Cherry Blossoms – Not Quite Yet

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Most of the Yoshino cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin are still closed buds as of now; looks like it’ll be a few days more before we have a real Yoshino bloom.

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The Shidarezakura trees along the Potomac near the George Mason Memorial are in a much fuller state of bloom now, however.

kite-festival-panorama

The Kite Festival was quite a sight. Hundreds of them around the Washington Monument, of all colors, shapes, and sizes. (Click the photo to see it full size, with all the kites.)

Update: Blossoms, a few days later.

Precognitive Simpsons Revisited

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Remember how The Simpsons eerily foreshadowed the death of Charles Bronson and the unmasking of LT Smash / Indepundit?

This week I was formulating a new hypertext art project for WWTQ which I arbitrarily named “Grimes,” for no reason other than that I was thinking of Frank Grimes at the time. I also bought plane tickets to Orlando for a Disney World trip my folks are planning in May.

Tonight, I get home from work and flop onto the couch for a rare evening of vegging out in front of the TV, and what Simpsons episodes should show on FOX5 but Frank Grimes and EFCOT Center. This really gives me the willies.

Strange Things

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I left work early yesterday to go with my uncle to pick up my aunt at National Airport. We then ate at some mall in Tyson’s Corner. I took photos with my N6600, some of which were strange and interesting.

Do Not Touch The Arc Frozen Cheeseburger

That's One Big Pita Bread Courthouse Metro

Mom also sent me some tuyo, which is dried fish, though in this case the “dried” fish is soaked in jars of olive oil, which they call “ready-tuyo“:

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Eight and Nine and Ten: Coffee Kottke Rock Garden

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Random skins eight, nine, and ten are back up, still keeping with the trend of expanding on the themes of older layouts.

 

Number Eight used to have coffee beans in the upper left; now it uses a close-up photo of my coffee pot. I guess you could make an analogy to growth and development in progress to completion, going from beans to the coffee maker to the pot, but I just thought the photo was cool.

 

Number Nine has always been done with Kottke in mind, even in past random skin series. Love him or micro-hate-ronize him, he was keeping a weblog before a lot of us were, so my incipient site was structured after his. Redoing an old but fun layout in CSS is a homage to old days being made new again.

 

Number Ten used a photo of the Ateneo Grade School Rock Garden. I opted for a different photo in rethinking the layout, but kept things simple. It was when I first made Skin#10 that I was introduced to the revolutionary new concept of using CSS rather than tables for layout. Immediately afterward I went back to the nine prior designs and redid them in CSS.

LOST Notes: Henry Gale, Claire, Kate, James, John

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(Update, 3/30/2006: Please see my post on “Lockdown” for more commentary.)

A few LOST notes for recent and upcoming episodes. I’m big on spoilers, so stop reading right here if you don’t want to know what’s coming.

First, be sure to read DCeiver’s latest Pompatus of LOST.

Claire and Kate?

Now, about Claire and her Flashback Adventure with Kate and Rousseau to the abandoned DHARMA medical facility, I have only one question: why did she ask Kate to go with her? I don’t remember Kate and Claire having any special friendship or connection through the course of the series. And if she wanted a tracker, she’s got ever-trustworthy, not-creepy-at-all Mr. Locke bedding down by her tent. (Of course, you just know it was because the writers had to get Evangeline Lilly and Emilie de Ravin together, out and alone in the sweaty jungle of mystery and passion. And with an insane wild French chick to boot.)

Henry Gale

As for Henry Gale, he’s an Other, right? But it’s not sure: maybe he really is just a rich balloonist with a penchant for making evil faces at Sayid and spouting offhandedly manipulative phrases at Locke while living on an island for four months and not hearing a plane crash. Next episode (2.16), Locke will enlist Ana Lucia’s help in interrogating him. You know what this means: Henry Gale will have met almost all of the LOST survivors’ minority representation. So far he’s had the Iraqi Torturer, the Weird African Beard Trimmer, and now the Trigger-Happy Hispanic Vigilante Ex-Cop. After next week, all he’ll need for the full LOST racial experience will be Jin the Korean Kneecapper coming into his cell and expressing his “extreme disappointment.”

James and John

One last point, and this is a major spoiler: we’re going to find that Locke and Sawyer have some kind of a “surprising connection.” (No, no, not that kind of connection — Sawyer loves Kate, remember?) I’m putting my money on Locke’s kidney-conning “father” also being a con man of Sawyer’s association, possibly even the Original Sawyer who killed his parents. Since LOST is big on biblical allusion (though occasionally getting it wrong), it’s worth noting that Sawyer’s real name is James, and Locke’s first name is John, and in the New Testament, James and John were brothers, the sons of Zebedee who were called to be among Jesus’ first apostles.

Also, what’s Eko building? A church?

Safe on the Sidewalk

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(mo_424_.jpg, uploaded by brownpau.)

A safe, comically upturned with casters in the air at R and New Hampshire NW. I kept expecting Wile E. Coyote to crawl out from under it any moment.

Deacon Daniel

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Congratulations to Daniel, who is now an ordained deacon. For Anglicans, as with Roman Catholics, deacons are clergy ministers, above lay persons in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. They assist the priest in the celebration of the eucharist, minister to the poor in the congregation and community, and get preaching rights. (And by the way, unlike Roman Catholic deacons, Anglican deacons — and priests — are allowed to marry.) Go Go Deacon Daniel!