Reasons TV is better in box sets

So I finished season four of Lost tonight. We bought season one and watched it all in one clump, to see what the fuss was all about. We suffered our way through season two and the whole Michelle Rodriguez thinks she is a good actress phrase. season three brought the wonderful additions of Desmond and Juliet as regular characters, but still never answered a bloody question. All of season two and three were watched about a week later due to either taping on VHS (we're behind the times) or downloading every week. This season, not quite able to do either. As TV is progressing into the digital form, we get less and less channels to show up on our bunny ears. Which, overall, is still more than needed as we really do not watch much television to begin with. PBS still shows up most days, while everything else is starting to end up dubbed over in Spanish. downloading seems to not work as well anymore as the main people to download torrents from seem to be addicted to putting everything in zip/exe format, which would be fine except that Macs cannot open those files. So this has been a season of watching abc.com episodes and suffering throught the terrible speeds, haltings and 'limited'
commercials. At least it is free.

Back on track, I finished the most current season tonight, and truthfully, I was left wanting. Not cliffhanger, need to know what happens wanting. Just, you know, wanting it to have been better. Wanting it to have a more decisive ending. Wanting it to NOT BE BLOODY PREDICTABLE!!!!

I like the flash forwards. I think since it started going that way it is a great way to wrap up the series, which has left than a full season to go. I like what it being described, and the course the show is taking. I like the subtlety of chess thrown in, as if everything is game possible to win, rather than everyone just being pawns. I'm more just so dissatisfied the ending being exactly what I predicted in the beginning of the series. Way to cliffhanger.

Seriously, though weirder, it is starting to get to Battlestar Galactica predictable. Doesn't mean I will not follow through to the end, just means predictable.

Alberto Forero

Art by Alberto Forero

So I saw this guy advertised his website on Face Your Pockets in his description that went to the corresponding photo below (man in middle) and was actually pleasantly surprised by the illustrations he has in his portfolio.

Face Your Pockets

Face Your Pockets Project

"Things that are living in the pockets of your bag, jeans or jacket: travel and pay checks, old cigarette pack that just looks interesting, sugar lumps and all the stuff that has found home in your pockets. They are all the treasures our project is looking for! Our goal is not only bring all this objects into light but show the owner of them."

Jellyfish!

Coe & Waito porcelain jellyfish installation. Because, really, is there any other reason to go to the aquarium other than to watch the jellyfish?

Things I Need #436

DespairWear

Designed for all of us.

Amnesty II

EVERYBODY IS AGAINST EVERYBODY. SOMEBODY HAS TO BE FOR THEM

Reason's to Travel

Bruno's Art & Sculpture

Gorgeous! I'd love to visit here, unfortunately it is in Australia. Someone sponsor me....Francis?

Conditions

CURRENT CONDITION:

the worthless word for the day is: antejentacular

[fr. L. ante-, before + jentacul-um, breakfast]
archaic before breakfast
(compare postprandial)

"Not one poor visit in the antejentacular perambulations."
- Jeremy Bentham, correspondence (1843)

"You will learn that the holder for a handleless coffeecup
is called a zarf (if you didn't already know it); that the
antonym for postprandial (afterdinner) is antejentacular
(before breakfast), while the antonym of wealth may well
be illth..."
- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NY Times Aug 9, 1982


CONDITION IN 2 HOURS:

the worthless word for the day is: malnoia

[fr. mal- : ill, wrong + Gk nous, mind] /mal NOI ah/
a vague feeling of mental discomfort

"At last—the word we all wanted, to describe the
way we feel five minutes after waking up in the
morning when we realize that we are about to
recall yesterday's unresolved problems."
- Peter Bowler, The Superior Person's Second Book
of Weird and Wondrous Words (1992)

Music

Why is it the small indie bands I realize I really like can't get their asses to Dallas so I can give them my money in exchange for listening to good music? Been listening to a few really decent bands of late, all of whom seem determined to not come within a close enough span to let me see them live.

