[New York]: This is the chicken I want

It's raining today in New York. My hair resembles this chicken. We would match.



(h/t My Pet Chicken)

[New York]: Foccacia

Haven't tried this yet, but it looks promising.

Melinama does Illustration Friday: "Wide."

I'm practicing up for painting a pushcart. This is "wide" lettering.



Technorati Tags: Illustration+Friday

The most unread books according to some.

The Incurable Insomniac wrote: "What we have here: the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish."

I found a lot of my favorite books on this list! Others that I wouldn't read if they were the only books in the house.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

The best antique pushcart pictures I've seen.

Mark does Illustration Friday: "Electricity."

'Electric Lightbulb'

Acrylic paint, colored pencil, and modeling paste on canvas.

Mike


Technorati Tags: Illustration+Friday

Mario Lanza (et al) sing "The Donkey Serenade"

UPDATE: Somebody on the Yahoo donkey shared this wonderful clip of "Donkey Serenade" from a 1937 movie...



Here's the Mario Lanza version I posted originally...

Here's Enrico Caruso doing it.

(Listen to the two Italians carefully using American R!)

Also note that, though the song is entitled Donkey Serenade, a mule features in the lyrics. I'm sure this is because "donkey" does not rhyme with "fool." I guess he could have sung: I'll sing to the donkey/ If you're sure she won't think that I am just a honkey.

THERE'S A SONG IN THE AIR,
BUT THE FAIR SENORITA DOESN'T SEEM TO CARE,
FOR THE SONG IN THE AIR.
SO, I'LL SING TO THE MULE,
IF YOU'RE SURE SHE WON'T THINK
THAT I AM JUST A FOOL,
SERENADING A MULE.

AMIGO MIO, DOES SHE NOT HAVE A DAINTY BRAY?
SHE LISTENS CAREFULLY TO EACH
LITTLE TUNE YOU PLAY.
LA BELLA SENORITA!
SI,SI, MI MUCHACHITA.
SHE'D LOVE TO SING IT TOO
IF ONLY SHE KNEW THE WAY.
BUT TRY AS SHE MAY,
IN HER VOICE THERE'S A FLAW,
AND ALL THAT THE LADY CAN SAY IS,
'HEE HAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!'
(BAND PLAYS MELODY WHILE VM HOLDS THE NOTE)

SENORITA, DONKEY'S FEET ARE
NOT SO FLEET AS A MOSQUITO,
BUT SO SWEET LIKE MY CHIQUITA,
YOU'RE THE ONE FOR ME! (BAND YELLS 'HEY!')
(BAND SWINGS THE TUNE, WITH SOLO LEADS BY
SAX, PIANO ,AND DRUMS CONSECUTIVELY.)

BUT TRY AS SHE MAY,
IN HER VOICE THERE'S A FLAW,
AND ALL THAT THE LADY CAN SAY IS,
'HEE HAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!
(AGAIN BAND PLAYS WHILE VM HOLDS THE NOTE)

SENORITA, DONKEY'S FEET ARE
NOT SO FLEET AS A MOSQUITO,
BUT SO SWEET LIKE MY CHIQUITA,
YOU'RE THE ONE FOR ME!!

Technorati Tags: donkey, serenade, humor, music

Jewish calligraphy from music advertisements and sheet music

What I really want to do: design stuff like this.

In which Jethro auditions for the role of Wild Equine.

Here is a "Why Paddy's Not at Work Today" type of story, except I in fact did have to go to work, black and blue though I am. I described today's adventure (see below) to the Triangle Jewish Chorale and they asked me to write it up as a Yiddish song for next year.

BTW the Yiddish word for donkey is "eyzl."

While I was visiting my son Zed in Connecticut for four days, Jethro was just standing and standing in his round pen waiting and waiting for the donkey-sitter to come play with him. No exercise. He probably was pretty restless.

So today I hitched up the cart and off we went.

The first half hour of the ride went like a dream. Jethro was obedient, cheerful, malleable (i.e. when I said stop he stopped). He was so good and steady I was thinking about taking him out on the Big Road (the road he'll have to stay calm on if I am eventually to realize my ambition to take him to the grocery store) when suddenly a motorcycle came over the hill.

