highindustrial.

So that's what happened to Steve Burns. I remember watching Blue's Clues with my little sibs when I visited home the summer after my freshman year of college -- and becoming briefly, non-homoerotically, infatuated with the unassuming Mr. Burns and his uniquely nonthreatening milieu of bluescreened colorforms, gentle anthropomorphism and rugby shirts. And by "briefly" and "infatuated" I mean I looked the show up on AltaVista and found some web page an aerospace engineer had designed for his daughter, replete with a couple of really lousy WAV files. (And by "non-homoerotically" I mean non-homoerotically.)

This transpired during a week in June, 1997. Sometime later, I read in the trades that Steve was leaving the show, tired of all the toddler/soccer-mom pigeonholing/adulation -- and indeed, some of his later performances were just the subtlest shade of contemptuous, ever so slightly arch and studied and condescending. But I don't really blame him: he probably foresaw a dismal future of Bob Denver-like same-shirtedness and ran screaming in the opposite direction. (Then again, he says he stuck things out through 2001, so who knows?)

He's even shaved his head. Good golly. Maybe he should start a weblog. It's the gestalt marginal celebrities ask for by name, the novelty bumper sticker on the bandwagon of almost-fame. (I'm being reflexively glass-half-empty about this but I think we all know what's gonna happen: I'm gonna write him a sycophantic email later and then feel obscurely embarrassed that I critiqued his middle-period Blue's Clues and likened him to Gilligan. But everything I say, I say with Nerf darts of non-homoerotic love, I swear. Steve, you're the greatest.) + 6

Oh dear god. + 2

Confusion is: heading to the kitchen for some Dimetapp because you think you might be coming down with whatever your roommate was complaining about last night; momentarily forgetting why you're there, distracted by the nocturnal allure of sundry sugary processed food items; eating a cupcake instead. + 3

Heh. +

Peter Carlson nails Dominick Dunne in the Washington Post. Admittedly easy comedy, comparable to skewering a cocktail olive, but it merits a chuckle nevertheless.

In other news ... Samoas are pretty decent. I had no idea: I've always defaulted to Thin Mints. + 5

So the engineers have given Galileo its last instructions: It is now commanded to fly straight on to Jupiter, past the gossamer rings, past Amalthea, and finally to bury itself in the planet where its mission began. There, in September 2003, its body and all its instruments will melt in Jupiter's heat, vaporize, and leave only a trace of aluminum and titanium atoms to record its 13 years of adventurous existence. + 7

That song in the new Nike "Just" commercials is Groove Armada's "My Friend." I know, it's been on my mind too. + 4

"Have you seen Rambo III?" Chris Csikszentmihalyi asks over the phone from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I went to Blockbuster to see what movies they had on Afghanistan, and it was the only one I could find. It's amazing to watch now. The mujahedin are portrayed as Western cowboys, and the gist is that Afghanistan is this peaceful, freedom-loving country, and we should give them all the weapons they want." + 5

This whole business with various government types attempting to viralize "Let's roll" into some sort of McMantra is, frankly, crude and embarrassing. I remember GWB parroting Todd Beamer's fighting words in his State of the Union address last month, and while I certainly appreciated the sentiment, the implementation has left a lot to be desired. Take this, for example: hideous. Nice straight-quotes/all-caps-Mistral action goin' on there. Is it my imagination, or did the Soviets have better graphic designers? Can I be the Air Force's graphic designer? I'd do it gratis, just to wipe those crimson novelty-font letters off my burning retinas.

Does anyone remember how Sony (i.e., Columbia-TriStar) tried to turn Clint Eastwood's "That's not going to happen" from In the Line of Fire into a national catchphrase during the summer of 1993? I didn't think so. (Actually, I'm also sorta reminded of the bit from Never Been Kissed where the "cool kids" try to make "rufus" into "the new word" ... but that comparison is almost treasonously mortifying.)