The Kin: Beyond fantastic brotherly duo who meld their voices into an amazing combination. I can see where Adrian says they need a good producer to clean up the music, but really, I was blown away from the first moment I heard their music. I tend to put about 75% of my likes in a band on the singing, and I have been known for eclectic tastes in that field. But these two have beautiful voices. And I have gone back through the old stuff from Australia to the newest, and really, I cannot choose which I prefer. The old was much more rock based, more mainstream; the new more folk and feeling each note. I've even gone as far as to join their street team in an attempt to get them to come sing somewhere in Texas so I can continue promoting a worthwhile band. And on a plus note, they toured with VAST not too long ago, which makes me ever so more endeared to both bands. And HI Michael!

Augustana: Recently invested into this band. Decent main vocals, can see every song just about in the background of some tv show. You know, one of the poignant moments that bring the show in focus. Which, evidently is how they garnered some fame from a Scrubs episode. The way I have been listening lately, I'm sure I will recognize the song by the time I ever get around to this season's episodes.

What Made Milwaukee Famous: I both love and hate this band. They range too far between some superb songs such as Sultan to a few of the others that just leave me disappointed.

I understand my tastes in music do not fit into the mainstream. If I were a few years younger, I could totally be a hipster except for my aversion for skinny jeans, beards, and the look of being unwashed. I love me some good live shows full of people that are coming down from Denton to see a band. I love more knowing I can afford my liquor while at the show b/c I am gainfully employed.

This was totally not what this post was meant to be originally, but I guess at time you need to just let out these bursts. And while almost everyone I know hates the music I listen to, I still am pretty well set in the opinion that I am right and it is just everyone else who doesn't know better.

I Am the Banana King!

They made a sequel. And it is more jacked up. Seriously, I want whatever drugs these guys have.

Itchy

"One of the biggest myths or misconceptions about chiggers is that they can burrow under your skin and drink your blood. This leads to the common treatment for chiggers of putting clear nail polish on chigger bites to suffocate the chiggers. Since chiggers don't actually burrow under your skin, this 'treatment' is unnecessary."

Thanks Hil. My legs itch like mad. Freakin' nature.

Spot for Amnesty International

Thanks Ja'

....the things my sister sends me....

BSG + Booze + Sleepy = Shitty

i wash my face with cleanser. then 2 cotton balls and a few swabbings of witch hazel and the evidence of the day is clear. contacts out, and i am as the gods commanded, back to basic and without demands.

adrian talks to his mother on the phone, a task i personally put off for my own family as long as possible. i cannot differentiate btwn duty and pleasure. and love and duty blurred the line long before i ever accepted the blurring of work and defeat. so where does that leave anything?

there is an internal monologue that i hear in my head that never ceases. in awakeness, in dreams, in drunkenness or sober, i hear myself narrating a world that never has existed. or, perhaps, existed just all too well that cannot begin to be in a physical form. i can't choose which it is as i cannot determine which i am ever actually in. worse is understanding that feeling and still not knowing the reason, feeling, or acceptance.

i often believe i have no clear understanding of the word 'feeling' and i just use it to explain the other thoughts i lack words for.

i wore a dress to work today. some saw, some did not.; probably the wrong ones saw, based on the reaction i received. i had people want to take pictures as this was such an unexplained occurrence. i was given compliments, as well as mocked for walking on my toes, when i finally wore tired of the heeled sandals and walked barefoot. one dared me to wear a dress tomorrow and he would wear a wig for a month, a dare i almost accepted, until i remembered that that was not the purpose nor the outcome to be wanting.

never knew a pair of very white calves could cause such a reaction. don't actually know from here if it is a compliment or just such an oddity that keeps people interested. carnies can do the same, but they at least get an income for it.

back to the beginning.l i apologize for laughing at you tonight for asking what religion you were in front of others who cannot understand. i know you are okay with it. but we both know i said it to diffuse one form for another, and b/c i am uncomfortable with all of it. this last weekend was very hard for someone like me. i have realized i have absolutely no faith in anything outside of myself and fate's sense of irony to give a shit about anything else.

perhaps that is worse. perhaps that will be my greater undoing and it can hopefully be at worst a very ironic ending. maybe the face of god will show up exactly as i am publicly blaspheming. irony. or the exacl opposite. hard to tell.

i really want to delete the entire last paragraph, but i almost feel it was a fight to even write down. my fingers do not want to work today. perhaps i am just stalling sleep as i cannot expect better than i already have in my own pessimistic mind.

either way, i suppose it is time...

Now We Just Need Some Mashed Potatoes.....

