Steel-Cut Sugar And Sugar Scissors

Monday, April 28, 2008

I prefer brown sugar in my coffee. It is a matter of taste, which I have, because white sugar is nasty once you've branched out and realized that it is merely the lowbrow cousin with the dead tooth next to its finer relatives.

I don't know what I'm talking about. Just stay away from white sugar. It menaces children and shows porn to old people on the bus.

My brown sugar does no such thing. It is sweet and good and goes to confession three times a week. Its one downside, though, is that it gets hard. There are some things that are embettered when they get hard, but not so my sugar.

Stop snickering, please. That was a perfectly innocent sentence.

A brown sugar lump hangs out on an old Underwood.

Above is my brown sugar. It has grown so hard that it has thrown off its plastic bag and roams proud and free wherever it is needed throughout my apartment.

I think I have been paying far too much attention to penis enlargement spam lately.

At any rate, my sugar is very solid. I was not sure how to deal with it one morning when I had poured myself a cup of coffee and could not manage to saw off a lump of the stuff. I tried a paring knife and a huge serrated blade, I stabbed at it with a potato peeler, and I even put it back in its bag and started banging on it with a hammer. Using the hammer was a bad decision on my part, because it only seemed to further compact the sugar lump. Also, it alarmed the Palinode.

What the fuck are you doing? he asked, looking up from his Harpers.

Just hammering the sugar, I answered as nonchalantly as possible.

You know, there are other ways to deal with that, he said, and rather than ask him for details, I continued to hammer for a while longer, because why take the easy route when you can experiment on your condiments with large, destructive instruments?

It was at that moment that the heavy duty scissors in my toolbox caught my eye. I figured that if they were supposed to be able to cut metal wires, they could surely at least make a dent in my sugar lump.

A brown sugar lump is threatened by some serious scissors.

And lo, it worked! Steel-cut sugar was born.

It is not uncommon now to hear the Palinode call me to the kitchen to cut my sugar when he makes coffee. I know that there are other ways I could deal with this, like throwing the sugar in the microwave for fifteen seconds with a slice of bread, for instance, but this new method of sugar disbursement brings a little extra excitement back to my coffee routine.

Also? My toolbox scissors are now known as the Sugar Scissors, which means that I am an inventor who has successfully invented two things simultaneously: steel-cut sugar and sugar scissors. I am going to get on one of those infomercial shows, cut sugar for an hour into blenders/onto toast/over desserts while an audience oohs and aahs over my visionary kitchen implement, and make a million dollars. I just know it.

Labels: the miscellany, the photographs

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Alltop.com: An Online Magazine Rack

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Many of you have, no doubt, heard of Alltop by now. The website has been much talked about since before its formal launch on March 11, 2008. The three people behind Alltop are Will Mayall, Kathryn Henkens, and the front man of the operation, Guy Kawasaki. They are the same three who earlier created Truemors.

I first heard of Alltop through Twitter, a social networking site that spreads news faster and quicker than any other I have found, and Alltop seemed to hit the floor running with the help of Twitter. Guy's involvement in the community was and is an important tool in the development of Alltop:

"Twitter played a major role in Alltop," Guy told me. "It would not be the same without Twitter. Without fail the Twitter community would always come back to me with the best stuff."

Alltop, then, is a collection of the stuff that top bloggers, Twitterers, and social media buffs like to read. It's not the wisdom of crowds, so much as the wisdom of the most engaged social media advocates.

- excerpt from "The Guidewire: Alltop Is One Stop Blog Shop; Curation As It Should Be", 11 March 2008

When I first found Alltop, I immediately liked how easy it is on the eyes. It does not accost its users with blinking objects or garish colour-schemes, and the feeds in each of the categories are arranged on one page for easy browsing through each of the what are now 46 categories.

I will let Alltop sell itself:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from "all the top" sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — "aggregations" — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this "single-page aggregation."

You can think of an Alltop site as a "dashboard," "table of contents," or even a "digital magazine rack" of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In this way, our goal is the "cessation of Internet stagnation."

- excerpt from "About Alltop" on Alltop.com

There are quite a few who also laud the simplicity of Alltop, including ReadWriteWeb and Download Squad. They see that it "... is a nice, simple service that you can start pointing your non-geek friends and family to", and that it is "... a way to quickly access the headlines for a certain topic, without having to open up the RSS reader (or even Google Reader)". Guy Kawasaki describes it best as "... an 'online magazine rack' that displays the news from the top publications and blogs." In other words, it is an uncomplicated, user-friendly guide to some of the best of the web.

