please use side door

Las Vegas, NV

where the boys (and girls) are

In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October—the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise.

In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat”—chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to such sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now (see chart).

As reported in Sex and the Internet: Devices and Desires, in the 19 April issue of the Econimist.

For anyone who's interested in traffic patterns online, the news that porn sites have been usurped by anything online is a possible indicator that, as the Economist suggests, the Internet is maturing as a medium.

It could also simply mean that the porn has picked up and moved shop to the sites that are beating it out in the traffic rankings -- social networking sites like MySpace, Flickr and SecondLife.

color tv

two highly unusual search queries

• should eel be parboiled before cooking
• what force in newtons will break coccyx

Both of these came in today to detritus via Google search queries.

Proving what Bill the Bard said through his Dane: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet was talking to his pal Horatio, but he might as well have been talking about Google.

a whole new U.[S.]

It is like being given a coloring book that your brother already colored in.

Michael Bierut of the New York design firm Pentagram, commenting on the new U.S. Passport design, as quoted in today's New York Times.

The Times reports that the new U.S. passport is a cacophonous assemblage of "American images" and allusions -- eagles, bison, Mt Rushmore, sheaves of wheat. Each page is mucked up with an image -- gone is the wonderful empty grid, the subtle seals of state, the spare running label: Entries/Entrées | Visas | Departures/Sorties.

Now "patriotic" blurbs like these run across the tops of the spread -- this one from esteemed Ich bin ein Berliner JFK spewing what sounds like W crazy talk:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Beirut's subsequent comment nails exactly why it is that something like this is all wrong:

A passport, not unlike a scrapbook, gets its allure from gradually accruing exotic stamps, with the blank pages holding the promise of future adventure.

It's ironic that this new document shouts so loudly about being American, when a passport, as a document, is about getting out of the country -- getting away from My Country Tis of Thee and being transported to a new place that teaches you unexpected things (the way wandering always does) -- about other people, other worlds. About yourself.

Don't tell me who I am. Let me find my own America.

getcher rock on

I've been away -- playing mostly, thinking some. Scrambling on rock faces and seeing what's over the next ridge.

Here's a quickie slideshow of ~ 5,000 year old rock art from a spot called Grapevine Canyon on a little spurt of Nevada Highway 163. The turn-off is a dirt road called Christmas Tree Pass (why it's called Christmas Tree Pass I have no idea -- this isn't evergreen country). Keep your eyes peeled because it's easy to miss.

As are so many things that are worthwhile.

esperanza

Hope is what makes us shiver and long to be with others.

An almost incongruous applique on a woman's dress, created in commemoration for the women (around 400) who have been murdered -- and whose murders remain unsolved -- around Juarez, Mexico.

The exhibit is traveling the U.S. -- many are hanging here on display at Stanford University, where I've been hanging out for the last few days at a conference.

slushi stop

Stopping for slushies on the road to nowhere.

22 cranes

22 cranes
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

I can count 22 building cranes outside my window at the Bellagio Hotel, and I suspect there are more hiding behind that tower.

Posting by cameraphone from Las Vegas, NV

ceci n'est pas Paris

ceci n'est pas Paris
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

The architecture of the Las Vegas strip baffles me: It's all skin and allusion (flesh and illusion, too). This was shot last night outside "Paris", a hotel/casino that emulates, well, Paris.

Spent the afternoon tooling around the old Las Vegas downtown, however, and all its sleeping neon and Googie wonderfulness.

That area, for some reason, although it's rundown and slowly dying out and the foot traffic is only a fraction of the Strip, feels authentic and real and right (or as right as Vegas is ever going to be).

Posting by cameraphone. Real pics to follow soon.

motoring into vegas

motoring into vegas
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Play day scampering on rocks and shooting 5K year old rock art.

Work begins tomorrow -- in Las Vegas for a conference-like-thing.

really meaty very easy stew

As has been noted here before, my darlin’ companion and I have different culinary priorities. I like my veggies diverse and piled high – he’d prefer they stay off the plate to make more room for the meat and roots.

