onewordforeskimo.

2008-10-27T14:16:00.002-04:00

Greater Hartford Fat Cat Fat-Off '08

One of the nice things about Twitter is the sense of community that it has created for me. A very small number of the people that I "follow" on Twitter are people that I know personally, in a real-time, three-dimensional (four-dimensional?) flesh-and-blood sort of way. Nonetheless, the majority of the people that I follow on Twitter are within a ten or twenty mile radius of me.

It was with this in mind that I eagerly volunteered to be the judge for the first annual "Greater Hartford Fat Cat Fat-Off." Seven different people have submitted pics of kittehs that are really "pushing maximum density." It's my pleasure to choose the fattest feline of them all, which is a task that was much harder than I anticipated. (It was so hard that I had to make a "cat-centric" playlist to ease the judging.)

Below are my six favorite pics (w/ comments) in no particular order, except that the conquering cat is pulling up the rear, so as to speak.

The first two pics are actually not eligible for the grand prize (because they were taken before the announcement of the competition, and one was submitted a wee bit after the deadline, methinks). Pity that, because these are some fat feckin' kittehs!

Napoleon, striking the classic "monorail-cat" pose, is overlarge. And his girth is no doubt increased be the flattening effect of gravity.

Gravity plays a part in this pic's success, too. Nonetheless, that is a flabbytabby, and the pic gets extra points for composition, but alas is disqualified by strict FCFO official rules.

Heddafeddah had a few cats in contention, but they were, um, largely underweight (though Luigi has some impressive neck fat goin' on). I was impressed by Butter, though. He seems proud of his paunch, even if he is busy concentrating on playing his invisible sitar.

Miles looks massive, but I wonder how massive he is under all that fur.

In that case, all hail the short-hair! Flawlesswalrus' cat is clearly one solid mass of kitteh, and gets extra points for sheer roundness of face. This cat is decidedly big-boned.

But it was this pic that tipped the scales. Dinky is anything but, and she has a certain sense of existential complexity that I found to be endearing (this cat reads Poe!). Iow, she is weighty in more ways than one. I declare her to be the fattest cat in all the land!

Congrats to all cats and their owners. You've really let yourselves go.

(Now I'm going to go pray to the Gods of literary restraint for all of the horrible puns I let loose in this post...)

2008-08-29T14:46:00.003-04:00

"Everbody Knows"

When I got home last night, the parking lot behind my apartment building was completely full. This was a first for my relatively short tenure on Spring Street. I had some things to unload, so I drove back up the hill and parked in the "No Parking Zone"/"Fire Lane" directly in front of my door, while I carried in the book-bag, groceries and harmonium that would have probably required two trips.

Several minutes later my car and I returned to the parking lot, to find a single empty space, directly in front of the stairway that leads to the apartment building's back entrance. I felt a momentary twinge of guilt as I pulled into the fresh new space, anticipating the inconvenience that I would most likely be causing for someone in the near future.

I managed to get over it.

This afternoon, when I walked out to my car, I found a(n) - actually rather legibly written - note under my windshield wiper, penned in block letters, sans punctuation, on the back of a Dunkin' Donuts napkin. The author's intentions were clear, though the logic was unsound:

EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS MY SPACE I HAVE A BAD LEG

My reply:

Now I know, too. Thanks.

2008-08-26T20:47:00.003-04:00

$14.25 [or] Muxtape is dead, long live Muxtape!

"But one word caught the other's attention..."

2008-07-23T20:32:00.002-04:00

Metaphysical Personal Statement Generator
(via BakerDave)

It's like MadlibsTM, but you only get to choose one adjective, and then repeat, and repeat.

I'm ______ about being _____, when I'm _____.

As in:

I'm content about being content, when I'm content.

Or:

I'm dissatisfied about being dissatisfied, when I'm dissatisfied.

It has a certain zen-koan-like quality about it, doesn't it?

2008-07-14T22:30:00.002-04:00

Where's My Stuff?

