Category Archives: ganesha the car

there ain’t no cure…

SACBO starts friday, and i haven’t posted about it once, this year… OCF starts in 3 weeks (for some in the crew it starts at least a week earlier), and i haven’t posted about IT once, this year…

😒

okay, this SACBO will be the last one as “local residents” for whoretense and holly, who are moving to vancouver BC in a few months. whoretense has been one of my more regular print-broker clients. the last business card i made for him didn’t have a physical address on it. now i know why. the plan is for thaddeus to show up for at least one of the two days. and my unicycle riding has become somewhat more stable this year, which means that i MIGHT be able to compete in the doughnut jousting tournament this year.

and we’re JUST getting started with rehearsals for OCF. we have two scheduled for next week (monday and wednesday) which will be the only ones with the entire cast until the dress rehearsal at the fair, which is 23 days from today. as usual, we seem to be pulling the entire thing out of our asses at the last possible minute, but because of the fact that it’s OCF, the probability that everything will go smoothly is never more than 50%, however things work out. i haven’t been to the ritz since before COVID, and i don’t know whether or not i’m EVER going back, which sort-of makes the collection of 30-some ritz tokens i have collected in the past, possibly superfluous. 😒 and the probability is very high that, once again, they will NOT have put up the story pole, and nobody will want to talk about it, which is REALLY frustrating.

also, it’s our 26th wedding anniversary on friday…

𝄡鲽頇♭

the front, passenger-side door-handle cover on my car broke the other day. i had noticed that it was coming loose for a few days, but then it got REALLY cold, and it just snapped off when moe was getting in the car to go to the airport, a couple days ago. in the process of figuring out exactly what broke, i nudged the broken piece a bit too vigourously, and dropped the broken-off piece into the interior of my car door… if it had not done so, there’s about a 90% chance that i would have just glued the part, reinstalled it, and been done, so, i went on youtube, and looked up instructions for how to remove the door panel, and instructions for how to replace the door-handle cover — which, according to youtube, are “made of chocolate”, a sentiment i wholeheartedly DISAGREE WITH, primarily because, if they were, actually, made of chocolate, they would be good to eat, and these things, while EXTREMELY fragile and apt to break if you look at them funny, are, very definitely, NOT good to eat… the guy gives the “official” hyundai part number, but it is the part number for the LEFT door-handle-cover, and i need the number for the RIGHT door handle cover (which, according to the dealer, is 82662 G2030)… and the only colour in which it is available is grey 😒 so i’m going to have to get it painted to match 😒 which means that the part ($25) and the painting ($75) by itself are going to cost me $100… i can probably put the cover on myself without a question, but i’m worried about the loose, broken part rattling around in the door, so i’m probably going to have to pay someone to take the door panel off and retrieve it… i started to follow the directions in the video, but got as far as “start removing the panel from the bottom — note the socket” and, while i found the socket, i pried fairly hard with a screwdriver and was unable to get more than about half an inch of the panel to barely loosen before it became almost impossible… and, well, i don’t want to actually BREAK anything, so i figure it’s a good idea to let people who actually know what they’re doing to dig around in the guts of my car door. and i’ve already talked to a place that will paint the grey part for me, and another place that will retrieve the part from the guts of the door (although i don’t know how much they’re going to charge me for that part).

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230811 Goddess Kring
230811 Goddess Kring
cannabis update: all three plants, once again, are exhibiting strong female tendencies. i’m going to keep the two that are in the tent, in the tent, just to make sure. then, when the weather turns, and i move the outdoor plant inside, i’ll switch the light in the tent, move the clones in there, and move the flowering lights out into the shed, where the big plants can finish up. macque sez he’s going to come and get the rest of the cirque stuff out of the shed, so that will mean that i have even more space. there are now two clones: one came from the top of the outdoor plant, and it’s apparently doing fairly well, although it hasn’t grown very much. the other came from my neighbour, about a week ago. it is “train wreck”, but, at this point, i still don’t know whether or not it’s going to live. we’ve also talked about setting up an indoor grow, this fall, to replenish any shortfalls i may experience prior to then, which is fine with me. i’ve actually grown indoors a lot more than i’ve grown outdoors, so there’s that…

230811 salamandir and Goddess Kring
230811 salamandir and Goddess Kring
um… lemme see… .25g 🍄 230727, 230731, 230804, 230807, 230812, and 230814, snakez alive performances 230805 (gemma daggatt houseboat gig), and tomorrow, 230818 (PPM/sunset supper), plus regular busking at the market, on wednesdays, ganesha the car shown at the “Jet Blast Bash” 230805-06, briar sea scare parade 230809, 230811 at the Fircrest Residental Habilitation Facility in shoreline, and this weekend, 230819-20 at Fresh Paint in everett. at the briar sea scare parade, and at fircrest, i had the privilege of showing my car with Goddess Kring, aka Shannon Kringen, who is a local folk hero who performed strange art pieces on public access TV when i worked at micro$lop.

circus class cancelled today because of heat. i think i have successfully weaned myself off of twitter (which is now called “𝕏”, but it’s still at “twitter dot com”)…

impending SACBO update

SACBO officially starts tomorrow, but it generally involves a caravan to various weird places around seattle, and, because of the fact that the caravan is done by a different person, and the people participating don’t always have radios, or ways to contact the “leader” in case they get lost, there is a lot of chaos, usually involving lost people being followed by other art cars because “they should know where we’re going”, or “they should know where they’re going”, or something like that, which isn’t actually the case about half the time… and, not having a radio myself, i opted out of the art car caravans a LONG time ago. i’m going for the actual festival, though, which is saturday and sunday. i’m taking my canopy, busking gear, and my harmonic flute and affiliated electronics, and MAYBE some incense, if there is enough room and i’m not too lazy. thaddeus is supposed to show up saturday for busking activities, but i’ll probably be on my own sunday.

i got a new tuba hard case. it is smaller than the previous case, which is both an advantage and a problem: the advantage is that it is smaller, and somewhat easier to lug around, but it doesn’t have a handle on the end, as the old case did, which makes lifting it a bit more difficult. and, the fact that it is smaller also means that there isn’t the separate case, inside, to keep mouthpieces, my tuba strap, and polishing cloths, which is a problem. it also doesn’t have wheels, and is a more rounded shape at the bell end, which means that it only fits on my folding hand cart one way, and it is the wrong way… but it cost $950, which means that i’ve got to get creative to solve these problems, because i’m not just going to send it back and look for a tuba case somewhere else. a lot of the cases don’t fit the instrument (particularly those sold by amazon(⁇⁇), sweeTWATer, and others), or cost WAY too much to order, wait for delivery, discover that it’s for a “right-hand bell” tuba, and send it back… it turns out that the ONLY place to buy a case for a conn 2J is allied supply — the same company that i have been ordering musical instrument parts and materials from for… <mumble, mumble> 30-some years — and i actually have an account with allied… so i ordered it from allied, and instead of paying $1800 for it from a local retailer, i paid $550… and another $400 for shipping… 😧

it came in a BIG box!! with a lot of plastic packing materials that couldn’t be recycled, so i put it out with the trash last night, and some time during the night, bears came and raided our trash can, spreading plastic packing materials all over… 😒

i actually, successfully, “microdosed” mushrooms last weekend. it all started on saturday, 230527, when the BSSB played at folklife. apparently, at some time during my stay at the TREMENDOUSLY CROWDED seattle center grounds (which included several people who wanted to take pictures with me, because i was wearing my fancy band outfit), i was exposed to COVID AGAIN, and i tested positive on 230528. 😒 unfortunately, we had scheduled a birthday party for moe’s mom on the 28th, which got cancelled… and then moe got COVID, as well… 🤬 ultimately, we put off the birthday party until 230611, two weeks later (when both moe and i were testing clear), but i woke up on the 11th in an absolutely FOUL mood, and moe was also feeling under the weather and disagreeable… so i took 0.05 grams, just as moe’s mom was getting here… not enough to really get me off, but definitely enough to change my mood… and, sure enough, it changed my mood. it was moe’s mom, so i wasn’t exactly exuberant or anything, but i wasn’t snapping at everybody and hiding in my office. my case of COVID was mild: i probably wouldn’t have even noticed i had it, if i hadn’t tested. and the good part is that now i’ve got “natural immunity” for the next 2 or 3 months, which means that i WON’T get COVID and not be able to go to the oregon country fair, AND, even if i get exposed at the fair, the probably is fairly high that i won’t get it at the fair, either… i hope… 😉

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blah blah, new year, new me, blah blah blah… 😒 i’ll tell you what: i’m going to do the best that i can NOT to kill myself this year, through direct or indirect action (indirect, in case you’re dense, refers to COVID or something like that). my “new years intention” (because “resolutions” are too restrictive) is less depression.

along those lines, i didn’t get a harvest from my “experimental” mushroom patch last year, but it has developed LOADS of mycelia… now, there’s no GUARANTEE that they’re “the right kind” of mycelia, and, until they start sprouting mushrooms, there will be no way to know for sure, but… it was three unplanted containers of sterile potting soil, covered with a thin layer of wood chips and straw, which i inoculated with mycelia LAST YEAR. i didn’t plant anything else in the containers, and, basically, i have left them alone for a year… apart from watering them occasionally, during the dry months last summer. i don’t KNOW that the mycelia i propagated is the one i’m looking at, but… well… there’s enough mycelia that all i had to do was disturb the top layer of wood chips SLIGHTLY to expose A LOT of mycelium… so there’s always hope…

however, even with auxiliary mushrooms from matrix genetix, the weather has been snowy/rainy/awful enough that it has been difficult to take as much mushrooms as i like, so i’ve been taking “microdoses” that i can’t perceive, but which smooth out the bumps to the point where i’m not snapping at people, complaining about everything, and being a complete recluse… but i’m still not particularly pleasant to be around. 😒

i’ve got to have my car serviced. i’ve been noticing a significant decrease in mileage for the past few months, i may need new tires, and, apparently there are “firmware upgrades” that are only available from the dealer. but the closest hyundai dealer is in renton, and i’ve pretty much burnt my bridges with the renton hyundai dealer years ago. there’s a dealer in auburn, with whom i haven’t burnt as many bridges, and there’s the dealer in puyallup where i bought the car, but this is sunday AND new year’s day, so i’m not even going to be able to call anyone about it until tomorrow. meanwhile, i’ve got to go to costco (tomorrow), and moe is leaving for a week in orlando on the 14th, which, coincidentally, is the same day thaddeus and i have our first paying gig of the year.

i got a “small” package, yesterday, of incense from one of the more reliable US distributors i deal with (“small” meaning only two kilos 😉), delivered by USPS, which was totally saturated, as though it had sat outside in the rain overnight, or something like that — which it certainly did not do outside of my house. 😠 only half a kilo of the two kilos of incense were damaged, and i have notified the shipper, but (once again) it is the new year, which means at least there won’t be anybody there until tomorrow, and i’m not sure there is anything that can be done about it, anyway. 😒

the moisture festival is happening. hooray(?). it’s going to be at the broadway performance hall, a “union shop” — meaning that there are going to be people not associated with the moisture festival doing things like managing the stage, moving sets, setting lights, operating spotlights and other suchlike stuff, and there’s nothing that can be done to change it. i’m kind of wondering how they’re going to deal with the fact that the bands are definitely not union organisations, but, at the same time, it’s for someone else to deal with. 😒 fortunately. 😒

W000T!! 😎

221220 hybrid elephant iphone!
221220 hybrid elephant iphone!

i’ve had this sayagata-pattern iphone case for an iphone that i have never owned, and, probably WILL never own, simply because its got a cool pattern on it. i was showing it off to moe, a week or so ago, and complaining that i didn’t know of anywhere i could get an iphone case with pictures that i want on them, and moe recommended about a dozen places that make custom iphone cases… because, these days, her “google-fu” is orders of magnitude better than mine… 😖

so, i had one made. now my phone exactly matches my car. 😎

fitment

220509 fitment
220509 fitment

unless something very unusual happens after this point, this is what my car’s hood will look like, very soon… (except that it won’t be blurry or fuzzy, that’s just the screen-resolution graphic. the finished product will be full colour and crisp lines. 👍😉)

and, to midnight window tinting (the guys who didn’t care about the fact that i couldn’t email updates to them), i say “bleh”. 😛 wicked wraps was able to handle my file without an issue, didn’t require me to save it in a different format, was able to figure out EXACTLY what i wanted with minimal input from me, they’re doing it for less money than midnight window tinting 👍👍, and they even took the finished graphic as a RGB file (which amazed even me), because, apparently, their equipment works better with RGB than it does with CMYK… 👍 they haven’t even seen my car, yet, and, already, they’re doing a far better job than you guys ever did! “bleh” 😛

new car, new art

220429 ganesha the car art
220429 ganesha the car art

this may not be the final artwork, but it’s pretty close.

i dispensed with midnight window tinting, despite the fact that they sent me an original graphic, last year, when my cloud drive was vandalised, because the guy refused to talk to me, gave me vague reasons for doing things that i know nothing about, and refused to tell me more, then gave me a screen shot of my artwork that was totally screwed up (despite the aforementioned fact that he actually had a good copy, previously), and, to top things off, his email provider uses a spam detection service that “detected” my email, and refused to deliver my emails to him, and when i texted him to tell him, his response was “don’t care”…

i’m now going with “wicked wraps” — sounds like an east coast thing, but they’re on the west coast… who knows? 🤷 — i haven’t met them in person, yet, but i’ve corresponded with them, and i’ve seen their work, driving on the freeway…

BLEHHHH!!!

day NINE of more than one foot of snow, and it’s currently snowing at this very moment!

i tried getting out to ship out the IOTM orders this morning, and didn’t even make it out of the driveway before getting stuck!

220103 stuck car
220103 stuck car

this is not fun any more. 😒

although, it’s a good thing i got stuck when i did, because i could have made it halfway down the street, or halfway to the middle-of-nowhere post office before getting stuck, which would be even worse…

[ETA] moe came home early, and informed me that there is a tree down across the road, about 150 yards up the street from our house, where it can’t be seen from our house… which means that, even if i had gotten out, i wouldn’t have got far. a lady heavy equipment operator came around and plowed the street in front of our house, all the way to the dead end, in exchange for $100. she said she’s been plowing the roads in our neighbourhood for 4 years.

ganesha the new car

once again, gas is $4 a gallon.

on july 18th, i got a new car: a 2019 hyundai ioniq hybrid.

it gets ≈65MPG… (it actually gets between 60 and 70MPG, depending on how i drive)

i LIKE spending $25 for gas, looking at the “full tank” indicator, and seeing that i’ve got almost 800 miles before i have to fill up again. 👍😎

although, i must admit, as a person who almost religiously got gas when the indicator said the tank was half empty, i still haven’t quite gotten used to the fact that, when the indicator says the tank in the new car is half empty, i’ve still got more miles to go before i have to fill up than any of my previous cars had when they were entirely full. 😉🤣

also, i REALLY like being able to drive down the street and not make any noise… i like stopping at a stop light and not making any noise. i like going 75 on the freeway and not making any noise… and looking down at the indicator to discover that i’m going 75 on the freeway, not making any noise, and RECHARGING MY BATTERY ALL AT THE SAME TIME! 👍👍👍😎

i have dreamed of owning a hybrid for at least 40 years… check that off my bucket list. 😉

now, to get some artwork on this blank canvas. 😈

gress

why is the opposite of “progress” not “congress” rather than “regress”?

i got in contact with the vehicle-wrap artist that did the actual artwork for the previous car, and he, also, sent me an .eps file containing the original artwork, so i’m sure i have backed it up, now… although i haven’t backed it up to the cloud drive, yet, because i can still only access it through a web browser on my linux box, and not at all on my mac laptop… and i am worried that they’re not going to be able to make it work on my mac laptop, because i did the steps to auto-mount a network drive, at startup, and it took my password and chewed on it for 30 seconds or so, and then rejected it… i THINK it’s because the cloud drive wants me to login to /cgi-bin/ but the ancient mac will only let me login to the base server URI. and on the linux box, it allows me to specify the login directory, and accepts my password, but never gets beyond that, to actually logging me in — it just repeats its request for a username and password, over, and over, and over, and over… 😕 hopefully, when the guy comes over this evening to give me the keys, he will be able to conclusively address these issues.

ETA: he addressed those issues like a boss, and had BOTH the ancient mac and my linux box wrapped around the NAS’s little finger in about 10 minutes… the old mac, apparently, doesn’t like the domain name, and REALLY doesn’t like the fact that my username has an @ symbol in it, but it eats up the intranet IP address like it’s going out of style, and, because of the fact that it’s ONLY addressing the NAS from the intranet, i just gave it the administrator username instead of my username… and the linux box was, basically, the same, once we figured out how to do it… and connecting monique’s computer was easiest of all: just gave it the intranet IP address and everything was kosher. 😎

there’s A LOT of music in .zip or .rar archives in my recovered data, so, once i get to the point of actually expanding those archives, i will have a significant part of my music collection back… for that matter, i’m pretty sure i “backed up” my music collection to CD, around 10 years ago or so, which means that, once i find where i’ve put it, there’s a good chance that my music collection will be back to 75% to 80% of what it was prior to the crack.

the western digital support personnel that i talked to on 210724, who said that someone would be calling me “monday or tuesday” lied, because it is now wednesday, and i HAVE NOT received a call from them… which only strengthens my suspicion that they are NOT going to try to contact me until after 210731, which is their deadline for making a claim through their data recovery program. 😒

the process of categorising partially corrupt files is both time-consuming, and ultimately frustrating, because, once i have rough-categorised the files, i have to go back through, re-open every file again to determine what it is, re-name the file, and then categorise it AGAIN… and A LOT of the file names started with the date that they were last looked at, which, frequently, is a complete mystery from inside the document, so even when i have them renamed, and categorised, i still can’t complete a time-line for stuff that was modified more than once… which will, very likely, cause major headaches in the future, particularly with documens created for other peoples’ printing. 😒

seriously, whatever anonymous skript-kiddie did this to me — who has never even met them before — just for “lulz” — better hope that i don’t run into them late at night in a dark alley, because, if that ever happens, the result will NOT be positive for anyone. 🤬

on a lighter note, i got my physical copies of questionable content, the electronic copies of which were lost… i’m slowly getting everything put back together.

but i still have to rewrite the IOTM blurb about patchouli for next month, because it’s coming up really soon, and it’s the only IOTM blurb that i didn’t get back… which is a real shame, because the old one was really amusing, and i don’t know if i can remember all of what i said.

not only….

not only have i resurrected the ganesha graphic, but i actually bought a design template for a vehicle wrap on a 2019 hyundai ioniq! 👍

now, maybe, i can do the whole vehicle wrap that i have been dreaming about. 😉

AND i pick up my new car today… even before we’ve decided what to do with the old one…

this deciding we’re going to do this big thing at some amorphous time “later”, and then having that “later” be “later today” is really confusing to me. 😕

yup… we’re now the owners of four cars: the 1998 ford F150 pickup truck, the 2009 hyundai elantra touring, the 2014 hyundai santa fe, and the 2019 hyundai ioniq.

the current fantasy, such as it is, is that we have traded the santa fe for the ioniq, but the santa fe is, currently, in pieces at autoworks of issaquah, who should have it put back together monday or tuesday. we’ve still got to retrieve the dog crates from the back of the santa fe, but, at this point, as soon as we receive the title from the bank (monday or tuesday), we’re handing it over to the hyundai dealership in puyallup. then, we’re going to private-sell the elantra touring (i don’t want to sell it with the artwork, but if we have to, then so be it), and, at some point in the next couple of weeks, we’re driving to salem to pick up monique’s new santa fe — it has to be a santa fe, because that’s what the dog crates (remember them) fit into…

so, alledgedly, we will, once again, be a three car household… but…

this is getting really confusing. 😕

i have resurrected ganesha the graphic

140215 Panchamukhi Ganesha The Car
140215 Panchamukhi Ganesha The Car
last night at about 10:30, i found a couple of .eps files of the graphic for my car.

vector renditions, i.e. infinitely expandable and contractable, keeping the same line quality.

today, i confirmed that they are the original, and my modified versions of the graphic, which is excellent, because, otherwise, i wouldn’t have artwork for my NEW car…

whee? 😕

oh, definitely whee… the new car is a hybrid that gets almost 50MPG, and is only slightly smaller than the current car, although it’s white, and not black…

such is life.

i got the data

good news: i got back (most of, as far as i’ve been able to tell, so far) my IOTM club records, including, most importantly the records of who paid when, and what they have received.

bad news: i’ve checked the largest adobe illustrator documents i can find, and they’re all corrupt, which means, very likely, that the artwork for my car is no longer, and when i get a new car (which might be a lot sooner than i expected), i will have to come up with new artwork for it.

i still have A LOT of files to evaluate… like more than a week, of solid 8-hour days, doing NOTHING but evaluating files… possibly as much as a month of 8-hour days. 😒

and that’s NOT listening to music and watching videos… that’s opening files, to make sure that they’re not totally corrupt, and listening to no more than 5 or 10 seconds of the music or video, to make sure that they’re not TOTALLY corrupt, and then rough-classifying the file based on the contents i’ve seen… and then going to the next file in the list.

which, of course, is leaving me with files where all but the last 5 or 10 seconds of music or video is corrupt, but the rest of it is fine, which is almost more frustratingly irritating than if the entire file was corrupt. 🤬🤬

also, more bad news: there were NO .ogg, .flac, .aif or .aup files recovered AT ALL, which means that NONE of the music that i have recorded since 1983 made it. 😢

i MAY still have the cassettes on to which they were originally mixed down, but they haven’t been played for at least 20 years, and i don’t hold out much hope. ken may have some of my stuff, because he is a music hoarder, and i have played music with him since 1985 or thereabouts, but he lives in bellingham. and i can download .flac files from bandcamp for all of the CDs i have made, except for the one that was made right after my brain injury, which isn’t all there on bandcamp… 😒

but, at this point, it doesn’t look particularly encouraging, and i strongly suspect that i’m going to have to re-rip ALL of the physical media i own, which is another couple of months of solid 8-hour days, at least. 😒

and that doesn’t even begin to address the HUGE quantities of music of which i have purchased and downloaded ONLY electronic copies, like the 40+ albums from ergo phizmiz which i have been collecting for AT LEAST 20 years.

it feels good to have created a way out of this mess, but it’s heartbreaking to think of how much quality work i have done that has been lost. 😢

ETA: i don’t know whether this is as good news as it could be, but i got a zip file full of business logos from my web designer, and there are a couple of high res graphics that are, basically, what i used on my car… and i actually found a couple of .eps files (which, i believe, are vector, and native to illustrator) of the graphic on my car… i haven’t checked, yet, because it’s late, and i really should be in bed, but, well… 😒 AND i am, officially, buying a new car (a hybrid, hyundai ioniq), which means that i’ve got to move my graphic, anyway.

naorgroan

three days later, and $1,000 poorer, ganesha the car has returned to the land of the living… or, at least, to the land of the functional. it now has a brand spanking new alternator to replace the fried one that left me stranded by the side of the road on friday.

moe says “everything costs a thousand dollars”, and she’s right… 😒

i remember the first time i saved up $100. it took me almost two years… and that was without a lot of everyday expenses, and with an “allowance” (i was about 12 years old).

at least $1000 comes a lot easier now than $100 did then. 😒

groan!

today and tomorrow are what passes for SACBO this year. basically, it’s a tailgate party in the public parking lot in fremont where, two years ago, snake suspenderz performed it’s last performance.

i got up this morning around 9:00, and went about my business until around 9:45, when i remembered that i’m supposed to be at SACBO today. moe had a karaoke party last night, which used my microphone and amplifier, so i rushed around and put them back in their respective boxes and i was JUST walking out the door, when i suddenly remembered…

yesterday, around 15:30 or so, i was on my way home from getting the last supplies for the karaoke party when, suddenly, my car died… i was driving along issaquah-hobart road, north of highway 18, and suddenly the radio turned off, and wouldn’t turn back on… then ALL of the idiot lights on the dashboard (including a couple i have never seen before) started blinking rapidly, and randomly, before they, too, shut off. the speedometer and the tachometer quit working… the power steering quit working… but i was still moving forward, and there really wasn’t a good place to pull over, so i decided that the best thing to do was get as close to home as possible before the car died…

which happened before i got to highway 18.

this is another one of those instances which is REALLY STRANGE to me, because, in the past, when things like this have happened, i, and everybody i know, immediately goes into “WHEN IN TROUBLE, WHEN IN DOUBT, RUN IN CIRCLES, SCREAM AND SHOUT” mode and stays there for at least a week, while transportation and money to fix the vehicle are sorted out.

but this time?

i called moe, and told her what happened. after confirming my safety, she said she would come meet me, and pick up the groceries that were sweating their lives away in my car (the air conditioning quit working). she also recommended that i call triple-A and arrange for a tow. she said i shouldn’t worry about my car being borked, because we just bought a third vehicle not too long ago (a red ford F150 monster, fondly known as “big red”). when moe got to where i was, it turned out that she had already called the fix-a-car shop, and had made arrangements with them to see the car on monday. she said “it’s annoying, but it’s not the end of the world”…

the tow truck showed up about an hour later, and i rode home with my car…

and totally forgot about SACBO until this morning.

um…

i guess i’m not going to SACBO this year… 😕

SACBO 2017

hmm… F11 seems to put firefox into full-screen mode and back again… interesting…

so, SACBO was last weekend. there were no snake suspenderz, but thaddeus and i had some fun with electronic devices for most of saturday.

