The Northwest Herald did a huge article about McHenry County College
and included stories about the Alumni who attended there and the
positive impact they had while attending.

I was interviewed about three weeks ago and during the cold snap
two weeks ago they came out to one of my concerts and did a
video profile of me performing.


If you pick up the paper there are a couple of
photographs of me performing.

Otherwise check the article out online here:
http://bit.ly/5POKC4

And video profile here:
http://bit.ly/7Bsabn


When watching the video there's a moment where the videographer,
Daniell Guerra, focused in on my father...

I feel like my mom was sitting next him watching over us.

I think she would have been proud.


Thanks Jamie and Danielle of the NW Herald and
Katherine for giving us this opportunity!

hey, I take TWO mice with my tea!





The cheeky little bugger was sitting on the coffee cups in the middle of the afternoon. After a brief chase around the counter, managed to trap him. Stuck him in the larger container to calm down for a bit. He took a nap for a bit (after eating the crumbs). Then he got put out in the woodshed along with a stale piece of bread.


In art news, I'm working on another train. This one will be Maleficent's dragon form from Sleeping Beauty once done:

Well, we've made it to the far edge of this (ridiculously scaled) diagram! That means that here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days, after today, will start to get longer again. That, is something worth celebrating. Some of us have had the pleasure of joining faunalia and reynardin for the Trancendental Solstice of the Silly Hat. Once again faunalia outdid herself with the (crowd favorite ;) deviled quail's eggs, wild boar risotto and many exotic other treats. It's wonderful that credjeep and lwinling were able to stop mid-voyage between Chicago and Ottawa to join us, and that none of the (more-or-less) locals blythechild, synap, someotherathena, gasolinequeen were out of town (or collapsed on their floors from nervous exhaustion).

Those of you in town tonight should all come out to see the Kensington Market Festival of Lights! It's their 20th festival. It never seems like the year is really over unless you've lit something aflame.

(Image: Young Girl Reading by a Window by Delphin Enjolras) 34. Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt. Little Black Book indeed. A.S. Byatt writes fairytales for adults wherein sometimes the monster wins, and it may not be the one expected. The Thing in the Forest is a war-time story within a contemporary frame which revisits the British-style dragon, the worm, which appeared in The Djinn in the Nightengale's Eye. It is about alienation and guilt. Body Art is an amazingly visual story, combining some of my favorite things (art, art history, history of science and cabinets of curiosity) with rounded characters and ethical dilemma. The Stone Woman is a wonderful story of geology and the modern-day, accidental, Nordic troll. Raw Material is a very dark story about writer's block - the violence is just beneath the surface. I am certain that no author before or since has ever made the Teletubbies quite so creepy, or combined them with Greek mythology, as in The Pink Ribbon. These stories appeal to our primordial pleasure in being scared just enough. Byatt has a lot of control and the confidence and insight to take the reader to the edge. Read this book.

35. The Man Game by Lee Henderson. The violence below the surface in the Black Book is let loose in the astonishing Man Game. This book won the BC Book Prize. Despite a contemporary narrator, it is mostly set in 1886 - 1887 in Vancouver, but this is no reverential historical fiction. It is more like Fight Club meets the wild west, but it is a true novel of the Canadian west, with more lumberjacks, Chinese immigrants, drug abuse, labour unrest and fewer cowboys. Beautiful newly-wed Molly Erwagen arrives in town with her recently paralyzed husband Samuel and native ward Toronto (honestly), just in time to witness a great fire which destroys most of the city. Two lumberjacks Litz and Pisk are blamed for the fire. It doesn't take Molly long to invent a profit-making diversion in the male-dominated Vancouver, combining dance, acrobatics, vaudeville and martial arts - the Man Game is a game of skill, fought in the nude (to avoid dirty tricks), illustrated in the book by a series of line drawing for the various moves. The cast of characters includes entrepreneurial opium-adicts, bookies, Chinese bakers, lumberjacks, the po-lice, snakeheads from San Francisco, a Mexican barman with a portable bar, a Bermudan barman, a cowboy "shit-disturber" (pro-labour xenophobe), the madam and the Whore Without a Face. The language is rough and tumble and full of Chinook, a dialect which allowed the major ethnic groups (miscellaneous Europeans, Chinese, Chinookan, Nootka, Salish, Haida, Siwash, Snauq, Sto:lo, Tlingit and other Native peoples) to communicate. A women is a mink or ee-na, and it takes little imagination to follow a discussion about her totooshes. Money is chickamin or blankets. The louts are bohunks, and they don't reckon, they kumtuks. I've spent enough time in BC to know what skookum means. Henderson obviously harbours a great love for Vancouver, but he keeps his eyes wide open. An overhead snipet of dialogue in the modern-day Vancouver man game left me howling with laughter ("So I teach yoga to get laid, but like, I also want to stay in shape"). He isn't scared to skewer sacred cows. Characters say "oot" and "aboot" throughout. The novel is a story of love, hatred, violence, art, men, women, cultural identity, family, labour and race relations. It is action packed. The societal issues facing 1887 Vancouver society may appear to have changed but at the core many of the issues simply appear in new guises. It calls out for a film adaptation (with built-in-product placement, what with all the Hudson's Bay blankets), except our society is afraid of male nudity. But, I love seeing this story set in Canada. I cannot believe it is Henderson's first novel. I've never read anything quite like it. I really think you'd enjoy it too, unless perhaps if you are from New Westminster.

