People who totally look like other people, or things:
Some of the finest school and glamour photos ever taken in one collection:
And finally, hot chicks with “men named after a feminine cleansing product”:
People who totally look like other people, or things:
Some of the finest school and glamour photos ever taken in one collection:
And finally, hot chicks with “men named after a feminine cleansing product”:
(Title is a reference to Finding Nemo)
Oh, yeah, let’s build a Halloween costume, Jessica. Oh, that would be fun, wouldn’t it, being that you have a party to go to and a costume-judging contest at work. Good times. Except that I wanted to be a cute little scarecrow-type-person, so I went to the twig district (I love New York, they have a twig district) and bought a whole bunch and suplemented those with some from my mother’s garden and now my bedroom is filled with bits of bark and tiny little gnats and I ended up not using most of the twigs anyway, bleagh. Stupid costume. I better win that damn contest, that’s all I’m sayin’.
Last weekend I went to the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival. I heard there would be bunnies and llamas and alpacas and punkin’ chunkin’, I just had to go. So my mom and I took the two-hour ride up to Rhinebeck, NY. The weather was gorgeous, the leaves were changing and it was just so durn pretty. And lookit – I took pictures.
Right in the entrance you were greeted by a pen with two lovely rams with spotted noses and pretty horns.
Then immediately after that, there were lemurs! I know! I was surprised too.
Ring-tailed lemurs, three of them hanging around a heat lamp:
And a brown lemur who looked slightly deranged and sleep-deprived, but I think that’s just how they look:
And a super-Qte kangaroo sunbathing.
Mmm, tasty sun. Do you see the pouch-hole? It’s a lady roo.
Then there’s the food booths, all kinds of predictable and unpredictable fair options. I had just had brunch (I really freakin’ love a good Bloody Mary. It’s always a good day when you start with alcoholic gazpacho.) so I passed on pretty much everything offered, but they had deep-fried dough, baked potatoes with a myriad of toppings, ice cream, caramel apples (okay, I TOTALLY had one of those, SO worth it), sheep cheese sellers and this booth, which clearly sold a little of everything.
Well-painted signage, too. My favorite are the two signs inside the booth, one for pickles and one for cappuccino. It reminded me of one of my first dates with Cricket, when we went to the Museum of Natural History (“the wacky evolution museum”). We had toured it and needed lunch so we went to the cafeteria and I learned an important thing about Cricket, which is that he liked to dunk food items into other food items regardless of what either of those items are. We get lunch and Cricket gets a slice of pizza, some garlic knots and some raspberry coffee. You can tell where this is going. Garlic knots right into the coffee. I was like, “O …kay, that’s an intriguing flavor combination.” Meanwhile a greasy garlic film is forming on his coffee and I’m considering dumping him right there, it was so gross. I didn’t and I’m glad I overlooked his strange dunking fetish. But when I saw the pickles and cappuccino signs right next to each other, I thought perhaps if Cricket was there, he would consider that an excellent dunking situation. Moving on.
Shortly after the food options was the fiddling competition. Really. I have pictures. Look, fiddling.
Waiting for their turn to fiddle.
More kids waiting for their turn to fiddle. I had no idea there were this many fiddle-playing aficionados in upstate New York.
And then, sheep. A great multitude of sheep. Come meet some sheep. This one had cool horns.
Different angle on horny (tee hee!) ram.
These are sheep getting judged for whatever sheepish (snork!) qualities the judges look for. I also learned sheep hate being judged.
They make a shrieking “BAAAAAHAA!” noise and try to kick, they are not all poised like show dogs. However, outside the ring, they can imitate lap dogs.
Awww. That’s Sue. Sue the Sheep. She likes to sit on her owner’s lap and just hang out. Isn’t she sweet?
Every farm that was there got a pen, and you could hang a sign telling people who you were and what kinds of sheep you bred, wool you had, etc. Most signs were just big vinyl ones, but this one was different and charming.
And this one made me want to give the owners of the farm a big underpants wedgie.
