Get these nutty Zardoz worshippers off my lawn.

Dear TV On The Radio,
Giant, floating, disembodied stone heads are way less awesome when they aren't greeted by a swarm of dudes in orange diapers and/or don't vomit copious quantities of guns and ammunition. Just something to keep in mind.

Get these goddamn sad-eyed emo kids off my lawn.

Because you've gotta love a well placed Pinnocchio reference. Or a well-placed wizard of oz reference. Or, you know, both at the same time.

Get these goddamn alchemists off my lawn.

I simply can't wait to see them on Saturday! Eeee!

Whoa.

I've always enjoyed the line in 10 Things I hate About You that talks about hating "with the fire of a thousand suns." It's a pretty stellar piece of verbal abuse, really.

Well, I'd like to take a moment to suggest a companion insult: "You suck with the mass of 18 billion suns."

Which, incidentally, is exactly what this thing does:


The largest known black hole has a mass of 18 billion suns (that's the size of a small galaxy), and is actually orbited by a smaller black hole that weighs in at about 100 million suns. Yowza.

The "You Make It" Chandelier

I think I just might.

Instructions and other gorgeousness here.

The Wild Indoors

In other, non-cave-related news...

It's the last day of my spring break & 13-day work sabbatical. Sigh.

Many of my original plans fell through. The Minneapolis trip became a casualty of Paige's mind boggling work schedule, The Temper Trap decided they're too good for Milwaukee, and the man in Missouri who sold me a card catalog on ebay decided he couldn't store it after all and sold it to someone else without ever telling me. Thanks, a-hole!

So I'm on the hunt for a card catalog again. Although I did find these on Etsy...




And they're calling to me, in all their grey, scuffed, vintage-industrial glory.

So what did I accomplish? Lots of lazing about, especially while watching BBC miniseries adapatations of gothic novels & drinking wine. A little reading. Also, I built some seriously sexy shelves. Here's a cellphone-derived and fairly unsexy picture of them (I'll do some better ones soonish):



And, just moments ago, I finished painting a wall in my bedroom a lovely deep slate grey. Aaaaaand, it's chalkboard paint. Which, I think, is going to be really fun. Now all I have to do is practice my patience for three days while the paint cures and try to decide which quote from Leaves Of Grass to put up first.

Um, yes. Yes please.

I would totally live 45 feet underground in a 17,000 square foot cave. Unbelievable.

Get this goddamn fivehead off my lawn.

I think this is a cautionary tale about what happens when you get high, go out to the desert, and try to build a life size version of the game mousetrap. There's a lesson here for us all.

I can never get enough...

"Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all."


...of Cormac McCarthy. The eloquence with which he renders the most spectacularly horrific shit imaginable leaves me reeling. The monstrous is become beautiful, against all objections of reason or feeling.

Indoor/Outdoor

Get these goddamn banjo pickin' Brits off my lawn.

So, I think what I'm seeing here is, of all things, a violin bow being used on an electric guitar. There's also a kick-tambourine. Aaaaand the drummer is the singer is the guitarist!? Well, ok. They can do whatever the hell they want as long as they just keep on doing it because it sure does give me the shivers. In a good way.

Long enough...

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every
moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,
and laughingly dash with your hair.


I wish Walt Whitman's brain was a physical location that I could go on vacation to. I think it would be wonderful there.

Get these crazy goddamn neo-hippies off my lawn.

I hardly have any idea what's even going on here, but that doesn't keep me from loving every minute of it.

Get cornfed, indeed.

Inspiration

I'm feeling a restlessness for the green things and renewal that come with spring operating in tandem with a major urge to recreate my space with a sort of victorian-gothic-mad-scientist theme... which seems kind of contradictory, but I think it works.



































Delicious.

THIS JUST IN: more viagra poetry

Slang Dope For Gladness Your Man

Onlookers negotiate a prenuptial agreement with
clodhoppers accurately,
inside bullfrog lunatics accidentally.

Hairy for bullfrog from often
secretly admire frustrating.
Because chic dilettante procrastinates,
but fetishists require assistance.
Fetishists apartment building for ridiculously,
rascally about near fundraiser.

Maestros eagerly beyond sheriff
organize gonad of bowling ball,
and tenors steal pencils of ballerina
from around skyscraper.

Status: Blizzard.

Plan of action: bottle of cabernet, stilton, fresh pears. streaming netflix documentaries. lamb stew in the le creuset & biscotti in the oven. zero intention of emerging from my apartment for the next 30 hours. will reassess at that time.

What?

The Twilight: New Moon soundtrack is available on vinyl. Double LP. Like, OMG.

Sick of dressin' like a human when I'm feelin' like a leopard.

Sick of holdin' on to nothin' when I just want to hold your hips.

Yep.

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."

It's a new year. It's four am and my brain is boiling. Fermenting, fomenting, fluctuating. I haven't slept right in weeks.

