flights

There once was a man who wouldn’t eat for eleven days because he couldn’t bear the sounds food made in his mouth. His family summoned doctors, lawyers, a hypnotist. On the twelfth day, the man asked for a reuben sandwich, a side of cole slaw and a dill pickle.

a beautiful girl
waiting inside the red van
with her dalmatian

Someone named Taylor Donahue, vice president of production at Timely Studios, wrote this memo to his boss. It’s pretty funny, but not nearly as funny as the pitch for the film itself.

A couple of weeks ago, I went sailing with Mike Casey for the fourth time. We had a nice steady, strong breeze that never reached anything like the gales we experienced on previous trips. This time we had a few skippers and, like every other trip, multiple Mikes. See the pics in the extended entry.
Continue reading ‘My fourth Casey Cruise’ »

My ongoing quest for the perfect web color picker tool has so far led me to…
Josh Davis’ ‘Cyphen’
Easy RGB
The 4096 Color Wheel

Those of us who love dogs will no doubt love The Sudden Giant Nostril Gallery.

There was an artist from a poor country who loved to paint pictures of the storefronts in his home town. One day, a small group of passionate young men and women arose to overthrow the government. They used his painting of a small town shoe store as the cover for their pamphlet. The government managed to put down this small uprising. Then they sent troops to arrest the painter, who was taken to prison, where he died many years later.

Two soldiers stationed on an island once quarreled over a girl they knew back home. In anger, one man shot the other, but not fatally. As there were no witnesses, the first man buried the wounded man alive during the night. The military police investigated but came to no conclusions. The man never told anyone his secret, and eventually the whole episode became such a faint memory that he couldn’t say for sure whether it had actually happened at all.

Unpacking this week, I found my ticket stub from the (May 29) The Flaming Lips show at the Warfield in San Francisco. Liz Phair opened. It was an amazing night. It’s probably still too early to tell for sure, but I’m placing it tentatively on the shelf as one of my top five shows of all time (along with the likes of Peter Gabriel and The Talking Heads circa 1982), to see how it fits. Their new album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is solid from beginning to end. It’s their best in a while, and in true Lips fashion you can listen to the whole thing on their web site. I’m only sorry I missed Liz Phair, whose opening set must have been miniscule.

The best way to summarize my opinion of Yankee Doodle Dandy is to say that when the AFI gets around to updating the list, this one is sure not to make the cut.
Continue reading ‘AFI #100: Yankee Doodle Dandy’ »