Alas. I missed my moment of glory. I had no idea. Nobody tells me anything. April came and went without fanfare, without jubilation, without anything more an "Oh, it's April... again." And yet, well, see what i missed?

Among that group of things that could be accurately called, "My Favourite Things to Do to Calendars," there stands alone one great and wonderful thing that can be accruately called, "My Favourite Thing to Do to Calendars." Really, I just like adding word balloons to the pictures to add context to the scene that is playing out before us over the course of the month. Here is this month's effort, straight outta Compton, yo.

And just in case you had trouble reading the text, it says the following:

CUTE ASIAN GIRL

*sigh*

it's just not the same without the cats.

WHITE IMPERIALIST SWINE

[she says nothing but I do so enjoy calling her a swine]

Vidblog #35: Vintage Elefunts

In some ways, this may actually be the oldest of my vidblogs as its footage predates even Levy Noir.

Pumpkin #14:
Yesterday's punpkin carving:

At the soda fountain today, I waited for a man in his sixties to finish refilling his coke. He added subsequently two seconds worth of every flavour going down the line of dispnser triggers before repeating the process. I smiled and he turned, looked me dead in the eye, and with a grinned said, "We called it a suicide when I was a kid." His eyes were stoked with the fires of glee. He then turned and amble off towards his table. The end. p.s., I love that every generation calls it that.

Vidblog #34: Four-Year

Yeppo! Today marks the four-year anniversary of that tragic day when I enslaved myself to your tender unmercies. Good times, huh?

Yeah, so.... Due to a lack of cameraman yesterday, I was unable to film the planned vidblog. I roped an assistant for this morning, but found to my alas that I was now missing an integral prop. I'll pick up the needed material at lunch and hopeful we should be go for this evening. Peace.

My Top 5 Favourite Flavours of Meat

(in no order beyond alphabetical)

Steak. Medium-rare. No dipping sauce. Love the Top Sirloin and New York. Looking forward to trying a Del Monaco soon.

Spare ribs. With Sweet Baby Ray's hot & spicy or honey.

Lamb shank. So tender it sloughs of the bone at a breath.

A Golden Baked Ham. Waaaaay tastier than the Honey-Baked variety.

Turkey drumstick when slowly roast to a lucious, dripping perfection. I always prefer dark meat because when I eat food, I eat for flavour!

p.s. like my version of alphabetical?

Okay. It's no secret. I love Photoshop. The sheer breadth of what you can do is amazing and really allows the kind of creative freedom that I will ever cherish like a little baby. But one thing I never really got a chance to try until recently was photo-retouching. Last week I showed you my family portraits that I had uncovered, but you only saw the retouched versions. Here are some examples so you can compare with the originals. And incidentally, since you asked Debbo, I included a close-up of Emma's eyes and lips on the original so you can see just why her lashes are so pronounced (it seems I'm not the first to try their hand at retouching this stuff!).

Okay, so my car got broked into last night while parked in front of California Pizza Kitchen. Fortunately, I left my windows down so there was no glass damage. Fortunately, the only things in my car at the time were a paperback autobiography by Lauren Bacall (incidentally, I think "Bacall" would make a rockin' first name for my next daughter), some swim trunks, a towel, and a buncha flyers for a party. The would-be theives didn't actually steal anything (except maybe a couple of Willy Wonka's Bottle Caps that I had in a box on the fornt seat. *shrug* Maybe they'll come to my party - that'd be a cool story.

Also, something I realized last night is that California Pizza Kitchen doesn't hire only pretty girls. My previous theory was shattered by what I saw while dining and shall be replaced by the new theory: California Pizza Kitchen does employ girls who are not nearly so pretty as the pretty girls but only lets them work slow nights like Mondays and never on busy busy weekends. Fortunately, one of the weekend girls was my waitress last night - I guess she was slumming it or something - and so my digestion worked just fine (it's notoriously sensitive to aesthetics).

