Photo taken on walkies...I just liked the color, and how it was sticking way out of the ground. I don't know if the sand fell away or if some goombah installed it badly. It looks better full-size, and brings to mind the song "no parking on the dance floor" somehow.

alton brown has a new rant... and it shows once again how I can be a fan of his cooking show.

Lately, in my own arena, getting complete stories to stick to the page has been like trying to tattoo my signature on the belly of a crazed weasel; it's leaving me with wounds and I'm not sure the weasel looks much better for all the effort. The best I can hope for is a few "illuminated scenes". The first act and the resolution of a story can be the most difficult parts for me to write... I think that my style sometimes is stuck in a sort of journalistic feel... plot progression has always been one of my weaker story points.

I don't know if it's just the images I'm tripping over, but the LALJ bash people look maybe a little too rowdy for my tastes... I don't think I'd be crazy about doing body shots off of people I knew were married. Maybe just more folks are into swinging than I'd realized before. Yuck, in my opinion. There seems to have been a lot of tacky stuff happening, but I imagine that it was nice to meet up with some folks there, too. I wonder what the final tally of ljers was?

I still want to make a wooden elephant toy for my sweetheart. Maybe I'll hit the hobby store this week, when I go to breakfast with Dan on Thursday.

That's my baby's sound is slightly off, so it appears that I'm watching something dubbed from another language. I like the effect. I half expect the infant alpacas to do some kung fu. There's one baby that seems to have chia-hair... fungus / mold? Also, the giraffe (Geoffrey) from the new Toys 'R' Us commercials sounds like Tom Hanks to me.

Finally, from Salon, this cracked me up -

Halle Berry made history last night, not so much for being the first African-American woman to win an Oscar in the best actress category, but for freaking horribly, uncontrollably out and making the worst, most hysterically rambling, discomfiting and liquefied acceptance speech in Oscar's 74-year history, and I thought Julia Roberts was going to hold that title for a long time. I know it was a big deal for Halle, who claimed her award for All Black Women Everywhere Ever, but her acceptance tantrum had such an alarming cringe factor, I had to leave the room. When they tried to pry her off the stage, she made that screeching Bilbo Baggins monster addiction-face when he Wants the Ring. It was a heavy, strange, grand-mal meltdown. America squirmed.