Not everyone understands this simple, pared down, magazine-rack concept, though, and strangely, it is Alltop's apparent simplicity that is drawing the most criticism. TechCrunch called it a "big pile of nothing", and Paul Stamatiou denigrated Alltop because "[Guy Kawasaki] seems set on launching... ideas for cheap...":

Person 1: Hey! We should build an awesome Web 2.0 app.
Person 2: That’s a great idea! Think we can do it for $10,000?
Person 1: No problem, we’ll just launch with no features and overpay someone to use open source RSS aggregation tools to grab headlines.
Person 2: I like it. When’s launch?
Person 1: Is tomorrow good for you?

- excerpt from Paul Stamatiou's "Useless Has A Name: Alltop", 11 March 2008

With a modicum of research (that same day, an interview between Kristen Nicole of Mashable and Guy Kawasaki at SXSW came out that explained the costs incurred with Alltop) and some anger management, Paul would have learned how that $10,000 was spent:

G K: Alltop cost us, so far, $10,000, but out of that $6,000 went to buy three Macbook Airs, as gifts for the programmers, and of the remaining $4,000, three went to buy Alltop.com, the domain.

- excerpt from Red Herring: Kawasaki Talks Alltop And Egos, an interview with Lalee Sadighi, 17 March 2007

Alltop has even been criticized for its inclusivity, which just strikes me as sour grapes. Exclusivity would have drawn a lot of bitterness out of those seeking fame on the internet, but inclusivity that still excludes them is like throwing blood in the water for people who feel that they have been left out. Personally, I find such criticism laughable. The complaint of oh-my-gawd-he-let-too-many-sites-in just sounds hollow. If you think Guy Kawasaki's magazine rack is too diverse, create your own. If you don't want to be a part of somebody's club, talking about how much they suck does not convince me of your apathy.

I am obviously a fan of Alltop, and to be perfectly transparent, I was a fan before I was inducted into life.alltop.com:

Yep, that's this very website listed in the top right corner of that screenshot. I was already clicking through it before then, because I found Alltop to be an excellent hub from which I could find some truly decent weblogs across a lot of categories. I am honoured to see that my website has been included.

So, drop in at Alltop and wander around a while. Guy has chose a diverse range of categories and websites, based not on their preexistent popularity but on whether or not he likes them, which means that if you like Guy, you might like what he's got to show you. I know I do.

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We Are No Longer Living Like Invalids!

Friday, March 28, 2008

Remember this?


Mid-Spring-Clean Mess from schmutzie on Vimeo.

That is pretty much what a living room looks like when you sleep, eat, change clothes, watch television, and do all your computer work in one room since June 2007. People would come over and say Cool! Your bed's in the living room! It looks so cozy. Yeah, no.

Living out of one room like a couple of invalids meant piles of musty clothing growing on chairs and under the bed. It meant that the two cats tended to stay in there with us most of the time, too, and we ended up eating more cat hair than we would care to contemplate. When I washed the sheets, it was no longer strange to find old gobs of salsa, coffee stains, and shredded cheese stuck to pillow cases. Lest you think us revolting house-hobos, I will have you know that I did my best to keep things under control, but as someone whose domestic activities more closely resemble a coma than washing the floor, you have to give me points for doing regular loads of laundry.

I took time off work to get my head together, because late Spring is the crazymaker and I am the object of its affections, and so I had this whole week at home to spend either contemplating the collection of scars that now fill my bellybutton (ex-piercings and a hysterectomy gave it so much character, don't you know) or fixing up this fugtastic mess of bad design that our apartment had become over nine months of our being in varying stages of convalescence. Since I can already map my belly button to within the nearest nanometer, I chose to clean and rearrange the apartment.

Here's what I did, because this is endlessly fascinating, I know: by myself, because the Palinode's back is still on the mend, I moved two dressers across the bedroom, carried a sofa from the bedroom to the living room, moved a queen size mattress/frame/headboard and two night tables from the living room to the bedroom, washed and hung curtains, swept and vacuumed, carried a large armchair from the office to the living room, and lastly, my crowning achievement, I converted a tall, awkward kitchen dining table into a low coffee table without the aid of a drill. Behold:

I screwed in sixteen screws without power tools. I am beastly mammoth.

Wait, I have to go masturbate now. My muskuls are very hottening.

There. All better. And now for the second behold:

Compared to the earlier video, the living room has undergone an amazing transformation replete with orange chenille and fuchsia furniture coverings. I have shown the above picture of our living room to several people, and while they all remark on my coffee table, no one says anything about our electric furniture. Do I blame them? No. They are just trying to be polite in the face of my orange/fuchsia/beige colour scheme, and I am just repurposing old bedspreads.

