Nom de Plume

For the most part, I am happy with you. You provide push button publishing to the self-centered masses (including me), and for that I will always be profoundly grateful. Your interface is a joy to use, your templates easy to manipulate, and I will always love you.

But I will love you as a woman always loves her first lover: with fondness yet no regrets that she has long since moved on. Will I, in fact, move on? Frankly, it depends on whether I can figure out WordPress or not. If I can, it’s dear John for you.

Your service outages are becoming more and more frequent. It’s irritating. What good is push button publishing if the buttons don’t work?

I am going to say something terribly unpopular: I WOULD BE HAPPY TO PAY FOR YOUR SERVICE if it meant not having to go through your outages.

And now I will copy this message before I hit publish post; I have no doubt that you will tell me that my blog hasn’t been found.

Boing Boing today published a link to a guy who retouches photos for a living. All of a sudden, I don’t feel all that bad about myself.

I am, however, disturbed, mainly because a google search unearthed Baby Photo Retouch–retouched photos of stillborn babies. The whole thing is sad, but these photos are horrifying. The before pictures are gruesome; the after just plain macabre.

As you can see.

Nephew in town for the summer. 12 yr old boy’s stuff wanted

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Reply to: anon-67291222@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-04-06, 9:15PM PDT

Hi,
I will be caring for my 12 yr nephew for three months this summer and would like to make his stay enjoyable. I have no kids, and being a grown up am a little strapped for ideas and supplies The following are items I am seeking
wake board
bicycle
tv
info on day camp or other good activities in bellevue/near bellevue
…other fun stuff 12 year olds would like….

You know something’s wrong in the world when early Internet curiosities make you feel old … Oh well, visit the Animated Gif Museum anyway. Via apartmenttherapy.

Just got the latest catalog from them–yikes, what serious yuppadelic CRAP. Like I’m really going to buy a $68 leather journal in which their lovely product shot features the handwritten copy, “While touring the vineyards of Napa Valley …”

A more likely case would be, “While surveying the spam torn landscape of my e-mail inbox … ” Buy a freaking wallet, get superglued onto the lists. I have unsubscribed from their e-mail newsletter FIVE TIMES and they still keep sending me stuff every two weeks.

On the other hand, I’ve also filed complaints with the FCC and TRUSTe. (It’s been a bad few weeks at work; I needed a whipping boy.) So we’ll see.

Lake Washington, 1913. (Photo courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives Photograph Collection)

Lake Washington, two weeks ago.

Pat Montella has a going nowhere job when she is summoned to Virginia by 91-year old Magnolia Shelby, who wants to bequeath her property. What unfolds is a modern mystery surrounding the Civil War. Well-written, yet not pedantic, I found it thoroughly entertaining. It was also very affecting (I dashed away a tear or two) without waltzing off into schmaltziness.

Among other things, I imagined two of my own ancestors facing each other from opposite sides of the battleground. Papa Ed (my maternal grandfather) was from Kentucky, with a long family history of westward migration from what was the Virginia Territory. Nani (my maternal grandmother) went back to New York and Pennsylvania via the midwest. Both had ancestors who fought. My various genealogical meanderings are another story, but I thought the following picture appropriate. I am not sure who , precisely, it is–but suspect it to be a brother of David Leonard Hoover (my great great great grandfather) and taken in or near Hennepin, Illinois.

For me, India on vacation is like life in abeyance. It’s not just the surrealism of a long journey in which beginning of the trip seems lifetimes away, or the strength-sapping heat, or even of adjusting one’s clock to “Indian time.” No, it’s a dusty smell of spices and burning cow dung, the absolute foreigness of people that share your same blood.

Chaudhuri captures this sense meticulously.

Jayojit Chatterjee and his son, who live in the States, return to Calcutta for the summer vacation. They stay in his parents’ apartment. His father, the Admiral, is now retired and they live quietly, so every action, every word is magnified. It through this microsopic view that we begin to see the cross-section of lives. Jayojit is getting divorced. He wants to spend time with his son Bonny. The Admiral observes. The mother fusses. Beyond this, however, is a keen sense of a man who has lost his footing in his native country, and the book ends when he returns to America.

Hey, that’s what the jackhammer says. Isn’t he cute?

Minus trim, which either needs to be added or sanded and painted.

Furney’s had tons of stuff they were trying to get rid of, including great stands of Tuscan Black Kale for 10 cents apiece. For someone trying to barricade the neighbors off the deck, it’s a steal–in full bloom and at least four feet tall.

And it’s an Italian heirloom kale too.

It always catches me unaware, and I always feel a little ripped off–as though I’ve somehow lost an hour of my life.

A rainy Sunday, and we are listening to Whiskeytown. The dog is sitting at my feet, chew toy in mouth, as I wait for Steve to get dressed. Then off to Furney’s for yet more plants and perhaps a watery stroll in Kubota Gardens.

The Library of Congress is slowly digitizing its collection and a wealth of materials can be found on their site. Lately, they’ve been grouping images into online displays. One that caught my eye was Edward S. Curtis’ The North American Indian. In their words: “…one of the most significant and controversial representations of traditional American Indian culture ever produced.” In mine: some incredibly haunting portraits.

link

It’s not that I haven’t been reading–it’s just that I’ve been reading a combination of mindless things and plant reference books.

Mary K. at work invited to me to join her book club, and for the second month in a row I didn’t make it. My excuse this time was that I was supremely uninterested in talking about The Lovely Bones. Talk about an overrated book; the momentum that carries the reader through the first couple of chapters dissipates with all the talk about heaven and such.

Took yesterday and today off, and it’s sheer bliss.