hey sweetie why don’t I have any socks to wear to work tonight?

oh I got caught up doing some, um, work on the computer. sorry.

feminist note: he usually does his own socks but I sweetly volunteered to do laundry before he went to bed this morning.

Robert Quine was a founding member of the groundbreaking punk rock ensemble, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, creating the movement’s anthem: “Blank Generation”. But he’s probably better known for his collaborations with artists such as Lou Reed, Brian Eno, John Zorn, Matthew Sweet, Tom Waits, Lloyd Cole, They Might Be Giants, and Marianne Faithfull.

Recently he’d released live recordings he’d bootlegged from various Velvet Underground shows as well as a compilation of Richard Hell & the Voidoids songs.

The cause of his death hasn’t been confirmed though there are rumors of suicide. He had apparently been in a deep depression since the loss of his wife to cancer last year.

Here’s the announcement on his official site where condolence emails will be forwarded to his family.

PS He had a law degree.

taking advantage of boredom and a wireless network

I’ve been trying to organize our living room this weekend. It’s full of book stacks because of the great office overhaul. We moved the bookshelves to the foyer because we didn’t have anywhere else to put them really and they actually look kind of cool there. So I decided to just shelve the books so at least it would look neat until I decided what to do next.

There is a gigantic box of unsorted office crap in the middle of the already cluttered room. It’s filled with stuff from the rats nest that was next to Cody’s desk including the usual fifty notebooks and pads with notes on only the first ten pages and stacks of printouts on arbitrary subjects such as preservation of genes in space that seem to trail behind my cute husband with the short attention span. There are also our old two desks in addition to the usual ugly sleeper sofa, matching chair and ottoman, dining table, sideboard, and china cabinet. Yeah. It’s a bit crowded.

We’ve been ignoring it for months but yesterday I was up early and just didn’t want to play games or watch tv. So I unpacked his laptop in the living room, logged it in to the wireless network, downloaded a few books on tape from itunes, and went through the box from hell. It was dusty with nicotene dust, pet hair, and the usual New Mexico extreme dust that permeates the pores. Bleh.

eventually

When I’m done with the living room I’m going to tackle the scary room!

We’ve also started talking in a serious tone about flooring. I think we’ve decided on a recycled PET carpet of some kind in most of the house with bamboo flooring in the foyer (and maybe the living room), and possibly linoleum tiles in the kitchen and bathrooms but maybe saltillo tile.

I also want to finish putting up new switchplates.

And put track lighting in the office.

And organize all my power tools and junk in the garage.

I’m thinking about putting my easel to the back porch and making it my studio for the summer.

No idea what to do with that back room. It’s always been vaguely ‘future baby room’ in my mind. It has the most pleasant view in the whole house of the back corner of the garden and is shaded by a big (still healthy) tree. But I’m getting very tired of not actually using it for anything other than storage of crap.

And hopefully someday I can decide on paint colors for the walls.

cluttery to philanthropy

I’m thinking about taking advantage of this freecycle thing to get rid of the desks and ugly sofa and chair. Or more likely I’ll give it to a domestic violence charity there are an unbelievable number of abused women in this state.

I also plan to go through all the health and beauty drawers and donate them to a women’s shelter and maybe go through my clothes and donate to that ACLU clothes drive for women to wear in court again if they’re still doing that Jocelyn?

I can’t decide if we should sell the boxes of books we don’t want anymore to a used bookstore or donate them. There’s also the decision if I should sell some things on ebay - like the Monty Python and the Holy Grail knights action figures set (still in their boxes!).

dream on

I have a vague vision of a “Woody Allen’s New York” style living room with a dining room, dark wooden shelves of books everywhere, and a little reading area with two comfortable chairs.

Otherwise all I usually want is something sturdy and comfortable that’s easy to clean, doesn’t show pet fur too much, and looks good.

Trying to incorporate all the cool mid-century stuff we have isn’t easy to do in a 70s suburban house but I’m trying.

cocksure

For the most part I don’t want to worry about a specific style and just include things that I like - someone demonstrated to me once that if you choose several things you like and put them together they evoke a certain kind of asthetic style that is personal and far more creative than the cut and dried style rules. And this may sound egotistocal but I *do* have a degree in visual arts so I usually know what looks good. Or at least I’m confident enough about decorating (when I actually do it) to ignore most criticisms about it. Heh.

Ok back to the living room for me now.

I hadn’t really been following music much the last few years. I converted a good portion of my catalog to mp3 and even did some kazaa downloading for a bit a few years back but with so many channels and Cody and I disagreeing on what to listen to I just slipped away from music for a while. Except every year I get a nice box set of music I like for Yule / Christmas.

So anyway last week I got in the mood to hear something new and started looking into those newfangled legit (ie probably paying for it) music sites. I asked Cody what he uses. Got my friend Jocelyn to ask her friend what he uses. The consensus was itunes.

I’ve downloaded many songs now, unfortunately. And I’m probably going to move my 6.11 gigs of mp3s over so it can all be in one place. And like a good demi-exhibitionist with a weblog/journal I wanted a big fat list of my music to show how diverse my musical taste is. Heh. Right.

But itunes only exports lists in xml! I don’t do xml. :hiding her thrice-opened O’Reilly guide:

Remember I’m a kind of geek-by-association for the most part. Dad is an old-school geek, Cody is a geek, even Mom’s a bit of a geek, sister Nicole’s pretty geeky too. I was just an art school girl from hell that got a compaq in 1995 and got a bit addicted really. So consider me geek lite. Or hehe the Alice B Toklas of geeks sans mustache or the desire to cook very often.

I was utterly flummoxed by the xml thing and after a few unsuccessful searches I called Cody at work to ask if there was a standard aggregator program I wasn’t aware of. Apparently not. But (and this is the cool kind of stuff you get being married to a geek to counterbalance the dead weedy yard and unfixed car) he’d helped a friend a few months ago with a similar question about converting xml to txt or html and he could whip a little program in vb on his laptop in a few days.

He showed it to me yesterday and it’s pretty cool - it automatically goes to the default itunes folder and you can choose which fields you want in your list. You can export it as text, a full web page, or an html fragment if you just want to paste it into a page. He said in a few days after some polishing I can offer it for download here. Neat huh?

June 25th has been announced as the release date. The trailer looks interesting. I still haven’t made it all the way through Bowling for Columbine yet it just depresses the shit outta me.

The 5000 dollar puppy pagoda pales in comparison

Maybe we should move to South Korea instead and become gaming superstars? But oh lordy the plumbing I saw there. Esh.

An open source travel guide - Contribute!

Guess which song has been covered the most.

hehehe

venus { women in music, art, film, fashion, d.i.y. culture }

“Turns out, I was just incredibly happy to be alive,” said Cushman. What a great story.

Take an imaginary vacation for a few minutes

The current ethos in the United States of America is all to do with surface and nothing to do with substance. It doesn’t matter that Britney Spears has nothing to say and is about as deep as a birdbath. It matters that she has cute tits, and that’s all that matters. She doesn’t sing in concert; none of them do. Those are samples. Push a button, out comes the vocal. Do you ever notice, when you’re listening to them in a live concert — any of them, Janet Jackson, any of the rest of them — that they’re not breathing heavy? Even though they’re dancing like crazy. That’s because you’re not hearing what they’re singing. You’re hearing a tape.
-David Crosby in the frontline special The Way the Music Died

The Flannery O’Connor library

**totally offensive but interesting** The Racial Slur Database

Bill Owens Photographer

International Business Culture, Business Etiquette, Customs and Protocol

A collection of childhood beliefs

So you’d like to…go insurgent / alternative country / no depression

Ettiquette Hell

So I’ve been thinking and I can’t decide but I want to have an answer when I’m asked what I want for my birthday. It seems my birthday gifts get stranger as I get older. I got a hedgehog last year. ’nuff said.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about - a wysiwyg editor like GoLive or Dreamweaver because I really have a better time starting a layout on them even if they do screw up the code a bit.

Or maybe hiring the ladies at blogmoxie for a new design and a few implementations like skinning the comments, about me page, and photo album when a skin is chosen on the main page. That seems awfully complex and more than I’m probably able to do, if it can be done at all. I love the designs they come up with and I’ve been planning to hire different designers for skins involving the same photo whenever I had the extra cash.

Or something else computer-related like a game or dvdrw drive to start the tivo hacking.

I’ve also been thinking about getting my tattoo worked on a bit - getting a few more flowers added and the others re-inked a bit.

But I’ve also been thinking (just the last day or so) about getting a tiny line drawing of a hedgehog somewhere. It would be the first non-Iris tattoo I’ve ever had and I’m a bit nervous about that.

Or should I get a tattoo of something else?

Or should I not get any of those?

What do you think?

Benefit of Cody working nights: bringing home breakfast burritos. Oddly enough the best one I’ve had here is down the mesa at the Giant where they make them fresh to order. Bacon, cheese, hashbrowns, scrambled egg, and christmas chile. Yum.

Yay a new Dave Sedaris Book is coming out! We listen to his books on tape in the car together all the time. There’s a great recent interview about it.

Robert Johnson left such a legacy of innovations in music that some thought he’d made a deal with the devil. His songs are still being played. A collection of his music won a grammy in 1990 and royalties for covers have been paid since the 70s but finding a legitimate beneficiary to the estate has been tough. Claud Johnson didn’t know who his dad was until 1971 and didn’t really think anything about it until someone approached him in 1998 after the blues singer’s half sister died. After years of legal hurdles (and some rather unique testimony) Claud has now inherited his father’s estate.

While I really try to avoid the whole interblog conversational linky love thing this was too good to let anyone miss-

Oh how I wish I could have a video from that elevator’s security cam

via Bitter-girl

Sushi Etiquette - dip fish side down.

Japanese table manners

History of Japanese cuisine

Ball State’s guide to power lunches.

I can’t resist adding this booklink I ran across last night too. Sorry.