brykmantra.com

Continuing now with my Five-Year Blogiversary commemorations, here’s more yammering about personal things that nobody cares about, just like bloggers used to do it during The Golden Age:

I have several long-sleeve dark t-shirts that are among my favorite things to wear in the winter, because they’re comfortable, they’re relatively warm, most of them have pockets, and even I look better in dark colors.

The reason I bring this up is that, as of last night, I have one fewer of those shirts.

Well, I still have the shirt, but two places on the collar — right in the front, very prominent — have big chunks torn out of them.

Yes, Bristol Destructodog has struck again. We keep thinking that he’s over that phase, then we turn around and find something of ours with huge chunks forcibly removed by tiny but powerful little jaws.

Here’s a picture of some of his early work, along with a picture of the artist (inset):

You can click here to view a gallery of more of his destruction.

Speaking of pictures … But first, here’s a bit about one of my favorite films, Koyaanisqatsi. Throughout the movie, Hopi Indian prophecies are sung in their native language, and those songs are translated at the end. One of the prophecies is:

“Near the Day of Purification, cobwebs will be spun back and forth across the sky.”

Well, here’s a picture that I took on Christmas morning:

Click on the picture to see the large view, and click here to see all the pictures I took.

Pretty strange, huh?

“Day of Purification”, remember those words.

I made stuffed mushrooms tonight, for the first time in at least three years, and they were wonderful, probably my best ever.

No pictures, though, sorry.

We watched another movie today: Open Season (the one about the domesticated grizzly and the one-antlered elk [Martin Lawrence, Ashton Kutcher] trying to get back to civilization on the first day of hunting season. It wasn’t bad, but it’s no Pixar work. It seemed very derivative, and of second-tier works like Shrek and Madagascar.

I’ll bet you’re wondering what music I’m listening to right now on my Logitech USB headphones as I labor over this mess.

Well, since you ask, little Miss Nosey-Nose, I’m listening to Luscious Jackson‘s Fever In Fever Out.

‘Cause you know how I feel about Chicks with Guitars.

Here’s a video of their biggest hit, Naked Eye:

Well, that should be enough pointless Blogiversary blogging just to prove that I’ve still “got it”.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a New Year’s date.

Today is my Five-Year Blogiversary! Yes, it was on this day in 2002 that I figured I had nothing better to do with my life, so I might as well waste it nattering away about nothing to people who don’t care.

And so far, so good.

Which is to say, I can’t believe I’m still at it.

But since I am, let’s get down to a big old pile of that nattering away about random personal things, just like we used to blog when it was still old-school:

Sure, this blog (and domain) only goes back to April 2005, but my first three years — my Blogging Glory Days! (BGD) — were on Blogger, with mutiple posts every day. Unfortunately, Blogger/Blogspot somehow ate that old blog, but I was able to save all three years, and I’m making it available in a zipped-file format. Just right-click here then click Save-As. A lot of the layout doesn’t work like it should, since you won’t be accessing it on the same server on which the links were written, but it’s still all there.

Ah, those were the days, when not every fourth-grader and their pet lemur had a blog, when blogging was new and exciting, and when everybody, bloggers and civilians too, spent several hours a day checking out other people’s blogs.

Yes, it was a veritable Golden Age of lost productivity.

And I made lots of blogging friends then, many of whom are still around and still checking in here occasionally: Yay Kim, Pamibe, Gigglechick, RennyBA, The Presurfer … but back then I had several dozen blogfriends, all of whom checked out my blog (and I theirs) daily. Everybody was always frantically searching for fresh content to post, and that led to more and more blogs and sites to have to monitor, and more friends, most of whom don’t stop by here any more, just like I don’t stop by there.

But blogging has cooled a lot since that heyday, and most of us are just casually posting now. I guess it’s the nature of red-hot trends to burn brightly until they finally burn out.

So why am I still doing this? Here’s why: It’s a map of my 100 latest visitors, according to SiteMeter:

Pretty cool, huh? Look at that: Two in the Russian Federation! Turkey! Hong Kong! The Philippines! A veritable squadron of visitors from Germany!

People in Egypt are reading about me cooking a big pot of beans for the first time in two years!

Somebody in Taiwan knows about Bristol tearing up my wife’s barley-hull pillow!

My accounts of my pointless goings-on are boring somebody in Italy! And the Czech Republic! Brasil! Israel! Thailand!

There’s somebody checking me out in The Netherlands! (That’s The Presurfer, of course, which doesn’t make it any less amazing.)