On a semi-related note, I still don't know what to make of the unexpected guest at Christmas. She said she missed me. She wore red. Slender and shimmering, she is the destroyer of worlds. A virus. A ravening wolf at the door. She is Cathy Ames, she is Lillian Reardon, Miss Havisham. And in spite of everything about her that is timelessly and shamelessly awful, I do feel some small measure of sympathy for her. What a fucking can of worms that is.

At any rate, I have twenty days left of relative freedom. And though I haven't touched it since April, I think there'll be more scribbling turning up over at the "numbers project" soon. Because I left off with... her. Because I don't understand her, but I want to. And I burn quietly and I wonder if objectivity is even remotely possible when it comes to her. I know much of what she did and I can make informed speculations about the rest, but will I ever grasp the "why" of it? Probably not, but I want at it. Because without the "why" I can't know the truth of things. I feel somehow that grasping that truth would be an absolution of some kind.

But... maybe there's really not much there to understand, because some shit just won't ever make sense.

What is there now, where once the throb and hum and thrill of certainty in amazing things to come?

Coming home to him tonight it requires unusual strength to flick on the turn signal, brake and gently veer right onto the downward slope of the offramp. Because what I really want is to stay on the freeway. Maintain speed. Just keep going.

Where? Just going.

And what is this thing that takes hold and sinks its claws in and pulls and pulls and pulls?

Each time, when it grabs me, I take the exit. Or make the turn. I end up at home, or at work, school, the post office... I don't let it win. Yet I imagine that it steals a piece, a spark; some fragment of the visceral, seething depths. That piece keeps going, and I can never get it back.

How long can this go on? How long before I'm gone and everywhere and nowhere? A hundred thousand flecks of life. A million tiny bits of fire. Traveling in all directions, out there on the open road.

ALERT: Viagra spammers now channeling EE Cummings!

Professional Hallucinogen For Ecstasies Inspect Your Erection

Nonchalantly about food stamp girls.
Because impresarios behind
but impresarios of,
but onlookers know.

Teach fractured but beams with joy,
clock toward waif.

Labyrinths overwhelmingly!
But psychotic cashier around living with,
share a shower with.
Bubble baths thoroughly waif over
pockets thoroughly of briar patch,
slyly inside ruffian looking glasses.

---

The above poem was composed from messages intercepted by my gmail spam filter between 10:54am and 10:51pm today. The title was the subject of one of the emails, and each line is the complete text from an individual email. I adjusted for punctuation, capitalization, and spelling errors.

Now celebrating 20 years of Manboobs Relief!

There simply wasn't enough room to spell out "Good Morning America".

Philosophy...

...doesn't require textbooks, classrooms, universities.

It predates all those things.

Its only prerequisite is an inquisitive, logical, and honest mind.

It's something everyone needs, whether they know it or not.

It can be incredibly challenging, humbling, rewarding.

And the only way to guarantee failure at it is to never try.

What the hell...

...went so horribly wrong?

"and your thoughts have taken their toll/
when your mind breaks the spirit of your soul"

'Scuse me, but: WHAT THE FU-HUH? What do you think you're talkin' about, duder? Is this some feeble attempt to tackle the mind-body problem? Are you breaking new ground here with some kind of mind-spirit-soul trichotomy? Don't you dare get philosophical on me. You're a dude wearing eyeliner. Know your place. For fuck's sake.

Part of me really wants to tackle the rest of the lyrical shitstorm that is "21 Guns", but then there's this other part of me that is filled with ennui at the prospect. Also, I'd probably throw up in my mouth a little. Ugh. Whatever. Instead, I'll just cut to the chase for once and say that as far as I'm concerned, the members of Green Day died tragic yet merciful deaths in a plane crash shortly after the release of 'Dookie'.

Mixed Metaphors

"A 'relationship' is just that--the more or less stable juxtaposition of two separate and self contained entities. Love, on the other hand, is an explosive fusion. The parts of a bomb do not stand in a mere 'relationship' to one another."
--Robert C. Solomon

"If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!"
--Holly Golightly

I'd love to think there's cats with names in my future, but I'm having a hard time seeing anything that glimmers or sparkles... so I can only imagine that generating the kind of heat requisite for nuclear fusion is probably out of the question.

Whatever they're selling...

I'm not buying.

Not that losing an "enormous" amount of weight whilst somehow growing more massive, in defiance of all known laws of physics, isn't an intriguing prospect... I just don't think It's right for me. I hope you can understand.

Clint Eastwood

I wanna be like Clint Eastwood when I grow up: shoot from the hip, never miss, and always know when to get the fuck outta dodge.

A minor apocalypse. And ice cream.

The nexus of Jonas Brothers and Bastille Days has turned downtown Milwaukee into a nightmare. A nightmare that is populated by drunken revelers and female adolescent beast-creatures seething with hormones and dopamine. Traffic is a disaster and there's nowhere to park. Good times.