Thaddeus & salamandir at the Hybrid Elephant Pavilion
Thaddeus & salamandir at the Hybrid Elephant Pavilion

the most amusing (to me, anyway) part was that, as you can probably see in the picture, thaddeus was playing a guitar-like object. it is, in fact, a guitar, but it had some substantial modifications that included a wireless pickup and a MIDI-actuated sound-producing device that could make any sound you might imagine. there were obvious things, like a sitar-sound, and somewhat less obvious things, like a saxophone and a flute. when the inevitable tourists came, and thaddeus was playing a “normal” guitar-like sound, they would walk on by without even looking up from their screens (really, i don’t understand why people go to festivals like this and spend all day poking through farcebook rather than experiencing life), but when he was playing the saxophone-sound, people would look around to figure out where the sound was coming from, since it was clear — to them, anyway — that there was nobody actually playing a saxophone… and, frequently, they would keep looking for several minutes, looking behind other peoples’ cars, behind the pavilion, and such-like… 😂

sunday, i was the only snake there (there were other musicians, like ranger and annie-bannannie, but i didn’t actually play with them), so i didn’t set up the canopy, but i did play music (sold a few CDs as well), and was joined by this marvelous little girl and her slide whistle…

click here to see movie

which may or may not be upside down on your device… my impression was that the lady who took the video may or may not have been fully clued in on the operation of her “smart” phone…

apart from that, there were the expected, and the new art-cars and art-cartists, and, with the exception of the sunday morning security-guard who was being a DICK and not letting me into the fair (i went a block down the street and got in without a problem. 8P ), a reasonably good time was had by… well, me anyway…

SACBO 2017
SACBO 2017
SACBO 2017
SACBO 2017
SACBO 2017
SACBO 2017

yawn

nothing except #drumpf and depression happening for the past couple of weeks.

moe stepped on zorah and dislocated her hip (zorah’s, not moe’s), which, naturally, mortified moe, and made it so that zorah has to undergo at least eight weeks of crate-rest before we will discover whether or not she has to have surgery.

the two ounces of space queen that i was gushing about is either not space queen, or, if it is, it lacks the characteristic flavour of space queen, which is one of the reasons i like it. on the other hand, it was cheap enough that i’m not going to complain. 😐

SACBO next weekend. 19th wedding anniversary on the 21st. OCF in three weeks.

that’s more like it!

160519 new Ganesha
160519 new Ganesha

mouse tail not wrinkled…

160519 new Ganesha
160519 new Ganesha

less white background…

160519 new Ganesha
160519 new Ganesha

smooth graphics, not anywhere near as pixellated…

160519 new Ganesha
160519 new Ganesha

more accurate swastika, unlike the previous one which was (i suspect, deliberately) off center and inconsistent.

ready to start a new season of art-car shows, as soon as i get back from my trip… which i’m dreading… 😨 (which is U+1F628 FEARFUL FACE, if the emoticon doesn’t give it justice) (the trip, not the art-car shows)

knob not noster

i decided that i wanted an 8-ball knob on my shift-lever, replacing the boring, ordinary one that has the shift pattern engraved on the top.

i looked around a number of different places, locally, and discovered that the only place i could get a “regulation” 8-ball-sized shift-knob was a place where i had to order it, and then wait a few weeks until it came in — none of this “order on amazon and have it in four days” crap, this is an OLD SCHOOL customising shop which offers real 8-ball shift-knobs, not those dinky, small 8-ball-wannabe shift knobs that look cool for about 6 months and then wear out, here.

i knew i was probably going to have to match the threads on my car, so i went and measured them, and bought the proper size tap, while i waited for the 8-ball itself to arrive. it came in about a week ago, and, immediately i noticed that there was a big problem: the knob came with two plastic “inserts” and three set-screws that were supposed to hold it in place, but my car (which is a hyundai, with metric everything) not only wouldn’t fit, but i actually destroyed the proper sized plastic insert trying to get it to work.

i discovered that, to work with my shift-lever, with its metric threads, i would have to make a “shim”: i would need to get a brass rod the same diameter as the hole in the 8-ball (½"), and drill it out to the correct dimensions to accept a tap (10×1.25 metric thread), at which point i would drive the rod up into the hole in the 8-ball, drive in the set screws, and screw it in place.

first step, finding a ½" diameter brass rod. i figured i would go down to the local home depot and pick one up… but home depot doesn’t have ½" brass rod, and hasn’t had ½" brass rod for at least a year. no problem, i surmise… i’ll just go to mcclendon’s, they’ll be sure to have it. WRONG… they knew what i was looking for, but said that they stopped carring ½" brass rod when it became “too expensive”… 😕 i’m reasonably sure that i could have bought ½" brass rod at hardwick’s, but i would have had to drive into seattle for that, and i didn’t feel like driving that day… not only that, but with the information that brass rod had suddenly got “expensive” i wasn’t sure that hardwick’s would have it, and i didn’t want to drive all that way for nothing…

160422 brass shim
160422 brass shim
so, i ended up buying 8″-to-9″ (random length) of ½" brass rod online for about $5.00 (which is what i expected to pay anyway, so i don’t know what they were talking about at mcclendon’s… too expensive??), and proceded to start to drill it out, but very quickly discovered that it was going to take a REALLY long time to do it manually, if i wanted it to be anything like the quality that i would expect to have on my car… but i know a guy who owns a machine shop in the south end of downtown seattle! 🙂

so, this morning, i went down to his shop and made a shim of the proper size, with the proper machinery, and it, literally, took five minutes (and most of that time was setting up the machine), and now i have a beautiful, new, authentic 8-ball gear-shift-knob on my car! 😎

160422 8-ball shift-knob
160422 8-ball shift-knob

i would be doing a lot more of this kind of stuff if i didn’t have to wait around so long for materials to be delivered, that i used to be able to go down to the local hardware store and buy…

160422 8-ball gear-shift-knob
160422 8-ball gear-shift-knob

ॐ ༀ ૐ ੴ

the typewriter has been left in the capable hands of the guy who is either going to fix it and give it back to me, or take it and sell me another one at a discount… and, honestly, i hope he wants to take it and sell me another one at a discount, because he’s got an underwood manual typewriter that doesn’t require electricity, and that’s what i really want… if there’s no electricity, an electric typewriter is an expensive door stop, but a manual typewriter works anyway… 👿

glow-in-the-daylight house
almost finished, and it glows in the daylight as well…
140909 milestone 666666
666666 outside of bellevue, appropriately enough…

SACBO, OCF et cetera

we have three snake suspenderz gigs next week. tuesday we have a gig at horizon house, which we played for last year to great acclaim. thursday we have a gig at the university house, wallingford, which doesn’t pay enough and only wants “background music” for their art opening (they could easily afford to pay us twice the amount they are, out of petty cash, considering how swank and regal the place is, but it’s for a friend of a friend, so we can’t really say much). saturday we have SACBO, which is in a new place this year. apparently, in spite of the crowds of people who attend, the fremont solstice fair budget is on the “shoe-string” level, and they decided to use the parking lot that we have been holding SACBO in for the past few years as a “pay-for” concert venue, which means that SACBO has to move to the former sound mind & body parking lot. it’s good because there won’t be the possibility for loud interruptions, like what happened last year, and it’s a nicer location, with more shade, right next to the water.

this year will also be the 14th 16th anniversary (this is why my wife is always right and i am always wrong) of our wedding, which now moves into the class of things i have done for the longest amount of time in my life, including smoking cannabis and being a musician.

the fighting instruments of karma (for which i am now, more-or-less, the “official” tuba player) has a parade in which i am actually going to be “marching”, in darrington, on the 4th of july. moe says i “dodged a bullet” because her mom wants us to come down to portland for a barbecue on the 4th. i’m still not totally sure whether moe will attend or not (although i don’t see any reason why not), but at this point, i’m grateful for anything that puts distance between me and moe’s mother.

then OCF happens from july 8th (or 9th, at the latest) until the 14th. we are already scheduled to perform at the ritz, on saturday, 12th july, at 7:30 pm. if you’re interested, and in the area, i encourage you to come: it is, definitely, not to be missed. both kiki and sasha are cast members this year, which means that stuart will be the pro-tem leader of the band, we will have an alternate drummer (possibly) and at least one new player whose name i have seen bandied about in email, but have never actually met. the philharmonic still hasn’t had any rehearsals, and there is no new music, although some is rumoured to exist, at least in kiki’s mind… in other words, we’re coming into OCF with practically no rehearsals at all, and (at this point) no rehearsals with the cast… just like normal… i’m not even 100% sure what show we are doing this year (although i think it might be “Sleeping Beauty”)…

it’s gotten to be so much of a “tradition” that i’m not particularly worried any longer, but it still causes a small amount of stress.

meh

i’m still alive and kicking, however at this point, whenever i think about posting anything the “meh” takes over.

i played for NANDA‘s 10th anniversary in the balloon hangar at ft. worden, which is now called the “McCurdy Pavillion”. 35 years ago, when i first came across it, it was a mouldy, forgotten world war II relic, taken over by the navy, that had been officially abandoned for 10 years or so. it’s amazing what a little bit of paint and a few hundred thousand dollars can do to a place. i spent saturday morning re-visiting the sacred sound-spaces with which i have become so familiar over the past 35 years, played music with members of my karass, and slept in a motorhome in port townsend. if i had my way, i would have spent quite a bit more time exploring the subterranean vaults, but i had to get thaddeus back so that he could take care of his obligations. i noticed, however, that port townsend is a little more than an hour’s drive from here, which (on heavy traffic days) is not that much further than seattle, which has got me wondering why i don’t get out to port townsend more frequently.

along the same lines, i have been in discussion with eben, clayton and andrew (the leader, and the two other tuba players for the fighting instruments of karma, respectively), and it has been more or less decided that i am now the “official” tuba player for the SANCApators. SANCA is a place in georgetown that is most known for its “School Of Flight”, but offers a variety of classes for all levels, including “drop in” classes in trapeze (the idea of which makes me wonder a little). they have classes in a number of pursuits that, i think, would be both fun and “therapeutic”, such as tumbling, acrobatics, juggling and so forth… it would be interesting to take classes there, but i would have to be sure that they knew about my brain injury, and talk with them about how it would be accounted for.

i’ve got 3 snake suspenderz gigs in the next three weeks: one at horizon house, which we played for a couple of years ago, one at university house, wallingford, which i booked in spite of objections from hobbit, and one at SACBO. the day SACBO starts, i am also going to be showing off my art car at the LeMay Automotive Museum with a whole bunch of other “car-tists”.

through sheer, stubborn will and determination, i got the fremont phil booked at the ritz at OCF before OCF, for the first time EVER… now, instead of wondering when we’re going on, and not knowing until 15 minutes before it actually happens (like what happened last year), we know, ahead of time, that we’re going on at 7:00 pm, saturday, 12th july, and OCF hasn’t even started yet! now, insha’llah, barring unforseen (and 51% likely, due to HIF) other circumstances, we actually know when we’re going to be playing at the naked hippie sauna… 😎

catsup

i’m still more or less stuck on the new web site, but i’m not really worried about it, because i continue to get orders from the current one… yes, i’m not always getting all the emails i should be getting regarding customer orders, but i continue getting the most important ones. also i still haven’t discovered an alternative for paypal, but both of those things may be mitigated by the fact that i may be hiring a professional to “do it for me” at some point. at this point, such a thing would only happen after a disaster, such as somebody cracking the site in a way from which i can’t recover on my own, or something like the current version of PHP or the database no longer being supported, or something like that. it remains a fantasy, but part of the current fantasy for the near future.

today i helped ezra move a four-foot-by-four-foot “painting” from his apartment in the central district to a recording studio in fremont. it barely fit in my car. the word “painting” is in quotation marks because the object looks like, and functions like a painting, but is, actually, made from scraps of vinyl. we also spent some time wandering up and down the burke-gilman trail discussing recent events, future plans, fantasies and miscellania. he’s going to lisbon for a couple of weeks, and then he’s doing a residency in central oregon for a month… my son is thinking of moving out of state, and perhaps even out of the country, on a more-or-less permanent basis.

i’ve gone through one “artist” who said that they would make a vector representation of my raster-based file. i don’t know whether or not they actually made a vector represntation of my file, because they responded with a “proof copy” and then stopped responding… which, i suppose, i should have expected, considering that i found out about them on “fiverr dot com”, which is, allegedly, a place you can go to find just about anything for increments of $5. i’ve sent a preliminary file to a “professional” in florida, who claims to do the same thing, although more “reliably” and, predictably, for more money, but they, too, said they would get back to me in 24 hours, and that hasn’t happened yet. fortunately, i haven’t actually forked over any money, yet, but this person’s web site had many, glowing testamonials from seemingly responsible, professional businesses and suchlike, so i’m hoping that the only reason i haven’t heard from her yet is because it’s sunday.

once i actually receive a vector drawing based on my raster drawing, i’m going to give it to the local guy who does vehicle wraps, and get a proof from him, and then, if i like it, i’m going to get a vehicle wrap on my car. i may, actually, be able to fit all 1008 names of ganesha on my car, due to the fact that i can, more acturately, render the typeface size because it’s from an electronic file, and not painted by me… 😎

woahy…

so i bought a “new” car yesterday… 😮

Ganesha The Car, v.4.0

i’m still kind of dazed and confused… i didn’t expect to have to buy a new car for… oh, i don’t know, a year or so… it’s not as though buying a new car was completely unexpected, and it’s not as if i couldn’t afford it (thanks to my grandmother, who has been dead since 1988), but…

okay, my old car died — they thought it was the fuel pump, but that was two days ago, and they were supposed to call me with an update, but didn’t — and in the mean time, moe and i went down to salem, oregon, where monique is friends with the people who own Withnell Motors, and, thanks to my grandmother, i bought a “new” 2009 Hyundai Elantra Touring, which qualifies as the newest car i have EVER owned (with the exception of two literally brand-new cars that i bought with moe, which were “our” cars)…

i have four panto performances coming up in a few hours, so i’m not even going to be able to BEGIN processing all this until monday…

ganesha the art car

Ganesha the Car, v.3
i finally got around to adding sanskrit to the other side of the car, but i still haven’t decided what else i’m going to put on it… it has a lot to do with the hood and the roof, which need to be sanded and have a new coat of gloss black applied before it gets anything else… and i’ve got the gloss black paint…

eventually, eventually…

stuff

moe has gone to san diego for a week, to attend a veterinary assistants conference… which means i have all four dogs to myself for a week… fun…

i don’t mind the dogs as long as someone else takes care of them most of the time (i was raised around dogs from a very early age), but i’ve never liked taking care of them that much… and, with a dog who is a little more than a year old and still very much a puppy (apart from the fact that he is a border collie and currently stands an inch and a half taller than his mother), and another, ancient and decrepit dog who likes to bark, suddenly and loudly, at nothing, for no very obvious reasons, my patience is being severely tried, and moe has only been gone for two days…

i have two gigs on sunday (again), one with the ballard sedentary sousa band (at the ballard locks, at 2:00 pm), and one with snake suspenderz (on mercer island, at 7:00 pm), which means that i’m going to be gone for longer than rye’s bladder will hold out, so moe arranged for some friends to come over and give the doggies some “relief” in the evening… which is absolutely okay with me, given the circumstances.

i had the windows in my car tinted the other day, which is very good, because now, when people are “just walking by” my car, on sunday, instead of being able to look in the car and see my new, fancy tuba in the back, they won’t be able to see anything… however, in the process of applying the tinting film, the guy broke the passenger side rear window… or something, it worked the last time i tried it, but i haven’t used it since i bought the car, which is when i “tested it out” the last time. my impression is that when the previous owner pulled off the not-professionally-installed (i.e. defective) window tinting film, it left a whole bunch of residue which, subsequently, gummed up the motor… anyway, they couldn’t tint that window, because it wouldn’t go up and down, so i took it over to edgewood tire last night, and had them “cut the cable and insert a wooden wedge” to make the window “go up and down” — sort of — but, because of the fact that it was held in place with a wooden wedge, there would have been no point in locking the door, or (for that matter) tinting the windows in the first place, so i ponied up another $250 to fix the window, which leaves me with very little money… but money has been coming in at a surprisingly high rate recently… not very large quantities (with one significant exception), but frequently enough that i’m not too worried about how little money is in my hybrid elephant account at the moment… 😉

interesting

i recently found out that the person known as John Michael Greer, the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, and reputed to be one of 21st Century America’s most noted occultists, is the same john michael greer with whom i went to college, between 1979 and 1981. i wonder if the way i feel about this is anything like the people who were personal friends of aleister crowley felt… i wonder if it’s even appropriate to feel this way.

snake suspenderz has a gig this evening at the horizon house, which is the same place that my elderly, brain injured client lives. i haven’t heard anything from him since a couple of months ago, when there was a problem with his power supply that turned out to be a motherboard issue, and then i stopped hearing from him… so i don’t know whether he got another computer, or what, but he doesn’t know that i’m going to be playing music there this evening, so things might get a little “interesting”…

SACBO is saturday. snake suspenderz is playing, and i may put some more paint on my car, depending on when snake suspenderz decides to show up, and whether or not the weather coöperates. the weather is supposed to clear up tomorrow, so i may paint some more tomorrow, as well.

moe needs my help trimming sheep feet tomorrow… trimming sheep feet? and i’m supposed to be holding the sheep, while she trims their feet… we’ll see how that goes. 😉

snake suspenderz has two gigs on sunday. we play in the early afternoon at the burien wild strawberry festival (which i attended with an art-car caravan, a few years ago, and was witness to the guy selling gold jewelry next to my car getting ripped off by a pre-teenaged doodlehum), and then, in the evening, we play at the can-can, along with the Wanderlust Circus, featuring my friend noah, from portland.

OCF is looming, and we haven’t had even one rehearsal. i don’t even know what play we’re doing… the princess and the pea? rapunzel? rumplestiltskin? a mash-up? this is definitely going to be an interesting year…

finally

i now, officially, have enough “art” on my car to make it acceptible for the seattle art-car blow-out…

which is to say, two lines of sanskrit down the passenger side.

i hope to have more, but it’s all dependent on the weather. the weather was nice today, but i had a whole bunch of preparation to do, so i didn’t actually get to painting the car until around 2:00… but still, i finished up about sunset, which (today) was around 9:30… which is why there are no pictures. there will be pictures tomorrow. there should be more paint tomorrow, as well, but it’s all dependent on the weather. 😛

fumdiddle

Olympia NOTC benefit show 2012i went to olympia last night, to play with The Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Chamber Band/Orchestra, which i have determined, is a majority of my karass. i have only become more convinced of this as time goes on: i have played with about 90% of these people, in one form or another (but, specifically, not as “The Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Chamber Band/Orchestra”) for the past 35 years or so. i have played with them in bellingham, lummi island, port townsend, mount vernon, and seattle, in groups like the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band, The Fremont Philharmonic, Snake Suspenderz, The Skagit County Community Band, The Stairway Jam and a number of other groups. and, as a karass is “a group of people who do God’s will without ever discovering what they are doing”, i think use of the word “karass” is a most excellent and absolutely appropriate use of the word to describe this group of people, and their relationship to me. last night’s show also featured The Mud Bay Jugglers, Joey Pippia, The Scuff and Al Show, Citizens Band, The Tallhouse Arts Consortium, The Juggling Jollies, Justincredible, Della Moustachella, and (special guests) the ORIGINAL(!!!) Flying Karamazov Brothers, Dmitry, Smerdyakov and Fyodor… and i also saw my very good friends from bellingham, Karl Meyer and Stephan Freeman, the son of Kenyth Freeman.

as i have said before, if i had the opportunity to move my entire life (including my workshop), wholesale, to bellingham, without having to worry about what i was leaving behind, or where to put things when i got there, i would be there in a second.