Of course, the bulk of my readers are right here in the good old You Ess of Ay: Several wise-guy types in New Jersey and Jamaica, New York, have checked in today, as well as a half dozen or so people in Florida.

And I can’t figure out who is out there in Gouldbusk, Texas, apparently getting here from typing in the URL, and not from a link or search engine. The town is close to where my old college friend Terry lives now, and I think it’s also not far from where The Spook currently resides. (It might also be close to where Mollie is …)

And for that matter: If you’re the person out there in Louth, Ireland, who visits here fairly regularly without hitting a link somehow — leave a comment and let me know how you got here, how you found out about me. If you’re shy, just send me an email at brykmantra[at]gmail.com.

And for that matter, whoever is out there reading this, leave a comments!

This post wouldn’t be complete without some boring nonsense about my personal life, so here goes:

Today I raked about half the leaves in our back yard; I quit there because I had completely filled up our entire trash tote, as well as a 30-gallon paper leaf bag. Plus, if i overdo the squatting and lifting, I can really overdo those thigh muscles.

We finally got around to watching Casino Royale tonight. Daniel Craig takes some getting used to — he looks like some scruffy version of Kevin Costner that a cat dug up in the back yard — but I like the new Bond character better than all the old ones. This one has to actually work for his pay, and he gets pretty roughed up. This version of Bond is much grittier and down to earth; it just might work out pretty well.

We also watched lots of movies over the Christmas weekend: Die Hard 4 (eh — same old stuff), The Bourne Ultimatum (superhuman guy is three steps ahead of the entire U.S. intelligence community, with lots of formulaic foot- and car-chases in stock urban and exotic locales; this is the epitome of a color-by-numbers movie) , Transformers and Superbad. Those last two were okay, but nothing special.

Oh, and we also watched Ratatouille, which is excellent and hilarious, and which is serious about being about food. We definitely recommend it.

Okay, that’s all for now. Thanks for checking in on my Blogiversary, and please keep checking back.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is the Solstice, aka The First Day of Winter, aka The Shortest Day of the Year (in the Northern Hemisphere), anyway. Our Nordic friend Renny, who is particularly affected by the long nights where he lives (Oslo), has documented the short day with pictures.

I was just thinking last night how much I love winter … but it’s really more about how I love winter in Dallas — more to the point, how much nicer Dallas Winter is than Dallas Summer.

I used to love summer when I lived in Lubbock (low humidity, less misery) and hated winter (colder than here, snowier, and with frequent dust storms).

Funny how I how much my seasonal opinion has changed since then — but of course that’s easy when daytime temperatures have gotten up past 70F this week. I’ve been able to comfortably go on my 30-minute walks for three days in a row.

That all changes tomorrow, when, just in time, the weather will be celebrating winter with a high around 50F and freezing temperatures at night.

I feel like such a slug; here I am unemployed, and yet I sent out three Christmas cards just today (yours is on the way, Yay Kim!). In my defense, under the circumstances we’re only sending cards to those who sent to us (and not even all of those), and we had only received one of those incoming cards yesterday (from my former supervisor of 12 years). But for the cards I’m sending Curtis (former co-worker and office mate who jumped ship last month) and Kim, my only excuse is: Hey, I’m job-hunting! (BTW Kim, you get a bonus photo of The Brat!)

And finally: The legendary David Bowie/Bing Crosby Christmas special duet from 1976:

At about 8:20 tonight, there was a loud knock at our door — it was the local water department, telling us that there was a water main break around the corner, and that they would be shutting off water to the whole block in about 30 minutes.

We rushed into action: I washed the dishes (my wife had just made a batch of brownies), then filled pitchers and buckets with water. She got her nightly bath out of the way, then emptied the bathtub and refilled it so we would have an emergency reservoir. Plus, we already had a couple of cases of bottled water in the garage; also, as luck would have it, I loaded up on hand sanitizer early this year when it was on sale, so we’ll be able to keep out hands clean during this temporary shutoff.

It also helps that we’re able to put things in perspective: We’re thankful, first of all, that we’re not the water crew, having to work in the cold and the pouring rain; it’s been raining off and on for the past 24 hours, and it hasn’t let up all even. We appreciate what those guys are doing to try to get the neighborhood back online, waterwise.

We’re also lucky this week that we don’t live in Oklahoma, just a hop and a skip from here, in global terms; most of the state has been paralyzed this week with ice storms and power outages.

