Snow

....Some pictures from Sunday and Monday's record snow in Portland. It's been snowing off and on for over a week now... k

I've become an obnoxious "liberal" or something

It's a flurry of smearing activity! I was gonna email you both this, but in the off chance that anyone else reads this blog, i thought i would spread the wealth. Visit this website now! Leaving in Baltisplat, this is relatively useless to me, but it would probably help people in real cities out. I had a break down in the fall and stopped eating any non-organic, unstustanably farmed meat. And i've cut just about every good fish out of my diet. My life now sucks as I really do not like pizza or pasta in any form and i live in balitimore. I basically just eat Mexican food. But that's fine, i'm now spending my energies trying to make everyone else miserable with me. You two are already vegetarians, but the websites are still pretty helpful and good to pass on to anyone who might care. j

snowy morning

...this is the third snow since Sunday, and it rarely snows in Portland. Not enough for snowshoeing in town yet, but enough to keep me off two wheels, so walk it is.

Yahoo is Scary

Breaking up is hard to do. I’ve had a yahoo email address since the 90s. At this point it functions as a relay so I rarely actually have to check it. I keep it despite a long held view that Yahoo is growing increasingly, laughably irrelevant- well, to me at least. And I can be quite prickly. I find the Yahoo homepage more saccharine train wreck than informative. It's pop, safe, dumb and irritating. Actually going to yahoo.com is cringe inducing, but then again, I do learn a lot: what kind of shoe are you?, Dude-approved holiday presents… something with 'booty' .... Help.


Yahoo being huge, lord knows why, gives it a type of search engine juice. Lately Yahoo Answers has come up in my searches. It is invariably unrelated to what I was actually searching for, I love that. The uninformed and undecided apparently flock to YA. Haven’t had the pleasure of Yahoo Answers- take a gander.






C'mon people. k

seasonal

Obviously, we are all hesitant to post anything and thus bump down that rad picture of A with B from the top. Maybe we should work it into a masthead logo?
Here's a little picture from xmas past to get us all into the spirit of not buying gifts this season. Of course, it's really just me that needs to be reminded that it's December. There was a high of 72 today here. I wonder if I will ever get used to the seasons in LA. There are seasons, actually, despite what people might tell you. It's just that there's only two of them.

Please note the handwritten label on the bottle above, indicating that its contents are not, in fact, Absolut Vodka, but rather some homemade liquor of Ylva's father's making. Skål!

*L

I wonder if Bill even knows

I'm not sure if y'all will find this as HI-larious as me, but I laughed for probably 10 minutes straight and can't stop laughing now as I write this. I assure you and promise with all my heart that this photo is real and un-photoshopped. Its from years ago, but A. just decided to unearth it now. See below for how normal people pose with a former U.S. president and for more evidence of how A is NOT normal. These photos might explain in full just why i love my boyfriend. j

Black Friday Indeed for Walmart

Oh what the hell is wrong with people. An employee at a Valley Stream, NY Walmart died after being trampled by really anxious shoppers. According to the NYT, shoppers broke doors off their hinges around 4:55am and things got ugly and dangerous.

From NYT: At 3:30 a.m., store employees called the Nassau police to report that the crowd was growing quickly, the police said. Officers came by to try to organize the line, but were called away to a Circuit City, a Best Buy and a B.J.’s Wholesale Club nearby, to deal with crowds there. .

A young man is dead. Jesus people, it's just shopping. *k



Photo Fox News




Photo just before stampede from NYPost.com

Before and After

I created my avatar (above), and then made her over. My hair is back to blonde now. Time well spent! k

I gotta hot waist, but the hips are too big.

This is what asa brings to my life. A Something to get in the way of my usually productive work day. Seriously, if it weren't for him i would slave, slave, slave away; probably finishing my PhD in 3 years instead of 5. Instead of slaving, i've made a simpsons avatar of myself. Now you too can be part of the fun. I'd like to point out that there was a time when my hair was actually this color AND i had blue lipstick. And if you had seen me after the hampden haircutter from hell gave me a mullet, this haircut would've been true to life too. Art imitates life? www.simpsonsmovie.com j

life in the fire zone

Los Angeles is currently surrounded by flames.  Fires in multiple directions, covering the city with an odd yellow glow that's pretty until you step outside and try to breathe in it.  Mike Davis has some fascinating and controversial things to say about LA's unique position of having "the longest wild edge, abruptly juxtaposing tract houses and wildlife habitat, of any major nontropical city."  This means not only that I pass the occasional coyote on my street at night, but also that the edges of the city run right into fire zones.  Zones where destructive fires are guaranteed at least every couple of years. 

Davis' position is clear: A chapter in his book Ecology of Fear is titled "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn."  And I tend to agree.  It's one thing to live in a state where there will be earthquakes once in a while, it's quite another to build multi-million dollar houses in a known fire zone (which is a bit narrower than a whole state, and thus more easily avoided) because greedy real-estate developers had building restrictions loosened for their own gain.  This shit is crazy!  Davis calls for controlled fires in these regions, which have been proven effective at preventing the spread of wild fires, but rich folk don't want those fires in their backyards.  I guess they'd rather wait for the big ones. Why should they even have a say, when other people's insurance premiums are raised to help them rebuild in these same fire zones?

The photo above has not been altered in any way (naturally, since I can barely use Photoshop), but cameras have limitations.  The colors were actually reversed:  The sky was whitish, and the sun was red like raspberry Jell-O.

*L