(and, if any of my band-mates happen to be reading this, i definitely would make the trip to seattle (or wherever) to maintain my current membership in whatever band they may be worried about. i live in the middle of bum-fuck, nowhere, currently, and it doesn’t affect my ability to drive into seattle to busk, or do paying gigs, or even rehearse, so i don’t know why you imagine that if i lived in bellingham, it would be any different.)

i found a reliable, honest mechanic that will fix my brakes for A LOT less than the $800 than i was quoted a few days ago: $300 to $500 qualifies as “a lot less” doesn’t it? and i suppose it really doesn’t matter that the guy who actually is going to fix my car is the father-in-law of my wife’s boss, does it? it seems a bit like nepotism, but the difference in price is enough to make me tend to ignore such things…

i still have a cough, but it has been going away, gradually. i actually went the entire night without coughing last night. i still feel exausted at night, and i’m sleeping more than usual, but that’s at least partially because of the fact that i was at a show until around midnight last night.

i still don’t have a car, but…

i still don’t have a car, but i’ve got a temporary vehicle, thanks to moe’s employer (and the source of my last two cars) for a week. i actually went to sammamish, a fairly large community to the east of the issaquah highlands, neither of which communities were even there 20 years ago, at 7:00 this morning to pick up the pickup…

seriously… i went to high school in that same area, 35 years ago, and the communities along the east side of lake sammamish weren’t there back then… of course the micro$awft main campus is right across the street from where i went to high school, and, back then it was a swampy forested area where all of the “degenerate” students went to skip class, have illicit sex, and take drugs… and i’m pretty sure that the same students are now working in exactly the same place

so i’ve got a temporary car, and that takes A LOT of the stress away.

furthermore, i (FINALLY) got in touch with the guy who wants to sell me his honda for $800. i’ve been trying to call and text him since sunday, but it kept going straight to voicemail and he wasn’t returning my calls… it turns out that his brand new, fancy, expensive "smart" phone erased itself, and then died on sunday, and he just figured it out… his honda is currently at his mechanic, having an “issue” looked at, but i will probably know more by the end of the week… and that, too, takes A LOT of the stress away.

i still don’t have a car, but…
     i’m becoming more and more sure that i’m going to get through this period without either screwing up or blowing people off, which is a very good thing indeed.

cat stevens

i was just listening to But I Might Die Tonight by cat stevens, and at the same time i got a spam message from… “cat stevens”… 😐

i still don’t have a car, but now i’ve got to actually make it to the BSSB rehearsal tomorrow, because liz is having trouble with her computer and wants me to fix it. specifically, she’s having difficulty getting micro$awft look-out to get her email. of course, my professional solution to any problem caused by micro$awft is linux. i don’t know whether or not she knows this yet, but i’m in no mood to argue at the moment. 😐

i still don’t have a car, but theoretically i can borrow a truck for a week, as long as i can figure out how to get to bumfuck nowhere to pick it up. it’s really in the issaquah highlands or some recently-built, trendy, nouveau-riche place like that, but it may just as well be bumfuck nowhere, because currently i have to rely on public transportation, my bicycle, or my feet, and wherever it is that i’m supposed to go to pick up the truck isn’t served by busses… and it’s at the top of a very, very steep, long hill… 😐

i called the trumpet player from the fremont phil, who says that he has a honda that he could sell me for $800. i talked with him friday, before the car died, and he said he’d call me sunday, but he didn’t. i have been trying to get in touch with him all day, but his phone immediately goes to voicemail. 😐

i’ve also got a date for taping a TV SHOW(!!) with snake suspenderz on wednesday, two snake suspenderz performances this weekend, and another one next week. unless i get some wheels, i’m gonna miss them, or totally screw up my sweetie’s day having her drive me around and/or having me drive her around… 😛

on the other paw, i have a button order pending, and a business card order pending, and another business card order that i just submitted, and i just sold the last of my aparajita, which means that i have to get more… i don’t really have to get more, but i’m down to my – fairly substantial (because it’s been so hard to find) – “personal stash”.

ganesha the no-longer-a-car… 8(

ganesha the no-longer-a-car, v.2ganesha the car, v.2 has died. it had a long life, but only a little more than a year of it was as ganesha.

it died on the way to hobbit’s house, after busking at the fremont sunday market today. when i started it up, it made a pretty loud, random-sounding rattle (which it has been doing for several weeks now) but it didn’t go away after a minute or so (like it has been for the past several weeks), but i decided not to worry about it…

and, sure enough, it died on 65th, just east of 15th Ave. NW in ballard, right next to ballard high school (go beavers! 😉 )

thanks to the almighty AAA, i towed it home…

but now i DON’T HAVE A CAR! 🙁

which is distressing…

but not too much, because i know that i will find some way of getting around eventually, and as soon as practically possible, it will most likely be in a replacement (sigh… FINALLY!) for ganesha the car, v.2.

hint: there IS going to be a ganesha the car, v.3… 8)

update

i’ve been working on a business card, but i’ve needed important things like the location of hi-res images and the names of the fonts and stuff like that before i can actually create anything… which means waiting for them to get back to me… of course, once i actually have all those things it took me about 15 minutes to put together a business card that is like the example they sent me, and now i’ve got to wait (again) for the customer to either approve the card, or make changes… and, being that it’s a business card for an artist, if there are changes, they’ll most likely want something exotic, unusual and expensive…

we had a snake suspenderz rehearsal on tuesday. it’s really great to play with the guys again, but i’m afraid that, once we’re through with the (one) gig that we’ve got scheduled so far (28th june, at the can can) the band will fade from existence again… and, as much as some people complain that it’s a “hobby band”, i get the very strong feeling that it could very easily be a good deal more than that. we’re going to be playing for SACBO on saturday and sunday. i have my canopy, and i’m going to be there anyway, because of my art car, so i figured what the hell… we can busk, and because of the fact that it’s the fremont solstice festival, we’ll probably make some money, and it’s a couple more “rehearsals” before we have to do it “for real” at the can can…

i decided that, because of the fact that SACBO is imminent, and because of the fact that the continued working existence of the current Ganesha The Car is still very much in question (it’s still working – touch wood – but who knows whether or not it’ll be working tomorrow, much less next week), i decided that i was going to put “freeform” art on it, and save the complicated design work for a car that i have confidence is going to last me a little bit longer. i haven’t taken any pictures of it, yet, but it vaguely resembles this drawing from my sketchbook. it’s not nearly as “artistic” (read “exotic and unusual”) as i would like it to be, but it will have to do for the time being.

we had a fremont phil rehearsal on wednesday. there was a rehearsal last week, as well, but i was in the middle of preparing for my colonoscopy last week, so i didn’t go to that one. the phil has taken off in a new direction, which is interesting and intriguing, and not entirely unwelcome. we’ve gotten a couple of new flutists, a new trumpet player and the baritone player and the EWI player from last year, who are all dedicated musicians and very interested in moving forwards with the group. we’re playing a private “ice cream social” near edmonds on the 23rd, and we’re sounding surprisingly good, considering the small amount of rehearsal we’ve had.

speaking of the colonoscopy, the results arrived yesterday. the other two polyps that i had removed were benign as well, and there’s nothing to worry about, but they want to see inside my ass again in two years, rather than the three that they told me originally, because of the fact that the polyps were there to begin with.

spooooons…

i have been taking a “constitutional” in the mornings for the past couple of weeks (it keeps my blood pressure down), and when i returned i realised that i had a HUGE pile of detritus left over from the deck-wrecking project blocking our driveway and, more importantly, blocking access to the recycle bin and the garbage bin… so i unloaded my car and reconfigured it for hauling junk to the dump, and then spent the rest of the morning(!!) sorting the pile of detritus into stuff that gets hauled to the dump, stuff that’s mostly dirt to begin with – which gets hauled down to the organic-junk-and-yard-waste pile at the bottom of the property, and a pile of stuff that won’t fit in my car. it turned out that i put about half of the pile in the “mostly-dirt-to-begin-with” category, and it turned out that i didn’t even fill the back of the car more than half-way with stuff that gets hauled to the dump. the rest, a pile of 8 or 10 twelve-foot-long 2x8s and 2x6s are now in a place where they won’t block access to anything except, maybe, the guys who come to pump the septic tank in another five years or so… but i hope to figure out something else to do with them before then…

then i took the stuff to the dump. when i was driving away from the dump, i stepped on the brake pedal of ganesha the car, and it floored easy without seriously affecting my speed – something which was only slightly less alarming because i was going less than 5 miles per hour. i pumped on the pedal once or twice and it came back to the point where i was able to control the car’s speed, but it was acting strangely for 10 minutes or so after that. i had to get the oil changed in the car anyway, so i took it to the repair shop, where i learned that i have to get the rear brakes and the wheel cylinders replaced.

great… i have to spend more money on a car that isn’t going to get anything but LESS reliable as time goes on… 😐

did it!

after somewhat less than a year of thinking about ideas and even trying out one on ganesha the car v.2, i’ve actually decided on a deceptively simple plan that, if all goes correctly, should turn the current not-quite-an-art-car into a piece of artwork to rival ganesha the car v.1.stencil

unfortunately, i am unable to give you a clear idea of what it’s going to look like, because i haven’t actually tried it out anywhere, yet, and also i really don’t want to “show my hand” too early in the game, but this graphic shows the stencil i’m going to be using, which should give you some idea of what it’s going to look like…

… not very much of an idea, but that’s the fun part… 😉

because of the fact that the design needs to be executed with more than the ordinary degree of accuracy, i’m going to lay the entire design out in pencil before i try to start painting, which is where the stencil will serve a dual purpose. printed on white paper, with alignment holes on either end, it will make an easy way for me to quickly pencil in the design on the car and make any necessary adjustments, and then, printed on clear mylar, it will make an effective way to paint the design once i’ve got everything laid out the way i want it. the only thing i have to do, now, is get the car washed and wait for nice enough weather that i can do it and not have to worry about rain…

fleep 牁铃 ฒำฉ #2

i bought a chilton’s manual for “Escort/Tracer 1991-00 Repair”, which is way too clean and shiny, and wants to be grease-smeared and dog-eared…

i would attempt to replace the exhaust manifold gasket myself, if i had someone like wheelsmaster here to help me make sure i’m doing the right things, but because of the fact that the instructions for replacing the gasket start off with “remove the drivebelt” and, shortly afterwards, is followed by “While not absolutely necessary, it’s a good idea to remove the radiator as well; the core can easily be damaged if it’s bumped by the manifold during removal”, i’m worried that, if i do something wrong, i’ll be left with a hulk in my yard that i will have to have towed somewhere before it even has a hope of running again.

however, i know that jack said he would charge me “a couple of hours labour” to replace the gasket, i’m going to see what the guys at edgewood tire have to say about it. it probably won’t make that much difference, but i could actually supply whoever makes the repair with a gasket, as well. 🙂

fleep 牁铃 ฒำฉ

ganesha the car is overheating and acting strangely, so i took it to jack – the guy i got it from, who owns burien imports – because he said that he would also fix the cigarette lighter which i would use as a power adaptor for my cell-phone, if it worked, which it didn’t, until yesterday.

on thursday, last week, i went to kirkland for their “2nd thursday art walk”. it was raining, and the store that i parked in front of actually closed about half-an-hour after i got there (which meant that nobody was “art-walking” on that side of the street any longer), but on the way there, i had to fight with traffic and deal with the fact that ganesha the car was overheating. then, when i decided that the kirkland 2nd thursday art walk had run its course, i had to fight traffic again going the other way (which is only possible because seattle has the worst traffic ANYWHERE on a pretty regular basis) and it’s a miracle that i made it home without breaking down, even with the heater turned up all the way and the fan on full blast… 8(

of course by the time i took it to jack’s shop, yesterday, it wasn’t overheating at all, which was a good thing, since jack wouldn’t look at it anyway, because “it’s not an import” which means that he doesn’t even have a shop manual for it. i left it with him anyway, because he said he was going to fix my cigarette lighter problem, and went out for a perfectly timed day on the bus.

i took one bus into downtown seattle, from burien, got off it, and almost immediately got on another bus to fremont, where i picked up my shoes from the shoe-repair guy. i then relaxed, smoked a bowl, and caught a bus back into downtown seattle, where i wandered the pike place market for a while, talked with the flute-maker with whom i interacted earlier this week when he picked up something that i put on freecycle, got some lunch and then caught a bus back towards burien, which, strangely enough, was being driven by a guy that plays in la banda gozona with me. i made it back to burien, where i wandered around for a while, went to my appointment with ned, and then called jack who had my car ready. i then got on another bus back to jack’s shop, and got home around 6:00. at no time during the course of the day did i have to wait longer than 5 minutes for a bus… which sort of makes me wonder why we have so many traffic problems around here…

in spite of the fact that “it’s not an import”, jack had some insight as to what might be wrong with the car, specifically the thermostat is probably acting sluggish, which would make sense: i hadn’t driven it for a few days before thursday, which is when it started acting strangely, and i have driven it every day since then, which is why it’s not acting sluggish now. he also said that the exhaust manifold needs a new gasket, which he said he could replace for a “couple hours” of labour… he did show me the exhaust manifold, however, and showed me what i had to do to replace the gasket, so i’m thinking…

now i’m going to go to the auto-parts store and purchase a shop manual for my car, and get the low-down on replacing an exhaust manifold gasket.

fresh paint

so i went to the art car show at Fresh Paint in everett yesterday. i really like doing shows like that, because i get paid for doing exactly what i like to do most, which is being creative and answering questions about my artwork. i only had one person who was obviously disturbed by what she saw as a “neo-nazi” symbol, and she was very concerned because, while initially she didn’t even see it, she was also very concerned about my eternal salvation: it didn’t matter that my religion has been around for 5 times as long as her religion has, and basically says the same thing that hers does anyway, if i would only accept that jeezis died for my sins, everything would be all right — until she also learned that there was a perceived “neo-nazi” aspect to it, whereupon she broke off the conversation in the middle of a sentence and walked away.

ignorant people like her really push my buttons… 😐

there are a few pictures – fortunately i was unable to get a picture of the ignorant woman, but that’s okay, because i didn’t like her anyway.

dreek

i bought some 1shot clear coat for the hood of my car. it works okay on the black – it does cause it to bleed this interesting brownish red colour, but i can clean that up pretty quickly. on the other hand, when i apply the clear coat to the gold ink, it smears – even totally dry ink – and it takes long enough to clean up that i won’t be able to clear coat the car, at least not before tomorrow, when i have a show in everett for which i’m being paid $100.

i’ve been playing around with a stencil design based on Śrītattvanidhi, but the stencils i have designed so far are too big for the media i have, and while i know that larger media exists, i still haven’t found a source for it. it’s coming really close to the end of the “create an art car in the open with no garage” season really quickly, and i haven’t got more than the hood finished on the car, which is a perennial source of frustration for me. hopefully the newly expanded workshop space will facilitate my attempts to make this a reality.

Renaldo & The Loaf – Hambu Hodo

Enter turtle here

monique flew away to atlanta this morning. she’ll be back in a week. when i returned from dropping her off at the airport, i discovered an epson media projector that wasn’t here yesterday, sitting on the kitchen counter. i hope it wasn’t supposed to go to atlanta with monique, ’cause if it was, it didn’t. of course i tried to call her, but she has her phone turned off so that the wireless signal won’t “interfere” with the airplane electronics.

the doggles are all upset and wary about the change in their circumstances this morning. they all got up at about the normal time, but instead of what usually happens on tuesday, none of them got to ride in the car, they got breakfast from me, and not from monique, and they’re all currently at home. i’m gonna guess that around 7:30 or so this evening, they’re going to start worrying and fussing about the fact that she hasn’t come home yet, and that there will be a good deal of dogs staring out the front window and barking when they think they hear someone driving up the driveway. magick just had some fairly substantial dental work done yesterday, so there’s going to be a change in her afternoons for a while (she has to take medication twice a day), and that on top of monique’s being gone are going to put her even further out on the edge than she normally is.

i made arrangements with a friend to give me a ride up to burien imports, to pick up my car, so i won’t have to ride my bike for an hour, take two busses and then ride my bike for another 45 minutes to get there. i’m hoping that it will not need further repair for a while, but i’m not gonna hold my breath, because my regular mechanic told me that a car of that age and make is notorious for needing constant, sometimes expensive repair. i still haven’t heard from the lady confirming my dropping out of the great peninsula future festival, but i got confirmation yesterday for fresh paint, in spite of the fact that this year’s car is a different car than it was last year.

ETA: i got home with ganesha the car and parked it in the sun… the rear view mirror fell off… 😐 it never ends…

snoid

i discovered second use, which is a very dangerous place for me to know about, because it is replete with various objects which, while extremely cool (and some of them are also immenantly useful) are, for the most part, totally useless to me… there are a few things that i could definitely use eventually – like the tessellated fish paving stones, which would go well in the paver-patio which will eventually be where the deck that has yet to be demolished currently is in our back yard. there are also a lot of things like doors, and windows that could, potentially, be used in our house, but don’t have a specific purpose… and there are things like an upright piano, which have no immediate purpose, but it would be extremely cool to have, and other things, like an antique foot-locker (with “authentic moth-ball smell”) that i couldn’t resist buying in spite of the fact that there was a good chance that i would have to use it to move out of our house when moe discovers that i had purchased more “stuff” to cram into our tiny house – which was ironic, since i had a hauntingly similar discussion with the guy behind the counter at second use, concerning the pros and cons of “needing more ‘stuff'” in the house. in fact, there was a heated discussion about the new “stuff” that i brought home, and the first thing that moe said was “what ‘stuff’ is leaving the house in order to make room for the new ‘stuff’ you bought?” fortunately, there is a pile of ex-clothing that i can take to the second-hand store, and a large pile of blankets and bedding that will actually go into the foot-locker, which will then get stored in the loft of the workshop, so i won’t have to be moving out (at least not any time soon), and my guess is that as long as i don’t start patronising second use unsupervised, there won’t be any major problems. i discovered second use because that’s where snake suspenderz played on sunday for a couple of hours. i love those guys, and i’m just starting to reach my stride where tuba-playing is involved. there definitely has to be more snake suspenderz gigs soon.

Ganesha the Second is ready, finally, and, hopefully, i’m going to pick it up tomorrow morning… oh, my! i just realised that tomorrow is the day that moe flies out to atlanta for a week, for her conference/test thingy, which means that i probably will have to make other arrangements to pick up the car tomorrow. grr… 8/ moe is going to atlanta to speak at a vet conference, and to take a qualification test for a veterinary behaviour technicans’ organisation, neither of which i can remember the exact names. it’s really cool for her, though, because she’s actually getting paid to speak at the conference, which means that she gets a working vacation in atlanta for free. i’ll figure out some way or another to pick up the car.

i’ve got a couple of art car things coming up. unfortunately, i won’t be able to do the Great Peninsula Future Festival, because moe will be out of town, and the festival involves getting there before 9:30 am, leaving after 6:00 pm, or whenever the festival closes, and a ban on domestic animals, which means that the doggles can’t come with. on the other hand, the fact that the car is (allegedly) in running condition again means that i can go to Fresh Paint again this year, which is definitely on the schedule, because i got a $100 stipend just for showing up last year… 🙂

dreeb

i just got an incense order for $15 from denmark. according to USPS, the charge for shipping to denmark is around $70. i’ve got it fairly clearly spelled out on the site, but nobody seems to pay attention to things like that…

except for that one person who sent me an insulting message because they found my new page about K2 and didn’t like what it said, but that’s to be expected.

i’ve got the opportunity to be a part of the Great Peninsula Future Festival with my art car, but it’s still in the shop, and i’d have to come each day before 9:30 am, and then go home every night, because moe is going to be in atlanta at a conference. i’d be getting $25 for gas, and there would very likely be other people i know there, but getting there before 9:30 would be kind of a trick. of course i get to the fremont sunday market before 9:30, but it isn’t two days in a row… and the car is still in the shop, and given that it’s being worked on by jack, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be ready in time.

spoons, etc.

yesterday i got up at an ungodly hour (6:30 am) and went to pick up my wanna-be-art-car from one repair shop, and drove it 15 miles to another repair shop where they’re allegedly going to fix it. on the 15 mile drive from one repair shop to the other, the car almost overheated, and smoke was coming out the fresh air vents when i arrived, but ganesha is in charge of this car, so if it’s going to be fixed, then it’s going to be fixed, and if it isn’t, there’s nothing i can do about it.

anyway, that left me in burien with no car. i had my bicycle, though it’s around 30 miles home from there, so i rode to the burien transit center and took a bus from there to international boulevard, where i transferred to another bus that was going to the federal way transit center, and from there i rode my bicycle the remaining 8 miles home.

when i got home, i turned around and went out again, to get an ink cartridge for my printer, so that everything won’t print green any longer, and i also went to the copy shop to get photocopies of the panto music of which i need multiple copies. then i came home again…

when i got home, i used the new ink cartridge to print an invoice, and packaged an order that came in the day before, and went out again to the post office to ship the order.

then i came home again, and searched for, and found a guy who would fix the free lawnmower that i got on freecycle the other day. he picked it up(!) last night.

today, i went to the bank to get cash for the guy who fixed the lawn mower, and when he delivered it(!), i mowed the lawn, taking a break in the middle to go out and buy a gas can and gas, because it ran out of gas and i didn’t have any because my previous lawn mower was electric.

then i got most of the rest of my gear ready for OCF. i still have to pack clothes, and there are probably some miscellaneous things that i haven’t remembered to pack.

i keep finding myself amazed at the fact that in a little more than a week there are going to be feral hippie children immitating the play that i only saw for the first time on monday, and that was an incomplete show, because all of the music isn’t written yet, and we’re still putting the final touches on the script… the final dress rehearsal for the panto here is tonight. i believe the people who aren’t going down early are having another rehearsal on monday, but the next complete rehearsal we’ve got scheduled for the panto is at OCF, a week from tomorrow evening before the fair opens on friday. i’ve still got to determine whether or not i’m bringing my saw. also i’ve got a pink bandana and a trumpet that i have to remember to take for katy.

tomorrow there’s supposed to be a banda gozona rehearsal, but it’s for a performance that i have to miss because of OCF, so i’m not sure whether or not i’m going to it. friday there’s the final BBWP rehearsal before the fire show the night of the fair opening.

as long as we hold it together, the panto this year has the potential for being the best show we’ve ever done. we’re doing a mash up of Red Riding Hood and The Three Pigs: they’re both fairly simple, short stories that have some similar characters – the big bad wolf, and the woodcutter, for example – and they’re both ripe for tweaking the plots a little bit (or a lot) so that they’ll fit together. of course we’ve got the standard gender bending and off-colour jokes which should go over the heads of the smaller members of the audience. if we don’t hold it together, well, it’s OCF, so the probability is very high that nobody will notice, or if they do, they’ll think we planned it that way.