I feel as though the Powers That Be are taking something that was spontaneous and heroic and "in the moment" and are turning it into a self-conscious, winking, middlebrow inflection point. It's cheap.

My two cents. + 3

I wake up, ready to cast verbs out into the day, but the central heating has just kicked in and the blinds are still drawn. Mid-morning is a rumor, arrayed in horizontal gradients the color of egg shells; diaphragmatic, oscillating with the passing clouds; an intimation, commingling with the warmth from the air ducts. And just like that, I'm back under the covers, craving REM cycles.

"He could not collect his thoughts, and then he was distracted by a false sunrise that lit up the clouds off to the northeast. He thought at first that some low clouds were bouncing fragments of the sunset back to him, but it was too concentrated and flickering for that. Then he thought it was lightning. But the color of the light was not blue enough. It fluctuated sharply, modulated by (one had to assume) great, startling events that were occulted by the horizon. As the sun went down on the opposite side of the world, the light on the ... horizon focused to a steady, lambent core the color of a flashlight when you shine it through the palm of your hand under the bedsheets." (p.17) +

This shot makes me never want to see Amelie. Oh, and this one. And this one. Someone needs to stop slipping Audrey Tautou all that Diet Coke with Lemon. Damn, even her name bugs me. What I'd love to see is her and Björk in a knockdown, drag-out astronaut-princess-eskimo-pixie catfight....

"Lars von Trier on line one." + 13

Because it's been awhile since I posted anything about the Olsen Twins. + 2

This layout, now in its unprecedented sixth month, is beginning to grate like the Popsicle-stick birdhouse I never brought home from the summer camp I never went to as a child. It's functional yet anemic, like a Hollywood starlet. It's a little threadbare, like my tendency to analogize in triplicate. (But oh! I can't help myself.)

That being said, my annoyance hasn't crossed the homicidal threshold yet. I still feel lazy-queasy whenever I fire up Fireworks, push around my Mondrian-lite blocks of color, rummage through my directories of impersonal, burnished object photography. The impetus isn't quite there -- plus, I have a zillion other things I'm supposed to be doing; but everyday it weighs on me incrementally, and sooner or later the water will break.

Dilemmas, dilemmas: would you like to see more sidebar action? Namely, sideblog action? Namely, little interstitial remarks and randomata that don't quite merit center-ring posting? Believe it or not, something along these lines was originally in the extended parameters of this layout, but I gave up on the enterprise for various reasons -- namely boredom and lack of technical wherewithal. Now that I'm chugging along, however, maybe it's time to revisit the concept, especially since it's all the rage.

Another nagging detail: should I give up on making my layouts 800x600-friendly? I know hardly anyone browses at that resolution anymore, but I always feel bad abandoning certain legacy conventions. I only recently stopped vetting my code in Netscape 4.x, for example, even though I haven't used said browser in over two years. Nudging my basic canvas toward 1024x768 would free me up considerably design-wise.

[Insert snarky non sequitur here.] + 10

I don't know what it is about February: maybe I'm just greedy for time, but I really resent its aberrant truncation. Trim away two or three measly squares on a grid and the whole month starts to feel lopsided -- the days Doppler-ing in the wrong place; March imminent with too much delta vee; possums hanging sideways in the trees; cans of soda refusing to stay put on supermarket shelves; everything just a little bit off. And all the stuff it was okay to soft-pedal in January will suddenly seem really, really pertinent come April; and really, that's the thing: the way time flies, it isn't almost March -- it's almost April; and by April, the year will have begun to creak, almost ready to break in half. I can already feel the floorboards shifting.

And yet it's only February. Only? Already. Already? Damn. Just like that. + 5

Gatorade Xtremo Mango tastes an awful lot like Peach Vitamin Water.

