Blogaday 2009 Wrap-up

Another Blogaday ends. Time for the wordy wrap-up!

• This year, I did 61 days instead of the previous 30. I have gone into this before with about 2 weeks of semi-prepared content with the expectation that I'd get back to the rest of it later. This time, those 2 weeks were 25% of the total content instead of 50%, so mid-November left me with some head scratching.
  
• The head scratching point is where the magic happens. Not saying that was the best content, but that's where I have to start thinking and stop coasting.
• "Start thinking and stop coasting" should be tattooed on my arm or something.
• Will Rogers used to write a daily newspaper column. He wrote it daily, in the field, and he made it funny. For most other humans, an essay a day is hard work. After my realization that I'm not built up to write an original piece of polished thought every day, I started posting pithy stuff, some that could have just been Twitter fodder. That was okay too.
• I still prefer essays here.
  
• It's actually not hard to think up something to put on a blog every day. I'm walking around thinking alla time. What's hard is noting that something I'm thinking could be put on a blog. The blog has to occupy a balcony seat in your head. I imagine there's a list of things in your head that you compare new experiences to, that you use to contextualize experience. A blog just has to make it onto that list.
• I missed a day in late November again. One of these years I'm going to try not to miss a day.

I'm also trying to top last year's post count, so I'll probably post more in December. It's Advent again, and Art Shop is this Friday -- come by if you're in Philadelphia! -- so I'll have things to talk about. Peace out, blogaday bitches.

Movies November 2009

Samurai Champloo, disc 1
I started watching this on Cartoon Network a few years ago, but never made time for it. The interplay of the late Edo period setting and hip hop is still pretty neat! It distracts me that the English voice for Mugen is the same guy who did Spike in Cowboy Bebop. The voice is too strongly associated with that one character for my ear to just let it slide into another one.

Scrubs, season 1, disc 1
I decided to rewatch this to learn. It's still funny! But what interests me more is how in-your-face the A-B-C plots are for each episode. I rarely notice when TV shows shift plots and acts, because I'm taking it in rather than studying it. But Scrubs just has really obvious set-ups and twists. Normally, obvious is bad, but this time I don't mean obvious = predictable or boring. It's just that when one of these bones of the show happens, it's sticking out of the flesh. Helpful!

Samurai Champloo, disc 2
This story is filling out nicely, and showing more intriguing Japanese history. The sex is strange here, because it's all sit-com sex, i.e., it never happens because of untimely turns of event. Plus Fuu is supposedly 15 years old, but drawn and sexualized older. And even though there was no age of consent in Tokugawa-era Japan, the modern context they made these stories in and the modern U.S. urban anachronisms they include confuse me as I try to figure out whether they're saying something about sex, or just titillating. Regardless of all that, I still dig it.

Samurai Champloo, disc 3
Ditto.

G.I. Joe: Season 1.1: Disc 1
Part research, part nostalgia. It's pretty bad for art, but ok for a 10-year-old's action-adventure fare, even today.

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Fun movie! It's a weird adaption, taking a children's book and making it a story about middle age. But that's Wes Anderson for you. It's no Royal Tenenbaums, but I can love it for what it is just fine.

Return of the King (extended)
Good times with my awesome LotR-loving wife.

Once you condense a mote of wisdom into an aphorism, it becomes more ornamental than instructive.

Yeah, I bought stuff

In case you were wondering.

Buy Nothing Day 2009

I haven't decided yet whether I'll participate in BND this year, but I'll promote it here like I do every year.

I 've heard that In This Economy, you need to take advantage of every sale, and retailers will be giving babies away with every purchase, and you don't want to miss that. Hell, I saw one major retailer who claimed to be open today, on Thanksgiving, to try to pick up a few more dollars.

And I don't know who you are, maybe you have a real need, and if you do, friend, go buy something tomorrow.

But if you're closer to my situation, you could stand to take a day and think about the stuff you already have in your life. New stuff will neither improve your condition, nor make your relatives love you more.

The act is only symbolic, but symbols have power when you give it to them. And you're probably going to give that power to some symbol. Why not make it a symbol you choose instead?

You haven't lived until...

Certain phrases trip the neuron set in my head that starts my teeth to grind. One of them is this intellectually poor man's version of the simpler, more urbane, "I recommend...".

A brief list of behaviors Internet tells me I haven't lived until I've done:

• eaten beefaroni with a hello kitty spork
• been to the Mayan Beach Gardens
• eaten a "Bacon Explosion"
• seen a 3 yr old sing ABBA
• felt your way along a jungle path in utter darkness, rounding a corner and spotting a pack of hyenas in a pool of light twenty yards away, with no apparent fence between you.
• witnessed a gargantum fireworks display set to Bee Gees (Staying Alive), MJ, U2 and The Prodigy
• LARPed*
• exsperanced pantanal**
• caught one of those high hard ones
• screwed a Catholic girl
• tried to explain arcane primary procedures and nominating rules to an eleven-year-old watching his first Democratic National Convention on C-Span
• shaked your ass of to house music in Barcelona!

Oh my wasteland of an existence.

*I've done this one, and can say with authority that its absence doesn't bar you from life.
** Totally true.

Why does the future still suck?

Spent two hours working on a Web site tonight, and nothing to show for it so far. But perseverance is key in these sorts of things, I hear. Must... have... operative... site... before... Art Shop....

Yo Mon

I watched the first disc of the G.I. Joe cartoon season 1 (1983) this weekend, and the primary thing I'm left with is the theme song played over and over in my head, except instead of the brass and strings of the original theme song, it's played with a steel drum that sounds slightly synthesized, like someone sampled it into a Moog.

I don't have time to expound on this, but yes, it is maddening.

Thunderstruck

I just realized this morning that I Wish I Were a Little Bar of Soap and If You're Happy and You Know It are the same tune.

Happy birthday, Meredith!

Today is the day we celebrate my wife's birth! I love my wife (seen here with Abraham Lincoln). She is kind to me, and works hard at our marriage, which is one good reason things go well between us -- underwater, she's paddling like a duck.

Here are some more things to know about her:

• Meredith loves warmth, and hates cold, even more than I do.
• She loves our dogs.
• She likes order and symmetry. She likes making it, and a lack of it bothers her.
• She likes assembling things: furniture, puzzles, equations.
• She dyed her hair purple earlier this year, and it looked great. I love it when she tries new things.
• She likes babies. Anybody's babies.
• She's going to quit her job in February, and that will be such a huge adventure.
• She is so liminal right now, and it is so exciting to be next to her while she's doing it.

Happy birthday, baby.