I knew I spoke too soon. The lawn blimps are back. There’s also an illuminated flag-thing hanging in front of the garage that’s red, white and blue Christmas lights in some sort of plastic grid. The sign to the left is permanent and commemorates local firefighters and police, which I was able to read for the first time today. Usually, I’m flying past on my way to work or to church (ooh! my brilliant career, not). I can’t remember if the flag signboard was always there, or went up after 9/11. I think it’s been repainted recently – it used…
-
-
Church today was funny (now there’s an opening line). It’s Pentecost and a lot of the readings were about tongues of fire and the Holy Spirit and the voice of a strong wind and so on. Every time one of these themes would come up, there would be a rumble of thunder. There were several perfectly timed violent thunderclaps during our priest’s talk with the kids from church school, putting a very strong emphasis on everything he said. The church school had some sort of project today, so they had popcorn and watched a video about Noah before they came…
-
Well, I finally got the simple web pages for “Holy Moly” updated (see The Church of the Holy Innocents) and added the date of the “Holy Rollers” car show. Apparently, we’ve been getting entries already – car shows are big around here, I guess. We’re going to hold it on the incredibly large and expensive-to-maintain lawn, which is ideal for this kind of event, since it’s construction-grade sod from the 60’s. And now I’d better get out of here. Big party piece for the choir, and we’re short-handed (or voiced) this week.
-
I borrowed this book from my MIL the other day when we went down to see their new place: The Nine Parts of Desire. I couldn’t put it down while I was there, and it’s one of “those books.” You know the kind I mean – books you heard about a long time ago, wanted to read, but never got around to it. I like books where the writer has to become a part of a community in order to write about it and the people in it. That was why I liked Nickel and Dimed. I read the latter…
-
Well, I’ve put an 8-hour day into screwing around trying to get something to work again. So now, let’s talk about the house again, shall we? The “kitty garden” is growing fairly well, except that the lawn service guys keep cutting the hell out of it with their big string trimmer. I keep forgetting to put some fencing around it; they came earlier than expected this weekend and caught me again with no fence and no little sign in Spanish saying “Favor de no cortar” which I hope is a fairly polite way of saying “please don’t cut (these).” However,…
-
Oh my GOD! Amazon links are finally working right. Thank you, Silverberry! I never could get Brad Choate’s version (slightly different, similar effect) working; I ran across a reference that it had to do with smart quotes replacing dumb quotes (guess what I have?) The “complex” macro uses overLIB, process tags, and I suspect there’s something I should do with encode_js in order to deal with apostrophes in the titles of books. <MTMacroDefine name="amazon" ctag="amazon"> <MTIfNotEmpty expr="[MTMacroAttr name='asin']"> <MTAmazon devtoken="XXXXXXXXXXXXXX" associateid="xxxxxxxxxxx" search="[MTMacroAttr name='asin']" method="Asin"> <a href="<MTAmazonLink>" onmouseover="return overlib('<img src=\'<MTAmazonSmallImage>\' align=\'left\' border=\'0\' hspace=\'5\'/><b>Amazon Price:</b><MTAmazonSalePrice><b><br />Released:</b> <MTAmazonReleaseDate format="%B %Y"><br /><a href=\'<MTAmazonLink>\'>Buy me…</a>',…
-
HONOLULU – Hawaiian music is doing swimmingly with listeners, and now it’s is ready to catch the big one: the Grammy. The genre will have its own category for the first time next year if the National Academy of Arts & Sciences approves. Great news, long time coming. If you’ve ever wondered “who sings that great mix of Over the Rainbow and Wonderful World,” that’s “Iz” Kamikawiwo’ole, a Hawaiian artist who died a few years ago. I was so lucky to have gone to a live show at the Northwest Folklife Festival that featured some Hawaiian Slack Key Masters. I’m…
-
Neil Gaiman quotes from a reader’s email in his mailbag: Sorry about your having to clean up after the cat. We have a cat here who doesn’t understand that having all four paws in the litter box is not sufficient, and so we often end up with urine under the litter box rather than in it. Sigh. Well, I know all about a cat being such an enthusiastic and productive pisser that also thought that just the two front paws standing in litter constituted “in the litterbox.” Also there was some confusion in his mind over whether hanging one’s kitty…
-
Osmond said he stopped and asked, “Why are you screaming?” One 16-year-old answered, “Because our moms told us to.” I went to school with a girl who claimed to be related to the Osmonds (these things are highly possible in Utah). She was quite a strange person. I wonder what happened to her.
-
Two of our travelers had a bad experience last night just as they were about to check in to a hotel – it was in Melrose Park, a suburb of Chicago. They complained to our overnight service desk, and as one of the many hats I wear is following up on the service calls in the morning, I looked at the record to see what needed to be done. This one was documented very carefully – the agent spelled it out so there’d be no misunderstanding. The male traveler was approached by a prostitute as soon as he got out…