The News

Somewhere there’s a woman elbow deep in another human’s blood, scalpel in hand, her brow roiling with sweat. She is an expert. She has trained her entire adult life to carry out these delicate maneuvers, investing countless hours in study and hard won practice, living for her victories, raging against her defeats.

Somewhere there’s a cluster of men in a humvee, scared and fatigued, rolling down a sun drenched street. The dust of their tires is the only evidence of their passage. Each pile of refuse that slides by their sandy windows may mean death, each inquisitive face that turns to watch their progress must be assessed to be friend or enemy, with little room for error.

Somewhere there’s a Mother who has just made the hardest choice of her life, having crept into the silence of suburbia in late morning. She is waiting at a bus stop with all she has in the world – a baby carrier, two small pieces of luggage, and a black eye.

Somewhere there’s a rich, self-important golfer, holding a press conference.

Deco Quickie: The Returnining

Jessica was asking me about the deco posters I occasionally use as desktop wallpapers, and if they were obtained at the recently mentioned Vintage Venus. While I love the stuff at VV, the posters she’s got in mind are actually the work of talented fellow, Steve Thomas.

My favourite work is definitely his series of planetary travel posters:

Steve Thomas' Venus by Air

Steve Thomas' Europa Air

Full size images, as well as more great travel posters are available at Steve Thomas’ site.

Almost Too Honest, Subway

Took this phone cam picture at our local Subway the other day.

Like An Honest Type Thing“Ehhh, it’s like a friggin’ mayonnaise type thing, know what I’m sayin’? A light dressing, sorta. Like an edible-petroleum-product kinda sauce?”

I was also pretty impressed with their follow up punch: admitting flat out that the “secret sub sauce” is just Zesty Italian.

Wonder Years

I’m mostly posting this for the lovely Jessica, since she can’t stand being made to feel bad by other people’s awkwardness.

This was one of the earliest memes I remember covering the internet from end to end – I seem to recall it was also one of the first to be set to music, although that music now seems to be lost. This was first a tripod page, where the video’s only image was also taken from. The site would automatically begin playing a looping wav file of the poor little bugger, a wav file which was later ripped down and sent around seperately.

Mike Blount – the kid in question – has unsurprisingly been unable to avoid the internet for the rest of his life, and thus has had to accept his early stardom and even parlay it into his own later-life blog.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7mozA-ptI]

There was, in a sense, a happy ending to all of this – Mike eventually realized he didn’t even want a future girlfriend, what he wanted was a future boyfriend.

Sports Illustrated

UghListen: I don’t get the swimsuit issue. You get 12 months a year of sweaty homo-erotic stick and ball handlers, then you get one issue of half-dressed ladies.

When I was a boy at Catholic grade school, I recall many of the lads flipping pages of ye olde National Geographic looking for the indigenous boobies –  is Sports Illustrated the equivalent for middle aged men carrying on dispassionate marriages, too constrained by the bounds of civility and upbringing to go out and buy a playboy? The softest of core brought into the house under the cover of respectable football player ogling?