I spent the day at the Natural History Museum and now I'm convinced the creationists are right

I mean, really, you're asking me to believe all these totally bogus beasts existed as anything other than a joke? Or Maybe the mice created them? A girl wearing a pink Eli Manning jersey? A giant armadillo with a matching yarmulke? No.

Have I had so many Manhattans that I am in risk of getting cancer from the Maraschino cherries?

I sure hope not.
What's cooking. Wiki. Josh Sens at Salon.

No, I have never considered a hand made custom bike

But if I were to do so... Capricorn has a shop site and a blog. Just saying.

Bestest Xmas gifts, 1

Could there be better Christmas gifts? Mr. Shriner Bear is signed Pearson-Maron, #6/10, 2008. The two prints are signed J. Richel. The fellow on the left is "A Bird In Hand", 19/50, and the fellow on the right is "Who's Coming For Dinner?", 13/50

Hi-School Romance #23

The current MNIDOAILY banner comes from the cover of Hi-School Romance #23, October, 1953. Not sure where I shagged my image of the cover, but lookie here for others.

What did you leave out for Santa last night?

We left half of one of Lori's leckerli cookies, half of one of Lori's plum jam filled cookie sandwiches, and two and a quarter pounds of smoked kielbasa from Nassau Meat Market in Greepoint. The kielbasa was a mistake, and thank goodness the old Nick wasn't hungry, or we'd have gone without our traditional Christmas day dinner (with pierogi, thank you) at Chez Lorishki.

happi happi, merri merri...

w/love and sloppy kisses,
from yr ol' pal JuJu

Mose Hoagyson

Is my favorites persons to listen to right now.
Left. Right.

Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money

What do I know about money? Nothing. But I know about being nice. (Shut up.) And I think "Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money" is a snappy title for an article and pretty good guidance. Or don't take the money. (Oops! Too late!)
James Fallows re Gai Xiqing, who controlls 200 billion of China's 2,000 billion US dollars.

Barbaralee and Joe

Hey, about that video of Barbaralee Diamonstein interviewing Joe Papp back in 1978 that I pasted into the sidebar - I don't get this. I've seen videos of steaming piles of poo that have had a million views on youtube, but this incredible interview with one of the giants of American theater has had, uh, 76 views since being posted three months ago. And two of them were by me.

Hello? The Public? Shakespeare In The Park? Joe's Pub? It's the man!

For the newyawkers in the peanut gallery, dig that this was WNYC TV.

Pratt steam whistles

On Friday evening V told us all about being at Pratt last New Year's Eve for the steam whistles. Count me in!

Dear Diary, 081221

Dear Diary:

D           G6        A6
What's new, pussycat? Whoa-oh
D           G6        A6   D  E   E7
What's new, pussycat? Whoa-oh oh

Well! For all the hardships, haven't we seen some of our great good friends this last week? And didn't we get to see the Loser's Lounge do it's 15th anniversary Burt Bacharach tribute at Joe's Pub on Friday night!? Oh! Yes we did! Dr. D, Cuz Rochelle, Ginny, E, Cuz Kev, J - mwah!

Shame. And fruitcake.

I imagine every marriage has a dynamic that centers on a deep, dark secret. I know mine does, and it surfaces every year at this time. It's the week before Christmas, the doorbell rings, and someone wearing brown hands you a box. A green cardboard box. A green cardboard box that has been shipped for Corsicana, Texas, and holds a Collins Street Bakery pineapple pecan cake. You blush, your stomach does a flip flop. You get back inside and you say to your wife, Hey, Craig's sent us another fruit cake, ha ha. And you know for the next week you'll be leading a life of shame. Sneaking into the kitchen each evening while your wife is a few rooms away, prizing the lid of the can open, cutting off another hunk of that sticky sickly sweet cake and shoving it into your mouth, chewing so quickly you're afraid you might bite yourself. And then you feel a little nauseous. And fat. And you want more. You want all of it.

And a week later you start wondering how you can get the tin out of the kitchen and the house without making your wife wonder, Hey, where's that fruitcake Craig sent?

Sock and awe

Given that 45 million shoes had already made contact by the time I saw this, I'm guessing you might already know. But, just in case you don't. (Thank you, macinwi.)

Are html jokes funny?

Rarely. But this one made me laugh. More of a barking kind of laugh than a belly laugh. But still...
Not Valid _ Jonathan Vingiano _ 2008. You need to view the source code for the page.

WF - 158,891 - WooF

Including mine. And I'm proud of it. But I wonder if it's wise that a political party whose inititals I always immediately read as Wrestling Federation should use silhouettes on its posters that make it look like an ad for a smack-down.