Incidentally, dontcha love days (and days and days) when I only post poorly annotated links and cryptic consumeristic comments? Yeah, I know you do. + 2

Get your indy jones on. + 6

No complaints about Sun day either. It's all avocadoes and M&Ms from where I'm sitting. The weather has been so perfect today -- so cold, so clear, so windy, so blue, so effortless -- that I find myself hesitating as I attempt to describe it, caught in the thrall of memory and immediacy, everything and nothing, electro and static. Days like this should be suspended in glass, cross-sectioned and stacked, shot through with lasers. Hologram'd. +

I so want to see this. Amazing pedigree. +

Sour bears and whiskey do not mix. + 8

Today is turning out to be a very Satur day. +

Sometimes I really hate the stench of inevitability. + 3

Proof that Twisted Sister's Dee Snyder equals Christina Aguilera. Irrefutable stuff ... although you could probably toss Sarah J. Parker in there somewhere too. (Incidentally, those Twisted Sister videos also used to scare me when I was little. I didn't wanna oscillate and fake-punk out, thankyoumuch. Muore la Revolution.) + 2

When I was half as tall as I am now, I was pretty decent at Denelian -- dark, regular strokes facilitated by frequent refills of graphite. Later, my cursive fell by the wayside, but up through high school, my note-taking print was still typographic in its consistency; people regularly commented on its precision. The afterbirth of respectable script, however, was flushed away sometime during my college years, betrayed by an orgy of emails and hastily filled bluebooks. These days my handwriting is a recluse, spied occasionally on a marker board or sticky note, or on the back of an envelope; and while my BLOCK LETTERS may recall a prouder, gentler era of penmanship, my incidental scribble is strictly serial-killa. (My signature looks like what would happen if an electroencephalogram were spliced with ... a strand of pubic hair.)

I was just pondering that today, vis-à-vis how I don't really think on paper anymore -- or at best rarely. Most of my silent ruminations occur on a computer screen, where syntax is molten -- rendered in liquid crystal and light. I sometimes get the impression that people generally feel the opposite way -- perceiving warmth from a handwritten note; but to me, words on paper -- metal film on dead wood -- feel just a little cold, like spent stellar cores. There's comfort, invitation, in a blinking cursor. Maybe smart paper will even the score someday. + 7

Scariness squared: that Toyota Matrix commercial where the robot chases the spy-dude. I would hate to be chased by robots. It's definitely a list-worthy fear.

Know what used to freak the bejesus out of me when I was little? Alfred E. Neuman. Those dead, pinhole eyes; that glazed, borderline-retarded expression; the generally threatening adolescent deportment. I remember literally being terrified one weekend when I was five or six years old that he was going to come for me in my sleep. In my nightmares, he was a two-dimensional miscreant in a three-dimensional world, like the stained-glass knight from Young Sherlock Holmes, or Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, right after he gets flattened by that steamroller/doomsday machine.

I still can't read Mad Magazine. Not that I'd want to, anyway ... but still. + 4

The ignominy continues. It's the little things CNN does, that extra mile it goes for mediocrity. To wit: ex-Real World Seattle denizen Lindsay Brien's appearance as an entertainment correspondent during an Oscar nom rundown this afternoon. She of the formerly russet curls, now hideously bleached and blow-dried like some burlesque Kelly Ripa, frog-croaking the worst canned commentary since ... well, everything else that preceded her on CNN today. A cosmic pile-up at the intersection of Warhol and Waters.

In other news: where can I get my hands on a sour cream gun? I covet the power to unleash precision-targeted dairy distress at high velocities. + 4

Sorority Boys is clearly going to be shit, but it does get brownie points for that bit near the end of the trailer where Harland Williams pillow-fights the crap out of Heather Matarazzo. + 1

I can't say I've ever been an aficionado of BattleBots. I mean, sure, I like watching stuff get destroyed as much as the next dude; but watching what looks like reanimated junk destroy other reanimated junk is a little too dog-eat-dog for yours truly. The whole phenomenon plays out like a monster truck rally for people who may actually have gone to ... well, if not college, at least a technical institute.

