This has gone around the world and back this week, but I’m going to go ahead and join in the party in case you haven’t seen it yet. There are a lot of "literal" versions of music videos out there, but this one is undoubtedly my favorite.
| Sweeeet, iPod, videos | Comments (1) | |
Lilies are without a doubt my favorite flower, and in our backyard there are no fewer than six varieties, all of which bloom at different times throughout the summer, planted by our house’s previous owner (or, more likely, by somebody she hired). I am eternally grateful to that woman, and to the people she hired, because the flower beds in our backyard are, with the exception of creeping ivy and their constant need for weeding, a source of joy for me from March through October. These white lilies are one of my favorite things, and they’re blooming now.
| Daily Photo | Comments (0) | |
Yellowstone from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.
My dad’s doctoral thesis was all about Yellowstone, and can you believe that I’ve never been there? This video makes me want to go; it is, after all, in one of the 14 contiguous states I have yet to visit. This video also makes me want to trade up my SLR to something that can do HD video, but if I had to guess which one of those two things was gone to happen first, well, it’s anybody’s guess. Someday!
| On The Road, videos | Comments (1) | |
So basically what people do at Kerrville is sit around in circles and play music. Most of this music is so good that you find yourself in gaping awe of it; occasionally there is some that’s so bad that you wonder if the songwriter had ever actually heard a song before picking up his or her guitar. This photo is a good depiction of the former, wherein K.C. and David (the MD of Pants) play her song "Redman" for Joe Crookston, who harmonized along after picking up the chorus. And so it goes; after K.C. finished her mainstage show we walked around listening to circles like this until about 3:30 in the morning.
| Daily Photo, iPod | Comments (0) | |
I have an odd feeling when I walk into the Deacon Shop for my shift that morning. The weather is beautiful but something seems odd; no one seems to be on campus at 8:30 in the morning. It freaks me out. When I walk in to the store everyone is staring at the televisions mounted on the walls. "What happened?" I ask. "A plane flew into the World Trade Center," a coworker answers. In my mind I picture a small prop plane, out of control, lodging itself into the giant edifice of the tower. The screen tells a different story, and soon I find myself transfixed along with the rest of the world. As one of the only public places on the Quad with a television, the Deacon Shop quickly fills up. Soon my boss comes up to me. "We need to make it look like everything’s normal in here, so if you could – I don’t mind you watching it, but – if you could fold some shirts or straighten the displays while you watch, that might make people more comfortable." I look at her for a long, silent moment, then say, "Seriously?"
Walking to second-period Current Events class I am distracted; I hear nothing. About halfway through the class period the principal’s voice comes timidly through the intercom: "Any students who have parents or family members who work downtown, please come to the counselor’s office." We all look around at one another, bewildered. No one from our class gets up, but names start flying through the air like paper airplanes: "You know Ally? Her parents both work downtown." "So do Josh’s." Soon the entire room is abuzz; the teacher is a lazy coach who never bothers to actually teach, so by the time the principal comes over the intercom to tell us that there has been a massive explosion downtown, our uninterrupted speculation has reached a fever pitch. Later, at lunch, one of the stoner girls is running around with the head of a baby doll – God knows where she got it – shouting, "I just went downtown! Look what I found!" She passes me and I say, loudly, "That’s not funny." She whips around and shouts, "Get a sense of humor!" I make a face and reply, "You get a sense of humor."
It seems that a lesbian couple wants to get married in Wait Chapel. Certain among the campus Christian community appear to have contracted rabies over the whole deal, and when a particularly mean-spirited letter to the editor appears in the campus paper, I take to my weekly column there to try to calmly suggest that while it’s all nice that the Christians have one or two small opinions about the matter, that our example as a community is not well served by the kind of vitriol the letter-writer spewed. I even suggest that maybe said lesbian couple has much better things to worry about than the opinion of a college sophomore such as the letter-writer, or me. When my article comes out a friend comes to me with squinty, concerned eyes and says, "Well, it was well written, but you didn’t do a very good job of stating what you believe about homosexuality." I sigh, roll my eyes, take the paper out of her hands, fold it up, and throw it away. "That’s the point," I say irritably.
Once again I turn it around on you, the reader: Where were you when [insert memorable historical event here] happened? Sound off in the comments.
| Vignettes | Comments (8) | |
This guitar belongs to Joe Crookston, who I was thrilled to get to meet last weekend at Kerrville. Joe’s album, Able Baker Charlie & Dog, was awarded "Album of the Year" by the International Folk Alliance last year. I could’ve listened to him play all night long.
| Daily Photo, iPod | Comments (1) | |
This is my buddy K.C. Clifford, who this weekend got to play the Main Stage at the Kerrville Folk Music Festival in Kerrville, Texas. Brian and I drove down to hang out with K.C., her husband David, her parents and a whole, whole bunch of really great folk musicians and folk music enthusiasts. We stayed up until 4 a.m. listening to said musicians play songs around campfires; it was great in every way something can be, and though I’m physically sleepy, I feel spiritually rested. More photos from the festival through the week. (Click the photo if you can’t wait that long).
| Daily Photo | Comments (0) | |
The Big Picture: Hubble’s Final Servicing Mission
Boston.com’s "The Big Picture" feature is one of my favorite things on the internet, and this week they look at the recent shuttle mission to update and repair the Hubble Space Telescope for the final time.
