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The house across the street, the one inhabited exclusively by statuesque debutantes, their beatnik boyfriends, and bookish friends-who-are-boys: it's also inhabited, or perhaps overseen, by an elderly-but-not-quite-old gentleman whom one of my roommates refers to as "Ronbo," because he apparently resembles the proprietor of some internet porn site. Ronbo's a dirty, lucky man, it seems.
Anyway, Ronbo has been out in front of his doll house all afternoon, tending his terraced garden: sinewy and spry in his lavender short shorts, white tennis shoes and nothing else -- the very picture of AARP moxie. There ought to be a statute against that. I had to draw the blinds. + 3 Some words on this layout: It's more of an evolution than anything else, mainly conceived to integrate a dynamic side/sub-blog into the scheme of the site. Keeping your suggestions in mind, I've maintained 800x600 safety and a whitespacey central column. The colors in general are not "web-safe," but at this point I sincerely hope no one's still browsing under an 8-bit config. The hues are also sorta dark, possibly glaucomatous if you keep your monitor brightness settings low, so bear that in mind. Let's see ... I vetted it in Mozilla/IE under Mac OS X and Win XP. If you're no doubt browsing under some alternate arrangement, this is still what you should be seeing. Let me know if that's not the case. And be thankful: I was gonna use this image for next month's refresh. (Grins.) + 7 Is. This. A. Joke? + 3 Insane. + 3 All at once the sun has shone and shown itself: slanting through blinds, molten through lowered eyelids; a lancet of light boring into me as I sit at my desk -- filling me with photons, recalling Indy Jones, the Staff of Ra and the Ark of the Covenant. And there it goes again. Gone. Behind a Maxfield Parrish puff of cloud, whereupon a cooler climate prevails. + Andy Richter Controls the Universe is pretty darn funny. Which means Fox will probably cancel it in a couple of weeks and fill the time slot with stock footage of Leona Helmsley (she's still alive, right? does it even matter?) boxing a kangaroo on a barge off the coast of Suriname. But still. Enjoy it while it lasts. + 4 So I've been hatefucking around with the previously mentioned redesign, but dag drollet, there's a hitch. See, at some point, I have to put text in the damned thing, and text just fucks everything up. Text doesn't stay put. Text is uneven. Text rushes to fill a vacuum. Text stampedes across chroma plains, tramples jpeg flowers. Text dribbles down your chin. Text is a bitch. But it's a hellcat in the sack. Can't live with it. Can't kill it. + 2 Some days everything is scrolling marquees and digital zooms. + 3 What excites you? + 7 Bumped up to MT2 ... let me know if anything's awry. + "A full-size fully functional virtual keyboard that can be projected and touched on any surface...." Very cool. + 4 Cirrus Socrates Particle Decibel Hurricane Dolphin Tulip. + 6 Some of these are pretty ... Farking great. Of course, I still have a sentimental favorite. + It felt like autumn again yesterday, and I was happy. Sunlight adorned vertical citysurfaces like beaten copper; the cold was not for the faint of heart; and the clouds, verily whipped, were not for the lactose-intolerant. I remarked to a friend that I should like to live in a place where it's always like this, always falling falling falling flying, and he said I should live in Copenhagen. I wonder. It would have to be at some point in the middle future, and perhaps only tangentially. I've had my sights set elsewhere lately. Elsewhere and nowhere and everywhere. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. + 2 Absent-mindedness is forgetting to turn on your electric toothbrush when you brush your teeth. + 5 I've watched A.I. four or five times now. I haven't been this hooked on a movie since Aliens and ... A Little Princess. I know, I'm twisted. + 3 Hook (1991) Nothing can be done to fix Hook, the creepiest film in the Spielberg canon. Nothing whatsoever. I mean, I suppose Spielberg could trim the sight gags in which men are shot dead in front of young children. And he could cut the scene in which Captain Hook points a gun at his own head and threatens to commit suicide. And the scene in which a child is stabbed to death by Captain Hook. But Hook's problems are far too deep to be fixed by any digital manipulation. The movie should, instead, be modified to contain, every