Wait till it blooms

sculptfull004-2,
originally uploaded by Meatspider Studios.

This picture of a Shoggoth sculpted in polymer clay reminds me of the very nice reading of the Hugo award-winning novelette Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear. Do go listen to it if you like Lovecraft. It's more to the ebon side than the transparent, but the mouth full of teeth is nice, I think.

Design notes

We were talking at work today in the context of telephone tech support and I came up with the idea of a best practices document entitled The Seven Words You Can't Use in a User Interface. I was thinking of a scenario where the support person would have to tell the user "Now click on the button whose name begins with C. No, the other one."

Not those Seven Words.

Well, maybe.

Reasons to be of good cheer

Back before the big Treo disaster I used to keep a file on my PDA called "Reasons to be of good cheer" which I would update from time to time. I needed it to help during the difficult times encountered during self-employment, to remind me now and then about the little things that would make life worth living.

Now Pam and I are out here outside of San Francisco for a few days of vacation, which is normally a happy kind of thing, but found ourselves dealing with some heavy issues involving some elderly family members, which was starting to lay a bring-down on the two of us. It was cold and drizzly as we drove around searching for a place to have a bit of solace one dinnertime when at length we happened upon the Nayeb Restaurant (aka Luxor) in South San Francisco.

The food was tasty, but that turned out not to be the point, when the background music suddenly was turned up a dozen decibels and the waitress announced the arrival of the Belly Dancer.
IMAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE
The young lady had long red hair and was several percent beyond the state of half-nakedness, I would estimate.

IMAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE

She was generous in the way she bestowed her attention to the various tables, and the diners reciprocated in turn, tucking folding currency into the waistband of her garb. I learned that this operation was more difficult than it appeared, both because of the motion of the target and the way acute embarrassment affected performance. Ah well, I did only what was right. (No picture available.)

At last a reason to be of good cheer which I'd completely overlooked: the existence of belly dancing. Surely the only way one could grow tired of belly dancing would be to grow tired of life itself.

With this entry, the meme has officially passed its peak

attribution

Tag your furniture

I heard Ruth Brown on the radio yesterday singing If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' On It and my thoughts naturally turned toward furniture. You can buy fabric spray paint to use on upholstery (thus putting a new twist on the term sofa painting), and it seems to me that with the proper tagging skills, one could produce some interesting art furniture.

Sit back and think of Mick.
What would you spray on your sofa?

Pied beauty

Christmas morning we drove out on a one-night trip to Massachusetts to visit Pam's mother. There's a pet store near us which we've patronized for ten years where we bring our two cockatiels for boarding when we're out of town, so that we know they'll be warm and fed.

Cornbread,
originally uploaded by milkfish.

Last night, after calling the store, we drove home and went over to pick them up, and the first thing I noticed when I looked at their cage up on a high shelf was that I couldn't see either of them. Had they gotten out and flown away? But then I saw a head pop up from the lower part of the cage and I thought they were just playing on the floor. Instead, we found BB (the one on the left here) slumped on the grill, dead, and Pearl had been standing by her. The pet store worker told us that when we'd called twenty minutes earlier, she'd looked and they both looked fine standing up on their perch.

BB was twelve or thirteen years old, near as we can figure, not very old for a bird of this type in fact. As you can see, she had that patchy "pied" color pattern quite different from the normal grey cockatiel hen. She'd gotten her name from her little two-note cry with a rising intonation, which sounded to us like "BB? BB?" She was not a hand-fed bird and so was always a bit nervous around us, unlike Pearl, though we came to an arrangement over time where we could pick her up without too much struggle to pet her, and she would never, ever bite.

We called the largest vet clinic here last night to find out what to do to find out whether there might have been some kind of illness present which would put Pearl at jeopardy, but they told us that they do not do pet necropsies themselves, referring people to Cornell if such is required. She seems to be fairly healthy, though she was unusually hungry when we got her home, ravenous, really, making us wonder whether they might have been deprived at the pet store, though it seems nearly as likely that she might have succumbed to a bad fall somehow. We had other reasons to believe that the account given by the pet store was accurate and that it had happened only a very short time earlier, but everything is based on circumstantial evidence.

I checked on Pearl this morning and she seems to be okay. It makes me sad to see her all by herself there, even though the two of them had not been best buddies or anything like that, because I know they are very social creatures. My wife is upset and unhappy too because of a sort of history of Bad Things having happened the week between Christmas and New Years Day.

I'll be going out to lay BB to rest in a spot in the garden later this morning. BB was a wonderful, sweet pet to have had these ten years, and it's a hollow kind of loss we feel.

Attention, Warner Brothers

Elmer Fudd would be overjoyed to receive a set of these rabbit fur serving utensils.
(broken image)

Do you suppose they could be persuaded to make a set in, say, roadrunner?

Sterilized for your convenience

I was looking at this transparent German knife block (broken link) at about the same time I was reminded of Laura Splan's Blood Scarf and devised this hybrid.

The red fluid would be dyed grain alcohol, sealed into the space between the clear acrylic panels, which would serve to help sterilize the cutting edges as well as providing the festive color accent. You would fill the thing with a big syringe, which you would also use periodically as the alcohol evaporates.

Non-seasonal greetings

It's the time when we are much wrapped up in greeting cards here, so I started thinking of non-Christmas cards for a change of pace. I came up with this romantic number (click on the image to open a printable PDF version in a new window.

Updated: corrected link to pdf.

Rothko cocktails

(broken image)

Originally uploaded by Jacky The Ripper.

I was thinking about colored drinks recently and the subject reminded me of the Mark Rothko exhibit I saw at New York's Whitney some years back. This classic tequila sunrise looks not too different from Rothko's Orange and Yellow

and I thought that it would be an interesting theme party for art lovers to have pousse cafe style cocktails which reproduce some of his other work. For instance, White over Red looks like cream over grenadine, float some blackberry brandy over the top and you've got Purple-Red-White. Not that I'd want to down either of those, but this is art!

To show off the drinks to their best advantage, one could steal an idea from Peter Hewitt and devise tumblers with rectangular flat plate glass sides.