Putting things in perspective

I found the work of Julian Beever when I received a chain email with a few of his images. I immediately looked him up to learn more. The bottle in the photo above was drawn with chalk on a two-dimensional surface (the sidewalk). INSANE. I wonder what he does before starting to draw -- does he really have such an uncanny mastery of perspective, that he can achieve such a convincing 3-D effect without prior sketches and computer-aided stretching?

Check out more of his stuff here.

Chapter 1: Ma' House

It's been about a month now that I've been all moved out of my '05-'06 apartment and all moved into my palazzo.


Perhaps palazzo isn't the right word... maybe chateau?

I was lucky enough to know the previous tenants, so they let me move in early, before the end of their lease. Good guys. The place has been treating me well.


The persian rug is courtesy of my parents. It's a pretty ratty rug as persian rugs go (we've used it in our family living room for a LONG time), but it's still WAY better than what I deserve to have in my college room right now. Thanks Ma, thanks Pa.

Twin monitors on the desk are barely visible -- one of them glows rapture-white in this shitty cellphone shot, the other one is caught between the twin rapture points of the window and the first monitor. Each monitor is connected to its own PC (you'll read all about that in Chapter 3: "Xtension Chords in collaboration with st00ts st00dios, Inc"). The keyboard is new and awesome, but maybe i'll talk more about that when I actually have something created to show you.

The plywood in the bottom left corner is another hint of what's to come in Ch. 3....

The bed is old, mattresses hopelessly worn in, headboard ugly, and the whole rig is somehow incredibly comfortable.

Yes, that is indeed an accordion next to the bed.

Let's head downstairs!

The Living Room -- As of yet un-decked-out.


The D-room -- Care to dine with me? Join me in the D-room! Pour yourself a drink!

The K-hole: Care to make me dinner so we can dine? Please, step into the the K-hole! Make sure you wash the dishes -- no dishwasher here.

The future good times headquarters of Chambana.

(Stalker Challenge! Can YOU figure out where I live from the pictures presented here? Winner gets a copy of my fall semester class schedule!)

Perhaps you meant...

Those chapter entries will soon come, I promise!! But here's a distraction in the meantime. I was looking at various dictionary sites for the word "escalate".. ever since I told Jamie that she was using the wrong word to describe "the escalating (growing) rip in her skirt". I was trying to find an authoritative source that would prove to her that it's not standard usage to use "escalate" when describing a physical increase in an object... Why should I even care? Good question.. I just felt like disagreeing with her on this point :)

Anyway, here's what I found at dictionary.net....


"
No entries found for "escalate"

We have not found any entries on our dictionary databases for the word you entered. Perhaps you are looking for one of the following instead?

escalade

"



PS. Anybody know of a dictionarywiki?

Table of Contents

Welcome to the

"Table of Contents"

!

Keep reading, and you'll soon find a list of all the things i want to share with you about myself!!! Yup, this is the Table of Contents for blog entries to come. Except you can't just flip the page to Chapter 1 whenever you want. I have to write something. Yeah, that's right. I decide when you flip the page in this publication. bitch.

Ch. 1. Ma' house!
Ch. 2. My pimp-mobil-a-car
Ch. 3: Xtension Chords in collaboration with st00ts st00dios, Inc.
Ch.4: Wildcardwildcardwhat'sitgonnabewhat'sitgonnabe






That's all for today folks, stay tuned for frequent chapter updates! :)

How could we have been so nerdy?

I just came back from wiki-surfing! This is what I saw:

Damn, they don't make magazine background gradients like they USED to!

I was meandering through some biographies of the world's wealthiest people and came across good ol' Bill Billy Gates here. The fact that Bill Gates was once this nerdy is no great surprise, but Time Magazine... how could Time Magazine have been this nerdy?

Jesus, it was only 20 years ago, but that magazine cover looks like an anthropological artifact.

I found these Wikis of extremely wealthy people interesting, both for the astounding facts they contained and for the amusing personalities of the writers of the articles. Warren Buffet is portrayed to be so classically American -- he filed his first income tax return at 13 - deducted his bike as a work expense. Bill Gates, on the other hand, seems a bit sickly -- like he took advantage of a fledgling, confused industry (computing) and weaseled around into just the right places to succeed. Mmm, slantastic.

Nonetheless, they are interesting accounts to read, to think about, to talk about. Warren Buffet seems like he could be the protagonist in an Ayn Rand novel. Though Ayn Rand probably wouldn't approve of the 39 billion Buffet just recently announced he would donate to charity, with most of that going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Wikipedia has been expanding in all directions so damn fast that now it's kind of an awkward teenager. It is one hell of a creature though.

:)

(more on various personal developments soon!)

I almost died tonight

That's no shock title, I seriously almost died tonight. My dad and I were driving home on I-294 from Buffalo Grove (where we were checking out a '98 Camry XLE for sale) when I noticed a huge white square object sitting in our lane 20 yards in front of us. Washing machine? Piece of posterboard standing on edge? Hard to say.

I blurted "watch out!" to my dad, and he reacted -- we swerved sharply out of the way. SCREEEWWEEEERRSHHHHHREEECH! Next thing I know we're sliding across lanes of traffic, skidding in wild arcs back and forth on the highway as cars pass us going 80 MPH on either side. At that point my brain understood two things:

1. The sea of headlights and taillights, if observed at night from an erratically spinning vantage point, is pretty psychedelic.
2. My car has a lot of momentum right now. So do the cars that are probably going to hit me. And that truck that's staring me right in the face as it approaches us helpless spinning saps... it's got PLENTY of momentum.

At that moment I was fully prepared for the possibility of getting severely messed up by this truck. I was waiting for the impact.

We ended up near the outer shoulder and gathered our wits enough to move off the road. The two cops sitting 40 yds ahead on traffic duty didn't react in the slightest, either to the big white thing in the middle of the highway, or the fact that a car just spun the hell out and was now sitting on the shoulder. We didn't really care, though; we just sat in our car and breathed deep and listened to our frantically pumping hearts slow down a bit.

My dad claims that the car oversteered... I think he just got startled and jerked the wheel way too hard. In any case, we still haven't found a good used car for me to drive around. If you got something, email me.

The Poop That Looked Delicious

Yeah, that's right, that's a shock title for today's entry. Now keep reading.

It all started back a few weeks before Acappellapalooza when I was working long into the nights in three and five hour spurts on that friggin' Xchords movie in my room. I was eating poorly and infrequently, and ended up losing a bunch of weight and getting frequent hunger pains.

Everything subsided for a time, but then finals came and I found myself working 12 straight hours no break on a paper in the library. Got some hunger pangs then, too.

They didn't go away after that -- been feeling them more or less continuously for the past month -- so of course my slightly paranoid doctor parents started suspecting an ulcer. I've been taking stomach-healing prescription drugs like crazy for the past 2 1/2 weeks.

Hold on, I've almost reached the poop part of the story!

So today I did some X-rays and they made me swallow this chalky, white drink (Barium) which apparently illuminates the shape of whatever it passes on the xray (hence the usefulness -- by seeing the negative space within the stomach, you can basically see the stomach itself). The doc said she didn't see any ulcer, so it could be inflammation from other causes.

And then I pooped, and it was pure, pure white. I paused for a moment above it, in reverence -- it looked so innocent, like a Dunkin Donuts powdered sugar pastry or something. It looked delicous.