Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

• Okay, this is ... strange. A site called "Bathroom Mania" markets some rather odd bathroom fixtures. Uh, on the other hand, this one is more likely to push folks' 'whimsical' buttons instead of their 'WTF?' buttons...
• I linked to chapter one of this story back in March, but since I just tripped over chapter seven of The Story of the Toddler, I'll go ahead and put it in here again. I'm also mining it for my QotD file.
• A creative (and politically minded) baseball fan got his sign confiscated once Mariners' security figured out what the sign said. I'm not going to spoil it for you -- take thirty seconds and go check out the story. It's short.
• I don't actually find the main point of this particularly surprising, but some of the details are interesting: Barbie Deemed Threat to Saudi Morality "The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as the religious police are officially known, lists the dolls on a section of its Web site devoted to items deemed offensive to the conservative Saudi interpretation of Islam." What I did find rather odd was their description of Barbie as Jewish. I never associated a particular religion or ethnicity to Barbie beyond "of northern European descent". Even more interesting, if they're worrried about the doll's immodest shape and clothing, putting up posters "plastered with pictures of Barbie in short dresses and tight pants" in schools and on the street to complain about this sounds perhaps a bit counterproductive. "Although illegal, Barbies, the creation of California-based Mattel Inc., are found on the black market, where a contraband doll could cost $27 or more."
• In case anyone missed this on the eleventh, and so that I don't forget which machine I bookmarked it on when I want to remind folks about it later: that Mark Fiore animation about the two years since the 9/11 attacks, A Nation Remembers II. "Wait, you're not supposed to remember that!"
• Planets being swallowed: "In a letter soon to be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr Alon Retter and Dr Ariel Marom from the Department of Physics suggest that this phenomenon is an expanding giant star swallowing nearby planets, an event which may one day befall our own planet. Their research provides data to support the theory that the multi-stage eruption of the 'red giant' known as V838 Monocerotis observed last year was fuelled as it engulfed three near orbiting planets." (Thanks to Fred for the link.)
• Another one from Fred: a spacecraft crash (on Earth): "As the NOAA-N Prime spacecraft was being repositioned from vertical to horizontal on the 'turn over cart' [...] it slipped off the fixture, causing severe damage. The 18' long spacecraft was about 3' off the ground when it fell." Link includes photographs. "The shock and vibration of the fall undoubtedly caused tremendous damage."
• Ever wonder how much a cloud weighs? "Let's start with a very simple white puffy cloud -- a cumulus cloud. How much does the water in a cumulus cloud weigh? Peggy LeMone, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, did the numbers." (Thanks to redaxe for the link)
• This one's more for the headline than for the story: World's Oldest Genitals Found in Scotland (Reuters, via Yahoo). Four times the age of the previous oldest-known genitals. (Kent Paul Dolan posted the link to talk.bizarre)
• A cartoon about the RIAA and the latest flap over file sharing. It points out some violations of copyright law (well, if you don't pay the royalty fee anyhow) that a lot of people don't seem to know about. (Have most folks forgotten about the ASCAP vs. summer camps thing, by the way?) Got the link from papergirl by way of filkerdave.

I've still got a huge backlog of these.

"Look, there is no war without spin. There is no war without outright lying to the populace, without trying to coerce a wary nation into supporting our unprovoked savagery by way of Hollywood-style set pieces performed specifically to deflect attention from the brutality and the decapitated children and the still-dying U.S. soldiers and the burning bodies by the side of the road." -- Mark Morford, in a column about Jessica Lynch's rescue

(It's unclear whether the above was meant to refer to war in general, or only to the US war in Iraq. My own interpretation is that it'a about all wars despite the reference to "U.S. soldiers". -- Glenn)

Wind picked up, then the wind died and a light rain started, then the wind picked up again. On the phone I described this as "what I think of as hurricane rain", by which I mean, the rain that comes a hundred miles from a hurricane, which is how I experience most hurricanes (if I get closer to them than a television set, that is). Yes, I remember Agnes, but we don't get many that come this far north. Earlier, before it started raining, I was looking out a window and noticing that yes, it's subtly wrong to see the trees bending this direction instead of that direction, and the clouds scurrying the wrong way across the sky. It doesn't take a hurricane to do that, but storm winds out of the east are rare enough here to look wrong.

