Having your kitchen torn out is stressful. What do you do when your haven from stress is the kitchen? You fire up the barbecue. The light of my life has made:

• Chocolate chip banana bread
• Ginger mixed berry coffee cake
• Blueberry chocolate chip oatmeal cookies
• Double-chocolate cherry cayenne brownies

and we’re not done yet. (And by ‘we’, I mean ‘she’.)

Sweet!

Thanks!

Some time ago, a big-time Web-design site linked to my table of border-radius compliance. There was a huge rush to this humble bastion of the information age, and my host at the time, iPage, shut me down. Couldn’t have me chewing up valuable server time!

Yep, I was suddenly too successful, and at the peak of my ability to fix all the world’s ills they turned me off. I don’t work with iPage anymore, even though they keep spamming me with $1-for-the-first-year offers. No, thanks, jerks.

But how badly was I really hurt? Day before yesterday, the tweetoverse spasmed over the same page. Because I rule my server and rule my fate, all requests were handled gracefully and this humble blog had its biggest day ever. 30 hours later, things are almost back to the original baseline. Had I been cut off, the curve would have been steeper but the end would have been the same.

Will there be new friends as a result of this new onslaught? New pithy or insightful comments to my less-than-focussed observations? A new gizo or nano? I hope so. You guys mean a lot to me.

Traffic to this site over the past month.

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Sweet!

Thanks!

Sitting here watching sports on television, I was treated to the preview of an upcoming movie. It’s a star vehicle for Kevin James; he plays a music teacher who, desperate to fund his school’s music program (American schools exist now with no music program! Really!), takes up ultimate fighting or something like that. Twenty years ago he was a solid wrestler. Now… not so much.

So, with only a few feet of carefully-selected cuts to choose from, I’m thinking this is an excellent date movie. It’s the perfect Kevin James script. A regular guy in way over his head for reasons we can all appreciate and maybe even cheer for. He’s just doing his best. I’ve seen only one 30-second preview, but our main guy takes a beating. This is what will make this a great date movie. There won’t be too much blood, so the distaff element will say, “he took a pounding for a cause”, while the Y-bearers will say, “he took a POUNDING for a cause, and WON!” Because, come on. He’ll win. Maybe not the big fight, but he’ll save the music, and he’ll get the girl.

Good chance for a cameo by maybe Phil Collins or, better, Mike Ness at the end comforting the bleeding and beaten music teacher and saying, “I got your back.” He loses the fight but wins the larger battle.

Kevin James probably isn’t on a lot of women’s short lists, [I’ve written this part several times now, and not nailed it. Let’s just say that I’m a guy and I don’t find Kevin James to be a hypothetical competitor for my hypothetical reproductive effectiveness when civilization falls] so guys can appreciate an earnest guy winning in the end.

So, based on thirty seconds of exposure I’ve built the movie, perhaps optimistically, into a great date flick. It’s formula, but there’s a reason the formula exists. Done well, it provides a chance to cuddle happily with one’s sweetie and root for the guy to win his love. That’s not a small thing.

Sweet!

Thanks!

Well, American-style football is back, which means the summer is over. Birthdays notwithstanding, I feel my ageometer tick over in the fall. Another summer gone. I think it goes back to school, when summer was when you really lived. It’s like you got to retire for a couple of months each year.

It’s probably due to my time in San Diego, when seasonal variation was so muted, that I came to measure the decline of summer by the start of football season.

My ultimate house would be on great crawley treads, and would oscillate north and south as the seasons progressed. If summer never ends, I never get older.

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Sweet!

Thanks!

Below the studs, beams and ducts, is good ol’ dirt.

Our Living Room

Our Kitchen

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Sweet!

Thanks!

I’m a little late on this one, but there are still issues left of the third Poetic Pinup Revue. I have to say, it’s pretty awesome. We’re learning as we go, and it shows.

The current Poetic Pinup Revue

To get your very own big, majestic, heavy love-fest of poetry and imagery, drop by the current issue page at PPR.

One important lesson we learned this time around, one that is obvious in retrospect: When you make a saddle-stiched magazine, you don’t just need an even number of pages, you need a multiple of four. This issue comes with two empty pages for your notes and poetry inspired by the other, print-cluttered pages. At last! A magazine that leaves a little space for you!

When I put it that way, I’m tempted to put blank pages in every issue.

The Editor of PPR spends a lot of time hunting for the right material, haunting places online where artists show their work. She looks forward to the day when she won’t have to — enough submissions will come in that she can spend her time crafting the magazine. But there’s something to be said for this method (as long as someone else is putting in the legwork); There are a lot of talented people out there who don’t bother to submit their work, especially to print markets. Are you one of them? Some of you that read this are, I bet. Toss us some work! The worst that can happen is that we say “no, thanks” in a respectful manner. The best writers (or photographers, or painters, or…) are the ones who hear “no thanks” the most.

An aside on the subject of “no, thanks”: Even the best artists go downhill when they’re not afraid of rejection anymore.

So seriously, if you or someone you know is talented with words or pictures, send them to the upcoming issues page at poeticpinuprevue.com. If any of the upcoming themes inspire, it’s a short trip from there to the submissions page.

Up next: Contumulation & Carrying On. Think about what comes after all this noise we call life, or perhaps how we deal with the noise when someone special is gone. Very close on that issue’s heels: Food for Thought. Art about that which sustains us. This one even has recipes! Click the link above to see the completely awesome covers for those and the following issues.

Another thing we learned this time (the second plug at last!) is that MGX Copy down San Diego way is pretty dang awesome. We use them because their prices are easily the best we found, but when we got this last issue and there were problems with the pages, they cranked out an entire new batch for free. No hassles, no pushback; we took pictures of the flaws and they sent a sincere apology and a rush-order redo. So, if you want quality and service for a great price, I highly recommend MGX. They’ve done right by us, and we’re hardly a big account.

Check out Poetic Pinup Revue. It’s good and getting better. If you subscribe, you can even trace our meteoric rise.

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Sweet!

Thanks!

OK, to start things off, I’d like to go on record to say that the new Fiat they’re selling here is ugly. It’s lumpy and wrinkled, but lacking the charm of a shar pei. When the ads try to liken the lump of poo to an Italian supermodel, I just roll my eyes.

But the Fiat is a passive sort of ugly, the kind of ugly that mothers the world over look past.

When the Pontiac Aztec came out, I was stunned. My first encounter with one was in a parking lot; I walked a complete circle around the thing, laughing the whole time. I thought, naïvely, that I’d seen the pinnacle of ugly. Surely nothing could ever surpass it. I mean, come on. Presumably most auto designers want their cars to look good.

Except maybe the ones at Toyota. It started with the Prius, which is not an attractive vehicle. Aztec territory. Particularly offensive: the giant silvery tail light cluster. Two giant festering boils on the back end of every Prius.

The infection spread. More Toyotas inherited this horror, and then it caught on with Toyota’s other labels. Terrible designers at other companies picked it up, putting the awe in awful.

This isn’t to let the makers of big, angular red clusters off the hook. Still ugly, but easier to overlook.

All this in a time when technology allows designers to do just about anything with the tail lights of a car. If I were in charge of the VW, there’d be optional flower-shaped brake lights on the bug – and they’d sell. There is less need than ever before for giant plastic warts on the ass ends of cars. Yet on some vehicles these unsightly growths just keep getting bigger and uglier. I saw an SUV today, painted in a dark color, with giant silvery tumors on its ass so big I was tempted to chase it down to see who made the damn thing. But I had better things to do.

1

Sweet!

Thanks!