Spastic Monkeys

Of Weather!

So how prophetic was my prediction of 22 Feb, huh?

We’ve just had a week of weather cold enough to freeze your balls to your leg. It snowed — yes snowed — everyday from Wednesday to Monday. Didn’t last long or stay around longer than Linsay Lohan at an AA meeting, but it did in fact count as snow.

Luckily, the weather peoples say Spring is back from its break and will continue forthwith. This is good because I have a hard time with having to wear heavy coats and gloves in April. That’s just wrong.

The Catholic Church has added seven new sins to the original seven mortal sins. I can’t name the original seven off the top of my head and frankly I’m too damned lazy to look them up now. They were mentioned in the various articles about this latest idiocy from a Christian sect which has been rapidly losing relevancy in this modern world, mainly from its own efforts, so if you really want to know what they are, go look them up. I can’t be bothered.

Anyway, here they are:

polluting

Whatever you do, DON’T FART.

Seriously, I remember doing some research years ago on some earth science requirements I needed for school or a merit badge or something, and the guy I was working with said something that has stuck with me all these years. Everything we do during the course of a day pollutes the environment. Step outside in the morning to get the paper and breathe out and BAM you’ve polluted the environment. The question is to what degree and whether the pollution is permanent or can be mitigated.

genetic engineering

“Igor! Igor! Put fluffy back in the cage! No, no, he doesn’t bite. Putting your head in his mouth is his way of sharing his love. Igor — Fluffy! Put Igor down! Fluffy! Bad Fluffy! Bad!

obscene riches

Does that mean Donald Trump can no longer justify his combover as an affectation of a rich eccentric prick? One man’s obscene riches is another’s reward for being successful. I, for one, consider highly successful and obscenely rich people role models for fuck’s sake because I would very much like to be highly successful and obscenely rich myself one day. Having money makes life so much easier than not. Therefore, having an obscene amount of money will make life obscenely easy. In this case, I suspect the Church is working from the assumption that having obscene riches yourself harms others. This is a stupid idea.

taking drugs

You can take my coffee from my cold, dead hands. Not before.

abortion

Not a surprise to me. Frankly, I can’t think of anything snarky to say here given the conflict I have with it personally. Read Freakonomics before you judge.

pedophilia

Strong bit of Irony here. The Church has just admitted what the rest of us has known for years, that the Church itself is going to hell. Woot!

social injustice
Alright! We’ll never have to put up with Paris Hilton, the Olsen Twins, or Nancy Pelosi’s face. Ever again!

Click the blue words to take the whizz quiz:

The following will come as no surprise to some of my friends who read this, all 2 of you.

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You’d be forced to wear clothes straight out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

It’s lunchtime and I’m starving.

Across the street from the office is a row of food carts. I’m thinking Tom Yum soup from the good Thai cart but I’m really hungry and I know it won’t last into the afternoon so I go to the Los Locos Burritos cart because they have really good chicken soft tacos. I can get three and a soda for the same price as their 2 taco combo and avoid the rice and beans I won’t eat anyway.

It’s a little after noon and the side walk is crowded with hungry people. The popular carts have lines bisecting the sidewalk the undecided bob and weave through and the committed huddle in little groups by the curb, waiting for their chicken tika and naan, philly cheese steak (damned good, a guilty pleasure), or burritos, maybe a salad or soup. The Thai cart is near the end of the row on the right and the Mexican place I decide to go to is the second from the left.

As I walk out the building courtyard into the early Spring sunlight, I hear some off key singing. I jaywalk across the street toward the the crazy little donkeys and realize the weatherman is a lying shit for forecasting 60 degrees and sunny. It’s sunny but no way is it 60, not with that wind blowing through the artificial canyon walls. The dude producing all the noise is a scruffy black guy with a guitar. His anemic attempts at the blues stabs the air around him, but I’m too hungry to care that much as a I order my food.

It takes a few minutes for my food to come up. I’m suffering in silence with the rest of the multitude at this guy’s voice and cursing the weatherman under my breath. Sixty degrees, my ass. From the left, a mother slowly pushes her stroller through the crowd. The business end of the leash tied to the stroller trails a long-haired dachshund who does not look happy at all the tall people with big feet crowding around. The poor thing walks a drunken line as it tries to keep its distance from, well, everything.

