iz not best bed evar... is ok
Alex made me miss my cats today, so I’m posting a picture of Nyc (or Euphrates or whatever), who was briefly my cat, and who believed he owned my entire house, as you can see.
Entries Tagged 'photos' ↓
My Former Cat
November 17th, 2008 — photos
Carnival on Trenton & 10th
November 16th, 2008 — photos
swirly swirly swirly swirly... PUKE!
It’s a cheesy pic; there are a thousand like it. But I wanted to take it anyway. Below, you see the beast at rest.
Exclusive: Centipedebot Devours McAllen
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Church is Fun
October 26th, 2008 — photos, updates
Femme fatale up to no good
Sadly, I will not be going to church with Alex for… let’s see… about six or seven more weeks. Sigh. To assuage my sadness, please indulge my recounting of three fun things from church today.
- A South American man we know told us about how confusing it was, as a child, to spend half his day in a Catholic school and the other half in a school run by communists. I can only imagine.
- While the Primary children were on the stand (yes, today was that day), Alex leaned over and whispered, “I am a child of God… and so can you!” Okay, I thought it was funny.
- One of the children said, very loudly into the microphone, something about the Holy Goats. Boy does that have implications for my religious worldview ;)
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Collected Stories by Donald Margulies - Dundas Little Theatre
October 25th, 2008 — photos, updates
Go see the play, already! It’s amazingly good. No, really. Note the dramatic awesomeness of both actors (my wife is the one on the right. Sa-Weeeet!)
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Dark Mean - Even Darker and Three Times Meaner
October 2nd, 2008 — photos
Did I already post this? Maybe. But here it is again. With enough cool pictures, I can temporarily forget about what is happening to my fair nation. :/
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Dear Cat: I still love you, really, it’s just… it’s complicated.
September 30th, 2008 — photos, updates
Teh Kat with his new owner. Both seem very happy. Also, new owner isn’t going to declaw him, so that’s good. I miss the little guy already, but I’m also hugely relieved. Very very relieved. Also the cat was fluffy and cute. Did I mention that?
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Not My Cat: Update
September 15th, 2008 — photos, updates
Bath Cat
By Saturday, I noticed that maybe his face wasn’t healing as well as it should. By that night (no vets open), the skin and fur had peeled down and back, and were hanging from the raw open flesh of his distinctly un-skin-covered lowere jaw like a flip-flop on a beach bum’s foot. Only the sutures seemed to be holding things together, and they were turning black and, um, oogie. Plus, the raw, nasty flesh that had been de-skinned was turning dry and black in some spots. BAD! So I freaked out a lot, worried a lot (I’m discovering that I’m a bit of a worrywart), tried to keep him isolated in the back room (except for mandatory snuggling) to keep him from further irritating his evil wound, and ultimately waited until this morning to do anything, except applying peroxide and antibiotic ointment, which NyC didn’t even seem to notice. On his raw, open wound. ::shudder:: Nerve damage, maybe.
This morning, I went to see Dr. Cerelli, who specializes in animal oral/maxillofacial surgery or something. I heard he was expensive, which was why I didn’t go in the first place (in retrospect, this may have been a been a bad choice). Four Paws is a swanky place. It smells clean and perfumed and new and expensive. They have sparkling consultation rooms with scrubs-clad technicians. They have lots of forms to sign. It feels (I’m sure intentionally) like an MD’s office.
NyC had a great fun time. He was angry from no breakfast, but he explored and meowed and played and came back to snuggle in my lap every few minutes. Normal cat stuff. Dr. Cerelli didn’t seem overly worried about his chances for survival, but he did express wonder and disbelief that my other vets had chosen to suture his mouth the way they did. Cerelli will remove the wire sutures, then cut along the gum line and re-attach the mouth in sort of a u-shape all along the lower jaw, with dissolvable sutures. It will cost much more than the first procedure.
One vet I talked to last week said something I already knew: for the price of making this kitten healthy, I could have several spayed or neutered. The implication (not very subtle) was that it would be more responsible to let this cat go (or having him put down) and then donate the vet money to other causes.
