Alphabet game: I is for artists

Check this week's narcissistic list.  It's all about me...or, rather, I.

Joni Mitchell

Volumes are widely inconsistent this week, just a warning...



















And this one is just weird...

So simple yet so right

A poorly-defined genre

Down at Shake-It Records, the section is called Americana, and that's about as good as anything I could come up with for today's playlist.

School's out for summer...

School's out for ever...

School's (not) been blown to pieces...

• Conflict - I love reductionism
• Frazil Ice - phenomenal footage from Yosemite National Park
• Compassion and Competition - more well-off, successful softball team helps less well-off team learn to play the game - touching story
• I'm Just Walkin' - from Rockaway Beach, NY to Rockaway Beach, OR just for the hell of it
• Watch This - a Cincinnati couple is working their way through the AFI 100 list this year
• Movie Night - Saturdays on Fountain Square look good this summer - especially June 12, 19 and July 24 (plus, I'm still in the photo at the top of the page)
• 50 Worst Inventions (from Time) - they pretty much stick to savaging recent inventions, but they do hit some real pieces of crap
• DC Comics Database - it's a DC comics wiki...my summer is now fully booked
• How to cheat on all of your tests - as long as your teacher is cool with you having a bottle of coke on your desk
• The Suicide Series - photographs of artistic methods of offing the photographer
• Adventures in Togoland - I taught this guy, and he's going to Togo with the Peace Corps.  Kind of awesome.
• Roland Garros poster 2007 - Every year at about this time, I'm really tempted to buy this.
  

No relief on the Deepwater Horizon

As Calen asked me earlier this week, is it too soon to laugh about the oil spill?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Spilling Fields
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No, it's not too soon to laugh about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill - still ongoing and already maybe the third largest oil spill ever - especially when it's Jon Stewart or BPGlobalPR or even the oil industry's forty-year old PR films throwing down the funny.

photo from the Big Picture

photo from the Big Picture, too

But it's also not too soon to continue to be angry and to look at the environmental disaster that continues to worsen every minute of every day - forty-two and counting of those since the initial leak and fire onboard the Deepwater Horizon.

 photo from National Geographic

We have no clue whatsoever how much oil is pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, and the fear of a well leaking for months and months and months continues to look more like a real possibility as the attempts to staunch the flow of oil each fall by the wayside.  Thankfully, the folks in charge - and that phrase should be used with much caution here - have chosen not to go with the nuclear option to seal up the well once and for all.

The thing that amazes me so entirely about this is that every step along the way is a step into uncharted waters here.  We have no idea how to seal up an oil leak a mile under the ocean.  We have no idea how the dispersed/emulsified oil is going to affect the ocean.  We have no clue what a hurricane is going to churn the waters.  We - and by we here I mean the smartest petroleum and geologic engineers on the planet - don't have a frickin' clue what the hell is happening or how to stop it.

We're pretty well and totally screwed.

cartoon from the awesome webcomic that I can't recommend on my school-linked blog

And all I can think is that this is yet another example of where every single thing that we do is bad for the environment.  Every step we take, every move we make sells our future.

On a diet - financially and calorically

I want Wii Sports Resort, wanna go out and buy it tonight to celebrate the start of summer so I have some new game to conquer before mid-August rolls around.

But I'm not gonna do that, not yet anyway.

Instead, I'm gonna go on a little diet - a diet of finances and calories at the same time cause I clearly need to get both of those things under a bit of control.

I'm a pudgy boy who's willing to stop by the ice cream store once a week (or twice...maybe three or four times), and that tends to add up to a bunch of dollars spent and a few thousand extra calories dropped into my ever-expanding gullet.

It's not the meal-time eating that's a problem.  Yeah, I could have a slightly smaller bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios in the morning, and I could maybe not quite finish that entree, but what I really need to do is to cut out the mid-meal snacking, the impulse buying, the peanut butter malt and the cookie dough wizzard made with peanut butter ice cream.

So, here's what we're gonna do.

I'm setting aside $10 a week - probably not a concrete $10, I tend not to always have the exact cash around - but an electronic $10.  Every time I snack on anything unhealthy between meals - potato chips, can of coke, hamburger bun with butter and cherry-strawberry-kiwi jelly, that costs me $1.  If I stop to buy something, that comes out of the $10, too.

Every Sunday morning, that's a fresh $10 into the bank and an update sent to you folks on where my progress is financially.  If I start to get a little more serious about things, I'll start a poundage update here and there, but I'm gonna need to start exercising before I go to anything quite that extreme.

So far, I'm at $10 three or so days into experiment week one.

Once I get into the range of buying that new Wii game, I'll be a little happier.

