New Catnip Spot

The photostream has consisted mostly of Pandora photos lately. I’m not sure why. She really likes that single spot on the bed now; if you look at the webcam, she’s always there, all times of day. Possibly something to do with my leaving her catnip ball in that spot for several days.

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Pandora's Impression of a Manatee (or Dugong)

Another DC Thunderstorm

Ah, summer: season of hot, humid, unstable atmospheric conditions producing “Whoa Holy Crap” type thunderstorms, such as last night’s lightning-fest. We had a similarly violent storm just over a year ago, when I had my camera pointed out the window to catch the pyrotechnics. Here’s a video flashback to that storm, which was not all too different from last night’s:

More from Capitalweather, DCist, and DC Metroblogging.

Last.fm

I signed up with Last.fm back when they were still “Audioscrobbler.” The plugin was kind of crufty, needing to be manually installed and accessed via the iTunes “Visualizer” menu, and it didn’t seem very reliable, so I gave up on it and cancelled my account. Seeing leeched Last.fm output from a bot in iEatTapes IRC (the bot could retrieve a user’s last played music) got me interested again, though, so I decided to give it another spin. It’s much improved; the plugin no longer needs to be kludged into iTunes, and has been sending music data all day.

So here’s my Last.fm user page, where you can see what I’ve been listening to. There’s a wizard to put your charts on your site via a javascript snippet, and they also provide data feeds in text and XML. At some point I might try parsing some of that into a sidebar “recent tracks” list, if you don’t mind seeing lots of medieval Latin and Italian song titles in there.

Police on Monday

mo_534_.jpgI emerged from my apartment Monday afternoon to find several CHPD and MPD officers converging on the building. There were no sirens, but lots of radio chatter, and I wondered if some kind of drug bust was underway, or if a terror cell was operating in my building. Much as I would have liked to stay to see the action, I was late for work, and had to leave.

A neighbor on the affected floor just filled me in on the details: an old lady had called 911 and said her husband was planning to jump from their fifth floor window. Except that she was alone and her husband had apparently been dead for years. All’s well that ends well, I guess.

Squirrel Fishing

Still on the topic of squirrels, there’s apparently a new sport going around called “Squirrel Fishing.” It’s like fishing, but, as hinted at by the name, it’s for squirrels. You put nuts on the end of a line (no barbed hook, I guess, since you don’t want to hurt the critters), and try to lift the squirrel into the air as he nibbles.

See Squirrel Fishing: A new approach to rodent performance evaluation for more information. Annie has also documented her Squirrel Fishing attempts, and there is, of course, a Flickr tag and a Flickr group for the sport.

(Ninja fighting squirrel, uploaded by Chris Hodgson.)

Squirrel Photos are Interesting

Seems like the quickest way for me to get into Flickr’s Explore feature is to take photos of squirrels. Squirrel at Fountain and Squirrel on My Knee both made it to the top 10 of Interestingness within a week of each other on 06/06/2006 and 06/11/2006. Do me a favor and click on the squirrel photos below to up their numbers; I’d like to displace the Flying Spaghetti Monster images as my most popular photo by number of views.

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Use Scout to find which of your Flickr photos made it to Explore.

Nationals Beat Yankees

Whoa, whoa, I missed this news over the weekend: Nats beat Yanks! Yesterday’s game was clinched by Nationals Rookie Ryan Zimmerman in the ninth inning, with a walk-off two-run homer on a pitch delivered by Yankee pitcher Chien-Ming Wang. Score was 3-2, which is just classic Nats: they’re not great scorers, usually much better on defense. Zimmerman’s homer came right out of left field, so to speak. Man, I’m bad at sport writing. I’m stopping right here.

Further reading: Baseball slang, and the definition of “walk-off.”

(Of course, this presents something of a mild quandary to me, as my girlfriend’s dad is a Yankees fan, but the Nationals are my local team. The inner conflict from divided team loyalties … it tears at my heart so!)