I can’t fault the guy’s logic. It’s logic I use all the time. But now I have a personal relationship with this cat. It’s not that I have to keep him; it’s just that I can’t stand to think of him suffering. Nonrational but very compelling.
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Sovereign Wrath vs. Hank of the Destruction Moose
September 3rd, 2008 — photos, thoughts, updates
So I was at this metal bar last weekend. It is so much fun to say things like that. Especially at church. A former student, Sergio, is in a metal band called Sovereign Wrath, and they had a gig last Saturday. After a year or two of promising (and failing) to go see his band, I finally did it. Sadly, there are no pictures of SW, because my camera battery died during the opening act, named (you know it) Hank of the Destruction Moose. Yes, the extra “of” is actually part of the name. Also, I bought a t-shirt. SW was more interesting, musically, however. Of course, they were both… metal. I’m not a huge fan of the modern hardcore metal genre (if that’s even what it’s called), but once again I have found that listening, in person, to commited, passionate, talented people making music is enjoyable no matter the genre.
The bar was a dual-purpose club in Harlingen, TX, named “Rock Stars.” One half was the metal bar, and the other was filled with equally merciless and frightening peppy dance tunes. Strangely, there seemed to be no noticeable music bleed-over between the two halves. And if you could have felt the impact in your chest from the dual kick bass drums, amplified with equipment usually reserved for large stadiums, you would understand why that’s surprising.
And that brings me to an important point: Metal types likes their tunes somewhat loud. I wore earplugs, and my head was still buzzing by the end of the night. When the first band (HOTDM) started playing, the beats were seriously making my eyeballs unfocus, slightly. I got used to it. It was a fun sensation. It was also fun to watch, with much lower noise saturation, how the people who were enveloped in the brick outhouse of sound were behaving.
Which brings me to the people, which were the whole reason this was an awesome outing (adventure, adventure… metal bar, adventure…). The people were pretty cool. They look scary, of course (I was a little afraid to photograph any of the seriously scary not-on-stage people), but they all seemed to be either friends, acquaintances, or strangers and nice to each other. Maybe I only saw a small cross-section, but that’s the experience I had. Of course, I also knew Sergio, and he introduced me to a few people. I am left wondering: was the friendliness a metal thing, or a Valley thing? People down here are pretty friendly, and often very tight-knit, socially.
HOTDM was impressive. Their synchronization was tight, the lyrics (unintelligible in all cases) were matched rhythmically, and they really put on a good show. Like SW, their set was sort of a full-frontal, all-out sensory assault on the audience, who ate it up like puppies with their chow. It was a lot of fun to watch the stage performance, which was clearly heavily influenced by themes of aggression and (or so it seemed) laypersons’ views of mental illness. Then, the band would break for a few seconds, and the singer would (often in his scary singing voice, but not always) make the standard chitchat: hello Harlingen. Your town rocks. Man, the mosquitoes are bad down here. HOTDM was from El Paso, btw.
Visually, SW was not as impressive as HOTDM, but that would have been hard. Hank seemed to have some serious work put into their floor show (as it were). SW, however, was every bit as musically tight. Plus, they had a more variegated sound. This was due partly to their occasional forays into non-metallic genres (only briefly, though), partly the Great Wall of Drum Kit (seriously; you just had to see this thing packed onto that stage), and partly to the fact that they had a keyboard player. Yes, keyboards. A skinny kid who looked like he belonged in a Depeche Mode tribute band was playing a double-rack, with riffs that alternated between bouncy power chords that would have been at home on Van Halen’s 1984, and creepy riffs that were much more Trent Reznor. But more the former, interestingly.
Metal seems to have its forms, like any other genre. The singer must sing with a psycho, throat-rending growl/snarl. The guitarists must Get Down into a Stance, and from time to time everyone must seriously bang their heads. Sometimes in unison, which produces a more powerful effect. Fans must mosh (though there was a good deal of checking to see if the guy you just slammed was OK if you hit him too hard… cute). And the F-word is very, very important. If the F-bomb frequency drops below about 8.5 per minute, I suspect your metal cred begins to suffer, no matter how righteously you can dish out the pain.
