Tricky Treats

L.A. kids are big wussies - the slightest hint of rain, and not even FREE CANDY will lure them outside. Which means I am stuck with a bag full of mysterious Chinese candies labelled "Nutrition Delicious" - as far as I can tell, they are both unhealthful and disgusting, so the description makes sense.

So actually a few trick or treaters have come by, but none since I realized that offloading Nutrition Delicious should have been top priority all along.

Our pumpkins, however, are awesome.

pumpkin vomits fluorescent waterspace dude robot pumpkin


The one is continuously vomiting fluorescent water... my picture doesn't do it justice. The other isn't doing much, and in retrospect I think the eyes were a bit bright, as they distract from the spirally coat hanger antenna (which is mine, and very cute). But awesome nonetheless.

Happy All Saints' Day, then, and let's all try very hard not to gorge ourselves on pumpkin pancakes made from super-cheap surplus jack-o-lantern wannabes.

yami · 21:20 · 31 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

Numbered List: I Am Smoke

  1. Went out to Joshua Tree Friday night, and so the photoblog has been updated for the first time in months.
  2. Saturday, Peter and I went to investigate a dry lake - where "investigate a dry lake" actually meant "get the car stuck in sand three miles from anywhere". We passed a couple of hours jacking the car up, putting rocks and rugs under the wheels, revving and repeating to obtain about half the necessary car-length of progress before a couple of women on their way to Palm Springs decided that they also wanted to investigate the dry lake.

    They had an SUV with extra gas-guzzling car-unsticking cylinders in the engine, but no rope. So we borrowed their cell phone, called a truck, and waved goodbye feeling generally pleased with those parts of humanity that don't charge $300 to send a winch out to the middle of the desert.

    Ten minutes later, a cop comes by. My pleasure quickly evaporates as he mentions that he could just pull us out of the sand, if we hadn't already called for a tow. Instead, he notes that Peter's registration stickers are out of date, and asks us if we've ever been arrested. And if he can search the car. And if we have any pipes or pot, and what we're going to do with the two empty beer bottles in the trunk. And if we're sure we don't have any pot. And if we're really, really sure we don't have any pot.

    Long Haired Man + Tie-Dye + Expired Plates + Confessed to Enjoying Nature Without Simultaneously Destroying It = BIG MARIJUANA BUST!

    Finding neither pot nor any excuse to search the car again, he left us to wait for the tow truck, which came by in another ten minutes and winched us back onto the road.
  3. Maps don't adequately convey the true scale of the burning. For forty miles as we drove back home, I thought each fire-covered hillside would be the last; and each curve brought a new fire-covered hillside into view. Satellite photos are better, though I wish they wouldn't draw yucky red boxes over the burning areas.
  4. I didn't do laundry this weekend. Major manufacturers do not produce campfire scented laundry products, why should I buck the trend with my hippie smokehouse clothesline?
  5. Re-evaluating one's attachment to stuff is always a fun game; we've been playing it at work. Most of my coworkers live much closer to the fire than I do, and some spent the weekend playing the game for real, after various amounts of their stuff was destroyed. So yeah, poor me, having to breathe stinky air.
yami · 10:12 · 27 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

Quicksilver: a partial review

Neal Stephenson jumped the shark on page 277. Over the moon and into some stable orbit, where a group of hasty sketches in an imitation Baroque tin can go round and round with the Bludgeon of Science History Hindsight. One wonders how many revolutions they can handle before the main character (whose thoughts and feelings are told at a slowly-increasing remove) is completely squished, leaving only a Foil for Progress.

Stilted dialogue on the philosophical standing of computing-machines has its place, in the opening scenes of historical-crossover Alan Turing / Captain Kirk homoerotic fan fiction. If Isaac Newton and Mary Sue Daniel Waterhouse aren't having sex in 50 pages, though, I will attempt to hollow out the rest of the book for use as a very nerdy drug'n'gun cache.

yami · 22:11 · 23 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Literature

Joe Jonah Euclid

Joe Jonah Euclid was (and possibly still is) an endearing type of delusional nutter, who posted his flyers around the Caltech campus my freshman and sophomore years. I haven't seen any fresh material in quite some time; but whilst cleaning out my file-box I came upon this one. Spelling is preserved, formatting is attempted. It seems to speak to important issues of our time, as well as the tail end of the dot-com boom when it was written.

