The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for 2007
Last year I was given a membership to the Exploratorium for Christmas by my aunt Dorothy. It was great fun going. I think I went 6 times or so, usually with a friend. I totally dig that place!
I haven’t renewed the membership yet… Memberships start January 1st. I think I’ll get one the next time I get the chance to go.
Charlotte went just yesterday and had a great time!
A friend of mine has a house he’d like to rent January –> May. Ping me if you’re interested and we’ll see if it might work out.
Strong preference goes to friends.
Here’s his letter…
I’m planning on being away in NYC from approximately mid-january hrough mid-may, and I would like to sublet my house for that time.
I’d like to sublet it to someone “in the family”, so to speak. Time period and amount of furnishings are negotiable (the less stuff I have to move, the better!)
Details (please forward as appropriate):
3 bdrm, 2.5 bath townhouse condo, 1350 sq. ft. I use one bedroom for
sleeping, another for my lab, another for the library. You can use it
for 1, 2, or 3 people. If you want low rent, just let me stash my junk in the
library, then it’s effectively a two bedroom.Tippy-tippy-tip of Hunters Point, past Box Shop and Headless and the
Haunted Barn.KICK-ASS south-facing bay view — alameda, San Mateo, SFO, all the way
past San Bruno mountain, almost to Daly City and the ocean.All bamboo flooring
Sunny south-facing master bedroom and living room
Beautiful garden!
off street parking,
washer/dryer,
dishwasher,
alarm system,
security camera system,
home automation,
video projector
… blah blah blah …Rent is negotiable — it costs me about $2500, but I’d be willing to
let it go for $1200 to $1500 if the deal is right (person I trust,
mostly furnished, stash my stuff in the library, etc etc…)
Call or email me for details.
GREAT TRUTHS THAT LITTLE CHILDREN HAVE LEARNED:
1) No matter how hard you try, you can’t baptize cats.
2) When your Mum is mad at your Dad, don’t let her brush your hair.
3) If your sister hits you, don’t hit her back. They always catch the second person.
4) Never ask your 3-year old brother to hold a tomato.
5) You can’t trust dogs to watch your food.
6) Don’t sneeze when someone is cutting your hair.
7) Never hold a Dust-Buster and a cat at the same time.
8) You can’t hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.
9) Don’t wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts.
10) The best place to be when you’re sad is Grandpa’s lap.
GREAT TRUTHS THAT ADULTS HAVE LEARNED:
1) Raising teenagers is like nailing jelly to a tree.
2) Wrinkles don’t hurt.
3) Families are like fudge…mostly sweet, with a few nu ts.
4) Today’s mig hty oak is just yesterday’s nut that held its ground.
5) Laughing is good exercise. It’s like jogging on the inside.
6) Middle age is when you choose your cereal for the fiber, not the toy.
GREAT TRUTHS ABOUT GROWING OLD
1) Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.
2) Forget the health food. I need all the preservatives I can get.
3) When you fall down, you wonder what else you can d o while you’re down there.
4) You’re getting old when you get the same sensation from a rocking chair that you once got from a roller coaster.
5) Its frustrating when you know all the answers but nobody bothers to ask you the questions.
6) Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.
7) Wisdom comes with age, but sometimes age comes alone.
THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE:
1) You believe in Santa Claus.
2) You don’t believe in Santa Cl aus.
3) You are Santa Claus.
4) You look like Santa Claus.
SUCCESS:?
At age 4 success is…not piddling in your pants.
At age 12 success is…having friends.
At age 17 success is…having a drivers license.
At age 35 succes s is…having money.
At age 50 s uccess is..having money.
At age 70 success is…having a drivers license.
At age 75 success is…having friends.
At age 80 success is…not piddling in your pants.
Woke up and had fun before getting out of bed
Blueberry pancakes with grade B maple syrup.. the tiny blueberries from Trader Joe’s and grade B from Coomb farms in Brattleboro via Rainbow
Went to the Holiday Gifty Art Sale at the Crucible.
Went sailing with Dan Goldwater and friends. From Berkeley, around Alcatraz and back! Wonderful. Sea water, sails, good conversation, propane powered potato gun, “hey, it’s getting dark, we should turn on the running lights.” “Well, yeah, we ’should’”. (what do you want, it’s a free boat?)
Had a great dinner with RICK and Charlotte at Everett & Jones Barbeque in Oakland.
And our evening ended with a bang when we watched a pickup truck in Oakland drive too fast around a turn in front of us roll over. We pulled over, expecting to have to call an ambulance but the kids inside were scared or whatnot and they put the truck back in gear and drove off as fast as they could
Thanks are due to Scott Beale for posting about the Flaming Lotus Girls Calendar. I’ve been promoting it quite a bit in the last few days. In the image, you can see on the right side that I spent $105 for a 1 week all-text ad on LaughingSquid. Click-thrus seem to be good. I also bought some Google Ad-words.