Oh, and the beige part of that colour scheme? That happened because I found the curtains for $6.66 on a sale table at Sears. They are the Devil's curtains. How could I not own the Devil's curtains?

So, while Spring-the-Crazymaker still holds some sway over the workings of my brain, I at least have a nice place in which to grind my teeth, and that makes all the difference.

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Who Said I Could Have Krazy Glue?

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Who said I could have Krazy Glue? Well, I did, of course, because I am an adult after all, but, as an adult, I should have better sense by now than to let myself use Krazy Glue.

There were six commas in that last sentence. No, I will not change it. I am actually kind of fascinated with my ability to bandy about commas to the tune of one comma for every 4.67 words. I am sure that I could inflict far more comma-heaviness on you, but this is not about commas. This is about Krazy Glue.

I own a bracelet that has these smooth red stones framed in silver. When I arrived at work the other day, one of the stones had fallen out of one of the frames, which I simply could not abide. Since I had bought the bracelet off a table from a vendor that was travelling through town, I could not take it back for replacement, so I decided that I would fix it myself and went out and bought some Krazy Glue over my lunch hour.

It started out well enough, as all matters with Krazy Glue start out. I had something that was broken, I wanted that something fixed, and I had the means to fix that something within approximately ten seconds. It all just seems so delightfully simple.

I always seem to forget the time that time I glued myself to a tacky Christmas ornament at work in July and spent two hours trying to help customers without letting on that my right-handed self had a ceramic puppy driving a choo-choo train glued to her right hand.

So, I was perturbed with myself when, twelve seconds after I had applied the glue, I realized that my bracelet was glued to my desk by the smallest stone with the most delicate links.

Did I mention that other time when my thumb and forefinger were glued together? No? Well, I did that once, too. And then there was that time when my thumb was briefly stuck to my forehead between my eyebrows. That was one of the few times in my life when I was truly thankful for my greasy complexion.

The bracelet eventually did come loose from my desk, and I wisely left the tube of Krazy Glue away from myself at work so that I do not get it into my fool head to start gluing things together around the apartment. In my attempt to remove the jewellery from the desk, however, I also nearly went the extra step of then gluing myself to the bracelet, so I think that it is safe to say that my Krazy Glue rights are hereby suspended.

The End.

Labels: the miscellany, the photographs

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There Is No Future In This Architecture

Thursday, March 20, 2008

I am one of those people who does not own a car. Neither does the Palinode. Our childlessness and lack of shopping lust makes a car seem like an extremely expensive child. The huge expense of energy - personal, financial, and planetary - that goes into the care and feeding of cars stresses me out just to think about it. When my co-workers were shocked at the cost of my monthly bus pass, I pointed out that they spend that much just to park their cars at work every month, and that is if they do not count all the nickle-and-diming when they pay for parking when they leave their neighbourhoods.

Don't get the wrong idea. I am not on some soapbox to eradicate cars. If the Palinode and I had children to ferry about or had to commute to work, a car would make more sense, but hundreds of dollars a month spent on car payments, gas, parking, and general upkeep just seems insane when we can go to work and do our shopping fairly locally.

This car-free style of living means that I take the city bus nearly every day, and I must say, the transit system and the advertisers who install advertising on those buses must hate us low-class cretins who use public transport, because they do their best to make it an aesthetically displeasing experience. The ads that grace the interiors of the buses are often clumsy-looking and garish. On top of that, ads like the one in the following photo are somehow deemed acceptable, despite their lack of any sense:

The above ad reads "The perfect give giving solution". GIVE giving? This ad was actually written by a person, and then the copy was approved by another person or persons, and then it went through a designer, who must have been at least somewhat literate, and then the ad was approved by the Southland Mall, and then the ad was approved by someone within public transport, and then it went through a printing service, and then someone installed it on the buses, and in all that fooferah that goes into getting an ad out into the public, NO ONE STOPPED TO SAY WHAT THE FUCK IS "GIVE GIVING"?

They hate us, and if they don't hate us, they at least think we are not very bright, or maybe they just don't care, because WE ARE NOT DOING OUR PART TO SUCK THE PLANET OF ITS REMAINING RESOURCES AND WE MUST BE ILLITERATE.

Moving on, here is another example of the ugliness of buses in general:

As you can see, this is Avril Lavigne's butt ugly tour bus. Of course, it is aesthetically on par with her website, so there's that.

