nears the house. It’s a man, though he’s quite skinny and wrapped in cloth, like a mummy. Only his eyes are visible. My brain tells me this thing is called the “Hoodoo Guru,” and despite the goofiness of the name, the Hoodoo Guru is terrifying.

With tremendous force, the Hoodoo Guru eventually crashes onto the angry young man, and for a moment both are on the ground, below the view that the window in the back door provides. Then the wrapped man stands, and then the young man does too. They look at each other for a moment before the Hoodoo Guru taps him once on the head and his body falls into pieces — specifically six: head, arm, arm, torso, leg, leg. Not bloody pieces, mind you. Neat and tidy, like a human body was meant to disassemble. The Hoodoo Guru gathers the pieces in his arms and bounds away.

That’s the dream.

When I had this dream, I was a sophomore in college and living in an apartment in Isla Vista. I specifically dreamed this story at about five in the morning. Immediately afterwards, I was perfectly awake — not so much from the fact that the dream scared me but more than I had to use the bathroom very badly. I didn’t, however, and this is the truly weird part of the dream: I had the completely irrational fear that if I walked into the bathroom, I’d pass by the mirror and see someone else’s face instead of mine. Not the Hoodoo Guru’s necessarily, though that would have been unsettling, I’m sure. No, anybody’s face. Just not mine.

Despite the insisting of my bladder, I lied in bed and very calmly told myself that I’d just have to wait until the risk of mirror confusion had passed. Near eight-o-clock, I finally realized the illogic of this belief and peed like a normal person. Clearly, though, I was insane at the time. I mean that literally.

I don’t know why the dream affected me so profoundly or so strangely. I had another dream during the summer after my senior year that also had a dramatic effect, but that was different. (For the record, I recorded that dream in a post shortly thereafter.) Also of note: The Hoodoo Gurus are an Australian rock band whose track “What’s My Scene” I had downloaded probably six months before the dream. It’s a good track in the style of The Replacements or The Smithereens. Every time I hear the opening chords, though, I get a little shiver, only because of the associations my subconscious made with it.

All in all, I’ve never been able to make anything from it. I just thought I’d write about it.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

It Was the Sister!

I’d like to present a song that, perhaps more than just about any other, warrants a closer look: “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” Yes, it’s country. Yes, as a rule, country sucks. However, this song was first performed in an era where a lot of country was good, enjoyed mainstream success and shared a lot of style with the soul and rock music of the day. Often, a song could easily be placed in any of the three categories.

People most likely peg “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” as out-and-out country probably because the cover version by Reba Macentire seems to be more familiar than the original by Vicki Lawrence. I vastly prefer Lawrence’s take. Since this is one of those sings that tells a story — again, like a lot of great country of the era did — Lawrence’s restrained voice works a lot better than Macentire’s big, brash vocals. True, both singers have red hair, but the fact that Lawrence considered this hit song a career high despite starring on “The Carol Burnett Show” and, later, “Mama’s Family” makes it all the more worthwhile to note.
He was on his way home from Candletop,
Okay, so he’s returning from “Candletop,” which I’d imagine is an area in Georgia between Moonshine Valley and Curly, Curly Piggy Tail. I’d always heard the lyric as “Canada,” but I guess that seems off, in retrospect.

Been two weeks gone, and he’d thought he’d stop,
At Web’s and have him a drink ’fore he went home to her.
Andy Wo-lo said: “Hello.”
Andy who? I honestly can’t make out what is spoken here, by either Vicki or Reba. Various results for lyric searches on Google give me “Andy Warlow,” “Andy Wadlow,” “Andy Woelow,” “Andy Wallow,” and, perhaps with the least chance of being correct, “Andy Warlord.” Also, Andy works at a bar called “Web’s,” but I’m certain his last name isn’t “Web.” And most confusingly, the narrator refers to him with the unlikely nickname of “Wo” two lines after the character is introduced.
He said “Hi. What’s doin’?”
Wo said: “Sit down, I got some bad news — it’s gonna hurt.”
He said: “I’m your best friend, and you know that’s right,
“But your young bride ain’t home tonight.
Since you been gone, she’s been seeing that Amos boy, Seth.”
I’m totally unclear whether Andy’s explaining that the wife is fooling around with a man named Seth Amos or he’s telling the protagonist — whose name is Seth — that she’s been fooling around with “that Amos boy.”
Now he got mad, and he saw red.
Andy said: “Boy, don’t you lose your head,
’Cos to tell you the truth, I’ve been with her myself.”
Awkward, Andy. Also awkward: the abbreviation of “because” to one syllable. I just stuck with “cos” with the apostrophe in front of it since that at least looked better than “cuz.” Technically, the apostrophe doesn’t even need to be there, since “cos” isn’t technically a contraction for anything.
That’s the night that the lights went out in Georgia.
That’s the night that they hung an innocent man.
Well, don’t trust your soul to no backwoods Southern lawyer.
’Cos the judge in the town’s got bloodstains on his hands.

