Loxosceles

Wreck this journal: you can buy a journal with wrecking prompts in it, or just follow along with a book of your own. Some ideas are here.

Flying Trapeze: explains itself. I took a trapeze lesson once. It's as much fun as it looks!

Another race, this one a 5K. My time was a little better - 31:29.

I don't plan on running any more races for a few months. Hopefully then I'll be a little faster.

If you go ice skating at Cass Park (or, now that it's spring, if you come to roller derby practices) you will see this mural:





Yes, that's right. One side has an angry evil octopus, the other has angry evil snowmen, aliens, and killer bees.

I don't know who painted this. It's as beautiful as it is nightmare-inducing.

Here are some more views of pain, suffering, and a small amount of fun-in-the-sun (the park also has a swimming pool):



Here, a girl is being chased by a snowman, right into the path of the red-toothed evil snowman you can see in the photo above. In the background, a UFO is abducting most of the landscape's remaining objects.



And here, some people swim (enjoying themselves or eating fish, according to their preference) while a girl who was flying finds herself stung. Maybe that's in the pool rules: no running, no horseplay, no flying?

When the Finger Lakes Running Company moved into this building, they started painting the side of it. This is one of my favorite murals in town.


Here is some more art. This one is in front of a gift/art/craft shop called Spirit and Kitsch that is located in what they call an "art vacuum" in Ithaca. It's on a street where every building is either a garage or looks like it wants to be one.

Chris and I are still alive. This is what we look like.

If it snows, they'll write the sky a nasty ticket.

To help encourage myself in my newfound love of running (I had a few good runs without my feet hurting, but I'm not signing myself up for a marathon just yet) I got a little music player. It's matchbox sized (does anybody remember when matches came in boxes?) and it does FM radio as well as mp3s.

(Yes, it's linux compatible - it's just USB mass storage.)

Apologies for the boring picture. I didn't go anywhere interesting today.

People rarely take photos of subway stations, but for me that's a big part of your trip. Some dumb statue? You passed it once. But the T stop is one of the first things you see, one of the first systems you have to navigate, and the infrastructure to get you around town.

OK, so I'm a rube who never sees subways at home. Is that so wrong?

(By the way, that song gets stuck in my head every time. Argh.)

Lots more Boston photos here.

A mural in one of MIT's engineering buildings. Surely you know the story.

I forgot to include a quarter for scale. The XO makes my laptop (right) look big.

The mcdonald's employee sweeping up told me that MY laptop was really small and cute.

I'll be traveling over the weekend, so in case I forget tomorrow's photo, here are some extras. They're from tonight's roller derby practice.

We're doing a great job recruiting new girls, and the new girls are doing a great job too! They're dedicated - for some, this is their 3rd practice in a week - and they are definitely up for a challenge. We did practice bouts (in our tiny gym space) and some of the fresh meat jammed! How awesome is that.

In the photo above, the girl in the white shirt and red helmet is jamming. And it's her second practice EVER.


This is a bonus on the bonus photo - in case the motion blur hurts your eyes, this is one of the few shots I got of derby girls sitting still.

Taken with the new cheapie camera, the one that actually fits in my pocket. I'm loving it.

I never knew it was there! This 0.89-mile asphalt trail, connecting Maple Ave to Honness Lane, is part of the Belle Sherman 5K route.

Seeing a colorful car like this always makes my day. Somebody loves their car very much and wants to use it to make people happy (or some other emotion, I guess, depending on what the paintings are of.)

For Christmas, I got a flash for my camera. It's the first time I've owned one - the kind that mounts on the hot shoe, can bounce off the ceiling, all that good stuff. I used to hate flash pictures. I have been won over. Just look at what it can do:


Flash pointed directly at the reindeer


Flash bounced off the ceiling.

Note brighter background, soft non-glarey light on the plush. No catchlights in eyes because the light wasn't pointing at the eyes. (This is my favorite of the three)


Flash pointed at the ceiling, with a doohickey that scatters the light so it comes from different directions.

This gadget scatters the light, so some of it reflects off the fur and the eyes, and less of it gets to the background.

Yarr! I be usin me new camARRa! It be a Pentax K100D. Look what it be doin!

A weed in me garden

Scurvy dogs dancin

Me own scurvy self

The cap'n's quarters

Each o' these be a photo I couldn'ta taken with me old camARRa. Avast, me hearties!

We went to the state fair.



There were chickens ...



... and even multicolored chickens ...



... but my favorite hairdos were on the ducks.



When chickens have ridiculous multi-colored hairdos, they really look the part. Like, "I'm a rock star!" or "I'm a clown!" But the ducks don't really get into the character. They're like "I'm a duck." A duck with a great hairdo, that is.

