July 23, 2008
At the bottom of the trunk.
In the dark.
For the past 34 years.
Where she had been pushing it ever since he left. Perhaps.
The card in the Royal Fusiliers Museum says:
Cigarette case belonging to Pte F C Shuter 10th.Bn. Pierced by a German bullet 10th.July1916 – The Somme
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July 22, 2008
From an antiques mall in Brighton. 50p. Don’t laugh. You’ll need one some day. I love the way the aluminum has corroded on the blade.
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July 21, 2008
Two insistent goldfish dance from side to side against the glass here when they’re hungry.
This is an extremely difficult activity to capture adequately on camera.
Drop them a few flakes of food and they zip about the tank, diagnosis there eating.
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July 20, 2008
I’m posting, website like this oh (checks watch), this 11 days late. We’ve taken a huge plunge into London, more about and are spending the morning and half the afternoon touring the city every day, then i comeback and work until midnight or 1 a.m.
I’ve been avoiding my chores. I’ve been Twittering. I’ve been shopping irresponsibly (about which more later). And we’ve been intimate with The Tower of London, A little vessel named Pockets the Norfolk Broads, Covent Garden, Windsor Castle, the London Eye, the South Bank, twoshows (both good!), Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s Gallery, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, and ancient Stonehenge.
At some point, I’ll have to edit the 457 photographs (literally) taken so far …
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July 19, 2008
“Daddy, no rx it’s stuck!”
We’re coming up out of the Tube this afternoon after a long day noodling around Brick Lane‘s rolling flea market and art swap meet.
My 6-year-old’s ahead of me on the escalator. “Get your toe out of there! Quit screwin’ around!”
It’s been a long day, capsule everyone’s tired and punchy and grumpy, side effects and this is just another way of her pulling my chain, I’m convinced.
“I can’t!”
“Shit!” I grab her arms and pull her just as the escalator devours the toe of her Croc and pulls it off her foot.
Thank God they were loose. After we all recover from our near-coronaries, we stand around and laugh the laughs of people who have jointly cheated death. Or at least a horrible maiming.
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July 18, 2008
Parsing the anti-Semitic etymology of “Jew’s harp” is a dicey business, cialis 40mg as Wikipedia amply demonstrates.
Better to appreciate that one of the oldest instruments in the world hasn’t evolved so much as found its shape in many cultures.
This one is Vietnamese – an elegantly simple tine of hammered brass that has been shaped and sliced so that it makes a lovely boinging noise when you hold it firmly between your lips. pluck the end and shape the inside of your mouth with your tongue to vary the pitch … (more…)
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July 17, 2008
The vehicular fetishes of young Britons of the 20th century line the crowded shelves of the marvelous Brighton Toy and Model Museum. This land-speed monster dates from the 40s or 50s.
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July 16, 2008
Sold on the Brighton Pier, visit web these are some of the weirdest confections ever – at the foot of the Brighton Pier, there you can buy large cellophane cones of them: wafer-crisp shells surrounding doses of sour/sweet bicarbonate-of-soda powder.
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July 15, 2008
We arrived in London yesterday morning, website jetlagged beyond belief.
I then had to put in a full day of work at my normal hour, physician which turns out to be 4 p.m. to midnight here – which on a daily basis has wound up leaving me pretty swacked – and just now (5 days let) catching up on HLOs.
So here are the first truly heavy things – passage to Brighton, a one-hour trip from Victoria station.
The train carriages are modernized now, far slicker and cleaner than the enameled, wood-and-wool lined jewels I remember from my last visit more than 30 years ago.
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July 14, 2008
Look, information pills web let me level with you. I’ve been slamming in four nights worth of HLOs for the past hour or so, and just to get ’em done. In fact, seek I’m post-dating this one because I’ll be in transit 24 hours from now. We’ve been packing and prepping our own house for a big house exchange with a London family, and it takes time to square things away.
This fell off the feather duster when I was dusting out my office last night. Its color always fills me with hope.
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July 13, 2008
comes home with my daughter
it sparkles when you turn it
push back the darkness.
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July 12, 2008
America’s chip bags need controllin’.
Two slabs of hot-poured plastic, doctor clinic a hinge, capsule a spring, rugger jawliners and some ink.
The bigger bags get bigger clips.
My wife: “You’re not gonna blog that!”
Well, uh, yeah. I am.
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July 11, 2008
A hybrid. A multi-utensil. A solution. A ridiculous word.
Say it a few times:
Spork. Spörk.
Spoooorrrrk. k. k.
Admire its completeness. Say no more. Spork.
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July 10, 2008
I found this little beauty in a basketful of them in an Indian curio shop on Melrose Avenue.
The high-impact barrel was molded and lathed in bone-colored plastic, view then hand-notched for detail. You unscrew its cap for a trace of your favorite stink-nice, this and the rest of the time it sits on your dressing table reminding you how worldly and cultured your life has become by adopting it.