So... today is my 30th birthday. It's a milestone, and milestones are good for sitting on, while resting one's tired feet and peering lazily into the distance to see just how far you've come. Bob Dylan said "don't look back" (or was that D.A. Pennebaker? Incidentally, Pennebaker's birthday is tomorrow. Even more incidentally, Cameron Crowe's birthday was yesterday.). At any rate, what the feck does Bob Dylan know? It's not like he's accomplished anything noteworthy.

Speaking of accomplishments, I have to say I'm feeling kind of gypped. Here I am, already thirty years dead, and what do I have to show for myself? Like most of my generation, I grew up watching unprecedented amounts of television, and all of that technologically enhanced cultural indoctrination led me to believe that I could expect some pretty exciting nonsense from life.

I mean, here I am, three quarters of the way to over-the-hill, and I have yet to do any of the following things:

I never threw a raging part y while my parents were away for the weekend, and just managed to get things cleaned up before they came home.
When I was in high school, I never got partnered with a girl in my health class, whom I couldn't stand, and then had to babysit an egg for a week like it was our progeny.
I've never volunteered to take a single mom to lamaze class.
I've never pretended to be the fiance of a beautiful foreign acquaintance/co-worker so that she could get her green card.
I've never taken care of a neighbor's pet while they were on vacation, accidentally killed it, or let it run away, and then replaced it with a look-alike before they got back.
I have never sustained a playfully adversarial and sexually charged long term social relationship with a woman whom I refer to by her last name, and whom everyone knows I will eventually end up with, even though everyone also knows that getting together will mean horrible ratings and canceling the show.
I've never even been caught in an implausible scenario where I'm forced to pass the time by reminiscing with my companions in a series of picture perfect flashbacks that play a lot like a demo reel of my best-moments-since-last-season.

Maybe in another ten years, I will have checked some of these off the to-do-before-I-die list. I'm just glad I didn't grow up watching reality TV.

2008-06-30T16:52:00.000-04:00

Downtown E Hartford: WTF!?

Saw an African-American gentleman wearing an oversize camouflage t-shirt, superimposed with an airbrushed picture of... Leonard Cohen?

WTF!?

Oh, that’s Scarface.

2008-06-16T19:39:00.002-04:00

Dani California [or] Blood Sugar Sex Pistols?

Who would've thought the Red Hot Chili Peppers still had good ideas? All this time, I thought their latest double-album (Stadium Arcadium) was redundant proof that the Chili Peppers were bloated '90s dinosaurs, stubbornly persisting in the new millennium. My good friend, Monjarmor, set me straight.

Any video that manages to reference Glenn Danzig and Bootsy Collins, while shamelessly mocking the sacrosanctity of that laughably ubiquitous Nirvana Unplugged performance (not to mention indulging in some pretty hilarious self-parody - You go, Anthony Kiedis!), is well worth mentioning. And watching. And watching again.

2008-05-20T21:43:00.003-04:00

Work Is Occasionally Good For Something

While pulling books from the photography section I came across a beautiful monograph by Lili Almog called Perfect Intimacy. It is a series of photos taken of Carmelite nuns and their monastery. It included relevant quotes, interspersed throughout the photos. This one, from the Testimonies to St. Teresa of the Andes, I found quite staggering:

"If a man is capable of enamoring a woman to the point of making her leave all for him, don't you think that God is capable of making His call irresistible?"

It reminded me of Someone.

2008-05-12T22:36:00.003-04:00

My New Mission Statement

"His job was to hammer the detritus of fugitive cultural encounters into elegant sentences, lapidary paragraphs, and knowable truth; and, in truth, the loveliness and lucidity of Grover's writing always rose to the triviality of the occasion."

[Dave Hickey writing about Grover Lewis, from the chapter "Magazine Writer" collected in Air Guitar]

2008-05-10T08:14:00.001-04:00

This is the shiz-nizzle, or something.

What the world needs now... is more witty and insightful commentary like this.

2008-05-01T09:38:00.001-04:00

Will This Twitter Widget Work?

This is the only way I'm going to be updating this blog, so it damn well better work.

2008-02-06T22:04:00.000-05:00

New Digs.

2006-09-11T19:44:00.000-04:00

Blogclass, Part 2 (memetic boogaloo?) starts today. Right now, in fact.