Vintage Sexist Ads
One of these straight-up says, "MEN ARE BETTER THAN WOMEN!" All at once a good laugh and a shocking look at the image of women in media over the last century.
J. Crew Math
via @whoorl, this blog helps you make sense of some of the more baffling choices available to you in your J. Crew catalog.
Onward Christian Soldiers!
Some truly creepy cover pages from Pentagon reports, seen by Then-Sec. Rumsfelt and President Bush, about progress in Iraq, featuring photos of war accompanied by scary-sounding, out-of-context Bible verses that seemed to cheer the war effort. So glad this administration is gone.
| Weekly Reader | Comments (3) | |
In the last week my freelancing load has grown from 2 travel articles about the state of Oklahoma and all the neat stuff to do in it, due by the 15th of June and (in my optimistic mind), the end of June before we leave for D.C. and Ireland, to FIVE ARTICLES, one of which I just finished writing about very small cattle and how they might rid us of CAFOs forever. It’s a neat story; look for it, and my travel pieces, and then two more pieces for the gay pride issue at the end of the month. Why all the work? BECAUSE WE’RE LEAVING THE COUNTRY AND I’M TERRIFIED WE’RE GOING TO GET TO IRELAND AND NOT HAVE A CENT AND HAVE TO WORK IN A FISH-GUTTING FACTORY OR GO ON A HORRIFIC GAME SHOW TO EARN PLANE TICKETS BACK HOME. (Read: "Because I’m not a well man.")
Speaking of Ireland, here’s a photo of the place we are staying for the latter half of our journey, in Kenmare:
That’s pretty neat, right? Yeah, I’m stoked.
Before that, however, our summer looks pretty good, even if we’re spending the vast majority of it having fun for free, as most of our money is being poured into this trip. I don’t know why I’m getting so weird about money; the last time I lived in Ireland, FOR TWO MONTHS, I don’t think the entire trip cost as much as the amount of money I’m taking with me over there this time. I’m just going to do us all a favor and blame George W. Bush; I’ll figure out later how this is his fault.*
This has been an emotionally exhausting week. We lost someone we love very, very much last week, and it’s sort of colored the seven days since very darkly. I had one really good bawl about the whole thing Thursday morning before the funeral, and then that afternoon two very good friends of mine rolled through town on a cross-country road trip they’ve been doing, and though I had to go straight to the funeral from seeing them, it did my heart good.
Tonight we’re headed down to Texas to see our buddy K.C. perform as a mainstage artist at the Kerrville Folk Music Festival in Kerrville, Texas. It’s a whirlwind trip – we’ll be back Sunday evening – and when I get back I’ve got 3 stories to complete in just over a week, which will be SO GREAT**.
*For Republicans who were offended by that: come on. Have a freaking sense of humor.
**Well, no, but I’ll get paid for it, so.
| On The Road, This I Believe, Writer | Comments (1) | |
This is what the garden looked like just over a month ago:
This is what it looked like on Monday:
So it’s all going great. The most exciting thing I saw over the weekend was this guy:
See him? Here, let’s get closer:
IT’S A F***ING TOMATO! This guy is going to get really big and turn yellow – he’s a Golden Jubilee tomato! This is on one of the two plants that I picked up from Home Depot, which are the tallest plants in my garden right now. All the tomato plants have flowers, though a bunch of them got tossed around pretty badly in the thunderstorms we had over Memorial Day weekend, and I need to cage them tonight to get them pointed toward the sky once more. While this guy is already producing some fruit, my hot peppers, which grow much more slowly, are just starting to grow out of the seedling stage:
These guys are growing in a little bit of shade; they don’t usually hit full sun until about 11 AM, and though I always thought that hot peppers needed full sun, these part-sun peppers are growing much taller and more quickly than the ones that are getting sun starting at about 8:30 AM.
The birds – blue jays especially – love to come down and snip these guys down to their roots. They don’t eat them or use them to build nests; it’s just sort of a recreational activity for them. On top of that, I’m continuing to find presents left by the neighborhood cats, who use the loose soil in my garden as a litter box. They poop near my hot peppers, then cover the poop up with some of the soil. As much as I love that, as great as that is, what happens is that half the time they either bury or kick over one of these plants, which are still too small for the cats to notice, unlike the squash or tomatoes. And so that’s why I have my Reserve Pepper Brigade:
There are about 30 extra of each of my two kinds of peppers that have yet to go into the actual plot. The ones in this photo live indoors at night and come out to enjoy the sunshine in the daytime. They were living on my grow shelf but got too tall for it. The others in the reserve are in my container garden on the other side of the yard, where for some reason the birds never find it, and they get to enjoy the company of this guy:
This is the blackberry bush I planted in May 2008. It grew well but never produced a single flower or berry last year. This year, on the other hand, it’s gone completely insane, taken leave of its senses and is currently home to between 3 and 4 dozen blackberries. It’s expanding, too, threatening to take over the whole bed where it lives. This is fine with me, as I love fresh blackberries. The one in this photo is my star; he should be ripe any day now. I wonder if my first harvest should go into a healthy smoothie or a wonderful blackberry cobbler? Stay tuned.
| Growing | Comments (0) | |
