February 18, 2006
On the Subject of the Discovery Channel's Top Ten Greatest Weapons Ever
Bubbles6203: Yeah, humans are pretty cool I guess.
diablevert13: I guess, dude. I thought it was a bit lame. Like 10-2 were all like, Sniper Rife! Pike! Katana! Tommy gun! and then Hand?
Bubbles6203: I think they are pretty helpful and much more adaptive than a knife.
diablevert13: True. I am pleased that I have hands at the ends of my arms and not knives.
February 16, 2006
Ladies view
Look! Pretty picture! Pay no attention to lack of content!
This is a picture of Ladies' View. So called because Queen Victoria visited Ireland once and two of her Ladies In Waiting stopped her and viewed the hell out it.
It's uh...somewhere along the side of a road in Ireland. A road I once was on in the course of a vacation. In Ireland. More than that I cannot say.
February 11, 2006
Two! Two! Ah-ah-ah-ah!
Okay, so I haven't posted in months. I feel bad about that. So I'm going to do twenty short posts all in a row. Sort of like 20 Short Films About Glen Gould. (Or if we're being honest, 20 Short Films About Springfield, which I have actually seen.) Here are the first two.
1. I had to clean out the fridge when I came back from Christmas. (The freezer went and defrosted itself the day before I left and I just didn't have time to deal with it properly then.) All that was left in there were salad dressings, relish, some packets of yeast and one lonely can of Guinness, but I gathered this stuff up and put it in a insulated bag and put the bag outside (it was in the mid-30s, I'd say) and proceeded to clean the fridge. Took me ages, but the mutha gleamed. When I took the stuff back in, I noticed that the Chiver's Lemon Curd (a kind of jam made from lemons, although it has so much sugar in it the consistency is a bit closer to that of frosting) had got turned upside down and all the curd had sunk to the top of the jar. I righted it when I put it back in the fridge, though.
The curd has remained suspended in the top half of the jar for over a month now, shaking a defiant fist into the stern face of gravity.
It's starting to freak me out.
2. Last night I caught a bit of the Olympics' opening ceremony. I was kind of looking forward to seeing something inexplicably weird and Eurotrashy. The Olympics opening ceremony is generally so ...tacky isn't the right word. Sitting there, gleefully rubbing my hands together and waiting for the pretentious wackiness to commence, I actually began to feel some sympathy for the poor schmucks, when I contemplated the rules within which they operate --- they've got to create a show which can be a) understood by a global audience, which means no words, basically, b) is a successful spectacle on two very different scales, the gigantic bird's eye view of the stadium crowd and the ground-level close ups of the camera for the TV audience, c) is a paean to the Olympic virtues of good sportsmanship and global togetherness and blah-diddy-blee-blah, and d) they've got to create it using as their thematic material the greatest accomplishments and/or cultural touchstones of the host city and country. (Which, I mean: Consider Salt Lake City. You've got your Morman Tabernacle Chior, you've got your beautiful mountain scenery, you've got your....Giant Lake of Salt! And after that you've got...uh...a certain genius with a jello mold? Hair bigger than Texas, even? Polygamy?)
And so what you end up with is a "salute to futurism" that involves as ballet-dancing mime who strips down to a body stocking outlined with circuits and chases giant eight-legged bronze ballerina statues around the ice. More to be pitied than censured, really.
But all that was to get around to this --- I watched this on BBC2, and I love the British presenters. I loved them best when your man said, of the Italian national anthem, that it was "definitely one of the top six in the world."
Top six. Brilliant. What were the top five, then?
La Ronde, Paris
This photo I took when I was a student in Paris. I've always rather liked it. It's the ferris wheel they put up on the Place de la Concorde for the millenium, with one of the equestrian statues that line the parapet along the south side of the plaza in the foreground. Or maybe it's there all the time.
It's all a part of my depserate attempt to slap content up on the page, having neglected it for weeks.