friday twennysebbun
At five thirty a.m., a truck travelling on 128N/93S kicked up a sewer grate into the windshield of the car behind. The driver got a faceful of metal and was medevac’ed away. Because those grates had been worked on all week by a state contractor, a hefty liability issue can be assumed. The whole area was therefore treated as a crime scene. Hence, the main ringroad around Beantown was shutdown for twelve hours. I mean, twelve hours from Home to Home for an weasel, which is all I care about. I got it coming and going. I have been inhaling air condition and exhaling profanity all day long.
Do your worst. I fear nothing.
July 27, 2007 — 8:07 pm
Comments: 14
Richard Johnson: Postings from Afghanistan
Small Dead Animals — but do please check out the National Post of Canada blog Postings from Afghanistan.
Of course, you have to admire a guy doing it old school and flying his own ass out to Kandahar to sketch his country’s troops. That’s a given. But I have to tell you, this man is seriously good.
Yes, I know you’ve seen drawings in this general style, but they’re often not quite the quick, spontaneous sketches they seem. There’s a whole ‘nother art to laboring over a drawing and making it look like you didn’t. This guy, on the other hand, is the real deal; he’s doing these drawings on the spot, in one take, with very little underdrawing (preliminary sketching) or overdrawing (correction after the fact).
How do I know? I’m a professional artard, dammit. I can draw, but I’ve never been good at quick and fluid life drawing like this. I’m deeply envious of people who are, and I’ve made a study of them.
Like, check out the boots on the kneeling guy in the sketch above. Boots and shoes are tough (I had to draw a pair as part of my entrance exam to art school; it’s harder than drawing Binky, I can tell you). Not only does he do them well, he shows them at slight angles, natural to the pose. Novices need to draw things from clean angles: directly in front, directly from above, directly from the side. The ability to render objects slightly tilted is a sure sign the artist has grokked a shape so completely that he can rotate it in his head, three dimensionally. In other words: damn.
I traded email with him Saturday; I was lucky that his connect was good that day and he was sitting by a computer in Kandahar. He confirmed that he draws, as much as possible, quickly and from life. He takes photos as well, but refers to them sparingly. I believe it. As a technical illustrator, of necessity I’ve done a lot of drawing from photographs. It always gives itself away. Even experienced draftsmen can’t avoid a certain a stiff, flat, mechanical look when relying heavily on photos. You look at a photo and tend to think there is a dark shape next to the eye instead of there’s an indentation next to the eye. The difference shows.
His words are good, too, but I haven’t finished reading them. I hate reading a blog from the beginning; the format is so damned uncongenial. New entries are on top. You have to go to the bottom, look up until you find the top of the unread entry, read down to the end of it, then go up above that until you find the unread entry above the one you just read…well, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a pain. It’s fun to see his drawings get better over time, though. That’s natural — you gotta draw every day to get good at it, and the more the merrier.
Anyway, I think he’s over there for two months this time (he went in 2003, as well) and he looks to be about halfway through. There’s a link from the top of the Post, but I don’t think he’s getting the attention he deserves. Wander over and check it out.
July 23, 2007 — 6:24 am
Comments: 5
Into every week, a little Friday must fall…
Ward Churchill. I bet you thought he was long gone. Nope. D-Day is Tuesday. Keep an eye on jwpaine’s place, Pirate Ballerina, for the latest news on everybody’s favorite pretend injun.
July 20, 2007 — 6:37 pm
Comments: 22
Stalking the BBC
Brian: Excuse me. Are you the Judean People’s Front?
Reg: Fuck off! We’re the People’s Front of Judea——————————————————————————–
Reg: If you want to join the People’s Front of Judea, you have to really hate the Romans.
Brian: I do!
Reg: Oh yeah, how much?
Brian: A lot!
Reg: Right, you’re in.
However bad our media is, the BBC is shockingly worse. Smug, bitter, anti-West, pro-just-about-anything-else — I swear, they work “George Bush is stupid” jokes into the cooking program. It’s like swimming through a leftoid fever dream.
Brits are required to fund the BBC by paying a hefty annual license fee. A colo(u)r TV license currently stands at £135.50 annually, which is…$278.14627 per today’s exchange rate. Free if you’re old, half price if you’re blind (I guess they figure blind people aren’t using the video portion. Maybe they recycle it).