I was talking to a couple of her roadies, and they said that Bubblicious was backing the tour. Apparently, they have buckets of the gum on their bus that no one is eating. I guess Avril's backup dancers have had enough of it. Personally, I think that it is the fact that they spend half their time in a matte black tour bus which windows they probably cannot even see through properly what with them being nearly blacked out and plastered over with a fuschia Bubblicious logo. Someone send them full-spectrum light boxes and some vegetables, stat.

I have been called an idealist since I was a very young child, and maybe this is one of my crazy ideals, but I do not see why we cannot surround ourselves with beautiful things. Why do we have acres and acres of salmon stucco housing plonked down around strip malls? Why are parking garages little more than excavated concrete? Why do electrical boxes have to be such eyesores? Why are there whole swathes of uninspired big box stores when they are neither convenient nor terribly accessible? There is no future in this architecture.

Usually, because I live in an older building in an older neighbourhood, I can go for weeks without noticing how ugly a city can be, but then I always make the mistake of looking up when I am on the bus, and there it is, plain as a misspelled, prosaic advertisement jammed into runners above my head.

This idealist wants an environment that lifts me out of the to-and-from mundanity, not one that further entrenches me or, even worse, is so caustic to the eye that I turn even further in on myself.

Oh, hell, at this point, I just might be able to settle for grammatical sentences with correct spelling. Will someone please send the Southland Mall a dictionary and a copy of English Grammar for Dummies?

Labels: the miscellany, the photographs

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Me On Powerful Men

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

I am a participant in Blog 365.

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Garfield Minus Garfield

Saturday, March 1, 2008

After watching the Palinode cry and fall over repeatedly while reading through this link I sent him, I decided that I would be committing a great injustice if I did not share this goodness with you all: Garfield Minus Garfield.

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Oscars Schmoscars. It's All About The Whiskey And The Twitter.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

I watched the Oscars on Sunday night along with several million other viewers, but I did it with a little bit of a twist.

I sat down with a glass of Crown Royal and Pepsi and logged in to Twitter. Twitter is a social networking website that does one thing: it asks you the question "What are you doing?" and gives you 140 characters to answer. Nothing more. Of course, I and my fellow twits often dispense with the question and spout whatever thing comes to mind, which is exactly what many of us did during the Oscars. We bantered back and forth about the Oscar countdown icon, the dresses, obvious hair replacement procedures, and the overuse of Botox on what used to be some fine faces.

Most years, I do not bother to watch the Oscars in their entirety. I usually flip back and forth between television stations to check in on who is winning what with the interest of someone who knows they will hear any pertinent information from friends and internet buzz for days following but whose real interest is to see the flustered tech award winners flush and stumble through gratitude they practiced while figuring out how to attach a cumberbund from a rental tuxedo. This year, I managed to stick it out through the entire Oscars awards show between hard liquor and live-twittering the highs and lows of the evening, because it made it feel like an event I was actively involved in rather than a slow road to zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Let's face it: the behind-the-scenes sound mixers and film editors are far more fun to watch receive their awards than the plastinated face of Nicole Kidmann delivering unnatural-sounding, scripted remarks with the aid of her bottom lip or than Owen Wilson's squinty read from a tele-prompter as he leaned in to get a closer look from the podium. We like the people who make film do the magic that it does. An actor can perform the hell out of a character, but without the wondrous actions of the tech gurus, it often would come off as a community theatre performance of "Our Town".

And that brings me to exactly what made the Oscars fall flat and what has been making the Oscars fall flat for years. We are shown multiple montages throughout the awards show of actors, actresses, space-filling bee themed movie clips, etcetera, but there is very little meat, and we want meat after having sat through the low-key, thoughtful Barbara Walters special that precedes it. The advertising between Oscars segments is too short for a decent bathroom break or snack fix, and after racing through toilet paper and zippers and tripping over the cat, what do we get? Another montage that feels just like the ads we had hoped we'd missed.

Here is what I would like to see in future televised Oscars presentations. Junk the pre-Oscars Barbara Walters interviews as they now stand. Keep her, because we like her, and she does not giggle to ingratiate herself to her guests, but make it more documentary-style. Tell us about some of the smaller films, behind-the-scenes work, and some historical context that we, the average movie-goers, rarely, if ever, get to see. Make it be at turns fun and spontaneous and serious and thoughtful. If they must have so many montages, intersperse them here. This kind of exposé would help to make the public feel a part of the awards, because we could see people doing work we understand to affect a greater cause. It would lead us up to a better view of an industry whose PR has been taken over by paparazzi snapping shots of starlets at their worst.

