The Pale King

There was a great article in the New Yorker this week about Michael Jackson. It made me sad. Just look at this guy!

Buckyball

The Madison Square Park Conservancy has rotating exhibits throughout the year -- usually very large, illuminated ones. I walked by the below exhibit last night and there was a DJ playing ambient techno and zero-gravity recliners surrounding the glowing "Buckyball." I stopped and watched and listened and fell into artist Leo Villareal's aesthetic trap: to find order from chaos. The ball is lit by randomly programmed LED lights, but from the way they change color and move from panel to panel it appears as if there is some pattern. 

As the Conservancy's blurb puts it: "BUCKYBALL will trigger neurological processes within the brain, calling on our natural impulse to identify patterns and gather meaning from our external environment."

Just for a minute -- makes you really wonder about the chaos of the city -- especially with Mr. Empire State Building glaring down at the park. How much of our urban experiences are truly chaotic, made coherent only by our subjective interpretation? How much of what I do every day actually makes sense? (On some days it feels like very little, which is what working in an office will do to you.)

This is a dangerous exhibit. If more people took a look at this during their lunch break, they might quit their jobs!

Stickyrice

Shiny silver fairy floss light shades project batik snowflake patterns on the ceiling. Striking pink lotus float in clean calm ponds. Austere, confident bronze figures both recline and stand to attention.

"Good evening and welcome to Wild Lotus."

Plants and Animals

Here are some things in my house.

Watts. He was only here for the weekend.

The Wizard. She thought the tree was filled with mice (no joke).

Chayote vine. I meant to eat it... then it sprouted.

French lavender. It's almost three years old!

Mouse. The only one alive...

Grocery store vine.

Clementines and eggshells in the Christmas tree.

Crossroads

I can't stop listening to this.

"Little Patch of Heaven"

The perfect singing aside, there is something totally entertaining about watching four middle-aged, paunchy guys have such a great time.

And this:

"Lucky Old Sun"

I'm no Deadhead by a long shot, but this sure is beautiful:

[stills from The Grateful Dead's Sunshine Daydream, 1972, Veneta, Oregon]

The Morgan Library

I went to the Morgan Library during my lunch break last week. It's not a huge actual library but rather a museum of a preserved library of its former tenant - the Mr. Pierpont Morgan, grandfather of J.P. Morgan of banking fame. The man had a study with velvet-lined walls, a steel vault for rare books, the original manuscript for"Yankee Doodle Dandy," and a death mask of George Washington. Insane!!

Cuneiform tablets

A gilded bible from the Carolingian era...

A Gutenberg Bible... ::drool::

The library

More library

A busy week

At least we have a date on Friday! (We're going to see "Lincoln.")

Label designs

I was thinking up some label designs for our cider (Circus Mouse Cider) and our beer (Fat Wizard Wheat). We've been painstakingly removing labels from all of our collected bottles and will soon replace them with our own, along with custom-designed caps -- the first step to legitimacy! Which ones do you like? I think we might go with the top one on each page.

HALLOWEEN

"The Price is Right" contestants

A Black Swan

The man on the left: "I'm just a woman."

Captain America

The Madonna and Child

Notes from NY

View through a fence: abandoned lot on 1st Avenue, East River.

Hilarious bulletin from the church my orchestra rehearses in

Don fishing for blue crabs in the East River

Rudy's Barbershop: 29th St., Manhattan

A finished persimmon

The Legend of Zelda

You need to watch this.

Cider!

We brewed a cider! We didn't press the apples ourselves (maybe someday...) but the fermentation and bottling was all us. We used 2 gallons of orchard-fresh cider and champagne yeast, which gave it nice small bubbles and a really clean taste. We dry-hopped one gallon -- poured the cider over a bag of dry hops as we bottled it -- and you can taste the piney hops a little bit. It's strong, too, and extra dry. 100% fermented success on the first try!

We're planning on doing many more batches, so if you have any creative ideas, send them our way! A ginger cider/beer, pear cider, and honeydew melon cider and are potential next batches...

We have one more batch fermenting in the closet right now: 3 gallons of Apple & Eve apple juice dumped on top of a German yeast cake from our last batch of wheat beer. It's pretty stinky... fermentation looks healthy, though!

RIP Sax Russell

Mr. Sax has died.

Our landlady turned off the heat at night, and we didn't have a heat lamp for him. I was asleep when Don came home and found him hibernating -- a deadly coma-like stage for African hedgehogs like Sax.  He tried to warm him up for an hour and a half, and he looked like he was improving a little bit. But when we woke up the next morning, his body was stiff. Our little hedgehog is dead.

Nowhere in our hedgehog research, nor in the care package provided to us by our breeder, did anyone mention hibernation. Temperature was casually mentioned ("your home's room temperature is typically fine") but no recommendations were made for heat lamps or extra insurance against the cold (i.e., anything under 65° F). No one mentioned that if your hedgehog begins hibernation will he die within hours. We were clueless new hedgehog owners and now our little guy is dead.

We buried him under a tree in his coconut shell home in the backyard. We cried. The Wizard is confused. 

RIP little man -- you were a great pet.

I'm sick

Orange juice
Cinnamon stick
Grated ginger
Honey
1 shot Jack Daniels

Heat. Serve.

Sax getting a bath

Wedding in the Lou

Second and last wedding of the year -- this time in St. Louis: Gateway to the West, home of the arch. I've never been to the Midwest and so was delighted to see a lot of particular Midwest-y things, like the Mississippi, lots of industry, toasted ravioli (a St. Louis specialty), and the St. Louis zoo. The arch was actually pretty amazing. And it's true - there were actually an overwhelming number of obese people!

Don and I flew out there on Friday (he qualified as my "plus one" because we live together hehe) and met up with other UD friends and had a pretty intensely good time. I was even further rejuvenated from the Crystal Castles show on Wednesday and finally feel relaxed enough to go back to work on Monday. Maybe my stress-induced scalp flaking will finally go away!

A few of these pictures are my own, but some are taken from friends' collections and -- yes -- the wedding app. The Wedding Party is an app for guests of the wedding to upload pictures to and so allows everyone to have access to the same photo stream. It's actually pretty useful, but as you can imagine it led to some irrelevant uploads (a Bud Light can, pictures of factories, blurry close-ups, etc.).

 Sarah and the wedding party, before the ceremony

 Looking across the Mississippi to Illinois... yuck

 The arch!

Hippos at the zoo

Toasted ravioli. It was meat-filled, though, so I never tried it...

Sarah and Scott (bride and groom)

Reception -- first dance

Sarah's ridiculously well-designed program schedules

End of the ceremony-- the wedding took place at the Missouri Botanical Gardens

Blurry good times with Don and Bill at the reception

Obligatory photo under the arch

............

I have to admit, as much as I'm personally against the idea of getting married, it is pretty nice to be around your friends in love...

CRYSTAL CASTLES // HEALTH

Went to see Crystal Castles and HEALTH last night at the Roseland Ballroom with Kelly and Charles. That show set me straight!

Photos from deathandtaxesmag.com and pitchfork.com.