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July 9, 2008
The world’s hardshell exterior surrounds a doughy heart of kitsch:
Anything initially cool – the remote to a Nintendo Wii game system, health for instance – can impart its cool to common objects by simple mimicry. Bluntly put, treatment things that look like other definite things are automatically “better” because of the same dim-witted value system that allows cars to all look alike because no one’s brave enough to buck current tastes to design something original.
And so, sick a chunk of branded schwag – a cheap LED flashlight is made more desirable (and worth an hour-long wait in a game expo line with other dupes) by modeling it on the Nintendo game controller.
Sizzle sold, itch scratched, creativity avoided.
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July 8, 2008
Was he forged in lava? Does he swim in mercury seas? Of tinfoil jellyfish is his diet made?
He came into our house from I know not where. He is small, link heavy, perfect.
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July 7, 2008
Another Tuesday, story another morning with little Kylie, site the
niña pequeña she cared for three days a week.
She trudged uphill once more, the rosary draped over her fingers. “Nomini patri et fili et spiritu sancto,” the sign of the cross trailing from her lips as she kissed the little madonna milagro and worried the yellow and garnet glass beads with her fingertips.
Traffic surged down the steep hill, past the place where she walked with no sidewalk. Cars and trucks gave her a respectful berth of three feet – almost colliding with oncoming traffic on the narrow street – and rolled on, brakes squealing to a distant stop …
(more…)
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July 6, 2008
Dad brought home movies. All the time. He’d set up the projector. I’d set up the screen. And we’d watch – Citizen Kane, doctor The Court Jester, Swingtime, The General, Soylent Green, They Were Expendable, Serpico – old movies, newer movies, all genres.
I’m grateful for that, as with all things from my father.
I love the contract the moviemakers make with us: You just sit there and give me 90 or 120 or 270 minutes, and we’ll do our best to show you something worth your time.
I spent this $11.75 on Wanted, which suggests that a 1,000-year-old cult of weaver/assassins has learned the art of curving bullet trajectories and otherwise obliterating the laws of physics. It is loud, witty, exciting and quite possibly the most preposterous thing I’ve ever watched … at least since sitting through National Treasure 2 and Shoot ‘Em Up last night.
My wife and kids are out of town. Nothing for it but to watch noisy, stupid cheese.
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July 5, 2008
They gave these out to the kids with tickets for Wall-E.
Movie – gorgeous to look at, page groundbreaking, but not nearly as smart and funny as Kung Fu Panda.
Watch – blue silicone rubber around a little cheesebox chip of Chinese chircuitry. My son’s came broken.
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July 4, 2008
And while we’re at it, information pills sometimes you make mistakes so egregious that only wiping them out with a rubberized chunk of fish and rice will do.
My wife found this at our favorite Japanese supermarket, and kindly annotated it with another HLO – the venerable Post-It note – about which, more later.
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July 3, 2008
My wife gave me this for my birthday a couple years ago, information pills to add to my growing collection.
Tiki culture is a marvelous cross-pollination of camp, what is ed partying and 50s mass-marketed hipsterism.
This one was designed, slip-poured, glazed and fired by Tiki Farm, but if you’re hunting for others, Munktiki turns out some beauts. You pull the hairbone plug from the back to fill him, then stick a straw through his fontanelle to drink.
And besides – sometimes, only drinking from the shrunken skull of a ritual victim will assuage the demons behind your eyes.
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July 2, 2008
I once had this foolish idea. I never acted on it, drug but it still sneaks into my head from time to time and pings on my hippocampus (the dream center) with a tinny little rhythm:
What if I counted every single object in the house? What if I catalogued every single book, sock, CD, grain of rice, child’s toy, piece of paper, tool, chair and can of deodorant? How many thousands (millions??) of objects would I wind up owning?
I’m not that crazy. Yet.
But stuff like this keeps piling up, and it gets thrown into a little drawer, and I think … if only I’d been counting all the time, I’d know how many of these enigmatic little chunks of hardware I own.
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July 1, 2008
Copper-jacketed slugs of chemistry power our gadgets. It seems we need them more and more.
Only the advent of rechargable lithium-ion batteries keeps a tsunami of spent alkalines from sweeping us all away to the dump.
Which makes one wonder about modern man’s dwindling ability to survive without electricity. Can you put yourself back two decades, buy before the ubiquity of cellphones, physician MP3 players, information pills laptops and digital cameras? Can you live analog for more than a weekend of camping in the woods?
Or are we evolving to the next level – a species so dependent upon powered communication and entertainment that we’ve sapped ourselves of animal instinct and actual knowledge – homo electricus?
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June 30, 2008
Cheap stuff breaks. You get to decide – take it apart? Or just stomp its li’l plastic casing to shrapnel.
I’ve had this in my stuff drawers for years. I keep promising myself I’ll take it apart.
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June 29, 2008
Buy one large cantilever umbrella to keep the sun from killing you on the deck. Realize it’s too small. Buy two. Realize it would be nice to be able to shift them around the deck, side effects to better block the coruscating sunset. Look for casters. Realize the umbrella stands’ feet aren’t fitted for them. Look for appropriate casters to bolt on. Realize none but the hugest, order most cartoonishly oversized industrial casters would even fit, even if you drilled the umbrella stands’ feet …
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