Joe Jonah Euclid                  2020 2020
	
Please Consider the hypothetical possibality that
the Internet is better than the Cosmic Consciousness.
Both provide communications at a distance and
any number of people can join in at any time.
	
It does not matter IF we Debate this.
It does not matter IF people have the wrong opinion.
	
It ONLY matters IF it is TRUE.     Long Term.
	
The younger generation will mostly Learn the Internet.
When they Hear Of   the Cosmic Consciousness, it is not better.
Because the Internet Equally Well provides the Communications.
	
Thru some Years, there is a smaller and smaller number of people
Practicing the Cosmic Consciousness.
One Day   they let up a little bit, and then
Society has Fewer Bizarre Disastors & Senseless Crimes.
There are research programs to Monitor this fine grain.
yami · 20:19 · 18 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Literature

Yami, Fearsome Goddess of Mint

The sky when I woke up was the color of the sky at the end of the world. Barbie's Nuclear Holocaust pink. I went out to see what malevolence had destroyed the day's marine layer, and to water my garden.

I water every other day, and if I forget, everything goes into a coma. The pansies do this high school drama queen thing where they sprawl out as far as their leaves will stretch and fall down, maybe leaving a crumpled flower upturned in a gesture of unique bathos. My tomato, moribund after an overenthusiastic dose of copper soap, looked like it had finally given up the ghost (some of the bottom leaves are still okay).

The word of the day is mulch.

yami · 7:55 · 18 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Uncategorized, Crap

Nitrate Pumped Nabokov

Any spammer called "Lolita" ought to have the tongue-tumbling, somersault-through-rapids literary stylings of Nabokov. And they never do, duh.

There's a blacklist plugin coming tomorrow morning, hell or high water if you believe the entry title. I've gotten a few spam comments lately, nothing unmanageable, but trickles do become floods if one isn't careful.

yami · 18:09 · 12 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Code

Small Comforts, and a Movie Marathon

Small consolations in the wake of Guvenah-Elect Ahnold:

  • Trumping all the "my governor can beat up your governor" cards from Minnesota.
  • The occasionally professional accordion player came in second-to-last.
  • Both bullshit ballot initiatives were killed quite dead.
  • Governor-elect Schwarzenegger has appeared in about 40 real movies, and many more schlocky TV specials and "The Making Of" documentaries. Combine that with the complete oeuvre of Ronald Reagan, and a "Governors of California" movie marathon will last until the next election.
yami · 20:04 · 8 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: California Politics, Movies

Seasonal Design

So I live in a neighborhood with real live children (not those fake ones some grad students have), and am quite possibly obligated to have candy and a jack-o-lantern. X-TREEM Pumpkin Photo Gallery, ho!

yami · 19:35 · 7 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Links

Happy New Water Year

At work we do much analysis in Water Years, which begin in October. With almost-spectacular timing, the gathering morning fog turned into a pathetic beady drizzle-fog today, too vigorous to ignore but too puny to exercise even the lowest setting on my windshield wipers. It is now the rainy season, and safe to plant spinach (or so I hope).

With "rain" drifting lazily in some direction near the road, it was prudent to knock at least 10 MPH off the average traffic speed on the freeway. Or so everyone seemed to think; I have now been driving in L.A. long enough to adjust to the speeds, and so found this rather irritating, rather than comforting and safe. I'll road your rain rage, yar, all the way to work.

yami · 7:58 · 3 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: I Hate Everything

i hovedet

Sure, my links have been coming from BoingBoing quite a lot recently, but lately the BoingBoing is not the sufficiently critical. This I have an axe in my head universal translator is not only unexciting derivative work, it's missing several languages, and I suspect the Scandewegish is rather un-idiomatic.

Swedish: Ah, Herregud! Jag har en yxa i huvudet!
Norwegian: Herre Gud! Jeg har en øks i hodet!
Danish: Oh min gud! Der er en oekse i mit hoved.

O bestly beloved Danish audience, do tell me that "I have an axe in my head!" ends on the delightfully gurgly "hovedet"! Else I shall be sorely tempted to take up Nynorsk.

yami · 20:31 · 2 Oct 2020 · #
Filed under: Foreign