Monkey Fight!

Monday is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, and the folks that first made it are leading the celebrations by giving away free samples.

You’ve probably seen those photo mosaics where a large image is made up of many smaller images acting as pixels. Kelly Houle has taken the idea a mile further by creating a photo collage that is also anamorphic -- a collage of illustrations and related material from Alice in Wonderland that, when a curved mirror is placed in the correct position, forms a portrait of Lewis Carroll. It’s absolutely amazing stuff. More of her fantastic anamorphic art can be found here, and she sells prints and wooden jigsaw puzzles at reasonable prices. Leonardo DaVinci will soon be on my wall. She’s only a couple years older than me, and studied physics, astronomy, and math at the University of Arizona in Tuscon. I wonder if she’s any relation to my New Mexico physics classmate Paul Houle. (Thanks for the link, Steve!)

It’s funny how you can blink and then another week has gone by. At least this week was a productive one (even if I never got around to writing here). Fridays seem to be “Frozen Pipe Day” around here. I spent a good chunk of last Saturday digging up a section of pipe between the well and the house that had burst. One I found it, it wasn’t that hard to repair, but still, there went most of the day. Last night, it froze but didn’t burst. Still took a few hours to thaw, but I didn’t have to splice pipe. Got a nice touch of winter precipitation Thursday night. Enough ice to make things slippery and freeze the car doors shut (Note to self: don’t forget to replace broken car door handle), then not quite an inch of snow on top of that. There’s still some on the ground now – it’s been right cold here. The puppy finally decided she liked snow, and the chickens never did figure it out. This year’s taxes were the first time they’ve been complicated. Between buying a house and operating a farm, there were all sorts of forms to fill out. Nineteen pages, by the time I got done. Thanks to TurboTax, it wasn’t at all hard, and we’ll manage to get back more than half of the taxes we’d already paid. By the books, the farm had a net loss of $7,499 – but I’m actually quite happy with that. A large percentage of that was start-up costs that won’t have to get repeated this year. Building barns and greenhouses gets a bit expensive, but done right they last a while. Anyway, with the magic of the internet, the taxes have already been filed and we may get our money back by the end of the month. I’ve been a busy beaver on the Town & Gown website this week, too. Many of the ttols I’ve written are for theater management (and thus behind the scenes), but the public site has been getting a lot of attention, too. And wonder of wonders, I’ve been productive at work, too, catching up on a huge backlog that had piled up behind a rather tricky installation of a new interface between our software and a new accounting vendor. But that’s working now, so I’m trying to tear through the backlog to keep the older customers from getting to upset at the wait. In related news, my wife is leaving a job that’s placed a high demand on her time of late (she’s leaving for Chicago for ten days Monday morning). At the end of the month, she’ll take a position at my office. That ought to cut down on our incidental expenses quite a bit, not to mention increase the time we can actually see each other. So… busy but productive.

I enjoy reading the classic Scottish poetry of Robert Burns as much as the next guy, but sometimes it just leaves me feeling dirty.

I’ve been thinking that downtown Athens would be a good place to perform Street Theater, but now I see I’d be playing right into the hands of those who practice psychotronic mind control.

Readers of Recipes from America’s Small Farms: Fresh Ideas for the Season’s Bounty, to be published in June from Random House, will learn a little about our farm and our chickens, and will get a copy of my “Eggs in a Tomato Nest” recipe.

Justices true to the Constitution and the Founders’ intent may wake up to the havoc wrought on the American political landscape by the Bellotti case and its reliance on the flawed Santa Clara headnote. If the Court chooses in the next few weeks to hear the Kasky v. Nike case, it will open an opportunity for them to rule that corporations don’t have the free speech right to knowingly deceive the public. It’s even possible that this case could cause the Court to revisit the error of Davis’s 1886 headnote, and begin the process of dismantling the flawed and unconstitutional doctrine of corporate personhood.

Thom Hartmann, atCommonDreams.org

Today, JRR Tolkien would have turned Eleventy One. For the Tolkien Society, today is a long awaited party. It is the society’s tradition to toast Tolkien on this day every year, at 9pm, by raising a glass and saying “The professor.” I’ll make sure I have a full glass handy when 9pm rolls around. UPDATE: Looking back at an entry from a year ago today, it looks like someone forgot to remind me to have a blow-out party at my place today. Too bad, really, because I could use a good party.