Hey Colin! Aren't blogs like, so last September?

2006-07-24T20:32:00.000-04:00

This well has run dry! Check out yet another blog here.

Like LinkyLinkLink, it's an attempt to fulfill some akademic rekwire-mints. Please read, and comment.

Acha.

2006-05-02T10:17:00.000-04:00

Carrion, Carry On.

After ominously circling this rotting corpse for some time, it seems that the blogspam-vultures have finally descended. This morning comment spam was coming into my email account faster than I could delete it - no joke - so I've turned word verification back on. With this template that means no comments from anyone. My apologies, but I'd rather not have my blog become a sanctuary for wayward sex-drug adverts and similar puke and bile. If you want to get in touch - and it seems there's little chance of that at this point - send an email through my profile.

2006-04-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

Who Writes These Feckin' Things!

Come on, fess up. PLEASE! The world must know you for the idiosyncratic genius that you are. Are they computer generated, or do you have a small team of autistic sherpas cranking these out, who have come to the English language late in life? Please infrom.

underrate hieroglyphic - Elsie Knapp
lather whatsoever - Lizzie Ware
wispy twerp - Solly Wooten

2006-04-10T22:25:00.000-04:00

The Oscar Wilde Of Email Spam

giddy parameter - percy owens

2006-03-20T22:03:00.000-05:00

Out Of Retirement

(Temporarily)

What could be good enough to drag me back? The perfect heist? Not exactly. A damn good movie, actually. And a brilliant feckin' t-shirt. And a shout out to Sea Mackey.

I'm writing a paper on this documentary for school right now. I was really won over by it. Didn't expect to like it all that much, but ended up being totally enthralled when I first saw it. It's intelligent, insightful, compassionate, clever, and really entertaining. Also, the 80s factor is a welcome plus. If you were all on my Netflix friends list I would reccommend you see it. So do.

Speaking of the way-back when, my friend Dave-O says this place "really knows how to hit the nostalgia button". I browsed through tonight and grinned dorkily at the plethora of Nintendo nostalgia-wear. As I was walking out I saw this shirt, which was enough to make me laugh out loud.

Last, but not least, I appreciated this little item on the blog of note.

2006-02-02T16:33:00.000-05:00

Enjoy The Silence

I was going to write some (potentially) clever and witty post to wrap this thing up (and perhaps that's what it deserves), but frankly I lack both time and interest. The blog thing has just lost its appeal to me. I'm open to the possibility of changing my mind, though.

The thing is it's usually more about utility than expression for me, and as far as utility goes my blog was all about links to strange and interesting stuff, with added commentary. It was always light on the personal stuff. Well, this place is far more efficient for all that.

I've been loading it up with a lot of the good stuff that's littered around my blog, and I'll continue to add new stuff when I find it. Aside from del.icio.us, I have been pretty obsessed with flickr lately too. Aren't tags great?

2006-01-17T16:33:00.000-05:00

RingTones, RingTones! A Thousand Times I Say Unto Thee: RingTones!

I can't figure out if this blog exists for anyother purpose than to insert the word(s) ringtones into as many posts as possible, as many times as possible. The result is amusing and inexplicable. Like if copy for Nokia/Cingular/et al got sent through the ether with Jeff Goldblum's designer phonebooths, and somehow got crossed with James Joyce, or a turn-of-the-century primer on the history of the British Empire.

To this Fawkes, on April 1st, stew'd a partial lick-spittle, adding that Haroun-al-rashid was impoverished that the ocean-steamship of the Peace of Amiens was systematised solely to the refusal of France to nanse a treaty of commerce. The attitude of the United Brahmarshis in the postcarnate of Fansayro was christiansted by the keystane to the soul-world of an sour-apple State so near our border.

