The Blog Formerly Found On Vox

Hummingbirds make me feel fine.

Humming bird feeder

I don't particularly like birds, so it's unclear what inspired me to go to OSH and buy a hummingbird feeder and a gallon of red sugar water a couple of weeks ago.

I bought them after seeing some of these blackish things buzzing about in the backyard. At first I thought they were bats because it was around dusk when I noticed them outside and they seemed to disappear almost before you could actually register them in your brain.

The instructions said to hang the feeder in a shady area. But that wasn't going to work, because I wanted to see them when they came to drink the nectar from the feeder, so I didn't follow the directions. Instead I hung the feeder from the roof overhang outside the second story bedroom window. I figured they'd never come.

But it only took a day or two for them to find the spot. And once they did, there were lots of them and the bottle drained within a few days instead of a week as predicted. They came mainly from the interesting, cool and shaded cork oak tree in the far corner of the yard.

There's the first one spotted.

Getting a photo (or 24 of them!) wasn't so easy. It took some time to finally get the birds to be okay with me stalking them from behind the curtains and then it took more time for me to figure out how to use the successive shot function on the camera.

Anyway, I'm still not a "bird person", but I do love this place! Just when I think I've discovered all the cool stuff that lives out back, I find something altogether new and wonderful inhabiting my little piece of the Bay area.

Update: when you watch the series of photos in the Flickr slide show version set to one second per photo, you can see them fly!

In The Hood

You are not connected to God. ORLY?

Satan From The Block

Good Vox URL's are going fast. Get your invites soon! 

Cool gadget alert: Helio Projector - it floats on air

it's like magic

What would Jesus/Allah/Buddha do?

What has the world come to?

From the BBC.com (which is often a better source of US news about these things that US news organizations!)

Vegas puts lid on soup kitchens

The homeless popuation in Las Vegas has doubled to 12,0

Soup kitchens serving the homeless have been banned in the US city of Las Vegas with fines coming into force for anyone caught giving hand-outs in its parks.

Council officials decided to curb the charity practice, with possible fines of $1,000 and six months imprisonment, after complaints from residents.

Other US cities have rules or have looked at limiting free food giveaways.

Las Vegas is thought to be the first to explicitly make it an offence to feed the poor, says the New York Times.

read more.

It's not the heat, it's the stupidity...

Courtesy of Sujatin

Katherine Ellison in a New York Times opinion piece asks if California's hot summer is a sign of things to come?

I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last weekend, but the theater was closed. The power was out because of an overheated transformer. It was Day 9 of our 11-day, record-melting heat wave here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Mark Twain once supposedly, but probably apocryphally, compared our foggy summer to the coldest winter he’d ever known.

The fog — the Coast’s natural air-conditioner — kept failing to arrive, however, as we sweltered in triple-digit heat. I briefly remembered the single night I’d hated the fog, freezing in extra innings at Candlestick Park. But mostly I recalled the sheer wonder of watching it spill over sun-struck mountains, summer after summer, and I yearned for its return. Where had it gone?

I’d just returned from a week in a Mexican desert to find it several degrees hotter at home, in a marathon that meteorologists have called unprecedented. My 7-year-old’s skin was so warm that I took his temperature. A neighbor had to shut down the emergency sprinkler system at his house, which, sensing fire, was about to douse his furniture. The water scalded his hands :read more

It's Friday and the cats are jammin'!

Weirdest Spam Email Yet?

Internet said I need fire extinguisher? Huh?

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QotD: Sugar, Sugar

What was your favorite candy when you were a kid? How does that compare to now?

            Then and now.

I pinch...for Matt & Joy

Posted for Matt and Joy who, due to their lack of premium cable television, have not seen this fun little Honda Element ad before.

I pinch.

Also added the others in the series in case you're familar with "I pinch" and want to meet the Element's other animal friends. The crab is clearly the best of the bunch, but these are cute too.

"Gil" the crab has a MySpace profile with blog entries and everything.

Opossum

Rabbit

Platypus

Burro

QotD: Back where I'm from...

Soda? Cola? Pop? What do you say? Any other regional words that set you apart?
Vox Question of the Day submitted by Gladys.

        Pop.

According to this test (thanks to Laura and Mena for providing link), I sound as upper midwestern as I actually am:

    65% General American English
    20% Upper Midwestern
    5% Midwestern
    5% Yankee
    0% Dixie

There are just a heckuva lot of words that can set you apart when you're darn near Canadian don'tcha know!

A Visitor's Guide

by Howard Mohr

Now don't expect to go to Minneapolis/St Paul (also known as the Twin Cities), which are actually very urban and hip, and expect to see the place filled with people talking like they're extras in the movie Fargo (which I thought was mean-spirited). But there are some lingering and telltale ways to detect someone with Minnesotan heritage.