36. Cake or Death by Heather Mallick. The problem with Heather Mallick is, in her own words, that she is "an appalling combination of socialist and snob". She shops at Holt Renfrew and wears pearls and has what I deem a perhaps overblown preoccupation with hygiene and cleanliness. However, she is often delightfully eccentric and self-deprecating. She cites Eddie Izzard for her title. She can be counted on to stand up for her convictions, and for that I admire her. She thanks Dr. Henry Morgentaler in the Acknowledgements. She calls out hypocracy when she sees it, isn't afraid of a fight and has a healthy, sarcastic and sometimes dark, ascerbic sense of humour. I recognize her descriptions of a stoic upbringing. I used to enjoy her column in the Globe and Mail before I gave up on seeing any decent newspaper published in this country. Mallick is never dull, but I wish this book were wittier. I think she is capable of it.

The essay about "why Doris Lessing will never win a Nobel" was redundant before this book even had a chance to come out in soft cover.
{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII}

'Tis the season for catalogs. Since most are printed on glossy stock, they're harder to recycle than standard paper and may not be accepted where you live.

look through the catalogs that hit your mailbox this year. Did you order anything from them? If not, give them a call and have your name removed from your mailing list.

To cut down on general junk mail, put your name on the Direct Mail "Do Not Mail" list. It really does work! Mailings are expensive and knowing that it's wasted money to mail to you means retailers really will stop mailing you junk!

But what to do with the catalogs you already have? If your trash service doesn't recycle them, check out Earth911 to find nearby places that will recycle them in the US. The international section of Earth911 covers Canada, Australia, Great Briton, and about two dozen other counties.

Project Night Night

Project Night Night provides care packages to homeless children. Each package comes in a tote bag and contains an age appropriate book, a security blanket, and a stuffed toy. There are nearly 300,000 homeless children in the US today, more than at any other time except the Great Depression. Providing kids with a security blanket and stuffed toy helps provide continuity in an unstable enviroment. The books help kids from falling behind in school due to frequent transfers.

They collect new and "like new" stuffed toys, blankets, and children's books to fill Night Night Bags. They also accept handmade blankets. They distribute roughly 25,000 bags every year through shelters all over the US.

They have various drop off locations around the country or you can mail them items. see their donation guidelines you can donate money online Or if you want to provide bags for a local shelter, you can do you own book and toy drive to fill bags for local kids

I will never get used to Christmas trees amongst palm trees, but I admit the scale of Californian Christmas trees is pretty impressive.

We did end up in a touristy crab joint, but the food was good and the company better, so I thoroughly enjoyed myself.


Friday morning I wanted to return the pants from Anthropologie, which already had ripped (grumble, grumble) but they didn't open until 10 am, so I wandered some more. This time I started with the swankier areas, as it remained somewhere I hadn't wandered on previous trips (as graduate students or post-docs do not necessarily want to be reminded of what they cannot afford).




Here is the overly-optimistic outdoor rink in Union Square. Despite pitiful ice-quality, it was generally packed, but not at 8 am.


I ended up in Chinatown.






This place was called "The Store with Beautiful Things".





Then I checked out and walked to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), past the Hyatt fountain:

to Powell Station. Managed to get on the least efficient route on the Air Train, so I arrived just at the right time. I don't think I've ever seen so much chaos as there was at the United counter, so I was glad I persuaded a machine to give me a not-quite-boarding pass which got me through security to the gate, where they sat me at the front of the plane, behind 1st class. Coincidentally, I was seated next to a U of T prof and we talked the whole way home.

Looking forward to seeing friends this evening!

"I dream as I walk through the moon my hood is so quiet I can hear the ants talk to each other"
Found next to a parking lot somewhere in the Mission district.