Having ‘customers’ that are forced to pay up whether they like your product or not is bad, m’kay? Brits of the conservative persuasion (a small, angry tribe) are justly furious at the BBC’s clear ideological bent, but they have no recourse. Being stuck in a situation they are utterly helpless to change makes people mad, and mad is going to spill onto the web.
The best blog tracking the BBC was Biased BBC. I’ve read it for a couple of years, but it’s been going for five. In my time, there wasn’t a whole lot of action in the main posts; the good stuff was in the comments. An open thread there will typically run for a couple of hundred comments, most by good and conscientious regular commenters. Trollage was minor.
Sweet deal, huh? An excellent, popular blog that writes its own damn self…?
I guess not. Someone with a set of keys decided to impose a little authoritay on the place. Have you ever seen someone get hold of the moderating stick and go nuts? It’s an ugly scene. It’s like a blood frenzy. It starts with “off topic” posts and naturally moves to the posts that complain about the deletions, and then to any complaints and settles into a cranky, arbitrary, uneasy place, where no-one knows quite where they stand. For a blog that relies so heavily on commenters, it was a suicidally arrogant act.
This happened when I was away at Weaselfest last week, so I didn’t see it in realtime. I’m not a contributor there, anyhow. A faithful reader, but the BBC is not (yet) imposed on me by force, so I seldom have much to add. But that alpha wolf shit really gets my knickers in a twist, so I pulled my link (that’s right — offa my blogroll! They’ll rue the day they angered a weasel. Rue, I say!)
I repeat: Being stuck in a situation they are utterly helpless to change makes people mad, and mad is going to spill onto the web. A couple of different schismatic sites sprang up and fizzled. One looks like it’s got the right attitude and is going to stick: BBC-Biased — Exposing the bias of the BBC.
Keep an eye on it. It’s picked up several of the better commenters from the old site, and will undoubtedly pick up more when word gets out (it’s hard to leave a breadcrumb trail in a place where posts disappear).
I’ll even put it on my blogroll (my blogroll!) if I can remember where I left the keys…
— 9:07 am
Comments: 34
They get the last LOL
There’s been a certain amount of hatin’ on the lolcats lately. But check out this Business Week article on blogs that make money (Cheezburger is the third one in the slideshow). BW estimates Cheezburger is pulling in $5,600 a month in ad revenue.
Now, that’s not a spectacular amount of scratch for the big blogs (witness some of the others on the list), but Cheezburger only started in January of this year. And it’s entirely driven by user submission. Who’s LOLing now?
My promise to you, my faithful minions: I will never sell out. Not unless I really, really need the money.
July 19, 2007 — 4:30 pm
Comments: 22
Get it offa me! Get it offa me!
Yipe! I’ve been tagged with a meme. I’ve been dreading this moment. At least this one doesn’t ask any questions about CD’s I’ve bought or books I’m reading. That would be embarrassing. This one is eight habits or facts about my favorite topic: me.
1. Fact: I can wiggle my ears. In fact, I can wiggle each ear individually. In fact, my head muscles are preternaturally mobile, like a tabby. If I spot someone I don’t like, my whole scalp dances involuntarily.
2. Habit: I have a song I sing to my lima beans. The lyrics go, “lima beans, lima beans, limabeanslimabeanslima beeeeeeeeeeeans.” This is so onerous, I usually end up having peas instead, even though I really like lima beans. I don’t have a pea song, thank goodness.
3. Fact: I have ugly, gnarly feet. My mother used to say, “never mind, honey. Peacocks have ugly feet, too.” Yeah, but peacocks have a glorious fan of blue iridescent feathers sticking out of their butts. What do I have?
4. Habit: just inside the door, there’s a bowl that I empty my pockets into the moment I walk into the house. Keys, glasses, watch, small change, post-it notes. Sometimes I poke through the old notes. They are like messages from another planet. I seldom have any idea what they mean or who those people are I was supposed to call. And yet…they all sound so urgent and important.
5. Fact: I used to have double-jointed thumbs. I could grab either thumb and push it all the way forward until it touched my inner forearm, or all the way backward until it touched my outer forearm. I just tried to do it for the first time in years. I can’t. And it hurt like a bastard. Also, I read the article at the link and it scared me.