Then we moved onto the llamas. Big, fluffy llamas. Here is a llama peering at me through clothing made with his fiber. He’s an inquisitive llama.
But some llamas are not as bright. This llama was staring off into the distance. See how his mouth is full of hay? He’s not chewing it. Just, you know, blankly staring. Holding hay in his mouth. I would like to think that he was thinking about something very important that required all of his brain power, but I’m guessing he was listening to the breeze gently flow through his empty head.
There were alpacas there too, but I forgot to take pictures of them. Just imagine a smaller llama with a cushion of fluffiness on their heads. That’s what an alpaca looks like. There were also some rabbits there, angora and lionhead rabbits, and they were just delightful. I was so busy petting them that I forgot to take pictures of them. I found some on the internet, though.
Lionhead rabbits:
Angora rabbits:
And did I mention there was some wool at this thing? Oh, there was wool.
Rooms and rooms of the stuff.
WOOL. TONS OF WOOL.
By then, Mom and I were tired, so we headed out and on out way back to the car, we saw the kangaroo again. And the little joey was poking its little joey face out of the pouch! Everyone standing around melted like sno-cones in the sun. So precious.
Also, I wanted to add that I saw a woman there with a baby boy, and the baby boy was sporting the most delightful hat.
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=16012273
That’s the baby, and that’s the hat. Go buy it for everyone you know. The hat, I mean.
And this woman has a video blog about 2006’s festival (which looks identical to this year’s festival) I recommend you watch it.
http://letsknit2gether.com/2006/11/01/episode-005-nys-sheep-and-wool-festival/
I saw Religilous this weekend. It was a rough movie to watch. I don’t like movies where simple regular people are made fun of without them knowing it. That’s why I didn’t like Borat. And this movie was just chock full of hurtful mockery of people’s beliefs. It’s sad to watch, regardless of how silly I believe their faith to be. The point of the movie was Bill Maher basically proving how idiotic and irrational religion is, which (surprise!) did not go over well with the devoted religious followers he was interviewing. Here’s the preview.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iUyAppOOU0
I won’t comment on whether I agreed with what he had to say because I try to stay away from inflammatory topics here, but I will say that opposed to the usual “religion is dumb because it’s all fairy tales” argument most atheists take, Bill most eloquently said something along the lines of:
“I am a preacher. I am preaching doubt. We don’t know what happens after we die or if there’s a God. And I’m okay with that. A great deal of people are not. However, now we have the luxury of doubt. When a man is in prison and he says, ‘Jesus is all I got,” that’s fine. When a man is in a foxhole, he needs God. But our society is well-fed and well-taken care of, we have scientific answers for things, the concerns of the black plague are no longer a major concern. Yet people, people who are rational and intelligent in every other aspect of their lives, choose to believe that a man lived in a big fish – I can’t understand that.”
It was nice to hear an smart argument for a change. Religilous is the kind of film that sticks with you for a long time. You go to sleep, you’re thinking about it. You wake up, you’re thinking about it. You see large masses of people (which I do all the time, I work in Herald Square next to Macy’s) and you wonder, “What does that person believe? And that person? And does the first person hate the second person for their religious orientation? And how much is your religion based on what religion you grew up with?” It’s a gristle-y film that you have to chew on for a while.
I saw Religilous on Friday night. On Saturday, I went with my mom to the city and saw the play A Man For All Seasons. Wow, that was a bad idea. Not the play, the play was excellent and Frank Langella was freakin’ awesome as usual. It’s just that when one is still reeling from Religilous, it is a poor idea to see a play about a man getting beheaded for his morals and devotion to the Catholic church. Technically, Sir Thomas More was beheaded for not signing the document that King Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn and sire sons (all this brought about the beginning of the Church of England). I wanted to scream at him, “Sign the damn document! Just sign it! Bless the stupid divorce already! God doesn’t care! He’s busy with other things, like creating a new kind of badger or something! Sign the document!” I probably would have enjoyed it a great deal more if I wasn’t all rankled up the night before. Oh, well.
