Gramarye

Flickr Photo Download: Platforming

This cormorant is clearly in training to be a game sprite.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that before there was email spam, there was fax spam:

Is it too soon to start making godzilla references? Probably, huh.

In the wake of yesterday’s earthquakes, Japan is today reporting that leaks at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant are worse than first reported.

In addition to a leak of radioactive water into the Sea of Japan, reports say that drums with nuclear waste lost their lids and radioactive gases were released into the atmosphere.

Nuclear leaks after Japan quake are worse than first reported - Wikinews, the free news source

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Every so often I find myself going for a longish walk; frequently this takes the course of walking somewhere that I would normally use some other transportation to get to; occasionally I just wind up walking nowhere in particular. Today, even though I’ve been feeling fairly sick for the better part of a week, I went someplace that was particularly nowhere in particular, if that makes sense.

I started by walking downtown and wandering around a bit; along the way I picked up breakfast in the form of a crepe w/fried egg and swiss cheese. I considered stopping at one of the many bookstores in the area, or raiding the Berkeley Public Library, but the library was closed and I was carrying two bags that I was loathe to surrender to a hung-over counter jockey with full body piercings. So I just wandered, and pretty soon, I had momentum built up.

I walked up Shattuck about as far as it would go, through the Gourmet Ghetto, etc., although I wasn’t at all hungry, so I didn’t actually go into any of the many, many restaurants. I did take pictures of a few menus for my sister, including that of Chez Panisse; I know she’ll be interested in their contents.

I walked from there down Solano to San Pablo (i.e., through Albany), and then followed a helpful sign towards the nearest BART station, which turned out to be El Cerrito Plaza, which made for a third city. I took BART back to downtown Berkeley and walked back from there, for a total of around six-seven miles, all while carrying a fair amount of crap. (Much more than I would have chosen to carry if I’d realized I was going to do this when I left the house.)

Only a few photographic opportunities; the neighborhoods through which I passed once I left my home territory are very, very white, populated by the rather bizarre yuppies that sprung from the chrysalis of a whole generation of hippies. The confluence of personal wealth (and the vested socio-economic interests that go with it) and participation in the mainstream economy (i.e., having a job and a mortgage) with a desperate clinging to the trappings of a long-lost and in most cases originally tenuous revolutionary idealism is…funny, but not in a way that creates interesting people or places. There’s a little tunnel (it probably has a name I should learn) with interesting water damage, but that’s about it.

This, coupled with the very anticlimactic discovery of a rather lame yarn shop (ktog, or somesuch), made for a relatively pointless trip. Although if there is a point to these peregrinations, I don’t think it’s anything to do with where I’m going. More likely it’s some desperate urge for exercise breaking out, or a somatic expression of self-loathing, or something.

I did find a couple of potentially interesting breakfast joints (a good breakfast is hard to find) that I may return to later (possibly using some form of transportation other than my feet), so I suppose there is some practical upshot….but still. I wish my subconscious would let me know when these things are coming so I can plan ahead for things like pack weight, proper hydration, and chafing minimization.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here yet, but I recently got some pretty awesome (for me, anyway) images of our friend the Egyptian goose at work.

See also the “flickr set I just mentioned”:http://flickr.com/photos/kukkurovaca/sets/72157600762940371/ in the last post. There are some other good shots of the egyptian, along with a sampling of cormorants, egrets, herons, and terns.

I’ve been, and I quote here, “blog-meme-tagged,”:http://www.bisso.com/epea/2007/07/8-factoids-about-this-bloggista.html by the artist formerly known as Uncle Jazzbeau. I’m supposed to state the rules now, although I’m 100% sure that I won’t be able to remain in compliance with them.