During the Oscars presentation show itself, I want to see fewer of these montages, as they convey little more than look-at-that-actor-what's-his-name? and she-was-in-that-film-I-should-see-but-don't-know-the-name-of. Instead, give me speeches! This may sound strange, but the three seconds that each winner is allotted is far too short. If the show is about them, I want to hear them. I want to feel that I know them. We do not want to hear stilted pap read aloud. We want to hear spontaneity, joy, and the passion that brings this entertainment about. On Sunday, there was a little spontaneity, but only from a few of the presenters, which was disappointing. Without enough material to cement our memories of these highly acclaimed individuals, we, as an audience, are left with nothing to care about. The Oscars? Pffft.

If you took away the montages and the less-than-inspired award introductions from Sunday's Oscars, we would be left with only the briefest of brief acceptance speeches and a few musical numbers. It is the live performance and acceptance speeches that are the highlight of the show! And yet they are the least of the broadcast. I know that there was very little preparation time this year due to the writers' strike, but I honestly did not see much of a difference over recent years. Next year, if I bother to sit through another round of the Oscars, it will not be because I care so much about the industry greats or expect an entertaining show. It will be because three glasses of mixed liquor and a good dose of Twitter attitude is an event unto itself.

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I'm Eighty-Five And Holding

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Did you know that I am old? Because, wow, am I ever. I know. It is shocking. I had no idea either until I found myself hobbling down the street this afternoon and wondering where all those kids in the restaurant found enough money to buy their own lunches.

It all started a couple of nights ago. br0k3nglass and I were standing outside on a clear night that was remarkingly not in the deathly cold category, and he pointed at a small, makeshift skating rink across the street in the park.

We should skate on that! he said.

Absolutely! I yelled, already running as fast as my wedge heels could take me across an icy road.

We did that thing that you do on ice when you do not have skates where you get a good running start, see how far you can slide, run, slide, run, slide, etcetera. This was great fun. I felt like I was seven. I was flying! And then, oh gawd, and then, I slid too well. I was experiencing that ecstatic joy of speed and cold air rushing through my hair when my feet shot ahead of my body at such an astounding rate that they kicked up off the ground. For a moment, I hung there, hip height and horizontal, thinking fuck me. I was stretched out in midair like a magic trick. And then, because of Isaac Newton and his bloody law of gravity, that time-expanding hang in which I was given space to think over exactly how much it was going to hurt in approximately 0.2 seconds lasted approximately 0.2 seconds.

BAM! I landed first on my left butt cheek and elbow and then the rest of my limbs and my head bounced against the ice.

I thought it would hurt right away, but I was wrong in that assumption. I did not account for the fact that I would experience a short blackout before I saw br0k3nglass standing over me with huge eyes asking if I was alright. Cool, I thought. He's all red and those lights so sparkly around his head.

So, now I hobble and have to ease myself in and out of chairs, which is what I did at the Vietnamese restaurant we went to today. I hobbled and eased and ate my noodles. I chatted with the Palinode. I checked out the other people in the restaurant. I did a double-take of the people in the restaurant.

How old were these people? I mean really? Their hair was so natural in colour and finely textured. Their skin, aside from occasional acne, was glowing. They laughed too loud with really white teeth framed by full lips. They must have been sixteen. But why was the restaurant almost solely populated with sixteen-year-olds with money? It was more of grown-up place than a teenage hangout. Didn't sixteen-year-olds suck back as many free refills as they can rather than order whole meals?

Suddenly, I was hit with the realization that these were not teenagers. These were twenty-somethings. This is what twenty-somethings look like to me all of a sudden. I mean, I am only thirty-five, but sweet jeebus, did they look like kids to me all of a sudden. These people were old enough for full-time jobs and paying rent and getting married and having babies and buying cars, and I had an urge to tell a couple of them to do up their coats when they were leaving.

I was made all the more keenly aware of this when I had to ease myself out of my chair and hobble to the cash register to pay. And the Palinode is still walking with a cane. And I've been wearing a little-old-lady fake-fur coat.

I have a sudden urge to invest in life insurance. And maybe pick out a funeral plot or two.

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1,000 Words About Things I Love

Thursday, February 14, 2008

I love the memory of the soft red socks I used to own. I love sea glass. I love the feel of lip balm after I have applied it with the middle finger of my right hand and then rubbed the excess into the palm of my left. I love the word "balm", but not when I can hear the L too strongly. I love vintage tin wind-up toys, especially if they are birds. I love old, wooden desks, because their drawers sound soft when you slide them in and out after all the years of wear. I love going through old bibles in second-hand stores to see what slips of paper and notations were left in them. I love that I still remember the smell and humidity of my maternal grandmothers' house when it was full of people and there was a big supper in the oven. I love the smell of old, musty books with yellowed pages. I love that when you slow down Alvin & The Chipmunks and Smurfs records, they sound like country-and-western. I love how the Christmas wrapping paper from the 1960s that my paternal grandmother was using in the 1980s sounded as we carefully unwrapped it to save it for another year. I love the old tires attached to antique baby buggies. I love feeling the rails to see if a train is coming to flatten our pennies.

