Patching holes in the cabin roof today. Talk to you tomorrow.
Have a great day, starting with a great day in the mornin’!
Three data points to keep you occupied:
Tag Archives: humour
How happy is your language?
Headline of the day
Driver of allegedly stolen car that
crashed in stable condition
[here]
Don’t you hate it when unstable [allegedly] stolen cars crash? And what happened to the driver?
One more for the road…
Molding a Character out of Molten Glass
I remember the first piece that grabbed my attention. Thick. Heavy.
Ever had a tumbler or paperweight that felt solid? 1 kg or more?
Stripes that ran through it…sigh…
But I lost it in a divorce.
“How did I lose something so precious to me?” Oh…never mind…if you haven’t been there, you wouldn’t understand…even the important things are worth letting go in a divorce.
It’s standing here, the heat in my face as I gather, where I feel truly at home.
My first glassblowing class, unlike yours, was almost a joke. No help from the instructors, as if they wanted to get a good laugh watching us fail. Nothing to take home with me, either.
That’s why you’ve got the molten ball, the flowers, the paperweight and the tumbler.
I want you to remember this day, cherish it, even.
Quiet. There’s a chopper coming in.
I thought we had promises of no warzones anymore. Oh well…
Where was I?
Hmm…I left my job, my “real” job, a while back…’95, I believe.
I got here in 2003.
In between, well, let’s say it was an adventure…renting time in other glassblowers’ studios. Studying under people who had no idea what they were doing and some who were very nearly the best of the best.
Sure, I could have apprenticed at a glass factory but I didn’t want to spend five years learning and relearning the fine art of one single activity, perfecting it before moving on to the next.
I like to experiment, see where the glass is taking me, understanding what the colours and the minerals do in extreme heat.
Yes, I’m married but my husband is the exact opposite of me. Very quiet. A homebody.
That’s okay, though, because we get along.
Besides, he doesn’t mind if I work late.
After all, this is my job and my hobby.
That’s the thing about owning your own business — you never get a day off — if you love what you do you never want to take a day off.
I have my apprentices here, as you can see. I love them all in different measure, just like children, who require various levels of attention, care and guidance because every personality is different.
After you’ve gathered and gathered and gathered, you get a feel for when gravity is pulling, so that’s why you see me absent-mindedly rolling the pipe in my hand. Ask my husband. If I’m standing with a broom, I’ll roll it around, too.
I’ve worked in this business long enough that I’m used to being seen as one of the guys. You don’t get a lot of female glassblowers, especially when I started, so I’m pretty thick-skinned.
That twisted piece down there was going to be a Christmas chandelier or tree topper but I didn’t like so I broke it. I think this piece could be a horn or a party hat. What do you think?
Stop by again soon and I’ll talk with you in more detail. I really think there’s a good story you could make with my character.
I don’t mean I have some sob story that’ll break your heart. I know there are a lot of good people in this town that a story’s begging to be told about us in one of those intersecting storyline/character sketch sort of things.
A small cotton town growing into the Rocket City. Where do we go from here?
When will the first glassblower open a shop on the Moon or Mars? Hey, it’s just a matter of time, right?
This and That
So, how do we solve the Syrian crisis? How do we send in people from other countries who will be welcomed by both pro- and anti-Assad Syrian citizens to prevent more killing?
A friend asked why poetry is not as popular as other written art forms (non/fiction novels, for instance).
My response:
In general, books can put us into the complete narrative of other people’s lives — fictional and nonfictional — with excruciatingly drawnout detail, which some crave for its complete escapist fantasy (pick your favourite genre), while poetry is often a snapshot or sketch of a single moment or idea, requiring the reader to use imagination to fill in the blanks.
In my youth, a pop poet named Rod McKuen both attracted people to the power of poetry and alienated those who consider poetry a higher art form.
Most people, if they think of poetry at all, hear what you call “does so much more, it says so much more, it’s so much cleverer, it requires so much more, it’s simply brilliant,” in song lyrics, which is not such a bad thing.
Another friend explains why it’s more fun in the Philippines.
DARPA wants to know your biometric habits.
And finally, have you ever wanted your personal bobblehead nodding back to you every day?
BONUS: Where’s Emma Peel when you need an appealing car model named PEEL?
A Guinea Pig for Chemistry
Even behind-the-scenes writers and not-so-fortunate fortunetellers need a break every now and then.
