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Some of the last of the cake mom made for me. It may not look like much here (and I don’t think the flash helped any), but it’s called Turtle Cake, and it’s actually two layers of cake that sandwich a layer of melted caramel, chocolate, and walnuts (if’n yer a nut sorta person). It’s good stuff, and you don’t even need to put icing on it!
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I ready this fabulous post somewhere on the web once that said, “If the Army ever issued guitars, they would issue Telecasters.” The point was that the Tele was a simple, durable piece of gear that would endure tons of misuse and abuse and still perform a myriad of duties with aplomb, that it was a very basic item, but it had the capacity to cover a number of duties that could be asked of it.
This here is Fender’s reissue of what the Army might have issued – the ’52 Telecaster. It’s paired up with an amplifier that’s an original of roughly the same vintage, a National amp probably from the late 40s or early 50s. Together this pairing is unbeatable for all kinds of traditional music. Anyone from Bob Wills to Muddy Waters to Jimmy Page could get what they wanted out of this setup. On the night this was taken, this combo did itself proud.
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Dad is helping me out with some of the bases for a few rolling ball sculptures that I’ll be making. I really wasn’t expecting anything more than for him to cut them to a basic shape and then maybe run some sandpaper over the corners, but he’s already done more than that! He’s the king of woodworking, so naturally he can’t just give them a quick rubdown with 400 grit and call it done. No, these things will have routed edges! Nice, eh? He’s talking about staining them and everything now. They’re going to be pretty awesome!
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Jem and I got another chance to work on the new drawing, and it’s coming along very well. Check out all we’ve added to it since just a few days ago on the 3rd of the month. Jem is doing this new stuff I haven’t seen, and I’m really digging it. My work seems to be almost completely devoid of the squiggle patterns which had dominated some of my previous work. I don’t know what that means, if anything, but it’s kind of scary and cool. Color comes next!
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It may not look like a gala event, but spirits were high at the coffee shop where we held our TGIO party following the end of yet another fantastic November for NaNoWriMo. It’s largely a general bag session, although things change from year to year, and apparently sometimes it’s been a bit more formal or dinner-oriented. One thing that is a continuing tradition, regardless of venue, is the reading of Autosummarized Novels.
There’s this function on Microsoft Word called “Autosummary.” What the true purpose for this is I have no idea, but it makes for big fun when combined with a novel of many thousands of words. What you do is, you highlight all your text, then select the function, and you can trim down your 50K-word novel to a summary of most-occurred phrases or sentences of between five hundred lines and ten words. We usually go for about 100 or 200 words. We gather these up and read them out loud, and they all sound rather ridiculous and repetitive and completely nonsensical – which kind of sums up how a lot of us feel while we’re in the middle of writing a novel of 50 thousand words in the time frame of a single month!
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World’s tiniest stage, or at least one of the tiniest I’ve ever had to play on. I can’t even reach my amp without squeezing around the bassist and holding my breath. That black box in the right rear corner? That’s their sound equipment. They ADDED that to the stage recently, because, apparently, there was too much room for things like humans in that corner. None of the guitarist’s gear is even on the stage at this point. I think we could have just built a drum riser by duct-taping our collected amplifiers and gear cases together, and then we could have all stood next to each other and played without moving anything besides our digits and/or lips.
I’m always grateful to have a place to play, but there’s almost no place to have a place here! Gah!
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Is it an airplane? A submarine? A tank??? WHAT IS IT?
I was very, very, VERY lucky to get this close to The Golden Submarine, which is not a submarine at all. Rather, it is a car, a very unusual and amazing automotive artistic achievement. I saw this car in a magazine a month ago. Never in my life would I have imagined that about thirty days later a woman would say to me, “You wanna know where the best photograph is on this car? Come around here to the back and lean up against it and look through the back window!”
No way. NO WAY! Not only did I get to see it up close, I got to (breathe deep here, steady…) LEAN ON IT!!!!
I took a nice collection of photos, but this one has the most “What IS that?!” going on with it, so I put it up for fun. If you would like to see some other photos and the story behind the car, go here. That’s right, I stood next to and against THAT!
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Like a welcome breath of fresh air, the collaborative drawings with Jem return! Our projects were on hiatus for all of November while I banged out my novel in various coffee shops and restaurants in and around the Circle City, but now that NaNo has passed, it is time to return to these fantastic explosions of color and design. This one was started brand new this evening, and I have to say that I’m really, really friggin’ pleased with how it’s looking already! If you compare this with some of our others, you’ll notice that there are some real interesting changes taking place in the line art. Stuff is showing up that wasn’t present on our earlier stuff. It’s kind of weird, but kind of cool. More will be revealed as we continue, I’m sure.
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Even more lame today! I’m not even moving!
I promise, better stuff is on the way…
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Apparently too toasted the day after finishing a novel to do more than shoot a quick snap while driving.