Happy 5th Anniversary
to me.

Well, missed it by a few days, which is odd, in its way, to miss such a milestone.

Maybe with Obama firmly in charge, one of my original impulses to blog has lessened (but we must never ever drop the ball again. Not ever, else they will creep back in with their evil ways.)

The blogosphere has changed, consolidating around Facebook and/or My Space, so that individual blogs seem almost beside the point.

I'm not doing as much artwork as I was 5 years ago -- or it seems different -- or it's not painting -- or something.

I haven't been knitting in awhile -- 2 sweaters I started still need to be sewn together.

Mostly have been cooking and watching the market and my savings collapse, sometimes at the same time.

For example, am making my famous chicken leg 'n' thigh soup (roast 2 or 3 of 'em for about an hour at 375, then strip the good meat, dump bones and skin and weird meat, add rosemary, salt, pepper, a couple of carrots, celery, a half bay leaf into your favorite microwave bowl, cover with water and pan fat, nuke at 60 percent for about 45 minutes. There you have it -- strain and separate out the stock so you can refrigerate and skim the fat off -- but save it for sauteing).

And, of course, still scripting and doing artwork for my never-ending game, Darkdevil County. Next installment is nearly ready. I mean it this time.

Labels: AGS, art, computers, cooking, Darkdevil County, GOP incompetence, obama, robots

- posted by Cynthia @ 5:27 PM | | | Link |

 
Heating Up Curated by Beth Hart and Vera Scekic at EAC
If you are unsure who to vote for this year, go to this show and head to the gallery to your left, an installation room by Lee Tracy entitled "Found." The white walls are washed up to 3 feet with water marks, the center contains an old oak desk covered with diaries and scrapbooks, containing what we hope is not our future history, writings of devastation and pointers to what a new future may look like:

few mornings ago it was reported that the last polar bear in the world had died. I am so sad.

one entry begins, and describes how the bear became thinner and thinner, her fur no longer fluffy, the silent lines at the Lincoln Park Zoo wanting to catch a glimpse.

I am thrilled that I was able to make the most delicious soup today. It has been so wet and chilly here that when I heard that celery and bell peppers were coming back into circulation this week, I made calls to find them. [...] I also bought four sticks of celery with the leaves intact from North Carolina, which is a state that has a harvest season (June and October).

And some beauty returns, too:

We have completely given in to the flickering lights and are in our 3rd year since the city adopted its "Low Lights" program. [...] Mood lighting is everywhere.

The large notebooks are written in pencil on translucent parchment paper, with drawings in the margins, interleaved with washed-out watercolor drawings. The handwriting in some of the notebooks becomes more and more frantic, witness to events only hinted at, since the writing is ripped, scraped off, washed away as Lake Michigan rises and wipes away our history.

I know Lee Tracy's work as a painter of large works, and hadn't known she also did installation art. This is definitely worth seeing, especially on a day when you can look out at a stormy Lake Michigan.

The other work I liked was Lisa Truax's ceramic strata, layers of sparkling, beautiful compressed geodes in progress, a million years from now, as garbage and our own bones create layers that may become fossil fuel for the next incarnation what remains of our species.

Other work in the show followed similar themes. Kim Jackson DeBord's UNI Chicken Project presented tiny shelves with pillows, a single egg resting on each. Or a scale balancing a pile of chicken feed and a pile of the resulting eggs. How precious these lives are!

The show runs through November 9, 2008 at the Evanston Art Center. In the past they've put a .pdf of their exhibition notes online, but seem to have stopped doing it. Worth picking up if you go see the show.

Labels: art, EAC, GOP incompetence

- posted by Cynthia @ 12:01 PM | | | Link |

 
Freeking Hilarious
So incompetent they can't even direct their own people to the right place:

Florida Republican Party directs voters to wrong early voting sites

If you're looking for information on early voting sites, one place to avoid: the Republican Party of Florida's Web site.

Under a "Voter Action Center" tab on the state party's home page, voters can select their county and, in theory, find out a convenient early voting location. The problem: For Palm Beach County, it lists 14 early voting sites. In fact, there are only 11.

The erroneous early voting information also was sent to voters in a mailer.

For the conspiracy minded, the RPOF (which apparently listed the early voting sites from the 2006 election) directed voters to the wrong polling places in Belle Glade and southwestern Palm Beach County, two heavily Democratic areas. Then again, only six of the 14 early voting sites listed by the RPOF are truly in action.

Spokeswoman Erin VanSickle said it's an "honest mistake that we are working quickly to fix."

The Florida Democratic Party quickly slammed the Republican mix-up.

"We knew the Republicans were incompetent when it comes to running the government, but now it looks as if their incompetence is spilling over to campaigns," said spokesman Eric Jotkoff. "The fact that the Republicans can’t update the list of early voting sites from 2006 [ed. even I updated my blog entry from 2006 about early voting] shows that the get-out-the-vote machine that they brag about is pretty rusty these days."

Memo to Republican Party: not all voters need to be suppressed. For example, your own.

Labels: elections, GOP incompetence, politics

- posted by Cynthia @ 6:23 PM | | | Link |