Too long has spam — despised, unwanted, and sometimes even cruelly outlawed spam — been relegated to the trash bins and baysian filters of our lives. Until recently I was, as you no doubt are, a person who loathed spam. Quite wrongly, I now realize, I dismissed it as mere junk without a single redeeming attribute. My daily trips into the WordPress spam filter of this blog were a dreaded chore. I would click to enter the spam zone, figuratively if not literally holding my nose against the assault of faux comments with their links to body part enhancers, fake…
Category: Arts and Aesthetics
All things creative. All things beautiful, profound, and moving.
I recently turned in a S.W.A.T article about hapless small business people who got entrapped into (allegedly and unknowingly) bribing officials of an Unnamed African Nation. They’re all facing ruin and prison time. So. Halliburton has now paid $250 million to Nigerian officials to get charges dropped against Dick Cheney. Okay, FBI, where are you when serious bribery is going down??? The really sad thing is that the current article I’m working on for that ‘zine covers exactly the same sort of shakedown and payoff being committed by a corrupt government (but I repeat myself) right here in the U.S.…
… in at least 11 years. First time I’ve had room for one. I loved getting out my old ornaments. I’d forgotten they had a theme: animals and birds. You can tell how long ago I got many of them; an embarrassing number of the animals are … ulp … unicorns. I cut the tree this morning at a nearby farm. My first noble fir! Most places I’ve lived noble firs have been too pricey to think about. Here, they’re no more than the scruffy Doug-firs (people in the Northwest are on a nickname basis with their conifers, you know)…
A friend is liquidating her art gallery and today, for a pittance, I bought a poster with this image. In the dim warehouse where the sale was held and with the soft quality of the paper, I thought the poster was a reproduction of a painting, not a photo. How could it possibly be a photo? Look at it larger: here or here (click on the image to enlarge). How could a man be standing there so calmly, hands in pockets, when he’s about to die? Yet photo it is. In fact, it’s part of a series of photos by…
I’ve yielded to all the commenters who said I should go ahead and paint my old 1950s kitchen cabinets rather than labor to strip them to bare veneer and varnish them. (See, now if I don’t like the result, it’s your fault.) As I contemplate what colors might go interestingly with pink sparkly formica countertops and faux copper, it occurs to me that the 1950s simply weren’t about good taste. In fact, the whole era was all the more tasteless because it envisioned itself as being so very, very tasteful. Young householders who’d trudged their way through the drear of…
Found this picture on a rather cool stock photo site. The photos at Stock.XCHNG are free for most uses (with a very few money-making exceptions) and despite the suspiciously flaky URL (.hu?), the site is owned by reliable old Getty Images. The catch is that they’re amateur photos uploaded by people simply giving their work to the world. That’s cool. But it also means that if you search on “dog” or “cat” you’ll get 50 pages of mostly undistinguished snapshots (albeit in glorious high-resolution) of people’s pets sleeping, grinning, or gazing soulfully up at the camera. Still, sometimes the old…
I know this is last week’s news and it’s already gotten a fair bit of circulation. But I think it’s worth a second read. Or a third: “Warning: Crash dead ahead. Sell. Get liquid. Now.” Paul B. Ferrell. I know that much doom-gloom needs to be taken with a healthy sprinkling of salt. But you do gotta wonder when we’re finally going to teeter over this brink we’ve been wobbling on. “The part of me the Watchers couldn’t see.” Encouraging. And apropos of nothing except a coincidence of wording (and some evils of government), I’m currently re-reading one of my…
A 10-year-old artist’s work is booted from an exhibition. Seems to me the reasons given for removing it are the very reasons it should have stayed. A history of the Raggedy Ann doll. Why care? Well, turns out the story involves some very contemporary-sounding issues about vaccines. Caveat: Three different sources give different accounts (others here and here). The latter is the most dramatic and so much at cross-purposes to the other two that it makes one’s head spin. Or maybe it’s just government spin. Hm. I’ve heard sociopaths sound sound just like this after being caught: trivializing the pain…
Ohhhh, I’m waiting for these to show up in a Google image search. Shah Rukh Khan is pretty darned sexy, even in images that don’t show all his … er, endowments. But (unless this claim turns out to be a publicity stunt by the Bollywood star), thanks to airport body scanners — you know, those machines that never, ever, ever preserve images of our nekkid bodies — autographed views of him in his (so he claims) full glory are already floating around in the world, or at least Heathrow Airport. Oh, lucky us, huh? Just think what future stars our…
Okay, here’s one for the lighter side. The only thing I miss about not having TV is great commercials. But with YouTube, no problem. This is my absolute, all-time favorite SuperBowl spot (other than the incomparable “1984”, of course). From 2007, I believe. On the other hand, I never saw this one until this afternoon. But it could really be my second favorite. From SuperBowl 1999 …