2/18/2008
The warm weather made the animals extremely active at the zoo today-- polar bears wrestled underwater, penguins breached, the lions were actually roaring, a tiger cub tackled his mother, and the rattlesnakes and cobras slithered in their tanks (it was also the first time I've ever seen a Gila monster move)-- but my most exciting animal encounter occurred at this 6:30 this morning, while I was recording some music: I was wearing headphones, the house was quiet, and I was immersed in the sound of the drum machine and backing guitar, when a large black bug fell from the ceiling and landed on my pick-hand; it was either a spider or some kind of beetle, but I flung it off so quickly that I didn't identify it, and I'm very proud that I didn't shriek loudly enough to wake the house (completely unrelated: on the way home from the zoo we passed a nursery and their placard read Pot Sale . . . Not that Kind!)
2/17/2008
Yesterday, my two sons and I formed a short lived rock'n'roll band, and my son Alex came up with our name: The Junior States (he had a rationale for this but I missed it because Ian had just jammed Legos into the keyboard and it was making a lot of noise).
THAT'S Fresh
I listened to 8 Diagrams on my eight-mile run this morning, and the Wu-Tang is still "keeping it fresh like Tupperware."
This Sounds Stupid (And Maybe It Is)
I hate it when actors have to act: for example, Catherine and I were watching an entertaining thriller called Primal Fear and the part requires Edward Norton, the alleged killer, to stutter-- some idiot wrote that in the script as part of his "character"-- and it's torture, because instead of enjoying the movie and speculating about who really did it, I'm thinking about how weird it must be for Edward Norton to have to pretend to have a speech impediment.
2/14/2008
A few weeks ago, I challeneged Alex to rub his belly and pat his head at the same time, but he was unable to do it and never mentioned it again until last night, when, just before bed, he said, "Look what I can do" and then he did it-- soI guess he was practicing in secret until he felt the time was right . . .
2/13/2008
A bittersweet day: Alex conquered the sled hill by our house for the first time, but Ian was sick with a fever and had to stay inside.
2/10/2008
The new kitchen is always the topic around our house: yesterday's topic was why does a stone floor feel colder than a wood floor when either one is going to be the same temperature as the rest of the house-- and I found the answer on-line; it is because stone is more dense and thus a better conductor of heat or cold and since the floor will generally be cooler than 98.7, it's going to make you feel colder (which leads one to wonder how cold Viggo Mortensen was during the filming of the naked knife fight in Eastern Promises-- he spends a lot of time crawling around on a stone floor.)
No Context, No Reward
I learned two things last night: God is a giant ear, and a "hook-up" is when you smuggle prison food out of the dining hall and back to your room, where you then try to make it a serviceable meal with whatever other materials you have on hand (for example, you take noodle soup and pour it into a bag of crushed cheese puffs and then put it under your pillow for ten minutes-- it congeals into a jail-house "burrito").
2/8/2008
Alex approached me with another "drawing" of his and I got ready to channel my time spent in the Uffizi (I use the Stanislavski method when I pretend that the scribbles my children produce are actually representative of something) but the person he drew had two arms, two legs, a face, two eyes and a mouth!
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=irule
Emu Farm
A new song by Greasetruck, but it's the same old story: boy meets girl, boy tries to impress girl by purchasing an emu farm, boy neglects security at said farm, emus escape, chaos ensues, stray emu kicks boy's girlfriend in the shin, and boy leaves town (I recorded the song on a Zoom Mrs-8, a tiny portable digital recorder and stuck the audio over a couple of random Youtube videos with some free Windows MovieMaker software).
Fourteen Words That Will Kill Your Buzz
I was having fun writing my trilogy of aphorisms about time, until I read this last night in Nabokov's Speak, Memory: "our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
2/5/2008
Living in the present is an impossible dream: one part of the mind is always anticipating the future, while another constantly assesses the past.
2/4/2008
Thinking about the past is a trap: remembering the bad times is depressing, and reminiscing about the good times is depressing as well, because inevitably, things have changed.
2/3/2008
Alex's swim lesson will be ten minutes longer today, to make up for the time that was lost last week because some kid upchucked in the pool.
2/2/2008
On Google Trends you can observe the top 100 web searches for the day-- it's a window to the consciousness of the world; on the day Heath Ledger died his name was the top search-- and number two was "Keith Ledger."
Homeless Elbow
Two days ago in Boulder, my friend Ryan and his wife Cat were attacked by a homeless man with a club-- Ryan took a shot to the head before Cat wrested the club from the attacker and beat him with it-- she reported in the paper that her arm was sore from bludgeoning the itinerant . . . seriously!
Finned and Defused
I'm reading Marvin Minsky's The Society of the Mind (his treatise on intelligence, artificial and otherwise) and Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body at the same time: I don't know whether I'm a very complicated robot or a very hairy shark.
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