Mighty Bob

“…expressed a wish to go to the river with a fishing rod. He liked
fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid
occupation.”

-Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

At Lawrence and Springfield.  The smudgy parts of the pic are actually raindrops on the bus window out of which I was shooting.

[Intersectionym: A name for a building or business derived from the cross streets at or near which it is situated, esp. in Chicago.]

I got tagged by Levi to do this:

1 Pick up the nearest book.
2 Open to page 123.
3 Find the fifth sentence.
4 Post the next three sentences.
5 Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Well, the nearest book happens to be the Robert Fagles translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid, so in honor of National Poetry Month, here are the 5th, 6th, and 7th complete sentences on that page:

“For that, if my crime against you is so wicked
rip me to bits and fling the bits in the sea,
plunge me into the depths! If die I must,
death at the hands of men will be a joy!” With that,
he clutched my knees and kneeling, groveling, clung fast.

The first 5 of my readers who want to consider themselves tagged for having read this should drop me a comment. I rather doubt I have that many readers, though!

Well, now I can blog by email, but I can’t send pictures yet. Is this
a clue, or a blatant lie? “Any images and attachments in your email
will be posted inline.”

Anyone with knowledge is welcome to chime in.

So, Flickr has made it very easy to email a picture to my Flickr account, and also very easy for me to make a blog post about any Flickr photo.  That’s to account for much of my recent blog-tivity.  And yet it seems stupidly redundant to have to post to Flickr in order to post to my blog.  I would much rather email a post directly to my blog, which WordPress is supposed to support, but I cannot figure out, even after a good 7 hours trying.

The directions are here.  I am 99% certain I’ve got steps 1 and 2 done correctly.  But neither step 3 “Manual Browser Activation,” nor step 3 “Automated Browser Activation,” (which is the one I’m going for) do a dang thing.  If anyone has experience setting this up, esp. on a Dreamhost account, and can talk me through or troubleshoot, future generations will surely thank you.  Once I have email-to-blog up and running, I promise to spend the next 7 hours batch uploading old photo sets to Flickr , labeling, and organizing them,  in a way that my Flickr content will no longer be simply redundant to my blog content.

(Oh, I’d also like to install the ReCaptcha plug-in, which is apparently as simple as uploading it to my “wp-content/plugins” directory, but I have no idea how to do that, either.  Guess I need an FTP program, right?)

No. Cal. central valley, originally uploaded by bobobobob.

From my West Coast vacation last Aug/Sept 2007.

Huh?, originally uploaded by bobobobob.

I was in Carrie & Lucas‘s wedding in beautiful Charlotte, NC, and I saw this in one of the church offices. Its meaning evades me. A little help?

The fellow in contemporary clothing, who strongly resembles Scott Bakula of television’s Quantum Leap, is holding a mallet and a railroad tie and is standing in a small stream of blood flanked by lillies. It looks like Jesus has arrived just in time to catch him in a swoon. But what does it mean?!?

We Were The World (Sha La), originally uploaded by bobobobob.

L to R: Don Ho, Waylon Jennings, Nico, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes.

photo credit: Dusty Springfield

Like babies love stray dogs
Ladies touch babies like a banker touches gold
And outlaws touch the ladies
Somewhere deep down in their soul.
(lyrics by Lee Clayton)

Hi, I’m Waylon Jennings for Sam O’Rama‘s “Rock and Roll Hell” costume party. I didn’t want to have to shave. For anyone who objects to my going as a country music star, I remind you that I used to be a Cricket.

For those of you who aren’t already aware that we live in the Age of Longevity, I present to you two startling facts: Kate Pierson (the red one in The B-52′s) is 60 (60!!!!) in a couple of weeks (I had a real crush on her as recently as high school) and Ronnie James Dio (i.e. God’s Throat – I have a real crush on him Right Now) is 65!!! WTF?!? And both have work in progress (sadly, not with each other), and sound, if not As Great as Ever, then at least As Good as Ever. Will tomorrow’s nanotech allow them both (and B-52 colleague Cindy Wilson, whom I imagine to be the superior vocalist, but who is a mere, no-longer-startling-for-rock, 51 years old) to sound (or look?!?!) as good as they did when they were 29?! And, if yes, then how good will I look?

If they don’t together convince you of the Wonderful-ness that will be The Singularity, then just imagine a near future where the average librarian can live for 1000 years, and in his spare time, can revive clones of William Howard Taft and Gene Kelly, and throw them a dinner party with his favorite (strange, unique, talented, freaky) rock stars like Dio and Pierson? Oh, and where the steak tartar and escargot are prepared by a cute robot? Because even though Taft and Kelly clones won’t have any memories of their originals’ lifetimes, one will still be able to dance, and the other will still be get stuck in bathtubs.  Hooray, The Future!!!!