So we’re happy to flush with buckets and brush our teeth out of a bowl, and ride out this minor inconvenience.

Three news items from friends, ranked from gladdest to saddest:

1. This isn’t actually news, but I had mentioned that Yay Kim was participating in National Solo Album month, and, for a limited time, you can download and listen to her finished work!

I listened to it last night, and it’s great — you wouldn’t know (if you didn’t already) that she knocked the whole thing out in just a month.

2. I don’t know if I’ve told you about my friend Nick back home. He and I had been friends since we were babies together in the church nursery, then I moved away, and for the last 20 years or so I’ve only seen him when I go home to see my mom.

Ten years ago last April, he was diagnosed with Multiple Myaloma and given six months to live. He eventually beat the cancer through a combination of chemo, radiation, and bone marrow transplant.

Then the cancer returned, so he beat it again. Six months has turned into almost 11 years now.

Still, not everything is totally peachy; something unexpected has happened:

Early this morning, his house burned to the ground, and he and his family escaped with only the underwear they had on.

Bet that’s not what you thought I was going to say, is it?

But anyway, my mom says they’re all okay. His parents have a big house, and lots of people in town are pitching in to help.

First order of business: Getting everybody some pants.

Then, shirts.

Seriously, though: He’s taking it all in stride, and compared to two bouts with cancer, this is probably nothing to him.

Dodging death is his specialty, it seems.

3. Our good blogging pal Pamibe‘s sweet chubby little dachshund Zoe passed away late last month, and she wasn’t even ten years old.

And you know us: Somebody losing a pet, even if we’ve never met the person or canine in question, is often sadder than when a close friend loses a family member, especially for my wife.

Because let’s face it, dogs are better than people. It’s a proven fact.

Anyway, go check out little Zoe’s pictures, read her memorial, and grieve with the rest of us.

Here are a bunch of mostly unrelated things, many of them I’ve been saving up for a while, waiting for a chance to post unrelated things …

So here we go:

I didn’t post this with my last post because the video part isn’t much — it’s just the end credits of the video game Portal — but what’s important is the excellent song, “Still Alive”, sung by Ellen McLain (a voice actor in Portal, as well as the other two “Orange Box” games) and written by Jonathan Coulton, who also wrote the song that became the theme for the G4TV animated series, Code Monkeys.

Anyway: “Still Alive” is excellent, so run the video and listen to it:

Speaking of good music, we’ve been watching The Next Great American Band on Fox (mainly because there’s not much else TV on on Friday nights), and except for the mediocre “artists” they make the bands cover (especially Billy Joel and Rod Stewart), it’s pretty good. We’re especially impressed by Light of Doom, a hard-rocking group of kids with a great work ethic and a healthy respect for the classic rock acts.

Hey Spook, Here’s the business we should have gotten into: Selling tumbleweeds for $25 a pop. This woman was learning HTML a few years ago, and had to pick a subject to build a test site around, so she constructed a fake tumbleweed-selling site, offering the rolling shrubs at $25 each.

That is, it was fake, until people (Yankees?) with more money that sense started sending in orders …

Now she’s making a good living at it.

Maybe you can figure out how to sell sandstorms.

Remember, target Yankees.

One interesting by-product of the writer’s strike is the fact that the Tonight Show is showing reruns from Leno’s first year on the job. It’s interesting seeing Jay with dark hair and wide lapels, trying to make Johnny Carson’s old formula work.

His current strategy fits him much better, standing closer to the audience, and interspersing the monologue with skits and props.

Carson’s routine wouldn’t work for everybody — in fact, there were a lot of times it didn’t work for him.

What are the odds that Evel Knievel would die of something as mundane as diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis? He spent almost half his life doing crazy dangerous stunts, but death couldn’t claim him during that time.

Just goes to show you: You never can tell …

Do you have too much time on your hands? This person does: Cowscapes.

I’ve been compiling various links for a week, and finally the ones that apply to video have reached critical mass, so let’s let off a little pressure and release those into the wild:

Dallas doesn’t doesn’t have a good alternative station. KDGE (the Edge) used to be, but about all they play these days seems to use an orchestra of buzzsaws as their main musical motif. Even the local college radio stations don’t showcase the alternative bands the way they’re supposed to. (If anybody out there knows any different about Dallas college radio, please let me know, but when I researched it a month or so ago, there was diddley-squat in the department.) Oddly enough, where the whole DFW metroplex fails, Lubbock succeeds: Texas Tech’s radio station KTXT-FM is a wonderful source of great new music. Every time I pass through there I come away knowing at least three new bands that I really like; if I could just remember to listen to their online stream more often (or if it would work more often), I wouldn’t be able to keep up with all the quality tunage.

