I saw this on Monday morning and the first thing that I thought was that it was left over from somebody coming home on the Metro on Sunday night. I had all these possible stories dancing in my head… fights… muggings… beatings. My mind was racing with possiblities. When Laurel got home and I showed her the picture she said “Looks like somebody got a nosebleed”… which is probably the most rational explanation for this.

Why did I not come up with that idea first?

Sucky Suckerson

Stumpy

The Doorknocker of Chulthu

I’ve been kicking around this idea for a while and I was bored the other day so I thought I’d test some things out. Just like the skull I think that if you draw something enough you can sculpt it too. I’ve been drawing tentacles in my sketchbooks for years. I’ve always just liked them, they’re like the remote controls of the animal kingdom. One looks a little bit like an elephants trunk, but I think with some paint they’ll be awesome. I’ll say one thing, sketching is a lot different from working with clay.

Twice a year at my office the boss runs this movie contest. We all have to submit a list of what we think will be the top ten highest grossing movies of the “season”. We do one for the summer and one for the holidays. There’s a certain style in picking movies that you personally don’t want to see (ever!) but you think will perform well at the box office.

1. Avatar – 350 million
2. New Moon
3. Princess and the Frog
4. 2012
5. Christmas Carol
6. Planet 51
7. Old Dogs
8. Blindside
9. Alvin and the Chipmunks 2
10. Sherlock Holmes

I know there are some problems with my list. I’ve very influenced by a good trailer, I am such a sucker. I just finished watching the second trailer for Avatar and I’d watched Aliens the week before so I was on a bit of a James Cameron buzz. So I might have ranked Avatar a little high. The other problems are that I might have ranked Princess and the Frog a couple of spots higher than I should of. It’s a return the the classic Disney style of my childhood, which I’m very excited about, but I’m not sure what today’s kids are going to think of it. Do you remember when every animated movie was a musical? I didn’t even realize they stopped doing that until I saw this trailer. The third thing I missed is I should have ranked Alvin and Sherlock a little higher, the contest runs through the 20th of January… so they’re going to come in higher than 9 & 10… whoops. But you never know, some other movie could sneak in an bump them down, it’s pretty much a crapshoot.

My boss likes to do analysis of the picks and sends out weekly update emails. After searching on the web I’ve decided to post them here. This is an average office with most of the people between the ages of 30 and 50.

Breakdown of pics by movie

This pot is $49.99

But it is ALMOST there. I’ve been using the Amazon wish list for a long time now and I really like it. The addition of the Universal wish list was a great addition, I just have the universal wish list bookmark on the firefox toolbar to add things from other sites. So when it came time to register for the wedding I thought… hmm… I wonder if Amazon has a wedding registry. It does!

We started using it a couple weeks ago and we’ve found some shortcomings with it. First off, While I do like shopping online, there are somethings that I want to see in person. When it comes to choosing a good set of pots and pans I want to hold the handle in my hand and see the finish for myself. I had heard about the iphone app Redlaser which scans bar codes and looks up the prices online on Amazon and Google. So I went ahead and bought it. The first time I tried it out it was amazing… it just worked. I scanned in a set of pans, it looked them up on Amazon and found that they were $30 cheaper online. Great! Then I noticed that you

Laurel as Vanna

can add to the wish list directly from the iphone! Could life get any better? I submit that it could not! But then I noticed something, you can’t add something to the Wedding registry from the Mobile version of Amazon.com (glaring omission #1). So I thought I would just add them to my wish list then move them over later, until I found out later that you CANT DO THAT. (glaring omission #2) So you have to… find the item on the wish list, click on it, re-add it to the wedding registry, then remove it from your wish list.

So what could have been “historically awesome” was rendered “just pretty cool” by Amazon.

In Summary the good things about Redlaser and Amazon are…

• The Redlaser app is historically awesome.
• Amazon Registry works with the universal wish list button.
• The Registry separates the items into categories.
• unique URL for sending out to people.

Bad things…

• Universal wish list items are relegated the universal wish ghetto at the bottom of the page.
• You can’t move items from your regular wish lists to the registry.
• Cant put things on the wedding registry from Amazon mobile.

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So a few weeks ago I published a photo of two skulls that I sold to a couple in Maryland. They had the order in for a long time, but I hadn’t finished them. For some reason I was having a horrible time deciding if they were cool enough yet. I think it’s because they were the first ones that I did in black with colors instead of a normal dark in the eyes kind of thing. Here are some pictures of it in progress. I really like the finished products, but I think there’s something to be said about the gloss black and gloss red. I just need to get it right and figure out how to use oil paints better.

Gloss black and red

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1989 Topps Back

Easy on the printer

The other day I saw this map that someone had created from a list of the top US craft breweries. I thought it was really well designed and looked great. But it was missing something… I was noticing how many of these breweries I recognized and had tried their beers. I thought, I want to check them off when I try their beers. Then I thought back to when I was a kid and collected baseball cards. So today I designed a checklist to be printed out and checked off. My inspiration was the 1989 Topps set, which I always considered my favorite. The first one is from the back of the cards, which might be a little hard to print out (but it is more accurate). The Second one is inspired by the front of the card and will be easier to read and print.

SloshSpot

Brewers Association

This video, besides being awesome, explains exactly what goes on at music festivals.

Let me explain…

1.) So there’s this crazy guy going nuts, he could be actually crazy, or he could be crazy-high. Regardless he’s having a great time and totally going for it. At first everyone is unsure if he’s going to give up, or have a seizure, or flip out on everyone. but when that time frame passes everyone decides that he’s harmless.

2.) Then comes in the slightly less crazy guy. That guy you know that’s always down to back you up on any foolish thing you might get into. At a festival there are tons of these guys, these are good festival peeps. So after a few minutes there are a couple other people around him doing their goofy, “I don’t care because I’m at a festival and haven’t showered for a few days” dance.

3.) The third wave are still fun festival people, but they’re so stoned that it took them a few minutes to realize that something was going on on the other side of the hill. But when they see that it’s not a scary fight, they really want to join in. So they all get over there and start wobbling and jumping around.

4.) Then the final group of people join in. They are the “I’m wearing a sundress girl” or “college t-shirt and sandals guy” The I got invited to this festival by a friend and I thought it would be a good time. They’re down for fun, but they’re too scared to just go for it unless there are a bunch of other people doing it.

Festivals need all these types of people to be great. They’re about getting together with a bunch of other sweaty people and just letting it all out. There’s something about not caring what people think that’s very liberating.

If we just let this crazy guy dance alone, then the terrorists win.

via SUCCEED!

Back in high school when I was a rebel rollerblader I loved punk music. But my friends were not the well versed music hipsters that you see today. So I didn’t know where to find new music. So I bought all of those Fat Wreck Chords compilations from Hot Topic … Fat Music for Fat People^W, Survival of the Fattest^W, Physical Fatness^W, Life in the Fat Lane^W, Short Music for Short People^W. That was back when Hot Topic was a scary place to go into and was dedicated to music, not to nerdy goth japanese import t-shirts.

Later I really loved the Punk goes^W series of CDs where each album would have a genre of music covered by punk bands. As I’ve grown up and my taste in music has evolved I find myself listening to punk and punk covers less often. My teen angst must be getting replaced by late 20’s fattness. A while back I posted a link to cover of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”, but I didn’t do any research beyond that. Today I found a link on Boing Boing to a folk cover of NWA straight outta compton, but sadly the link was down.

But what I did find in that post was solid gold… Coverlaydown.com. Which is a blog dedicated to Folk covers of songs. It’s fantastic! Maybe these make such good covers to me because, just like the punk covers, they are so different from the original style of the songs. I just can’t say enough how much I love this site and the music. It’s like they took all the pop songs and ran them through some kind or emotion amplifier and they came out the other side even better. A lot of them are so different that you might not even realize what song they were originally. I really like the way the site is run, giving credit to the original poster while providing links to the covering artist for purchase of new music.

Here are a few that I really like.

• Dr. Fox’s Old Timey String Band: Kids (orig. MGMT)
  (from MySpace)
• Sara Watkins, Sean Watkins, and Glen Phillips cover Elliot Smith’s Between the Bars live in some parking lot way back in 2004.
• Butch Ross: Eleanor Rigby (orig. The Beatles)
  (from A Long Way From Shady Grove, 2009)
• Whip: White Wedding (orig. Billy Idol)
  (from Bridging the Distance, 2007; more Whip)
• Ingrid Michaelson: Can’t Help Falling In Love (orig. Elvis Presley)

This video is a little long and sappy, but it does make you want to go out and have a really good beer. I really like Craft beer, my favorite recently has been Southern Tier Unearthly IPA. I just feel like ST puts so much flavor into their beers. I’m not the kind of beer snob that can’t enjoy a few Miller lites now and then. But these brewers really do put in some work and produce beer that they can be proud of.