Author: colter

I am Lou Reed

Lou Reed likes the digital photography. His pictures are, as described in a Salon article today, “devoid of people, replete with brilliant sunsets and neon.” That sounds familiar. Looking at samples from his upcoming exhibition in New York, I see a lot of sky shots and funky long exposures. It’s a really odd feeling to know that my weird little photography interests are shared by someone as far away from me geographically and socially as Lou Reed. The sensation is simultaneously comforting and disquieting, if that’s possible.

Two Things Gone

Pancho’s Villa, the infamous purveyor of Robitussin refried beans and my next door neighbor, is no more. They have packed up their wares and disappeared into the night.

I have yet to determine if there is a correlation between this event and the disappearance of the Post-Yuletide tumbleweed, which was notably absent from my yard this morning. My brother suspects another of my neighbors, his brother-in-law Mark, who lives down the block and is known for being something of a prankster.

Probably a more likely culprit than either wormholes or space aliens. Less interesting, sadly, but certainly more plausible.

Peace

This is the kind of thing I have always suspected but have almost never seen reported on: “Peace: No Longer Just a Dream” is an article I read in The Week, and I think we should spread it around, mainly because the dominant 24-Hour News Machines tend to only make money on sensationalistic claptrap, and this doesn’t qualify. Some important points made by the article:

  • The number of ongoing wars throughout the world has dropped by 40 percent since the end of the Cold War, and is still declining.
  • The year 2005 had the lowest number of conflicts of any sort—wars between countries, civil wars, ethnic cleansings—since 1976.

I would go further to say that, despite what the media says about the war in Iraq, it’s not a catastrophic tragedy as wars go. Our loss of life is currently at 2,200 US troops. Vietnam was around 50,000. Yes, the war in Iraq was maddeningly unjust and poorly planned, but any comparison of it to Vietnam is flaccid. Of course, the most dangerous aspect of this war is not the blood in the field, but the sinister machinations of its genesis in Washington.

My point in all this is that I truly believe the world is continually becoming a better place, in increments too small to truly measure. Anyone who says the past was better, simpler or more peaceful is someone who hasn’t studied much history.

Random Things and The Grandiloquent Dictionary

The Grandiloquent Dictionary is a magical place to explore and to improve your vocabulary of obscure words. So far my favorite is quasihemidemisemiquaver – according to British musical notation, a 128th note. I should buy quasihemidemisemiquaver.com and start a guitar site for people who like to play really fast.

In other news, I noticed that the Encore movie channel has either purposefully or accidentally added older movies to their channels that have the same titles as recent movies. Twice it has happened that I have clicked on the title (AND description) of a recent movie only to find a completely different film by the same name: Jersey Girl and The Aviator. The former being a 1992 Jami Gertz/Dylan McDermott vehicle, and the latter being a 1985 Christopher Reeve/Rosanna Arquette picture. In both cases the description listed the more popular Kevin Smith and Martin Scorsese films. I’m just waiting for them to add Kicking & Screaming, because they’ll most likely not play the more recent Will Ferrell film, and I’ll get to see one of my favorite movies of all time on TV.

Last night I got my car stuck in the mud….of my driveway. It was dark, and I moved a road cone blocking my drive, assuming that it was absentmindedly left there when in fact it was put there for a very specific reason, namely the gaping, muddy hole where the skirt of my driveway once was. It was a reasonably level pit, a perfect fit for my vehicle, which was unable to jump up onto the remaining driveway, or move back up the muddy slope to the road. Fortunately for me a couple guys were still out working, paving my neighbors new driveway, and they gave me a short tow with the arm of their backhoe. I parked in the backyard. They said they should have a new driveway for me by tonight; I’ll be curious to see how that works out.

And Another Thing….

Yahoo, those sneaky bastards, let you download mp3’s with their Yahoo Music Engine, but when you go to burn a disc they’re going to tell you that there’s a burn license limit. Maybe one, maybe seven….maybe none. Damn you people. Now I have to go back to iTunes and use their weirdo format to burn CDs.

Captions

Recently I’ve had a series of pictures come up to me and demand captions.


“Goodbye cruel world!”


Must Be This Tall to Ride


“We’re getting married!!”

Microsoft Visual Studio BITES

Let it be known that Microsoft’s Visual Studio sucks the sweat off a dead camel’s back!! It has no idea how to handle CSS! It strips all td style declarations and so I have to continually redo everything whenever my developer opens my stuff in Visual Studio. It also takes the ever-elegant shorthands like “padding: 5px 10px 5px 5px” and separates them into their horrifyingly unwieldy individual components “padding-top: 5px; padding right: 10px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px.” Add to this its inability to split-view design and code and you’re talking about a piece of software that rivals NotePad for flexibility. Oh wait, NotePad wouldn’t dick around with my CSS, so it’s actually WORSE. Damn you, Bill Gates!! AAARRGGH!

The Post-Yuletide Tumbleweed?

I found this in my yard today:

Let’s do a little scientific inquiry here. Here are all the possible explanations:

I. It was put here by man.
 A. Deliberately
  1. Dumped. Unlikely as there are far better places to dump a Christmas tree.
  2. Left as a form of communication. But what? Have I offended someone?
 B. Accidentally. This is unlikely as I have not only a fence but also a virtual moat around my yard made from road work.

II. It was put here by nature.
 A. The weather today has been exceedingly windy. Perhaps it blew in from elsewhere. Unlikely, see IB.
 B. It was teleported via wormhole or some other bending of the space/time continuum.

III. It was put here by an unknown force.

I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourselves.