GRABBINGSAND

Super Me, Halloween 1975
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

I was Superman.

This is little me on the front porch of our horse. The costume is not a costume, but pajamas. The most awesome pajamas ever, I think. The only things missing from little me are the right shoes. Boots, actually. Red ones. I asked for them for Christmas, but realized quickly that actual knee-high pointed Superman boots might be hard to find, so I changed my wish to a far more reasonable request for red socks.

I got those.

This was my favorite Hallowe’en costume, though a few others compete for second place. The Shogun Warrior costume was exceptionally cool, if maybe a bit too plastic. Kept the mask from that one for years. I was “backwards man” once, wearing my clothes in reverse, but nobody got it.

So what about you, dear readers … what were your favorite costumes from kidhood?

(This is going to be one of those nerdy self-referential posts where I write about this blog, as opposed to writing about something truly interesting. You might want to skip it.)

As a dedicated WordPress user, this is where I’m supposed to mention kindly this new theme that now frames my blog. In particular, this one is based on Misty Look, a theme created by Sadish Bala(subramanian).

However, I couldn’t leave well enough alone.

So I expanded the width of the container, tweaked the colors, changed the way posts handle images and did some judicious copying and pasting in the stylesheet to double the number of side-columns. One column is never enough, in my humble opinion. Of course, this only served to make the seemingly convenient Widgets functionality null-and-void, but until the Widgets become far more customizable, I’m not going to be using them.

(Hmm. Customizable Widgets might actually be defeating the drag-and-drop convenience of the feature in the first place. Oh, well. Let it be. After all, the stated point of Widgets is that “they’re just things you can use to personalize your WordPress site without knowing HTML.”)

But the funny thing is, this post only matters right now. In a few months, I’ll change the theme again and any references to behavior and design will lose their relevance. But in this moment, I like the placement of the Search function, as well as how my blog is no longer so dependent on a visitor’s screen resolution to be seen clearly and completely.

Of course, I’ve yet to test this newness in Internet Explorer. It might look absolutely hideous.

Last week, it was fifteen. This week, it is twenty. Who knows just what it will be next week. Regardless, here’s the music that filled my afternoon from about 2pm on.

1. “Bad Boy Clyde” - Esthero
2. “Kick” - INXS
3. “Ogive” - William Orbit
4. “Lil’ Jimmy Skit” - Kanye West
5. “Under Tha Influence (Follow Me)” - Cee-Lo
6. “Virginia Avenue” - Tom Waits
7. “These Days Without You” - Big Head Todd & The Monsters
8. “The Moon Got In My Eyes” - Frank Sinatra
9. “Come Back From San Francisco” - Magnetic Fields
10. “I’m Stepping Out With A Memory” - Anne Shelton
11. “Shiver” - Coldplay
12. “Hello” - Sugarland
13. “Cry One More Time” - Gram Parsons
14. “Trick Photography” - Black Tie Dynasty
15. “Stoppin’ The Love” - KT Tunstall
16. “Way Over Yonder” - Carole King
17. “Soul Free” - George Michael
18. “Femme Fatale (Stereo)” - Velvet Underground
19. “Walk With Me” - The ARC Choir*
20. “Just For Now” - Imogen Heap

Kind of a mellow afternoon, all things considered.

(* - The original source sample used in Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.”)

Our latest podcasted effort for North Fulton Drama Club has been posted at Georgia Podcast Network. The title for Episode 7? More Candelabra.

This was a fun one to do. As will be immediately obvious to anyone who cares to listen, we were under the influence of birthday cake, pumpkin seeds and free flat beer. The cake was consumed in celebration of (Sister) Amber Rhea’s birthday. The seeds were pulled from the guts of a handful of freshly-carved jack-o-lanterns — including one marvelous interpretation of R. Land’s Loss Cat by the talented Alyssa Jackson. And the beer, flat as it was, was kindly provided to the podcast partiers by DecaturGuy.

(For a bit of extra fun, stick around and listen to the entire podcast from beginning to end. Not only will you get the entire track by Magnatune’s Lisa DeBenedictus, but you’ll get to hear a hilarious false start to episode 7, interrupted brilliantly.)

NaNoWriMo starts in five days. I’ve been on the roster for a couple of years, but I’ve called forfeit every time. Too busy, typically. There’s always something else to do.

But when November comes to a close, I feel a little pang of missed opportunity. And quite frankly, I’m getting tired of the panging.

I logged in just now to the NaNoWriMo site. I have to give them credit, as the Flash-generated profile page is pretty sweet. Looks like the end-pages of a library book. Nothing stokes the flames of a writer’s ego quite like seeing their own work in print, even when it is purely illusionary. Of course, the facing page holds the imposing progress chart. The goal is zero to 50K in thirty days.

I know folks who have tried it, only to think better of it. And I’m not so sure that I’ll fare any better, but I’m willing to step up to the plate.

But what I need is an idea. Some spark. So I’ll put it in your hands. Whether you’re here for the first time today or if you check in on me every other day, I want to hear from you. Leave me a comment or send me an email with an idea, as simple or as involved as you want. No matter how mundane or ridiculous, I want you to tell me about what you’d like for me to write.*

Don’t be shy. Have at.

* Translation: What you’d like for me to write about. Damned dangling prepositions …

Didn’t I say this already? Yes. I did. Only this time, the phrase has been phased out officially. When revisionism fails to work, then a change of language is in order. I wish other issues were so linguistically manageable. When next my kitchen sink is clogged, I could just say that my drain is just maintaining a steely and admirable resolve against the insistent force of gravity.

Goodbye “Stay The Course” … though I can’t say that any of us will miss you as much as the President himself. One can only hope that the next phrase of power will be as easy to say and simple to remember. Depending on the outcome of the upcoming midterms, the Bush administration might just go with a dismissive and meaningless catch-phrase like “America Prevails” or “So Say We All” and have done with it.

Next Thought …

Lupe Fiasco. He’s 25 years old. If you’ve listened to Kanye West’s “Touch The Sky,” he’s the guest star that namechecks anime’s own Lupin The 3rd. His debut album has been out for a few weeks now. Though initial Billboard reports called it a commercial failure, it was soon discovered that somebody forgot to throw Best Buy’s retail sales into the spreadsheet. Oops. Turns out he was #1 in hip-hop, #2 in R & B and #8 overall. Not bad for a self-professed nerd from Chicago who lists shortwave radio and chess in his hobbies.

On top of it all, Fiasco is a mighty lyricist who holds nothing back when he’s got something heavy on his mind. Like in “American Terrorist,” a beautifully produced track about the human WMDs we might be breeding in our own backyard, all for the sake of more profit … or maybe for the sake of a Savior that isn’t coming back soon enough to satisfy some.

Camoflouged torahs, bibles and glorious qurans -
The books that take you to heaven
and let you meet the Lord there
have become misinterpreted,
reasons for warfare.
We read em with blind eyes.
I guarantee you there’s more there.
The rich must be blind,
because they didnt see the poor there.

Lupe Fiasco - “American Terrorist (with Matthew Santos)”
[audio:lfiasco_american.mp3]

The more money that they make … the better and better they live ….

The Unsent - Tiled
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

I’ve taken quite a few photos with my camera phone this year.

Here are 47 of them.

The new iPod is still learning the hows and whys of shuffling, I assume. There are repeats. At first, it wouldn’t leave the confines of a single album for the next random song. But it is learning. I think.

This is the morning’s musical bounty:

• “Just My Soul Responding” - Smokey Robinson
• “66″ - Afghan Whigs
• “Fat-Bottomed Girls” - Queen
• “Touch Me With Your Love” - Beth Orton
• “Is There Any Way Out Of This Dream” - Crystal Gayle & Tom Waits
• “Ain’t No Other Man” - Christina Aguilera
• “Call Me” - Frank Sinatra
• “Cuts You Up” - Peter Murphy
• “Song For Yukiko” - Tricky
• “Go (Featuring John Mayer & Kanye West)” - Common
• “Pressure” - Billy Joel
• “Shelter From The Storm” - Bob Dylan
• “Masters Of War” - Bob Dylan
• “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix)” - Kanye West
• “Strange New Cottage In Berkeley” - Allen Ginsberg

Double the Dylan.

And this list doesn’t count the three tracks that failed to rip well. Sad to admit, but many of my older CDs aren’t doing so well anymore. The first Live album, an Allison Krauss collection and Shelby Lynne’s reintroduction LP, all of them resulted in stuttering and worthless MP3s.

Daeva & Daksha In The Title Bar
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

There’s a new header up there.

It might stick. It might not. It’s been about a year since my last major WordPress theme renovation, so it’s time to shift things around. I’m starting at the top and working my way down from there.

Of course, I might just throw up my hands and accept the fact that few things amuse me more than PhotoShopping hats on cats …

10-22-06_1345.jpg
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

One of many in the lawn at Barrington Hall. Picked up during strike.