Portrait of Seven

Paint

I've taken this last week of vacation to paint the Hollywood apt. Love this shade of green and it's nice to have some color after years of "off" whites.

Be Kind Trailer

A few frame stores from the trailer.

Weekend Dog

Still playing around with the new camera and caught Seven playing this past weekend.

Hung and New

I went over to Amy's house yesterday to see how the lamps I made for her were being hung. They looked really nice and very period and went with her house really well. I came home and made the last of the four hanging lamps. We found this shade at Silverlake Salvage. When I turned it on last night, I thought it was one of, if not the, best design yet. love it.

Blackouts and Earthquakes

Last night we had a two hour blackout. It seemed relatively confined as those apartments two blocks away were still lit. The power outage seemed to be just south of Hollywood Blvd and up towards Ruynon Park. All the ice cream survived so we were happy.
Meanwhile this afternoon, we got a litttle jolt. About 3.5 on the scale up near Chatsworth. Last week a 4.5 shock hit the same area.
I think it's time to get a job in NYC for a month or so.........

Lamps

I took some pics of the lamps this morning and have a few of the final product in my Brooklyn hovel. Tried to get some backlit ones so you can see the detail in the old glass shades. I have two more to put together.
The blue in the middle right has 4 candelabra bulbs and the larger white one has two regular sockets.

Hot Hot Hot

I arrived back in Los Angeles last night. This was the scene this morning at 6:00 am. It's going to be hot, Hot, HOT today.

Roses Lead To Divorce

"Leroy Greer is a bit of a romantic. He sent a dozen roses and a teddy bear to his girlfriend, with a card reading "Just wanted to say I love you".

Unfortunately the florist sent the receipt to his wife.

Now the luxury car salesman from Missouri City is suing the firm for $1 million for "mental anguish" caused by the mix-up and his resultant divorce."

Read the rest of the story here.

Roman Empire

David Walker, Comptroller of the United States and in charge of the nonpartisan Government Accountbilty Office, offered dire warnings to the long term survival of the American way of life, likening it to ancient Rome. His report was largely ignored in America and this interview was conducted by the Financial Times of London.

"The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned."

"Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said. “In my view, it’s time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

"“With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks,” said Mr Walker, a former senior executive at PwC auditing firm."

Military Mammals

I saw these pictures recently of training dolphins for underwater mine detection. Not sure if this is from the first or second Iraq war. The Day of the Dolphin is here.

An article from the BBC on Russian use of dolphins here

MSNBC Article on dolphins' use after Katrina

An article in The Observer

Trader Joe's to Brooklyn

Their coming next year! A 5 minute walk away. Another reason to stay in Brooklyn!
And bloggers are going nuts!

Hollywood Squares

Q. Which of your five senses tends to diminish as you get older?
A. Charley Weaver: My sense of decency.

Peter Marshall: What should you do if you're going 55 miles per hour and your tires suddenly blow out?
Paul Lynde: Honk if you believe in Jesus.

Q. In Hawaiian, does it take more than three words to say "I Love You"?
A. Vincent Price: No, you can say it with a pineapple and a twenty.

Q. Charley, you've just decided to grow strawberries. Are you going to get any during the first year?
A. Charley Weaver: Of course not, I'm too busy growing strawberries.

Q. Back in the old days, when Great Grandpa put horseradish on his head, what was he trying to do?
A. George Gobel: Get it in his mouth.

Q. Jackie Gleason recently revealed that he firmly believes in them and has actually seen them on at least two occasions. What are they?
A. Charley Weaver: His feet.

Peter Marshall: According to Tony Randall, "Every woman I've been intimate with in my life has been..." What?
Paul Lynde: Bitterly disappointed.

Morning Light

Friend Phil gave me some old lamp pieces last night to help me in my light building endeavors. And while testing my new point and shoot camera, the Fuji A820, I thought some of the crystal looked nice in the morning sun.

Fatigue

It's remarkable that if this story was told in the States, the reporter or the fact it was written would be vehemently attacked by the right. But as with so many things today, the real news of Iraq comes from outside our borders.
Excerpts:
"Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up."

"You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust."

" 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.
They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. "

" Only a third of the regular army's brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers"

The Observer

Be Kind, Rewind

The trailer is out and it looks GOOD!

Be Kind, Rewind

Get This Party Started

I love this song..... Probably the grooviest seventy year old out there. Covering Pink's Get This Party Started is DSB. Dame Shirley Bassey!


What's interesting is the live footage of the Glastonbury Festival. The famous music weekend is mostly rock bands. How will a seventy year old diva be welcomed? She seems apprehensive at first but the roar of the audience gets her going full tilt. And when singing Pink's saucy lyrics, the crowd goes wild. The band and the conductor are having a gas, as well.

Here is the live version she rocked Glastonbury Festival.

The Christmas Mark and Spencers advert that started this new rush of acclaim.

How does a pop icon slog through the mud of a rainy concert? In a pair of $6000 diamante encrusted wellies, of course!

More Fox Studies

I think there are so many studies of Fox News viewers because America has never had a blatantly biased news outlet before. In most of the world, you read the newspaper with a point of view. The gamut runs from the communist Il Manifesto in Rome to the conservative La Parisien in France. American journalists, however, always prided themselves on objectivity. Think Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley. Until now.....

From Think Progress's post on the survey:

"Fully 63% of Americans who count Fox as their main news source say news stories are often inaccurate — a view held by fewer than half of those who cite CNN (46%) or network news (41%) as their main source.

Similarly, Fox viewers are far more likely to say the press is too critical of America (52% vs. 36% of CNN viewers and 29% of network news viewers). And the Fox News Channel audience gives starkly lower ratings to network news programs and national newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post…

For example, fully 71% of Fox News Republicans hold an unfavorable opinion of major national newspapers, compared with 52% of Republicans who use other sources, and 33% of those who are not Republicans."

Read the full report here.

Thousand Islands pt.4

Dave's family arrived sunday afternoon for the night. Peter and Ryan immediately dove into the shallow end of the bay. Bravely defeating all water lillies and demonstrating back flips and foward flips and sideways flips. In the setting sun, these two kids achieved a poeticism that they themselves were probably unaware of.

Thousand Islands pt.3

As we approached the dock with aching arms, we could see that Ryan already was trying his luck. The passing by of tankers and jetskiis did not deter him from his goal of catching a whopper. It was Mom however who reeled in the big one with Ryan being gallant enough to remove the hook and pose with it.