But I digress.

I fully intend to ramble even more aimlessly in the future on that subject, but for now, the point I was trying to make was that another good source of good new music, in the absence of good radio stations, is TV commercials.

I’m serious: Ad agencies these days are freakishly good at finding good new music, and internet users are freakishly good at posting lyrics and videos of the commercials.

Case in point is the new J C Penney’s Christmas commercial, with a catchy little tune by a band I’d never heard of called The Weepies. You can watch the commercial here, or stay on this page and hear the song while you watch this neat little “video Christmas card”:

There are more cool ads I’ve seen lately, but I’m sure you’ve heard your own new favorite songs during commercial breaks, so if a Google search with key words in quotes (plus the words “lyrics”) doesn’t turn up the artist, try going to Splendad and searching for the name of the business running the ad, or just browse the site and you’ll probably find that it’s been requested by others as well.

Next: If you ask me, and I know you would if you could, nobody raps like middle-aged Singapore bureaucrats:

(Via Attack of the Show, as is this next one:)

Next up: What’s the current biggest criminal threat in this country? Junk-food-hungry cross-dressers, of course:

And finally: You might have seen this already, but here’s the wackiest ref call of the year (the funny part starts about 39 seconds in):

Things keep happening, and there’s never been any time to spell it all out, but here’s the big thing from the past weekend: My cousin from Austin was in town with her husband to see an old school friend on friday, but her husband fell in the hotel shower and hit his head, so he’s been in ICU here locally ever since then.

So I’ve been going up there everyday and just sitting around with them, and catching up with her and her daughters. It’s especially good to see Becca again, who I practically grew up with (during holidays and vacations, anyway), but who lately I’ve been seeing about everyh 6 or 7 years: Last year at Thanksgiving, before that in 2000, and before that in 1993. I’ve got other relationships like that too — Spook, Terry, James — friends that I spent a lot of time with for years, and now I’ll see or communicate with them about once every two presidential terms (or more) , and we’ll catch each other up on our lives in the interim, then we’ll go our ways again. (Except for the Spook, of course, who has been keeping contact by email these past five years.) I think that must be a common experience these days.

It’s like a really good TV series that you used to watch, but now they only make two episodes a year. It’s kind of a weird feeling, but it’s better than no contact at all.

Anyway, this next thing is unrelated, but I saw it today, and if I wait until it’s on-topic, I’ll never remember it so here goes (via Attack of the Show:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been trying to find something to differentiate himself from the rest of the GOP pack, and it looks like he’s found TWO things: 1) Chuck Norris, and 2) A sense of humor.

Anyway, tomorrow’s another day of job-hunting, and I’ve got a lead on a place that’s only five miles from my house. I can put up with a lot of crap for only a five-mile drive. Wish me luck.

My wife has always described me as “eclectic” — that is, when she’s in a good mood; I can’t mention how she describes me when she’s not …

BUT SERIOUSLY: She especially refers to my musical tastes as eclectic — and as if to prove her point to the world, pictured at right are the four CD’s I checked out from the library last Sunday. They are, clockwise from upper left, Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues (their first post “Mersey Beat” album, and one of the few I don’t have on CD); a faux-exotic New Age compilation double album called Krishna Beats; a fairly new band with their self-titled album Morningwood (Get it?? Get it?? Ha!) — not exactly Chicks with Guitars, just Chick Lead Singer Who Really Rocks; and finally (Texas in the house!), Willie Nelson’s magnum opus from 1977, Red Headed Stranger.

A fine collection, all told. Who says the unemployed can’t have fun?

But let’s go back to Morningwood (heh!) for a bit: The album’s really great, and I’m really, really fond of one song in particular, To the Nth Degree, even though I usually shy away from songs based on cliches.

And now you can hear it for yourself, decorated nicely by this cool album-cover video. Enjoy!

It’s Todn8r‘s birthday today, and if he had bothered to give me his current email address, I would have already sent my birthday greetings personally, but since he didn’t, I feel forced to post this very flattering photo of him wearing the jersey of his favorite sports team in the world.

Isn’t that right, Todn8r? You like the ‘Skins, dontcha?

Anyway, happy birthday, old man! (I gave you your present earlier in the year, when I talked you into playing Oblivion. You’re welcome.)