All in all, it was a most enjoyable evening. The drive over was pleasant, the drive back was lovely, and cruising around the streets of Harlingen looking for the club reminded me of previous weekend-evening excursions to that town, and the way the teens and young adults seem to have evolved loitering into a fine art. Seriously. Almost every block seems to have a group of people, with their cars, parked in a lot of some kind, standing around and talking, drinking, and/or seriously inspecting each other’s subwoofers and cylinder bores (both literally and figuratively, from what I could tell). It was eerie, like a scene from The Outsiders, but also interesting. This Valley is not such a bad place.
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Trying on Clothes in the Street
August 23rd, 2008 — photos, updates
I don’t know why I was surprised to see people trying on clothes in the street, but I guess it makes sense, if you’re going to buy them there. Anyway, this may have been the same vendor from whom I bought Amanda’s Boston hat. Alex’s shirt came from a different street display. No picture of that.
In unrelated news, Alex crushed Amanda and me at Scrabble last night. She was ahead (but only by a few points, so we thought we had a chance) when suddenly she busts out “GRUMBLER,” placing letters on two triple-word-score squares! I mean, come on. We looked up the rules, and when that happens, you triple your score, and then triple the result. Ouch.
167 points for a single freaking word. But somewhere, underneath the poor-loserishness, I was still remembering that I find her braininess attractive.
Deep underneath.
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Boston Subway - Blue Line - Orient Heights Station
August 22nd, 2008 — photos
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boston - bike messenger shrine
August 20th, 2008 — photos
I’m pretty sure this roadside display (Summer St., near the bridge) indicates a tragic incident. And also, the photo sucks.
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APA Convention Scenes - Boston 2008
August 19th, 2008 — photos, updates
Protesters at the convention. Here’s why.
A nice hallway scene at the convention center.
A view of the exhibit floor. It was really pretty huge. Surprisingly, we only used 1/2 to 1/3 of the floor space at the convention center for exhibits. We did, however, use all the meeting rooms (around the edges, on 2 floors) almost all the time. This convention is too #$@% big.
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Boston Yard Saints
August 18th, 2008 — photos
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Mushroom Mushroom
August 13th, 2008 — photos
Anyone know what kind of mushroom this is? I certainly don’t. Feel free to comment if you do.
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Alex on the Dock
August 12th, 2008 — photos
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Accidental Poetry & Hellboy 2 review
July 23rd, 2008 — photos, thoughts, updates
unrelated Moses picture
So I was websurfing, looking for Pixies tabs, when I stumbled across the following, in a bass tab for “Isla de la Encanta”:
You really should be abel
to tell when to play what.
Is that not some awesome stuff? It’s unintentionally haiku-esque. It’s profound. It’s just plain good advice. I especially like the (probably also unintentional, but still cool) alternate spelling of “able.” The line break is even in the original!
In other news, Alex and I saw Hellboy 2 last night.
Review: meh. sokay. 2 1/2 stars (out of 4).
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Illegal Immigration vs. Speeding
July 22nd, 2008 — photos, thoughts
I’ve ranted about illegal immigration before, and how annoying it is when people go all warmongerin’ about it (sometimes more so after they go all presidentin’). Thinking more about it, the thing that bothers me the most about increasing punishments for immigration problems is this: the foul does not match the harm.
I’ve never disputed the idea that immigration laws should be enforced. The rule of law must be upheld even when we disagree with the finer points1. And I know there are illegal immigrants who cause harm to the people or resources of the United States2. But the trend toward upping the punishment ante is not reasonable. Put them all in jail? Charge them all with felonies? Give them all long prison terms? These punishments do not match the crime.
Now, I may not be a big-city lawyer, but it seems to me that the severity of criminal punishment in the U.S. is based on at least three things:
- The amount of harm done by the criminal act
- The intent of the person who committed the crime
- The moral “wrongness” of the act (or the extent to which it violates our cultural ideas of right/wrong)
Extreme punishments for illegal immigration fail on all three of those points. Lemme splain:
- Harm: As I’ve mentioned before, our best data suggest that the overall amount of harm done by illegal immigration is not nearly as high as the sky-is-falling doomsayers (*cough*Bill O’Reilly*cough*) would have us believe. Yes, there is harm from some illegal immigrants, but so far it looks like it’s less (on average) than the harm from good old God-fearing lifelong American citizens3. That’s the criminal angle, anyway. Economically, it appears that illegal immigrants are a net benefit to the U.S. economy.
