Death Wears Jockey Shorts

We had an unexpected winter storm with lots of ice on the roads, people sliding all over ( I realize this is TOTALLY unimpressive to those in the midwest or on the East Coast ), and today it is 50 degrees and sunny. I have been away from the blog for two reasons: 1. I have a life. A pathetic life, granted, but it has activities which take up what would otherwise be vaulable blogging time. I need to justify my existence by generating income and contributing to the GNP. I am a patriot where the GNP is concerned. 2. We are buying a house, and I had forgotten the amount of time that can be chewed through in pursuit of appliances, kitchen refinishers, blah blah blah. Now I remember why I have always wanted to live in a culvert. I have a sneaking fear of coming down with "blogger's block". I will press on, however. No link for you. I have been too busy on the Web hunting down washing machine reviews to come up with anything amusing, except that I did find a range with a refrigerator built-in, so one can place one's to-be-cooked dinner in it when leaving for work, then it keeps it cold until just the right moment, goes into oven mode, and voila!, dinner's ready when you get home! Can you spell R-E-S-T-A-U-R-A-N-T.? Back to the giant hamster wheel....

Snowing lightly this morning... I had been waiting for the DVD of "Winged Migration", and it was more than worth the wait. If you haven't seen the film, rent it right now. You'll never see migrating flocks of birds in the sky the same way again. The documentary about how the film was made is quite touching and a monument to organizational skills, teamwork, and dedication. As I said when I saw the movie in the theater, "If you have a planet you want photographed, call the French."

I have had the good fortune to come across some interesting art recently. A gallery in San Francisco carries the work of Masami Teraoka ( who I have commended to you before, and whose fanciful and disturbing work you can find on today's URL as well), and is currently featuring Sandow Birk. He has a brilliant series on Dante's Inferno set in modern San Francisco, as well as a series of oils depicting battles in an imaginary war between Los Angeles and San Francisco. I am heartened that some fine artists are unafraid to employ humor given the dreadfully serious and self-important world of art criticism. Take a peek, pilgrims...

http://www.cclarkgallery.com/

Weather unseasonably warm here. It was 60 yesterday. Not bad for mid-January. I had to drive all over the place and am headed into the mountains today so this is a good thing. I was given a wonderful book by a friend: Bookman's Progress, by Lawrence Clark Powell. I couldn't find a comprehensive website about him, but he was a master librarian (mostly at UCLA) and wrote about books, mostly by obscure authors. What a happy thing it is to be shown not only a good writer, but one who refers the reader to more books that have fallen from the popular reading list. The book I am reading has stimulating essays about travelling and seeing live music in the mid-twentieth century, among many other topics. There is something so fine about being in a beautiful concert hall in a foreign city, full of local people behaving in their local ways, and listening with them to a skilled orchestra play. I will try to find some link to Powell, but you will find many books by and about him at Abebooks.com, the best used book site on the planet. And here's something silly if you like bad translations:

http://www.snopes.com/humor/misxlate/tounge.htm

All that TGIF jazz not witshtanding, the first work week of January is over. Such a lot of picking up loose ends from last year and starting new projects for '04. The cold is off, and I'm headed to the mountains today for work. Finally saw Finding Nemo last night. Insanely beautiful use of technology if you ask me, which you didn't. It is another example of how wrong the old idea was that computers would do old tasks more quickly, saving time and money. In fact, most of the time, computers have opened paths to whole new tasks, which take more time, but offer new complexities and possibilities. Remember when the early computer chess games arrived? Now look at computer games, where four (or more) different people can play historically accurate squad-based games from four different locations, in voice contact with each other. And this is happening now. Anyway, the documentary on making of Nemo, which I bet all of you have seen, reveals a project which required such creative teamwork over a multi-year timeframe, that it completely dwarfs the old Disney accomplishments in terms of getting the most out a group of artists working on the same project. Gosh, I sound damn near positive. It MUST be Friday. Here's a link to a curious and amusing computer modeling site you can play with:

http://www.sodaplay.com/index.htm

Here is something REALLY useful for you. Google offers a cool new tool called Google Deskbar. It downloads and installs quickly, and puts a small window in your toolbar. Enter anything in the window and press enter, and you get a Google serach without opening Google. Also, enter a word and press Ctrl-D and it looks the word up in a dictionary, instantly. Crtl-T is a Thesauarus. Very,very cool. If you have broadband, you'll find yourself using it a lot. So here's how. Go to Google, then to services, then to Google Labs, and look for deskbar. Don't confuse it with the Google Toolbar. Everyone I have turned on to this loves it.
Stay warm, unless you're someplace warm, in which case, stay cool.

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Back from wherever-the-hell we went. Had a really good time, that much I remember. Happy New Year to all. I have high hopes for 2004, the election notwithstanding. I figure that for the news outlets to make money on the election coverage, they will have to create a situation in which an actual race takes place. No matter what, if it is evident that Bush will win by a landslide, ALL commercial media outlets will lose billions, because no one will watch "the game". So they will need to boost some Dem, tear Bush down, or do whatever it takes to keep themselves in expensive shoes. So it is not hopeless. Pretzel logic, and so early in the year. My resoultion is to entertain you and prompt you to turn others on to this blog. Other bloggers may falter, but not me. I will be linkier, wittier, better-spoken and funny as all-get-out in the coming year, so go ahead, tell someone and let's have a bigger party. Coming: pictures, feedback, more audio-blogs from odd places, and oodles of damning with faint praise. Also, plain damning. Stay tuned. Think of me as that guy with the long beard in the New Yorker cartoons, holding a sign that says ":"THE END IS NEAR". You write the caption....