Anatomie of a Gummy Bear By Jason Freeney.


...via Why Me?

Rurality

18 years ago my uncle decided to move from Indiana to Arkansas to try his hand in chicken farming. He has always loved farming and being in the country, having no neighbors to speak of and escaping the standard life we 'city slickers' live. He now has hundreds of acres of some of the prettiest land up in the Ozarks in multiple places, a lake house in the town, a country house with a big barn, 4 chicken houses and a few dozen head of cattle. The chicken houses are not the standard small operation style with a few measly birds pecking in the dust until Farmer John decides it is time to have Sunday dinner, instead they are full-scale operations with 30,000 baby chicks and another 30,000 older chickens that will be sent off to another farm once full grown to lay eggs that will be sent off to our wonderful grocery stores for our consumption.

This weekend my baby cousin graduated high school, so my father and i went to Arkansas for the graduation. My mother, who spends 3 months at home and then another 3 months back and forth taking care of my grandmother in Indiana, was to come down with said Grandma and a few other family members so we could bring her back to Dallas for a few months. So 8.5 hours driving and we're so far up a gravel 'County road' that I couldn't find my way back without instructions,and we are there for the weekend.

I'm not terribly close to my non-immediate family. My oldest sister has a very special connection with my grandmother and makes it a point to see her every year, along with the closest in age cousin on that side of the family. I have never had that closeness nor worked for it. I'm not sure if it was the geographic distance from that side of the family growing up or the age gaps, but I never had a huge connection to anyone. But, duty and familial guilt had me go on this trip, and in the end I am rather grateful for it. I saw a lot of people that I haven't for years, was surrounded by some of the most gorgeous country I would never care to live in, and saw so many example of exactly why I could not be around the type of people that live in these types of areas.

The poverty is overwhelming. There are houses you wonder how they are still standing, and what's more, how someone lives in them. Some of the people you meet are only concerned with a leaky roof, not a paycheck. The amount of people living on Welfare in this area is beyond amazing. It almost seems like everyone is on it. I know that when my family moved out here, they had almost nothing but a will to make it and a bank loan that if they defaulted, the next 3 generations wouldn't be able to pay off. My aunt and uncle each worked full time jobs for years in towns over 60 miles away from home, besides having to take care of 60,000 chickens as well as drive another 50 miles everyday to feed the cattle they had on another farm. When they had time to sleep is beyond me. The neighbors originally hated them for being outsides, Yankees, and having money to live on. They had to raise 2 small kids as well as grow into a community that did not understand a woman who would have a conversation with a man they did not know, a child that had leukemia, a very strong Baptist base community when they are Lutheran, along with the everyday life struggles that are too much for most people to handle. I am always amazed when I see this family, especially when I can understand as an adult now what they all went through.

I know the stereotypes that follow Arkansas, and I can see first-hand how they could form. Remote location, very little education, etc. I spent 3 weeks here after I graduated high school almost a decade ago, and I took back a completely different perspective this time. It is 20 miles one way to the nearest town, which is actually an area comprised of 4 towns all incorporated into 1 for schools and the like. In the last year alone they have undergone flooding and 2 tornadoes that took out large sections of town, leaving all of the small business in dire need of rebuilding. Yes, there is the requisite Walmart, but it does not take the place of all of the other shops in this type of location. They are cutoff from most major towns, if you even want to call any town in Arkansas "major".

This, however, did not lead me to make some amazingly obvious observations, most of which were done during the graduation commencement itself.

1. Any race outside of white is basically unheard of in this area. There was a few blacks, and a few mixed of unknown origin, but really, white is the only color in town.

2. This is the most politically incorrect place on Earth. One of the biggest of the 4 towns is called Cherokee Village, so named, as the Trail of Tears was walked through this area. We spent some time looking for arrowheads on some of my uncles property as they used to camp alongside the river and threw the extras into a large pile that eventually washed into other areas. In Cherokee Village there is the Choctaw Center, Iroquois Rd, Delaware Dr., Omaha Center, Thunderbird Lake, etc. Basically every Indian nation was named in the street signs and landmarks.

3. The mascot of the high school is the Rebels, complete with Confederate flag and caricature of Robert E. Lee.

4. While my family was dressed in slacks, dresses, etc. for the graduation, about half the crowd wore such wonderful assemblage as a Tinkerbell t-shirt, camo hats, overalls, mud boots. Outside of Tinkerbell, this was both men and women.

