Whomp Power

Derek saw this cake on Boing Boing. It is a Katamari Cake! Katamari Damacy is a way cool game for the PS2, where you are a tiny prince that rolls a ball around and stuff attaches to it. By stuff I mean paper clips, sushi, cats, toilet paper. See, you are trying to make a big katamari so the king can turn it back into a star... Really, it is cool. And the music is so great, you can even by a cd.

This is so genius - adjustable hot sauce.

Baby Chick and mama are all over the place now, and baby is getting big. It is still difficult to get a decent picture... here they are enjoying the seeds that the squirrel drops...


For our Los Angeles friends and readers, a map of L.A.'s fallen fruit. Yep, an old law states that any overhanging fruit is public property. What I wouldn't give for free avocados...

I heard this band on NRK called Nouvelle Vague. Their deal: "Nouvelle Vague" ( means « New Wave « in french, « Bossa Nova » in portuguese) revisits number of both Marc and Olivier's favourite tracks of the early eighties, from Joy Division to XTC.
Their idea was to forget the initial punk or new wave background of each song,keep simple fundamental chords,work with young singers who never heard the orginal versions,and make the quality of original songwriting happen in a completely different way (bossa nova,jazz style and sixties pop)."
You can listen to a few tracks on their site, and I listened to A Forest. It is a song by The Cure, and the cover is awesome.

GWB better watch out on his next visit to the Big Easy...
Guardsmen Sense Ghostly Presence in New Orleans

I am lucky enough to be in another art show this year. I hooked up with 3 other stay at home mom artists for a show this weekend at the Oswego Pointe Clubhouse. Yes, it is called Desperate Housewives. All the art is different, so the show should be quite interesting. It is only up for the weekend, so if you want to see it, you have to do it fast! There is a reception friday night (9/23) from 7pm - 10pm at 5033 Foothills Road in Lake Oswego. You can also view it from 10am - 10pm on 9/24, or 10am - 5pm on 9/25.

Looks like we will only have one baby... the other two eggs didn't really make it. One was a little smashed, then later that day it had disappeared. ??? The other egg lasted a few days more, then I found it partially smashed with flies on it, and it looked like maybe the chick had stopped growing a while back (there was a thick membrane around it but I could see a little bit... pretty gross actually, sorry I don't have a picture for you. :) ). Anyway, a couple days later I went down to check on the chick and nobody was in the coop. Eek! I started to freak out, but O heard some peeping and we found mama and baby out under a tree, with mama having a dust bath and baby trying to sit on top of her. I guess they had to go outside sometime! They have ventured further from the coop each day, but the baby (named Cutey) sticks right by her side.

Kevin Smith's Company View Askew is holding auctions to benefit victims of Katrina. You too can bid to win a walk on part on the set of Clerks 2! Way to go Jersey Boy!

We had to buy O some new underwear, and he insisted on Batman. I started to sing the Batman theme to him. He was getting frustrated at his inability to sing the "da na na na na na na na" part right, so we found the song on the interweb. He insisted on listening to it again and again. I found a site with many other tv theme songs, and we started listening to them too. Now I'm trying to make a playlist so we can listen to them in the car on the Rio. Said playlist will include such tv theme song classics as Fraggle Rock, Batman ('70s theme song, not '60s), Super Chicken, Mighty Mouse, Popeye, Scooby Doo, Spiderman, Underdog, Winnie the Pooh, Yogi Bear, Flinstones, Jetsons, Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner, Smurfs, Inspector Gadget, and his favorite - George of the Jungle. This oughta mix up his current playlist a bit, which includes The Beastie Boys' Brass Monkey, No Phone and Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps by Cake, and The Wiggles.

So we have a hen that decided to sit on some eggs. Last friday we heard peeping, but didn't see anything. That is when we learned that the chicks peep inside the shells a day or two before they bust free. The hen is a barred rock.