Found a lovely little something of a stew that made us both happy and cooked up nice while I was working from home this week nursing a cold. You’ll definitely need a weekend to pull this one off if you’re not usually home during the day – the mix up part is quick and easy, but it wants four hours in the oven. We still have a little nip of winter left here, so this meat and potato stew slow-cooked in olive oil and lemon juice was perfectly appropriate – stick to ribs with just a hint of the warm weather to come.

Original recipe with my modifications:

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
¼ cup water
(This is for the adventurous souls who are going to seal their dutch oven with a lid of dough – I used tinfoil. So sue me.)

1/4 lb veal
(I hear humane veal is now available, but I was too tired to hunt so I skipped it)
¾ lb lamb, cubed for stew
¾ lb pork, cubed for stew
(I got away with ½ lb of each meat – there were only two of us eating off this pot)
2 celery ribs (don’t like celery so much, so I left it out)
3 – 4 medium carrots, cut into rounds
4 – 6 medium potatoes, cut into big stew-y cubes
3 large onions (I got away with one monster)
4 garlic cloves, minced (doubled it)
1 heaping tablespoon of oregano
Strained fresh juice of 2 ½ lemons
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
(Use good salt. Always. From the sea. Large granules. You know what I’m talking about.)

If you’re making the dough, place flour in a medium-sized bowl and make a well in the center. Add water and stir with a fork to form dough. Knead until smooth and set aside, covered.

Or just pull out the tinfoil like I did.

In a large glass or clay casserole dish or dutch oven [1] combine everything.

Yep. That easy.

Now cover it up and bake it for 3 ½ to 4 hours in an oven set to around 275 to 300 degrees. If you’re using tinfoil, don’t be tempted to lift the lid to look inside. Just leave it alone. It’ll be just fine. (If you’re using dough over the top you won’t have the same temptation.)

Then, when your nose tells you it’s ready -- somewhere between that 3.5 and 4 hr mark -- turn off the oven and let it set for 20 to 30 minutes. You can take it out of the oven if you think it’s farther gone than you’d like. But LEAVE THE LID ON.

Meanwhile, rustle up whatever you want to go with it (Green salad? Chilled bottle of Retsina? It is a Greek recipe, after all. Maybe some of that crusty white bread with the sesame seeds on top…)

Okay. 4+ hours have passed? You can lift the lid now. Be prepared to be particularly pleased with your meal.

Freely adapted from The Food and Wine of Greece by Diane Kochilas

[1] I use glazed cast iron myself.

hello, kitty.

You’re not the prettiest girl I ever saw, and you’re not the best singer I ever heard, and you’re certainly not the best actress I ever hoped to see, but if we put them all together, we’ll find the husband we’re looking for on the stage.

Kitty Carlisle’s mother to Ms. Carlisle when she was still young, as reported this morning in the New York Times.

Later she would say to her daughter, after seeing her perform for the first time: “My dear, we’ve made a ghastly mistake.”

I’ve long had a crush on Kitty Carlisle, as I do on most dames. She died last night at 96.

There are so few true dames left. I still haven’t figured out the recipe, and the women who embody it so well – Ms. Carlisle, Ms. Stritch, a few old girls in my grandparents’ circle – are slowly aging out. Are they a product of a certain time when women were expected to be something very different and they insisted, instead, on being entirely who they were?

Give me time: it’s a nut I’m trying to crack.

There’s no evidence that Ms. Carlisle addressed her mother’s concerns directly, but she showed them to be completely wrong by living a vital life in which she performed up until this year on the stage. The New York Times reports her as saying, shortly after her 79th birthday:

”I’m more optimistic, more enthusiastic, and I have more energy than ever before.” Energy, she said, came from doing the things she wanted to do. “You get so tired when you do what other people want you to do.”

And maybe there it is.

p.s. Kitty Carlisle remembers her life in the theatre »

solitaire

a found poem

There were bad moments
When I would discover
I was alone

Alone-ness became loneliness
The sensation strong enough
To remind me
(How could I forget?)
That the one thing better
Than solitude

The only thing better
Than solitude

Is society

Not the roar of city streets
Or the cultured talk of schoolmen
Or human life in general

I mean a friend
Or Friends
Or a good, friendly woman


Found in Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

pull focus

You know those days when you *really* need to pull focus -- and your body, your mind, just can't?