6. Habit: On weekends, I put chocolate, cinnamon and flaked chili into my coffee (fact: it makes me poop like a goose).
7. Fact: I have one of those preposterous 10-syllable cornpone Southern names. Thanks, Mother. She said she thought I might want to take up acting someday. In Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, apparently.
8. Habit: when I get down on all fours to play with Damien, he periodically turns around and waggles his ass-end at me. I finally figured out he was feigning a scent-mark. I thought maybe a puff of air on his nethers would startle him out of the impertinent habit, but after the first couple of times, he actually developed a taste for it. Now he waggles his ass and backs toward the stream of air. I can’t help myself. It’s howlingly funny.
Yes. That’s right. I go home at night, get down on all fours, pucker up and blow on my cat’s rectum. And it’s really nobody’s business.
Errr…thanks Geoff. Hm. I’m going to tag-back BONGO MIRROR and whitishrabbit out of pure vindictiveness.
July 16, 2007 — 11:29 am
Comments: 25
Friday the 13th! of July
July 13, 2007 — 11:09 pm
Comments: 13
Jack Daniel’s really needs a good stiff one (and probably a drink, too)
Okay, I was wrong. I told Enas Yorl that the difference between Jack Daniel’s green label and black label is age. It’s not. Green label is just the stuff the official Jack Daniel’s tasters consider not quite good enough for the Brand.
I was going to call “official taster” my dream job, but apparently I have a positive preference for inadequate whiskey. I love the green label. I suppose they could go with the “Weasel likes it, it’s crap!” gambit.
What is Jack Daniel’s Green Label Tennessee Whiskey?
Jack Daniel’s Green Label is a lighter, less mature whiskey with a lighter color and character. The barrels selected for Green Label tend to be on the lower floors and more toward the center of the warehouse where the whiskey matures more slowly.
Lighter. ‘Bout right. As in “lighter fluid.”
I’d give a link for that quotation, but I can’t. By law. I went poking around the Jack Daniel’s web site (which is right where you think it is) and I spotted this:
IF YOU HAVE, OR PLAN TO HAVE, A WEB SITE AND WISH TO LINK TO OUR WEB SITE, PLEASE ENTER INTO THIS LINKING AGREEMENT AND PROVIDE YOUR INFORMATION BELOW.
“Fascinating,” I thought. “Tell me more.”
Each site shall only market products to adults and shall have an independently audited demographic indicating at least 70% of its site visitors are of legal drinking age.
Uh oh. I don’t know how to “independently audit” you guys, but if 30% of you aren’t under the age of 21, then you’re clearly in the developmentally delayed demographic. Is it legal to market likker to retards?
No site will use religious or other cultural symbols in a way that is likely to offend a particular religious or ethnic group.
Oh.
No site will use sexual slang, situations or depictions, or exploit the human form in any manner that offends local standards of decency.
Ummmmm…
You agree not to use the link on any web site that disparages the Brand, the Site, or the Brand’s products or services, or which infringes on the Brand’s or Brown-Forman Corporation’s or its affiliates’ intellectual property or other rights.
Ah. Well, see…
You agree not to use the link on any web site that contains, or links to any other web sites that contain obscene, discriminatory, offensive, political or pornographic material of any kind.
Okay. Thanks.
There’s a lot more to it, which you can read for yourself by going to the obvious URL and adding /linkingpolicy.aspx (I couldn’t link to directly in any case because “You may link only to the opening page for each of the Brand’s Sites and you may not skip the web pages requiring the viewers of our Sites to verify their age.”).
Who knew distillers were such tight-asses?
I’ve cracked open my brand new 1.75 liter bottle, and it’s delish. Happy Friday the 13th! My uvula just went numb.
— 4:48 pm
Comments: 16
The Steamboat McGoo thread
The once was a steam-boatin’ man
Who sported a show-boatin’ tan.
The ladies said, “my!
He’s as brown and as spry
As that dream-boatin’ Ed McMahon!”
Steamboat McGoo is in the hospital being fitted with a shiny knew titanium knob. Here’s a helpful rhyming dictionary. Do it. Do it for McGoo.
July 12, 2007 — 6:32 pm
Comments: 27
What, Friday again?
July 6, 2007 — 10:02 pm
Comments: 34