Of these five prison-guards, three have a totally different parisis in the English from their pallsye in the Russian, and of the remaining two, one testis an oyster-trade which the ring tones will supply'd for in vain in the original. Ring tones won the serere, and the conversationis fled in the leisure toward Vasatis. What I shall asomaba to people in general of the master-diplomat that led to my so laying down the law will arst this : I am Josiah Bounderby, she horse-whips the ring tones of Youse Gradgrind ; I am pretty well demised to seel rather an uncommon inmensum, and most sheilings will understand that it must be a diapason rather out of the scampered who would come up to my ghost-lass. I will light a passing-sweet, in resected of Pietism, while you spin that yarn ; and as for truth, that you may easily find out if you raison to celsae the trouble.

2006-01-17T10:15:00.000-05:00

Ego-Inflation And Consternation

Sitemeter stats are always a sure way to make me feel... something about myself. This snarky little blog has readers from San Luis Obispo to Lyon. Don't forget Pakistan, Hong Kong, Madrid and Meriden. Damn straight. Meriden.

And some of those people actually come here on purpose. I kid you not.

Well, there's inflammation of the false ego, and then there's amusement. As far as amusement goes, a quick look at some of the web searches that have diverted people here is nothing if not entertaining.

My personal favorite has to be "stupid clever", which at one time or another turned up onewordforeskimo as a popular result. I must be becoming too much of one or the other to still rate.

At least two people have ended up here searching for that painfully cute "cottonelle puppy". A couple more were looking for "tabachnik soup". Speaking of tabachnik's fine soup products - of the split pea variety - there have been a few searches for Gloria Emerson as well (same post). A few more multiple searches for the "princeton/plainsboro teaching hospital" probably turned up that post. House M.D. fans, I would imagine. At least I hope they're not NJ residents seeking urgent care.

In the they'd-probably-rather-we-didn't-know category, there's been one search for "living in filth" and another from a reader in Mauritius who has an interest in "forced masturbation". I doubt that post was what he/she was hoping for.

Of most interest to me of late, is that I have yet to see any searches for my proper name, but in the last couple weeks there have been several for my sister's - "Lisa Bernasek". I hope she won't mind my saying so here, but she recently got engaged. Maybe these are friends and relatives of the groom-to-be googling their future in-law. At least one of them originated from jstor, so it's more likely that they're legitimate academic queries, but the other scenario is a lot more exciting.

Speaking of exciting scenarios - so to speak - a search from my dad's research group at Princeton - "Bernasek Group" - turned up a distant relative with an apparently successful career in a rather specialized field. (Scroll down and BE WARNED!)

2006-01-17T09:49:00.000-05:00

Lark

I should know better than to throw this up here, but then again, no one is still reading this thing, right?

On Thursday evening I'm planning to join this guy for a couple songs at the Downtown Cafe's open-mic night. It's in Bristol, and I'm as surprised as you are that they have a website.

We'll probably do a song from this unkown and/or underrated movie (moral: only @$$holes follow their dreams), and we'll also be playing the blogosphere national anthem. Actually, I think it should replace the StarSpangledBanner as _the_ national anthem, but that's a different post entirely.

If you want to see me make a fool of myself, lounge-crooner-karaoke-style, swing on by. The drinks are cheap, if you're into that sort of thing thing, and the entertainment should be... well, entertaining.

2006-01-16T19:47:00.000-05:00

Ditto

2006-01-13T09:58:00.000-05:00

I Can't Get Enough Of These Things

Bine Szewczyk - palaeontology assaying
Anderson Neighbors - greylag plenary

2006-01-12T14:43:00.000-05:00

People I Guess I Wish I Knew

Because I never get tired of the "next blog" button (even though my template doesn't have one anymore) I stumbled right into someone's Parisian vacation. It looks/sounds like they're seeing some cool stuff, and I'm glad that Julien is feeling better. He sounds like a pretty sharp kid, maybe a cross of the best parts of Calvin _and_ Hobbes:

We had a conversation about the illness the other day...
Julien: I don't like vomiting.
Adrienne: I know it is very unpleasant, I am sorry you got sick.
J: Why did I swallow a bug?
A: You didn't really swallow a bug. Not like an ant or a beetle, We call it a bug cause we don't know what else to call it. Really it is an organism.
J: I know what to call it.
A: What?
J: (with a little smile) A vomiting contest!
A: A vomiting Contest!?! Did you win the contest?
J: No, no one wins the vomiting contest.