Nursing a spring cold that just won't let go, and I'm having one of those.

upside/downside

The upside to waking with a start at 2.30 in the morning and realizing that you're not going back to sleep anyway so you might as well get up and work on this thing, is that by the time 6.30 rolls around the thing is done. And you've logged half of your requisite 8 hours, so your work day should wrap up no later than Noon. If you're lucky.

The downside is that you're sleepy. And the rest of the world is wide awake.

(One other upside: pretty sunrise.)

and if that doesn't work, imagine them naked

I sometimes think about returning to the US, but I’ve gotten awfully attached to living in a free country: and I’m not sure America is a free country anymore.

A friend of mine made that remark about a year ago. He's a Far Rockaway boy, from Queens, who moved to the UK many years ago. He made the comment in passing and it’s stuck with me since. At the time not so many Americans would have agreed with him, although I think in the last year that's changed a bit. But I still don’t think that’ll be enough to bring him back.

I pinged him today because he used to teach at Virginia Tech and the news coming out of there was so bad that I was concerned some of his old colleagues or friends may have been impacted. Fortunately, no.

While I had him close I asked him one last thing, because he’s the best lecturer I’ve ever heard – he has a brilliant far-ranging mind that one reviewer likened to “Umberto Eco on speed” – and I’ve been buried in preparations for four different presentations that I'm on the hook for in the next week.

The request: One line of advice about public speaking.

The response:

Never assume that the audience knows more than you about your topic.

It works both ways: It prevents you from being intimidated and from being arrogant.

And now it’s yours to keep as well.

But I’m going to keep his good luck wishes for myself -- 'cause I need all I can get right now.

Rule #7

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Rule #7 from Vonnegut's rules for short stories. Read all 8 rules at Boing Boing.

hand knit jacket for your apple

Maybe this whole knitting thing has gone too far.



I'm just sayin'... (via stylehive)

short sightedness

card catalog
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

The Dewey Decimal System's categorization for religions of the world, aka the 200 category, is defined as follows:

Dewey, 200: Religion
210 Natural theology
220 Bible
230 Christian theology
240 Christian moral & devotional theology
250 Christian orders & local church
260 Christian social theology
270 Christian church history
280 Christian sects & denominations
290 Other religions

From Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet in Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

The Dewey Decimal Classification system was, of course, developed by the American (and presumably Christian) Melvil Dewey in 1876.

random tunes

Two tunes floating around my head this morning -- the first is Smile by Lily Allen, who I heard interviewed somewhere recently (maybe Sound Opinions? maybe NPR?) and really got grooving on her wonderful title LDN. Found her site and then her tracks on iTunes -- and had to laugh when I realized how dark and dire the majority of her lyrics are, wrapped inside such a sweet-pop optimistic sound.

I'm not in an unhappy relationship, and I'm miles away from an unhappily dissolved relationship, but still Smile brought it all back -- "it" being the time my philandering ex- moved to DC almost concurrently with the appearance of that snipper -- and yes, friends, I was, shall we say, "optimistic" that the two would meet up. That's just how bad those things suck. Smile brings the vengeance back without the pain -- or the murderous impulse. (I'm over it. Honest. Not so dangerous anymore.)

Also fresh in my head: Bright Eyes' First Day of My Life. Little bit healthier, for those who like their love sunny-side up.

I was introduced to this track by their video and I scored the recording right away. It still sends me over the moon -- but I had forgotten how sweet the video was until I came across it again on del.icio.us. Once the camera settles in for a long shot it doesn't move again, but instead a series of individuals cut in and out of the frame, all of them sitting on the same couch, all of them listening through headphones to the same track, all of them responding like human beings do to the thoughts, the ideas, the words that describe this thing called love.

Pure sweetness. (Blogliners click through to see the YouTube video -- because you know those things don't show up in the feed.)

'cause anniemcq wants you to

Anniemcq was kind enough to nominate detritus for a couple of blogger's choice awards -- one for stuff, the other for photography.