Enter title here

i upgraded to wordpress 3.0. whoopie. at this point, wordpress is stable enough that you don’t see anything from the outside, and apart from a few telling colour changes, nothing is really that obvious from the back end either. i suppose once i try to do something that isn’t part of the plan we’ll see whether or not they’ve actually done a good job this version.

evan, moe’s boss and the guy who gave me the current version of Ganesha The Car, has said that something regarding the car will get worked out, eventually. meanwhile, i have an incomplete art car that won’t run sitting at a transmission shop 20 miles from where i live, which is closed saturday and sunday, so i won’t even have the chance to deal with it until at least tomorrow. once again, i thank Ganesha for the jeep, which means that i’ve been able to get to rehearsals and performances, like the performance i had at st. mary’s church in the central district this morning, or the rehearsal i have in the university district this evening, without too much difficulty (although the jeep does get fairly awful gas mileage and it still stalls at stop lights occasionally).

OCF in a week. i’m going down with chris this year, because i don’t have a working car, and he wants to get there monday, which is the earliest i have ever arrived at country fair… not that i’m complaining or anything, although it will mean that i’ll have a three or four day head start on mosquito bites when everybody else gets there. BBWP is on the schedule for the friday night fire show.

Country Is Dumb
by Pliny Keep

Well, I’m proud to be a yuppie from Kentucky
Where we pretend we’re farming in the mall
And cowboys ride in cars
And waste their lives in bars
And our music’s still the biggest joke of all

Country is dumb, country is dumb
You only got three chords to work with, number one
And the songs all ramble on about
Women and chicken and trucks and guns
Well all I’ve got to say is country is dumb!

Well they brag about hospitality here in Nashville
They give the spotlight to the common man
But out in that sea of faces
I see no other races
And I hope there ain’t no homos in my band

‘Cause country is sexist and racist and country is dumb
You only got three chords to work with, number one
And the songs all ramble on about
Women and chicken and trucks and guns
Well all I’ve got to say is country is dumb!

(solo yodeling)

Now country is number one across the nation
People say it brings them closer to their roots
Like ignorance and hate
And a submissive mate
That fits as cozy as a pair of cowboy boots

Country is dumb, country is dumb
You only got three chords to work with, number one
And the songs all ramble on about
Women and chicken and trucks and guns
And busted hearts and trailer parks
And calloused hands and one night stands
And faithful dogs and white male Gods
And all I’ve got to say is country is dumb!

COUNTRY IS DUMB!

blah!

i just spent $1,800 on a new transmission for Ganesha The Car. the transmission now works like a dream, but the engine smells funny, it’s running really hot and i have to put coolant in it about once a week, so i took it to have it evaluated to see what’s wrong with it now that the transmission is all fixed…

the heater core is dead. worst case scenario is that it will cost $1,200 to fix.

for a free car, this is certainly costing me a hell of a lot of money… 😛

okay, i’m here…

doughnut joustingi am totally exhausted from SACBO and surrounding festivities, and i’ve been pretty depressed most of the day (the morning after blues?), but i’m slowly coming around. it rained pretty much all day sunday, and there was at least a bracing dampness to the air all day saturday when it wasn’t actually raining. fortunately it cleared up for the actual parade, because i was very clear about the fact that if it was raining, all of my expensive electronic music production gear was going to stay in its respective boxes, which would have definitely put a cramp on our part of the parade. i didn’t vend sunday, but lack of motivation was only part of the reason. now that i’m fairly confident that the transmission on ganesha the car version two is going to last at least a year (because that’s how long the warranty on the new transmission that i bought for it lasts), i can turn my attention to the leak in the pressurised engine coolant system which causes the car to run really hot when it’s not on the freeway, smell funny, and requires engine coolant about every 4 days to a week. it’s annoying that i’ve had to put so much money into this free car to get it working reliably. about the most fun i had at SACBO was watching the doughnut jousting that evolved over the course of sunday afternoon. the crowds were really light because of the rain, but we were determined to make the best of it, which resulted in a couple of microphone stands and some coat hangers becoming targets on which were placed yesterday’s doughnuts, which were the target of jousters on bicycles, unicycles, wheelchairs, and pretty much anything else, armed with pool cues. i spent time with people that i only see once a year (mostly), was part of the centrepiece of the whole parade, and i was inducted into a secret society, the less said about which the better. fremont phil rehearsal tonight, BSSB rehearsal tomorrow, players rehearsal wednesday, LBG rehearsal thursday, BBWP rehearsal friday…

moe was at a sheepdog trial all weekend, and she won! she got a 92, and the person who came in second (who is also moe’s mentor and friend diane) got an 88. i’ll let her tell the story, but we’re all pretty proud of moe and her doggie. 🙂 also, today is our 12th wedding anniversary.

SACBO tomorrow

touch-up for SACBO
tomorrow’s schedule: 7:00 leave for SACBO, 8:00 arrive at SACBO and check in, 9:00 be at the parade start and help get things put together, ≈12:00 pm – 2:00 pm play in the Fremont Solstice Parade, after the parade is over until ≈8:00 pm participate in SACBO, drive home and do it again tomorrow, only with “play in the solstice parade” replaced by either vending at SACBO or not (i still haven’t decided).

it’s definitely rehearsal season…

BBWPlast week, monday i had a fremont phil rehearsal, tuesday i had a sousa band rehearsal, wednesday i had a players rehearsal, thursday i had a banda gozona rehearsal, friday i had a BBWP rehersal, saturday was the banda gozona performance at the seattle version of guelaguetza, and today i had a rehearsal of the beatles-simulacra-band for the solstice parade coming up on saturday. this week, monday i have a fremont phil rehearsal, wednesday i have a players rehearsal, thursday i have my choice of a banda gozona rehearsal (which i am going to miss, because it is in preparation for a performance at the solstice parade in which i am going to be otherwise engaged) or a beatles-simulacra rehearsal, friday i have a BBWP rehearsal, saturday i have the solstice parade, plus SACBO, sunday i have SACBO and a number of options, including vending… and then in a week, monday i’ve got a fremont phil rehearsal, tuesday i have a sousa band rehearsal, wednesday i have a players rehearsal, thursday i have a banda gozona rehearsal, friday i have a BBWP rehearsal, and it continues from there until OCF.

i’m going to OCF with chris this year, and chris wants to get there on monday, which is earlier than i have ever arrived at OCF before. which means that i’m going to have to be extra prepared this year (i.e. no “making a run to town to get things i forgot” this year). we’ve already been scheduled for a BBWP performance at the friday night fire show – which we didn’t do at all last year, and there was such a furor because we weren’t there that they demanded to have us back 🙂 – so i’ve definitely got my work cut out for me, learning the new rap, practicing my poi and my tassel-twirling and the fire-avoidance thing to think about. plus i’ve got to do some homework and come up with sound effects for the beatles thing. we’re going to be in a “Yellow Submarine” float, and they want some appropriate submarine noises, along with the actual keyboard stuff that i signed up for.

tah daaah!

hood finished!
finally!

i called maaco, and they said that it would cost around $200 to clear-coat the hood, depending on how the preparation goes. i told the guy that i would hesitate to spend that much on the car if there was something wrong with the engine, and my budget was around $100. he said that i should bring it by tomorrow, which i’m going to do, but i’m not expecting much. it’s possible that rick at edgewood tire has some suggestions, but i haven’t asked him.

i’m probably going to go get my tuba soldered tomorrow afternoon, or some time in the relatively near future.

i sent $500 to india for 20 dozen boxes of aparajita. i got an invoice for it, so i’m a little less suspicious than i would have been otherwise, but i still don’t know for sure that it’s going to be aparajita that the guy sends me. at this point, it’s wait and see, because i’ve already sent the money. there’s another incense retailer that’s going to buy half of the 20 dozen as soon as i get them, which is good, because i don’t have the space to store 20 dozen boxes of incense.

taking shape

taking shape   taking shape

one of the disadvantages to using “inferior” quality paint, instead of one-shot, is that the black paint has a tendency to flake off in certain areas, and i have had to go back over the already painted portion of the previous two or three lines and fill in the parts that have flaked off. fortunately, apparently, once i’ve gone over them and filled in the parts that have flaked off, they don’t continue to flake (i’ve had to do it a couple of times now), so i’ve been able to continue, but it’s yet another reason why i want to finish painting as quickly as possible and clear coat it before it all flakes off.

the gold, on the other hand, is looking really good, and is not flaking at all.

it rained on and off yesterday, so i couldn’t work on it much, except to touch up some of the places where the paint had flaked off… the tape that, according to the packaging, wasn’t supposed to leave a sticky residue, but, in reality, does leave a very sticky residue, is A PAIN IN THE ASS!

quick update

my host provider has decided that he’s going to stay in business for his existing customers but not take any new customers. it eases my concern about finding a new host provider immediately, but i’m still going to move eventually, because i really don’t like being jerked around like that. the first time you said you were sorry and i gave you another chance, but the second time it was entirely my fault, and i don’t want it to happen again.

The Beatlesin other news, my copy of The Beatles Complete Scores came in the mail today. this is a book that i have wanted ever since it was first published in 1989, and it’s 1136 pages of the actual music by John Lenon and Paul McCartney from the people who would know. this means that i can now work on arrangements of things like Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite for Snake Suspenderz without having to rely on somebody else’s frequently incorrect interpretations of what the chords are… and i can finally figure out the chords for Michelle, which i have been wondering about for 30 years… 8)

now, off to get denatured alcohol. i ran out yesterday and i need it to clean up the sticky residue which was not left by the lining tape on my car, because the packaging said that it didn’t leave a sticky residue, so, in spite of the fact that, when i pull the tape off my car, it leaves a sticky residue, apparently, it wasn’t left by the tape… 😐

oh yeah, i got email from someone who wants to interview “Rev. Guido DeLuxe” concerning the Church of Tina Chopp. she said she was interested in tracking down the truth behind the rumours… she was also born in 1988, which was well after the church had established its presence… i wonder what sort of gibberish i should spout in order to confuse her even more… hey, she wrote to me

finally
i went to an art car show in kirkland last week, and painted about a quarter of a line before i had some serious problems with my purple paint pen and ended up splattering purple paint all over the part that i had already painted, so there was a great deal of clean up last week instead of steady progress. i went to an art car show in fremont today, and had a much easier time of it. i decided that the purple wasn’t turning out the way i wanted it anyway, because it fades in a day and it was taking too long to re-do the purple part, so i decided to change it to gold, which doesn’t fade anywhere near as quickly. i actually was able to finish two lines of sanskrit. i probably would have been able to accomplish a lot more, but the package of lining tape that i bought specifically because it said “does not leave a sticky residue” was actually a lie, and i’ve had to clean up the sticky residue from the lining tape before i am able to paint a new line of sanskrit.

yee haw!!

yee haw!
it’s going to work even better than it did on the mockup! 😀

there’s a minor problem, though, which is that the original paint is cracking when i lean on the hood. and it’s practically impossible not to lean on the hood when i’m working that close to the windshield… but i’m going to have to come up with something, because leaning over on one arm isn’t going to do it: i get too tired, and i have to use too much concentration to be reliable leaning on my arm…

yeah, i know… i’m asking for it…

Ganesha the Car planthe design that i blotted out yesterday was definitely wrong, and i’m really glad i listened to my gut and did it, because it was the right thing to do. the picture to the right is the new plan – although it’s going to be sanskrit writing, and not a blue background (which was put there with a computer, to gauge dimensions) – and i’m already more than aware of the fact that people are going to ask me, and harrass me, and that sort of thing, about the swastika on my car, perhaps even more than with the previous car.

but, see, the problem is that when i look at that plan, i get this gooey feeling right here <taps chest>, that i get when i look at my wife, which is an indication that i have created ART and not just art… and this is just the hood of the car! i can hardly wait to see what the rest of it is going to look like. 🙂

Gajaanana and Eyjafjallajökull

Ganesha the Car, v.2 creationso i got started on the actual artwork for Ganesha the Car, version 2, in spite of the fact that it was spitting rain all afternoon. there wasn’t enough moisture to affect the process, and i really wanted to get started on it, because i’ve got an art-car show in a little more than 2 weeks. i’m still not completely sure of the layout, because sanskrit has some weird length issues, especially since i am essentially transcribing a printed document in calligraphy, but if everything goes according to plan, i should have just about as many names on the hood of Ganesha v.2 as i had on the entire Ganesha v.1… although i still wonder whether i’m really going to have enough room or not. i figured that, since there’s no guarantee that Ganesha the Car v.2 is actually going to be a functioning car for very long, i would put some considerably less “permanent” artwork on it. to that end, i bought a bunch of uni paint pens, thanks to an art-cartist i talked to at SACBO last year. while i am impressed with how well they work in general, i still think that i’m going to get a clear-coat put on after i’m finished, because the paint pens are a good deal less permanent than the 1Shot that i used on v.1

in other news, apparently “Eyjafjallajökull” is sort of like Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in that unless you’re from there, you’d be better off not trying to pronounce it. case in point:

miscellaneous honk blat wak wak wak ungow

one doesn’t tend to notice annoyances that have disappeared, but i just realised that the guy who has been sending me spam with great regularity, at least once a month, for five-plus years hasn’t sent me a spam message since november of last year. i won’t claim sole responsibility for ridding the net of this annoyance, but i would be willing to bet that the multiple reports of his spam i made to the washington state attorney general’s office couldn’t have slowed down his departure too much.

the new Ganesha The Car is probably not going to be a car very much longer. there’s nothing wrong with it currently, but the transmission is on its last legs, and from what the people at the repair shop (not the repair shop from which i got the car, a different one) told me, the ’93 Mercury Tracer (which is also called a “Ford Fiesta Escort” for some unknown reason) is notorious for transmission and engine problems, and pretty much anything that goes substantially wrong with it will very likely cost more to fix than the car is worth. at the same time, i didn’t actually pay for the car to begin with, and the repair shop that i got it from will very likely do things like replace the transmission for far less than other places would, because we fall under the “friends and family” category with the owner of the shop – which is also part of the reason why i didn’t pay for the car to begin with.

in the short term, this means that i have even more impetus to create “temporary” artwork on the car, using paint pens instead of a brush and one-shot. daniel smith’s has a piss-poor selection of paint pens, but i picked up some black, and some gold pens. i’m hoping that i can find a wider assorement of colours somewhere else.

frustration is finding a bittorrent of something that you really want, and downloading 99.3% of it – with 8 “leeches” and a “seeder” who only logs in after midnight – before getting stuck and spending weeks repeatedly opening up your network to a DOS attack while you wait for the remainder to appear… all i need is 1.16 MB of information and then i’ll have the whole thing… is that too much to ask?

a guy advertised “Goldblatt drywall stilts. Rubber is good, but the straps are shot and some minor hardware needs replacing.” on freecycle, earlier in the week, and i responded, because i can probably fix the things that they have wrong with them, and then i’ll have a set of drywall stilts… unfortunately, i didn’t notice that the guy’s email host is christian.net, and the quote that automatically appended to the signature of my message was “Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world. — Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet), 1694-1778″…

he didn’t reply, so i sent him another message this afternoon. the quote that automatically appended to the signature of that message was “The more you complain, the longer God lets you live.” i still have recieved no response from him, but i get the impression that the probability of my recieving a response from him is miniscule at this point. oh well… if nothing else, i can post a wanted to freecycle for drywall stilts. if i’m really lucky, the same guy will respond… 😉

i’ve got to get up and go to a gig that banda gozona is playing for part of Honk! Fest West at 9:00 tomorrow morning. there’s another gig that banda gozona is playing at 3:00 pm as well, which means that i can’t even go home and get some rest between the shows. the music that we’re playing is all stuff that i know the tuba parts for quite well. unfortunately, i’m playing trombone for tomorrow’s gigs, and the trombone parts are really fast, with a lot of notes that range from E an octave below middle C to A an octave above middle C within a measure. i’m reasonably certain that i can play most of the notes, and i’m sure i can play all of the notes at a reduced speed, but the fact that there’s going to be at least one other trombone-range instrument (most likely euphonium, but another trombone isn’t out of the question) makes me a lot more at ease with this performance than i would be otherwise.

spoons &c.

i subscribe to a modified version of the spoon theory, and the past few weeks have definitely been ones in which i have pushed the limits of my spoons, traded one day’s spoons for another day, and that sort of thing. now that the moisture festival is over for another year, it is important that i rest up and gather my spoons for a spring and summer that looks exciting and frightening at the same time.

i am expanding hybrid elephant in a number of ways: i have gotten at least one and potentially three or more new web clients, which may mean that i’m going to need more web space eventually(!), and i have been talking with bfly about teaming up to teach some classes(!!).

i talked with dan from nanda about printing business cards and postcards for them.

i have also decided, now that moisture festival is out of the way, that i’m going to have my tuba “seen to” by someone that can re-solder the outside guard bracing that’s come loose, replace several missing braces that are currently being held together with zip ties, and tackle the third valve slide that is wider at one end than it is at the other, and is just waiting for me to bump it a little bit too hard in the wrong direction so that it will totally lock up and never move again.

i also have a new art car project to work on. i have every intention of putting all 1008 names of ganesha on my new art car, which, of course, will mean that i will have to write them a lot smaller than i did on the previous art car, which will doubtlessly mean more time spent on it. SACBO is in june, so that doesn’t really leave very much time…

푚??

the new Ganesha The Car is back in the shop because of a fuel leak. it should be ready today (ETA: it’s ready, i just have to go pick it up). i drove it for two days and went through a tank and a half of gas before i figured out what the problem was. hopefully it will get slightly better mileage now that it’s not leaking fuel all over the place. jack said he didn’t notice it because when he put gas in it he only put about a quarter tank in, and apparently the leak was higher up on the tank.

the moisture festival has started for me. i had a show last night, and i’ve got a show tonight, two shows on saturday and either one or two shows on sunday (typical moisture festival scheduling chaos), then there’s one or two shows(?) next saturday, a show the following thursday, friday, two or three shows the following saturday and the closing night performance on sunday 4 april. hacki’s back. he couldn’t get a visa last year, but he got one this year. this is the first year since the first year that we’ve had opening night somewhere other than the palladium. this year, opening night was last week at ACT theatre. we’ve also got four different venues this year – i get the impression that this is the beginning of the actualisation of the fantasy that they were throwing around last year. this year we’re having the comedie/varieté acts at the palladium, the burlesque (read "titty & ass") shows at ACT (because mike hale is a “christian” who doesn’t at all approve of exposed tits, despite the fact that the burlesque shows bring in the most money), and we’ve also got shows going on somewhere in georgetown and some others on vashon island.

i have been having a sharp pain in the joint of my left thunb for about a month. i went to see chris who spent several days poking me with needles, and that seemed to help, but once he quit, the pain came back over the course of several days. i went to see a hand specialist yesterday who said i probably have arthritis – i’m genetically predisposed to it; both my grandmothers had arthritis in their hands. she (the doctor) recommended that i take ibuprophen and go to a specialist that makes splints for when the pain gets intolerable. getting old sucks.

doobie dumb

today i took the old Ganesha The Car up to the shop to get the stereo and PA speakers removed. it actually started, which is better than it was behaving a few weeks ago when i took it out for a spin. i’m taking the new Ganesha The Car to get the stereo and PA speakers installed tomorrow, and then i’m going to the DOL to get the license plates switched. at the same time, i believe i am going to inquire about getting a disabled person permit, since i do receive disability benefits. also i’m going to inquire about “collecter” license plates – i believe the car isn’t eligible for them yet, but it seems to me that any car that is older than 20 years can have collector plates, which basically means that the car is exempt from emissions inspection and doesn’t have to pay for yearly tabs.

i have an appointment with ned on wednesday and an appointment with a hand specialist on thursday (despite feeling a good deal better than it did a couple of weeks ago, thanks to chris and his needles, my left thumb is still painful enough that it is difficult for me to hold my trombone), and then i have a week of performances for the moisture festival starting thursday.

a few weeks ago i went out to woodinville and retrieved a freezer from moe’s friend diane, which works, but has broken hinges on the door. i determined that it was a kenmore stand alone freezer, and found a number to call for the sears service center. i got a number that rang and rang and rang but nobody answered, so i called the sears toll free number, and after bouncing back and forth through automated “if you want parts and service, say ‘parts and service'” menus for about 45 minutes, i finally called the sears store at southcenter and ordered the parts from them. they’re supposed to get here, according to the moron helpful customer service engineer on the phone, by 23 march, and then i have to figure out whether or not i have the correct tools to replace them.

bouncy squee!

the new Ganesha The Car!
40,811.4 miles
i got the new Ganesha The Car today! it’s a white 1993 mercury tracer station wagon (keeping alive the tradition that i never own a car that is newer than 15 years old), which aches for new sanskrit artwork – there’s already plenty of plans for that – and it has a roof rack, which means that i can pile more stuff into it when i go to the fremont sunday market. and it’s got less than 100,000 miles on it, despite the fact that it’s older than the previous Ganesha The Car by 3 years! as soon as the moisture festival is over and the weather gets a little nicer, i’m creating a new art car! 8)

i’ve been having a difficult time the past few days… and, also 卍 卐 ☹

i’ve been having a difficult time the past few days: the process of switching host providers again has gone pretty normally, with the normal SNAFUs which have been more or less worked out over the past four days. there is still the matter of getting my clients to update their nameservers to my nameservers(!!) (i finally figured out how to create ns1 and ns2.hybridelephant.com, which means that now, when i sell host services myself, i don’t have to give my clients the nameservers that belong to my host provider) which should happen soon, but it’s a little difficult to get other people to do something, even when it is important.

also, as an extra added bonus, as a part of switching host providers, my email has been down for a week, and i’m going to have to enter the 50 addresses on the mailing list by hand (once liz has reset her nameservers) so that it will work, because the new host service provider had “never restored a mailing list before” and didn’t know how to do it.

