Adorableness

Know nothing of these and must admit I only heard of them through P--------, so am a little hesitant to go all bandwagon hoppy, but this song is very nice for roaming around in our current cold snap in the runup to Crizzle. The B&S-aped artwork, the 1990 shoegaziness of the whole enterprise and general "They could be in Sassy!"-ness says these kids have it in them to be the Vampire Weekend of Jan-Feb '09! Remember - you read it here last!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVrTruj_Aw

Biscuit will get there in the end

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3545370/Worlds-oldest-cat-celebrates-100th-birthday.html

Ralph Nadir

Um, no:

L.M. Boyd

My mother, if she could fathom computers and see my humble blog, would shake her head, tut and say "Why, anyone can see you fancy yourself a cyber-era L.M. Boyd! This is a disgrace!"

And, man, would she ever be right!

How I miss the daily trivia column that ran for the years of my youth! Easily cuttable for the editors of the amusement pages (should Ann Landers go long with a particularly hot one) but always full of great facts, bluntly stated, such as "Skunks eat bees." or "The guitar is a popular instrument for the starting musician because it's easy to start, but then you can never get good enough" [papaphrase] or "It was illegal by decree in bygone Cambodia to insult a rice plant."

SO megaglad I thought of writing this because I found the picture above (the only other photo I'd ever seen of the great man [a Seattle native, if you wondered] was the one that ran beside his column for years, where he looked like a Johnson Space Center employee on break, flattop and all, oh, and btw: England's terminally sick kings traditionally pardoned all prisoners except murderers and thieves) where L.M.(d.2004) sits around all old-guy hip/casual (though I'd have preferred something more Look Book); also, it lead to my finding THIS!:
http://www.walknet.net/boyd.shtml

The haunting of Exit 44

At the exit where I leave the highway every morning, there is inevitably a car dead on the shoulder. If not at all the way at the actual confluence point, where there is a stoplight, then definitely in the mile leading up to this particular exit.

But why?

It is a slight grade, yes. But not enough to warrant a sign as such. Yet, daily, without fail, some crappy rust-spotted Maxima with temporary tags sits abandoned. Sometimes hazard lights still blink, though mostly not. Or a van. Are they out of gas? Why so many temporary tags? And doesn't some sort of urban legend-like folklore permeate the air where used car buyers congregate, like an eldritch vapor whispering "Don't go on South 75 past Exit 44...you'll never make it."

And maybe there was a Hopewell/Adena curse placed eons ago that said as trespassers neared the Holy Place (http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/places/sw12/index.shtml) their conveying animals would weaken and keel over, and maybe that curse has transmuted, because some wise soothy shaman said, "We cannot know, my brothers and sisters, as we grind maize and make tools from smoothed river stones, that conveyances will remain ever thus [points at domesticated mammoth]. Nay, we should have a backup clause in this pup."

But where do these drivers go? Perhaps they just leave their keychains in the ignition and just wander off through spitting snow into the stubbly fields wedged beyond the new CarMax (good luck with that!) and start their lives anew.

Help is on the way

I work (no, really) in a tech sort of field (you can tell by my MS Paint skills!) and have for some time and I can say I feel another money bubble coming on...

I have not really seen mentioned anywhere just what an effect the Y2K runup spending had on the robust economy of the late nineties and how it can relate to our present predicament. I just know that every company and mother with a scanner was were, in 1999, rushing out and buying all sorts of new machines and whanot so as not to lose their high scores on Defender. But directly after the ZDNet-covered frenzy wound down, the spending stopped and doldrums set in by March of 2000!

Now, of course, all the crap that was bought on credit over the last 200 years is coming back to haunt us all - but there is hope!

My modest proposal: that everyone who buys a convertor box for their old non-cable TVs?...while they are out getting them, that they also buy a sandwich. Like, a seven dollar meatball sub.

Stimulicious!

Never forget!