I promised her I'd promote it, and sheepishly here I go, 'cause if you've read miss anniemcq's Mommy's in a Timeout blog, you know she's one tough mother (in the best kind of way) -- and she's not a mama I wanna cross.

Thanks, Miss Mcq. Now folks, I need your help, so we don't let her down.

Vote for stuff »

Vote for photography »

Thanks tons.

future home of pequod's pizza

Passed by the grey gardens site today; it's been leveled to nothing by top soil and hung to the chain link fence that surrounds it is a sign that reads: "Future Home of Pequod's Pizza."

Glad I stopped when I did (reprised) »

oh crap.

Chicago won out over LA to vie for hosting the 2016 Olympics.

Here's what I think about that »

Oh yeah -- and guess what? They plan to touch the lakefront.

crap.

morning paper, morning light

Still not quite Spring. My kitchen table, around 6.30 AM.

a malleable inconvenience

... It steals my capacity to think about...
Originally uploaded by !esco&guilmon!.

Some eyecandy for your evening, courtesy of Flickrite !esco&guilmon!

A Malleable Inconvenience »

If you clickthrough on the above link for the slideshow and then dial the timing way down so that a frame flashes every second or so, you might find (as I did) that it's curiously reminiscent of Dali and Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou.

Maybe it's the eyeball. Or maybe it's just me making freaky associations again, where no real affinity exists.

open for the season

open for the season
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Chicagoland, USA

record of invention

So I leaned over to my Higgs Bosen buddy at a break during our committee meeting last night and asked him, what with all the news on the new Collider: “Have you been to Cern lately?” (don't I sound urbane? ;) Which of course resulted in some gossip (apparently Fermi Labs has embarrassed themselves badly with an exploding magnet), and delightful use of language (when particle physicists talk about ramping up a new particle accelerator, they say that they’re going to: “get some beam up” – slowly, so as not to compromise the equipment – and then, over time, they’ll “move up to top energy”) and then led into the most extraordinary napkin-sketch conversation.

He’s just filed a record of invention – predecessor to prototyping, forerunner to any possible patent – for a tremendously cool device that would provide energy efficiently and at practically no cost – if it works.

All this he sketched on a scrap of paper for my wondering eyes and made perfectly plain sense of for my fascinated-by-physics-but-not-entirely-savvy-to-it ears.

And of course I’d like to tell you all about it, but seeing how they still need to ramp up a prototype (at the Department of Energy’s expense) that would probably be breaching a trust and the what of it isn’t important anyway, is it?

What’s important is that people think these things up. Manufacture them out of nothing more than grey cells and coffee gone cold and the pure night air. (And oh, right, government funding.)

Wandering around Rodin’s bronze folk at Stanford the other night I got to wondering the thing I wonder a lot whenever I’m moved by a masterful artist’s art: Why do I need this? And why did you, my friend the artist, feel compelled to create it? To drop everything else and just do this? For me. For all of us.

The courage of that astonishes me. I have such a compulsion to be useful – even the way I make my livelihood grew out of that compulsion – much as I love it, it was more or less accidental. I saw an opportunity to do something, something that I did reasonably well, something that other people found to be of use, something they’d pay me to do so that I could eat.

And I like to eat. So I kept on doing it.

But to quit everything else and only create things because they’re beautiful?

M’s sketch last night – the invention – the whole thing was about harnessing energy. Spinning coils and magnetic fields and laser beams – all to harness this one thing and put it to beautiful use. Born of pure imagination, it may well find a useful end. But only because he dreamed the beautiful thing into being. Only because he allowed it to be.

Beauty is its own excuse for being. — Emerson

steely amanuensis

Why?
Originally uploaded by ReyGuy.


a found poem

It is strange and pleasing
That a machine famed
For its cold efficiency
Issued from the hands
Of this modest and distracted man [1]

He wore battered hats
One historian says.
His trousers were inches too short

[In later years]
He soon disowned the [typewriter]
Refused to use one

Or even
To recommend its use

[And yet]

Nietzsche used a typewriter
In the effort to stem his migraines
And incipient blindness
(Symptoms of syphilis)

Mark Twain was the first
To deliver a typewritten manuscript
To a publisher [2]

For many years after his death
[The] devoted typist [of Henry James] [3]
Claimed that she was still receiving
[His] dictation

(Indeed
Through her spirit medium
She was informed that
Thomas Hardy, George Meredith,
And John Galsworthy

All as dead as James
Also wanted to use
Her stenographic services.)