We had two chicks, born a day apart. I started this post over a week ago and the littlest black chick died right after I started... I think she fell. I was very sad, and Owen was very sweet, and we buried it and planted flowers. Anyway, we moved Mama and the 2 remaining eggs she was sitting on to the ground. She sort of abandoned the eggs... we had candled them to see if they had chicks, and they looked almost completely black inside. Anyway, one got sort of dented, and then later in the day it was completely gone but no chick in sight. Who knows what happened. I've been trying to get her to sit on the remaining egg, but she doesn't do it often. I guess I'll call it a loss in a few days if nothing hatches. Owen named the chick cutey, and he never shuts up (the chick, not Owen). I'm pretty sure it is a "he", you can sex barred rock chickens, and it sounds like by his markings he will be a rooster. Great.

It is always amazing to see the dichotomy of the power of people to do good (and an 8 year old at that!!), vs. the power of Bushco to be such an asshat. Way to go Tessa, family, and Oregonians on the coast.

"Nehalem residents, hit hard by flooding in 1996, contributed two pickup loads of diapers and toothpaste, toilet paper, clothing, blankets and towels. "They were picked off the top of their barns with helicopters less than 10 years earlier," Streeter said. "That's what drove them -- we've been there.""

Great article on reporters taking government officials to task on the botched Hurricane rescue.

Ok, I haven't been watching or reading much on the hurricane, what with work, and a kid, and a new PS2, but what I do read usually makes me feel helpless and enraged. Gah.

Here is a blog, from the heart of it all. I think the guy is holed up in his office.

What is with reports of people not being allowed to come back and help? I have a 3rd hand report of Harry Connick Jr on the Today show saying he could go an hour away from N.O. and get water and supplies, but "they" wouldn't let him bring it back in to help. Our government is such a clusterfuck.

Michael Moore has a great letter to Bush called "Vacation is Over".... Snippet: "Dear Mr. Bush: Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag."

MM also has links to Submit a missing persons report, Help victims, Searching For missing persons, a place for survivors to say "I'm Okay", a way to Offer Housing to victims, and More.

Here is a really cool blog by Kathryn Cramer that shows a lot of map images of the flooding before and after. She states "a group of us, most of whom don't know each other and have never met, struggled to create a visual understanding of what was happening to New Orleans, using the tools to hand. Those tools were media images (mostly decontextualized), Google Earth, Google Maps, GlobeXplorer, Mapquest, Flickr, Technorati, blog technology (in my case, Typepad), email, and whatever else came to hand. I present here the emergent result of our group effort. In particular what has emerged from this effort is a technique for superimposing media disaster images on satellit photos using the tools available through Google Earth."

I love her comment on her blog, also, about the Washington Post's moralizing of the photo captions... "How can you even consider publishing passages like People who had resisted early evacuation orders, including many elderly and infirm . . .? Age, infirmity, and poverty are lifestyle choices? This is a natural disaster, not the Rapture."

Ok, now go to Eschaton and find the post from Tues. August 30 titled "Captions Are Fun". No surprise, I suppose, when you are african american, you loot, when you are white, you are "surviving". And who is to say that any of the things they are dragging through the water are stuff they took from a store? Maybe that garbage bag is full of the only things he could rescue from his house, and he grabbed the box of diet pepsi in the way out the door so he'd have something to drink.

Here is a Salon article Rick sent us... suffer through the ad and you can read it - it is good in an infuriating kind of way that only Bushco seems to know how to do. A teaser: "In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war."

Finally, I was wondering about this, and cousin Chris sent us a story - radio stations pull Tragically Hip classic "New Orleans is Sinking" from playlist. As the song has run through my head more often than usual the past few days, I was wondering about this. I think even more unsurprising - the station manager's name is Gord.

"My memory is muddy what's this river I'm in
New Orleans is sinking and I don't want to swim"

Does that title even make sense? I couldn't think of anything else. Anyway, found this site called Demockratees with some pretty cool lefty shirts. They have clean, simple graphics, often letting the graphic speak for itself without a tag line or anything.

For high school aged kids in the U.S., here is a site to "opt out" of the military and NCLB databases. "Each high school receiving federal funding is REQUIRED to turn over student information (name, address, phone number) to local military recruiters unless parents opt out in writing."