oh, metrology

The US is hanging tough with Liberia and Myanmar as the three pillars of darkness, only countries not to have not formally adopted the International System of Units (metric) as their official systems of weights and measures.

Liberia folks.

Hopefully the graph is not too hard to read; click and make larger.
above graph and cartoon from USMA






road sign from Averill Hecht
I find this pretty interesting and want to learn more about the metrication push from 1975 to 1982 that I can't remember (and I know L &J can't either). It was largely resisted and ineffective and finally done away with by Reagan in March 1982 to "reduce government spending and its streamline operations." Stop you're killing me.

Later in grade school, I remember a perceptibly half-hearted effort to teach the metric system; it was pretty crude and as inexact as possible: a meter is like a yard, a kilometer is about 200 school buses holding hands, you are not a litre- and other equally useless equivalents. C'mon you gotta know this stuff.

k

He's all i'll ever need

My life is dragging me down. i am mentally, emotionally and even physically exhausted. I used to think the difficulty of a long distance relationship would be how much you miss the person. This is incorrect. It is the unbearable strain on your job, finances, other friendships, ability to travel for fun, private time and life in general. i would have a total breakdown if it were not for this: This is not my greater swiss mountain dog puppy, but one just like it will be arriving at my home some time between august and october, if all goes as planned. All i do all day at work is stare at photos of them. I want to eat its head! its the farking cutest thing ever. I wanna love it and smoosh it and teach it to pick klaes up and move him and teach him to growl at asa when he's in trouble (asa, not the dog. the dog will never be in trouble. i love him already!)

And the even better part is that he will grow into a 110-130 pound mellow, loving, work horse of a dog who can carry my stuff while hiking and plow my garden for me! I mean, look at how big and beautiful he is!

This is truly the only thing keeping me going. i love you little swissy! Just image what would happen if the puppies were covered with baby chicks! Oh my god, my head would pop off my body! j

redundancies

Last full day of Bush! Here's a guide to my walk filled weekend. Not really. But I do love long walks, partly for what you see and would likely miss otherwise. Danny spotted this apartment building on a walk in se portland. There was a reasonably cute 1 bedroom available, if you can get past the name. Ack worse than PIN number...





paulrus is dead tags are everywhere in portland, everywhere and with the same message. I remember seeing earlier versions asking where is paulrus or whatsa paulrus or something. Well, apparently it's dead now- part of beatles mythology or so I've heard. do you know about this?
for some reason it reminds me of neckface being everywhere in ny a few years back. -k

duct tape

Only for you two would I offer such a humbling picture for public view.  It's all for your amusement, per K's request. Those are supposed to be robot / tin man arms.  I may have to come back and pixelate my face later. 

This is what I did on Xmas day.  K knows to what end, but I'll let J guess... 

*L

To my fellow Smearers:

Dear Rachel gave me this mug for christmas because it made her think of me. That made me feel like a million bucks. And, no, she did NOT mean it in the retarded way. I'm posting it here, b/c you 2 are special too. j

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