Expressiveness

by

I think a short passage in this Reuters Photographers blog may have nailed one of the reasons why my interest in sports is limited to football (real football, that is — most of you know this as ‘soccer’):

…there appear to be few sporting images more emotional or exuberant than those “jubo” moments of soccer players celebrating after scoring a goal. The expressions of American football and icehockey players are all too frequently obscured by facemasks. Basketball players seem to err on the side of mean and moody and baseball players appear to be almost permanently underwhelmed. It might be a cultural thing or perhaps just a result of the way those sports are broadcast or sponsored. There certainly isn’t a lack of passion because tempers do fray and fights and arguments are frequent, but there doesn’t seem to be any of the theatricality we see from soccer players, at least not during the game.

A Vogue New Year’s Eve

by

I don’t guess that I’ll be going — Prairie and I, over the past few years, have found that New Years Eve out and about is often just a bit too much — but it’s nice to see one of my photos in use on the flyer for Monsignior and Roxy’s New Years Eve’ bash!

Flyer under the jump…

Read more

Best Xmas Commercials (So Far)

by

It’s only a top two, rather than a top ten or top three or any such thing (mostly because it’s so rare that commercials are actually fun that it’d be nearly impossible to get a list longer than two). However, here for your amusement are the top two commercials of this Christmas season, as chosen by Prairie and me.

In second place: the Staples Easy Button.

And…(the envelope, please)…in first place…(riiiiip): Verizon’s Pony!

Prairie can’t even think about the pony commercial without giggling, let alone watch it.

One Hundred and Forty Peeps

by

So far, I’m a little unimpressed with the leading contender for a collective noun for ‘those people I follow/am following on Twitter,’ which appears to be ‘tweeple‘. To my ears, it’s rather silly, and a rather glaringly obvious portmanteau.

Myself, I’d much rather reappropriate an already existing bit of slang, and mash together ‘people’ and ‘tweet’ into ‘peeps‘. It’s already culturally (more or less) accepted slang, is already being used to denote a group of people (“my peeps”), and as a nice little bonus, is also onomatopoeia for the chirp (or tweet) of a smallish bird, so it fits right in with the general theme of Twitter.

So you all can go on with your bad selves and your ‘tweeple.’ Me, I’m going to be hanging with my peeps!

(And on a slight tangent: I’d be amused if, since Twitter imposes a limit of 140 characters for tweets, they also imposed a 140 ‘character’ limit for your contacts. Not sure if that should work out as 140 followers and 140 followees [280 total contacts in both directions], or 70 each, or perhaps just 140 total allowed and spread them out however you wish. Realistically, best would be a limit to only following 140 ‘characters’, but allowing for an unlimited number of followers [so that organizational Twitter accounts like Twitterific or high-profile personalities like Wil Wheaton can still be followed by all those who want to]. Of course, this version of the 140 character limit won’t happen, but it works in my head. Really, how many individuals can most people really keep track of full-time?)

Six Billion Gallons

by

That’s approximately how much water has fallen over the Seattle area in the past few days, according to the Seattle PI. Flooding all over the place, bridges and roads washed out, I-5 is closed between Seattle and Portland forcing a detour through Yakima…crazy stuff.

Flickr: Liembo: Nice one!

Outside of leaks taking out a few ceiling tiles at my store in the mall, neither Prairie nor I have personally seen any of the more dramatic effects of the storm. Apparently we got off fairly lucky — the PI mentions a few people in our area of town that didn’t fare so well.

“It felt like we were on the Titanic,” said Randy Carter, who awoke at 4 a.m. Monday to lights from utility trucks and the realization that his apartment in the Jackson Greens complex in North Seattle was flooded to evacuation levels with 3 feet of water.

[…]

In Seattle, where rescue crews were forced to carry people from hard-hit homes in the Northgate area and then shelter them on Metro buses, Mayor Greg Nickels said flatly that the city’s infrastructure had been unable to cope with the deluge.

“The systems that this city was built around — the draining systems, the transportation systems — simply were not built to handle this kind of rainfall,” he said.

By late afternoon Monday, nearly 6 billion gallons of rain — the rough equivalent of six Green Lakes — had fallen.

Four apartment buildings, housing some 50 people and their pets near Midvale Avenue North and North 107th Street were evacuated and another four were similarly affected, Seattle Fire Department spokeswoman Helen Fitzpatrick said.

“The flooding is up to 10 feet deep in some areas,” she said.

In one building, the parking garage was almost completely under water, cars were nearly floating with rain up to their windshields and firefighters were carrying residents out.

The PI has a photo gallery of some of the effects around town.

(photo by Liembo)

Wishlistr

by

My wishlistFlying full-bore into the Season of Greed, I’m playing around with Wishlistr, a clean and simple site for tracking all those little (and, me being me, not-so-little) “I want” bits that pop up.

My wishlist is rather small at the moment, with an odd mix of trivialities and big-ticket items that will never actually randomly fall into my lap…but, as always, that’s the point of a wishlist, right?

Badass Bible Verses

by

Cracked has a list of the top nine ‘badass’ bible verses. Just for fun, I’ll list the verse citations here. Any guesses at what stories they’re referring to (before looking at the linked article or clicking through to the linked NIV versions, of course)?

  1. Exodus 2: 11-12
  2. II Kings 2: 23-24
  3. Ezekiel 23: 19-20
  4. Judges 3: 16-23
  5. Numbers 16: 23, 31-33
  6. Deuteronomy 25: 11-12
  7. I Kings 18: 24, 38-40
  8. Judges 15: 15-16
  9. I Samuel 18: 25-27

Zoom

by
  1. 1957: Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke.

  2. 1968: Cosmic Zoom, a Canadian animated short film inspired by Boeke’s book.

  3. 1977: Powers of Ten, a short film by Charles and Ray Eames, inspired by the prior two pieces. This is the most commonly known version of this presentation.

  4. 2004: The Simpsons parody version (10.3 Mb .mov file), as the couch gag for The Ziff Who Came to Dinner

All links via Kottke.