Vidblog #33: How to Succeed with Women

Perhaps the most frequently asked question here at Nowheresville, USA

Because I know how small they looked in that picture of a house, I thought it would be good to show you some of the spooky genes in divergent branches of my geneology. These are Bessie and Lucille Hahne - whom I believe are great-great-great-aunts of mine. Spooky, huh? I mean really, look at 'em. Lucille, especially, looks like she could be forty-eight. But she ain't - unless old women play with dolls too....

Even as I found a treasure trove of my dad's paintings, I also discovered some great old photos of family that I never met or heard of. These are some of them: Pictures of my grandparents' grandparents. And the house my grandfather's grandfather built in Savanna, Georgia in 1888! Cool beans, no?

For those of you who are interested, I took some browser stats from one of the websites I help administer. This may be a more accurate cross-section of the worldwide world out there simply because this particular site avreages around 250,000 page views per day. So, the stats are as follows:

Internet Explorer 6.x	74.9%
5.x	11.9%
4.x	.2%
3.x and lower	.1%
AOL	7.3%
Netscape	2.2%
Firefox (including the negligible Firebird stats)	1.9%
Safari	1.2%
Opera	.2%
Konqueror	.1%

Hate to break it to you Russ, but it looks like "The Seth" is already taken by some cheap imposter (who curiously enough is right about the right age).

Brian Godawa is a devious fox (which is not quite as cool as a foxy deviant!). And perhaps slightly unethical. Today I was forwarded one of his copious emails promoting the film for which he wrote a screenplay, To End All Wars. Usually these consist of ways to support his film and include release dates, theater locations, etc. and are always loaded with the typical cultural-redemptionist jargon. Today's message though was a little less tasteful:

We need your help to directly impact Hollywood. I know many of you have been praying for change in Hollywood. Here is a practical and tangible way to impart that change.

If you have not already seen the film - please rent and or buy the DVD or video. It is also on Netflix, so if you have already seen it but you are signed up with Netflix, you can rent the dvd and then send it back the next day without even watching it. That will still count as a vote.

Sooooo... we're to redeem the culture and "directly impact Hollywood" by artificially affecting the tally of the film's marketability? Rent the movie even if we're not planning on watching it? Just to boost perception? Whatever happened to supporting a film based on the fact that it knocked our socks off? I mean seriously. I recently saw 1995's Before Sunrise and loved it thoroughly. So much did I enjoy Linklater's film that I immediately set about to evangelize not only on the film's behalf, but on the behalf of its sequel-that-I-have-yet-to-see as well (which goes to wider release on Friday). In the space of a week, I was able to influence with my excitement five different people to not only want to see the film but to actually see it. And every one of them is at least interested in seeing the sequel - whether in the theater or on dvd.

That's the power of a good film. It doesn't need underhanded machinations to gain support. Now, To End All Wars was not by any means a poor film. I'd grant it two-and-a-half to three stars out of four (that's somewhere between average and a little above average). But honestly, I had a better time watching The Day After Tomorrow (and I know I talked a lot more about that silly film than I did about Godawa's baby.

In the end, I find the scheming of his plan to affect Hollywood principles distasteful. Isn't he wanting his supporters to take the moral high ground? Well... being conniving isn't usually associated with MHG.

Vidblog #32: From the Street

Yesterday, i was commissioned to create a label for a CD to be geared toward youthful types to scare them into abstaining from nookie. Or at least that's what I presume. In any case, it seems they were unhappy with the original art for the disc and so gave me a day to kiss it better as it were. Below are the two versions: 1) the original designer's version that they thought was too bland, and 2), mine, which they haven't seen yet but due to time constraints are kinda stuck with.

Brandon, Wendy, and I tried to figure out what the price for nookie was according to the original designer. At first we imagined the price was turning into an old, wasted couple like the two sitting there holding hands in their twilight years (btw: though they look eighty, they're really 16-year-olds who had sex). Later, somebody pointed out that the couple were really ghosts, making the price for sex much more understandable: certain death.

My design however brings another price for sex: weird coloured fungus, man-hands on chicks, and slight belly pooch. Also, you can't tell now, but before I shrunk down the price tag, it said $25.oo. Therefore, Sex has a price: twenty-five dollars.