Cruel bars of gourd

Domain name: punkinheadjack.com


It's quite dark out already but I'm not seeing any trick-or-treat action on our very quiet, rather safe suburban street. So I don't think Jack is in that much danger of violent liberation, out on the porch rail where he is now.

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By the light of the silvery moon

Hunter's Moon,
originally uploaded by Suneet Panesar.

honeymoon cottage

we thought it was a

dog's howl

Frightful! Also, there might be a monster

Book name: Neptune's Illegitimate Daughter

LESLIE HOLMES

via britishpathe.com

Friday music! of a rather peculiar sort!
Perhaps science and technology has progressed to the point that we can settle the controversy about Loch Ness by simply creating an aquatic beast of our own and introducing it to the famous locale. We'll put whoever's responsible for this varmint in charge:

I doubt that it can be much more disruptive to the ecology than the monster-hunting robots and other seekers already clogging up the loch looking for a (presumably rather annoyed) natural sea creature.

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We'd be afraid not to give him an award

Band name: Glenduff Mobile Psyops Brigade

via instructables.com

Despite the impressiveness of the armament, I think the best part is how he made the backpack with the "jet ports" out of a broken typewriter.

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Rembrandt's got nothing on me today

Thoroughbred name: Non-Specular Bid

(Because of this horse)

I was at work the other day in a room with a little-used whiteboard turned to the wall and saw myself in something approaching the ultimate in soft-focus. Perhaps mirrors with the exact right degree of bumpiness could be made, scientifically, in which one sees what others see of oneself when they are completely besotted with tender emotion. Or is puppy (horsey?) love still in style?

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A mania anticipated

Media sensation: Balloon Mobs

via iwantyoutowantme.org

Inspired by the hoaxers, a great many lonely Americans construct and take off in color-coded personal helium balloons (presumably wearing breathing apparatus), in search of love and community in the upper troposphere. In the process, beautiful aerial displays drift over the eastern slops of the Rockies, with a few soaring to icy dizzying heights, and a few others falling like overripe fruit down to the unforgiving Earth. Experts speculate on how the phenomenon has grown out of the increasing levels of isolation and narcissism in society coupled with worries over the H1N1 pandemic.

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Yeah, you heard me - WISDOM

 

Traditional end of meal course: Surrealism Cookies

 

The other day we had to go to the phone store to replace Pam's broken handset, and when we were done we stopped at a local non-Western restaurant named after an inhabitant of the natural world. It was a nice meal, but I was stopped in my tracks when I opened my fortune cookie. It seems to have sustained translation damage in more than one place. But I think it is good when your food makes you stop and think, because that gives you three extra opportunities a day to achieve enlightenment.

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In two decades we'll know what they've done

The Disney company has had to eat some considerable amount of crow with regard to the Baby Einstein product line they acquired a while back, which seems not to do what it was touted as doing. All this infant video watching might have some other effect however, perhaps inspiring some to craft tightly-written family dramas, others to spectacular documentaries, and still others to agonizing historical montages we can only dream of now. Or they could grow to like CGI the way I have not.

My question is: where did I leave the top of my skull?

Horror movie title: The Previously Dead

via dreamstime.com

I have been served brains before, and enjoyed them, insofar as one can enjoy something so similar to hard-boiled egg whites without benefit of deviled egg filling. This was long before people had worries about BSE or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and I think I have suffered no ill effect from the experience. Nor any especially potent beneficial effect, along the lines of "the best brain food should be brains," since after all it was a matter of consuming them, not acquiring a transplant or anything.

I notice that it is possible to buy a brain hat but they really should put on a warning that it intended only for those with short or no hair, which would be bound to spoil the effect. It is just the sort of thing one might wear to see a zombie movie hoping to score a reduced price ticket.

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I don't know why he's standing there

Album name: Cameleopard vs. Manatee
Spotted by the cafeteria in our office building
Which would win? Or would it even possible to imagine them fighting?
http://frabjoustimes.magahiz.com/pages/contact

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A surefire vaccine against boredom

Candy name: H1-oween Shots

via luxirare.com

How cool would it be to give out treats this year in syringes for Halloween? You would even need to carry out the elaborate and somewhat tricky 'spherification' process described in this post, just have the kids line up one by one and direct the concoction straight into their greedy mouths from the nozzle of your needle-less syringe. Maybe better for a party than for trick-or-treaters at the door owing to logistics and trust factors, but we obviously have the technology.
Thanks to Holy Kaw for pointing me to this blog.

Poor Poor Thing

The terror of (nearly) lost time

SF story: The Aliens Have Arrived and Are About to F*** Up All Our S***

via flickr.com

I have been thinking recently about spicing up my photographic activity by perhaps getting into the toy camera scene which relies on the Lomo, Holga, and similar inexpensive plastic cameras to come up with unusual grain and color effects, to the extent of visiting the enormous B&H photo superstore in New York city to see what they had to offer. In the end, however, I decided against picking up any more gadgetry and have turned toward the even more obscure specialty of expired photographic film to come up with a similar kind of weird effect. Conveniently, my badly neglected two decade old Nikon FG-20 was already loaded with a roll of film maybe eight or ten years old that I hadn't gotten around to finish.