few minutes, an apology from Steven Spielberg and an explanation of why, exactly, he thought that children might enjoy a 2-hour-and-20-minute retelling of the Peter Pan story that -- instead of being about a boy who never wants to grow up -- is instead about a heartless yuppie's midlife crisis and his loathing of his own children. Jurassic Park (1993) Ian Malcolm, eyeing a gigantic mount of dinosaur dung, comments, "Now, that's one big pile of shit!" Clearly, a euphemism is called for. Overdub the line with, "Now, that's Hook!" + 2 Andrea Thompson has left the building. So who are they gonna replace her with? Daisy Fuentes? Jessica Rabbit? Fred Savage? I hear Geena Davis is looking for work. In unrelated news -- Can we please retire the word "swag"? Thanks. + 3 Mitsubishi Motor Sales USA's latest music-themed ad is not only the launch spot for the freshened 2003 Eclipse coupe but also the U.S. debut of a British pop band. In the 30-second spot, a female passenger in the Eclipse is seen "popping" -- an '80s dance style -- to U.K. band Dirty Vegas. With the ad, Dirty Vegas makes its U.S. debut March 11 on national TV. The song is "Days Go By." It's synaesthetic, chemokinetic. Furthermore, that new not-bad Adidas spot ( Who loves you? I do. + 2 Via Dark Horizons, regarding the swiftly approaching Clockstoppers: "MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, BET, CMT, MTV2, Nickelodeon's Games & Sports, Noggin, TNN, TV Land, VH1 Classic, VH1 Soul and VH1 Country will all freeze programming at 8 p.m. March 26 for a live two-minute promo-cum-prize giveaway." Nice to know the Viacom synergy juggernaut has its basic-cable foot soldiers in lockstep on this. + 3 Time and light are slow tonight: pooling on surfaces, accreting in corners, seeping seeping seeping. I wish I could preserve the feeling. + Ani DiFranco looks like Parker Posey in the photo that accompanies this interview (which I didn't bother reading). + 3 And in an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper, Professor Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University in New York, commented: "There are millions of people who want Ted Koppel to stay on the air, who think Nightline is one of the last bastions of serious journalism. And then they go home at 11:30 p.m. and they turn on David Letterman." Well, it beats watching Golden Girls reruns ... or does it? + 3 Undercover Brother: blaxploitation gets the Austin Powers treatment. + 4 Light is, indeed, the mightiest of agencies. + Damn. I happen to like widescreen televisions. They're the bizness, as anyone on Cribs will tell ya. + Fortunately, I won't have to accidentally almost watch The X Files just to see the latest Star Wars Jango Fett looks cool, though. I bet he's a great toy. (Question: why does Yoda look like Greg Kinnear?) + 2 I don't like it when people sneak peanut M&Ms into a container labeled "Almond M&Ms." + 4 Chicago's John Hancock Center strikes again. Recalls an interesting discussion that transpired here some moons ago. + 3 This weekend Scotland's drugs minister has officially declared that the 30-year war on drugs is over. In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Herald, Dr Richard Simpson, also the deputy justice minister, said: "The only time you will hear me use terms such as 'War On Drugs' and 'Just Say No' is to denigrate them." That's awesome; and my puerile superlative aside, there's some solid rationale behind the decision, as discussed in the article. + 4 I hate it when I haven't gotten enough sleep. The world seems to spin, press in, strobe like a zoetrope. I have to compile the restraint of my twenty-four years on this planet and split the difference with the five-year-old I really want to be. Negotiating the day becomes an exercise in deliberation, the threat of expletives ever-present: a few choice wordz, poisoned Pez, for everyone and every outcome, but nothing to say, really. Nap-time beckons like the last refuge of scoundrels. + Fark discussions are usually pretty  , but this one's kinda funny. + Turns out the universe isn't so tacky after all. + 5 Walter was living in an abandoned home on Precinct Road for about a month before a Fort Bend County public works crew called the SPCA on Christmas Eve, said the agency's chief investigator Jim Boller. The young monkey, he said, probably foraged on his own, but he enjoyed playing with the four puppies and being around them and their mom. "He had kind of bonded with them," Boller said. |