I love chocolate covered doughnuts filled with venetian cream. I love strong, hot coffee in the morning before work. I love the feel of a spoonful of brown sugar in my mouth, especially the little crunch before it melts on my tongue. I love putting a wide slice of orange peel over my teeth and smiling a big, orange smile. I love toast. I love the look of those flat, circular confetti sprinkles, even though I do not like to eat them. I love buttered spaghetti with salt. I love how root vegetables make me feel full and satisfied. I love the bright taste of pea pod shells after they have been peeled. I love dusty raspberries right off the bush. I love the feel of kiwi fur on my chin. I love the sound of an avocado pit when it rolls across a hardwood floor. I love eating buttered popcorn and washing it down with a tall glass of ice cold 1% milk. I love the feeling of bun dough squeezing through my fists to make perfect spheres.

I love it when Onion crawls under the blankets to cuddle with me in the morning. I love that each of Onion's feet has one black toe and that it is a different toe on each foot. I love the wookie noises Oskar makes when he sits on my shoulders and butts the back of my head while I put on makeup. I love how my old cat, Pepper, used to hang from the chains on the cuckoo clock to make the little bird pop out and tweet repeatedly. I love that little vole that got so used to me at the bus stop one day that we could spend a good while eying each other up. I love raccoons. I love bandicoots, simply because they are called bandicoots. I love the wild red fox that let me pet his head when I was thirteen. I love the bear that did not eat me two years before that.

I love the crunch of empty snail shells into soft sand under bare feet. I love the long, golden sunshine that makes everything glow just before the sun drops down below the western horizon. I love how the sound of poplar trees' leaves in the wind is like shallow water rushing over stones in a fast stream. I love the feel of grass in the yard when it has been left to grow long enough to seed. I love the insane vibration against my lips when I whistle through a blade of quack grass held between my thumbs. I love how snow has the squeaky sound of crushing styrofoam beneath my feet when it is particularly cold out. I love that ice crystals in the atmosphere magnify the appearance of the moon so that you can see even the part that is in Earth's shadow. I love the soft slapping sound of lake water against the canoe when I am lying in the bottom. I love the sting of my knees burning in the sun. I love tree stumps that are the right height for sitting down. I love picking through all the old string and gum wrappers and whatsits woven into vacant, found birds’ nests.

I love that crazy guy who is sometimes on the bus who has a laugh that actually might fit the word "chortle". I love my hands. I love that crinkly, sleepy look that the Palinode gets around his eyes when he leans in to kiss me and he is putting his whole heart and soul into it. I love that so many of my friends are filled with so much creative energy and pour it into so much music, art, clothing, writing, learning, and crafting. I love the softness of hugs from women with large breasts. I love super-localized colloquial terms shared between groups of friends. I love that the people I know on Twitter are slowly but surely killing my cynicism. I love it when people have Fred Flintstone feet. I love that everyone wants to be loved and has to work so hard to learn how to give it away to others, because we have to fight so hard to get there, and it is the fight that makes us realize how important it is and why we should. I love that the more love we find and give, the more there is lying around all over the place, like when you recognize someone for the first time, and then they are suddenly everywhere that you are.

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A Complete And Utter Spoiler Of Terrence Malick's 1973 "Badlands"

Friday, February 8, 2008

Terrence Malick directed Badlands, which came out in 1973 when I was no more than a few months old and busy rubbing my dark, curly birth hair out into a fading, blonde mohawk.

The movie is based on the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, a romantic pairing of a nineteen-year-old man and a fourteen-year old girl who fell through the cracks and slid haphazardly into a murder spree that began with a gas station attendant and Caril's immediate family and involved several other victims before a high speed police chase brought it to an end. Starkweather and Fugate's frightening adventure has inspired more than a few films, such as my beloved Badlands, as well as David Lynch's Wild At Heart, Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott's True Romance, Dominic Sena's Kalifornia, Robert Markowitz's Murder In The Heartland, C. M. Talkington's Love And A .45, and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.

The Palinode introduced me to Badlands a few years ago, and rarely have I been so drawn into a film. I studied the youthful faces of of Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen from thirty years before, their lean bodies, the low affect of their speech and facial expressions. What initially came off as flatness turned into space for my imagination to roam and carry me in as an active participant in the film's creation, and that is exactly how it feels when I watch it again. And again. I co-create within the film's broad space and sense of silence.