The text on the building down the laneway reads, "Heɐrt Sinktheship". This intrigues me.


This reminds me, strangely, of a series of moody black and white photos taken by my brother (the OB, actually) in Windsor. One was of a doorway labelled, "Baby Hotel". I'm not sure why one reminds me of the other. Perhaps if you begin your life in a Baby Hotel you end your days as an Odd Fellow. This in turn reminds me of my favorite overheard sentence at the conference. A Japanese scientist was explaining his numerical model of seafloor sediments and said, "We start with baby sands. Then, the baby sands grow."








I dragged MR around so I could photograph some street art over lunch time on Thursday. It was beautiful out and it was good to get outside. Some friends need to be encouraged to disengage from their computers or shop talk. Though I think he secretly thought if I was going to wander in that direction (with a laptop bag no less), that I was better off not going alone. I am more more of a city person than he. We didn't even venture that far away from the more polished neighbourhoods. I would have continued exploring, as it was broad daylight. I feel it is mainly important to be aware and to walk with purpose.




This was some sort of crumpled paper art installation in a window. I have this idea that almost anything can look fascinating if you repeat it. It becomes a fetish.


The vortex of paper was hard to capture, but when I saw the artist's statement, complete with equation (W = -Δ PE, or work is equal to the change in potential energy) I had to record it.


Then we had wildlife, architecture and the ubiquitous geometric crystal decoration. Could someone explain to me why contemporary art and illustration is infested with crystals? I mean I like group theory and think crystallography is nifty, but I don't get it. Though, I certainly enjoyed this hoarding:






If you watch the sidewalks in San Francisco, you can read about its history.



On Thursday I joined Jill and her former colleagues and alumni from Scripps (including KW, whom I know as a marine EM person) and we made the requisite cable car trip. You have to try this at least once after all, even if it is touristy. Plus, Fisherman's Wharf is a place you can arrive with a dozen scientists and get a table without a reservation. Lastly, the Scripps alumni missed sea lions. So we needed to go to the harbour.



I thought it was funny that I ended up in groups like 'people from Victoria', 'New Zealanders and/or people educated in Zurich' and 'people from Scripps (UCSD)' at various times, when really I don't actually belong in any of these categories, though I have some claim to the first. On the other hand, some Victorians think preferring Toronto is likely a sign of mental illness. I think to each her own.

we're in our house i LOVE OUR HOUSE
but i burned the french toast so now it's all smoky in here

IN POLITE SOCIETY WE CALL THAT IRONY

The holidays turn me into a whiny, wimpy, obnoxious little person. I don't like spending ridiculous amounts of money on gifts for people who won't be that thankful and who don't really need a bunch of crap anyway. I try to remedy this consumerist spirit by making a lot of things or buying handmade. Of course, this plan is much more stressful than stopping by Target, so I add some frustration onto my bitterness.

I hate the whole spirit of secular XXXmas. Family togetherness is nice, but I don't really think my family enjoys being together. We do much better separately, sorry to say. Instead, our celebrations are just a gift-off. It's lame and annoying. I would rather just skip out on the whole thing, but tradition beckons me.

So there, you get some crankiness from me.

Today was canceled due to lack of interest...


Look at them being good and not chasing each other...



naaaaaap



Your camera is too loud. you woke me up. can I go back to sleep now?

For martes and laughinghyena

Evil logging company dump toxic waste, creates giant killer mutant bear! There's more clips of this film on youtube if you really want to watch more.



And on a somewhat related notes Polish bear fights nazis Holy crap!

I get up and walk to the conferece every morning and pass this hardware store. I love the inexplicable, dissembodied fox head.




This afternoon, the usual chaos in front of Macy's (Christmas windows with puppies... people go gaga, like they had never seen puppies ever before) was increased by this accident.

i have just come back from a cold walk around the 'hood wherein i let crows, mushrooms, and owls be taped up all over posts, in cafes, on parking meters, etc.

except, i ran out of regular tape, so i had to come home- all i could find was an ancient roll of hello kitty printed tape. so i used that. coz why not.

also, i need to start being more careful of what i say on the internet because GOOD LORD everything is cached these days in 500 places aaaaaah i'm totally skerred.

ALSO i have a tumblr but no idea what it's for. that's where i am in life people. putting my art on telephone poles, horrified by all the people on tumblr who are into my mushrooms, and generally laughing in a corner.

it's true, i really don't eat enough bones.

From http://twitter.com/ocelot_eyes/

• Beware of the octopus carrying a coconut! Nature really is astounding. tinyurl.com/y9nvft6 #

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