Filed under: Bloggidy Blog
I saw the Wienermobilego by on my way to the studio this morning. We’re pretty close to the Oscar Mayer plant , which, due to the building’s administrative appearance, Don and I refer to as the “meat hospital”. So wienermobiles are around but I haven’t seen one for a long time. I’m taking today’s sighting as a sign of impending good luck or perhaps a harbinger of an early Spring. If the universe wants to get back to me on that I’ll be in the office cave playing Free Cell.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: class, mask beads, the vinery, yellow snowball effect
Hey! I’m teaching a mask bead class at the Vinery on Saturday, April 18th. It is very lucky for you that this information came along because I was about to post a blog about the dog urine glaciers that are appearing along the sidewalk between the store and my house. Pee is everywhere!Consider yourselves spared of the gory details…for now.
But back to the bead class–this is something you may want to consider. It’s only one day and it’s $125. which includes all materials and lunch. A year or two ago I got an email from a gal in Ohio who got together to make mask beads with some friends and they did an “eye swap” where everyone makes one murrine representative of an eyeball, cuts it up into pieces and then trades them with the other people. Time efficiency-wise, and also from a designing standpoint, that is a really good idea. So I want to do the same thing in this class. For extra variety, I’ll be providing a bunch of my own murrine to throw into the mix. Depending on how many students we get this should result in perhaps the besteyeball murrine selection ever. Your eye choices usually determine the facial expression so the more choices you have, the more it makes you brain think about different possibilities. Andtime you spend on the art with your brain is time well spent, no matter what you’re thinking about.
So, that’s the class. Hopefully I’ll think of something more to say soon.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: garbage collection, high definition tv, hovercraft garbage truck, isuzu pick-up, magnets, sheep
I was watching the garbage gentlemen work this morning and thinking how the robot garbage collection system doesn’t work so well when the giant snowbanks are in the way. It would work much better, I thought, if the garbage trucks were hovercrafts–then they could hover over the snowbanks and reach the cans on the sidewalk. Then I thought I should come up with 30 or so ideas just like that one and mail them, one a day, to the Mayor’s office. That would help the winter pass. Then I started wondering about how hovercraft work–is it magnets, or air or what? Cause a hovercraft garbage truck powered by magnets would probably take out every magnet sensitive object within a mile radius as it drove by. Then my thoughts turned to TV and how I accidentally de-magnetized the screen on our old timey one by placing two guitar amps right under it. The screen grew more and more purple until I asked Don “Those amps don’t have magnets in them, do they?” That was funny. Fortunately we had a back up old timey TV. Then I started thinking about new TV’s and that high definition switch that’s supposed to be happening. What happened with that, anyway? I couldn’t go a day without hearing about that until about a month ago. It hasn’t happened yet, has it? Or have people just stopped talking about it because Christmas is over and no ones likely to buy a new TV in this economy? I wonder about that.
But, anyway…I drew something the other day:
Ever wonder what breweries do with all the spent grain they have left over from brewing batches of beer? Of course you haven’t–that’s why I’m going to tell you all about it. Whenever Don has multiple, multiple garbage cans full of spent grain this guy, Arlan, a sheep farmer, comes and picks it up in his pick-up. He feeds the grain to his sheep. Sheep like grain. Anyway, after years of abuse hauling very heavy loads, Arlan’s white Isuzu pick-up sort of expectedly, unexpectedly took a shit. In the wake of the truck’s passing, Don must have sensed some regret or remorse or something radiating off of Arlan because he felt compelled to ask me to draw up a nice condolence card for him. As you can see it’s a picture of a sheep sniffing a dead white pick-up with flies flying around it. Killed at least four hours drawing that. Made me feel uncharacteristically useful, actually. Thought I’d share.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: barber's itch, grippe, lumbego, quackery, renewlife, renulife, violet ray generator
Don got a violet ray generator for his birthday from Brad and Carrie. It is non-functional which is unfortunante though not unexpected as they found the unit in an antique store’s garbage pile. I couldn’t quite grock what this was used for at first but it turns out it’s a fairly famous example of questionable medical equipment circa 1920. It even appears in the Museum of Quackery. The Renulife device consists of a bakelite handle into which one inserts any number of blown glass vacuum tube accessories designed to deliver electricity to pretty much any area of your body, inside or out. We were fortunate to receive the model with accessories that are probably too large to have ever been inserted anywhere. We hope, anyway. Here’s a close up of one of them:
That’s some craftsmanship on that sucker-that glass is thin. Someone really knew how to join tube. According to the accompanying booklet, this particular accessory was probably used to treat an ailment known as “Falling Hair”. Gray hair can also be cured with it, especially when the gray hair is caused by bacteria or poor circulation. The booklet warns against using alcohol rich hair tonics being a fire hazard when treating your scalp with electricity. Here is a picture of the accompanying booklet:
As long as you have the proper glass accessory and you’re not afraid to electrify it and stick it up your nose or rectum, you can cure pretty much anything with this device, including the Grippe, Lumbego and Barber’s Itch. I can’t imagine why someone would throw this away, you know? It’s only non-functioning if it worked at one time.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog
After four years I think I’m finally getting the hang of Quick Books. Every time I use that program, which is maybe 4 times a year, it’s like I’m experiencing it for the first time. Wouldn’t it be great if almost anything besides a computer program were like that? Like a song or a movie? Quick Books is like a little pre-taste of senility for me. Before long everything will be that unfamiliar. Hopefully, the majority of it won’t fill me with such a sense of self-loathing. (Note to self: Quick Books does not have a “Back” button. To see the page that you were on before, look for it in a little window on the left hand side of the screen and click on it there.) Had I written that down last time, it would have saved me about twenty minutes of looking around for a “Back” button this quarter.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: cat, feathers, spontaneous bird explosion
There were feathers and little chunks of bird all over our front porch this morning. And on the stairs. And on the snowbank in the front yard. No tracks to be seen anywhere, which is weird because it just snowed. Tres mysterious! I suspect cat, but the lack of evidence kind of points to spontaneous bird explosion.