Summer plans

Last summer I threw up my list of summer tasks but I didn't follow through with getting back to you at the end of the summer.  That's mostly because I didn't accomplish very many of the things on that list.

So, this summer, I'll make sure to follow up on this.  Hell, there needs to be a little accountability around these parts.

Here's the to-do list for summer 2010:

• Get rid of 20 cd's
• Replace electrical covers in hall bathroom
• Undo first, unsuccessful attempt at picture rail
• Mount second, soon-to-be-successful attempt at picture rail
• Remount (or dispose of) bulletin board
• Edge driveway
• Trim front bushes
• Cut sod to expand garden
• Throw compost into garden & till
• Split & re-pot plants from The Girl's school
• Clear out clothes from closet
• Look into ornamental grasses in front
• Get & mount electrical covers for bedroom
• Play frisbee golf ten times
• Tidy laundry room storage
• Split & move wood pile
• Clean gutters
• Replace broken gutter
• Replace fence post (by wood pile)
• Replace fence posts (by Ann & Paul)
• Cut & nail quarter round in living room
• Pop ten honeysuckles
• Redo school storage cabinets (lettered drawers)
• Sort through school drawers (in front desk)
• Sort through wardrobe at school
• Post old photo albums to Picasaweb
• Identify faces on Picasa
• Get fence estimates
• Plant new trees
• Read five books (graphic novels don't count)
• Trench drainage by deck
• Trench drainage by Ann & Paul

Sadness

There is nothing but sadness around Casa del ChemGuy today.

The most impressive six year run in tennis history is over.

May a new one begin at Wimbledon.

Alphabet game: H is for artists

The search for the Z continues this week with H artists...

The craziest of the crazies has passed

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

Nothing too heavy here

A bit of fluff for a Sunday mornin'...

I'm going for saves since we have a limit on pitching starts

• The Yankees Eras: 1903-2010 and Red Sox Eras 1901-2010 - more neat writing from Rob Neyer
• Adverputt - a fascinating combo of advertising and flash game
• 12 Best Movie Sequels Ever Made - #1's an easy prediction, but Breakin' 2 got robbed
• Rob & Elliott - take your patriot pills, boys
• Jim's Pancakes Photostream - I particularly enjoy the oil spill pancake
• Top 10 Satire Movies - I've seen all but #7...#3 is a favorite, as is the too-lowly-ranked #8
• New Kate Nash?!?! - how did I miss this?
• Gorgeous Landscapes of Scotland - I've been missing this place of late for some reason
• Morgellon's Disease - easy to dismiss as crazy, but check the two paragraphs starting with "Getting the patients to take steps..."
• The Bechdel Test - I remember reading a book with a female protagonist and no positive male characters and struggling mightily.  I can't imagine what it's like to have so very few main characters - or even entire films - without a connection.
• Hidden gems - The 20 least-visited National Monuments in the US...18 and 10 look the most interesting and achievable to me
• Clever job hunter used Google Adwords - and got two job offers from it...awesome and creative
• Berthier's Door - moderately interesting at first, then amazingly fascinating once you get to "This further brings to mind..."
• Get Your Complaints Solved With One Simple Question - elegant and insightful
• Superhero term papers - Lois Lane and Peter Parker's are classics
• Superfriends with benefits - perhaps the greatest shirt ever
• Young Barack Obama - great pictures from his 18th year
• 20 Best Nike Ads - #18 & #11 are personal favorites...#7 and #4 are drastically overrated...the rest are all awesome...
• BP Global PR - it's not real, but it's funny

 And two videos to close it all out...

NBC's fall lineup

I think that, come fall, I may be watching even less television than I already do.





Check out more of NBC's fall lineup here.

And just so you know, Mad About You is probably my favorite sitcom ever, but that Paul Reiser Show looks like a crappy remake of Curb Your Enthusiasm (which I hated.)

Fork it!

Ah, a game in which you are a fork trying to stab sugared toast.

The plotline itself is a grabber, in't it?

Alphabet game: G is for artists

Seriously?  Yes, seriously.  My favorite songs from G artists is this week's playlist.

Not alphabetically thematic but something I wanted to hear today...a little bit o' soul...

Billy Connolly: what an accent

I would happily listen to Billy Connolly read the phone book.  His voice fascinates me that much.



That interview continues here.

Glee's best yet

I'm pretty well hooked on Glee.

Shut up, I know, but I dig it, and I especially dug this number from this week's episode.

Grease gets a little cleaner

Quick question about this trailer.

At 0:57 and 1:32, didn't the characters originally have cigarettes?


Grease Sing-A-Long in HD

Trailer Park Movies | MySpace Video

I didn't like it when Spielberg took the guns away from the agents in ET.  I didn't like it when Lucas took the first shot away from Solo.

And I don't particularly like this - politically correct, though it may be.