Jethro rolled his eye in an inauspicious manner. I could read his thought-bubble: he was trying to decide whether to hold steady or lose his *&^%. Unfortunately, he decided in favor of wild abandon. He reared way up on his hind legs, like the trick horses in the movies, made a very sharp U-turn, and GALLOPED full speed up a long hill. It was kind of fun in the cart bouncing along behind him, wondering where we were going. We'd never gone this fast before.

When Jethro loses it, he forgets the difference between road and not-road. We careened across a driveway, narrowly missing a flowerbed, towards a deep ditch. Again I saw him consider: "Jump or Not Jump?"

He voted for Jump and leapt across the ditch. The cart behind him (with me in it) plunged into the ditch and bounced up the other side. He landed more or less forehead-to-tree-trunk and that's when he finally decided to stop, his rear end all bunched up, like a cartoon character (cue the screeching brakes).

I got off the cart and saw he was still rolling his eyes. We had a long, quiet discussion. We agreed we would try again, now that the motorcycle was gone. I led him into another U-turn and we headed back down the road.

I walked beside him for a while, not holding his halter but protecting him by my presence. He is much calmer when I'm next to him. When he first came to live with me, I thought, "How sweet, he thinks I can protect him," but now I know that, as per this story...

A donkey and his owner are being pursued by a bear; the donkey stops to change into his running shoes.

The owner says, "You're crazy! There's no way you can run faster than a bear!"

"I don't have to run faster than a bear," replies the donkey. "I only have to run faster than you."

... he likes me next to him simply because he can outrun me.

Anyway, his eyes were still semi-rolling and he was hyperventilating. He clearly needed some Valium, but he doesn't have a prescription. We weren't near home, so on we walked.

A car stopped, the window opened, the driver did something friendly in a sudden manner. Jethro reared up again and the tornado he stirred up as he reared knocked me over. I bounced on the pavement. I got up and we continued along.

Third time is the charm. I was still walking beside him when yet another friendly neighbor stopped to say hello.

Jethro yanked away, ran down the middle of the road, then crossed over and went across a ditch into a huge hay-field where the grass is more than a yard high. He galloped across it until he was as small as a penny and then disappeared from sight altogether. I could still hear his Bulgarian bell ringing.

I trudged after him through the high grass but slowed and stopped as I realized I would never be able to catch up with him.

Then, following the advice of a donkey-whisperer, I turned my back on him. And waited. The bell went silent, then got louder. He was coming closer! I looked, he stopped, I turned away from him again, he came towards me again. He veered and galloped, veered and walked, sometimes closer, sometimes farther...

When he was very close he stopped. I went to pick up his lead line. Usually after an "incident" he's perfectly happy to let me be boss again. This time, though, he decided he was enjoying the wild life and took off again. He galloped out of the field, crossed more ditches, the cart turned on its side, he dragged it a while, he made a wild turn, the cart righted itself, he made another wild turn, the cart bounced hard and landed on its other side, he dragged it that way as he galloped on.

The cart righted itself, Jethro galloped across the road, went through a ditch and found himself, again, face-to-trunk with a tree. This time he let me catch him. We walked on, what alternative was there?

We were quite close to home when the last great menace appeared - a baby in a stroller, with a nanny, we have seen this baby many times, but Jethro couldn't take any more. He reared one more time and, trying to catch him, I nearly tore off 1/3 of my thumbnail, so I almost fainted, I don't remember anything about the rest of the way home except that I was limping and Jethro was calm, even abashed. He's now back in the sensory-deprivation round pen.

I would like to thank my friendly neighbors for being so patient with my donkey, who has been bad in the past but never this bad. Now that he thinks he's a wild mustang, and now that the wheels of his cart are bent and wobbly, what next? I guess buying some new wheels comes next.

Technorati Tags: donkey, disaster

A new enthusiasm for pushcarts.

A friend of mine is tired of regular jobs and thinking maybe he'd like to be a pushcart peddler. Of course this appeals to me.