Well Andy got scared, and left the bar,
Walkin’ on home, ’cos he didn’t live far.
You see, Andy didn’t have many friends,
And he just lost him one.
Brother thought his wife must have left town,
So he went home and finally found,
The only thing Papa had left him — and that was a gun.
I’m honestly confused as to why the main character would just assume his wife would have left town, for whatever reason, but whatever — it advances the plot by giving him to go home and play with this heirloom revolver he apparently has.
He went off to Andy’s house,
Slippin’ through the backwoods quiet as a mouse.
Came upon some tracks too small for Andy to make.
A clue!
He looked through the screen at the back porch door,
And he saw Andy lyin’ on the floor
In a puddle of blood and he started to shake.
I'm assuming it's the main character who's shaking and not the newly dead Andy, though from the context you really can't tell. Damn pronouns.
Georgia patrol was making their rounds,
So he fired a shot just to flag them down.
A big-bellied sheriff grabbed his gun and said “Why’d you do it?”

Judge said guilty on a make-believe trial,
Slapped the sheriff on the back with a smile,
And said: “Supper’s waitin’ at home, and I gotta get to it.”
{chorus}
Well, they hung my brother before I could say
Okay, so the narrator isn’t just some random person. She has a personal relation to the main character. Interesting that we don’t get that until the end of the song. And wait — they hung the brother? For whatever reason, I just assumed that the brother got the electric chair and his electrocution was the reason the nights went out in the entire state. You know, because the whole of Georgia only has enough power to operate one electrical appliance at a time.
The tracks he saw while on his way
To Andy’s house and back that night were mine.
And his cheatin’ wife had never left town,
That’s one body that’ll never be found.
You see, little sister don’t miss when she aims her gun.
I love this. The narrator, whom we have just assumed is some nameless storyteller is actually an active participant in the story. The murderer, no less. But seriously? He was tried, convicted and hanged — not "hung," as the lyrics erroneously state — before she could do anything about it? Seems odd. She was probably busy killing every other person in town.
{chorus}
So that’s it.

This is a great song, and I’ve been thinking about it more closely than probably anybody else I know ever would ever since I saw that scene in “Resevoir Dogs” where Nice Guy Eddie mentions having listened to the song and then finally realizing that Vicki Lawrence is the killer. I’m just honestly impressed that such a story could be compacted so neatly into a three-minute song. Seriously, this song has more characters than books I’ve read:
  • the main character
  • his sister, the narrator and murderer.
  • Andy Whatever-His-Last-Name-Is, the ill-fated bartender
  • the whore of a wife
  • that Amos boy, Seth
  • the backwoods southern lawyer the protagonist apparently entrusted himself to
  • “Papa,” the father of the protagonist and the narrator
  • the big-bellied sheriff
And so few pop songs have twist endings nowadays. The idea that she’d murder Andy on the same night as her brother would come home, only moments after Andy confronted him is odd, I’ll admit. Beyond that, I’m not entirely clear as to why she’s killing people. If most people were going to confront a adulterous sister-in-law, they’d probably just talk about it over coffee or, at the very least, yell “Whore!” as they passed her on the street or something. Maybe the sister is just psychotic. That would explain a lot.

