Monthly Archives: July 2011

Potted Plant Planted in Pot: Help Me Name a Mascot!

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Okay, so I-like a-little alliteration a-lot. But I wanted to show you all my new mascot!

The Big Green

The Big Green

It’s not the Sun’s mascot, it’s just my mascot.

It was given to me by the Anne Carlsen Center–it was a leftover from a sale that helped finance the gardening therapy style program they had there.

The pot was painted by a boy named Brandon, who, as you can see, clearly has a pretty good sense of color and shape. This picture doesn’t really do the pot justice, but it’s pretty nice.

The plant inside is an aloe plant. I was initially offered some poor helpless green thing that probably would have wilted and died simply from being in close proximity to me for very long. My brown thumb is that powerful. I can pretty much kill plants just by glaring at them (although to be fair, most people of German descent can). I explained this, and was offered an aloe plant instead.

I have killed cacti in the past. More than once. Someone should probably make me a kudzu farmer. There wouldn’t be a single specimen left in the U.S.

Anyway, the important thing is, the aloe plant needs a name. The initials on the pot are B.G., so I’ve been calling it the Big Green, sort of like you’d call an adorable fuzzy kitten “Killer,” but maybe you can think of something better with the initials B.G.

What do you think?

Amy Winehouse Is Dead (And the 27 Club Nonsense)

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I was grumpy throughout most of yesterday after I heard Amy Winehouse had died.

If there were ever a perfect example of wasted talent it was Amy Winehouse, and yes, sometimes the “wasted” in that sentence had more than one meaning. Of course her death is still under investigation and it is a little premature to put the blame on drugs at this point.

However, there is no denying the woman was a gloriously talented mess.

I have both her albums, Frank, which is pretty much jazz, and Back to Black, which is the soul-jazz-Motown-retro-throwback music Winehouse became famous for. Both albums are excellent, but they feel very different from each other, and I was really hoping she’d manage to claw her way up out of the abyss to produce many more.

Now that won’t happen. She was robbed (or maybe robbed herself?) of her life. And we were robbed of her music. Who knows what could have been?

In a time of auto-tuned, pretty people with vanilla-pretty voices that sound pretty — and pretty much the same — Winehouse sung soul raw, beautiful, with rough edges. (Note: the singing in this video is Winehouse, but the acting is not.)

Winehouse joins the so-called “27 Club,” of influential musicians who died at the age of 27, including Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones, as well as Kurt Cobain.

Infuriating, to see so much wasted talent undone by death.

Kids and Safety

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I am not a parent.

To some people, this would automatically exclude me from having any sort of a valid opinion about children, so just keep it in mind when you click on the following links. Which I do not necessarily endorse, except as food for thought.

Can a playground be too safe? wonders the New York Times.

Quite a few of the playgrounds I remember from when I was a kid would probably be considered deathtraps today, but they were fun, and I obviously managed to escape relatively unscathed. I remember a friend who had old playground equipment on her farm that was probably made of rust, tetanus and powdered asbestos. It was awesome, though.

I only remember getting injured on a playground once, and it taught me a very valuable lesson: springy metal animals are not to be trusted and should be watched at all times, no matter what they claim.

I got a bloody nose that day. I can’t even remember how, specifically, but I do remember it hurt and it was scary. It can’t have been that traumatic, though, or I’d remember everything else as vividly as I do Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And I don’t remember the accident that well.

There is quite a bit of discussion about whether children are overprotected these days. Here’s quite a long post about science kits for kids, which have become rather watered down (sometimes even literally) and aren’t as cool as they used to be.

Then again having your kid irradiate himself with uranium is also not cool.

A New Name for the Heat Wave-Streak-Bubble-Dome

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I keep referring to the heat wave as a “heat wave,” but it’s really more of a heat bubble. That’s how the National Weather Service meteorologist described it to me.

Since then, though, I’ve heard it referred to by other names. (All of them have been safe to say in front of children. Most of the descriptors for those names haven’t been, though.)

  • In this AP story, it’s a “dome” and a “pressure cooker.”
  • Here it’s a “heat wave.”
  • And here, they’re “stretches.”
  • This headline calls it a “scorcher” and a person in the article calls it a “streak.”

I propose to make a noun out of a verb and call it a “wilt.”

How does that sound?

Superheroes and a Sleuth

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Ah, nerd icons.

I’m not much of a superhero person, but I have enjoyed the recent slough of superhero flicks, including the Dark Knight and both Iron Man movies. And I’m looking forward to Joss Whedon’s take on the Avengers.

So here’s a few things. The Dark Knight Rises has a teaser trailer. No sign of Catwoman, regrettably; I’ve been curious about how Anne Hathaway is going to top Michelle Pfeiffer’s version.

And here’s an entertaining little piece about how they took buff Captain America and made him into a skinny little twerp. I’ve been curious about that too, being peripherally aware of the Captain America origin because of some sort of geek osmosis–my friends talk about these kinds of things all the time, and even though I don’t know much about it I do find it interesting.

Apparently it’s all done by computers, because they didn’t have time for the actor to slim down to nothing and the body double thing looked goofy.

Finally, ooh! Sherlock Holmes trailer. Each generation has their own Sherlock Holmes, and this is mine. I feel ours is about as faithful to the original as any, and at the very least, its depiction of Watson as an intelligent, daring ladies’ man is 100 percent accurate to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s vision.

I really do not like stupid Watsons.