And being the consummate huckster, you can still get -your- FLG Fire Arts Calendar before Christmas. Just go to flaminglotus.com/calendar.
Charlotte was interviewed by a live internet television show called Church of the Perpetual Party when we were at the Fire Arts Festival in July. Here’s the entire show.
Interesting bits:
It might take a while for the whole 50mb show to stream onto your computer.
Here are a couple sites that will let you download videos from YouTube to your computer. YouTube is great and all but it won’t be around forever. So that video your best friend posted of his cat playing piano…. eventually it will get lost on the interweb unless you snag it!
To download videos from other sources, like something that would normally only play in a protected stream to Windows Media Player, use Replay A/V from Applian Technologies.
Get it while it is HOT!!!! Flaming Lotus Girl 2-year calender with all the trimmings
Sexy Flaming Lotus Girls with power tools!
Magnificent sculptures on fire!
Beautiful pictures of the playa!
What more do you need to celebrate the holidays?
A two-year Flaming Lotus Girl calendar featuring big flaming metal sculptures!
They make amazing excellent gifts.
FLG is a female-driven collaborative arts group and we made a calendar. Help us fund big flaming metal art by getting our calendar. Forward and post this freely!
Check out more of our art at SerpentMother.com
And take a look at who’s in August!
I ended my job at Valley Yellow Pages a week ago. TJIC wrote to me about it and I responded…
>Did the yellow pages not end up paying that much?
Not so well. One of the clinchers happened a couple weeks ago… There was an office-wide meeting. The boss, Jesse had a bunch of numbers on the board. The first ones looked like this:
171k 91k 84k 70k 54k 53k 52k 50k… He had 13 numbers on the board in all, the last one was 40k. He told us, “I won’t say who each person is, but these are the earnings of each person in the office. Look how well you can do! I want you to do like this [pointing near the 91k] and not like this [pointing to the clump around 45k]. As he kept speaking about how much money we could make, I thought about the numbers…. 171k, That’s Tambri. She’s a Yellow Pages MACHINE. Her son had a broken arm a month ago and she told us how she was in the Emergency Room going over her Leads waiting for the bone to be set. 91k, that would be Jackie. No one knows how he gets so many contracts. No one. It’s actually a tiny bit suspicious. But hey, he’s doing well for himself.And then there’s the rest of the pack… rather, I should say, the rest of the bell curve. You see, there are 30 salesmen in the office. First, Tambri and Jackie are the outliers. From a few seconds of mental calculations, it looked like the midpoint was about $38k. So the AVERAGE salesman in the office makes $38,000. The meeting wouldn’t have been quite so upbeat if the boss had shown the other side of the curve.
So to answer your question, no, Yellow Pages doesn’t pay that much.
Today we begin a new segment called “Aljazeera or Onion?” where you decide if the headlines before you were taken from Aljazeera or The Onion…
For the answer to today’s quiz, highlight the white-on-white text between the arrows.
—>This appeared on the front page of http://english.aljazeera.net/ on 11-30-07. Truth can be so much stranger than fiction.<–
What a spectacle!
(thanks Marah!)
I hadn’t looked into who the body actor behind that groovy Golf GTI ad was. It is David Bernal, AKA David Elsewhere. Normal physics does not apply to this person!
I don’t think I mentioned this here before but the Serpent Mother made the centerfold (yes, literally the centerfold) of the November 2006 edition of IEEE Spectrum magazine. Spectrum is the Time Magazine of the professional geek world.
Want to inform people that a myth is false? You can’t do it! Merely by talking about the myth, you are reaffirming it in their minds.
Want to “make” something true? Just tell it to your audience repeatedly. Eventually, they’ll mistake being told many times by the same source as being told by many sources the same thing.
This is how advertising works. This is how political attack ads work. This is how selling works.
From On the Media’s “The Truth of False“, aired September 7th, 2007
BOB GARFIELD: Americans may or may not be as sleep-deprived as drug makers claim, but if it were a myth you could try to quash it with the truth. That’s what the Centers for Disease Control Prevention recently did. They sent out a flyer listing various facts and myths about the flu vaccine and labeled them “true or false.” But a study at the University of Michigan found that the CDC flyer actually did nothing to change people’s minds and may have even spread vaccine myths to more people.
Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for The Washington Post, explains that right after reading the flyer, people mostly remembered the false statements as false.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: But about 30 minutes later, older people started to remember some of the false statements as true, and three days later, very large numbers of older people and significant numbers of younger people also started remembering increasing numbers of myths as true. Continue reading ‘The Truth of False’ »
Images from Ben Thompson’s merciless peep army
Here’s a couple SWARM Glamour Shots that Mark Alexander shot of Erik and myself. It’s mid-August and we’re working at the Box Shop on getting the batteries for the 6 orbs up to snuff for the playa.
I had accidentally marked several blog posts as “Private”. That made it so I could read them but noone else could. Here are most of those posts, de-privatized:
