- Vladimir Putin wants to sign a bill banning Americans from adopting Russian children. There have been 60,00 Russian children adopted by Americans since 1992 and Russia interprets that to mean that they can’t take care of their own. There are 740,000 children without parental custody in Russia and only 18,000 Russian parents ready to adopt. Bill is supposedly a retaliation against American measure forbidding certain Russians from entering the US and utilizing the US banking system, but that measure was designed to expose Russians who had been involved in a massive tax fraud and the death of a Russian lawyer after he uncovered said fraud.
- Another Bethlehem has been discovered, Bethlehem of Galilee, not the Bethlehem near Jerusalem. B of G was only 7 kilometers from Nazareth whereas other Bethlehem was 150 kilometers. According to the Old Testament, Judean Bethlehem was the city of david would be where the messiah would be born, but that Bethlehem was not inhabited in the 1st century, only in the 4th.
- Joseph’s coat of many colors: red yellow green brown scarlet black ochre peach ruby olive violet fawn lilac gold chocolate mauve cream crimson silver rose azure lemon russet grey purple white pink orange blue
- ACNE flagship store: Aoyama Tokyo
- Little Lord Fauntleroy first children’s novel by Francis Hodgson Burnett
- Bird: Thrush
- Imagine being one of the snotty kids that Anne Frank spoke about negatively in her diary and being ashamed of it so asking to be assigned the initials so as to remain anonymous. Imagine those people a they aged, in their homes, being quiet.
- Ranking of best Kids in the Hall, according to my opinion PLUS platonically: Mark, Bruce, Kevin, Dave, Scott. As of now, I’m willing to go to the mat on this.
- Johnny Galecki from Big Bang Theory is the kid in Christmas Vacation!
- Elephants walk on their toes, the heel is made of skin.
- My dress has an Elizabethan collar, not a presidential collar. Shakespearean would also work.
- I need to revisit the Keith Haring documentary.
- The murder of Shanda Sharer in Madison Indiana was too brutal to comprehend. Perpetrators were Melinda Loveless (16), Laurie Tackett (17), Toni Lawrence (15) and Hope Rippey (15) picked up Shanda from her house and then committed numerous acts of violence for 10 hours that I don’t want to commit to written memory. Melinda and Laurie seemed to be the most culpable Melinda looks lovely and sweet and gently now, training dogs for rehabilitation purposes. Laurie is truly frightening, quoted as saying she knew it was her destiny to kill and spend her life in prison. What could have been done? Melinda witnessed wretched violence from her father as a child. Could that influence have been reversed? With the presence of one caring and involved adult?
- Flaming torches used at proceedings at night are called flambeaus
- Frost flowers grow near the north pole, when the air gets colder than the frozen ocean’s surface, the dryness pulls moisture off of little bumps in the ice, bits of ice vaporize, the cold makes water vapor heavy and the air wants to release excess weight so air turns back into ice creating these little ice blossoms. They are each full of millions of bacteria, because bacteria can survive these elements. They suck up salt and have 3 times the salinity of the ocean.
- You know pangrams? Sentences featuring every letter of the alphabet? The British have better ones than we do. Among them: “Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex!,” “Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes,” and “TV quiz jock, Mr Ph.D., bags few lynx.”
- A Savannah cat has the size and temperament of a domesticated dog.
- The Naga Lights that shoot up from the Mekong river in Laos are unexplainable and unpredictable. Scientists say phosphine gas, but phosphine is heavier than air and also produces a toxic cloud that has not been observed. Stories from long ago claim balls were white and flew low. Now, as the fireballs have increased in popularity, they fly higher and are orange and shit. What’s the truth?
- Leaving your vowels open on the bottom when you handwrite is a sure sign of psychopathy.
- Vasculitis is inflammation of your blood vessels, when you walk hard or dance, your ankles and legs swell up like crazy. My school secretary’s daughter has that. She had to pick her up from her prom because of it.
- Made some changes to 3 behavioral systems that’ll help Diane be listened to by the kids, today.
- Dyed my hair red at the ends, like Hugo was supposed to. It was easy and 7 dollars.
- Haven’t had coffee for a few days. Have decided not to have caffeine in the mornings, I already have energy from sleeping, but to have it in the afternoons when I start to wear down. I really like it so far. Felt like myself in a real way today. Good mood too. ooooooooo
Today I read about The Society of Six which was an avant-garde group of six artists in Oakland in the 1910s and 1920s who lived and made art together. Now there is a restaurant in West Hollywood inspired by them. They serve a burger patty on top of a pile of french fries with gravy. This is what caught my attention.
I read about how Mangum was inspired by Anne Frank. I read about how Otto Frank wanted the parts of his daughter’s diary in which she described her vagina removed. I read that there were apparent ball point pen corrections in the diary, and ball-point pens were not available during WWII. When the library that held the diary, who claimed the pen marks existed, was asked to produce proof, it could not.
In an interview, Mangum was asked if he was inspired by Lewis Caroll and he answered, “Yeah, like, Candyland.” I liked that.
I ordered The Diary of Anne Frank so that I can read it again. I often find myself relating to the young, hopeful notions of teenagers. She held such power inside of her.
I found TheBurgerReview.com and discovered more reasons to avoid Father’s Office.
I explained “Umami” to my parents.
I incorporated Milt Kobayashi, my favorite Japanese figurative artist, into Xmas gifts for my friends.
I watched the only Hot Sugar interview I could find and liked that he offered his help to a fan that wanted to get into making associative music, on his blog. His song that incorporates the AIM chime is the best example of associative music that I’ve seen. I watched an interview with he and Kitty and I would like to see more of them together.
Zero Dark Thirty means 12:30.
Made some fried rice the wrong way.
Found out that eggplant is a fruit and Rhubarb is a vegetable.
I took a lot of vitamins in a valiant and revolutionary effort to stay well.
I decided that pretension has its place in my life, but its place is not in food.
Sometimes I think about that thing people say, that there’s no such thing as a selfless good deed. And I think, there is no such thing as a selfless good deed, because fortification is the paddlewheel of decision making. Doing Things That Make You Feel Really Good as Much as Possible is how to be a person. Wholly good, consistently good. The consequences of the good things also feel good; that’s what all of T H I S is about. Some days I put so much energy into being purposeful, that I feel overwhelmed and I think about that other thing people say, “Hey, take some time off, do something for yourself.” And it’s like, I am. This is for me, too. That’s the key to never really needing to stop.
I made myself go outside alone tonight, which is never my first choice of physical activity. I’d rather jump rope in my living room. I’m an only child, but all kinds of independence were discouraged by way of intense overprotection in all areas for my first 20 years. Independence of thought was the only kind I had access to and as a result, that part of me will forever be working overtime. To call that independence is a generous dub because thoughts without accompanied action are still half-baked. I do not want to be afraid of being outside, so I left my iPod at home so I couldn’t use it as a veil. I jogged all the way up Vermont past the Roosevelt Café where the street veers left into Boy Scout Road which is a very wide and inviting dead end street. At the top, on the right, there is an elevated platform with graffitied stone picnic tables and behind them are about 8 arched, stone steps built into the side of a hill. It is the perfect place to host a talent show that would never happen. I stood on the stone stage and told a joke; the steps were silent but they were not mean. Walking back down Boy Scout, I thought of how that sentiment would look written down, “The steps were silent, but they were not mean.” I figured if I wrote it down, I’d have to end it with an exclamation point otherwise it would seem like it was stretching for a depth that would not be achieved. There’s so much safety in the guise of excitement or that tiny crawl space of disconnection in comedy. There is so much safety in an exclamation point. “Oh please, I wasn’t serious.” I am always aware of how I will be received, before I am aware of what I want to give; this is something that I’d like to reverse.
Curiosity, not condemnation.
I guess it was those times when I knew I would win that I chased it with half of my heart.