When the movie opens, Kit (Martin Sheen) is a garbageman who gets his footwear from wealthier people's alleys. Holly (Sissy Spacek) is the motherless daughter of a sign painter in her early teens who takes music lessons and twirls a baton.

(All of the following images are digital photographs of my television while I was watching Badlands last weekend. I know that I could have taken stills directly from the disc, but my disc drive is non-functional, so you will just have to deal with the blur and the wavy lines.)

See?

These opening scenes tell us that the film does not take place in the present day, because Holly is out twirling her baton in the middle of the street without fear of being run over, and Kit is pulling off that James Dean, white-t-shirt-and-jeans, sauntering kind of look.

Kit approaches the guileless Holly of the short shorts and chats her up a little. He plays shy and she plays standoffish, but eventually they walk down the road together.

She tells Kit that her father does not want her to date him, because he is a garbageman, so Kit tells her that he knows a lot about other people's garbage, and what does her old man know about it anyway. She agrees.

I do not know what her old man is so uptight about. It's not like his job as a sign painter is so high up on the economic scale. Unless it is. I could be wrong.

I missed taking pictures of their lackluster courtship, but there are scenes of them having picnics and kissing outside in nature, which I think is supposed to impress upon us the naturalness and outsider status of their relationship. Moving characters into nature from the controlled conditions of urban life often means that they are more wild, less tameable, and outside the usual order of things. It hints at chaos.

Anyway, despite how bored they look all the time, even during their first conversation after he has taken her virginity, you know that they are bound together, at least in Kit's mind, because he takes a rock from the place where they had sex by which to remember their act of love. He takes a piece of the wildness with them.

Oh yeah, so, Kit comes by to get Holly from her house one day and shoots her father. Then, he pours gasoline all over the inside of the house and sets it on fire while playing a record he made in which he explains that they are responsible and have gone off to kill themselves, which they have not. He is trying to cover his tracks.

They go live in a thinly wooded forest in a treehouse where they live off the land. Holly starts to dress slightly more grown up and dances with him to music.

I also missed a shot of when Kit kills bounty hunters that have found their little forest hideaway, but I think he kills two of them. Maybe three.

Holly and Kit take off to see an old family friend of Kit's. Kit gives him a live chicken as a present, which confuses me, because shortly afterward he shoots the guy in the belly for what seems like no good reason. Kit and Holly sit with the man for many hours while he slowly dies of his bullet wound. How thoughtful of them.

They have to get away from their latest crime scene, so Kit pulls over a car with a pair of teenaged lovers in it, forces them into a storm cellar, locks them inside, shoots a couple of bullets through the door, and steals their car. It is not clear if the couple is harmed or not. It does not seem to matter, though, because we are in the midst of swiftly rising action on our way to the climax.

They come across a large house and force their way in via a deaf maid and hold her and the rich owner of the home hostage. Kit plays with a dictaphone and records his wisdom for living a good life, and a lot of his advice is actually pretty good, so you feel a little bad for him that he has allowed circumstances to turn himself into such a psychopath.

They steal supplies and the rich man's car, and they drive off through a great expanse of nothingness, a terrain with no defining features, because Kit and Holly do not know what they are doing aside from moving forward.

See? They did it again. Their entrance into nature shows how lost and skewed they are.

Again, it is in the wildness of nature that their romance blossoms again. When they dance together in the dark by the side of the road, you know that they are bound together until the end, and that, in a way, this is all they will ever be: two lost individuals without a human tie to this earth aside from each other, waiting for the inevitable.

Is that an oil well they are next to? If not, it is something like that, because they steal gas from places like that to fuel their stolen car.

This time, though, the jig is up, because a helicopter swoops in. Holly is tired of running and chooses to stay where she is.

Kit, of course, hops in the car. He is in it until the bitter end. It is his only destiny. He and the police engage in a high speed chase. We are at the climax!

Kit knows it is time to give himself up, so he pulls the car over and builds a little pile out of rocks to commemorate the event. He is big on using rocks to remember things. Again, this is supposed to make us see his connection to nature and, therefore, his wild lawlessness and free spirit.

I love how he so naturally accepts his fame when all the military and police guys are in awe of him. He stands so coolly on the wing of that airplane handing out his personal effects as though they are highly esteemed mementos. You can tell that all the law enforcement men think that Kit is pretty cool.

Kit and Holly are allowed one last conversation before they are taken away from each other. It does not feel overly sad, or even very emotional, because this whole thing was inevitable. They did not expect anything else, even though Kit did dream of crossing the border into Saskatchewan. Dreams of the future were not for them, only the moments in which they were.