[New York]: Ugh, how one's heroes betray one

I grew up on Carl Hiaasen's hilariously, ridiculously bitter environmentalist satires of evil developers in South Florida. And now I find out he wrote a book about how obsessed he is with golf???

And what's his excuse?

“The great irony is that golf courses are becoming the last bit of wildlife refuge we have,” he said. “I saw a bobcat on a golf course once, and I don’t know that there’s anyplace else you could do that now.”

Nope, that's not going to do it for me, Carl. In fact, um... I have another explanation...could it be that the bobcat was on the golf course because heinous developments such as golf courses had just eaten up the last tiny shred of habitat it had left???

{{scream of rage}}

Now I hate Quicken and I hate Intuit. Eat dirt and die!

Long ago, I liked Intuit's money-management software Quicken Basic. It came at a reasonable price and helped me control my peculiar financial situation.

I "upgraded" to Quicken 2005 when I got it practically for free at tax-time and was disappointed: it was buggier than my previous version and bloated with many features I didn't want, while things that had previously worked well worked less well than in the earlier version.

Intuit has a diabolical Planned Obsolescence program for its software: all users of Quicken 2005 are being forced, as of April 30 (today), to "upgrade" to Quicken 2008 if they want to continue using its online features.

Intuit does not allow any penetration of its corporation. Unlike almost any other company, according to gethuman.com) (fabulous website, by the way): Intuit does not support inbound calls. Go to www.quickendirect.com/phone and request a callback. 5 AM to 5 PM PT, M-F only. 800-811-8766.

I did call this number, I wanted to ask: "Isn't there any way I can pay to continue my on-line access per se and not have to "upgrade" to a new version of your product, which, I expect, will be even slower and more bloated than the last?"

I tried twice on two different days. Nobody at Intuit ever called back.

As it turns out, one cannot buy Quicken Basic 2008, because there is no such thing. The cheapest program one can now buy is Quicken Deluxe 2008. This surely must be to justify the gigantic jump in price. (The tag on the box I bought says $64.99. I got it cheaper but not by enough.)

So here it comes in the mail, and it overwhelms me with its excessive packaging (no doubt to justify its huge price and huge shipping/handling fee).

I put a nice little Netflix mailer in the picture for comparison.



The two packages - (1) the Netflix paper mailer and (2) the Quicken box, plastic tray, advertising, huge cardboard box, and huge plastic bag - each contain precisely the same thing: one cd.

Another win to institutional greed in all its glory. Another unnecessary conglomeration of egregious detritus.

Technorati Tags: Intuit, Quicken 2008, Quicken 2005, Corporate Greed, Overpriced bloated software

See what Fruit Loops can accomplish!

Most of my donkey projects have a very long time line. Including this one...

Back in September the gentleman farmer offered me this free trailer for Jethro.

It took a month to find and then order and receive, by mail, the right tow bar for my old van, and then to get the correct size ball hitch.

Then I drove out to Greensboro to pick up the trailer and managed to get it home by going only forwards -- I figured I'd learn how to back up some other time.

The trailer is illegal, it doesn't have tags and its electrical harness isn't connected yet. But a more urgent problem was that Jethro would have nothing to do with it. I spent hours trying to lure him into it and then gave up for a while.

Wise donkey owners told me the best way to obliterate his phobia would be to dump his dinners in the trailer.

All his pastures were considerably downhill of any location I could tow the trailer to without getting stuck in the mud, so I started work on a new area to be enclosed by an electric fence.

That entailed trenching an electric line quite a long distance and wiring outlets at the far end. And then figuring out how to hook up the fence. That took until mid-April. I immediately put Jethro in his new area and he immediately ate all the grass down to within 1/32" of the ground.

Then I tried backing the trailer up to the fence. Going forward and backward a little bit at a time (there is a knack to this I mostly don't understand) after about twenty minutes I heard hissing and looked up to see smoke and steam pouring out from under the van's hood. Yikes! I turned off the van and left the whole mess.

Before rehearsal next morning, Bob reassured me I hadn't cracked the engine block. He backed the trailer up to the fence lickety-split. What a guy.

It turns out, just putting breakfast and dinner in the trailer didn't do the trick - Jethro went on a hunger strike.