I just saw this and thought it was so beautiful I had to share it.
http://www.eddieross.com/eddie_ross/2008/10/pumpkins.html
Long story short: Man buys small pumpkins. Man cuts them out from the bottom. Man drills holes in pumpkins. Man puts tea lights in pumpkins. Man impresses the crap out of me.
I love Glowing Pumpkin Stairwell. The only thing I would do differently is I would try to rig it with battery-powered fake little tea lights so I wouldn’t have to go around relighting tea lights all night. Those suckers burn out pretty fast. But other than that, simply stunning.
I like to keep everyone updated on the type of spam I receive. Most of the time it’s sexually related and pretty blunt: “Things that go into other things! Different people, different places!! Click here!!!” Now I’m getting spam with one of these as the beginning:
Hello design-newyork.com , grim for my spam, I realy desperate straits moneys, I’am a inadequate student…
Hello design-newyork.com , stark for my spam, I realy emergency moneys, I’am a pitiable student…
Hello design-newyork.com , grim for my spam, I realy dire moneys, I’am a as a church-mouse student…
And then it goes into More Things Into Things!!!. I totally don’t get this new trend. In my mind I see this little Victorian boy dressed in rags in the street peddling smut to make a shilling. “Please sir, if I don’t sell this mature lesbian video, Mummy won’t be able to feed all us. One of us will go hungry again unless someone purchases this granny-on-granny lovefest.”
1. Holly Madison left Hugh Hefner as his primary concubine because he is unable to make babies and she wants babies. DUDE. He’s OLD. His spermies are dusty and brittle. They’re like that blanket up in your grandmother’s attic. If you move it and bend it too much, POOF! it turns into a powder due to dry rot. Like a certain person’s little flagellators. Also, what was she, like 30? She’s past her Playboy prime. It’s about that time for Hef to get a set of shiny new jiggly gigglers. Which he has done. 19-year-old identical twins, no less. Delightful.
2. Head’s up to the two homeless twenty-somethings I pass on my way to work: Perhaps if you had not spent your money to get unattractive tattoos all over your face, thus preventing you from working in many fine establishments around the country, you might not have to be panhandling. Just a little fiscal wisdom from your Auntie Jessica.
3. Nothing warms the cockles of my heart more than walking to work with big displays of dismembered heads and screaming skulls. I truly dislike Halloween sometimes. Patton Oswalt, one of my most favoritest comedians ever, summed up what it was like when I lived at home with my parents in True Suburbia (fast-forward to 3:10):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFI9siGOT7s
That sums it up perfectly. Really.
Aaaand I’m done. Sweaty and tired, but done. Mixed up a bluer blue-green, took off all the tape and painted the hell out of the bathroom.
Voila:
My arm hurts and I’m going to take a shower now and chisel all this paint offa my skin with a toothbrush. Really. This is some tenacious paint, bro. But I’m extremely pleased. Totally happy.
Okay, I’ve taped out the bathroom and put down a base coat.
I mixed up the paint and it looked perfect and then I put on a coat and the yellow came to the surface and now instead of bluey-greenish, it’s greeny-blueish. And I’m pissed-ish. So now I have to mix up a new color with more blue to counteract the yellow. Deep breaths, deep breaths. It will all be okay. I also laid out my stencils and painted them in.
I will mix the new color and continue on my merry way and hopefully I’ll be done by tonight. Hopefully.
My guest bathroom has some issues. It’s got glass on one side with the shower and on the other side it’s pure white and there’s no cohesive thread between the two. One would think to just hang artwork on the white side that had those glass colors in it, but I already have art that I want to hang in the bathroom and it has no glass-green in it. Therefore, I am making a mural, of sorts. I traced where the art would go and incorporated the plugs, switches, towel rack, etc. into the design with ornate elements. I made sketches just to give me a rough idea of where I wanted things to go.
Then I went into Illustrator and built the ornate elements so I could cut out stencils for myself.
Now I’m taping out my bathroom so I get nice straight lines. By tonight I should have pictures of that.