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
4. At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

h3. One

For some time now, *any* time I leave the house, I am certainly wearing a hat (felt or straw fedora), suspenders, and glasses, and carrying a camera. A few years ago, none of these things were true, and not only did I not wear suspenders, me tucking my shirt in was so rare an occasion that I could and did use it as a *halloween costume*. I have several friends who have not seen me in person since this transition took place.

h3. Two

I became a prolific knitter starting a year ago this past February; this was several months after completing a NaNoWriMo novel in which, coincidentally, the textile arts played an important role. I could really have used then the knowledge I acquired later about, well, textiles.

h3. Three

I was, very briefly, a cub scout and later a “webelos”, or somesuch. I was never much good at carving things, but I was the best shot in my troop with a rubber band gun.

h3. Four

I’ve traveled across the country (coast to coast) by train, plane, and automobile, providing “automobile” includes buses. While traveling through Utah on a Greyhound bus, I fell asleep. The bus had mechanical problems and had to return to its point of departure ahead of schedule. It took five people a considerable period of time to wake me when we arrived back at our point of origin. One fellow helpfully pointed out that they could have killed me easily, I was sleeping so soundly. Somehow, this wasn’t very creepy; he was clearly trying to be helpful.

h3. Five

I always find it surprising to discover that people (such as the esteemed nee Jazzbeau) are aware of this blog; I’ve gotten used to the idea of myself toiling in a corner of the internet so obscure as to resemble the open ocean beyond the archipelago in Le Guin’s Earthsea books: where things don’t answer to their names and all known magic ceases to function.

h3. Six

The previous fact once resulted in me semi-inadvertently starting a “trackback fight”:http://redshirtknitting.com/?p=897 with the inventor of the Tree Sweater (who also thus became the coiner of the term “trackback fight”).

h3. Seven

Together with a friend who will be mentioned in the section below, I invested considerable time in discovering Sanskrit terms equivalent to a certain f-initial vulgarity. His knowledge of Latin proved to be the essential element, since Sanskritists of old liked to use that language for their euphemisms. We also invested a fair amount of time in coining lewd neologisms in Sanskrit, my favorite being “svapayugrasta.” (Forgive my lack of diacritics. I keep forgetting to reinstall my custom keyboard after wiping my OS a few months back.)

h3. Eight

When I was a child, two gray geese attempted to kidnap me, seizing my shirt in their beaks and attempting to drag me off. Their intentions were not clear.

Lately, I’ve noticed that some of the birds in the channel near work (Canadian geese, ducks, and great egrets) have developed a habit of approaching quite closely and looking at me in what can only be described as a coy fashion. I would assume this is purely stale bread solicitation, except for two things: I never feed the birds at work (I never have the foresight to carry food on me, and besides, it’s not really good conditioning for the birds), and this only happens when there are no other birds or people around.

The last fact is a good excuse to link to my “flickr photoset of birds from the channel”:http://flickr.com/photos/kukkurovaca/sets/72157600762940371/

Now, I absolutely *do not* have eight currently blogging acquaintances on whom to inflict this meme. If I were still using my livejournal account, maybe, and any of my LJ friends who may still be reading can absolutely consider themselves “tagged” if it somehow tickles their fancy to do so. Most of my other friends and family are either too untechnical or too lazy to maintain blogs, or else harbor some secret deficiency that prevents them from wanting to broadcast their entire lives over the interweb.

Losers.

“Earthopus”:http://earthtopus.blogspot.com is the obvious first candidate, so there. Beyond that, I shall consider “digital graffiti,”:http://meme527.wordpress.com/ the blog of one of my flickr contacts, as fair game, since I’m in the blogroll. Theoretically, I could hit two in one with “Friendly Tentacle Monster,”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/friendlytentaclemonster
but that sucker has been dead for a while.

So, with apologies to all parties, for adhering to the rules to the extent that I did, for not adhering to them to the extent that I did not, and for the typographical and conceptual errors that are almost certainly scattered through the text above, owing to my being much, much too tired to blog.

Night, folks.

BTW, if anyone out there is reading this whom I don’t know about, do me a favor and email me at kukkurovaca AT gmail DOT com. I admit to a certain curiousity.

The BBC news story quotes a local woman, Suad Hussain, who claims to have been attacked by one of these creatures: “My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer”

Are the BBC tapping the elderly to do their translating, or did this woman learn an awesomely old-fashioned version of English? That sentence would have been perfect English usage 150 years ago.

Or maybe in Britain it still is. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t say it on Dr. Who, though, unless they were traveling in the past.

Boing Boing: UK troops rumored to be using man-eating badgers to attack Iraqis