Observations from the Window 4.30.1

The changing seasons, warm breezes carrying the sweet smells of hot asphalt and garbage. Wait, this isn't about the city ....

Unlike nature, or the way nature once was, my mind only acknowledges two seasons, warm and cold. Technically more because there are the grass, ice, and dirt sports seasons but this isn't a sports post and it just gets confusing. Everything suddenly changes, my thinking, my attire, and the tunes I listen to. The later is the surest sign my seasons have changed as I found out over the weekend.  Over the protests of the techno-pop gallery crowd I rediscovered an old friend. No Beach Boys here, my kind of summer tunes.

One other thing about the warm season, Foxy puts her top down
and we play the tunes really really loud.

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Observations from the Window 4.30

The was a big article in The New York Times today about an upcoming biography of Joe Paterno so maybe I was already softened up when I got my sis' email. She also has the uncanny ability of knowing what to send me even when I don't know it's just what I need. Whichever the reason, when I saw this video I just had to smile. It's just a short thing, and isn't even about what I saw, yet it made me think about what it is like in my mountains this time of year.

May was always a fun yet hectic time at Penn State as I'm sure it is at any school. The end of the school year, finals, graduation, and the beginning of summer role into each other as the month moves by. There is something special added in the mountains though, a feeling of renewal that comes from the woods being reborn around you. I love that feeling and I'm thinking I may have to make a little spring road. Excuse? Well I still do know some people up there and I really need to visit my paintings.

Than again maybe I should just tell the truth.
Sometimes I'm just a softie.

Yeah that works too.


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Observations on the 2012 Election

As I said in my last post the first chapter in the 2012 Presidential election has come to a close. What was totally surprising is how fast the second chapter began and the somewhat overlooked 'big gun' of the Democratic Party was turned loose. President Obama's campaign released a video today narrated and I suppose starring former President Bill Clinton. The implication of "One Chance" is that Willard, like Dubya, wouldn't have had the guts to take out Osama bin Laden. I think it is something we are going to hear again and again over the next few months.

"It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person," said Willard in 2007.


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Observations on the 2012 Election

With the end of the Santorum and Gingrich campaigns the first chapter of the 2012 presidential campaign comes to a close. All we learned is what we knew at the beginning, it will be Willard facing President Obama in November. You know Willard, the man whose time has come, who waited his turn, who will be the first to tell you he is entitled to the job.

It was a fun ride while it lasted. The Republican primaries gave us the war on women, the war on birth control, the war on the poor, and according to Hugh Hefner the war on sex. They gave us a quarter billionaire nominee who will possibly be the only man to run for President who has had a horror movie named after him. They also gave us a cast of characters that included but was in no way limited to a bishop, a historian,  a mad woman from the north who was not named Palin, a pizza salesman, and Le Mitt Romneaux, a satirical twitter account of unknown origins. The nightly news will suffer their exiting the stage and they all will be missed greatly.

Upon further review, history is sure to judge us harshly.

Rick Santorum Aborts Presidential Campaign from Ashley Judd

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Observations from the Window 4.23

Spring, the time of tulips and warm weather, when thoughts begin to return to the beach, and most importantly it's the time of playoff hockey. Some thoughts on the Stanley Cup playoffs and the just ended Flyers/Penguins series.

One thing that irritated me during NBC's national telecast of the clinching Game 6 was how the announcers acted like it was such an upset for the Flyers to eliminate The Penguins. During the regular season the Flyers finished only 5 points behind the Penguins and could have just as easily been the home team for this series. However the vaunted Vegas sports machine picked the Penguins to  win the Cup so far be it for a cocky young (6 rookies on the roster) Flyers team to knock them out.

Youth does have it problems tho as the 10-3 loss in Game 4 showed. After that game Sarah Baicker, the Flyers editor for Comcast SportsNet Philly, wrote "There's a fine line between swagger (good) and arrogance (bad)." There is a lot of truth in that but something many of us never learn. What? You don't think I was talking about me do you?

As for the rest of the NHL, it seems it's wide open and Lord Stanley's Cup could be won by almost anybody. The Los Angeles Kings eliminated the Vancouver Canucks last night and with them the league's best record. In the east the Ottawa Senators had a 3-2 lead over the New York Rangers but the Rangers won tonight. Had they lost the two best records would have been out in less than 24 hours. A gem of a series is the Coyote/Blackhawk one. Phoenix leads the series 3-2 but all five games have gone into overtime, something that has never happened before.

Finally Flyers forward Claude Giroux who had a record setting 14 point series against the Penguins. What is there to say? After game 6 coach Peter Laviolette said, "His game tonight was monstrous, it really was. When the best player in the world comes up to you and tells you, 'I don't know who you're planning on starting tonight, but I want that first shift,' that says everything you need to know about Claude Giroux right there."

Welcome to elite status.