It's official: 44

Short to-do list

Download some Tujiko Noriko. Been a long while since I've listened to electronica. I'm thinking I might be ready to uke it. Really.

Commission Taliah Lempert to paint a portrait of mi bikeybianchi. I think I've pointed to T. Lampert's pictures before, but now I met her yesterday at the Flea and I'm thinking, Oh, Yes, Yes of course.

Commission Mehlman to paint a portrait of me and Lori, or just me. He's already said no once before. He said, What if you don't like it, I'd feel terrible. And I'm, like, Dude, what could you do to my face that I haven't done? Gonna try again. (Lori might not want to.)

Just say no to a Christmas uke splurge - even this Richter at Fleamarket Music. (I just got a cramp looking at it again.)

Not to be a downer, but...

Just heard from a second friend in the last week who's lost his gig. Old cabineteers might remember our Nader look-alike pal?
Anyway, gonna have a big ol' shoe toss.

a hero to all of us who have long wished...

for the opportunity to fling something at that enormous waste of space known as G.W. Bush.
courtesy the NYT: Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Becomes a Folk Hero

Karen Dalton

Still catching up to things that happened while I was in high school - I'll get there, yet. Maybe.

Was listening this afternoon to the marvel that is WWOZ, heard a singer and song that pretty much mesmerized me, waited for the playlist, and that sent me scurrying to download Karen Dalton's In My Own Time (1971). Yow and double-yow and a sad ending.

My Mario Valente chicly covered my Roberto Bolaño

OK, Juju, since we're letting it all hang out.

I have this beautiful Mario Valente herringbone thigh-length overcoat. Everyone comments on it. It's the nicest piece of clothing I own. Très chère!

And, I think I've said before, I'm reading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, at the urging of Kansas Bunny, who himself is starting in on 2666 and went to see Bolaño's translator, Natasha Wimmer, give a talk last week.

So. You know, there's this little scene early on in the first book of The Savage Detectives where Poet García Madero is in a park and is daydreaming and gets a boner and then needs to move on and has to awkwardly deal with his physical state? Well, I'm on the R train Brooklyn bound, around Pacific, crowded, standing facing a line of people seated in front of me, and reading my TSD, in which at that very moment Luscious Skin is describing a very steamy and slap-happy encounter with Maria Font, when... Uh oh!

And that is how my Mario Valente chicly covered my Roberto Bolaño.

not ashamed to confess...

juju's been sitting down for the occasion for years now ('ceptin when in location or facility where such a thing might not be convenient nor prudent...): via the NYT, on the topic of that thing we all do, that no one ever wants to talk about,15 Minutes of Fame for Human Waste and Its Never-Ending Assembly Line;
related item espied elsewhere recently, The Three Fundamental Flaws of the Modern Toilet...

and on another topic entirely, farewell to the lass that inspired innumerable fantasies, mine as well as those of many, many others. Requiscat in Pace,
Ms Page...

sometimes we all need a hand...

yah, like when you might be hoping to find a film like that one you saw that one rainy night so long ago...

via the local fishwrap, some news about clerkdogs...

and lo and behold, clerkdogs does a pretty damn fine j - o - b of it...
OH, nearly forgot-
also from the pages of the local fishwrap's food section today:
(hey dere stumperino, lemme know if the flavour truly be dere!)
gift suggestion for the baker you love, Baked, from that bakery in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood...

Money & the Arts in NY (Crain's)

Well, lookie there. A few hours after I posted this I guess the folks over at Crains decided we're not embed worthy. They don't mind sending me their email and adverts. They don't mind the occasional story in their site about my employer. I guess they just don't want Dante diluting their brand. SKANK! And Crains isn't serving DIA and the Geug very well by limiting their exposure. SKANGAGAIN!

EvoMona

Genetic programming: evolution of Mona Lisa. By Roger Alsing. Wiggy.

And, uh, Hey Hey.

Stumpster's Friday night of theremin love - be there

The man says:

This Friday's ReSiDeNt show promises to be one of the most exotic and entertaining to date:

Michael Hearst (of One Ring Zero and Songs For Ice Cream Trucks) will perform original compositions on theremin and claviola along with fellow musians Ron Caswell and Ben Holmes (both of Slavic Soul Party), and Allyssa Lamb (of Las Rubias Del Norte).

Hallvardur Ásgeirsson will perform music for LEMUR robots featuring Patrick O'Reilly-percussion, Anne Herzog - dorophone, Louise Danoise - cymbal and vocals with videos by Anne Herzog and Emmanuelle Page shot on Super8 camera.