(Side note: Isn’t our kitchen floor great? That linoleum stopped responding to cleaning years ago. I have high, high hopes of laying down tile there, someday. This side note was brought to you by the letter “D”.)
So, the cold weather is gripping the mid-west again. I am once again digging around in my activity bowl trying to find something to do. I’m down to the twin horrors of doing taxes or cleaning the studio. Shit. I don’t want to do either of those and yet I must do both. Tax doing naturally causes a flurry of cleaning as I retrace my steps for the past year trying to find post office receipts. Gotta do that sometime. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting on the floor when I clean.
I made a giant cookie out of the old dough I found in the fridge. It was fine. Me and Bob Foster ate it.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: crazy good, don hertzfeldt, falafel, giant pear, magic putty, pop tarts, skull fracture
Today’s top search engine word: kepala tengorak. That’s Indonesian for “skull fracture”. Three people found my blog today when they punched those words into Google. I guess they were possibly clicking on a picture of a ceramic skull I wrote about a while back. It also could have been a picture of our toilet brush holder–that’s an almost life sized human skull with the back of it all bashed in. (That’s where the brush goes. It’s pretty trippy.) I believe that’s the weirdest top search engine word I’ve seen. And it got three clicks which makes it thrice as odd.
Fully 50% of all of the search engine terms that bring people to the blog are about Pop Tarts. Pop tart cartoon, pop tart dude, pop tart animation etc. They all end up at a rather lame post that I wrote about a year ago about a trip I took to the grocery store. On a lark I took a picture of a cartoon pop tart that I thought had been drawn by legendary animator Don Hertzfeldt. Thank goodness I did that because the pop tart post is the most clicked upon entry I’ve ever written. People read it more than once every single day. It recently unseated another equally riveting post that I wrote about “Magic Putty” to take the top spot. Yeah, people. You can’t predict what the hell they’re going to be searching for, but they seem pretty interested in pop tarts and magic putty. And now skull fractures.
Apropos of not much, though, why not talk about it because you never know what people are going to search for, I went to the grocery store with Don today and took a picture of him standing next to a giant, snow covered pear.
Here’s a funny story: Let’s say, instead of Don standing outside of a grocery store next to a giant pear, he was standing outside a falafel restaurant. Would you assume he was an Arab? A cab driver from Milwaukee did when he stopped to ask Don directions while Don was standing outside of a falafel restaurant. I don’t feel anything one way or the other about that assumption. The story made me laugh so I thought I’d share. I’ve been trying to work that into the blog for a week at least. Phew!
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: cacti, cactus tutorial, chameleon designs, fish tutorial, frit happens
The new tutorial is up on Etsy. Hooray! I finished something. You can click on the picture to be magically transported to the listing. I look forward to seeing what everyone does with this one. Those of you who live among cacti are going to be able to come up with more ideas than I have. Maybe you’ll be able to figure out why they scream so much. I never got that.
Also, if you’re still making fish or you’ve made a bunch and you don’t know where to go with them, Becky from Chameleon Designs is heading up a fish swap over on Frit Happens. Folks are making fish from all of the fish tutorials available–of which there are several, including some that are free. No better time than now to learn how to make a fish. I’ve never done a swap before but, hell, I’ve got fish lying around so I’m in.
A lot of folks at Frit Happens are from the UK. I don’t want to paint with a broad brush or anything but I believe UK’ers to be a hedgehog loving people. I’ve heard some of them invite hedgehogs into their backyards, kind of like I did with the possums, except (hopefully)without all the swarming. So they’re ok by me. If you’ve got extra fish you should sign up for the swap.