Anyway, I like this song. I enjoy that it’s more complex than an episode of “Law & Order.” I like that it’s ambiguous, even if part of that ambiguity means not explaining exactly why the lights went off. And most of all, I like Vicki Lawrence. This whole mess would have made an excellent series finale to “Mama’s Family.” Kristy McNichol actually starred in a 1981 film called “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” but, as the Wikipedia explains it, the plot bears little resemblance to the song. That’s probably a good thing, since I’d imagine most people would have realized that the sister is the killer during the period the song was a number-one hit — April of 1973, right between Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” and Tony Orlando’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” I might as well note that adapting songs into movies was also a trend during that has long-since vanished. Two other popular country songs from the same time as “Georgie” — Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” and Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” — fared considerably better.

And you know what? I just figured it out — the lights went out in Georgia because the batshit-crazy sister killed them too.

The Kodos-o-Lantern

Last year, when pressed with the task of turning a pumpkin into a jack-o-lantern, I decided to fashion the face in the likeness of the scariest thing I could think of.


Yes, little Quincy Jones, the dog who thirsted for blood, made the cut. This year, I bought an even bigger pumpkin. We decided to have a mini-marathon of “Treehouse of Horror” and, thus, I made my pumpkin in honor of the tentacled aliens who so often appear in them — specifically Kodos and not Kang, because Kang is clearly inferior.

kodos-o-lantern 2

kodos-o-lantern
Not all that close, especially since it’s pretty hard to carve tentacles.


But I’m pleased with it. For the record, I was told I could not, in fact, call the jack-o-lantern “Kodos,” so we’ve taken to calling it “Miriam.”

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Sea of Heiuso

The whole weekend didn’t revolve around possible apparitions of long-dead prom queens in white hats, however. This below is entirely more representative of my time at home.

dog time 1

dog time 2

dog time 3

dog time 6

dog time 7

dog time 8

The Woman in White

I drove home last Saturday for a brief break from Santa Barbara life. In all, the weekend went well. On the drive up, however, I nearly veered off the road while gawking at an unexpected roadside attraction: a strange person, dressed all in white, with a white, wide-brimmed hat, bowing reverently to passing traffic. This occurred right on Highway 25 — a backwoods stretch also known as “Airline Highway” that I use to cut through King City and get to my house without having to pass through Salinas. She was standing right where the road forms a “T,” with the various legs of the letter running to Hollister, King City and Coalinga, respectively.

Yesterday morning, I traced the same route back home. When I got to the T once again, I saw the same white-clad person, only a few yards from where the first strange encounter happened. This time, the person was walking with her back to me, towards Coalinga. I was half-tempted to follow and ask what strange compulsion could possibly be causing this activity — at the height of the midday sun and on a shadeless road, no less. But then I started thinking about “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Hills Have Eyes” and the like and decided to press ahead to King City.

Right at where Highway 25 dumps off onto the 101, there’s a gas station that I always stop at. I arrive at this spot either one hour or three hours into the four-hour trip it takes to between Santa Barbara and Hollister, and regardless which way I’m headed it usually marks the time when I have to use the bathroom. So I asked the attendant — from whom I’ve been buying bottled water and assorted car trip food since I started college — if he had heard of anybody ever seeing this person. He had, in fact. He confirmed that the figure was a woman and that she had been dressing in white and walking the back roads for a while now.

I had never seen her before. Honestly, she creeps me out a bit. However, I’m curious to know if anybody who reads this blog had seen her or if they know why she is doing this. Is she keen on Jesus? A proponent of midday constitutionals? Proud of her white hat? Somehow, I feel the number of regular readers who would have reason to use this bypass would have diminished since we’ve mostly all graduated and moved away from Santa Barbara. I found nothing online about the Woman in White — not that I really expected to, seeing as how her ilk usually spread their gospel on poorly Xeroxed newsletters with lots of exclamation points and run-on sentences.

The combination of fearing for my life and not wanting to slow beneath sixty miles per hour didn’t allow me photograph the woman, but until I can this image will have to suffice.


Disregarding the nose, the menacing grin and the lit dynamite, it’s actually not a bad likeness.