5. Teeth are optional. As are mullets. And molestaches.

6. Meth is rampant, as is alcoholism. I find it interesting how in the 70's/80's it was white people giving crack to the poor blacks and getting them hooked, and now we have the Mexicans giving poor white people meth and getting them hooked, The cycle circles around. The counties they live in are dry. The counties around them are dry. Fro where they live it is easier to go out of their way to drive to Missouri to buy beer than it is to buy from a wet county. As my uncle put it, these people are not like Yankees where they can have a few beers in the middle of the day and then go about finishing their work. They drink to excess and then don't get back around to the work. Domestic violence across the region is high, though not to say that every person who drinks beats their wife, far from it.

7. Out of 105 graduates, almost all of them received some sort of scholarship to college, in varying denominations. Try seeing those odds in Dallas.

8. Of those, 2 kids graduated from Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts, similar to the program in our area called TAMS. One of the girls who getting a diploma from ASMSA received over $350,000 in scholarships to multiple schools and is pretty well set for life.

9. There was an open-house for my cousin the day after graduation, a tradition evidently not well known in those parts. A few years ago when my other cousin graduated, invitations were sent out to neighbors and lots of them dropped by to find out exactly what that even entailed. The same people this time showed up as well, and from what my mother said, quite thoroughly enjoyed themselves even more than the last. The groups did not mix well between the city-folk and country, but at least the bridge was gapped and the attempt made.

10. I have never been so happy to come back to Dallas. I might want to escape here and move someplace different, but I already know that due to my upbringing the country is not for more. Nice to vist, very beautiful country without pollution, not the kind of lifestyle I would be comfortable living. Can almost say that while I do not want to go to work tomorrow, I am very grateful that the type of job I have does not involve chickens or farming or something of the like.

11. Congrats to anyone who actually read this whole entry. I just had a lot to think about on the drive home, and somehow this all came pouring on out. Pictures should be up on Flickr sometime in the next week or 2.

Fail

13 year old steals dad's credit card to buy hookers, more interested in playing Xbox.

I think the whole article is perfectly wrapped up with the last sentence: "Ralph's ambition is to one day become a politician." He's got a good start.

Things That Piss Me Off #3389

They were out to create seizures"

All You Need....

All You Need... from Jaye Bhee on Vimeo.

New NIN Album

NIN: The Slip

Go. Download. Now.

Maleonn

Artistry by Maleonn. I was completely blown away by the amazing photography this man has produced, as well as the variety of different types of photos. Also absolutely love that in the first picture there is a small photo of Salvador Dali.

Pain

The bright lights are killing my eyes. Everyday the new contacts are coming out earlier due to the amount of white space I look at. New building today with fluorescent rather than recessed lighting really jacked up my eyes.

Help me out. Make the intertubes darker and less glaring.

BTW Tuesday was....

..a great night.

"It's a New Year,
I'm glad to be here
It's a fresh spring,
So let's sing.

In 2080
I'll surely be dead
So don't look ahead,
Never look ahead"

photo totally stolen....yahoo image search or something. go crediting and being nice.

Nom nom nom

Breast feeding highest percent in 20 years

I had a roommate in college who had been adopted that I always liked to pick on saying that forula kids have an average of 20 IQ points lower than breast-fed kids. Those were good times. This would make me feel better overall, except that now it is a generation mostly of breast-fed kids whose parents dine on fast food.

Economic trickle-effect as a rule of food intake x newborns = people who take care of old me?

Makes me want to die young. Don't see this actually turning out as well as the predict.

Best statement to back me up on this? "The latest CDC report found rates of breast-feeding were also lowest among women who are unmarried, poor, rural, younger than 20, and have a high school education or less."

Not CNN, but Worse?

NSWF: News Story or Editorial?

...Not really fully unsafe for work, but come on....I don't want to see this on your screen when I walk by.

Mentos vs Coke on Mass Scale

It's good to see that in a world of starvation and poverty people can come together for some very important and cheap experimentation. Hope that record was worth it!

And really, raincoat or no, that's pretty damn sick. You're gonna end up with coke all over you. The picture is kinda interesting though.