as i posted previously, somebody grafittied Ganesha The Car. i wrote about it in I, Anonymous, and, after an encouraging start, the conversation turned into the “why are you trying to reclaim the nazi symbol?” rant from people who are much more adept at pushing the buttons of a newbie than i am, and it went downhill from there. the day after it was grafittied, i took it in for a check-up, because the “check engine” idiot-light had gone from its normal “on all the time” to flashing, and i wanted to find out what changed. yesterday, i got the call from the repair shop. they said they had found out what was wrong – burned valves on the 3rd cylinder – and they said that it would probably need a new engine before it will pass emissions inspection the next time. 🙁

on the other hand, there have been some good things as well. i have been watching craigslist recently, and bought some swastika jewelry that i found there, which was decidedly not nazi jewelry. one is an american-made gold swastika hatpin with a diamond in the center. it came along with a whole bunch of other hatpins, and the lady wanted $25 for the lot, which i happily paid. the other is a silver native american swastika pin with a card that dates it to around 1907. the guy that was selling it wanted $25 for it and a nazi flag. i told him i was interested in the native american swastika, but i didn’t want anything to do with nazi stuff and he agreed. i took both pieces for an “appraisal” today (the guy said, and i agreed, that what i had didn’t warrant a “real” appraisal, which would have cost $50 per piece) and found out that the silver pin has a “niche market” collectible value of around $100, and the gold and diamond pin – 18 to 20 carat gold, and a 3-point diamond, by itself – is probably worth $150.

also, i bought a number of buddhist swastikas from a place in singapore, out of which i’m going to make jewelry.

and the fact that Ganesha The Car is dying isn’t as bad as it seems. it runs the same as it has been for the past few years, and there’s nothing really wrong with it other than it only runs on 3 cylinders. i’ve been thinking for some time about taking the class they offer at south seattle community college, where if you provide your own car they waive the $400 class fee and you get to participate in converting your car to an entirely electric vehicle. also, tom at the repair shop said that he could probably round up a rebuilt engine that has a 1 or 2 year warranty that would give Ganesha another 5 years or so. and if none of those turn out to be an option, jack (the guy i bought Ganesha from, who is moe’s employer’s father-in-law) has been turned on to watch auto auctions for another cheap car that will be turned into another art car.

and, on top of everything else, they took off the grafitti while they had it at the shop, and didn’t charge me for it. 🙂

somebody grafittied my car!

grafittisomeone grafittied my car!

i was at Hale’s Palladium this evening for the last performance of Aladdin and The Magic Lamp. i parked there and went in around 1:30 pm, and when i walked out of the palladium at around 6:00 pm, there it was. the paint was dry, which, in my mind, means that the guy must have done it around between the time that i left it, and 4:00 or thereabouts.

i asked around and i learned that the guy who tags things with “SEEDR1” is around 30 years old, and was a student at cornish until he was expelled because of a conflict with one of the instructors (big surprise). he is known for his “photo-realistic” grafitti art, but he also tags (which is likely one of the sources for the conflict with the instructors at cornish), and he was probably drunk when he did it (big surprise).

i don’t know who he is — yet — but i’m already closing in on his identity, and it hasn’t even been 6 hours yet. i’m pissed at this guy, because his drunken tag is going to cost me time and money to cover up, but also because tagging a car — any car — is really a lame, juvenile thing to do. if i ever find him, i don’t know what i would do, but i do know that i’m probably going to file a police report regarding it whether i find out his identity, or not, and if it’s possible to get reimbursed for it, by whatever means, from him, it would be an awesome thing.

grafittii’m going to get better pictures in the morning, when the light is better, but i really don’t understand why he did it… to my car doesn’t matter, i would wonder the same thing about such a tag on any car. the guy must have known that it wouldn’t last long, nobody would see it, and — especially because of the fact that it was on an art car to begin with — it is going to be covered up immediately, before i drive anywhere other than directly home.

and if the guy is an artist himself, what was going through his mind as he spray-painted his tag on my piece of artwork? how would he feel if i spray-painted a tag on one of his pieces of artwork? maybe, because of the fact that his artwork is mostly grafitti to begin with, he wouldn’t mind so much, but i would be willing to bet that if he created a work of art that wasn’t grafitti, and someone spray-painted on it, he would be offended at the very least, so why would he expect any less from me?

i’m not really surprised that someone grafittied my car, but what i am surprised about is why it has taken this long. i’ve been driving ganesha the car for 5 years, and this is the first time anyone has done anything nasty to it… and really, thinking about it, it isn’t really that nasty, except in a vile, putrid, disgusting sort of way. and the guy managed to paint on one of the few places on the car where i won’t have to repaint the actual artwork on the car in order to cover it up, so apart from being really lame and annoying, it’s not that bad.
i am writing in I, Anonymous about it, though, because i know a lot of people read it, and very likely the guy who did it will either find out about it personally, or from one of his friends.

and, by the way… the guy who tags SEEDR1 is an worse than an asshole. he’s an anal polyp and he deserves to be removed from society’s colon immediately. the guy i caught in the act of trying to rip a bumper sticker off of my car apologised and admitted that he was being an asshole, and he got forgiven by me, because he stood up, admitted what he was doing, and that he was an asshole. this guy is worse, and he is not getting forgiven. die in hell, scum!

this is the state of ermerika, not iran…

i was accosted at the coffee stand down the hill from my house today. as i was conversing with the barista (who burned my mocha, again) this incredibly fat woman (really, she was wider than she was tall. i don’t know how she was walking) came up and said “you have a swastika on your car!”

Incredibly Fat Woman: you have a swastika on your car!

me: yes, i have a swastika on my car.

IFW: that’s offensive, my husband is black.

me: i’m sorry you feel that way, but the swastika and the shatkona, the six pointed star design you see on the roof, is a symbol of Ganesha, the Hindu God of Removing Obstacles, and has been for ten thousand years! the nazi symbol you’re thinking of hasn’t even been around for 100 years…

IFW: i don’t know where you think you are, but this is the state of ermerika, not iran…

me: yes, and in America we have the freedom to worship the way we want, and display symbols that may be offensive to others. this is my way of getting back at the nazis who abused the swastika, by blatantly using it as a symbol of peace and goodwill.

IFW: … 😡

me: (as i’m driving away) how can a symbol be guilty for the acts of a madman?

i suppose i shouldn’t be surprised by things like this any longer, but this really affects me on a very deep level. what she said, "this is the state of ermerika, not iran", as though America is not "The Land of The Free", but instead the land of the intolerant bigots who refuse to accept the chance that there might be someone who thinks differently than they do… i’m tempted to go back and see if i can make friends with this woman and her husband, just to show them that the swastika is not to be feared… but i fear that if i show my face (or my car) around that particular coffee stand again, that i’ll probably be killed…

merry xmas… 😐

phnerb

i had decided that i was going to go to the fremont sunday market on friday, but then i took ganesha the car to a big community festival at magnusson park yesterday, and not only did it rain on and off for about half the day (and, because of an email screwup, i was the only art car there for about 4 hours), but i was so exhausted that i slept most of the day. i’m still really tired, and i think it’s a combination of the fact that i have been sick for the past 2 weeks, along with the generally depressed feeling that i usually get surrounding anything having to do with SSDI. even though the probability is good that i got approved (this time), i don’t know for sure yet, and there have been enough times in the past that haven’t gone well that being depressed after such an event is fairly common. anyway, i slept until 10:00 am (after having gone to bed at 10:30 last night, after having slept for an hour or so on the couch) and went to the FSM to pay for next week… which means that whether or not i feel like going, the fact that i’ve already paid will be an additional impetus to get me going anyway.

update

happy 4/20. i’d be consuming more holy vegetable, but i still am terrifically short of breath and coughing a lot as a result of being sick still. i’ve been vapourising a bit and even that has been causing me to cough. i suppose i could probably make some ghee or something…

they’re putting on a new roof, so that it won’t leak any longer. it’s only about two years overdue, but there’s no point in complaining about it now. the dogs are being quiet, in spite of the roofers right over their heads, making all kinds of noises which dogs would definitely find suspicious. we’ll see how long that lasts.

the $300 withdrawal from my bank account has had a band-aid put on it, but it’s still an open and sucking chest wound. at this point i’m done talking with people until i hear from the bank concerning my contesting of the charges. moe has taken over talking with the people who actually withdrew the money, and considering that i never actually signed anything, combined with the fact that the first time i ever even heard about an “early cancellation fee” was when i checked my bank account on thursday, she seems to think that there’s a more-than-likely chance that there will be a positive (for me) outcome. we’ll see about that, as well… 8/

maybe i’ll go to the fremont sunday market on sunday. one way or the other, i could really use a day of doing nothing but making money, and there’s a good chance, since i haven’t been there in a while, that fremont will be itching for some new incense.

i got another order on the web site, but no corresponding order from paypal, which makes me seriously wonder about whether or not i’ve got it set up right. it should be that you confirm your order on my site, and then transfer to paypal’s secure server to complete your order, and of the three orders i’ve gotten since the site upgrade, two of them have confirmed the order on my site, but not completed their orders on paypal’s secure server. i wrote to one of them, but she was located in the UK and never responded. the new order came in on friday, from a guy in california, according to the site, but i never heard anything from either the customer or from paypal, so i don’t know what happened. the next step is to write to the guy and see what happened.

i’ve got to get my tabs for ganesha the car. also, i have a fremont phil rehearsal this evening.

plagiarism

gah… i’ve been sicker than i have been in a long time over the past few days, which has left me in a fouler mood than normal, and it hasn’t been being helped at all by the person i mentioned in my last post. i’m on the uphill swing, at this point, but i’m still pretty sick, which is going to be interesting, since i have to take a five-mile walk to pick up Ganesha The Car from the shop this morning, and later on i have a fremont philharmonic rehearsal, which is probably not going to end up happening, because i’m so sick.

i was reviewing my web statistics a few days ago, and discovered that the person, a nandita prabhu who has several other blogs as well as the one linked in my previous post (which no longer exists), posted a new entry in one of her blogs called Plagiarism, where she outlines the process by which she gets artwork to post in her various blogs. she says things like:

People allow me to use these copyright images (I take their permission)

and

I think it is “Ok” for my readers to “borrow” the content of my blog but please ask me before you decide to do so.

and

To sum up, You want to borrow something that’s fine all you have to do is “ASK”.

not only that, but all of her blogs are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, but the images that she hotlinked from me, and the images from other sources that i checked on his “The Broken Tusk” blog (which is now deleted) all had very clear watermarks or other indications that they were actually copyright to other places, and there’s no indication, not only that she has permission to relicence the images, but that she has permission to use the images at all.

strangely, when i received email from her on friday, she said

i had no idea of this at all. Infact I have been doing this from so long and i had no idea its wrong. Is it a problem even if i say that the pic is from this website ( like source) ?

and other things that, if i hadn’t actually read her blogs – all of them – would make me believe that she has any idea that this is the wrong way to approach “borrowing” other peoples’ artwork.

normally i don’t give much credibility to any laws governing “intellectual property”, but in this case, she’s coming across to me as one thing, and she’s posting on her blogs something entirely the opposite, which makes me very suspicious indeed. it seems to me like she is trying to come across in her email as a clueless newbie, and in her blog as a person who has her shit together, which is not a way to gain my confidence in the least.

i commented on her blog, and have received several emails from her. i guess i’m going to have to wait to see how this all works out, but at this point, i don’t hold out much hope. i’m certainly not going to prosecute myself, but considering how many other web sites she “borrowed” artwork from (several of which replace the hotlinked graphics with ones that say things like “this image stolen from…” – i’d be willing to bet that someone else will, unless she gets her shit together.

random

i took Ganesha The Car to the shop today to get the automatic lock swich replaced, because it had stopped working. fortunately i didn’t have to pay for it, because of some design and printing that i had done for the shop earlier in the week. but it turned out that it wasn’t the switch that was broken, so now i have to take it back on friday so that they can take the door panel off and investigate the wiring. also, El Elefante Híbrido is apparently an article more or less about Ganesha The Car (from what my limited spanish plus a web-translator-thing tell me), but it’s too bad he tried to hotlink my image (which is how i found out about him). if i knew enough spanish, i would comment about hotlinking graphics, but i don’t, so i probably won’t do anything except be thankful for the traffic he’s sending my direction.

snake suspenderz has a gig at the skylark cafe on the 23rd, and earlier that day i’m meeting with the lawyer, because on the 24th is my hearing to determine whether or not i’m going to get disability. according to my impression, there’s still a 50/50 chance that i’m going to be approved, and if i don’t, it will be pretty much the same as it is now, but i’m under increasing amounts of stress because of it. then, on the 25th, i’ve got an art car show at magnuson park, which is either going to be really exciting or really relieving, depending on what happens the day before.

i got Bruno Bozetto’s “Allegro Non Troppo” on DVD, and i can play it on my mac, but the “Command+Shift+3” screen-capture function is disabled, for, perhaps obvious, but not very convenient reasons, which means that i’m going to have to figure out some other way to capture the picture of the snake that’s the primary character in Stravinsky’s “The Firebird”, which i want to propose as the snake suspenderz logo. i also got the 14 Sequenzas by Luciano Berio on CD the other day. i played Sequenza V (dedicated to the memory of Grock) for a juried audition when i was in college, and i know the guy, Stewart Dempster, for whom it was written. when i played it, there were two women in the jury who were trying, in vain, to suppress their giggles, and when it was all over, i whispered to them that it was okay to laugh, because it was written for a clown, at which point they cracked up.

along with the Odd Factoids (in the place of most news reporting, which is simply too depressing to read any longer), here’s a couple of links that i read recently:

God Hates Shrimp – the logical (if there is such a thing) response to God Hates Fags.

Cybersecurity Bill Proposes Unprecedented Government Power Over the Internet – yes, i am still a terrorist. get used to it.

Continue reading random

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new Hybrid Elephant site

okay, i’m getting really excited now. after what seems like years of not getting anywhere, i’m finally coming down to the last stretch of work on the new site. i’ve still got some products to add to the database, i’ve still got a few things that need tweeking, and i still need to add a whole bunch of content, but i have a fair idea of where that’s coming from and a fairly good idea of how to incorporate it into the site without too much difficulty. there’s still an annoying difficulty, which is that when i put the “ganesha” directory anywhere in the new site, for some reason (including permissions, which i have already checked and they’re all set correctly), the contents of the directory don’t show up, and links to within the “ganesha” directory come back as “403 Forbidden” which is exceedingly strange. furthermore, when i link to where the “ganesha” directory currently lives, there’s no problem, but i get the impression that it can’t stay that way, because when i “move” the domain from the old site to the new site, everything that’s where the old site currently is will be two directories in back of the root directory, and while i can develop that way, i’m about 50% sure that domain-forwarding will make it impossible in real life. i’m not worried, though. things will work out, as always.

ganesha the car got a tune up for the first time in 3 years today. it was close to $400, but the guy took off almost $100 of that because i paid in cash, and because i’m going to make him more business cards. he’s also got a flyer that i’m going to design and (probably) print as well. it was really strange, because i dropped off ganesha the car yesterday and he gave me a ride home in his huge-ass black cadillac with a license plate that says “CHR1ST”. this is the guy who, when i showed up wearing my “it’s just a vegetable” shirt, gave me evil looks all afternoon. i guess he’s willing to look askance at my propensity to sacrifice the Holy Vegetable when it means that he’s going to get kick-ass business cards.

i got a call from "the attorney" the other day, about the notice i received. he said there is nothing to worry about – like i believe that, especially coming from an attorney 8/ – but it was good to hear him say it if nothing else. he said that we’re one to two months out from "the hearing", and he needs to collect updates from me, and various other folks.

hrmph

i was supposed to go to the FSM today. now that it’s later in the day and it’s raining, i’m kind of glad i didn’t, but i wasn’t so glad when i got up at 5:30 this morning and got about half a block down the road before i discovered that i had a flat tire. i was even more irritated when it cost me $100 to replace the tire, because it had a hole in the side wall. and to make matters worse, the guy said i need new brakes as well. it seems like i just got new brakes recently.

i suppose it’s just as well. i would much rather have a flat tire close to home, so that i can bring the car back home and go back to bed for a couple hours rather than being stuck somewhere. and it’s raining hard enough that it’s just as well that i didn’t make it to the FSM anyway.

spam?

i got this very strange email today. it said:

you drive like you have sand in your vagina. your car smells like ass and I thougbt my friend crapped her pants but it was just your nasty car. I hate you.

i’m puzzled that anyone would respond that way to me. i’m not surprised that people react to my car, that happens all the time. what puzzles me is the combination of stuff that, if taken separately, would each represent a valid, if totally ludicrous complaint about my car and/or its occupants… but taken as a whole, i just have to sit back and wonder who they are and why they were so upset with me.

i don’t know what it must be like to have sand in ones vagina, but i can’t imagine that it would be very comfortable, and it would probably limit ones mobility quite a bit. i don’t know about anybody else, but i use my car to enhance my mobility, and if they saw me driving, then they would doubtlessly be aware of that. also, i am a very contientious driver: i make mistakes from time to time – i just got a ticket from one of those automated corner-watcher-robot-flashy things in federal way – but most of the time i’m a very safe driver, whether it’s on the street or on the freeway.

and if they saw me driving, then how can they be sure that it was my car that smelled like ass? i have driven through some mighty smelly areas within the past week or so, and the smell was definitely not coming from my car. if they saw the car while it was parked somewhere, i can understand why they might react that way, even though i know for certain that my car doesn’t smell like ass. it also doesn’t smell like what you would expect a car to smell like, and i’m pretty sure that some of the numbskulls around here would not be able to tell the difference. but at the same time, it makes me wonder how they saw me driving poorly enough to know that i drive like i had sand in my vagina?

and to wrap the whole thing up, they say “i hate you” – in case what they said previously hasn’t sunk in yet. well, personally, i would think that if a person was wound up enough to say the other things about me, saying “i hate you” is overstating it a little. it’s as though they thought they weren’t being clear enough about their feelings, and wanted to make sure that i knew what they were talking about. it also makes me think that they were just ranting to rant and picked me because my email form was easily accessible.

i think, and this is all just conjecture, because i’ll never know for certain (the return address on the email response form was [email protected], and i’ve already tried and failed to sent email to that address), but it’s possible that this was written by one of the teenagers that sped past me on the freeway this afternoon, only subsequently to get pulled over by the police. my guess is that they got pulled over for speeding and/or reckless driving because they incredulously and minutely examined all sides of my car – at freeway speeds – before blasting forwards at about 90 miles per hour… whereupon the fuzz, who was in an unmarked car to my right rear, and who i knew was there, flipped on their lights and went after ’em.

i guess feedback is one of the reasons why my feedback form is there, but sometimes i really wonder whether such things are good to have in a place where just anybody can get hold of them… 8/

moisture madness &c.

slow but steady progress on the web site. i’ve discovered Simple Template System, which is a method of creating templates with keywords instead of actual code. one way or the other, it’ll give me some added control over the site that i would have to learn a lot of coding stuff before i’d be able to do any other way. it seems really odd that i was on top of the game in terms of web coding 10 years ago, and now i would have to learn several new coding languages before i would be anywhere close to as competent these days. of course, back then i didn’t have my own business, and i wasn’t doing the work i had always dreamed of doing, so i guess i don’t feel too bad about not being as knowledgable as i once was.

moisture festival is upon us again, and there’s as much chaos and disorganised speculation about how things are actually going to get done as i have ever seen for this early in the process. at this point it appears that we have been tapped for 13 performances, two of which are “burlesque” and one is the panto. alledgedly the plan is to keep stringing them along because, alledgedly, the plan is to eventually have the moisture festival in multiple venues, and then we will have our own venue and do all of the shows for that venue, but that’s in the future. this is now, and the fact that we’ve got 12 performances that aren’t panto, compared with the zebra kings getting 16 performances, and most of the “burlesque” performances (the “variete” performances are pretty much evenly split between the fremont philharmonic, the zebra kings, the sancapators, and the other bands that are involved). personally, i feel as though it is a known fact that RB is not the best person to be figuring out who does what in which shows, and it’s already showing itself to be a bad decision that RB is in charge, once again.

the 31st, snake suspenderz is going to portland for the national kazoo day celebration. we’re getting together some time this week to have a listening/mixing party, where we also intend to finalise the track order. i’ve been on several recordings in the past, but this one is exciting in a way that those other ones weren’t so much: there’s a good chance that i’ll actually get paid for this recording! 8)

i went out and took a look at loudspeakers for my car. first i had to learn a bit of terminology: there’s a difference between loudspeakers and a public address system (or a PA), and further, there’s a difference between a PA system and indoor/outdoor waterproof stereo speakers. i get the impression that any way i want to do this, i’m also going to have to upgrade the stereo in my car, which won’t hurt my feelings too much, but it’s an extra, added $150 or so, depending on where i actually buy it from. at this point, i think what i’m going to do is buy my stereo upgrade from car toys, because they have a deal where any stereo system over $100 that you buy from them is eligible for free installation, and free is always good. then i have to make the decision whether i want a (mono) PA speaker – which i can get for $35 or so – or whether i want to splurge for the indoor/outdoor waterproof stereo speakers, which cost more and likely have to be built into enclosures which also cost more, but will sound a great deal better than mono.

obama has only been president for two days, so i don’t want to get all freaked out about what a good job he’s doing, but he’s already doing things like shutting down gitmo and putting all of bush’s “midnight regulations” on hold before they can be enacted. he hasn’t come out and said that bush should stand trial for criminal malfeasance, but it’s a step in the right correct direction, if nothing else.

moosehead – a great beer and a novel experience for the moose.

