how now brownpau
Those of you who were wondering what the thorny green-and-purple plant here was, I asked about it on Metafilter. It’s called the Bed of Nails plant, or Naranjilla in Central America, scientific name Solanum quitoense. I don’t think I’ll be growing any of those soon, as they would probably be a literal pain to repot.
I’m happy to announce that Amykow.com is back in action. Amy wanted to start with a clean slate so she could focus more on her art, so the older Blogger entries are now lost to the ages.
The site now runs on WordPress, with a template I specifically designed to act as gallery rather than weblog. This meant dispensing with comments and trackbacks (so as to avoid the travails of spam and community moderation) and moving most other conventional weblog trappings — date-based archives, categories, and search — down and out of the way, to draw focus to the current piece. Hence the bottom-positioned “side” bar.
Amy thought a black background would accentuate her work, and I agreed, having seen a similarly vivid sharpening effect in a book on Vermeer paintings which used glossy black pages. However, I still don’t think I’ve done enough for the design to visually center on the art; the text and link colors seem to compete too much with the painting, though for readability’s sake, the font cannot be made any smaller or darker. For now, I’m okay with this, and I’ll have a tweaked version of that theme up for other WordPress users desiring a similar layout.
(P.S. Note that I formulated this footer-oriented layout well before Powazek’s “Embrace Your Bottom.” In this case, it was the Flickr “Fruit at the Bottom” approach I had in mind.)
Scarcely a month after Hurricane Katrina, now we have a new Monster from the Gulf: Hurricane Rita. (Well, from the Atlantic, actually, via the Gulf, but it’s the warm water in the Gulf of Mexico this time of year that feeds these beasts so they grow monstrous.) Texas and Louisiana are at risk, but having seen the havoc wreaked by Katrina, millions have evacuated. (What’s being done for the NOLA evacuees at the Astrodome, I wonder?)
Houston, which is right on the coast, and Galveston, a shield island jutting out into the Gulf, are going to be hit hard by this storm; but a direct hit may now be avoided as the storm veers east, and Rita is weakening from Category 5 to Category 3. Sad to say, New Orleans is getting pounded once more: weakened, patched-together levees are breached again, and parts of the city are re-flooding. The only reason New Orleans will be spared massive destruction this time is because the city already lies in ruins from Katrina.
Satellite and radar imagery:
More news and links:
Update: Rita came and went, and the impact was not quite as bad as Katrina’s, probably because it didn’t hit as flood-prone an area as New Orleans. There was damage, still, however, but oil seems to have dodged the bullet.
You know what really bothers me about the whole Yahoo-Flickr deal? Take a look at each of these sites:
All of them were bought by Yahoo sometime between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Do you sense a common thread? What happened to each one after being bought by Yahoo? I’m not aware that Yahoo has ever allowed any of its acquisitions to maintain a unique identity. What, then, does that bode for Flickr?
Update, Feb 2007: This entry has been linked a couple of times (okay, once by me) in the official login merge thread, and I’ve added links to a few more acquired companies that have been brought up. It really is looking unavoidable that Flickr will be turned into a subdomain within the next few years. They better not break my <img> links. Also see the list here and the Wikipedia list of Yahoo acquisitions.
Update, 2008: Yum, crow!
I forgot to post about this last week, but last Tuesday, September 13th, marked this weblog’s fifth year. HNBP is now a super-senior.
It all began with “Think,” a spare directory in my old Hypermart space (gone now) where I could tool around with various things — in this case, Blogger — as I reacquainted myself with the joys of hand-coding my own HTML, after years of being spoiled by Adobe Pagemill and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Back then, it was black backgrounds, table-based layouts, and <ALLCAPS> <TAGS>. (I still get a bit embarassed at myself when I look at the code on my old sites.)
Over the years, “Think” (later to be called “How Now Brownpau” in an obvious pun on my online handle) would cycle through a long and painful series of free web hosting services before I got my own credit card and was finally able to buy my own domain name and paid web hosting. The site has been demolished and rebuilt several times, quite often around its anniversary, so don’t be surprised if new changes appear sometime soon. ‘Tis the season.
(Trees.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
It was nice enough out that I could amble home from work today, so I opted for the “scenic route” along the National Mall. I had to stop at one point and just admire how twilight shone through the trees as a warm northwest breeze rustled the canopy. A heavy sense of history seemed to settle over me, as if all the generations that had trod this place through the years had left a palpable aura, so thick you could almost smell it.
Or maybe it was the contractors’ porta-potties as the workers dismantled the tents from last week’s National Black Family Reunion.
(IMG_3598 uploaded by brownpau.)
Amy came over for the weekend. We sniffed botanical aromas, learned about First Ladies, viewed 15th Century woodcuts and Claesz still lifes, dipped our toes in the fountain at the Sculpture Garden, walked around Watergate, and watched a couple of bad movies.
My camera was most active at the Botanic Garden, for some reason, so here are a few nice closeups I got:
(IMG_3587.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
Pandora lazes in her new favorite spot under the coffee table. I’ve put her catnip mat there so she can enjoy the location.
Heh, my entry on Spammers, Stickers, and Shirts appears to have struck a nerve in Link Spam Land, because I’m being hit with repeated rape/incest/bestiality spam comments, specifically targeted at that single post. Just goes to show: there may be lots of money in illicit mercenary weblog vandalism (I don’t really think of it as “marketing”), but money can’t buy morals.
It’s also worth noting that money couldn’t save Vardan Kushnir.
So I tried watching Bones last night, and in the first two minutes, the show tries to make you believe that you can see the US Capitol from Dulles Airport (you can’t), that a woman will gladly flash her breasts to get a snooty flight desk clerk’s attention, and that TSA agents will only accost you for the decayed skull in your handcarried luggage — several minutes after you’ve arrived and come out the gates. All this, in an airport which was very clearly not Dulles, nor was it National, nor was it BWI.
I decided to turn off the TV and just wait for something considerably less insulting to the viewer’s intelligence: House, which featured race issues and LL Cool J, with a bad heart and necrotic bowels. Brilliant.
Update: The proof:
Thanks to DCist for the hat tip.