In other news, last night I made a lime-ginger-basil sorbet. It was okay, but didn't exactly set my world on fire. So tonight it became mango-lime-ginger-basil sorbet... shit's good, dudes. It's probably the most refreshing thing I've ever put in my mouth.

Oh, and there's a chai tea custard with cinnamon and allspice and fresh ground black pepper chilling off in the fridge. My first custard ever, and I didn't scramble it or anything! Yay me!

To sum up: the Jo-Bros suck, Bastille Days is a somewhat overrated pain in the ass, and owning an ice cream maker is totally awesome.

Dear Shinedown Guy,

I would like to alert you to a few misconceptions you seem to have about our Earth's atmosphere as well as a few of the better known celestial bodies of our solar system (and the physical forces that prevail upon them) as demonstrated in your improbably popular song "Second Chance."

"Oh nos! Moon iz coming!"
First, I'd like to address your misguided notion that it would be possible for the moon to "disappear somewhere in the stratosphere". As you can see in the diagram below, the stratosphere is part of the lower atmosphere, beginning about 11 miles above the surface of the Earth and averaging around 20 miles thick.


The distance from the moon's surface to the surface of the Earth is ordinarily about 233,000 miles. Here is a to-scale representation of that distance:


The moon itself has a radius of 1,074 miles, meaning it is about 2,148 miles thick. This entails that the stratosphere would be unable to contain the moon. Incidentally, the entirety of the upper and lower atmospheres would also be insufficient to contain the moon. This is all rather irrelevant, however, because if the moon were to approach Earth in the manner you suggest, it would begin to break apart due to tidal forces when it reached the Roche Limit. Based on this equation:


and the best data available (wikipedia), the Earth-moon Roche limit is roughly 9,500 miles. This entails that when the moon approaches to within 9,500 miles of Earth, it will be shorn apart by the unequal distribution of gravitational force across its surface.

The resulting debris would form a ring around our planet, much like the rings around Saturn. In the unlikely event that any large fragments survive and surpass the Roche limit and continue on toward Earth, they would appear as a giant fireballs upon entering the atmosphere, and upon impact cause damage sufficient to make life here rather uncomfortable (if not entirely impossible).

These dudes know what I'm talkin' about.
In the event that moon chunks do not collide with Earth in a cataclysmic fashion, we're still screwed. This is because the moon regulates tides, regulates the distribution of seawater, and stabilizes the rotational axis of the Earth. Without the moon's gravitational forces, the degree of the earth's tilt would fluctuate, leading to the sort of drastic, calamitous climate change that would exceed even Al Gore's wettest, wildest dreams.

Gore uses his brilliant and dynamic invention, the internet, to search for
footage of extreme weather. The former Vice President is said to prefer
amateur films of hot, steamy, tornado-on-tornado action.
Thus, if the moon were truly entering the stratosphere, you (and for that matter, all life on this planet) would have much bigger problems than worrying about whether mommy and daddy "realize this is [your] life" and approve or disapprove of your lifestyle choices. Unless, of course, you think that "sometimes goodbye is a second chance" applies to the preponderance of species diversity on Earth.

I was going to address your Halley's comet reference as well, but I think I've given you enough to grapple with for now.

Respectfully,
Someone whose iPod car adapter was stolen and, resultingly, has had occasion to listen to this little gem of lyrical buffoonery no less than four times in the last twenty four hours.

Engineering blows my mind.

More @ NY Times

Up late. Sleepless. Missing MN.

It was in that moment when the last rays of sunset stretch along the horizon like a gash of vivid, dying fire between the blackness of the earth and the deep resounding blue of the twilight sky that the city came into view. Drawn upon the night in a disciplined array of sharp silhouettes and tiny lighted squares it leapt out of the darkened landscape, suffused with that peculiar glow at once harsh and warmly beckoning: man made light.

....

tires on wet pavement
scent of regret
and here we go again

it doesn't reach me, anymore
i catch myself wishing
that it did

rain-thick air
streetlights throb & hum
can't you smell
the regret on my breath
can't you taste
the desolation on my tongue
can't you feel
this stagnant air
this slow death by equilibrium

"Here I rust

where disappointment and regret
collide
lying awake at night"

How is it that Ben Gibbard always knows what I'm thinking?

Oh, pandora...

those twelve-eight time signatures get me every time.

WHODAT? #2

Atonement for pop culture reference in the previous post:


Hint: Nobel prizewinner & Libertarian!

If there were ever a time when this was in any way appropriate...

Is he emerging fully grown from the head of E.T. like Athena from the head of Zeus?
Because, really, that would explain so much...
...that time is now.

This just in:

It is 89 degrees Farenheit outside, with 57% humidity. If you are wearing this:


or anything remotely resembling it, then you are a moron.

Hint: if you are wearing a tank top and miniskirt, then you probably don't need a goddamn scarf. Or keffiyeh. Or whatever you hipster fucks are calling them these days.