This picture makes me inordinately happy, for some reason. I don’t laugh at it, and it doesn’t make me sad; I just smile, and wish I could hang out with that guy.

It is, however, begging for an awesome caption. All suggestions will be indulged.

(note: I found this in an aggregated site, and I don’t think even they knew where it came from. If anyone knows, I’d like to give due credit)

From the Community Posada in McAllen, TX

Unrelated Awesome Quot(ation):

Ah, emo — the men’s movement of punk, in which rough boys whose fathers read Iron John in the bathroom grew sensitive while strumming VERY LOUDLY on guitars.

(source: emusic)

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Hi. This is what I saw when I looked out my window, Saturday morning. But that’s not the point. The point is that I read the sweetest Instructables ever. No, not the one about the lady who made a molded silicon replica of her right breast as a squishy stress reliever toy for her boyfriend. No, this one was much cooler. It’s supposed to be just about harvesting bananas, but I felt seriously touched when I read it. To me, it was a story of a girl and her mother. I’m serious. [how to harvest bananas]

Yes, the work ethic simply radiates from me today. You can tell by the fact that I’m going to post funny (or in one case kind of freakishly indicative of unfortunate elements of our world) pics from photobucket.

So… Yeah. Mitt Romney, hoping to deflect the anti-Mormon concerns of evangelical Republicans, is going to give a big ol’ Faith and Values speech, owning his LDS identity.

As a fellow Latter-day Saint, I Really. Wish. He. Wouldn’t.

Click the following links and then press play on the page that pops up. You won’t be sorry :)

1. Rucksack
2. Smile
3. American Tourist Friends
4. Red Shirt
5. Voiceover Artists

Emma Clarke, the lady who has (recently) been the voice of the public announcements on the London Tube apparently recorded a few of her own messages and put them on a blog (now offline). There’s a discussion about whether she should have done this, and whether the London Transit folks should have killed her freelancing contract with them, but I don’t care. I think the messages are Extremely Delicious :)

….aaaaaand maybe this is (one of) the reason(s) she got canned: Pinstripe Suit

(link to boingboing story where I found this)

Know what? Christmas is coming! I’ve hit on a project to make a present or two. This makes me happy, and makes me look forward to the holiday. I find that when all I do is buy presents, I really don’t look forward to it as much.

In other news, OSU continues to stomp heads. Yay! And the weather here is perfect and gorgeous. Just cool enough not to need the A/C all night, but not so cold that I need more than a light blanket. Sigh. “Fall” and “Winter” here are pretty sweet. And for summers… there’s always Ontario.

If god = good, then god+n must be super-good!

Can you tell I am fascinated by this whole curandero/a concept? I think it’s a combination of the rich symbolism and iconography, plus the clear element of human need, plus the logical insanity of putting a representation of pagan Death in front of three crucifixes.

Anyway, here’s a folk cure a couple of my students described in class the other day. It’s for mal del ojo (evil eye).

First, you get an egg. The brown ones apparently work best. Then you rub the egg all over the person who has mal del ojo. Seriously. All over them. Then you crack the egg into a bowl (in water? I think just in a bowl… man, I can’t remember) and place it under the bed of the person who has the problem. In the morning, you look at it. If it looks like an eye, then the person did indeed have mal del ojo and is now cured. If not, then I don’t know… you’re screwed.

Interestingly, you can both get and give the evil eye without intending to. The way it was explained, if you just look at someone too long, or with a strange expression, or something, you can become an unwitting vector for mal del ojo. One way to deactivate its effects before they set in is to touch the person you may have inadvertently cursed. This is why, apparently, some Hispanic women (and men? I dunno), after staring in adoration at a child or a baby, will want to touch said child/baby. Which creeps the White Folks out. See? Cultural misunderstanding!

heeeeeeeeere souly souly souly souly…

So, it’s Day of the Dead. Did I have a lame Halloween night? The answer to that is a resounding YES. But it was nice, anyhow. Did some time on my cycle trainer while I watched some high-quality X-Files. What more could a fella want?Also, I think I have (at least temporarily) fixed the rear brake on Señor Pulga. It’s not terribly satisfactory, however. It’s really really hard to drill a hole through a stainless steel bolt. :(

In other other news, there’s an excellent editorial on Wired’s “Security Matters” Blog today. It’s about how the “War on Terror” is becoming “… an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected. It’s a war on different.”

Cutting & Pasting:

The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector or a trash sculpture. Nor can they tell the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy — usually based on fear, media hype or just something being different…

The police cordon off the area, make arrests and/or evacuate airplanes, and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling or a cell phone in an airplane seat. Of course, by then it’s too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted…

…these incidents only reinforce the need to realistically assess, not automatically escalate, citizen tips…

Equally important, politicians need to stop praising and promoting the officers who get it wrong. And everyone needs to stop castigating, and prosecuting, the victims just because they embarrassed the police by their innocence.

Causing a city-wide panic over blinking signs, a guy with a pellet gun or stray backpacks is not evidence of doing a good job: It’s evidence of squandering police resources. Even worse, it causes its own form of terror, and encourages people to be even more alarmist in the future.