Awesome Onion Video

Video Find of the Day

This is way cool.

The Onion: Supreme Court: Death Penalty Is 'Totally Badass'

It's Too Hot II

It was way too hot when I got home at 6 this evening, so I took the new used camera for a walk outdoors. It occurs to me that when I talk about the apartments I live in or life in downtown Seattle, one or two of you may have no idea what that looks like.

I hate living at the Union for the noise and the patronizing management, but I love it for the location. The Pioneer Square District in Seattle is a great place to look at and walk around. And contrary to what people who don't live here think, it's not all that dangerous. I feel much safer here than in condo-ridden Belltown.

I started the walk out back of my home, the Union Hotel Apartments. This is the view from 4th and S Washington. The Union Hotel garden, all 70 or so square feet of it, is the tiny bit of greenery the other side of the fence to the right of the bus shelter.

Here's the same bit of garden viewed from the south looking northwest from 4th Avenue S, showing how the garden is a foot or two from a precipice dropping to the railroad tracks leading to the Seattle railroad tunnel.

It was so hot I went to the water. This was shot 3 blocks west of the Union Hotel at 1st and S Washington, looking north along the east side of the street. When I was last homeless the sign advertising rooms for 75 cents was hard to take, knowing that it's just an antique. If there really were rooms for 75 cents a night, I wouldn't have been homeless.

I love alleys. And look: someone's art perpetually looks on this one. Between 1st and Alaska at Washington, looking south.

I spent some time at the Washington Street Waterfront Park, then moved a block north to Yesler and headed back east.

Creative use of wall space at Alaska and Yesler.

Gentrified saloons, saloons turned into fancy restaurants, saloons turned into sports bars, saloons turned into art galleries, and then, sometimes, saloons turned into saloons...

Not a half block further, a mural decorating the beautiful southern entrance to Post Alley from Yesler.

At 1st I jogged over to Cherry so that I could get a shot of my favorite building adornments.

Then south on 3rd to get a view of the Morrison Hotel, another subsidized apartment building run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center. Fellow editorial committee member Stan lives here. It also houses the DESC shelter on one floor.

Back home, I prepare to ascend my throne, the red chair, with My Blue Friend behind me.

It's Too Hot I

Video Find of the Day

In spite of being featured on YouTube, this guy's video has only been seen about 5000 times so far. Please help him out. He supports a good cause.

How to Get Featured on Youtube

Carmen This, Carmen That

Video Find of the Day

I loves the Carmens.

Kogan - Waxman Carmen Fantasy



What I like the most about this next one is the conductor. Watch his expressions. His face and hand gestures make silent music.

Callas The Carmen

Bird Dancer

Video Find of the Day

The title of this entry was the title of a painting I did, which I posted last September on Somewhat Art. The painting was inspired by a film I saw of a Marquesan dance in imitation of terns mating in air. I haven't yet found that film in a form I can embed, but here is a woman doing the Marquesan Bird Dance. Tilt your head left for maximum viewing enjoyment.

Marquesian Bird Dance

Look Out...

I have a camera. I've been wanting one forever. The last time I had a decent camera for still work was in 1971, when I had the use of a Polaroid Land Camera. One of the results was this shot of my parents' fat beagle, right.

Now I have a digital camera. My work with a cheap video camera was well received at the office. A still from one of the videos was used in the paper. So I said, if you're going to use my stuff, give me a better camera, dammit. And they did! Problem was, it was a camera that our Macs wouldn't recognize.

Well, tonight I found out the easy way around that crap. You just borrow a camera that the Macs will recognize; you take the memory card out of the camera you have and stick it in the camera you borrowed, and you download your pictures from the borrowed camera.

So I'm set. I don't know if the trick works with videos yet, I haven't tried it. But it works with stills. Here at left is a picture I took of a painting in my room. Click on it for a bigger version. Click on the bigger version for a bigger version.

And Speaking Again...

Video Find of the Day

Chris Rock's classic routine on the subject. We don't need gun control, we need bullet control.

Speaking of Gun Control

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around spring, 1959. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

So today, for the first time since the Bill of Rights was ratified, the Supreme Court said that, yes, it means individual citizens have a right to own guns, at least for home defense. As some of you may know, my views on gun control are insane. I not only oppose gun control, I think the government should give guns out to people who can't afford them. Poor people need self-defense, too. The constitution says people have a right to lawyers, and the courts have decided that means that if you're too poor to hire one, the government has to provide one. That's the way it should be with the right to bear arms. It doesn't make sense to tell me I can bear one, if I don't have one. And ammo. Make mine an Uzi, thank you.

I've never used a firearm. There's three reasons for that. One was the old student deferment, and the high draft lottery number. Another is the ongoing poverty, preventing me from purchasing one. The third has to do with my Father.

When my Dad came back from Taiwan in 1959, I wanted to patch up our relationship. From age six on I couldn't bring myself to initiate a conversation with him. It was extremely awkward, and I wanted to break out of it. What I felt I needed was for him to offer to do something with me that I could stand. For that to happen he needed have some minimal respect for me, enough to pay attention to what I was interested in, and propose we do something having to do with it.

He constantly struck out on this front. He suggested taking me fishing. I hated fishing. He suggested taking me to ball games. I hated ball games. I told him I wasn't interested, and he would throw up his hands and say, to my Mother, "I can't do anything with him. He hates everything."

One day he was driving me and the neighbor kids to a school event. He started to complain to them that I never liked to do anything. He said, "Like right now, I know that if I offered to take him to a firing range and teach him to use a rifle, he would turn me down."

I jumped at that. I said, "Would you do that?" He said he would. He was shocked that I finally found something we could do together that I was into.

If the offer had been to take me hunting, I would have turned it down flatly. I don't have any desire to kill my own meat. But I was fine with target practice. And at the time (I was 9) I hadn't ruled out the possibility that I might want to enlist some day. Wouldn't it be handy to already know how to use a weapon?

It never happened, of course. All the talk about, "He never wants to do anything," was just abuse. It wasn't really about what I wanted or what I rejected. It was about having an excuse to put me down.

For the next four or five years whenever he tried to use that line on me I said, "So, OK, when are you going to teach me how to use a rifle?" Each time he would grit his teeth, and say, "I've told you before. Soon." And then he'd change the subject.

Eventually, I got tired of that game.