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.