It's a Puppet Show!  Choose any movie title you like and replace one word with "puppet" or "Puppets" and no, you may not use "marrionette".   A Few Good Puppets Full Metal Puppet Puppets of Madison County A Puppet Too Far Puppets Inc.  Once Upon a Puppet in America The Day the Puppet Stood Still Puppet on Elm Street It's a Wonderful Puppet The Maltese Puppet   Okay, I came up with 10.  Amaze me with your brilliance.  Have fun! ...

Three more weeks of the kindergarten assistant gig.  It's been fun but those mornings play havoc with my system.  Despite my best intentions, I return to my night-owl ways every weekend.  I started taking vitamins so that is helping with my energy level and since it finally warmed up, I don't feel like I'm eating like a pig all the time.  Best of all, I finally got over my cold.  At last! Did some pictures for an event.  I think it could be a good way to get some...

Anytime I wanted to listen to music other that with headphones, I've had to turn on the Playstation3 and the TV.  I'm not the biggest fan of this method.  The PS3 kicks out a lot of heat (nice in winter but evil in summer) and the TV takes up a lot of energy. I've got an iPhone and an old nano that I am going to hook up to some speakers and thus, have I entered the murky waters of confusion. The easiest fix is just to buy a set of cheap portable speakers, plug the stuff in and aw...

Continuing my tradition of untimely movie reviews, here is mine of The Fountain. I generally won't see a movie because of it's actors but Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz are beginning to change that idea for me.  I found these two imminently watchable and that is a good thing because this is a really intense movie. The story line interweaves three different timelines with incarnations of the same character.  While it takes a bit of mental effort, it doesn't take too long to get cau...

I practiced riding my bike to work today.  It's about 10-11 km from my house to work.  Usually I take the train which mostly runs underground so I didn't want my first attempt to ride my bike there to be on a work day. And that turned out to be a good thing. One of the things about streets in Japan is that they seldom run on a grid system.  It's not uncommon to have an intersection with five streets or intersections at strange angles that make it just a little tough to fig...

It's been hard to write a post or even a reply.  I'll get started, even write some long paragraphs, then I just sit there a while and then decide to delete the whole thing. I'll be amazed if I even get this post up.  I just realized I was daydreaming about stuff. I think I'm usually fairly bland and un-opinionated when I write or respond to things.  Blah.  Because that's not really me.  Ironically, I don't really like conflict but I hate backing down.  That le...

Who doesn't like a good pirate story?  Actually, me.  I mean, I didn't mind a pirate yarn until Pirates of the Carribean III really spoiled it for me.  Then I read an anthology called Fast Ships, Black Sails  edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and my interest was revived.  The book is put out by Night Shade Books which is quickly becoming a favorite publishing house of mine. I read the book two months ago but still have the stories lingering in my mind.  For me, ...

Why do people feel they need to add a banana to things with caramel?  Things taste lovely without banana. A new bakery opened up near my house.  Last time I sent I got a caramel flavored chou-cream.  I think it's what we call a cream puff back home. Lovely!  Amazing!  And without caramel. I bought one today and it was pretty nice except for the banana slices inside it.  Ick.  I'm kinda bummed.

I was listening to a recorded lecture today.  The speaker, Carla Neggers, quoted from Elizabeth George's book on writing, "discipline, you're born with it or you aren't."  I may need to go back and have another listen to double check my accuracy with the wording. The topic of the lecture was about understanding your creative process and the discussion turned to discipline. I suppose I could go into more context, but the phrase exactly is what I'm hoping people will comment on. Ar...

The photos that were exhibited in Naked Tokyo 2008 are up on the nakedtokyo.com site.  My photos can be found here .  For the last little while I have been working on urban nightscapes.     My artist's statement: The " Yoru no  Sojourn" series examines solo nocturnal journeys through Tokyo's urban landscapes. At night, the ambient light can transform mundane, ordinary places into something strange and mysterious. Our sense of place is so strongly informed by ...

I am in desperate need of help.   I am trying to make a site where there is an AP Dive tags I want to have a mouse over link on an image.  I can do the mapping and linking, but to get the image to stay in one spot needs a AP Div tag.  I can do this, but the problem is that if the AP div tag doesn't take it's position in relationship to the container it is in, but the edge of the page.  If someone slides their browser window smaller or larger, the rest of the page wil...

I recently watched a video online about a man who wants the kidney he donated to his wife returned as part of the divorce settlement-- or she can pay him 1.5 million dollars. You can read about the story at this link  or this one or watch it here  (more from his point of view) or here . Evidently there was a major breakdown in this relationship.  According to the first video, she cheated and refused to let him see his children.  I don't agree with her actions, but ...

I got two books from Amazon that just came in the mail. One is a book about CSS and the other one is about Illustrator CS3.  I'm pretty excited about them.  I have been doing online tutorials with Lynda.com and Adobe, but I'm not as good with video as I am with a book.  It's my earning type I guess.  I even took lots of notes when watching the videos but I tend to daydream a lot during lectures.  When I was in uni, most of my notes had cartoons all over the pages. &nb...

Happy Holidays everyone!

Once upon a time there were three sounds looking for work.   These sounds were Whrrr, Grr, and Skruuuunk.   They were down on their luck sounds.   All the good jobs had been taken up by other, more famous sounds such as Snap, Crackle and Pop; Do, Rei and Mi and famous twosomes such as Ding and Dong and their slightly less famous cousins Bing and Bong. The biggest problem is that no one seemed to want Whrrr, Grr and Skruuuunk around.   Every once in a while they woul...