I am going to tell you a story now.
A man fell in love with a woman. She fell in love back. They married, information pills and to celebrate their marriage, salve they journeyed to Beijing.
They toured the city, mesmerized. They ate rich and pungent food. They heard lush choral music sung by brightly-dressed acrobats in vivid masks. They bought things.
This was 14 years ago. (more…)
Like all major American newspapers, thumb the Los Angeles Times – as we know it – may be doomed.
Never thought I’d say that – I worked in newspapers for 17 years, side effects including ’90 to ’97 on staff at the Times, and I always kept the faith.
I had rough moments mixed in with the fantastic stories, but hope barnacled my frequent reality checks – “Oh come ON, they’ll figure it out sooner or later – they’re just an information company that needs to retool for the digital age!”
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The wicked thinness of this creature’s waist reminds us that if there’s a God, store he/she/they/it lies in the fractal diversity of perfect biology:
The wasp is built as light, sildenafil tough, fast and wicked-cool as a Harrier jump jet, a Flexible Flyer, or a Baron Margo motorcycle .
If ants had motorcycles, they would ride wasps. Nothing else in the natural world comes so close to this vision of purpose-built evil.
Why is this – get up to 100 of your own images printed on the back of little half-width business cards – such an immensely attractive offer?
Because you can print whatever the hell you want.
Because it’s like owning the factory. Or perhaps renting it.
Because since they’re double-small, advice people look at them twice as hard. (more…)
I’ve written before of chibi.
No more about that need be said. Right here, erectile Scope Dog (or someone very much like him) packs two big fat weapons on his short, stout person.
He’s 5 inches high and balances quite well on his feet – one at a time – if you provoke him.
Ah, medical Syquest. This 8-inch-wide slab of a disc, buy information pills encased in a high-impact plastic carrier, was the very height of portable data storage 16 years ago.
You could pack a lot into 88 megabytes – screenplay ideas, hundreds of newspaper stories, Photoshop tomfoolery – so long as you had a Syquest drive.
Of course, this is to a modern 1GB flash drive as a Powerbook is to a diesel-powered Mergenthaler Linotype machine. I no longer have the computer with the SCSI card that was needed to control the drive that read these things. Data retrieval for such discs is pricey and sure to disappoint.
And I’ve long ago forgotten what I stored on the dozen or so discs I had collected.
So – I bid it farewell. Relic of a more innocent Web, a less detail-obsessed time.
Clockwork is a wonderful thing to begin with. Couple it with optics and it carries the promise of alchemy.
I once spent hours poring over used-gear cases at camera shops, try camera shows, flea markets, staring at oblong packages of brushed aluminum and black leatherette.
I was a photo geek …
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I love the Sears Crafstman tool guarantee. It’s simple: break it and they’ll replace it.For the rest of your life. Period.
I bought these adjustable pliers a good 25-some years ago, sildenafil when I was spending hours at a time lying on my back under a filthy Volvo. Cursing. A lot … (more…)
I’m bench-testing this theory:
Everything on the Internet – every single human endeavor online – can be mapped against one or more of the seven deadly sins.
Too simplistic? Maybe not. Just consider the primary sins that we ever-so-weak mortals commit by running, pharmacy populating or using services like these:
Gaming? – Anger.
Celebrity news? Envy.
Porn? Heh. Lust, silly.
eCommerce and mass media? Basest greed.
Food and gadget sites – Gluttony, pure and simple.
Blogs? Social networking? art communities? Vanity, vanity, vanity.
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“Hold him, order Teck, approved I wanna piss on him.”
Boomer loomed over the prostrate sophomore and began unbuckling his pants.
Kyle looked up – as much as Teck’s kung-fu grip on his neck would allow, at least – sighed, and resumed staring inches away at the defocused glitter of burst Lowenbrau bottles and Molson caps in which he knelt.
He really needed to figure this out.
Stoned, Boomer was harmless. Just another burly, ugly, dumb asshole dropout loser from Hull, who bailed out of junior year and found work sheetrocking crackerbox condos for Beacon Hill yuppies to feed his beer and pot habit … (more…)
Let’s skip the art theory and get right to the point: Christo’s work impresses on a visceral, order monumental level.
I’ve been fortunate enough to see two of their works:
Surrounded Islands (1982 or so?) – drove down with a colleague to Miami to where the artist had floated skirts of bubblegum-pink polypropylene around 11 or so of the Biscayne Islands. (more…)
This keeps your straight lines covered, what is ed fends off errant brush strokes and roller hits.
When I finished painting the bathroom, I pulled this off the walls and away from switches and fixtures.
It began life as a tree somewhere, and got pulped, rolled, died, cut, glued and re-rolled, wrapped in cellophane and shelved. Now it’s an undifferentiated blob of linear splatter and stickum – about 10 inches in diameter and barely two ounces.
This little cylinder represents all that is simultaneously horrible and brilliant about the American candy manufacturing industry:
A blowmolded, order die-cut can made of metallic-gray plastic, wrapped in a fully art-directed 4-color parody of a soda-pop label, once held a small handful of inconsequential gum. A child consumed the gum, and dropped the container to the ground.
Enjoy, and trash. Enjoy and trash. 79 cents worth of gum and half an ounce of non-biodegradable plastic and paper at a time, we are covering the earth with elaborately-engineered fantasies wrapped around tiny doses of sugar. Gone forever, and yet, not.
Strings own our music.