Another Reason to Mistrust Pelicans

Children aghast as pelican swallows pigeon whole


[ link: the original story at the Daily Mail ]

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Don't Drink the Cuckoo Punch

It's just not a good recipe. Click for a larger image with readable text.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

The Victory of Pauline

Everything's so easy for Pauline. Everything's so easy for Pauline. Ancient strings set feet a light to speed to her such mild grace. No monument of tacky gold. They smoothed her hair with cinnamon waves, and they placed an ingot in her breast to burn cool and collected. Fate holds her firm in its cradle and then rolls her for a tender pause to savor. Everything's so easy for Pauline.

Girl with the parking lot eyes, Margaret is the fragments of a name. Her bravery is mistaken for the thrashing in the lake of the make-believe monster whose picture was faked. Margaret is the fragments of a name. Her love pours like a fountain. Her love steams like rage. Her jaw aches from wanting and she's sick from chlorine, but she'll never be as clean as the cool side of satin, Pauline.

Two girls ride the blue line. Two girls walk down the same street. One left her sweater sittin' on the train, the other lost three fingers at the cannery. Everything's so easy for Pauline.
[ something i haven't done in a long while ]

The Ghost Tree of Malaysia

Does it not make you feel slightly uneasy? It should.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Your House Is Ass

Before I forget, the Kane mansion wasn't the only notable building we saw on the drive down. Please also note this La Jolla residence. Visible from La Jolla Scenic North, its circular roofline gives the structure a striking resemblance to an anus.


You see it, right? A certain Flickr user provides us with a better angle. He seems to be missing the joke, however.

The Neptune Reality Tour

Seeing Jen and Shaun get married was more than enough motivation to see San Diego. Really — a Nexus wedding, sure to one day create little Nexus babies. Furthermore, it’s a union between two co-workers that I don’t hate and, more importantly, don’t hate together. But that’s a different entry.

This post concerns the trip to San Diego, but strictly from the viewpoint that this city serves as the setting for Neptune, the fictional hometown of one Veronica Mars. Since Spencer is a San Diego native, more or less, he came along for the ride and showed pointed out various points of interest — ostensibly those relating to himself, and not to the spunky teenaged detective. However, one leg of this journey took us through Rancho Santa Fe, his old neighborhood, and directly by a yellow cardboard sign that read “V. Mars.” Now, this being election time, it’s not uncommon to see various strangers’ names on signs posted along the roadside. We noted the “V. Mars” and continued up El Montevideo — the road’s official name, sans “Rd.” or “Dr.” or anything, like all the byways in the area — and came to another “V. Mars.” sign, this time directing related crew to park in a dirt lot.

Spencer explained that the area was in very close proximity to the house that serves as the Kane mansion, inside which much of the show’s first season drama unfolded. (Spencer also points out that Casa de Kane is a “mere chip shot away” from his family’s former digs in Rancho Santa Fe. El Montevideo runs so close to the house, in fact, that you can recognize it on this Google Maps close-up.


I darkened the unimportant areas on the map. The bright line crossing over the image’s bottom left-hand corner is El Montevideo. The dirt lot where the "Veronica Mars" crew was parking is just south of here. The house in the top right corner with is the Kane House, better known as 6658 El Montevideo. See that light circle with the diagonal rectangle in the middle? That’s the Kane family pool — or the place where sweet little Lily Kane got her head bashed in.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this cyber-real estate-voyeurism is that the house is currently for sale — for the very affordable price of $7.6 million. So if you want to film your “Veronica Mars” fan scripts, you’d better be prepared to cough up the money. This Del Mar real estate website features some better photos of the Kane mansion.

Here, again, is the death pool.


And here is a photo of what I’m guessing is one of the complex’s kitchens. If you look in back, you can note the door has those strange translucent horizontal panels that appeared in many of the shots inside the home.


And here’s another shot of the home, from a better angle than the one Google Maps provides.


The upside of all this — other than the fact that I was potentially within earshot of my favorite TV show as it was being filmed — is that the crew’s presence means the old, upper-crust Neptune crowd may soon be making a re-appearance on the show. My guess is that Duncan Kane — now excised from the show’s opening credits — could show up again, though Spencer tells me that the house used as the Goodman home is also in the area. That’s fine. I’d rather see Gia again anyway.