- Criminal Intent: I’m sure there are some illegal immigrants who come to the U.S. with the intention of doing something bad to Americans. But again, our best information suggests they are a small minority. The vast majority of illegal immigrants (especially Latin American) come here with motives like “earning a living,” or “escaping political repression back home,” or “eating three meals a day, for once.”
- Moral Wrongness: I don’t know about this one… how wrong is it to sneak into another country? Is it like trespassing? We have long traditions about the wrongness of murder, rape, theft, robbery, incest, arson, etc., but I don’t think most of us really have a common sense of just exactly how bad sneaking across a border is, in and of itself. In fact, there are plenty of Americans who think national borders should be open (including those American presidents who called for the Iron Curtain to be lifted). I suggest that it’s not very high on the wrongness scale to sneak across the border. It is wrong in the sense that it does violate law, but not much beyond that.
So, there’s some harm done (personally, but not economically), there are some people who have evil intentions, and it’s some kind of wrong, in itself, to come to the U.S. without permission. This is clearly, I think, not the national crisis it’s sometimes made out to be. Problems? Yes. Threat to All That Is American? Hardly. Now, I’d like to compare illegal immigration to another legal violation that frequently happens in the U.S.:
Speeding vs. Illegal Immigration
Speeding. You know, driving faster than the speed limit. This is estimated to have caused over 13,000 deaths in the U.S. in 20054. Also over 40 billion dollars in property damage, healthcare and other costs. The penalty for speeding is generally a fine. And points on your license. In extreme or repeated cases, a person may get jail time5 or a really large fine, or have their license revoked. Rarely is there an arrest. Almost never does speeding become a felony. Speeding generally stays at the same level of criminality as the traditional “status offense” of illegally entering the U.S., almost never rising to the level of felonies and demonization recommended by people on the Fox Network for illegal immigrants. For comparison…
- How many American citizens are killed or injured as a result of illegal immigration each year?6
- How much money is lost by the U.S. economy as a result of illegal immigration7? Note for this one that most experts (who aren’t being paid by conservative political groups) agree that there’s a net gain, especially since illegal immigrants’ wages get taxed.
I am open to being wrong, if there’s reliable data8, but it seems to me unlikely that immigration is going to exact the toll in life, injury and property that we rack up by speeding. Even if we break it down on a per-person basis (should we? I don’t know), I doubt the situation will change9.
So, if speeding costs more than illegal immigration, shouldn’t speeding be punished more severely, especially in cases where there is no reason to suspect criminal motives in the immigration? My sense of justice says “yes.”10
So, what’s it going to be? Should illegal immigrants be punished less severely than speeders, or should speeders be punished more severely than they are now? Felonies for speeders? Automatic prison time for speeding? These would certainly make our highways safer.
What is (IMHO) Actually Happening
The reason certain people on TV (O’Reilly and his ilk) continue to exaggerate the numbers of illegal immigrants, and insist in the face of all reliable evidence that they cost this country huge amounts of money and human life, is because they know that their viewers do not like the idea of immigrants coming to our country, and these viewers don’t always know why they don’t like it. So, the doomsayers feed them a plausible reason: it must be that the immigrants are dangerous and expensive. They must be stealing from us. They must be hurting us. Now, people who don’t like the foreigners can indulge their instinct to punish and punish, telling themselves they’re protecting America.
I suspect the real reason for insisting on increasing punishments for illegal immigration is a basic discomfort with things (and people) who are strange to us. Otherwise, the suggested punishments would fit the crime.