All afternoon, I sat in a chair at the Salon Professional Academy while a friend, Tammie, coloured and cut my hair, changing me from a white-haired guy to a ginger-haired professorial type.
Thanks, Tammie, and to your colleagues, for the fun, friendship and new hairstyle.
Now, back to the story you know will keep you in your seats…
= = =
Thanks to MailPro; Richard, Ray and Julie at Lowe’s; USPS; B&N; Jonathan at Anaheim Chili.
Congrats to the NY Giants.
To think, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, GI, GI Joe
The 1% of 1%, we don’t see the world in geographic political boundaries.
Of course, as you know, we pretend the boundaries exist, telling you stuff like “Look out for that country over there — it’s against us this year,” and “Our strategic partnership with these countries is the only thing keeping your economic livelihood stable.”
Now that more than 50% of our species lives in sub/urban areas, “free” of the bind to land-based [subsistence] living, you are all our virtual slaves, depending on our virtual chess game results to tell you what to do next.
Two steps forward, one step to the left/right, please.
And then, as previous chapters have told you, there is the Committee, which also manages the lives of the 1% of the 1%.
Finally, there is the universe itself, spinning off little eddies of atoms and molecules that collect and replicate their patterns.
You should have in your thought patterns by now the full understanding that the universe as we know it is simply revealed by a 360-degree searchlight from the point of our planet/solar system, reaching a finite boundary and creating the illusion of a symmetrical sphere in which we are the center.
Feel free to comprehend our ignorance, vast as it is and will continue to be, ad infinitum.
There is just so much that I, the individual, can bother to talk about here while supervising the construction of the interwebs of interwebs tying you to your personal supercomputers tied to everyone else’s supercomputers tied, as if all of that is a single node, to the Internet of the Next Big Things to Come.
So, to me, all military actions, no matter how we label them in nationalistic or terror group or lone wolf terms, are all one.
For instance, I don’t see an Iranian nuclear scientist killed by the CIA or Mossad. I see us managing to control ourselves by killing ourselves.
Same for sports and other categories of diverting ourselves from our primary tasks of eating and breathing.
Let us move on to more important matters.
Details in the next chapter of the story of our lives seen from the vantage point of 1000 years from now.
Happiness and humour — share them endlessly.
Beginner Glassblower Glasses Classes
“It wasn’t always like this,” she told me.
You see, me Ma, she’s been around the block, as they say, being a marathon runner and all that.
We remember our ancestors who were awarded land by the Crown all those centuries ago.
And it weren’t too long ago, when me Ma’s Da’s Da, invited to supp with the Queen, said, “Why, I wouldn’t set foot in the same room with that German impostor!”
But seein’ as you don’t know what I’m talkin’ ’bout, y’ought to know more, right?
If it ain’t always been like this, when has it been?
Or will it?
Like last night, sittin’ in the dark, watchin’ them kids from Knoxville, Cookeville, Nashville and Texas swingin’ to the oldies, music spun up on hard disks by the DJ crew Winter Wonderland for the Huntsville Swing Dance Society…
I got to thinkin’…
Yeah, and that’s why I’m still here this morning, wonderin’ why it is that this is not what it’s always been like.
When did we teach kids to dance in low {earth} gravity conditions?
They weren’t born on your home planet.
The last direct descendant livin’ on Scottish soil had died, revertin’ our ol’ homeland back to the Crown (and yes, the Queen is still one of them German pretenders to the British throne but who’m I to care, bouncin’, as I am, out here in the hinterlands of our species’ solar system settlements?)…
Am I just a fractal projection of a 2D surface?
Or is that a holographic computation upon a 4D equestrian equation equal to none and summarisation of everything?
I think me oxygen level is out of balance with me nitrogen mix.
Besides, them dancers what celebrated the 13th birthday on Friday the 13th at KCDC, they’s got their time to shine in the sweaty spotlight.
Oh well, not like the dinner theatre in X27B is any more real than any other history, past or present tense, tension or predisposition.
But the sentiments are the same.
As me Da said to me Ma, “And it’ll never be like this again.”
Homeless shelters solve protein issue…
…feed pigeon and cat meat to residents, end animal overpopulation problem at same time, fix euthanasia moral crisis.
Note to lying, cheating scum (you know who you are) – rats are edible, too.
And that’s the news this week from our offworld colony, Nua Éire, where the whole lot is used to hardship and oppression, key ingredients for successful colonisation of harsh environments.
As one colonist noted, “We don’t need no princes, princesses or prima donnas ’round here.”
treetrunkdings 