William S. Burroughs wrote
And may have believed
That a machine he called
The Soft Typewriter
Was writing our lives
And our books
Into existence


Found in The Typing Life: How writers used to write, Joan Acocella's review of Darren Wershler-Henry's new book The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, in this week's New Yorker Magazine.

[1] Christopher Latham Sholes, from Milwaukee, was the inventor of the typewriter that was marketed to great success by Remington after the Civil War (when the market for guns dried up). The machine was the first to deploy the QWERTY keyboard, designed to be inefficient so that the typewriter’s keys wouldn’t jam together. According to Wershler-Henry: “Reportedly, Sholes’s partner delegated his son-in-law, the superintendent of schools for western Pennsylvania, to draw up a list of the most common two-letter sequences in the English language. Sholes then designed the keyboard so that these pairs were separated, thus introducing a tiny delay between the activation of one letter and the next.”

[2] The manuscript was Life on the Mississippi

[3] Theodora Bosanquet

this just in

Received earlier today as part of a random email thread.

mmmmmmmm. bacon.

N = C + {f_b (c_m) • f_b (t_c)} + f_b (T_s) + f_c • t_a

In which:
N = force in newtons
f_b is the function of the bacon type
f_c is the function of the condiment or filling effect
T_s is the serving temperature
t_c is cooking time
t_a is the time taken to insert the condiment or filling
c_m is the cooking method
C represents the breaking strain in newtons of uncooked bacon

The formula that best describes the bacon sandwich, or "bacon butty", as devised by Researchers at Leeds University and reported in yesterday's New York Times.

According to the researchers, perfection of the bacon butty is realized through the attainment of the perfect crunch, which is understood as follows: "the amount of force in the bite, expressed in newtons, and the level of noise, expressed in decibels. … Ideally ... 0.4 newtons should be applied to crunch the sandwich, creating 0.5 decibels of noise."

goodnight, baby.

Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

From Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, as cited in the New York Times obituary for the writer, who passed away today at 84.

Even though on two different occasions two different friends (neither of whom knew the other) told me of encounters with the esteemed Mr. Vonnegut in his twilight years, sloshed at one literary after hours gathering or another, behaving badly and leering at the young women -- even still I love the man.

Love the way his words take shape on the page and play their music in the ear. Love, most of all, just to hear what he has to say.

Goodnight, Mr. Vonnegut. Safe home.

clothes make the man

We got spontaneous reports from the women that we never got from the males, comments like "I would have liked the photos better if the people didn't have those ridiculous '70s hairstyles."

Dr. Kim Wallen of Emory University as cited by Natalie Angier in Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It. in today's New York Times.

Dr. Wallen comments on the fact that in a scientific study on sexual desire, conducted by Emory University, women showed a marked preference (over men) for images of men performing cunilingus on other women. They also noticed more fashion details.

(Which reminds me of a story that a friend once told me about a girl in her grade school whose name was Connie Lingus…)

the malady of the quotidian

a found poem

There is a peculiar intensity about some streets in Dublin
which becomes more gnarled and layered the longer you live

in the city

and the greater the stray memories
and associations you build up.

Sometimes this sense of the city
can be greatly added to by history and by books;
sometimes, however, the past
and the books
hardly matter

seem a strange irrelevance.

On a busy day it is easy to go
into the GPO in O’Connell Street
without a single thought
for MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse
or without remembering

for a second

that Samuel Beckett once asked his friend to
measure the height of the ground to Cúchulainn’s arse’
the ancient Irish hero
patron saint of pure ignorance and crass violence.

The need to buy a stamp
or a TV licence
or fill in a form
is often too pressing
the queues too long
the malady of the quotidian
too richly detailed to be bothered by heroes.