The doting crowd of military and law men crowd around to see Kit off, and we are treated to a long shot of Kit in the plane.

He and Holly are no more. The closing voiceover narrative tells us that Kit is put to death six months later and Holly marries the son of the lawyer who defended her.

The End.


The thing that is so great about this film is that I can tell you all that, but you have no idea how strong a roll the musical score plays, or how much the inferred quiet affects your involvement in the film, or how the story allows you to feel like you understand the so-called necessity of Kit and Holly's actions.

In short, it is good, and you should watch it.

The End, again.

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Labels: the miscellany, the photographs

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Pink Cupcakes

Monday, February 4, 2008

At breakfast with a friend of ours on Saturday morning, the words Business and Venture and Sex and Move came together somehow. I am not sure who said them. My brain wants to say that I did, but I think it was the Palinode or our friend.

At any rate, I piped up: That sounds like a band name, "Business Venture Sex Move". Or maybe I did not pipe up.

I like the way Business Venture Sex Move sounds. I would like to be in that band, or at least watch them play.

I like to think I made them up myself, even though I probably did not.

Then, we went grocery shopping, and I fell in love with a tray of pink cupcakes.

I do not like the colour pink or things that are heart-shaped. My sweet tooth wore itself out in my early thirties. Foods that are too artificially coloured make me nervous. There the cupcakes were, though, being frighteningly pink and absorbing more colour into their mounds of icing from the hear-shaped sprinkles that had been thrown into the clear plastic tray with them.

They were miniature, like they were treats for people with little hands or those who pretend that miniature food will not make them fat.

Despite my finding them to be hideous and sickening, I wanted to buy them so I could take pictures of them in the evening light.

Can I buy those? I asked the Palinode, as if I were eight years old and had to ask permission.

Of course, but why? he asked back. His face was pulled into a grimace of disgust.

Because they are so pink! I said.

I carried the tray in my hands while we went through the checkout and while we took a taxi home and while we carried our groceries up to our apartment. I did not want anything to press the plastic carton in to wreck the swirls that were still perfect on half the cupcakes.

In the middle of my cupcake photo shoot, which took place on blue bristle board on a corner of the bed where the evening light shone long, the cats moved in to investigate. They upended the cupcake, leaving stains on the paper and pink icing on their nose leather. After that, they kept sneaking back to steal more icing. It is two days later, and they are still the only inhabitants of our apartment to eat that stuff.

I found a pair of tweezers in the carton yesterday. The pink cupcakes must have become insecure about the cat hair moustachios they were sprouting.

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Labels: the miscellany, the photographs

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What Is An Atomic Orbital?

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Today, I discovered the beauty of atomic orbitals through an e-mail sent to me by my friend Mary:

Hey [Schmutzie], check these out...

They are pictures of an electron and a proton, a hydrogen. They increase energy input to show off the shapes of the different orbitals as the electron speeds up, and moves through each orbital. The dark ones are only because they don't exist (p1, d1, d2).

They are so beautiful I think.

Did I understand what I was looking at? No, but I thought it was beautiful, too, and I got lost looking at atomic orbitals on the internet for an hour, so I did a little research into what they are.

Feel free to skip by all the new knowledge you could have to get to the actual point of this whole post at the end: pretty pictures of atomic orbitals.


A Short Lesson In Atomic Orbitals
by Schmutzie

An atomic orbital is the region in space that an electron is likely to inhabit when it travels around the nucleus of an atom. If you plotted the path of the Earth around the Sun, that would be an orbital.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, if I put it in extremely simplified terms, tells us that we cannot know where an electron is or where it is going to be next. Those electrons are crazy now-you-see-'em-now-you-don't free spirits. This means that you cannot plot a specific path of an electron around the nucleus of an atom, but if you plot each instant that an electron shows up, and if you do it over and over, you can slowly build up a three-dimensional map of the places that a particular electron is likely to be around that nucleus.

Think of it this way: you live in your house (or apartment or trailer or whathaveyou), but you don't spend your time in all the space your house has to offer, so you track all of the space that your body actually occupies for a week to show where you are likely to be found at any given time. The resulting image would show us that you were not likely to be found up in the corner by the ceiling or in the spaces between the walls where the heating ducts run.

Okay, look, I know that my example does not explain atomic orbitals by using something that orbits, but you get it, right?

There is also a lot of information regarding specifics like s, p, d, and f orbitals, but the whole point of this report was to give you the simplest explanation I could of what these pretty pictures are.

This is what some atomic orbitals look like:

Pretty, no?

The End.

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Labels: the miscellany

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