I’m sure I’ve ranted about this before, but making Watson into a moron makes him less of a foil to Holmes and also makes him a worse audience stand-in. I like to think people who typically read Sherlock aren’t blithering idiots.

And, lest you complain about the Hollywoodization: I think some of that is inevitable. But yes, Holmes really did know martial arts and could, in fact bend a poker with his bare hands, and yes, Watson did run after people with his pistol more than once.

So I am looking forward to the movie.

It’s the Humidity

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If it gets any hotter, I may spontaneously combust. Except it really does seem like there’s so much moisture in the air that nothing could possibly catch on fire. This isn’t true, of course, but maaaaaaaan.

Apparently I have to be especially careful, too, because I am in one of the groups of people more vulnerable to heat exhaustion and heat stroke: I have high blood pressure.

(Note: it’s not super high. I mean, if I get cut the red stuff doesn’t shoot across the room a la “Kill Bill” or anything. And it’s under control, vaguely.)

Others who should be careful: Asthma sufferers, the elderly, people with diabetes and people taking certain kinds of medication.

I think people are generally aware of the heat.

It’s pretty well impossible not to be, by this point; when I go outside my glasses immediately fog up.

Normally the only time that happens is in the winter, when it more or less happens all the time. Halloween was always an exercise in complete blindness: go in, glasses fog up, go outside, glasses fog up again…

 

Extra Crispy

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I have obtained, I am sorry to say, a sunburn.

It’s a weird sunburn. It has largely confined itself to the back of my neck and just around my neck on my back, thanks to the shape of the shirt I was wearing. Apparently that area of my person had not seen much sun prior to yesterday’s trip to Oakes and Monango.

My face and arms merely got slightly overdone, and aren’t even pink anymore. The back of my neck, however, still feels a little fiery. I am going to have to find my aloe, which I definitely haven’t unpacked yet.

The problem is, I’m fairly certain I’m going to forget that I have the sunburn and just hop groggily into a nice hot shower in the morning. If you hear an agonized shriek from the general vicinity of my apartment, that will be why.

Note to self: Find sunscreen in preparation for the week’s fair coverage.

Further note to self: Pink does not look good on you. Avoid in future.

All the Sirens in Town Go Off At Once

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When you wake up to the sound of fire truck sirens howling in front of your house the day after multiple tornado warnings, the first thing you think of is not “parade.”

Yes. I admit it. I completely forgot about the parade that I wrote about in the paper just a few days prior to the event.

The sad thing is, I didn’t even get up and try to go into a sheltered spot. I just rolled over and put a pillow over my head, figuring that if something really were going on, work would call me in to help cover the story.

If there’s ever a real tornado, I will probably die.

In this case the sirens didn’t stop, because it was a parade, and eventually I wandered out into my living room to see what the heck was going on. Oh yeah! Parade!

I watched it for a while from my enclosed porch, in my pajamas.

Losing My Marbles (And Other Items)

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Moving is chaotic. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever had to move.

The great thing is, I’m not having any trouble finding stuff. I find stuff all the time. Sometimes it’s stuff I remember packing, and other times it’s stuff I haven’t seen since the last time I moved.

This morning I found several vital and critical items I doubtless could not live without:

  • My coffee mugs for work. Currently I am rocking a china mug with pink flowers on it. It’s a little girly but I am in fact an actual, card-carrying girl. So that’s all right.
  • My ParaSail water bottle. It’s just an ordinary bottle from Newport Labs in Worthington, where they make ParaSail–the first vaccine against swine flu. (Note: It is actually a swine swine flu vaccine. Not for humans, for piggies, who unfortunately can catch swine flu from humans.) The water bottle does not contain any ParaSail, but it is cool.
  • My Tums. I can’t stop fretting but at least I can do something about it, right?
  • My candy dragon. Unfortunately I haven’t got any candy to fill his belly with yet, but that’s the next step.

But I’m always finding stuff.

I look for my coffee mug and find a Kleenex box. I look for a Kleenex box and find canned goods. I haven’t looked for canned goods yet, but I have a feeling that when I do, I will probably find Jimmy Hoffa.

Hello, Jamestown

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Annnnnd we’re back!

I’m now typing from a sweet little desk in the newsroom of the Jamestown Sun in Jamestown, N.D. It’s going to take me a while to get situated here, so my blogging may be pretty sporadic for a while, but I’ll try to keep posting from time to time.

Jamestown is an awesome place so far, and the people here are pretty friendly as far as I can tell. There’s a bit of weirdness with the town layout, which had to be arranged around the James River, but they seem to have kept everything on more of a grid layout than is generally possible when you have a lake in the middle of the town.

Jamestown stores its lake north of town, which I think is pretty sensible of them.

I have already learned a couple things about North Dakota.

  1. It is not actually filled with nothing, contrary to the beliefs of famous people who have never set foot on North Dakotan soil. I suspected this before, of course. Turns out it’s full of crops and cattle and people and roads and trees and rivers.
  2. North Dakotans like blowing stuff up. Then again, who doesn’t. That’s pretty much what the Fourth of July is about, right? Commemorating our nation’s history of freedom and liberty through explosives. People here seem pretty patriotic in general, which is nice.

(What happened to the rest of the post? I’m not sure. Maybe the buffalo got to it. I hear they like to hide in trees and drop down on unsuspecting bystanders, like ninjas but without those cool throwing stars. Or maybe that’s drop bears.)