Listen real closely and you can hear a hockey player's out come oot of my mouth from time to time.

 

• We don't make a tuna cassarole (I know, ick), we make a hot dish.
• There are some who claim that the phrase whatever orginated in MN
  
• Agree with me, then say you betcha! or you got that right!
• Found a great bargain? It's a heckuva deal!
  
• The answer to "how are you doing?" is Can't complain. Could be worse.
  

Lastly, I will leave you with a little life-in-Minnesota snippet that was reported in City Pages back when I used to work there.

At a party last winter, two Minnesota transplants--a New Yorker and a Los Angeleno--were talking. The New Yorker said, "We used to call this 'flyover' country back east. What'd you guys call it in California?"
"We didn't," she said. 

Rolling black outs?

The power's out again, or perhaps I should say it's still out. Everything but the cable tv and internet came back on last night, but around noon today the electricity went out again. PG&E's automated phone voice said something about 8 pm for a status update; I sure hope it's back on before then. The battery just died in the laptop and it's getting awfully warm in here.

The power cut in and out a few times and then finally stayed off at around 1 pm today. Shortly after went off I decided to run up to the store. (I'm glad I filled up the tank yesterday.) I noticed a woman talking to my neighbor next door through her window and I waited to speak to her to see if they knew anything more than I did. She had just come down to Almaden to take her elderly parents to her house where they had power. Her mother looked pretty worried and kept talking about the stuff in the freezer going bad.

PG&E is being ironic

I drove the half mile or so up to Safeway and saw that they had signs on the door saying that they weren't selling any perishable foods until further notice, but they were open. They'd pulled all the meats, deli foods, cheeses and other dairy off the cooler shelves and roped off the freezer aisles. I bought some cherries, strawberries, toilet paper, batteries (for what I don't know) and another case of bottled water; feeling a little like a hoarder of resources in a natural disaster zone.

There was power at the shopping center, but the cashier said it had just recently come back on after going off about 8 pm last night. We laughed when I told him that my power had just gone off again after coming back on around 8 last night. The always bustling Starbuck's right next door was closed with a sign on their door saying something like "no power, no coffee".

After leaving Safeway, I drove around for a liitle bit to see where power was off and on. There was no reason to go home really, the car was a/c cooled and home was not anymore. The outages seemed random, some street signs were out, but others were not. The Albertson's about 3 miles away was open and selling frozen and refrigerated goods and they said they hadn't been down at all. But the ATM outside the store was down.

Strange weekend.

Homemade Limoncello Recipe. When California life gives you lemons...

Inspired by an earlier Vox question of the day, the summer heat wave and an April post about a freaky lemon, I'm sharing my homemade limoncello recipe.

ready to label and drink!

Limoncello is the traditional Italian lemon-flavored liqueur made using lemon zest. You can sometimes get homemade limoncello in Italian restaurants and some liqour stores will carry one or two commercially bottled imports, I have found most of what you find in the stores to be expensive and not that good. Nothing compares to homemade.

No power?! Now no tv or internet. Not happy.

 

The power is out here. The kid next door says it's been off for about a half hour and was going off and on a lot before that.

Yikes!

I've been out of the house since 8:45 am. I got a pedicure and sort of lost track of time in a haze of clearance sale bargains at Macy's. The outside temp gauge in my car said 111 degrees when I pulled in the driveway just now.

Perhaps I should go back to the mall and finally see "An Inconvenient Truth". Seems fitting.

 

PG&E has no ETA on when power's going to be restored.

-sent from my mobile phone (cuz I have no freakin' power at home).

UPDATE: the power came back on a couple hours after I sent this. 

I took a nap instead of going back to the mall.

But now the cable tv and internet is out. :- ( 

Comcast has no ETA on it's return.

Thank goodness I have this wireless card in my work laptop, but still...

Business Week talks Vox in relation to the new Pew study released this week

  Pew Blog Study Shows the Lure of Storytelling is High

Heather Green

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new study out on blogging that finds that most people who blog do it to tell stories about their lives--not to write about politics, tech, or media.

One tidbit I found particularly interesting is that 55% of bloggers write using a pseudonym. This is much higher than I would have expected and I think shows that there likey unmet demand for blogging software like Six Apart's new Vox, which allows you to create filters to control who can read your blog.

Overall, Pew found that about 8%, or 12 million American adults, blog, while 39% of the population, or 57 million people, read blogs.

Here's the link to the blog post.

These people will make great marketing partners

This is the name badge I got today (well, technically it was yesterday) at a LJ/Vox agency presentation.

Lobby surf boards? Pirates? Office Dogs?

I think we've discovered some kindred spirits.

Of course you can bring your dog mate-y. Arrrr!

Have you seen Wordplay yet? Is it good?

I think I'd like it. Did you?