As the stroller passes the guy croaking out something resembling a tune, he leans down toward the dog. The dog looks up and gives him one good bark, right in the guy’s face, before trotting away.

I smile and think, “Well done, sir canine. Well done.”

A bubbler is an old fashioned name for a drinking fountain.

A Benson Bubbler is a drinking fountain named after Simon Benson, the rich guy who donated 20 of them to the city of Portland in the early days of the 20th century.

Benson gave the City of Portland $10,000 for the installation of twenty bronze drinking fountains. These fountains, known as Benson Bubblers, are still in use in downtown Portland. It is said that the fountains were put in to dissaude workers on his hotel from going to a bar to get a drink of water and then decide on an alcoholic beverage instead.

The intention was a double exposure, since the fish eye has a cool switch which allows for that, but alas, the effect was less than stunning.

Benson Bubblers

An incredibly ugly piece of public ‘art’ in a small square between 6th and Broadway. In the afternoons, a group of local skater boi (s) make it their bitch.

Virgin Galactic, the spaceship division of Virgin Group, unveiled it’s first spacecraft back on January 23rd. Construction is nearly complete and it will soon begin the mandatory 50 test flights for safety. Nevertheless, flights are being booked for 2009 at 200 large per, which is quite a lot of large for a 2.5 sub orbital flight. The price drops to 100 large after the first 100 reservations and Richard Branson promises to drop the price to 20K eventually.

That puts it in the realm of possibility for the Average Joe. Definitely, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, but still possible. People save over the course of several years to have a really fun blowout vacation on a fancy cruise ship in the Caribbean or to travel all over Europe for two months, why not this? But is the ROI on a 2.5 hour suborbital flight worth it? While I would like to experience such a flight, if I’m going to drop 20K, I’d want my ROI to be a bit better than 8000K/hour. That’s a hell of a lot of gelato in Italy is all I’m saying.

Then again, if you’ve got the frequent flyer miles, why the hell not:

Virgin Galactic claims up to 200 people have already booked seats on the sub-orbital craft through 2009. Though the initial ticket price is $200,000, a British businessman named Alan Watts was able to redeem two million frequent flier miles for a 2009 flight.

Last Father’s Day, the Fetching Mrs. Bixby gives me a fisheye camera 2 from Lomography, a company which started out selling cheap Eastern European fixed lens cameras to young, urban, hipsters, thereby elevating grainy and poorly composed snapshots into an art form. Looking at their online store now I see they’ve upped the quality a bit and have increased their offerings, but you can still get cheap fixed lens cameras in case you need to scratch your Young, Hipster Art itch.

I like my fish eye. It came with a roll of cheap ISO100 film so I loaded that bad boy up and lived the Lomography motto, “Don’t think, just shoot.” I burned through that first roll pretty quickly and it ends up in a drawer for six months until this morning, when on a whim I decide to get it developed.

The results are to be expected. Only half of the roll came out, I suspect because I thought the roll was over and rewound the film too early. I really don’t remember now. Of the images that did come out, about 4 are even close to the right exposure to be seen by the naked eye. I present to you now the three that have some compositional interest.

Enjoy.

It took me a while to get this next one. It’s a shot of the dash of my Mustang.

He’s made 8 of these now. This one is on the myth of the declining middle class.

After watching this one, go back and watch the rest. Good stuff, Maynard!

Victor David Hanson skewers Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama.

It is so nice to be able to walk to the office without being bundled for an arctic expedition. We still have to get through March, so a few more cold days are probably in store for us, but I’ll enjoy the warmer temperatures we’re having now unconditionally.

By ‘warmer’, I mean upper 40’s. The high today is expected to reach 53°, which is almost too warm for a sweater.

I love that the weather is actually something I need to consider in my day to day activities for a good portion of year now. It’s something that helps to take me out of my comfort zone and actually think about things that are further than 10 inches from the end of my nose.

This can actually apply to me. Mount St. Helens is stil active.

Kinda cool.