??? ????????? ???

we finished recording the rhythmn tracks for the CD today. all that’s left are a few vocal, solo and percussion tracks, and mixdown, and it will be a finished product! also it was farewell to eight years of political BUllSHit and the beginning of an entirely different kind of political bullshit, which will be equally opressive, but right now i’m so fucking tired of bush that anything else will be a pleasant and refreshing change for a short while. i got my order from the theosophical society bookstore, and i made an order from om imports for incense, incense burners and murtis. also, i’m going to start pricing loudspeaker systems for Ganesha The Car. i still have to work on rebuilding the web site, and feeding the database, both of which i have done shockingly little in the past week. banda gozona rehearsal on thursday, and a gig on saturday evening, after moe gets home.

yem

so i prepared the vehicle for going to the FSM tomorrow. i figured that i would put the dogs’ food in their kennels in the car, to save time – that way all i’ll have to do is get up and let the dogs out, and while they’re outside i can get dressed and then all i have to do is put them in the car and i’m off… which seems reasonable, since i’m going to have to get up at 5:30, and recently (since moe has been gone) i have been sleeping until 10:00 or so (which is offset by going to bed between 2:00 and 4:00). but the doggies were confused when i started doing the stuff that i normally do right after i get up (i.e. getting food ready for dogs), and they only just settled down. i put in 6 boxes of incense and 2 boxes of murtis, along with all of my display gear and my canopy and i can still see out the back window, even with three dog kennels as well. i’ve been wanting to get a roof-rack for Ganesha The Car, but i want one that won’t damage or get in the way of the artwork that’s already there. i carry everything inside, with just space for me to drive when i’m driving Ganesha, and there’s no room for doggies, but this is an entirely different beast. if it didn’t mean creating an entirely new art car, i would think really strongly about a minivan – and, for that matter, if it weren’t for the economy and gas prices, i’d think about it because of the fact that it meant creating an entirely new art car. i’ve also been thinking about getting a loudspeaker for Ganesha, which i can hook up to my music player, so that i can broadcast hindu chants outside my car for shows and parades and suchlike. i’ve actually got enough money that i can realistically start thinking about actually doing something like that fairly soon.

geek joy

stylesheets rock!

i uploaded some information i found out recently that will augment the pages on Ganesha The Car nicely. because of the fact that i found it in a variety of other places and rewrote the code from scratch, i didn’t take the time to write a new stylesheet, i just uploaded the information – which produced a page that looked okay on linux, looked bizarre but readable on mac, and was totally unreadable on windoesn’t.

then i went in and put in minimal stylesheet information and – voila! – it looks great regardless of which platform and (to a lesser extent) which browser i am using. it went from looking like a 12-year-old put it together to looking a lot like the rest of my site, and i only used two selectors: .center and .background – but because of the fact that all the other selectors were already defined, i didn’t have to do anything else.

yeah, i’m getting excited about HTML code… i’m a geek, what do you expect?

in other news…

i started the day with a phone call to verizon wireless, to check to see if there were any specials for my “new every two” plan. i checked it out online last night, and determined that i can get a LG VX9400 and as a result of it being my “new every two”, i would only have to pay $30 for it. the nice lady on the phone checked, and said that, yes, it would, in fact, be only $30 for the VX9400. so i decided that instead of waiting the requisite 2 to 4 business days for delivery, i would go down to the verizon wireless store at the supermall and pick one up in person.

when i got to the store, a nice young man named jayson (or something like that, i was too distracted with anger to remember details like that very clearly) asked me for my customer ID (which is my wife’s cell-phone number) and looked me up and said that a VX9400 with no accessories would be $98.50 before tax. i said, no i looked it up online, and it was only going to be $30, because this was my “new every two”. he said, no, the “new every two” only applies to the primary number (which is my wife’s cell-phone) and my number is an “add on” number, which doesn’t apply for the discount. when i offered to look it up online for him, he said, in a very condescending tone, that it doesn’t matter where i look it up, nor who i called, it was going to be $98.50, not $30, and there was nothing i could do about it.

at that point, seething with anger, i walked out of the store, and walked around the supermall. while i was walking, i called moe, and then i called verizon wireless, and by the time i got back to the verizon wireless store, i had bought the phone (i went home and printed out a receipt for $30) and everything was taken care of. i went back into the store and told the guy that i got the phone for $30, and that he sucked. then i walked out.

it’s my recollection that we went through exactly the same thing at the verizon wireless store in the supermall, two years ago, the last time i got a “new every two” phone. it really makes me wonder about what they teach their sales associates in training, if they really teach them that the rules don’t apply when you’re actually in the store, and that they are free to charge whatever they want (the non-discounted price for the VX9400 is $70 if you already have existing service, or $95 if you don’t already have service), or if they just assume that people are going to be stupid enough to believe whatever some nice man in a verizon wireless uniform tells them, just because he’s wearing a verizon wireless uniform. if people really are that stupid, we’re in deep trouble, and there’s no sign that things are going to improve for those of us who still have part of a brain left.

the only reason it hasn’t affected me more than it did is because i went from there to the post office, and while i was there, a old, local guy asked me if that was my car, and wanted to know how much it had cost me to paint all that stuff on it, and when i said i had done it all myself, he said “cool!” – which i took as quite a compliment, seeing as how he was in his 60s or 70s, and seemed really interested…

camp cirque de flambé post-burning-man party tonight at 7:00. it’s possible that moe will be there as well, which would be nice for me. i hope to give out the remainder of my “I Survived Burning Man 2008” buttons to the people i haven’t already mailed them to. BSSB at the Kenmore Oktoberfest tomorrw.

incense nazi

swastika

Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.

i bought a swastika at the FSM yesterday, and despite my feelings about nazis’ stealing the swastika away from what it truly means, i find it kind of amusing that i can now make jokes about how i am an “incense nazi”… but, at the same time, i also appreciate that if i am able to make jokes about being an incense nazi, the important part is that it’s not about other people, and it’s obviously a joke, whereas most commentary surrounding nazis and swastikas definitely is not considered to be very funny.

also i made $99 at the FSM yesterday, which is one sixth of the repairs that i had to make on ganesha the car over the weekend. only five more days like that to go…

busy!

clown-in-trainingbusy!

i had a rehearsal on monday with snake suspenderz, a rehearsal on tuesday with the the ballard sedentary sousa band, a parade in Brier today (from which there are pictures), and there’s going to be a gig in queen anne with snake suspenderz tomorrow. i have also been running around buying last minute things for burning man, like a patch kit and bicycle pump so that i can take my bicycle, and closed-toe shoes (it has been so long since i’ve worn anything other than birkenstocks, i don’t even know what size “normal” shoe i wear) and a first aid kit. i plan on getting the oil changed and the brakes looked at on both cars this weekend. plan B has, more or less predictably, turned into “very likely plan A”, which means that i will be driving to burning man, most likely with stuart and heather.

update

as i said in a previous post, a lot of things have been going on. one of which is that my windows computer died, and i haven’t even been motivated to fix it, apart from possibly retriving the data that resides on the hard disk. i suppose at some point i’ll have to figure out something to create music on, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. the fact that my laptop died motivated me to create a database for hybrid elephant, which will streamline the process of ordering and invoicing considerably – up until now i’ve kept paper copies of all my orders and invoices, which i will probably still do, but this will provide a way to find a particular invoice, and give me a way to keep track of inventory that will automatically warn me when i get below a certain point so that i can order more, and a whole bunch of other things that i probably haven’t even discovered yet. and i’m going to start doing business with a supplier that i have known about for a few years , but have never ordered from, other than personal stuff – for some unknown reason, because they carry a lot of merchandise that i really like, is really authentic, would go very well with the stuff i already carry, and is insanely inexpensive.

Devotional shop in Kanchii found this image on internet, of a devotional shop in india, which really inspires me, but i’m not sure how realistic a business like this is in the united states. i have never been to india, but from everything i’ve read and every picture i have seen convinces me that india is my home, much more than the united states will ever be. i feel more at home with pictures of india than i am with real live united states.

i’m going to move my desk, my computers and the incense and murtis part of the business out into the dining room, and move the pile of boxes in the dining room into the office. this will do two things: first, it will put my computer out in the main part of the house, so that i can interact with moe more readily without having to stop what i’m doing and go in the other room, and second, it will give me more space to create a workshop of sorts, because i truly am going crazy not having a real workshop. the main part of the moving isn’t going to happen until after i come back from burning man, however.

yes, i am going to burning man this year, as compared to 2003, when i bought a ticket(!) and was all set to go, and then had a brain injury instead. actually i was out of the hospital in time to go to burning man, but i was still pretty fragile, and was having a lot of trouble speaking and getting around by myself, and moe (or somebody) would have had to go with me, to make sure nothing bad happened. i’m pretty sure that i can do it myself at this point, and not only that, but i’m getting in for free. i don’t know for sure how i’m getting there, yet, but all things will fall into place eventually.

i went to FSM on sunday and made $84, which is not too bad, but when i get started with this new supplier, i expect a dramatic increase in sales. i’ve been collecting ideas for buttons for years (i started my first button banner when i was 15 or so), and i actually sold about $10 worth of buttons, including five swastika buttons to an asian guy who said he collected them. moe is using the canopy next week, and the week after is the last week before burning man. i haven’t decided whether or not i’m going to the FSM that week (the 17th), but i’ve got a week or so to decide. i probably should go, because however i get to burning man, i could use all the money i can scrape together.

the punk rock flea market happened, and it because of the fact that i know the guy who runs the whole thing, i got to include my art car in my set up, which was considerably more space than i have occupied in previous PRFMs. i also discovered that apparently i am one of only four vendors that have been to all four PRFMs. i made $75, which is as much as i have made in the 3 previous PRFMs combined, which is enough to make me antipate the next one. i woulda posted pictures except i forgot to bring my camera. oh well.

the banda gozona has a rehearsal on thursday, but i’ve been so busy with other things that i haven’t been able to attend many perfornances with them this year. i’ve been recruited to play with yet another band, this one with my old friend hobbit, and my new friend thaddeus, called Snake Suspenderz. my first rehearsal with them is next monday. next tuesday there’s a BSSB rehearsal, and next wednesday is the briar sea scare parade, which is going to feature Ganesha The Car.

OCF 08 – a retrospective

milestonei left home for OCF at 6:30 am on wednesday. my first stop was the fred meyer’s in puyallup, which i got to before they opened, so i had to wait outside for 10 minutes or so until they got around to unlocking the doors. i got water, but neglected to get bug spray, a fact which i would intensely regret later. the trip down was relatively uneventful, however when i got off the freeway south of portland for a food and pee stop, i noticed that as soon as i stopped moving forward, the temperature in Ganesha The Car shot up to the red zone. i put some water in the radiator (which was completely empty) the temperature went back down to the normal range almost immediately, but it was a little frisson of anticipation that made life interesting.

before the fairi was actually able to get through the H.I.F. (Hippie Ineptitude Factor) surrounding checking in with little difficulty, but i didn’t realise that there is a big difference between asking and informing when it comes to announcing that your plan is to drive in to chelamela with a full load to be delivered to morningwood odditorium. if i had informed them of what i was doing, i would have been able to drive in without any problem, but because i asked if it would be okay for me to drive in, i was told that i couldn’t drive in without a van or a pickup load of stuff. so i waited for a gator (gaiter?), which is a motorised utility vehicle with a long string of carts that it tows behind it, to ferry my load to the stage. i then found a camping spot behind the stage, in the middle of a huge swarm of voracious mosquitoes which proceded to cover my back with about 5000000000 mosquito bites (of course, they chose the only place on my body where i can’t kill them or shoo them away, and where i can’t scratch). so i got my tent set up as quickly as possible, which was a chore, because it was hot and sweaty, which made the mosquito infestation even worse, and there wasn’t quite enough room under the bushes, so i had to incorporate the undergrowth into the structure of the tent, and got my stuff loaded into it, inflated my (new) bed, and then went back to the outside where i left my car, and parked in scoff-lot. i got finished with all the essential stuff around 3:00 pm or thereabouts, but because of the fact that the ritz was only open for showers (no saunas until thursday 8/ ) i had to put up with an extremely itchy night.

before the fairthursday was spent finishing the stage and wandering around gawking and taking pictures of the places that i knew would be full of people within the next 24 hours. it’s really odd to see nobody there, when you know that when everyone else sees it, they’re going to see everyone else as well. it really makes me want to come back in the winter, to see what the fair site is like when there’s really nobody there. i’ve got some friends in eugene that might actually make it possible for me to do that, at some point…

i also got attacked by huge swarms of voracious, bloodthirsty insects – something that very rarely happens to me – so i decided to go into town to buy bug spray… and ice… and beer… well, okay, the ice and beer were for other people, but i was going into town anyway, so i made the run so they didn’t have to, and that meant that i had beer when i got back. i blocked off my parking space in scoff-lot and told the guy at the gate that i would be back in half an hour, which i was. however, when i came back in, another guy told me that blocked spaces in scoff-lot were taken immediately, and that i should head for outta site parking, which is about a mile further down the road. this is where i learned the difference between asking and informing the people of what i am going to do. the next guy i came to (there were three or four of them along the road) i told him that i was going to scoff-lot. he told me that scoff-lot was full, and i said that was okay, so he let me get through. i drove up to scoff-lot right behind the tow truck, but because of the fact that i not only was able to say that i blocked a spot, but because of the fact that i was able to say that it was in row J, the guy let me in anyway – much to the chagrin of the people who were being towed to the dead lot, which is all the way at the far end of the site. and when i got to row J, what do you know? my spot was there, right where i left it… i am certain that at least part of this is because of the fact that i invoke The Remover of Obstacles ON my car, especially because, all the way back in, everyone was telling me that scoff-lot was full and the fact that i had blocked off a parking space didn’t make any difference.

still, it’s a LONG way from scoff-lot to chelamela when you’re carrying four bags of ice. stuart and i went back for the beer with a black plastic garbage bag, so that i wouldn’t have to carry it in alone, and so that we wouldn’t be stopped and potentially asked to share, which is definitely a possibility.

the discowe had a dress rehearsal thursday evening, immediately followed by a disco, which was an incarnation of the same un-namable evil that first manifested when disco was still popular, 30 years ago, so i took pictures of it from a distance, and then immediately left to go to the ritz, where i sweated out about half of the mosquito stingers in my back and got to feeling relatively clean again.

the lizard in the gazeeka boxfriday was the beginning of the fair for most “ordinary” people, which meant that it was the beginning of a working weekend for me. we did two shows a day, one at 12:00 noon, and one at 3:00 pm. on friday, we also did a 10:00 pm burlesque show. because of the fact that Big Bois With Poise were Short Dudes With Boobs this year, an act which doesn’t include fire, we opted out of the fire show. in spite of the fact that we didn’t use fire this year, they asked us to perform anyway, which gives you an idea of how intensely popular BBWP has become. the band really didn’t have much to do during the burlesque show (a fact which depressed stuart to the point where he said that if we do the show next year, we should ask for a specific slot to be an act, like everyone else, and then just vacate the stage rather than sitting there for the entire show), but because of the fact that i had BBWP duties, i also decided that it would be fun to be a part of the gazeeka box as well, so maque gave me a lizard costume and i was his ex-wife’s attorney, much to the amusement of everyone.

the cast and bandthis year’s panto is the traditional tale of cinderella, with the expected panto gender-bending, marginally obscene innuendo and horrendous puns. we’re getting good enough at this that this year we didn’t even have as many problems with the feral children who see every single performance and screw things up by anticipating lines and heckling us. at one point simon called a girl up onstage who had been anticipating his lines, and taped her mouth closed with gaffer tape, much to the amusement of everyone. the audiences absolutely despised the ugly stepsisters, who were played by chris huson and dan “the body” goodman. i actually heard him introduce himself to a group of tourists as ‘dan “the body” goodman’, which i found to be really amusing. we did actually get three new pieces of music on thursday at the dress rehearsal, and there’s still more to come, but presumably we’ve got a while to rehearse now that OCF is over. it was all 100% original, 100% new music, including a couple of pieces by amy bob.

i was standing in the food line at hospitality camp when a person i didn’t know came up to me and said “you’re salamandir”… i didn’t know what to say, so i said “yeah…” it turned out to be the mother of a friend of ezra’s from bellingham, who ezra refers to as “jordan(e)”. it seems oddly coincidental that i would have to go to the oregon country fair to meet a person who i know from bellingham, but oddly coincidental is a very good way of describing the oregon country fair.

friday was also my birthday. i’m 48 now, an age which i, in my wildest dreams, never imagined that i would actually reach. whoopie. 8/

saturday night the fremont philharmonic played at the ritz. i took off right after our 3:00 performance was over, and got there about 5:00, so i was well and truly sauna-ed by the time the rest of the band showed up, which was around 8:00. when i walked up, tuba in hand, i was met by a woman who said “NO tubas!” in an authoritative voice that i recognised immediately to be a joke, and, later on, i talked to lem and david, who were part of the ritz crew responsible for music. i was very suprised to learn that they don’t allow bands with drum sets to play. “at all?” i inquired, and they responded yes, which concerned me a great deal. it turned out that the guy who i thought was responsible for us getting to play, peter toms, aka professor petrol von huffenfuel, isn’t actually a part of the ritz crew, but the fremont philharmonic is apparently grandfathered in, so we weren’t kicked out for having a drum kit. i finally got around to arranging “Rubber Duckie” for the phil, and, of course, we played that. we also played “Il Ballon di Quaqua”, with a great effect. i talked to david on sunday and he said that he had frequently seen bands that had the entire ritz singing along, but he had never before seen a band that could get the entire ritz dancing. we also were offered a gig at a nudist colony near portland.

gnomesthe fair had to put up with an infestation of gnomes this year, which was amusing and frustrating at the same time: the gnomes were rowdy and rambunctious, and always getting into trouble. they broke in to our back stage area and drank all our tequila, and from there it went from bad to worse. they were ubiquitous. sunday, they were seen shaking down a vendor in the meadow, and when confronted, became belligerent… i think tricky bunny was a part of them, but i’m not sure, because they were wearing annoying gnome costumes, and avoiding my camera. also, i was walking up the eight saturday and i was accosted by a huge flock of people in flamingo costumes. they all gathered around me, honking and cooing and fanned me with their wings for about five minutes, and then flew off again. once again, it is my understanding that tricky bunny was a part of that as well, but i couldn’t tell. as i was walking away from the encounter, i wondered how one could take a picture of such an experience that would come anywhere close to reflecting what i actually experienced.

lightsi met a whole bunch of people, including positively stephie, who had vibrating massage bugs that felt really good on my mosquito-bitten back, and a family of neon people, the father of which works at adobe and will probably be looking for the pictures i took of them.lights

i saw a sign, of which i was not able to take a picture, unfortunately, which said “The Oregon Country Fair – Psycho-Spiritual Rejuvanation For Everyone”. it’s kind of ironic that i would see that, because i was talking with ned a week ago, and he was saying, based on what i have told him, that things like OCF are like medication for me, which is absolutely true. it’s just too bad that OCF only happens once a year. it’s even more ironic because i realised even more this year that an observation i made about OCF last year is also absolutely true, and that is that OCF is basically a big, hippie-oriented mall without the mall. it’s strange that i should get so much benefit from something that, at it’s lowest common denominator, is specifically designed to extract money from unsuspecting tourists.

there are a whole bunch more pictures which are the only things left of OCF 08. so go look at them… you know you want to…

finally

first i had to retrieve the camera from moe, then i had to title all of the pictures, then i moved them from one place to another and screwed up my picture archiving tool, so i had to get that sorted out, and decided that there wasn’t much that could be done (apparently digicam can’t deal very well with albums that aren’t located on the hard drive), but, finally, there are a whole bunch of pictures of SACBO.

SACBO!

the Seattle Art Car Blow Out was last weekend.

on friday i went on the “cruise” which was supposed to be a way to show everyone in seattle our art cars, but ended up being a chaotic mess that started at golden gardens and then headed downtown, where many people drove around the seattle sculpture gardens many times in both directions, at the same time, trying to catch up with each other. we completely blew off a drive around alki – because there wasn’t enough time – and then drove to georgetown where we took a “tour” of the historic georgetown steam plant (which was a lot cooler than it sounds – and by “tour” i mean two “proprietors” opened up this huge, historical, fully functional, four-story tall, steam-powered electric generation facility to 35-or-so artists. they had their hands full keeping us out of the high-voltage stuff – there were several times when one or the other of them was heard shouting “BE CAREFUL! HIGH VOLTAGE!” – and the huge steam-powered vacuum engine, and the room which had two or three antique trucks, one of which was a firetruck, a couple of small-gauge steam-powered trains {anacortes railroad? i didn’t know anacortes had an antique steam-powered, small-gauge railroad…} and a steam-powered machine shop, with a couple of huge lathes, a couple of milling machines and a brake. i went up on the roof of the building, which is right next to the north end of boeing field. it’s so close to the runway that when a plane takes off they were no more than 100 feet above us – it felt like you could reach up and touch the landing gear as it folded up) and then went to a party.

saturday, i showed up at 8:00 am, and parked my art car in the upper burke lot. i had two different people, one of whom should have known better, ask me if “that’s an art car”, which i found absolutely puzzling (of course it’s an art car, that’s why i said i was part of the art car blow out…?). i then picked up my tuba, two books of music, my stand and chair, and walked the block-and-a-half to lenin, where we were playing. later on that day, somebody asked me why i had made the car, and i said that it was because i play in the fremont philharmonic, and if i were driving an ordinary car i would have to park at least two miles away and walk, carrying all my gear, to where we were playing, and then walk, carrying all my gear, back to where i parked when we were done. i really like driving an art car, if for no other reason than i get to park in the middle of fremont during the solstice festival. because of the fact that i had all of my tuba-related gear, i didn’t set up to vend anything substantial, but i did put out my buttons (which i made in the two days prior to SACBO), and made $30. i even sold 2 swastika buttons!

playing in the parade was an interesting mix of an honour, exciting, extremely frustrating, and having people being downright rude to us. we were supposed to set up in front of lenin, right on the street, so that we would be able to interact with the Master of Ceremonies, Professor Petrol Von Huffenfuel. but first we had to evict the person who had been sitting on that spot since 5:30 pm the previous day – who was more than a little miffed that we came along at “the last minute” and took his spot, and then, once we got set up, two or three rows of people crammed themselves in in front of the band, put down blankets, and refused to move… then two or three more rows of people crammed themselves in between the first two or three rows and the band (which was supposed to be in front), and stood up, which meant that i, who was sitting in the band (which was supposed to be in front, with nobody in front of us) couldn’t see… 8/

so i only got a view of the solstice parade through the crowd, and i left the parade grounds as soon as it was over, because i was so frustrated with everyone.

as i mentioned in my last post, saturday was also our 10th wedding anniversary, so instead of going to the pizza party at the fremont historical society, i went to salty’s on alki and met with the most beautiful woman in the world, where we shared the best table in the house and ate amazingly outstanding food until we couldn’t eat any more. getting married to monique was, without a doubt, one of the smartest things i have ever done in my entire life. i love you, sweetie! 8)

sunday i decided that instead of going on “the caravan” (which turned out to be a repeat of friday’s chaos, only in reverse), i would go directly to fremont and set up hybrid elephant with a bunch of new stuff, including some original music CDs (i actually sold one, as well, which really made my day), and the buttons, on a fancy display that i came up with recently. when it was all over, i made $150!!!! i sold eighteen 20-stick packages of incense (at $1.50 a piece) to a single person (obviously another incense fanatic), plus i sold two ganesha murtis ($15 and $20), two rudrakhsha malas ($14 each) and an original music CD ($10). i sold a lot of incense to a whole bunch of people.

and i really like sitting around on my ass, under a canopy, on a beautiful, warm day, doing nothing more than talking with people and encouraging them to think in a different way (which most of them are perfectly willing to do, and the ones that aren’t are blatantly stupid and wrong about it), and having them give me money.

there are some pictures, but most of my pictures are in the other camera, which is currently in moe’s posession, so they’ll get posted later.

busy busy busy

i went to the fremont sunday market last sunday, and made $97, plus i got three orders for incense and one for a sivalingam necklace, as well, which was enough to finish paying off the button machine that i’ve been paying on for about a month now, so i got a new toy – a one inch button machine, which i have been dreaming about owning for close to 20 years, if not more. unfortunately, my colour printer has decided to quit working, so i’ve got to figure out what to do about that (the most obvious choice is to go to rePC and purchase another one, but there are other options as well).

cinderella rehearsals are in full swing, twice a week. we’ve only got 5 more rehearsals (one is tonight) before the oregon country fair. i plan on going down on wednesday and coming back monday.

the solstice parade and art car blowout are this weekend. i’ve still got to wash my car and it would be nice if i could figure out a way to play CDs in my car, because my ipod died, and i recently got a recording of a guy reciting Sri Ganapati Sahasranaamavalih (which is playing now) which would be really cool to play around Ganesha The Car.

ignorant savages!