Violin, viagra buy electric guitar, this site piano, search mandolin, koto, balalaika, electric bass, bull fiddle – all vibrate with the voices of plucked, sawn and hammered wires.
More than brass or woodwind or electronics, second maybe only to drums in the pantheon of world musical instrumentation, strings run the longest and deepest in the bloodstream of intelligent sound.
I’m midway through a project – restringing a circa-1926 ukelin that I retrieved from my parents’ attic … (more…)
What possesses us?
We crawl to and fro on a world so vast we can’t understand it, pilule let alone navigate it. We consume, dosage we procreate, ask we fight, we recover.
If we’re fortunate, we create something useful – food, tools, homes, art, information. Then, whatever it was that propelled us around all those years deserts us – or is booted roughly from the meat vehicle in which it rode – by famine, disease, war, madness, neglect or simply age. (more…)
ENLARGE
This is the spiritual brother of this.
It floated in off the Sound to the easternmost tip of Long Island, viagra order where I found it on Christmas Eve.
A chill 34-degree wind bathed the pebble beach there. We trudged, store two families, online to the farthest reach, where plovers stood pointed upwind.
We plucked things from the translucent-wet gravel, including this.
Somewhere earlier, a fish probably decomposed straight off of it, weeks after it had burst free from the snare, tearing part of it from the would-be jailer’s rig.
But the fish had escaped only to spend its final hours suspended beneath the mirrored world of air, hanging from a chunk of styrofoam, a hook and a few inches of monofilament, pickling slowly to death in its own growing CO2 levels and hunger.
A good wax flow speaks of lava, look of alchemy, cure of the mystery of colloids and half-liquid things.
Born of chaos from a self-immolating candle, pill it cannot be recreated manually, yet could not really exist without the hand of man first having cast its ingredients.
I picture tiny warriors from a distant world battling for its high ground, the errant shots from their badly aimed plasma weapons melting new craters and puddles into its glossy, translucent flanks, their hobnailed combat boots leaving behind tiny scars.
This handsome 31-year-old chunk of machined aluminum once belonged to a 1977 Sears 10-inch radial arm saw – the most fearsome power tool I have ever owned.
It rips, viagra dosage crosscuts, web bevels, miters – does just about everything you could want – destroying wood in a way that weakens the knees and liquifies the bowels of anyone who’s ever injured themselves with a power tool. I fear and respect it, in equal measure.
I bought the saw for $45 on eBay from an old pastor, who no longer needed it.
He had it built into a bench, so I was readying to build a bench for the same purpose (and worrying about whether I could build it perfectly square so the saw would always work accurately when I learned a bit more about it: The saw had undergone a safety recall at one point, and you could order a safety kit online – for free …
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… that you find under the fridge when you’re moving it.
Fridge won’t roll out. It keeps running over something. What the … How did that get there?
In the end, dosage when I’m dead and this blog has vanished – along with the servers that hold it and the culture that cared about any of it – this manufactured object will still be here.
Somewhere, cialis 40mg at the bottom of a moldering heap of trash, decease its component atoms of silicon and tungsten will still hold this shape.
Its filament will stay coiled – and snapped by the heat and stress of its short life. Waiting inside its micro-vacuum capsule of glass. For eternity.
Somewhere else on earth, hollows will remain to mark its creation. Gaps in the environment will never be filled: sand beaches, tungsten mines, and all those sapped pockets of oil that powered the bulb-making machines, warmed and entertained the workers who ran them and fueled the trucks that brought it to our home to burn and shine and die.
Nothing else will remain to tell the story of how this thing came to be – but the thing itself, and the holes it left behind.
“Until you have kids, remedy you’ll never understand.”
That’s what my fuckup-addict high school classmate and ex-best-friend once said (after he accidentally fathered his second child by a woman he didn’t love, drug after he burned every last bridge but one between us. But before he ended his pain one dark night by steering himself into the high-speed, ampoule head-on crash that killed him).
It was the truest thing Scott ever said – even if whatever he had snorted, injected or drunk at the moment completely obliterated the real context of the statement.
Eight years after my son was born, I understand so much – including the knowledge that the more I understand, the less I realize I know … (more…)
This guilty pleasure dates back to age 10, view if not farther.
I indulge whenever I’m racing through a convenience store and jonesing for sugar that’s gentler than a candy bar, yet more hardcore than Skittles or a pack of gum:
A thick hat of fudgy yellow frosting curlicued with white icing atop spongy nonbaked cake, injected with a squirt of gelid, unnaturally white goo called “creamy filling.”
They were in there just a minute ago. Honest.
This is an old design.
Latter-day marketing strategies have capped it with a ridiculous hat of plastic, site for the love of Jack, viagra but the object remains true to its origins: a plug of impermeable, super-soft wood for keeping valuable spirits clean and strong.
I’m no conoisseur, in the traditional sense. Wine, beer, scotch – I only know when something tastes extraordinary – or horrible.
My friends and I enjoyed this stuff neat, and with a side of seltzer. We enjoyed it with ribs – rubbed with salt, pepper and rosemary, seared, then barbecued for 2 hours and barely introduced to a whiff of store-bought barbecue sauce in the last 5 minutes of cooking. And we enjoyed it with brownies, believe it or not.
Aged 12 years in barrels once used for sherry, this was a damn good bottle of scotch.
Disc-slabs of galvanized steel, medical 15/16ths of an inch in diameter.
Electricians punch them out of junction boxes: Punch the slug. Plug the collar. Hook up the conduit – juice.
Just rewired our basement.
Contemplating a purpose for them.