Found in Darlings: Colm Tóibín on Beckett’s Irish Actors in the 5 April issue of the London Review of Books.


It is a not insignificant artifact of my life that I am homeless. Meaning, that although I have more than sufficient shelter, I have no ancestral home to return to. The one that I might have claimed, my grandfather’s, was sold long ago, and my parents have long since moved elsewhere (each to a different destination) to places that have very little purchase in my heart, although they’re pleasant enough, all three (counting a step-parent in there).

For that reason, home for me means the company of the people I love. And, not insignificantly, the memory of their company is tied, concretely and discretely, to the places where we exchanged evidence of that mutual accord – through conversation, the squeeze of a hand, a shared look, a snug hug, a tumble beneath sheets.

I realized recently with a start that this specificity of geography in the landscape of my heart is also tied tightly to time. This occurred to me when, just this last week, I asked a colleague to let me off at the top of Taylor Street in San Francisco, with the intention of walking down to my hotel. I stepped out of the car and discovered that I was directly in front of my girlfriend M’s place – or at least where she was living when I visited her in the early 90s. She’s somewhere in Vermont now. I was just married at the time, to a man who would make me a chump, but I didn’t know that yet and thought myself luckier than most. It was a time bender, to stand there and remember a very different set of circumstances when I visited her back then; and to wonder how much of that Me is still left?

This is a question that comes to mind often lately: “Where have I gone?”

Or, more to the point: “Where am I?”

Traveling west of the Mississippi stirs it up the most, seeing friends that are tied, in my mind, to that landscape leaves me longing for a home that I’ve lost. Living in Chicagoland I feel sometimes that I’m a stranger to myself. This landscape doesn’t store up memories for me, and yet there’s something about the broad sweep and openness of this place that has become inhabited with parts of me that I’m still getting to know. Older. A bit more detached.

All of this came to mind as I read Colm Tóibín’s piece this morning in the London Review of Books, because it reminded me of crossing a street in Dublin just about a year ago now, and spotting a distinguished gentleman whose carriage emulated my Irish grandfather’s almost exactly. I embarrassed myself, without thinking, by stopping and staring with an impolite familiarity. Although I stood a distance from him my sudden stillness was enough to catch his attention and he turned to look, startled, at what I was up to. Our eyes locked. There was no smile, just puzzlement at the rude American. I wonder still how much I gave away. I wanted nothing so much at that moment in time than to sob and reach out to the ghosts that are my home and bring them close to me.

But of course, there’s no holding a ghost.

The moment passed, and we moved on.

isn't that special?

In digital you can be so much more special.

Richard Prenderville, head of global brand marketing at Reebok, Canton, MA, as quoted in last Thursday's DM News.

with malice aforethought

Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we've arrested?

Chief of Police Frank Mercurio, commenting on the arrest of Desre'e Watson on 28 March. Desre'e is a 6-year old who threw a tantrum in her Avon Park, Florida, kindergarten class.

Cited in Bob Herbert's column: 6-Year-Olds Under Arrest in this morning's New York Times.

Sweet mother of god: We've gone completely round the bend.

xela

Shot last December. It's been a while since I've been out with my camera and I was moping around today (for that and other reasons) so I dug through some old files for a little medicine.

remembering rodin

10. Hand by Rodin
Originally uploaded by janeymoffat.

Had a chance to see this fellow and his compadres by moonlight when I passed through Palo Alto a few days ago. I expect to make it back in the daylight with a camera before the month is out, but I'm doubtful that it'll be possible to capture the impact that this place had on me.

Some moments -- and everything they contain -- just don't shoot well.

my sentiments, exactly.

Fast Forward is way too fast.
I just want to Play.

Couplet by awgeez, posted at Choka-on-it

reading light

reading light
Originally uploaded by MGL.

This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.

From John Hodgman's Areas of My Expertise

skin deep

façade-ectomy
The practice, gaining in popularity in Chicago, of preserving only the facade of historic buildings in the belief that this qualifies as historic preservation.