QotD: Celebrational Muppetational!

Vox question of the day: Who is your favorite Muppet? Why?

      Animal. Of course.

What's not to love?

Leaving Outta Burbank

sent from mobile phone

Boarding

view from the plane

The lobby at OMD/Tequila - Los Angeles

The lobby at OMD/Tequilla.

The international surf's up at an ad agency

LA Morning View

It is a nice hotel

sent from mobile phone

QotD: The one that got away

Tell us a little something about your first girlfriend/boyfriend.

Dexter

His name was Tony Deach. It was kindergarten and I used to try to put my plastic coated fold-up floor mat next to his at nap time. He was short (even for a 5-year-old), had curly brown hair and thick dark rimmed glasses. He sort of looked like Dexter from the cartoon, only with a smile. Another girl (I can picture her, but I can't remember her name) used to try to beat me to the spot and put her mat down next to Tony's. But I knew I liked him more than she did and that the spot was mine.

He must have moved away that summer, because he wasn't there for first grade. And that was, as they say, the end of that.

If we could select whole Vox blogs (instead of just entries) as favorites...

I would make Timmy! a favorite for such notable posts as:

• what to do with junk mail
• blogging the story about the guy who blew up his townhouse (and himself) in NY to spite his ex.
• Dance Monkey! Dance video
• Orginal video like Pinkie and Haight Parking argument

Explore and enjoy! Every neighborhood needs at Timmy!

Quote of the day. Murrow on blogs?

.

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world
doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965)

QotD: Scents & Sensibilities

QUESTION OF THE DAY: What's the strongest association you have between a scent and a memory?

• There was a Malt-O-Meal plant in Northfield Minnesota, the town where I went to college. About 5 miles before you got to campus you could start to smell the distinct "oaty" scent of cereal. Malt-O-Meal is the
  

  Toasted Oats
  maker of bags of cereal with names like "Coco Roos" and "Tootie Frooties" as well as hot cereal. When the wind blows theright way, the town and the campuses of both colleges in Northfield fill with the smell of cooking cereal.

• My mom used to make two things that when I smelled coming in the door from school would instantly make me start to surpress a gag reflex: sauerkraut and oyster stew. My salivary glands are working themselves up just typing about it.
  

• I was one of those kids that liked to sniff permanent markers.

• 

  Good Thing I Never Got Hooked
  
  
  

  Plumeria

• The smell of plumeria takes me right back to Hawaii. I lived there for a year in 1983-4. This wonderful scent that hit me as soon as I got off the plane always sends me back and fills me with memories of that year and my visits since.

Taking VOX everywhere. Oh happy mobile world.

VOXing in the salon

Looks like this could be a good book

The Brief History of the Dead : A novel

Kevin Brockmeier

I saw this review by NPR's Nancy Pearl in a round up of summer reading suggestions and I thought this book sounded really interesting, or at least the reviewer made it sound "wish list worthy". It's fiction and I've been reading non-fiction almost exclusively for the past few years.

Has anyone read it?

Here's the review.

It's difficult to do a precis of Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead. First of all, it sounds depressing, which it isn't, really. Secondly, it's one of those novels that's simply unique; I can't think of another story that's even similar. The plot, laid bare, is this: There's a worldwide epidemic due to an out-of-control synthetic virus that is inexorably leading to the end of humankind.
 
Sounds like a thriller, right? But the plot itself is almost incidental to the book's theme, which really concerns the quite literal power of memory. In the world of this novel, when someone dies, they go to some other, intermediate place, where they remain so long as there is someone alive who remembers them. When they no longer exist in the memory of anyone living, they disappear.
 
But again, Brockmeier doesn't mean this metaphorically -- in this intermediate place are ordinary people living their quotidian lives, publishing newspapers, falling in love, regretting the past, anticipating the future. In alternating chapters, we also get the story of Laura Byrd, who's part of a scientific team in the Antarctic. How these two seemingly disparate stories intersect gradually unfolds as the novel progresses. This is the kind of book you'll find yourself thinking about long after you've gone on to other novels. The writing is masterful, the ideas are provocative, and, all in all, this is a stunning achievement. Read an Excerpt: 'The Brief History of the Dead'

The new Mac vs. PC ads are here (hilarious!)

The Second Crop of Mac Ads Are Finally Here!

Courtesy of Steve, who alway seems to find, know and be the most interesting things.

The Second Crop of Mac Ads Are Finally Here!

This is just too good. I love Parody. Enjoy.

I swear I felt a tremor

I swear I just felt the building vibrate.

Checked the site. Nothing.

But the map's not been updated for 40 minutes.

It must be...big trucks? heavy traffic? too much caffiene? sleepiness?

I really must leave the office now.

AM UPDATE: there nothing, except the vibrations of my imagination apparently.

I gotta check this again in a few minutes