However: the current Carmen Electric season of said show is not without its charms. Watching aforementioned professional celebrity blankly bungle her TelePrompTered exultations and come-ons is to experience something like ... not transcendence so much as ... trashcendence: it's sublimely awful, almost narcotic in its banality. Ms. Electra's lack of conviction recalls the shameless phonetic phoniness of a certain celebrated harlot from a certain famous Kubrick movie. She stinks real good.

Tangential diversion: the bizarre will-they-or-won't-they tension burning a hole in the ozone between color commentator Bil Dwyer and play-by-play announcer Tim Green. One suspects that if the two were to sit any further apart at that huge, huge anchor desk, they would probably circumnavigate the proscenium arch entirely and end up in each others' arms. ~~What's up with that?~~ Not that there's anything wrong with that.

So yeah. It's about robots. That battle each other. And stuff. + 3

"The United States is being led by a lowbrow from the upper-crust ghetto, largely unaware of culture -- high, pop and maybe even yogurt -- a forthcoming biography of President Bush says."

I love that. It conforms to all my "Curious GWB" preconceptions. Have any sketch parody shows portrayed Dubya and Cheney as Gilligan and the Skipper, respectively? If not, they should. Condie Rice could be Mary Ann. + 3

The fruit of a recent discussion: I've isolated my hatred of the Eighties to one specific cultural artifact. I feel much better now. + 7

There are evenings, wintry and wet: when the rain is ambient but not oppressive; when the harbor lights recede into a "featureless void ... a barely visible, near-ultraviolet tenebrosity ... on the very edge of night"; when pedestrians make their way through the streets perhaps more purposefully than they ordinarily would; when the city is timeless but not inert, seemingly poised along the curvature of some great unfolding intrigue; evenings when I could just keep walking, exploring, slightly out of phase with everything. + 2

Sometimes when my answering machine says "You have [blah blah blah] new messages," I'm momentarily suspicious it may actually have said "Snausages." + 10

I just ate my first and final Slim Jim®. That unique burning leaves/greasy crayon taste is going to haunt me in the coming years. Unsavory meat experiences always remind me that I should probably revisit past forays into vegetarianism ... but then fate throws a club sandwich in my path and I'm a goner. + 9

Unsettling: asking your mother to rummage through some of the CDs you forgot at home and hearing her utter the words "Do you like my tight sweater?" over the phone. For the love of Marty McFly! + 1

That really is the best picture ever. I can think of nothing to add to it in the way of commentary. It's perfect, just perfect ... like that experiment where Mr. Wizard made the pin float on water. Know what I mean? + 6

This photograph makes me laugh. + 3

Earlier this evening, a friend observed that Poppin' Fresh would probably be pretty yummy if you pop-pop-popped him in the oven. After all, he is a "dough boy," right? I bet he'd come out tender and flaky. Well, except for the eyes and the sailor-chef getup. + 9

I hardly ever get sick. I've thrown up maybe once in the past seven years. I can't remember the last time I had a cold. Sometimes I'll get seasonally congested or feel a little tickle in my throat, but I'm usually on it so fast with meds that it never develops into anything worth mentioning.

Anyway, I feel really sick today. It may have been bad sushi or an avocado and cheese sandwich. I'm assuming it's food poisoning because the last time I felt this way was on account of something I ate -- physically exhausted for no particular reason, like I somnambulated my way through a 10K marathon. I even feel too tired to type. Ideally, I could just bang my head on the keyboard, like so:

skklsdkl ddjdio wqoiwwsxm qwowosm pepm;qx llaqwpwei3 kldk dcddmao pikachu skksddkxxcep x,l;wso sowioixo hot monkey sex apwpoxpmo q,z;;woomw kioxkwspowq ksssss kkd ksdldskkdk wo0202fci8 ksdnbncsdjk wokidsuas dsoksw azopwqoo igloo.

But then you wouldn't really know what I was talking about, would you? I'm gonna crawl back into bed now. Later, I have a hot date with a bottle of Sprite. + 6

Blah. If you wanna suggest a better image, be my guest. At least February is the shortest month. + 10