Architecture critic Blair Kamin laments the situation in The Danger of Becoming Skin Deep, in this Sunday's edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Here's a slideshow of some of the sites he mentions in the piece »

hurry up and wait

hurry up and wait
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Or: How to survive a 3 hour pre-dawn layover in Detroit while trying to get home to Chicago after catching the redeye out of SFO.

• Walk the length of the terminal with luggage in tow.

• Walk it again.

• Purchase a bottle of water from one of the few open shops and slurp it down while walking the length of the terminal.

• Wonder at all the sleeping people.

• Wonder if you could just nap a little bit without almost missing your flight like that time in Amsterdam.

• Keep walking.

• Watch the sunrise come up over Gate A9.

• Replay the golden moments of the last few days through your brain. Wonder at why it hurts so much to say goodbye to friends. Realize you know why. Wish there was a workaround.

• Long for bed. Long for dreams. Long to brush your teeth.

• Cave and get some coffee.

• Realize you're past that -- coffee can't help you now.

• Keep on walking.

long lonely thoughts

long lonely thoughts
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Posting by cameraphone from the Airtrain Station at SFO.

Heading home on the redeye.

golden gate, fog

golden gate, fog
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Posting by cameraphone from San Francisco.

2 zin lunch

2 zin lunch
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Posting by cameraphone from The Boon Fly Cafe, Napa, CA

walk this way

walk this way
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Oh do not ask what is it
Let us go and make our visit.

-- T.S. Eliot


Posting by cameraphone from San Francisco.

gee ma, it's a wurlitzer! [1]

gee ma, it's a wurlitzer! [1]
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Intermission at the Stanford Theatre

Palo Alto, CA



[1] Google Ian Whitcomb for this one (posting by cameraphone from the Bay Area)

the eye's camera

This was the shot I missed just now, cabbing
camera-less through San Francisco's Tenderloin
district on the way to my hotel:

A long, lanky derelict man sucking on a rainbow
popsicle while seated against a brilliantly colored
street mural. The sun was shining and he wore
a scowl as he looked to one side.

minnesota nice

Mauling victim has deep wounds but no ill will.

Headline in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune

picniking at the gate

picniking at the gate
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Transferring in the Twin Cities -- home of the Mall of America and Target too, I think. The airport certainly doesn't disappoint -- shopping abounds.

These far Northerners really have merchandising down.

table manners

Sharing a meal, sometimes sitting face to face with strangers, is a curious act that sets humans apart from all other animals on the planet. So strange is this behaviour, yet so important to the development of society and communication, that plenty of scientists and philosophers have tried to decode the origins and history of the human meal.

Kate Colquhoun reviews Feast: Why Humans Share Food by Martin Jones in the 27 March issue of the Telegraph.

I want to know if Jones touches on when we decided it was rude to put our elbows on the table. I'm increasingly struck by how this taboo limits engagement when you're sharing a meal with someone; pulling you back and away from the place of exchange and engagement; calming your body language, hands in your lap, so that animation is stilled, the body is made passive, and conversations evolve in much different directions than they might have otherwise.

I have elected to break this taboo repeatedly, and without compunction. Particularly after the last plate has been cleared and there is still some wine left to drink.

brought to you by the letter "D"

D
Originally uploaded by Leo Reynolds.

found, but not really a poem

D is for
daleth, or door
an ancient Assyrian symbol
for the "gate of heaven"

Mystics say it symbolizes
the breast or the bosom
even the vulva

The Greeks considered
their delta
the letter of Demeter

In its triangular form
resides all three aspects of the goddess:
Demeter, Persephone, Kore

The Pythagoreans preferred it
for its geometry

D is for
the waxing of the year
twin to the letter T
sacred to the druids
who call it duir
and associate it with the oak
the planet Jupiter
and Thursday

The ruinic sign
was named daeg
meaning "day"
and was equated with light

The first and least tangible
yet most desired gift



More or less found and cobbled together from The Alphabet Abecedarium, which I'm picking through instead of working, because I'm tired of working, even though I still have much work to do.

new growth

more leftovers

Like dew that vanishes
like a phantom that disappears
or the light cast
by a flash of lightening—
so should one think of oneself.


Ikkyu Sojun
Trans. Steven Carter