Ganesha The Car has been kicked out of another parade – only this time it was early enough that i didn’t actually drive to the parade. it still irritates me that people can be so outrageously ignorant.

i sent the following description to the 4th of july parade coordinator in everett

a 1996 mazda protege with a prayer consisting of the first 100 names of the
1008 names of Ganesha, the Hindu God of Removing Obstacles, written in
sanskrit all over the outside, and a Ganesha Yantra on the roof. in sanskrit,
the name of the prayer is “Sri Ganapatisahasranaamavalih” which means
the “1008 names of Ganesha”

photos and a more complete description can be seen at
http://www.hybridelephant.com/ganesha.html

NOTE: PLEASE LOOK AT THE PHOTOS AND DESCRIPTION ON THE WEB SITE CAREFULLY.

the car has two swastikas on the back corner panels, and a swastika on the roof.

IN CONTEXT, THESE SHOULD NOT BE INTERPRETED AS SYMBOLS OF NAZI HATRED!

the swastika and the six-pointed star (commonly called by its jewish
name, “magen dawid” or the “star of david”) in combination, are ancient
symbols of Ganesha, and represent good luck, peace and love. the combination
bears a similar meaning to the “taijitu” or “tao symbol” from china.

the swastika and the six-pointed star have meant good luck, peace and love for
at least 5000 years, and they still mean it to this day, despite the people
that claim the swastika means nazis. IT DOESN’T, THEY’RE WRONG!

it is because of ignorant people less than 90 years ago that the swastika has
come to mean anything other than good luck, peace and love.

this car is, among other things, my way to reclaim the swastika from those
ignorant few who have turned it into a symbol of hatred, and return it to its
original, beneficial meaning. IT WORKS!

i have postcards, the back of which contain an explanation of why the swastika
is not what most american people erroneously think it is, which i am willing
to hand out to people at the parade, but i have also been kicked out of
parades in the past, because of people who refused to understand, and i would
like to avoid that if possible.

this is the response that i got from them:

Thank you for your quick response. I appreciate your detailed
description and respect your views. However, we are unable to fund your
participation in our parade due to the sensitive and controversial
nature of some of the symbols on your car. I am very sorry and wish you
the best of luck in the future.

Sincerely,

Laura Baird – [email protected]

the response came back quickly enough that i get the impression they didn’t even look at the web site, and they certainly didn’t have time to look at the photos… 8/

broken car update

i called and talked with someone from jiffy lube.

i know, jiffy lube is not the place i want working on my car. but they did the work that resulted in my car being broken, so i have to start with them.

the guy i talked to on the phone said that he would send someone out to pick me up so that i could get the keys to them. i figured that he had called a tow truck, but half an hour later i got a call from someone else, who couldn’t find my house (i live in a remote “unincorporated” area of king county between 5 “cities” – only 2 of which actually are cities – and i live at the end of a gravel road that you have to drive down another gravel road to get to, so i’m constantly fielding phone calls from people who have something to deliver but can’t find the place), and when i said “i assume you’re driving a tow truck” he was rather surprised and said “no, what’s wrong with the car?”

so i told him: late last night, as i was on my way home from a rehearsal in seattle, the car suddenly started making the “loose belt” noise, which was quickly followed by a thump from under the hood, the “loose belt” noise stopping abruptly, the lights going dim, and the charge light coming on. i was on the freeway at the time, and i figured (it turns out, rightly) that if i turned off the engine, i probably wouldn’t be able to get it started again, and i was on the freeway at 10:30 at night about 30 miles away from home (damn it!) so i kept on going until the car ceased moving forward, about 5 miles from home.

he said he was not driving a tow truck, but he was lost and couldn’t find my house, and he would deal with the car once he had the keys. i took three more phone calls from him over the next half an hour before i walked two blocks to the street that he said he was on – which he wasn’t – and eventually met up with him and we went to where the car died.

indeed, the serpentine belt – which they replaced two weeks ago – was completely broken and only a small bit of it remained in the engine compartment. not only that, but the other belt, which was also replaced at the same time, was in the process of coming loose as well. the guy had brought a new serpentine belt and a socket set, but i could have told him that it would not be possible to replace the belt from above, and he confirmed that he had talked with the guy who had done the work originally, who had told him that it was a difficult job, even from underneath the car.

it also turns out that the serpentine belt is attached to the water pump as well, and the fact that i drove it for 25 miles at freeway speeds with no water pump means that likely the head gasket is blown and the water pump may be frozen. as i (correctly) surmised, jiffy lube doesn’t routinely fix head gaskets or blown water pumps.

i have the lowly pæon’s assurance that jiffy lube will pay for any necessary repair, but as he is a lowly pæon, i don’t put much confidence in his word. also, because of the fact that he didn’t come in a tow truck to begin with and – get this – they “have to find a tow truck that will give us a good deal”, they won’t even have the car to the jiffy lube until “some time later today”. when i asked what that meant, he started evading my questions, not very effectively. i got him to admit that they’ll have at least a diagnosis on the car by 4:00 pm, but that doesn’t do me much good if the head gasket or the water pump is blown.

fortunately i don’t have an actual performance until friday, but i’ve got a BSSB rehearsal tonight and a BBWP rehearsal on thursday. and my beautiful art car is sitting (on county property) far away from where i am now, with who knows what going on to it that i have no control over, and i’m stressed to the breaking point! AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

UPDATE: i hit save on this post when the phone rang. it was eric, the half-a-bee manager of the jiffy lube, who said that he had worked on the car personally, that the head gasket and water pump appear to be in working condition, they changed the oil (again?) and coolant, and charged the battery and it is currently idling just fine. he said he would drop it off to me.

while it is a huge relief, i am still going to drop it by a real mechanic, today to have it checked out to make sure there isn’t anything else wrong with it. and i’m going to think twice before i go back to jiffy lube for anything! 8/

ANOTHER UPDATE: it is now 2:30 and i’ve taken the car to a real mechanic who says that – in spite of the “check engine” light, which has been on almost ever since i first bought the car – i can “take this car anywhere”. he also suggested that i bring the car to him for oil changes, because “we’re cheaper than jiffy lube” which is another good reason to go there.

this is precisely why i invoke Ganesha, Lord of Removing Obstacles on my car: the mechanic said i was extremely lucky. he said he had driven his car and the alternator went out and he got – maybe – ten miles before it quit. i drove for 30 miles on the freeway with no alternator and no water pump, and i didn’t blow out my engine.

and the “christians” say that ganesha doesn’t exist… 8)

damn!

my car broke.

i was on my way home from BBWP rehearsal and it started making the “loose belt” sound, which was quickly followed by a “thump” from underneath the car, the “charge” light came on, the lights went really dim and it stopped making the “loose belt” sound.

then, when i was most of the way home (fortunately) it stopped going forward and i had to leave it by the side of the road.

we’ll see what happens in the morning, but it doesn’t look good at this point. 8(

yep…

Pakistan’s Decorated Vehicles – these are far more decorated than Ganesha The Car, which is what i was originally thinking of when i first started work on it. if i ever want to get Ganesha that decorated, i’d better start working on it. these are good inspirations for what i can do…

Talking About AT&T’s Internet Filtering on AT&T’s The Hugh Thompson Show – the editor of Boing Boing Gadgets was interviewed by Hugh Thompston, but the interview didn’t go the way Hugh’s corporate sponsor, AT&T, wanted it to, so they cut it, right after the (hand-picked AT&T) audience voiced their opinions about AT&T filtering their email, and started over. here is just the video, and here is a FAQ about the EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency. “AT&T: Your World. Delivered. To The NSA.”

Elephants Evolve Smaller Tusks Due to Poaching – more blasphemous evolutionary facts that further negate the jeezis-people’s divine intelligence. what with the mounting evidence over the past 200 years, you would think that evolution would be getting a better rep these days. but at the same time, mike huckabee is supporting a state constitutional amendment in georgia which would reclassify most birth control as abortion. this is to put up a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade and, eventually, make birth control illegal. it used to be that i would seek out people like this in order to blast holes in their arguments, but since my injury, all i can do is shake my head, because anything more than that and i end up sounding more idiotic than they do.

Surge To Nowhere – Don’t buy the hawks’ hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it.

ganesha – the remover of obstacles

last night i got pulled over by the cops. i had just run a red light, along with the car next to me (which happened to contain liz dreisbach, the leader of the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band, and apparently the cop had been hiding in the shadows on the cross street. but it was midnight, and there was nobody else around, so i think he didn’t have anything better to do anyway. i pulled over and he gave me a warning: “safety tip, when your light is red, that means mine is green”. then he sniffed and said “sandalwood?” to which i responded “yeah, i sell incense” and grabbed a business card, which i keep on the dashboard for just such an occurrence. he thought i was handing him my license, and said “no, that’s okay” but then he saw that it was my business card and said “oh, is that a business card?” and took it, peered at it with his flashlight, and then let me go.

i am firmly convinced that Ganesha Vinaayakeswara was watching over me, and that is precisely why i have Aum Vinaayakaaya Namah painted right over the driver’s side door

aum vinaayakaaya namah

not only that, but when i got home, i discovered that i had a $50 incense order from someone in the 90210 zip code.

fremont peak park

salamandir with the fremont philharmonic certificate

so we played for the official opening of fremont peak park. i was late, which is to say that i was supposed to show up at 11:00, but i didn’t actually show up until 11:45, thinking that we were supposed to start playing at 12:00, but actually what happened was that politicians and park organisers started talking at 12:15 or so, and we didn’t actually start playing until almost 1:30… and the street was closed, but after driving around for longer than it should have taken, i was able to convince one of the “we’ve got the road closed” people with safety vests, that i was a part of the celebration, so they let me through. i parked across the street, and was able to watch from the “bandstand” (which was a little terrace off to one side of the park, with an excellent view) as people gawked at my car and wondered what it says. there was a couple of people who were old enough that they probably remember when the swastika was just a swastika, but the old lady looked disgusted as she was walking away from it. the cake that they made for the celebration was an exact, scale model of the park, and was entirely edible. the terrace that the band had set up on was supposed to be reserved for the band, but unfortunately, someone gave it away to someone else before we got there, so they gave us other parts of the park instead. i asked if it was ethical to eat the park that they had just opened, and the guy said “you can have your park and eat it too”…

i got some decent pictures, but my picture of the band turned out to be a movie, which i didn’t take correctly and didn’t work. better luck next time…

random bits of this and that

last night was the Sousa Bash, in honour of John Phillip Sousa‘s 153rd birthday, and, coincidentally, it was also Antoine-Joseph Sax‘s 193rd birthday. it went well, in spite of the fact that the west seattle bridge was closed for 3 hours, immediately prior to our concert, which made everybody, including a significant portion of the band, late. it was held at Kenyon Hall (formerly “Hokum” Hall), which, despite the fact that i actually lived in west seattle for a year or so, and have driven past it so many times i have lost count, i have never heard of it. it’s a good thing i know were it is now, however, as we apparently have the hall scheduled for the next 2 tuesdays in a row for recording.

it also makes me interested in talking to lou (the proprietor) about scheduling the fremont philharmonic there at some point…

<weird dream>
i was in this hotel in a big city somewhere, lots of glass, modern architecture, doing something, when these three guys with automatic weapons came in and started screaming and spraying bullets everywhere. fortunately i was off to the side, so i wasn’t a direct target, but also the shots that i did take were, apparently, fairly low velocity, and they were buckshot about the size of a dust-speck, so they stung, but they didn’t actually injure me – it was frightening, none the less, and everybody was cringing and trying to convince the guys to let them go. somehow i managed to find my way to an elaborate laundry chute which lead to the basement, but the guys were not letting anyone escape that way – despite the fact that there were three or more people that jumped down the chute that i saw. when i was getting ready to jump, one of the guys waved a gun in my direction and told me to stay put, so i didn’t jump, but i continued to work my way towards the exit, and i eventually managed to escape into the parking garage. at this point, i realised that moe had been there as well, but instead of going back for her, or notifying the police or something like that, i decided to get out of town by the most direct means possible and not tell anybody about the fact that this hotel was being held up, or that my wife was in danger. towards the end of the dream, when i was going out of town, it vaguely resembled 5th ave., in downtown seattle, except the buildings were all different, and if it was 5th ave. then the hotel that i was coming from would have been approximately where the westlake mall is, except that it was backwards, and a hotel instead of a mall.
</weird dream>

i also got another email from the 2008 art car calendar people, indicating some vague interest in knowing more about the swastika, and the meaning of my car, which, on the surface, sounds like i may have made an impression on them. i’m not holding my breath, however, because one of the questions they asked was answered in plain, clear language, in the blurb i sent them about the car originally, which makes me wonder if they even bothered to read the blurb in the first place, or they just had a knee-jerk reaction to the swastika.

i have a swastika on my art car… get used to it!

so i submitted pictures of my art car to the national 2008 Art Car Calendar.

this was the response they sent me:

Hi,

You have a beautiful car, but I do have a problem with the swatstika on top.

Yes, I know that I am ignorant and narrow minded, but the image is embedded in my brain as an evil symbol of hate.

Next year if you would allow me to cover it up or replace it with another symbol, then I would feel more comfortable to have it in the calendar.

I truly apologize if I have offended you in any way, but that is my opinion and I publish the calendar.

Thank you for submitting your car for the calendar.

so this was the response i sent back:

if people like you continue to be in positions where they can determine what other people see, then the swastika will never regain that which it had for everyone, for literally thousands of years before anybody ever heard of the nazis. if that happens, it will be a sad day for humanity.

one of the reasons why i put a swastika on my car is to show people that it had another, entirely opposite meaning from the one people like you have put upon it in the past 85 years.

you may not cover or alter the artwork on my car. to do so would be a misrepresentation of what i meant for my art car, and i will not permit you to do so.

i am offended, but i will get over it. however, you should examine your prejudices again in a year or so and see if they haven’t changed, because if they haven’t, then it is possible that you have offended The Remover of Obstacles, and i can’t speak for Him.

1085

the clamper meeting was last night. i apparently did a naughty no-no and wore red. apparently you aren’t allowed to wear red to a clamper meeting unless you’re an official clamper, but the widders i hung out with last night were saying that i was probably a clamper and didn’t realise it. after all, they adopted Doc Maynard as their patriarch and named their chapter after him, and he wasn’t a clamper. anyway, i’m probably going to go to their labor day parade in black diamond and be a “sweeper” (which doesn’t sound good), and if they like me, there’s a “Poor Blind Candidate Interrogation Meeting” on september 7th, and then the initiation at the “Doins” on whidbey island on the 14th.

i must admit, however, that i’m not sure i’m going to fit in with these people. my first clue was that most of them are also eagles, and the meeting was held in the eagles hall. i had quite an experience sitting and listening, and being respectfully quiet, while this 70-year-old guy with no teeth and what appeared to be a middle finger joint that was missing (bitten off? i didn’t get the whole story), ranted and raved about his ex-wife, the bitch-whore-drug-addict, the “horrors of drugs” and what the combination had done to his now-adult kids (and me wearing my ‘IT’S JUST A PLANT” t-shirt), causing him to lose two houses, and so on, where everything was “fuckin’ this” and “fuckin’ that”, for 45 minutes… if that’s what it means to be a part of their fraternal organisation, i could give it a miss without too much difficulty. it could be that the reason i have never heard of them before is because they’re rabid republicans. i suppose my experience as a “sweeper” will confirm or reject that possibility.

meanwhile, i got this from the snoqualmie valley record, by way of “bottlehound”, the “Noble Grand Humbug”. apparently he was quite impressed that i got my article on page 1 of the print edition, which is one of the reasons, apparently, why my wearing red was overlooked by the assembled clampers.

Swastika is banned in parade
Symbol deemed too offensive for Snoqualmie Railroad Days event
August 08, 2007
By Leif Nesheim, Editor

Ganesha Guy
Displaying the symbol that got his car evicted from the Snoqualmie Railroad Days parade, Bruce Salamandir-Feyrecilde of Milton said he was disappointed he couldn’t be in the parade.

Bruce Salamandir-Feyrecilde’s white 1996 Mitsubishi Eclipse is adorned with black Sanskrit characters and a colorful Hindu symbol on the roof. The problem? The symbol includes a swastika. The art car was nixed from the Snoqualmie Railroad Days’ grand parade. Salamandir-Feyrecilde was incensed. “It really bothers me that while I am trying to educate people, the people who need educating the most are the ones in charge,” he said. Salamandir-Feyrecilde is Hindu. He painted his car in honor of Ganesha, the Hindu god of removing obstacles. The roof symbol, known as Ganesha Yantra, is similar in meaning to the Chinese Yin-Yang symbol, he said.

The swastika symbol has been used for thousands of years in many different cultures. The name derives from the Sanskrit term for “well-being”.

Tove Warmerdam, the festival’s volunteer organizer, said the chose to remove Salamandir-Feyrecilde’s car from the parade to prevent people from being offended by the swastika. She said she understood Salamandir-Feyrecilde’s point about the Hindu meaning of the symbol, but that its use by Adolph Hitler’s Nazis is the first association known to most Americans.

“This is a small-town festival,” she said. Warmerdam said she felt the unintended offense likely to be caused by the car wasn’t in line with the parade’s guidelines and spirit. She said several people who had seen the car came to her with concerns about it.

In several e-mails, Warmerdam explained to Salamandir-Feyrecilde her reasons for excluding his car and said she was sorry he felt offended.

Salamandir-Feyrecilde said he felt singled out for discrimination because his wasn’t the only parade entry with a swastika, but was the only one prohibited from participating.

The Falun Dafa float, which took first place in the parade, also contained a swastika. However, Falun Dafa members covered the symbol during the parade and explained its meaning at their festival booth, Warmerdam said. Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is a Chinese system of belief that uses meditation and exercise to achieve spiritual harmony.

Salamandir-Feyrecilde said he felt intimidated when a “burly” police officer told him he couldn’t be in the parade. Snoqualmie Police Officer Robert Keaton asked Salamandir-Feyrecilde to leave the parade at Warmerdam’s request.

Warmerdam said she was glad Keaton was present because she and the other festival volunteers began to feel threatened when Salamandir-Feyrecild’s became agitated.

Salamandir-Feyrecilde lives in Milton. He and his wife sell incense, jewelry and other goods from India and are computer consultants. He initially planned to come to the festival to see the E Clampus Vitus (a fraternal Western Heritage organization) parade entry, but decided to enter his car in the parade a few days before the festival when he learned entries were still being accepted.

For more information on his car, visit www.HybridElephant.com


my rebuttal, such as it is:

you got some details wrong. although you never asked me, it’s a 1996 Mazda Protegé, not a Mitsubishi Eclipse. i know, it’s details, but still… you could have asked me.

the point of your article is a bit vague: it could be in support of me, because i was discriminated against, but it could also be a fact-filled article proclaiming that “if you’ve got a swastika, you’d better not try to be in a parade in our town”. i wonder what you would think if i entered next year and put a big sheet over the “offending” symbols with a sign saying “CENSORED”, so that you couldn’t see it? you haven’t made that absolutely clear in your article, and that concerns me.

also, that bit about warmerdam feeling “threatened” when i “became agitated”? that is completely the opposite of what happened. i’ve never even met warmerdam before, unless she was the woman who was taking my registration at the parade – which i admit she might have been, but she wasn’t giving her name when i talked to her before the parade or after i was being kicked out – which was after the “burly” policeman had been involved twice. as far as “becoming agitated”, i speak differently since my injury: i speak with a lot of hesitation, stammering, and one-word-at-a-time, especially with people i don’t know, and that might have been interpreted as “becoming agitated”, but it was just my brain injury showing. not only that, but i was becoming agitated: i was originally encouraged to come to the parade by someone on the phone (who i later found out was warmerdam herself), and welcomed, only to be kicked out at the last moment, with only the vaguest and lamest of explanations. who wouldn’t become a little agitated under those circumstances? but to say that she felt “threatened” by me is totally asinine, especially because the “burly” police officer was at least twice my size. i felt threatened by the fact that there was this huge police officer, who “wasn’t speaking as a police officer”, telling me that someone i had never met was kicking me out of their parade.

but apart from that, you got all of the talking points correct. i’ll give it a C+

1084

Swastika is banned in parade
August 08, 2007
By: Leif Nesheim

Ganesha Guy
Displaying the symbol that got his car evicted from the Snoqualmie Railroad Days parade, Bruce Salamandir-Feyrecilde of Milton said he was disappointed he couldn’t be in the parade.

Bruce Salamandir-Feyrecilde’s white 1996 Mitsubishi Eclipse is adorned with black Sanskrit characters and a colorful Hindu symbol on the roof. The problem? The symbol includes a swastika. The art car was nixed from the Snoqualmie Railroad Days’ grand parade. Salamandir-Feyrecilde was incensed. “It really bothers me that while I am trying to educate people, the people who need educating the most are the ones in charge,” he said. Salamandir-Feyrecilde is Hindu. He painted his car in honor of Ganesha, the Hindu god of removing obstacles. The roof symbol, known as Ganesha Yantra, is similar in meaning to the Chinese Yin-Yang symbol, he said.


actually it’s a 1996 Mazda Protegé, but they got the important stuff right. there will be more of this article when i receive the actual newspaper that it’s printed in.

but i think it’s amusing that he said i was “incensed”… i wonder if he looked at my web site… 8)

meanwhile:

I hope it isn’t inappropriate to contact you via this site.