I couldn't give up, though - this project has gained code-red priority because Hannah wants to go hiking this summer with Jethro carrying the gear, and if he won't get in the trailer, we'll have to hike in our own neighborhood, which won't be very exciting.

So after some reconsideration, I started using her cat Lydia's clicker-trainer and a bag of fruit loops (plus a lot of reassurance and random legitimate treats) to convince Jethro the trailer will not eat him.

(It's been pointed out that since the penultimate time Jethro was in a trailer he ended up gelded his caution is not completely irrational.)

So, half a year after the project began ...





AND AFTER THE GREAT ADVENTURE, A PAUSE FOR SELF-CONGRATULATION:


.

Order your own Jethro merchandise! Donkeys for fun! "Don't Tread on Me!"

This is the design (photoshopped version of my donkey Jethro) I just uploaded to a print-on-demand tshirt/totebag company. You can buy Jethro things here at Printfection.com. The prices of these online places are kind of expensive but when you consider how much trouble it would be to set up your own silkscreening operation... anyway, there you have it.

FYI I just get $1 per item. I'm doing this for fun only. Heh.

UPDATE: Here it is on a mug and also on a postcard!

Technorati Tags: Donkey, Democrat, Independence, Freedom, Merchandise, Politics

Mark does Illustration Friday: "Wrinkles."

Wrinkled Dog in the Sun
The web has some very cute photos of shar-pei puppies. I found one I liked, then modified the color scheme a bit.
Mark



Technorati Tags: Illustration Friday

Melinama does Illustration Friday: "Wrinkles."

I started this picture a long time ago, on a very flimsy cheap piece of paper which ripped when I took it off the board. Today I taped up the rip and worked on it some more...

Below, see the photographic original.




Technorati Tags: Illustration Friday

Locavores vs. year-round kiwi fruit

Extracts from
The Food Chain: Movable Feast Carries a Pollution Price Tag
By Elisabeth Rosenthal for the New York Times, April 26, 2008
Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

The movable feast comes at a cost: pollution — especially carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas — from transporting the food.

Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.

"We're shifting goods around the world in a way that looks really bizarre," said an Oxford University economist ... [who] noted that Britain imports — and exports — 15,000 tons of waffles a year, and similarly exchanges 20 tons of bottled water with Australia.

This year the European Commission in Brussels announced that all freight-carrying flights into and out of the European Union would be included in the trading bloc's emissions-trading program by 2012, meaning permits will have to be purchased for the pollution they generate.

Under a little-known international treaty called the Convention on International Civil Aviation, signed in Chicago in 1944 to help the fledgling airline industry, fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.

Proponents say ending these breaks could help ensure that producers and consumers pay the environmental cost of increasingly well-traveled food.

Some foods that travel long distances may actually have an environmental advantage over local products, like flowers grown in the tropics instead of in energy-hungry European greenhouses.

Better transportation networks have sharply reduced the time required to ship food abroad. For instance, improved roads in Africa have helped cut the time it takes for goods to go from farms on that continent to stores in Europe to 4 days, compared with 10 days not too many years ago.

And with far cheaper labor costs in African nations, Morocco and Egypt have displaced Spain in just a few seasons as important suppliers of tomatoes and salad greens to central Europe.

The economics are compelling. For example, Norwegian cod costs a manufacturer $1.36 a pound to process in Europe, but only 23 cents a pound in Asia.

"Food is traveling because transport has become so cheap in a world of globalization," said Frederic Hague, head of Norway's environmental group Bellona. "If it was just a matter of processing fish cheaper in China, I'd be happy with it traveling there. The problem is pollution."

Box Fresh Organics, a popular British brand, advertises that 85 percent of its vegetables come from the British Midlands. But in winter, in its standard basket, only the potatoes and carrots are from Britain. The grapes are South African, the fennel is from Spain and the squash is Italian.

Today's retailers could not survive if they failed to offer such variety, Mr. Moorehouse, the British food consultant, said.

"Unfortunately," he said, "we've educated our customers to expect cheap food, that they can go to the market to get whatever they want, whenever they want it. All year. 24/7."

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