Scanwiches
Aren't sandwiches just the best food ever? That might make Scanwiches the best website ever. People scan their sandwich and share what's on it. I've got at least a dozen recipes I want to try now.
5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do
"Has your mom ever called in a panic, saying the computer was displaying a weird error message and that she hurried and unplugged it just to be safe--and then dunked it in the bathtub so it wouldn't burn the house down?
It makes you realize that, to some people, a computer is still a terrifying box of mysteries. Well, we think Hollywood writers have those people in mind when they portray laptop computers doing everything short of blowing up the moon."
Painter of Crap
I once was almost asked to leave a Thomas Kinkade gallery that I'd been dragged in to when I referred to the artist as "The Painter of Crap," so naturally this story made me smile.
"Here we find Sigourney in rather lighter mode as the glamour quotient of a Star Trek-style show that is trying to cash in on its glory days. Dean Parisot’s comedy/spoof is a Trekker’s delight, as all the familiar off-screen rancour of the ST cast is mirrored, but then delightfully healed in a way which continues to elude some of the real-life cast…"
WRITE OR DIE!
"Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you’re fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences."
"Think"
"Clever advertising campaign for the School of Visual Arts encourages people everywhere to “think” by giving them a place to write down their ideas."
Taken at the Norman Medieval Faire over the weekend. It was a beautiful day, I got my first sunburn of the year, and - no kidding - saw at least four people with this exact hairstyle, in this exact color. It must be a new thing all the kids are doing.
It was time. It was past time. I’ve been working with it for a couple hours now and I have to say, OH MY GOD FORGET GAY MARRIAGE CAN WE MAKE IT LEGAL FOR A MAN TO WED HIS LAPTOP?
This wasn’t really a funnel cloud so much as just a weird formation low to the ground. If it had been a funnel I wouldn’t have posted this wussy picture; I’d have waited for it to touch the ground, snatch up a trailer and throw it at Helen Hunt.
When I took this photo in downtown Oklahoma City I wasn’t sure it was going to be any good, but Photoshop and patience equals voila! Also - can you see the moon in this picture?
Another storm front moved through last night. Before it came in Brian made turkey burgers on the grill and we sat on the back porch and watched the lightning while we waited for Heroes to start. I love spring. Tornado season started early this year. Should be a good one.
On a frigid January night, a few days before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2000, I was piloting a Texas-plated Volvo down a West Virginia highway. My buddy Tish was in the passenger seat, our friend Jen asleep in the back, and we were pointed in the direction of Chicago, trying to make the 14-hour drive in a night. We’d agreed that one person would sleep, another would drive and the third would stay awake in the passenger seat, keeping watch to make sure the driver stayed awake, and in this way we made our journey safely.
Tish and I were trading stories and music. We’d bonded over a mutual love and admiration for Rich Mullins, and now we were branching out, and she asked me if I’d ever heard of David Wilcox. I hadn’t, I said; she pulled out her CDs, revealing the man’s entire catalog.
You know that music that is in your life, that you know you wouldn’t be the same without? It’s not the same as the stuff you just listen to, say, for fun, or for singing along in the car or cleaning the house. It’s in a world all its own, and it has shaped you. David Wilcox is one of those artists for me, up there with Patty Griffin and Mary Chapin-Carpenter and Rich Mullins, who not only challenge my creativity but taught me how to be a person in the world, how to cope with such great beauty and pain so often in such close proximity and in such blinding quantities. He came along at a time in my life - sorta like now - when I was questioning loudly what it meant to be a man, and it helped to have one here that I could relate to, even just in my stereo.
Anyway so on Friday I got to see David Wilcox perform live for the first time. I won’t waste time on a review except to say it was better even than I’d hoped, and I was blown away and humbled. Rock House Films in Dallas is a fantastic listening room, and David’s even better on guitar than what you hear on his recordings.
Anyway, David’s got a new record coming out on iTunes tomorrow; it’s called Open Hand and the songs he played from it the other night were fantastic. Meantime, here’s video of David playing one of my favorite of his songs, "Rusty Old American Dream:"
So - who are some of the musicians without whose art you wouldn’t be the same person?
UPDATE: David’s new album "Open Hand" is now available on iTunes Plus. I can’t really recommend it highly enough; "Red Eye," "Open Hand," "Outside Door," "Modern World" and "Captain Wanker" are delightful, and "Dream Again" is like the opposite of a protest song about the new administration. Fantastic.
They said it was going to snow 6-10 inches this weekend. Gary England Twittered it, for God’s sake, though the Twit in question is now absent from his feed … hmmm. AT ANY RATE, even slightly senile weather men and a last-second winter blast couldn’t keep these buds at bay, and kids, it looks like spring is finally here to stay. AW YEAH.
20 Things You Didn’t Know About Time
"7 One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milliseconds per century."
TACO TOWN!
These guys recreated the "Taco Town" commercial from Saturday Night Live. "Pizza? Now that’s what I call a Taco!"
All The Presidents’ Girls
Artist Annie Kevan painted a gallery of Presidential mistresses (alleged) going back to George Washington. It’s creepy how many of them were Kennedy’s.
My Dinner With Dubya
One of the Bush twins’ drinking buddies got invited to the White House once to have dinner with Dubya and Laura. He wrote this wonderful piece for Vanity Fair so we could all feel like we were there.
These are on a bowl on the back porch. It’s going to snow this weekend, but I’m going to use this photo to help me pretend it’s the kind of weather where we make drinks that paper umbrellas go in.
