the size of our world uses images of various celestial bodies set on a virtual table top to illustrate the size differences between the planets in our solar system and the major stars in the sky. very illuminating – i didn’t realize neptune was so much larger than earth and i certainly didn’t realize that antares is freakin’ ginormous.
via boing boing
holy crap is it raining. so much thunder and it goes on for so long – my windows are continuously shaking. thunderstorms make me miss home. opening the front door and standing on the porch – looking over the front yard, across the court and into the trees on the other side, watching the rain come down. the sound of the rain pelting the roof and rattling in the gutters and downspouts. the smell of rain in the air on a warm night. my cat peeking her head around the doorframe to see what i see. sticking an arm out over the porch steps to feel the fresh rain on my skin. listening to the rain rustling the trees and falling asleep to the sound of it all.
maybe it’ll rain while i’m home this weekend.
headline: Defense Minister Resigns Via Text Message
this somehow reminds me of that episode of ‘sex and the city’ where berger breaks up with carrie in a post-it note or that time my boyfriend broke up with me via email – completely lame but still hilarious.
via gizmodo
this QTVR piece by kozyndan is, at first glance, really cute. penguin balloons, happy tanuki graf artists and adorable yellow creatures eating fruits. then you slowly realize that horrible things are happening. the rabbits are tipping over the turtles. the gingerbread men are crying over their lost limbs. the tomatoes are screaming as the big yellow creature eats them.
to cheer you up i direct you to the amorous nudibranches
via boing boing via eric
this weekend i was pretty much only home to sleep – i’ll have to catch up tonight 🙂
friday charlie and i saw the fast and the furious 3: tokyo drift (which apparently was given three stars by roger ebert) which was incredibly entertaining. the first reveal of these two cars drifting side by side was AWESOME. afterwards we blew half a tank of gas – premium gas; we drove down lake shore drive and shot lower wacker drive three or four times. i really need to get a car.
saturday was the first day of the intonation music festival. i met cecile at her place and we went over together. jim boggs (in town for a visit before he moves to london next month) showed up a few hours later and we spent the whole day lying in the sun listening to good music. saw brian cagle, who had AD-ed on galileo’s grave, zach and a whole slew of cecile’s friends. lady sovereign and the streets played that night and while the performances weren’t outstanding, it was still a lot of fun. after the show we walked to tuman’s and met up with andrew, christine and jim’s old flatmate, angelo. we drank, danced, i ran into patrese, got hit on by a dj and hit the pillow sometime after 3am.
sunday morning i had organized a galileo’s grave reunion lunch – some of us met at three happiness in chinatown for dim sum. it was fantastic and a good assortment of people were able to make it. as we were finishing though, i realized i had forgotton my ticket to intonation at home. i spent the next two and a half hours on trains and buses criss-crossing the city. not. fun. when i got to my apartment i was incredibly bored with public transportation so i wanted to grab my ipod too…d’oh! left that at work. i dug out my cd player instead, hoped it still worked (it did, but has no shock protection) and was on my way.
i ended up getting to intonation in the middle of annie’s set. i found cecile, jim and angelo and we hung out the rest of the day eating various fried foods and drinking 312s. the guy giving out the over-21 bracelets was bizarrely entertained by the size of my wrist. saw more zach and more of cecile’s friends – this girl knows everyone. sunday night bloc party was the headliner, and i have never seen so many enraptured hipster boys. they put on a really good show (bloc party put on the good show. well, i guess the panting hipster boys put on a good show too, but replace the word ‘good’ with ‘amusing, though mildly pathetic’). it rained a little during bloc party, but it was ok because it made everyone feel more hard-core. go ahead, laugh. but you know EXACTLY what i mean.
afterwards cecile and i were both tired and had to get up for work the next day so we headed home. waiting for the western bus this guy (also named angelo) started up a conversation with us – he had obviously underestimated our ages because he kept asking where we went to school. he kept talking all the way up past belmont where he exited – topics of conversation included: how he could get me a job in catering ($12/hour!), confusion about cecile’s origins (“you’re canadian? but…you look asian”), anime and underground hip hop, which he apparently is really into. he’s putting an album together as a producer and is looking for some people who can “lay down rhymes”.
ok seriously – i spent the whole bus ride trying not to laugh and the whole conversation seemed like it was really making the day of every other bus patron – but this guy was really nice and i seriously hope his album is super awesome and he makes it big. it was a pretty good cap to the weekend though. after angelo left the bus i put in the streets and listened to that all the way home – which took about another 40 minutes due to bus schedules at that time of night.
this weekend is the 4th of july weekend…and i don’t know what to do. seems like there will be things going on here (maybe?) but my brother is in town back home and my family really wants me to come home for the whole time so everyone can be together, etc. maybe i’ll just go for two days or something? i don’t know if we get monday off work or not and i have a haircut friday evening, so who knows.
at eric’s behest i got signed up for last.fm awhile ago. it’s neat – i can see what i’ve been listening to – top artists by week and everything, so that’s cool. but the ‘neighbors’ function, which seems like the whole point since that is the social networking part of it, isn’t working for me. neighbors are supposed to be people with similar music tastes. you look at their music and maybe you see some stuff you haven’t heard of that you’ll like also.
except.
i think my diverse musical tastes are screwing with this. for instance, today i’ve been listening to beatnuts, the streets, the pharcyde and rjd2. other days i’ll listen to josh rouse, ben folds, death cab and the high speed scene. if i’m alone at work i’ll listen to something girly like nikka costa or anna nalick. sometimes i’ll go sort of obscure and listen to some songs:ohia or my friend ryan. or, i’ll ‘rock’ some blockhead, boom bip and telefon tel aviv. suffice to say, last.fm doesn’t know what to do with me.
this was published a bit ago, but here is an article at new media caucas which features a photo i took of the tropicália exhibit at the mca last year.
pat: OH!
pat: i need to go get tacos!
kara: oooo
pat: yeah, i go to this taco shop that all the immigrants hang out at
pat: it’s delicious
pat: and i think i’m the only one with a social security card for blocks
pat: it’s SOOOO good
from thursday through monday i was on set for ‘galileo’s grave’ and it was FANTASTIC. hands down the best set i’ve been on. maybe it was the awesome all-girl camera crew, maybe it was the 25′ crane, maybe it was the truck rig, maybe it was the ADs riding around set on the actor’s bicycles. i met a lot of cool people and got to know better or reconnected with others.
thursday was hot and sweaty – we were outside fro 9:30am to 5:00pm – but the rest of the weekend felt like october. friday and saturday nights everyone was bundled up in multiple layers except for a few brave grips who were still rocking shorts and tshirts.
besides the crane shot and the shots from the back of the pickup truck we also did a lot of shots from ladders. except for a few time-lapse inserts and a shot of a computer screen, the entire film was hand-held or steadicam. we shot all over the north side of chicago – clark & bryn mawr, bohemian national cemetery – and out on the west side and in arlington heights.
it’s a little disconcerting to hear your friends say things like “this is the car we’ll have when we have kids” or “i just bought a building on the west side” or “isn’t your biological clock ticking yet?”