More goodies: Wayfaring.com keeps track of these kinds of things. They give you a street number for a lot of "Veronica Mars" shooting locations, as well as for other shows.
[ link: be a snoop ]

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Mario Kart Beta — Way Beta

"Super Marius Velocipede." It’s too good.


I don’t know whether the Little Nemo-style art makes it work for me or if it’s just the muffin-shaped mushroom top that pseudo-Toad is wearing. But I love this, which Kotaku posted a few days back. It’s a prospective t-shirt design at Threadless, the very cool you-make-it clothes company that has previously offered other Mario-related designs by the same artist.


Mario meets the Victorian aesthetic. Too fucking good.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Mary Didn't Know What the Hell She Had

People tend to know that I dig weird animals. One of the virtues of this is that they often come to me with new discoveries: animals that once were and others that should not be. A prime example of this happened a month or so ago when Spencer told me about Bedlington Terriers. These curious dogs fascinate me, if for no other reason than they look like the result of a run-in between a nearsighted sheepdog and one of his more sexually accepting charges. Case in point:


Adorable, no? And simultaneously confusing.



The Wikipedia page for these should-not-bes describes them with the following:
The Bedlington Terrier is often described as looking like a lamb on a leash, probably because it has fur with a linty texture.

Although it looks meek when reclining on the couch, the Bedlington Terrier is argumentative and every inch a terrier when aroused.


At a trot, the Bedlington moves with a 'mincing' gait, picking its feet up in what appears to be a dainty manner.

They are groomed with large patches of fur on their heads and ears. This is because the breed used to hunt rats, which would try to claw at their ears or head. With the fur, they just became entangled in it.
Needless to say, I want one. I like the idea of people thinking I’m walking a sheep when I take it out — and apparently I’d have to do so about five times a day, if I’m to believe how high-energy these little guys can be. Most of all, however, I want to take a Bedlington Terrier home so I can confuse the hell out of my actual dog. Chief, you see, is a border collie, whose primary purpose in life is to herd anything that looks like a sheep. I want him to see this wooly little fucker and then try to corral him into a pen — only to have the terrier bark back at him and shatter his little border collie mind.

Well, that and I like sheep.

There’s a few videos up on YouTube showing the Bedlington Terrier in action, but somehow I think this particular video portrays the dog in exactly the kind of light it deserves.


Even better than fainting goats, no?

Sunday, October 8, 2006

Quadruple-Walker

I hesitated at first to include the second statement in the list below — the one about always being told I look or act like other people. Though this is something that has happened continuously throughout my life, I found myself struggling to remember the last time it’s happened. Nothing recent actually sprang to mind.

This morning, I got the following text message from former UCDC-mate and honorary Marin native Emily:
Drew! If u haven’t moved to DC without telling me, I just saw ur exact twin in Adams Morgan and made an ass out of myself! Hope ur well!
I like it when this blog makes its own foreshadowing.

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Fun Teenager Ketchup Party

Stole it from Meg H., who stole it from Bri. It really did sound like fun:
Rules:

1. You guys tell me what kind of music you want.

2. In a few days, I'll post one mp3 for each of you.

You can't request music by band name or genre. You have to describe, in terms of color, mood, texture, taste, or any other creative way you can think of, what you're looking for in a song, and I'll do the best I can with what I have. Yes, that means that I may end up posting a song that you wouldn't normally listen to. That's part of the fun.

I can't use more than one song by any given band. The point of this meme is to give you a taste of new stuff, not to pirate whole CDs. If you like what you hear, you'll still need to buy it yourself. If two of you come up with identical descriptions, I have to find two bands that both fit, or use one song for both of you.

I can't make the song permanently available. Unless the song in question is already available on the band's website (in which case, I'll provide a link to their site instead of posting an mp3), I'll be taking the songs down in a few days, or posting them on a temporary host so that they'll expire after a few days.
And be forewarned: I tend to have fairly odd taste in music. Make of that what you will.

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

The Jesus Balloon

Can't remember from where or when, but I somehow would guess Sanam's various online tendencies had something to do with it. You have to admit — it's pretty freaking awesome.

Monday, October 2, 2006

Antonio Carlos Showbeam

Still too busy for words. In the meantime, play with this neat little reflected bird. He's fun, I swear.

bird in the water