strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »
Jun 26 06: Baby’s First Funk Freakout
Man alive.
Dig this: it’s 1973 and it’s a kick-ass day on Sesame Street. Why? Because Stevie Wonder is there, performing a bone-crunching 6-minute cut of ‘Superstition’ and his own personal take on the Sesame Street song.
My last couple weeks have, by and large, sucked; but this makes it all feel a little better. There’s a kid in the background of the ‘Superstition’ video who’s dancing up a storm. If I were on that fire escape, I’d do the same. As it is, groove things were shaken here at home. Enjoy. (Via BoingBoing, doncha know.)
Jun 20 06: bad:good:: ignorance:strength
I’m watching Die Another Day at the moment on Spike TV (“the Star Trek, Ultimate Fighting, and Poker-Playing Babes Network”).1 The opening montage shows Bond in North Korea. His mission gangs seriously aglee—there’s a mole somewhere! Bond is Exposed! Capture by the Bad Guys! Aieeee!
So anyway, cut to the opening montage, backed by that horrible Madonna song. They spend the opening credits driving home the point that the North Koreans are eeeeevil. And how do they do it? Well, they begin with a shot of Bond’s face being held in a tub of icy water. And from there? Oh, you know, the usual: beatings, electricity, burnings, dangerous animals. In this case, scorpions.2
In the Bond world circa 2002, the easiest way to demonstrate that your villans were a nation of irretreivably bad guys was to show that they tortured their prisoners.
I feel ill.
1 My chest is getting hairier as we speak.
2 I think we can assume that Bond could not hear the Madonna song, but we can’t rule it out. That would be evil, wouldn’t it?
Jun 7 06: project corner
It’s the age-old vacation dilemma: summer is here, but somebody’s drained the pool and the ocean has a toxic jellyfish alert and the dog ate your book. What to do? Is there still fun to be had? Yes! Yes, I say! I have been trawling the internet, and I can say that the answer is Yes! If fun is what you seek, then you should make a shiny mud ball!
No, really. A shiny mud ball! Via the often lovely, frequently fascinating Pure Land Mountain, I bring you the latest in craft-time delight. The shiny mud ball, or dorodango, is, um, a ball of mud. That is shiny. And by shiny I mean highly polished, resembling a mineral sphere that The Nature Company would charge big bucks for; this ain’t no ordinary dirt clod. For analysis of the dorodango’s cultural significance, and its use in child-development studies, see this article at Web Japan; but for the definitive how-to, consult the experts.
It seems unlikely to replace the knitting on my list of leisure-time crafts, but if the opportunity strikes this summer I may give it a whirl. If so, I’ll report back.
harrumph
I keep trying to write a post celebrating a few things, via a few photos: how my beautiful, most favorite cousin got married in Prague the other day, for one; how happy a pair of delightful gentlemen in England looked getting married (finally making honest men on one another, after 20 years together) in England; and a shot of Paul and myself at the England wedding, which I wanted to bring up in conjunction with mentioning that we had our tenth anniversary together over the Memorial Day weekend. Love abounds. I can’t make it stick together, though. Maybe tomorrow.
I’ve been rather sour today, having started off on the wrongiest foot. The radio turned on at 6:10 this morning and what did we hear but President Monkeyface Goatfucker talking about how treating the queers like, you know, people rather than freakish deviants whom Jesus wants us to spit upon would bring down the Republic. I slapped the radio into submission and pulled the covers over my head, fighting to supress the urge to rant incoherently, and promptly fell back asleep.
And that’s why I missed swim practice this morning. Lucky for me, though, that I got out of bed in time to get to the dentist, because otherwise I would have missed the chance to hear that my teeth are coming loose again. “You’re clearly doing a good job of keeping them clean,” he said, “so that’s not it. Have you been under a lot of stress lately?”
Grrr.
I did make one happy discovery today, though. Fafblog is back! Huzzah! It is, after all, the whole world’s only source for Fafblog. I’d be much more up in arms about the whole Federal Marriage Amendment thing if if Giblets hadn’t been there to set me, um, straight. Go read.
Jun 5 06: eureka
Dear Whoever You Were, I Guess It Doesn’t Matter,
Thanks so much for getting that missing CD back to me. I also admire your sense of humor. It was most clever of you to sneak it into our apartment and tuck it amongst that cache of CDs I had forgotten were stuck in the stereo cabinet. If Paul weren’t on the phone with his mom right now I’d crank ‘Filthy/Gorgeous’ waay up and dance around the living room.
Anyway, it’s nice to have it back. If you need to borrow anything else just let me know. I may, however, insist that you write your name on a list or something next time.
Yrs,
A
that aching empty feeling
Dear Whoever You Are, I Wish I Could Remember:
I hope you’ve enjoyed my Scissor Sisters CD, which I lent to you some time back. Would you mind pressing the attendant-call button, please, so we can discuss its return? I miss it so. I mean, for one thing, it’s one of my favorite albums of the last couple years. It makes you want to put on outfits of questionable taste and dance suggestively in seedy bars, and in a good way; I mean, hell, an album that fun should require a prescription. And for another, I bought it on a trip to England and so it’s sort of a souvenir.
Yrs,
A