I caught a sheep mid-baa:



and some pigs during their nap:



These guys were really rocking their harmonicas



and these seals were trained to plop their heads on anybody who posed for a picture.



I can't forget the butter sculpture



but most amazing of all is the tiny state fair inside the state fair.



I looked, but I couldn't find a tinier state fair inside of it.

More photos are here. The state fair website is here, but you can't see it for yourself until next year.

I'm really enjoying Thingpart comics. The characters are so expressive of their joy or sadness. I love the artist's abstract, yet cute and cuddly, representations of things like God or souls or fruit flies.

Unusually for a web comic, when a Thingpart comic is confusing or not funny, you can read it again and it gets funnier. Try it!

Yay for Ithaca Festival! Swing set had a performance at the "Swing & Salsa Dance Blast" along with some other awesome, talented dancers. (I LOVED the girl/guy salsa dance-off, btw.)

In the evening we went to the Silent Film Festival held at the State Theater. It's a beautiful, sorta run-down old theater, and we sat in the front row of the balcony.

The show was straight from 1916, with news clips, cartoons, and a Beatrice Fairfax double feature preceded by a singalong ("Oh Beatrice Fairfax, what shall I do? I want the bare facts, the truth from you...") The movies were filmed in Ithaca. In the silent film days, the Wharton brothers had a movie studio in the place that's now Stewart Park.

Best of all, there was live music - provided by a pianist whose specialty is playing for silent movies, and a singer/assistant who provided sound effects.

I'm convinced now that it's wrong to watch a silent movie in silence. The accompaniment transformed the film into a really engaging performance. The plot became crystal clear.

The show opened with some news clips. There would be a description of the newsworthy item, then some film of it. The pianist would change the mood of what he was playing usually as everyone was reading the caption. (Typically he would stop playing the melody but keep up the upbeat rhythm. When he decided what to play next, he'd work the new melody back in.) One caption mentioned the French army, so he worked a little Marseillese into the music, and the audience laughed. Another was about Harvard's crew team, and he played "row row row your boat". Sing! he told us. Now just this side! Now the other side! We got in a few verses in the round before the clip was over.

During the Krazy Kat cartoons, we got sound effects of the Kat's airplane and meowing for his serenade. For dialogue, an empty speech bubble would appear, and words would fill it in as the character said his piece.

The two Beatrice Fairfax stories barely involved Beatrice at all. They each started with three sets of characters: Beatrice and Jimmy, at the newspaper office; a young couple in love; and a handful of villains or suspicious characters. Jimmy would investigate the villains (he was a reporter) and soon enough an important clue would come when half of the lovelorn couple would write to Beatrice. Beatrice wasn't so much a character as she was a plot device.

I had thought that silent movies explained all the dialogue on little cards of text, but there was actually very little text used in the movie - just a little bit to introduce the characters or to deliver a very important line ("You'll find the murderer inside the vault!")

You don't really need much dialogue to show that a couple is in love. One card would identify the lovers, and then we'd see them chatting on the phone. The guy, smiling. The girl, giggling. What more do you need to know?

The piano didn't just set a mood - it really amplified the mood of the characters. When someone is worried, she doesn't say "I'm worried" or show it in her face; she shows it with her actions, and the pianist plays music that makes you a little nervous.

The sound effects were right there for the gunshots and phones ringing. There would be a "ding ding ding!" and a character would run across the room to answer the phone. Or somebody would open a door, and you'd hear the BANG as they were shot.

In one scene, the actors managed to convey "let's draw lots to see who has to kill these people we've captured" without saying a word. In another, one villain snuck up on two of the heroes listening at the door while his fellow villains discussed their plans inside. Why face them alone when five of his friends are on the other side of the door? He went downstairs and tapped on a drainpipe ("tink tink tink!") Inside the upstairs room, the villains all gathered around the pipe with hands cupped to their ears, listening, curious. So they opened the door to go downstairs, and the heroes tumbled in.

Now that is good storytelling - without a single word.

This was my February.


Like February itself, this photoset is mostly boring, with a few fun days here and there.

My favorite is the chili pepper photo. That was all Marty's doing - he bought a bag of dried organic cayenne peppers, deposited them on my desk one day at work, and repeatedly told me to photograph them. (I think he was getting sick of all the dog and lunchbox pictures.) So we wandered around the hallways at work looking for a suitable backdrop. Somebody left an art book near a sunny window, and the rest is history.

These space paintings by Don Davis show a hypothethical space colony designed by some people at NASA back in 1975. They're public domain (yay!). Lots of pictures of planets too. Here's what he said about the photos above:

The interior is shown primarily hollowed out and heavily planted. Most other depictions show the colony crammed with levels of high density housing. Ugh.