Here is an example of the kind of image you get when shooting film going back several years and bring it in for development. The helpful staff at the neighborhood drugstore returned my prints with a note giving tips on how to avoid Poor Color Quality, including a warning about old or outdated film. I had to chuckle -- I could not be more delighted with the trippy retro results in fact, and am looking forward to shooting a couple other unexposed rolls of aged film which have just been laying around deteriorating in some unpredictable fashion.

Poor Poor Thing

Gravity is only a suggestion

Short story title: Experiments in Curved Space

via pbase.com

 I think it would make a lovely book cover as well.

Music for Friday: a cover of John Coltrane's Naima

Poor Poor Thing

Green leaves represent

Domain name:  chlorophyllnation.com, vegetationnation.com

I picture a community of users who like to picture what our spaces will look like post-humans as they are returned to a progressively more wild state, focusing on the vegetation more than on the plummeting masonry and rusting automobiles.

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Thinking of next spring

Musical piece: Sweet Pea Sweet

via flickr.com

I did not do any sweet peas this year, which I think now to have been a mistake, since my soybeans did nothing either. I believe I will plant that whole bed along the driveway in sweet peas next spring for a color shot after the snows melt.

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With this ring I thee hex

I would take this pincushion ring one step further and make the cushion in the shape of a tiny person, thus making it a Voodoo Ring. I would then market it to ladies unlucky in love and with certain hurt feelings to work out. It would be sized appropriately for the ring finger rather than the thumb. Perhaps if the wearer has a diamond engagement ring, the voodoo ring could be made to fit around it with the stone occupying an anatomical region of some importance, thus making the whole thing that much more pointed.

God-cursed brutes

Baboon,
originally uploaded by milkfish.

The illustration of the musculature of a snarl is from a book of gross anatomy of primates (baboons, chmpanzees, and humans) and makes me think about the Beowulf story and the first of the monsters in it, Grendel. From Seamus Heaney's translation:

Suddenly then
the God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
from their resting places and rushed to his lair,
flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
blundering back with the butchered corpses.
Lines 120---125

Maybe Grendel could have been an enormous baboon larger than a man, his fangs and claws used to grab and carry off his prey, for some reason impervious to edged weapons but susceptible to Beowulf's might in their one and only fight, at the climax of which he has his arm and hand torn off. I could imagine that. Then Grendel's mother would be an even larger sort of baboon wreaking vengeance on the Danes on account of her loss then retreating to her marshy lair, where she too is confronted by the hero:

Quickly the one who haunted those waters,
who had scavenged and gone her gluttonous rounds
for a hundred seasons, sensed a human
observing her outlandish lair from above.
So she lunged and clutched and managed to catch im
in her brutal grip; but his body, for all that,
remained unscathed: the mesh of the chain-mail
save him on the outside. Her savage talons
failed to rip the web of his warshirt
Lines 1497--1505

So perhaps an amphibious, part-human, part-baboon enormous monster race of super-mandrills or the like, able to wield a knife (line 1546) and adapted to live in frigid northern waters. I think that would make a pretty good spectacle, in a graphic novel format or in CGI video.

Curiously om

Title of the Buddha: The Master of Refreshment

via youtube.com

Add in a small DC motor and this prayer wheel could run continuously until the battery runs down.

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The power behind the drone

Song name: Aboriginality Is the Art of Concealing Your Power Supply

Music for Friday. The resemblance to the experience of running a drum sander or a router is striking.

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There's a sequel

Hitchcockian novel set in the South of France: Window Derrière

via iranian.com

I think the teal lady-silhouette ought to be worried about getting soiled.

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That's one clean android, Og

Story title: Shower stall from the future

via starshipsofa.com

Not implying any slight against Skeet's artwork, which I admire greatly, just that I have a hard time getting past our recent bathroom renovation, about which more later.

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Biting bovine band

Folk-metal group: Ox Toxin
The name is kicking around the net, I guess as folk etymology for the hormone oxytocin. It also came to mind a while back when we'd named a server OCTOXEN which is also a decent band name.
#end

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Everyone knows midichlorians are orange

Bad Guy: Darth Gourd (his subordinates would address him as "Lord Gourd")

They probably look even better when they're slightly moldy.

Pretty soon it will be time purchase the raw materials needed for the year's Halloween creation. I always favor interesting shape and texture versus brute size.

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Call me smiley face

What would you call a book about a struggle between a driven man and a huge homicidal cetacean, written in cute little 12x12 graphical icons?

I am thinking that if it were my project I might have gone for something like Hello Moby or Sailor Doom.

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Update: Funded, in the last couple of days left to go! Soon the might of the crowdsourced Mechanical Turk will be unleashed.

Funerals were really something back then

This is was the figurehead on the funeral carriage that took Lord Nelson's body from where it was lying in state to his resting place at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The thing is a smidge over a meter long and is supposed to evoke the nautical figureheads on ships of the day. It makes one wonder just why it is that figureheads have vanished off of modern vehicles (even including their miniature cousins, hood ornaments) pretty much everywhere except in Texas, and whether they could be brought back someday. Perhaps it would take the death of a national hero the way Nelson was regarded in his day, migrating downmarket from the funeral pomp into daily life once more starting with luxury vehicles. Soon everybody would have their own personal talisman guiding the way as they thunder down the road. Boats too.

Their first single would be Melty Cheese

Band name: Racklette

The confusion with pop band Roxette is, of course intentional. The temptation to title your music group after a more or less common misspelling would also make me think that one might consider the handle Soul Alyssum as well.
 

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