Roy Vanegas will create a melancholy, ambient mix of beats accompanied by violin, mezzo-soprano, two guitars and the GuitarBot.

ReSiDeNt: New Works, New Instruments, New Artists
LEMUR, 461 Third Avenue, Brooklyn
Friday, December 12th
8 pm - 10 pm
$5 at the door
http://lemurbots.org

hiya keedz

ya know me misses ya when ya away for so long...


from NPR, Fresh Air, today's show, lovely conversation about wine with two lovely people, link to show here..

our own T day celebration passed enjoyably, hoping you all had fine times with friends, family, maybe, if you really lucky, both.

Shameless promotion: Melon Ride, and oddness

Well, blow me down. We met Ben Osto at a party last night. Ben is Spectacular Melon Ride Fuctifications. Totally. Took a look at his site this morning and followed a link to another of his projects - Web Wunderkammer. Yowza. The oldsters in the house will remember the long ago beloved Cabinet (on long gone editthispage.com), where some of us us first met. And I'm guessing that maybe only Lori will remember that before then I had created a Wunderkammen at panix.com, in 1997. More squishy coincidences. Ben pointed to ripping off Melies for his logo, and Melies' Trip to the Moon was, I think, the first film Lori and I collected on 8 mm, 1985 or '86? And my first big Wunderkammer piece was Lulu Calvert's Mechanical Butterfly - and Ben usess what as the index image for his cabinet?

My bottom crank is much better now, thank you

Finally, time to get back on Bikey! If not for the pure joy, then for the combined health benefit of constant jiggling over BKLYN roads and constant watchful awareness of imminent collision. But, oh yeah, I remember now, after less than a mile of riding I felt my cranks loosening. And, yes, I had my crank wrench in my bag and after a quick cuppa @ Southslope (and have you seen Christoph Niemann's coffee drawings at the NYT?) I used it, but then headed straight to the nice folks at On The Move. A few hours later I was in bicycle dreamland, having replaced by scrunched up cup and cone with a pretty good qualiy cartridge. Sassy!

Odetta

Long (20 minute), lovely video interview & songs & footage of Odetta at the NYT. Tim Weiner did the interview: The Last Word.

Odetta's first album was released the year I was born.
It's also the year that John Barth published The Floating Opera and Allen Ginsberg published Howl. 18, 19 years later I was digging all three. Most especially Barth. But Ginsberg's books could fit in your back pocket.

It's the cars, stupid

Cringley has an article on this that just has too many quotable paragraphs to quote any one of them alone. (Including a little 'up yours' to those who'd like to blame the unions.)

Us? We drive a Mini Cooper S. Happy to pay up the cost per pound scale to get fun and far per gallon.

What's Dante Oblimov doing at facebook?

D.O.'s been poking his imaginary self around facebook, and sucking down hours of my time doing it. We be older than dirt and don't know about nuthin, and the nothin' we don't know is this: makes my skin crawl in the same way that seeing corporate space taking over public space in the physical world makes my skin crawl. A little more loss of the commons. I mean, even here on a Google-owned site they can yank my plug whenever if I cross a line drawn through the user agreement, but fb feels really much more closed in. Smurf-like. Great tools, though. Would take no time to cobble together a nice presence and throb. (Unless you're Dante Oblimov and have to beg people to be your friend. It ain't easy being imaginary. Go help they guy out.)

Nina Hagen splurge

I don't know how it happened, but I wound up watching an hour of Nina Hagen videos on Youtube last night. Yow. Herman ist high, no? Maybe I was just counterbalancing the farming thing.

Greenhorns and rye

Macinwi told me he and the family helped plant rye at Shelter Island Farm this Thanksgiving holiday (yo, get blogging, farmer), and that the community doings were filmed by the Greenhorns project people. Don't know the Greenhorn, but hey, they are taking farmer nominations for inclusion in the project. Tell your maw, tell your paw, tell your twin sister who moved down east.

Diversion: Tumbarumba

Jah, Tumbarumba, for the Firefoxers in the crowd:

Tumbarumba is a frolic of intrusions—a conceptual artwork in the form of a Firefox extension. Tumbarumba hides stories—twelve new stories by outstanding authors—where you least expect to find them, turning your everyday web browsing into a strange journey. You can read more about how it works or just discover it for yourself by downloading it now and then browsing!

Via Rhizome. The coinkydink is that I had lunch to day with Mellie Mel and an old acquaintance / sometimes colleague of Mel's, and we got to chatting about the old text adventure games (Colossal Cave!) and programming in Prolog and all that stuff. The stories never end.