A Blog Apart

A Blog Apart, community cultural commentary contributed from a Christian context, courtesy of Jason and Jeremy and their associates, with a WordPress theme designed by me. How do you like it?

(That design, by the way, was a second attempt, because my first design looked rather conventional, very standard “boxes and lines,” without much connection between design and site content. The theme looked like just about every other Kubrick spinoff out in the WordPressosphere. Sometimes you need to push forward with a full CSS-and-images mockup that you can totally reject when it’s done, just to get the bad design out of your system. It was only after that when I realized I could use a crowd of asterisks and a separate asterisk to symbolize the idea of something being “set apart,” and everything else followed from there.)

Gross Frankness

Heh, if you thought my deodorant reminiscences were TMI, you should check out Kutitots’ thoughts on constipation.

It’s one of the fun things about Filipino culture (and East Asian culture in general, I guess, with the possible exception of Japan) — our conversational frankness about the grossly biological facts of life. I remember newspaper columnist Hilarion Henares writing a full column a long time ago about the texture differences between Filipino and American toilet paper and how to wash one’s, er, nether regions.

So a lot of us can talk about urine and feces and periods and toilets. It’s not a loud, boisterous, brazen thing, and not something you should be constantly steering conversation towards, but it’s something the common Pinoy or Pinay is able to discuss offhand without too much embarassment. (Sex is another matter, though, since the Philippines is still a largely conservative Catholic culture. Hushed whispers.)

After the Rally

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Walking around the National Mall a few hours after the Darfur Rally was over. The Mall was almost empty, except for the cleanup crews disassembling the stage and loading the parts onto trucks. A few leftover activists wandered around the Mall, still carrying signs, holding little huddled conversations. The garbage receptacles were stacked to overflowing, of course.

The Busy Month of May

Busy busy weekend, and it’s going to be a busy May. Had an apartment yard sale yesterday (finally sold that comforter and phone), then there’s church and choir practice today, then the Darfur Rally, then a concert at the NGA, and just now Mom texted me to go to Best Buy and get her a new digital camera. (Update: Mom’s going to buy the camera herself, and I skipped the rally and classical music, but now I’m helping a neighbor move to a new apartment. Still busy.)

Screenshot of my Google Calendar for May 2006For most of the first week of May, I’m going to Orlando, where my family has already begun to gather for a convention my father is attending. I haven’t been to Disney World for over a decade, so I’m really looking forward to giving Mission: Space a try. After that, I fly back to DC with my younger brother in tow, and he stays over with me for a week. At some point in the month, there’s jury duty, N.T. Wright, work, and I push my freelancing forward full ahead. And most importantly, Amy‘s graduation is coming up, when she finally gets her MFA.

I’m going to breathe a sigh of relief when May’s over.

He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. – Isaiah 40:29-31

Walking Home in Amber Light

Some photos from the walk home along the National Mall while the slanted rays of a Friday sunset tinted the monuments and buildings amber:

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Mentioned on Thumbtack Press

Thumbtack Press liked my San Francisco photos, especially since I release them under a CC license. I’m happy to oblige.

(The weird part is that I found this link, not from my regular scans of Technorati or Google Blog Search, but via a completely random stumble upon KBCafe, which at first glance I thought was a spammy bot-copied content republisher, based on the ad clutter. It took a closer look for me to decide it was legit — and hey, they picked up a link my regular inbound-link haunts didn’t. Update: Never mind; KBCafe is just republishing search results from IceRocket and splattering contextual and affiliate ads all over that.)

Blogger Pruning

As you may surmise from Backup Brownpau and my Blogger profile, I’ve recently done a big Blogger cleanup, pruning out dormant weblogs and repurposing the single active one into a downtime fallback. Whereas my Blogspot space has served several roles in the past, I found over time that each of those roles was best filled by this site itself: mobile weblog and self-sightings, for example.

I’ve also found Blogger insufficient for the needs of White House Fence Jumpers, and am retooling that site on its own domain with its own database.

I’m not giving up on Blogger, though. It’s still the best externally hosted weblog solution there is, and is still great for immediate and usable out-of-the-box functionality. I will be using it for the “news” sections of other sites coming up — with a very stripped-down template and no comments.

Updates on all that soon.

Outage

So sorry about today’s downtime. Site 5 hardware trouble brought everything down for six hours, but their support staff has been very responsive regarding the server issues, and it looks like they managed to restore everything with no data lost. Always keep backups!

Backup Brownpau is now up on Blogspot for updates during any future outages.

A Pause While Cleaning

Pandora stops licking herself in awkward places for just long enough to pose for the camera.

Corner Redux

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Notice anything new about The Corner?

One of my neighbors just moved out and was selling stuff, including a lovely old wicker rocking chair. It just barely fits, and if I rock it too far back I get Norfolk Island Pine needles in my hair, but hey, it’s a wicker rocking chair! Perfect for making Psycho Mom impressions.

Update, 4/29/2006: As you can see from the new photo below, someone’s already making herself quite at home with the new furniture!

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