Old Communion Equipment

Saturday was Church Work Day, and we came across some lovely old communion equipment in the locker behind the altar, like this communion cup holder (If not for the cup holes I’d say it was a cement scraper) and silver juice pitcher with air pump:

Communion Cupholder and Pump Bottle

More photos here.

Recent Reading

The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I’ve been on a semi-nostalgic run through kids’ literature, and I wanted to see how my perception of Witch had changed since I last read it in high school, now that I actually know a thing or two about American history and culture. The setting felt far more familiar, though of course many characters seemed more caricaturish than I remember — this being a children’s book, after all — and the happy ending fairy tale resolution left me hanging, somewhat.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Another romp through nostalgia for the sake of seeing what I have picked up from greater knowledge of American history and culture. Mark Twain’s humor runs thick, his intended parody of sixth Century barbarism also steeped in facetiously double-edged parody of the mechanized utopianism of the industrial age and the intellectual arrogance of Enlightenment thought. The Yankee mocks the pervasive credulity of the medievals, but his own anachronisms betray him as well — probably my favorite part in the whole book was his very first step to beginning a progressive modern civilization: establishing a patent office, “for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn’t travel any way but sideways or backways.”

Sense and Sensibility. I have lately felt about Jane Austen as I’d once felt about Dickens, i.e. it was about time to get acquainted with a literary great whom I’d been missing out on. And what better way to start on Austen than with her first full published novel? If you can get past the first couple of chapters, which read more like a primer on Victorian-era home economics and annuities, you are rewarded with a moderately interesting story of love lost and found, and of finding happiness outside of family money.

Bare-Faced Messiah. The unauthorized biography of L. Ron Hubbard turned out to be quite a fun and engaging read. Psychopathic liar and megalomaniac cultist though he may have been, it can’t be denied that he was well-traveled in his youth even without the embellishments he would later add, and aspects of his life as a 1930s pulp science fiction writer are almost inspiring. Hubbard actually had admirable determination and drive to Get Things Done. Such a pity those efforts went into so many lies. Probably the funniest embellishment Hubbard told about his life was about being in the Philippines before World War II and learning the 300-word vocabulary of “Igoroti” by the light of a gas lantern. I’m part-Igorot from some north Philippine ancestry on my mom’s side (there’s no “i” at the end of “Igorot,” by the way) and there are six tribes, each with their own dialect (somewhat related to Tagalog), all having significantly more than just 300 words.

Next on the Reading List: Manhunt, the 12 Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. Yeah, yeah, kind of mainstream and not too challenging, but it’s a decent overview of the events leading up to and immediately following Lincoln’s assassination, and I’m enjoying reading the blow-by-blow account, mostly assembled from real evidence, of a catastrophically tragic event in American history that took place just a few blocks from where I’m sitting.

“Send a Helicopter”

He’s a tall white kid, about 16, long brown hair, goatee, wearing loafers, jeans, t-shirt, and a brown jacket, all very clean looking. He very quickly jumps the turnstile beside me at Union Station, landing a bit heavily. I give a quick “Yo” to the WMATA security personnel who are helping tourists nearby, but they seem fairly unconcerned.

“You do this everyday?” I ask the turnstile jumper with a slight chuckle as we walk down the escalator. “Don’t you have a ticket?”

“Don’t have money,” he replies, “and I can’t, like, beg for money, you know?” Slight midwestern accent, I think.

“So where are you from? Where are your parents?”

“I don’t live with my parents,” he laughs. “I’m from Virginia, the suburbs.”

“Great Falls?” I immediately think of Borf.

“Naw,” he says, “But I have friends from there, if their parents knew,” and here he holds his cellphone (Motorola flip phone of some sort) to his face, “they’d be all like, ‘send a helicopter to pick him up right now!'” He laughs.

“Um, okay, good luck, then,” I walk off, rolling my eyes. It’s not a very bad cellphone either.