- I also advocate revising our immigration laws to be more in line with the realities of both the justice and economics of the situation [↩]
- because they always make it into the papers [↩]
- One might argue that, since some illegal immigrants commit robberies and murders, therefore all of them should be punished more harshly, just for sneaking into the USA, but that’s certainly not what we do in other domains. We have not heard Republicans, for instance, proposing restrictions on foreign business involvements when some foreign businesses commit fraud or other crimes. [↩]
- sorry; no more recent data from my websurfing [↩]
- extremely rare for speeding without other violations [↩]
- Let’s say, not including casualties incurred on the job of policing the immigration regulations or border, as those particular problems are tied to immigration policies, not just the act of illegal immigration… otherwise, it’s like saying marijuana is lethal because people get killed in drug raids [↩]
- again, not including the cost of immigration enforcement [↩]
- please let me know if you have some [↩]
- That would be, FYI, a net of about $160 per illegal immigrant per year, and 1 citizen death per about 18,000 illegal immigrants. If the made-up number of 200,000 illegal immigrants were correct, we would need a dozen murders of U.S. citizens per year, committed by illegal immigrants, just to match those from speeding [↩]
- This is a somewhat separate issue from enforcing immigration through border security, which can take non-punitive forms. Some of those ideas and their implementation are also problematic, but for different reasons [↩]
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Fair Verona: Where Civil Blood Makes Civil Hands Unclean
July 19th, 2008 — photos, updates
Fair Verona is Shakespeare as he never intended. Graham Jenner and Kerri Bojman have remixed and resampled Romeo and Juliet (with lines from other Shakespearean plays) to create the one-act tale of a community killing its most beautiful young people through an obsession with conformity and ritual. The text is pure Shakespeare, mashed up and rearranged. The themes of the play are not exactly foreign to the Bard’s work, but while they’re merely implicit in the original R&J, here they are explicit and a bit chilling.
The play is being put on at the McMaster University Summer Drama Festival (website here), a perennial celebration of theater completely by students. The budget is miniscule, the stage was built by volunteers, but the offerings at this festival are often amazing. McMaster has more than its share of talented actors, but it also produces skilled stage crew, directors, and (obviously) playwrights.
This festival is one of the best bangs for your theater buck anywhere. Talented young women and men come together every year to put it together from scratch, and their dedication always shows. The music was even composed by one of the actors, who is also an advanced music student.
Fair Verona starts this weekend, with three more performances next week. See the SDF website for more details. And here are some more shots from the rehearsals. Enjoy!
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Town Without Pity
July 16th, 2008 — photos, updates
Fair Verona is coming along nicely. It’s a thoughtful, lovely piece about a nice, cohesive community crushing young love like a ladybug. Last night was the first rehearsal at the outdoor stage in The Hollow. Mosquitoes, volume issues, etc… but it’s still a great play. I’m loving it. There was far too little light to take decent crisp snapshot-type photos last night, but there was enough for some long-exposure crazy shots, so here is one. I like to think that Shakespeare would have approved of the ghostly apparitions strutting on the stage.
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Velo Sport (sarcastic quotes required on the second word)
July 4th, 2008 — photos, updates
Last week, I liberated an old Velo Sport from a neighbor’s yard. For Brad! For brad, I tell you! This week, I removed (almost) all the extra parts. No more shifters, rear derailleur, front derailleur, 6-speed Atom 77 freewheel, or very-long chain. Now it’s a nearly-respectable, very civilized single-speed bike.
Notes:
- The mtb pedal clips are a little too deep, though joyously wide and tall
- I still need to cut off the offending and extraneous outer chainring on the front (but I don’t have a dremel tool or angle grinder)
- The seat is pretty cheesy; after riding one of those pressure-relieving seats for a couple of years, this one feels like a golf ball is constantly being shoved up my wazoo
- The brakes are pretty awesome
- The steel wheels and Maillard hubs are perhaps not the lightest, but I like them. They both need cleaning.
- The beautiful aluminum sleeve in the center of the drop bars concealed a lousy steel bar under the tape. And the bar was not bilaterally symmetrical! Geez…
- This bike needs a serious bath, and probably everything repacked and lubed
- There is a definite clacking, possibly in the bottom bracket, with every pedal revolution; must diagnose and fix… someday
- The chain that was on this was too skinny to fit over the BMX freewheel, so I got an inexpensive BMX chain
- BMX chains don’t fit in regular chain tools
Anyhoo, I took it for its voyage of rebirth today, and that was fun. I went over to the Chedoke Golf Club and climbed the stairs, then rode along the ridge through the ritzy neighborhoods, then a bit on Bruce Trail, then back through Ancaster and down the mountain on Wilson St. Good ride. I like the bike.