Supreme Court Attack Squirrel

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I was attacked by a squirrel yesterday.

Okay, maybe “attacked” is too strong a word.

As I was skating by the Supreme Court after lunch, my attention was attracted by a squirrel sitting calmly by the concrete bollards surrounding the Capitol construction area. Thinking to take a few pictures of him with my Pencam, I stopped, sat on the sidewalk, and clicked my tongue. He carefully approached, hungry for tourist-offered snacks, but, as with any wild rodent, suspicious of the tourist. Still, braver than most squirrels, he came right up to the toes of my skates in nervous eagerness. Best of all, he didn’t mind the beeping of my camera as I snapped away.

After I had taken some good shots, and was ready to stand up, a large pigeon suddenly landed behind the squirrel and flapped its wings. The squirrel, startled, leapt away from the noise — straight at me. It landed on my shoulder, and just as quickly, jumped off me and onto a concrete bollard, all before I even realized what was happening.

That had me laughing the rest of the day. By virtue of this rodent’s unprecedented boldness, I have christened him “Supreme Court Attack Squirrel,” and given him the honor of being my first photolog entry. If I see him again, he will be rewarded with glorious quantities of Planters Trail Mix.

(Photos taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP.)

The Prisoner and The Simpsons

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To understand tonight’s episode of The Simpsons (Homer getting drugged on a mysterious English island), you have to have seen The Prisoner, a very, very interesting old TV series.

Isaiah 53

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I opened my Bible to Isaiah 53 this morning, read the familiar chapter as though I had laid eyes upon it for the first time, and cried. Tears of joy.

But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

We were all of us undeserving, and even the most innocent of us owed a debt that could not be paid. Yet He descended, He suffered, and He died to pay it for us, to justify us freely, to clean us spotless by His blood.

Thank you, Jesus. Though this secularized world may find those words corny and trite, I cannot say it or mean it enough: thank you, Jesus.

Changelog 7 July 2002

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Rummaging through some old pictures, I found several photos of the Ateneo de Manila campus which I had shot for The GUIDON graduation issue in 1998. Those have been combined with a few other old Ateneo pictures in the nostalgic Ateneo album.

A DC photography skating spree, this time with my Pencam, has yielded more photos for the Washington album. The statue of Freedom atop the Capitol Dome is now free of its scaffolding.

A couple of folks have emailed me to say that parts of my blog are almost unreadable because of small font sizes and/or non-contrasting text colors against dark backgrounds. In the interests of readability and accessibility, I’ve gone over each blog style sheet to tweak colors, increase contrast, and replace the tyrannical font-size: 11px declaration with a fuzzier, friendlier, font-size: 70%, which, rather than forcing text size to 11 pixels no matter what, will instead be rendered somewhat larger for IE-users who prefer to browse with the text-size cranked up. Hopefully 70% of the default text-size should be enough for you large-print types.

New links:

To Whom It May Concern,

A Cup of Rich (another Rich!),

Kyriosity,

Painted Cloud,

and probably a bunch of other people who’ve gotten lost in the bustle, but are linked in the menu.

Grayed-out links in the navigation menu are in progress. I’m reworking some folders for the archive, so those may be intermittently inaccessible for a few days. Also upgrading to Movabletype 2.2 sometime this week.