Category: Out there

Met a woman yesterday in an office building, complimented the cute picture of her daughter on the wall. “What’s her name?” “Special.” “Her name is Special?” “Yes, she has two sisters — Unique and Lovely.”

My interest was, um, piqued, but didn’t quite know what to say next. She filled the silence. “Sometimes when someone asks Special her name, she tells them, ‘Oh, what a unique name!’ and she answers, ‘No, Unique is my sister.'” So her kids are trapped in an endless game of “Who’s On First?” with strangers.

Don’t get me wrong – I think unusual names are great. Shows balls, shows art. But this trio of monikers brings so much built-in difficulty for the kids.

Reminded of a story I heard about a woman who gave birth to twin girls and named them Orangelo and Lemonjelo (orange jello / lemon jello)… after the post-labor food she had just enjoyed. No idea whether the story is apocryphal, but I actually don’t entirely doubt it.

Nevermind Burning Man, the French know how to do performance spectacle x 10. From the Nantes festival, celebrating the works of Jules Verne:

“This Thursday, May 19, a rocket landed on the square of the Cathedral. It is a rocket controlled by a small giantess. Our sources of information indicate to us that it is probable that she will leave tomorrow morning… This Friday, the elephant of Royal of Luxury arrived on Saint-Pierre road and the small giantess left her rocket to join it and visit the downtown area.”

P.S. God bless Baby Elephant Walk.

Biking home from work, saw a police cruiser parked behind a late-model Corolla, lights flashing. Occupants of the vehicle standing outside the car talking to officers, both wearing karate or judo robes tied with black belts. Karate Dude #1 holding his cell phone up, screen flipped out toward the face of Officer #1, as if showing him an image. Officer #1 shaking his head slowly at the phone, looking puzzled. Officer #2 seemed to be studying Karate Dude #2’s getup.

Tried to write the caption to this scene in my head the rest of the way home.

Mark Morford for The Chronicle, hard not to quote at length:

After all, Jesus was a rebel. Jesus was the Original Liberal. Jesus was a devoted pacifist and a badass egalitarian and his best friends were all whores and dissidents and freethinkers and miscreants, artists of every shape and size and haircut and of course, were he walking around today, Jesus would be pretty much loathed and ostracized if not outright hacked to bits by the Christian Right. “Goddamn hippie liberal tree hugger,” they’d sneer, waving scythes and Bibles. “What the hell?” Jesus would say.

All of which places Jesus in direct line of the iPod’s marketing demographic and all of which naturally raises the question, well, so just what does the great mystic and healer and closet Buddhist and funky savior of humanity have on his holy iPod?

… Jesus knows this Big Obvious Secret: All music celebrates God, because God is merely another word for life and life is merely another word for “hot divine energy force” and “hot divine energy force” is merely another word for, well, “Steven Tyler.” So there you go.

In general, I like to think of the old birdhouse as a sort of time capsule — an immutable web-based record of interesting things artists were doing online when the web was catching fire in the mid-90s. But every now and then, an artist contacts me to say that they’ve moved on, are doing more interesting things these days, and would prefer not to have the dusty old content online anymore. Just got a request like that from surrealist William Carr, who is now doing most of his utterly wiggy visual arts in video and Flash rather than the static graphics he was doing back then. His new site is called DreamHive, and is a trip. Bye William!

The untold story of how NASA excluded black Americans… and how the Negro American Space Society of Astronauts got to the moon a full three years before whites took all the credit. The Old Negro Space Program (55 MB, worth it).

What is it about romance novel cover art that makes it seem almost inherently laughable? Is it the airbrushed paintings of lust disguised as love, depicted through perpetually heaving chests (both male and female) on impossibly fit bodies? Or the dashing-but-flaccid titles that sound almost computer generated?

Longmire (“The Internet’s leading source of wasted pixels”) has spent many long hours re-inventing the romance novel (or at least the covers), with hilarious results. “Lord of the Hissy Fit” and “I’m About To Let One” top the charts.

Thanks Paul