I heard what happened to you involving the Railroad Days parade. The story made it onto http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?brd=965 . if the parade actually banned you because of that, I would make a very big deal out of it. The parade is part of Railroad Days, and isn’t Railroad Days something sanctioned by the city of Snoqualmie?

Personally, if something happened that were to violate my freedom of expression, I would make a big deal out of it, by contacting the news or perhaps contacting the ACLU. At the very least, they, whoever initiated the ban against your car, needs to be shamed publically, in my opinion. Maybe they’ll learn.


1081

> Without
> seeing your entry or having a full explanation of what it had on it, we
> couldn’t make a full decision on the matter.

I gave you my URL – http://www.hybridelephant.com/ – which has pictures and an explanation of what I was going to present when I spoke with you on the phone, several days before the parade. All you had to do was look at that web site to get all the information you needed.

Not only did you apparently not look at my web site, but you said you would call me back the next day, and you didn’t. How was I to know that I would not be accepted under those circumstances?

> I understand that you mean no harm, and want to put a
> positive outlook on the symbol, but one of my committee members saw the
> symbol, in fact it was a person you spoke of in the email and thought they
> were not upset by it….they actually were VERY offended by it.

That kind of person is exactly why I originally created the car to begin with. If they don’t see that the swastika has meanings beyond what they assume, then how are they ever to learn that originally it meant exactly the opposite of what they think?

I wasn’t even given the chance to tell them that they were wrong.

> We live in
> a small community and this is a family event.

Your small community apparently has a number of families from India living in it as well, and many more people who are not from India. They were not offended at all, but understand that the swastika has more than the sinister meaning that it has obtained relatively recently.

Why should the misguided opinions of one person, who doesn’t understand, take precedence over a majority of the community who do? Why is it not preferable to educate those who don’t understand, than it is to eject me from the parade because of a few people who don’t understand?

> I understand you feel the
> Falon Gong Association is being positively recognized and you are being
> singled out. That is not the case, they actually concealed the symbol for
> the parade, and had a booth at the parade to fully explain their beliefs,
> organization, and representation of the symbol. You had one card with you.

I have postcards – http://pics.livejournal.com/przxqgl/pic/000rcfc2- which I handed out to everybody who was interested…

… AFTER the parade was over, and outside of the actual festival.

Which meant that relatively few people actually saw the car, compared to how many would have seen it if I had been allowed to be in the parade.

> I sincerely believe you mean no harm
> and the symbol is a positive symbol to you, but to others it’s offensive.

It’s only offensive to those who don’t understand. Those people need educating, not coddling.

It is offensive to me that I should be labled something which I clearly am not, by people who refuse to see anything other than their narrowminded opinions, and ejected from your parade without even getting the chance to explain myself to the community. You seem to have no problem in offending me.

first draft of a letter that i’m going to send to a whole bunch of people

Tove Warmerdam, Parade Coordinator – [email protected]

Matthew R. Larson, Mayor, City of Snoqualmie Washington – [email protected]

Bob Larson, City Administrator, City of Snoqualmie, Washington – [email protected]

Joan Pliego, Media Contact, City of Snoqualmie, Washington – [email protected]

Leif Nesheim, Editor, Snoqualmie Valley Record – [email protected]

Sonia Krishnan, Reporter, Seattle Times – [email protected]


To whom it may concern:I went to Snoqualmie recently to participate in the Snoqualmie Railroad Days parade. Originally I had planned on going because another organization had a group in the parade that I wanted to see. When I called to get directions, I mentioned to the person that talked to that I had an art car, which represents Ganesha, the Hindu God of Removing Obstacles (pictures of my car can be seen at http://snurl.com/wb4x). They suggested that I should be in the parade as well. I was unsure if they understood what an art car was, but they assured me that they were looking for unusual things to be in their parade, and they assured me that I would be welcome.

So I went, registered for the parade, got assigned a number, and parked my car in the parade lineup. I was hanging out waiting for the parade to start when I was approached by a burly Snoqualmie police officer who said that there was “an issue” with my vehicle. Apparently someone on the parade staff was concerned that somebody might be “offended” by the fact that there is a swastika on the roof and back corner panels of my car. I explained to him that the swastika and the six-pointed star is an ancient symbol that represents Ganesha, which has been used for thousands of years. The swastika and the six-pointed star – known as Ganesha Yantra – is to Hinduism what The Dao is to Buddhism: a symbol of balance. Furthermore, the swastika is an ancient symbol of love, peace and good luck that has been used by every group of people on the planet, and in that context, I was reclaiming the swastika from ignorant people who assume that the only thing it means is a reference to the nazis.

He agreed with me, and went on his way. At the same time, I started talking with some other people who were waiting in the parade lineup, including some people in the float in front of me, which was sponsored by Falun Dafa, another group which uses the swastika in the emblem for their organisation. They were appalled that there had even been any question about it, and offered to go talk to the parade staff about it, which I wholeheartedly encouraged them to do.

Then the Snoqualmie policeman came back and told me that he was not speaking as a policeman, but as a spokesperson for the parade staff, who had decided that I was going to be ejected from the parade, despite the obviously non-nazi use of the swastika, because “it is a family event” and they didn’t want anybody to be offended. He said that if I didn’t move my car out of the parade lineup, it would be towed.

I don’t see how people can learn that the swastika means anything other than what they’re wrong to think it means unless they are exposed to it in public situations that are different from what they think, and I told him that. He said he was sorry, but that if I didn’t move my car, it would be towed. He encouraged me to find a parking spot somewhere out of the parade lineup, where I could explain to people what it meant, but there was no more he could do.

Several people were watching this whole encounter, including the woman that took my registration and gave me a number for the parade. They spoke up, and said that they weren’t offended by the swastika on my car, the swastika has a far more ancient and positive meaning than the “parade staff” was putting on it, and they didn’t understand why I was being kicked out of the parade. It didn’t matter: I was summarily ejected from the parade.

The only person I talked to was the burly policeman, who wasn’t speaking as a policeman, and several other people, including the people from Falun Dafa, and random passers by. I never actually spoke with the person who made the decision to eject me from the parade. I find it interesting that, despite free speech and freedom of religion, my car, which is clearly the antithesis of naziism, would be kicked out of the parade, when the Falun Dafa float is allowed. Falun Dafa was actually awarded a proclamation on May 13, 2007 by the Mayor of Snoqualmie, Mr. Matthew R. Larson. I find it very interesting that one organization (Falun Dafa) who uses the swastika would be awarded a proclamation by the mayor of a city, while my car, which represents Ganesha, the second most widely worshipped deity in the world, should be ejected from the parade in the same city, three months later.

I ended up parking my car and handing out postcards to anybody who seemed interested. Most of the people I talked to were shocked that I was kicked out of the parade, especially since the Falun Dafa float was not, and those few that asked me if I “liked Hitler” were quite open to the idea that it was not a nazi demonstration, and listened while I informed them of the historical definition of the swastika. There were even a number of Indian families, who looked as though they were locals, who didn’t even need to be told what the car signifies. They said that they were very definitly not offended by the swastika, took pictures of my car, and encouraged me to come to more events in the area.

It really bothers me that, while I am trying to educate people, the people who need educating the most are the ones in charge, especially in the light of the fact that I was originally welcomed by the person I talked to on the phone, and in the light of freedom of religion, and free speech. I feel that it is terrifically disappointing to be welcomed, only to show up and be summarily ejected when someone decides that I and my car might be offensive to some unknown person, especially when I didn’t actually get the chance to talk directly to the person who made the decision. I hope that all of Snoqualmie is not that prejudiced, and from what I subsequently saw, all of Snoqualmie is not that prejudiced, but it’s difficult to tell when they wouldn’t allow me to be in their parade.


any suggestions? what do you think?

IGNORANT PEOPLE REALLY PUSH MY BUTTONS! 8/

i went to snoqualmie today, which is about 70 miles east of here, ostensibly to see the Doc Maynard chapter of E Clampus Vitus Precision Drill Team (which i am probably going to join at their next meeting). when i called to get directions, i mentioned to the person that i had an art car, and they suggested that i should be in the parade as well. i was unsure if they understood what an art car was, but they assured me that they were looking for unusual things to be in their parade, and they assured me that i would be welcome.

so i went early this morning (on saturday, 8:30 am is early), and registered for the parade, got assigned a number, parked my car, and was hanging out waiting for the parade to start, when i was approached by a snoqualmie police officer, who said that they had “an issue” with my vehicle. apparently someone on the parade staff was concerned that somebody might be “offended” by the fact that there is a swastika on the roof and back corner panels of my car. i explained to them that the swastika is an ancient symbol of love, peace and good luck that was used by every group of people on the planet for thousands of years, and in that context, i was reclaiming the swastika from ignorant people who assume that the only thing it means is nazi.

he agreed with me, and went back to his other duties. at the same time, i started talking with some other people in the parade, including some people in the float in front of me, which was sponsored by falun gong, another group which uses the swastika in the emblem for their organisation. they were appalled that there had even been any question about it, and offered to go talk to the parade staff about it, which i wholeheartedly encouraged them to do.

while they were away, talking to people, the snoqualmie policeman came back and told me that he was not speaking as a policeman, but as a spokesperson for the parade staff, who had decided that i couldn’t be in their parade, despite the non-nazi use of the swastika, because “it is a family event” and they didn’t want anybody to be offended. he said that if i didn’t move my car out of the parade lineup, that it would be towed.

i don’t see how people can learn that the swastika means anything other than what they’re wrong to think it means unless they are exposed to it in public situations that are different from what they think, and i told him that. he said he was sorry, but that if i didn’t move my car, it would be towed. he encouraged me to find a parking spot somewhere out of the parade lineup, where i could explain to people what it meant, but there was no more he could do.

several people were watching this whole encounter, and spoke up that they weren’t offended by my car, that the swastika has a far more ancient and positive meaning than the “parade staff” was putting on it, and they didn’t understand why i was being kicked out of the parade, but it didn’t matter, and i was summarily ejected from the parade.

it turned out that one person Tove Warmerdam was the one who was offended, and she (he? i don’t know) never talked to me personally. the only person i talked to was the burly policeman who wasn’t speaking as a policeman who was insisting that i remove my car from the parade lineup.

i ended up parking my car right next to a “christian” bookstore and handing out postcards to anybody who seemed interested. most of the people were shocked that i was kicked out of the parade, especially since the falun gong float (and chinese dancers) were not, and those that asked me if i “liked hitler” were open to the idea that not only was my car the antithesis of what hitler was trying to create, but that it had been that way for thousands of years prior to hitler’s birth, and that the swastika had been used since ancient times to mean completely the opposite of what they initially thought. i also noticed that there were a number of indian families who looked as though they were locals, who didn’t even need to be told what the car signifies, who took my picture and pictures of the car, and encouraged me to come to more things in the area (the parade in north bend, just up the road from snoqualmie, is next week. i may go.)

i talked to the guy who is the editor for the snoqualmie valley record, who took a couple of pictures of me and my car, and he said he would be writing me, but it really bothers me that i am trying to educate people, and the people who need educating the most are the ones in charge.

1050

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o? s?u??? d?l?

1039

it’s the first of july… where has 2007 gone anyway?

next week, at this time, i will be going to “art on the ave” in tacoma, with my art car. i have recently got the brakes and the left front CV axle replaced, with money given to me by moe who was given it by ann a couple weeks ago when she went to portland after her mother had a stroke. it turned out to cost about half of what i was fearing, which means that, potentially, i can get the muffler fixed soon as well. it’s probably not going to get fixed until after oregon country fair, but that’s a lot sooner than i thought a week ago when i first learned how serious it really was. it all started when i got a flat tire, and ended up getting four new tires, but at the same time, learning that i had no brakes in either the front or the back, and that the ominous clicking sound that i was hearing when i went around a corner was the CV axle trying to work it’s way loose. i had about a week of worrying about that when the muffler started making a lot of noise. now the only thing left to fix is the muffler, which (i learned yesterday), is due to a broken weld just before the exhaust pipe enters the muffler, which can be fixed very easily if i knew how to weld…

when i was in fourth grade i took a career aptitude test that said i was most suited to be a welder. at the time, i was absolutely convinced that i was going to be a musician, and completely rejected the idea of becoming a welder. i have had several opportunities to learn how to weld since then, including in high school and in the tech school, and, while i admit that i didn’t completely reject the idea, at the same time, i also didn’t learn how to weld. i have been noticing, more and more frequently, how desirable knowing how to weld would be, and i’ve been wishing that i would have done things differently when i was in fourth grade. i can’t imagine that welding is an awful lot different than soldering, and i know several different techniques for soldering, so i get the impression that welding would not be that great a stretch for me at this time… it’s just a matter of finding someone who wants to teach an old dog new tricks… and then buying a whole bunch of new, expensive tools that i don’t have room for…

and then, two weeks from today will already be the last official day of the oregon country fair, which is what i was talking about when i said “where has 2007 gone” earlier… this is the first year in the (now) 5 years that i have been going to OCF that moe is going with me, although she’s going with me on thursday and coming back on saturday because she has to teach classes on sunday and she took off sunday a couple of weeks ago to go to portland when her mother had a stroke, so she can’t skip another week. it also means that i’ve got to find another way to get home, but considering that we’re going down as part of a large group of performers, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and if it is, i’ll be stuck in eugene with my tuba and all the camping gear, so i’ll probably be able to come up with some ideas for ways to get home — after all, i am a hippie… 8) it will be fun to have moe along. she’s not obligated to do anything, so she can hang out and check out the fair, and help out with our theatre stuff if she wants to… and she’ll get to see all kinds of performances, such as the fremont philharmonic at the ritz, and BBWP, which will probably perform at the friday night fire show again this year. also, this year is the first year since i started going to OCF that my physical birthday will not happen while i am at the fair. ready for this? i’m going to be 47 in a couple weeks… even if you were ready for it, i wasn’t… it feels like i haven’t gotten that much older since i was 30, which, if i recall correctly, is very much like what my grandparents said when i asked them when i was in fourth grade…

where has 2007 gone, anyway?

1022

so i went to the burien strawberry and arts festival again today. it was raining on and off, so i didn’t sell as much incense, which left an awful lot of time for me to answer more questions. at one point a guy came up and asked the perennial question: what does your car say. i answered him, like i answer everyone (at this point i could probably recite this line in my sleep) that it is “the first one hundred names of the one thousand and eight names of ganesha, the hindu God of Removing Obstacles.” he then asked some other questions about why i did it and so forth, and then he said something that i should have recognised, and ended the conversation right there. he said “but what happens when you die?” if i had been thinking more quickly, i would have made some excuse to end the conversation then, but i said “i go to heaven.” to which he said “based on what?” to which i replied “my belief in God.” he then said “but what about the exclusive claim that jeezis made when he said (john 14:6)?” i replied that it wasn’t an exclusive statement, because Kṛṣṇa made a similar statement (bhagavad gita 8.3) over 2000 years before jeezis, and that people have been saying similar things ever since humans first developed language. he asked me why nobody has ever heard of this “ganesha” before, and when i told him that ganesha was the second most widely worshipped deity in the world, and that if he went to india he would be inundated with material about ganesha, he said that he had worked in he had worked in india for a year and never heard of him, to which i responded that he probably hadn’t talked to the right people. then tried to nail me on some “subtle” point of logic, which i circumvented by saying something he had never heard before (big surprise), which is that God is one. he then asked me where that is located in the bible. because of my general lack of interest in debating with “christians” since my injury, i don’t know where that particular scripture is located in the bible (although i know it’s in there somewhere), so he pulled out a PDA and searched for it! and when he couldn’t find those exact words, he proceded to tell me how wrong i was about everything. he kept ranting, not letting me get a word in edgewise, and when i finally interrupted him (the stupidity had gone on long enough) he asked if he could “finish his thought”, and when i said “no” he walked away.

grrr!

it’s just as well, i was verging on punching him, which would have looked bad, regardless of how satisfying it would have felt.

i’m beginning to understand why muslims refer to “christians” as “people of the book”… it’s almost as if the guy was saying “if it’s not in the bible, i don’t believe it”.

1021

today i went to the burien strawberry and arts festival with my art car and a small pile of incense. i made $69.

i’m really surprised at how many people looked very closely at various aspects of my car, but didn’t ask me about it at all, because i’m fairly sure that, for the most part, the people in burien have absolutely no clue what it means. there was also a “christian” booth on the other side of the festival site, and people with shirts that said “Jesus Loves You” were very carefully avoiding even looking at my car, as though just looking at it might mess up their “christianity” somehow. there were a few western folks – like, maybe five, total – who asked me what it said, and there were a few indian people who knew what it said without having to ask, including one guy from nepal who read off the names like he was reading the newspaper (which made me feel very happy and very sad at the same time), and said that since he came from nepal he hadn’t been chanting as much as he used to. it turned out that he was a vendor up the row from me, and his business is called “Ganesha Imports”, which struck me as particularly amusing.

then, the guy in the booth next to me got ripped off while i was watching. it was rather distressing, actually: there were a couple of kids – seriously, they couldn’t have been older than 14 or so – hanging around my car, and when the guy’s back was turned, one of them swooped in, grabbed all his money, and was gone before he (or i) could do anything. the guy said he lost around $450 (he was selling gold and silver jewelry), plus his ID and wallet. fortunately he didn’t keep his car keys in the bag as well, but i’m gonna keep my eyes open tomorrow and report that kid if i see him again, which wouldn’t be too great a stretch… especially since the guy he ripped off is not going to be there tomorrow…

moe is in portland. apparently her mother had a mild stroke or something, because she was in the hospital a couple of days ago. moe hasn’t said anything specific about what happened, other than to assure me that her mother is okay, but she’s planning on coming home tomorrow, so i should know more then.

1013

blurdge

now that i’ve gotten a mouse (my old one died: the red LED that it uses to gauge the surface moving by burned out. it was only 10 years old.) so that i can photoshop the photos, i can update about the fremont fair and solstice parade.

i arrived around 8:30 in the morning, because i was aware that later on there would be traffic problems. as i was on my way into the south part of seattle, i saw this train car that had a grafitto that said “trousers”, or something like it, so i decided to take a picture. it’s a good thing, too, because if i had waited until i was on my way home, i would have missed it.

blurdge

the parade was at noon, and there were a whole pile of naked bicyclists throughout the whole parade. there were also a bunch of people who dressed in the style of ancient egyptians and built a pyramid in the center of the universe… and then dismantled it and carried it off, block by block…

blurdge
blurdge

there were the standard gawkers, lookie-loos and someone, once again, said “oh, that’s french!”… although they may have been talking about the car next to mine, which said “La Vie En Rose” on it, but they were in front of my car, and looking at my car, so i really don’t know.

there were also some real characters. this one older guy in a white suit and straw boater hat was feisty. i asked him if he minded if i took his picture and he said “why?” i was taken aback, but at the same time, i figured what the hell, so i pulled out the old cop tactic and said “why not?” he replied “most people don’t ask.” then he struck a pose for me. he also got into an argument with a girl that was buying incense, and spanked her with his cane.

blurdge

then there was a whole family of people who were very excited when they saw my car, and asked all sorts of questions all at once: is this your car? did you do all the writing? do you know what it says? who gave you the text? what text is it? do you worship ganesha? are you from india? are you from seattle only? ah cha! it is very good, you have done very well, it is very appreciableness! we are from india, you know.

blurdge

SACBO was a blast, and i got to sell incense both days. i didn’t make very much, but i gave out a lot of cards with my URI on them. i’ll have to bring more business cards with me next year… there were a ton of cars that i have never seen, some of which are pictured here for those of you who are interested. there would have been a lot more pictures – there were 185 on my memory card yesterday – but while i was copying the card to the hard disk, the computer crashed and took about ⅔ of the photos with it.

yesterday moe and i went to see the indigo girls at the zoo. i left my car at the fair and picked it up at 8:30 pm, after the fair was over. it makes a lot of noise and i am worried about driving it with no brakes and a cv joint that needs to be replaced, but unless a miracle happens, i’m not expecting to be able to get it fixed any time soon.

bleh

i drove into downtown seattle yesterday to meet with silveradept, who was here from ann arbor, michigan, for job interviews. i spent part of the afternoon wandering around seattle and the market with him, despite the bracing dampness in the air (which would be called “rain” just about anywhere else in the world), and then i went up to capitol hill to meet with moe and micah. after that i discovered that i had a flat tire, and my spare was flat as well, so i hassled with getting air in my spare, and changing the flat one and then i went home for about 10 minutes, whereupon moe and micah picked me up in moe’s car and we, along with the szechuan chinese takeout that they picked up for us, went to kirkland to watch indian movies – which in this case was Cheeni Kum, starring amitabh bhachchan and tabu. it was typical, in that it starred amitabh bhachchan, and it was long enough that it had an intermission (4 hours?), but it made for good character development and even the incidental characters had personality and life that you don’t see in western movies, but it was odd for bollywood because there were no big song and dance numbers. i then drove micah back to hahn’s, where he’s staying this weekend (he lives in florida, or something like that) and then drove home, in moe’s car, while moe slept. this morning i got up and was out the door at 8:00 to take my car to get new tires. in the process, i also discovered that i have no brakes (which was a surprise to me, as i thought the brakes were pretty good, and they haven’t been making any untoward noises or anything like that) and my left front CV joint needs replacing – something of which i have been aware for a few weeks now – which they said would cost around $400 to fix, but i’m hoping i can get it cheaper from jack, because he’s someone i have done business with in the past, and he sold me the car to begin with. one way or the other, it should probably get done before OCF. i then drove – with no brakes – to key center, which is west of purdy, but i got lost on the way and actually made all the way to the north of bremerton before i realised it and turned around and found the road to purdy, where i got a FREE lawn mower (freecycle ROCKS!!), which is something we have been needing for a couple months, since the old one died. i then drove back home, ate leftover szechuan chinese takeout, and mowed the lawn, which took about 3 times longer than it should have because it hasn’t been mowed in a couple months.

whew!

now i’m gonna take a shower, wash the grime and grass stains out from behind my ears, and afterwards, smoke what little cannabis i have left. later on we’re gonna go to maneki to have dinner with micah and mom.