I never did find out what the ominous crashing sound from behind my house was this afternoon. Oh well.

Anyhow, it's not so much how the rain falls in a given moment that makes it feel like "hurricane rain"; it's the pattern of recurring bands of rain without thunder, the pattern of the wind, how the light changes -- it's a multiple-hours thing to make it feel like this.

But now it's dark. The police rang my doorbell a little while ago. I looked out the window and saw that the tree in front of my house had fallen along the sidewalk, uprooted. I can't tell whether it damaged the white car next to it -- it did fall beside, rather than on, the car. I had trouble hearing from a couple floors up, but the police were either asking me to move my car or asking if I wanted to move my car (once I pointed out that mine was the red one just upwind of the tree). By the time I got downstairs they were pulling out, yellow tape having been applied to white car and fallen tree, so I couldn't ask for a clarification. Now tomorrow we have street-cleaning parking restrictions for a few hours around midday, so I was thinking of moving my car anyhow ... and I'd been wondering whether they were going to invoke snow-emergency parking restrictions for a hurricane despite the lack of fluffy white stuff (but I haven't heard anything about that on the telly) ... even though we all know there isn't a snowball's chance that the street cleaners will be out tomorrow. But then I thought maybe the police were suggesting I move my car someplace safer?

Except that the one tree that could possibly be a threat was already down, so all I had to fear was the light pole. I went to look at nearby legal parking spaces anyhow, and noticed that most of them were under (and downwind (for now) of) trees. Whoops, maybe not. While I was contemplating this, a neighbour approached, desperate for a ride to work, since taxis were in short supply and the bus system is shut down. I didn't want to drive my seriously damaged car more than a couple of blocks in this weather, but I went ahead and ran him up to North Ave. When I got back, I found a spot around the corner at the other end of the block that's not near a tree (if the church there loses a steeple, however, the car is toast ... but the church looks really old and solid). So I don't absolutely have to move my car until Monday morning.

The neighbour I gave a ride to isn't from around here. I forget where he's from ... I've got this half-memory that it's somewhere in South America, but his accent sounds more African (not like I know all of the accents from either continent, mind you). Anyhow, after we dodged a fallen tree limb (well, we dodged the other cars who were dodging the tree limb), he commented that the storm hadn't been as bad as he'd expected. So I explained that the storm is just starting here. Dunno how bad it's going to be -- hey, it's over land and thus losing energy -- but it's going to be worse than what we've seen so far.

Got home and found that the 3rd floor roof got around to starting to leak. Only in one spot so far, but it's a tricky spot to catch the drips from. It's along a wall. Argh. So tonight I'll be spending a lot of mental energy, at least, checking on or worrying about that roof, and moving buckets around. That's my big issue for the evening, and the expected big issue for this hurricane overall.

Perrine has been agitated all day. She was in zoom-kitty mode last night, and while she's been less zoomy today, she continues to indicate that she wants to play "chase". Mostly she wants me to chase her up and down the stairs. When I move away from her, she runs at me, overshoots, then tries to get me to chase her in whichever direction I was already going. If I do run at her, she happily darts around a corner, ears up and body twitching. She also keeps trying to lead me to the bedroom (the green room, where she's allowed) so she can curl up next to me if I'm not going to play chase. She doesn't want to play "swat" today, or wrestle, but I can distract her for a minute or so at a time by throwing a toy. Most days she's happy to start a game of "swat" almost any time one of us is on a stair. I'm not sure whether her behaviour today is because of the storm, feline randomness, or what.

Late last night I got word that a musician I used to play with had died. I knew he was sick -- the reason he left Three Left Feet was to go to an oncologist in New Hampshire -- but I still entertained hope that he'd eventually get better enough that I'd get to perform -- or at least play -- with him again. No such luck. He died about three weeks ago, but it took the person who contacted me a while to track me down. (Her email started off by asking whether I was the right person. Apparently it's a good thing I'm on the web. The job of tracking down folks who need to be notified does not sound fun.) I'll scan a photo of him from before he got sick, and post it (probably Monday or Tuesday).

So anyhow, along with the beauty and risk of the storm, and the worry of my leaking roof, and everything else on my mind, there's this sort of layer of thought/mood on top of the rest, about death, and the unfairness of having one of the Really Good Musicians taken away.