Deviant Dispatches

First, allow me to say that next week, I'll be taking Monday off instead of Wednesday. Then you get to hear all about the apartment I'm going to see on Tuesday pretty much as soon as it happens. I know - it can't possibly get more exciting than that. Wrong. More beautiful steampunk art   Driveable sculpture motorcycle , made from recycled parts! Miniature cities - this one's made of soap! Have an excellent holiday weekend!

I got some new music this week, and Anoushka Shankar's "Red Sun" is a favorite of mine. Spousal Unit heard a piece about her on NPR a few weeks ago; she's the daughter of famous sitarist Ravi Shankar, and this piece is on her CD Rise . But her new CD, Traveller, features a blend of Indian and flamenco music. This live video of the title track features some gorgeous Indian dance, too. Another new song I got was Garbage's "Bleed Like Me." Nothing like Garbage to make you feel that your weirdness isn't that weird after all - plus, the melody is very catchy. (If you know Garbage, you know without my saying that this song is full of potential triggers. It's beautiful, but listen with caution.) Last was a new-ish song by The National: "Exile, Vilify." I love the duality of the song, and how it changes when the word 'vilify' is first used. Two halves of the same whole. This video features a sock puppet. At first...

Aladdin has pretty much always been my favorite movie, and every time I watch it, I learn something new. On my most recent watching, I heard something new in the scene where Jasmine "falls for" Jafar: she tells him his eyebrows are very angular, and that he has "cute little gaps" between his teeth. This can be added to the myriad things I've learned from Aladdin in the past, as follows. Source 1. Don't marry anyone who makes you change your clothes. Or, you know, spits on you. 2. People who say they're an excellent judge of character usually aren't. 3. Puns are often used for evil purposes. "Don't toy with me!" 4. A magic carpet is a pretty pimp ride. 5. Don't turn your best friend into an elephant. 6. So long as you have 75 golden camels, no one will question whether you're actually a prince. 7. If you make a wish to become a prince, be sure to include a "no lie-detector feathers"...

I had a pretty terrible Friday. Almost immediately that morning, I lost all faith in humanity - I really hate starting my days like that.  It began small, with a realization (while perusing Facebook) what a propensity mankind has toward selfishness and ignoring the plights of others, and everything snowballed from there. The lowest point was probably when I looked up the New York Times and found an incredibly inappropriate and graphic picture from the Empire State Building shooting. On top of all that, I was working all day, and dealing with the masses when already in a low place doesn't usually help bring you up. Yep. I felt like that. Luckily, things really turned around over the weekend, despite my slaving away unpacking textbooks all weekend. (In a way, unpacking 35 boxes by myself on Saturday helped - noticeable progress was made, I interacted with relatively few customers, and I got a good workout.)  When I came home from work on Saturday, Spousal Unit...

I am not a rare-book person. I'd rather be able to read it than have to keep it under glass and admire it from a distance. But that doesn't mean I don't admire something beautiful when I run across it. This book is Rosenblätter: Lieder und   Sprüche   des Volks ä ngers und Improvisators Assim-Agha  Gül   hanendé . Or, in English, Rose Petals: Songs and Speaches by folk singer and improvisor  Assim-Agha  Gül   hanendé.  The poetry was originally written in Turkish, so far as I can tell from the German introduction, and was translated by Bernhardine Schulze-Smidt. Try as I might, I can find little information online about this book - it seems to be somewhat rare, at least in the U.S. - but I'd love to know more. The above picture, on the lower left, mentions publication in Bremen, in 1893. There's even a small piece of paper cut and glued on the very first page: B ü chbinderei Hebel & Denck, Leipzig. Very old school. (And it's a ...

Last week, Spousal Unit and I were on our flying carpet of a porch when we saw something unusual in the sky. It wasn't a bird, or a plane. (And who gets excited about those, anyway?) I'm pretty proud of myself for getting a pic of the hot air balloon while it was gassing up. I'm also proud of myself for knitting a lightsaber. I found a picture of Darth Vader's and replicated it almost exactly - not an easy feat, and I did it all without a pattern. Above, I was using three balls of yarn at once, for the angular end of the handle. It got pretty tangly. I think I did really well for such a self-invented project. The saber itself was made of Fun Fur, the black yarn was Caron, and the silver was Vanna's Glamour, double stranded. I made the black parts  bulge by running the yarn behind it very tightly, and then stuffing between the back strands as I went along. You may notice the white thing sticking out of the first lightsaber picture. I...

Source I have big, big plans for today, and for the rest of my four-day weekend. Unfortunately, if I can't shake off the sleep that's caught in my eyes, I'll spend the rest of today napping and being lazy. This is not an acceptable course of action. Here are the steps I'm taking to remedy that: 1. An immediate and cold shower, lasting about five minutes. This will make my nerve endings scream, "AUGH! We're awake!" 2. A cup of Assam Gold Rain  black tea to make the brain cells snort, "Whut? Iz okay, we can has think nao." Or maybe I'll skip straight to the English Breakfast . That always gives my brain a good kick in the pants. 3. A head-first dive into my list for the day. Usually, by doing that, I tend to just forget the rest of the sleepiness, and by the time it's all gone, I've already been productive. The problem with all of these is that I have an unusual sleepy feeling today - one not caused by a lack of sleep. I ...