Obervations from the Window 4.22

My brother's 24^th  birthday was a few days ago, something I find way hard to believe. What makes it even harder to believe is the fact that if he is now 24 I'll be 30 in just a few months. This can not be true. My brother is closer in age to me than my sis and I spent time with him at Penn State, as well as racing across I81 to get home, so we have always been close.

My sis was, and in ways always will be, my mini-me slash evil twin. My brother has always been my friend, sometimes my only one.

One of my favorite memories of my brother is the time we all made a trip to New York and Sean visited the Museum of Natural History for the first time. Probably a time in his life akin to my first visit to MOMA. I can still see the look on his face when he saw the dinosaurs. You see most people loved dinosaurs as a child but usually the pink friendly variety. Sean loathed Barney, instead he collected dino books and grew to love the raptors of Jurassic Park. He dreamed of being a bone digger from the University of the Rockies and became an environmentalist from Penn State.

I think the three of us always got along so well because of how we were raised but also because we are a lot alike while also being very different. The kid is totally laid back, which all of us can be at times, but I'm much more emotional and arrogant. My sis fills out the triumvirate with her intensity and more stoic arrogance. Like I said, so much alike but different enough to keep it interesting.

I talk to them both almost everyday but I still find myself missing being with them as much as I was.

But anyway, Happy Birthday again Sean and Happy Earth Day.

And, yes, I said thirty.

Observations from the Window 4.20

"I apologize but we seem to be having technical difficulties here
 at the empire, be back shortly."

I really should make some kind of button that says that because lately that is the story of my life. For a variety of reasons I have just been having all kinds of probs with the interwebs for a couple weeks now. As always insanity rules.

Last Friday night I was watching the Flyers' playoff game and tweeting about it when suddenly TweetDeck cut me off. It gave me some bogus error message that said I was tweeting over limits. Now there is a limit but it's in the thousands so I have no idea where the error came from. I just switched to a diff platform and went back to tweeting my inner most thoughts with minor irritation.

Than there is Tumblr. I probably enjoy Tumblr more than anything else because the combined four sites have become my pseudo gallery with me as the curator. I usually queue the posts the night before, spending way too much time picking and sorting the photos and quotes to appear just the way I want them. This worked just fine for the longest time but now, if I queue the day before, Tumblr sees it in my best interests to post randomly in the appointed time frame. This is more of a major irritation. I  mean what curator wants the movers to bring in works of art and randomly hang them on the walls?

The totally worst is Yahoo. There are all kinds of rumors out there but one thing that is a fact is that Yahoo reorganized recently and cut back heavily personnel wise. As far as I'm concerned it's starting to take a toll because Yahoo Mail is driving me insane. My Droid app loses mail or doesn't send it, I have to type in one of those anti-bot codes a few times a day, and yesterday morning Yahoo totally cut me off for suspicious activity. The only suspicious thing I see is that I stick with them and don't totally move to gmail. Maybe Yahoo should spend more time and money on their lawsuit against Facebook because the legal department seems to be the only one hiring.

I take my empire way too seriously.

Observations on Art 4.17

Back in my dark arrogant days Hole was the shit. On Friday night, following a screening of the documentary Hit So Hard: The Life & Near Death Story of Patty Schemel in Brooklyn, all four members of the band reunited for the first time since 1999. The cost for a movie and the unannounced reunion? Ten dollars.

It may have been a short set but for fifteen minutes they
were the shit once again.


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The trailer for Hit So Hard ....


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Go Flyers !!!!

Last year I gave you the gorgeous Lauren Hart. This year I give you .... I'm so sorry.


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Some background. The whole thing with Hulk Hogan began when a Hulkster look alike Penguins fan was dancing around Scott Hartnell behind the Flyers’ bench during a game a couple weeks ago. Hartnell gave Corbin the “I can’t hear you” salute. A photo of Hartnell mocking said fan was than featured on the back page of the April 2^nd edition of the Philadelphia Daily News. The Flyers saved this video till today's game was almost over than played it to, yes, thunderous applause.

The Flyers are up three games to none in their best of seven series with the Penguins.

4/17 update - The Flyers-Penguins game on Sunday afternoon pulled a 2.3 overnight rating, making it the most watched non-Stanley Cup finals playoff game in more than a decade.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 4.12

Yesterday a good friend of mine sent me the link to a new book by one of her fav authors Christopher Moore. The book is called Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art and is a novel about art, the color blue, and van Gogh. My life, my color, and my artist all in one book. My friend knows me too well. Moore wrote in the prelude, “Blue is glory and power, a wave, a particle, a vibration, a resonance, a spirit, a passion, a memory, a vanity, a metaphor, a dream. Blue is a simile. Blue, she is like a woman.”

While I was reading the reviews I remembered a famous letter van Gogh had written to his brother Theo in April of 1888. What I didn't realize was that the letter had actually been written 124 years ago to the day,
April 11, 1888.

Karma.

"My dear Theo,
It’s awfully good of you to have sent me the complete order of colours, I’ve just received them but haven’t yet had the time to check them. I’m so pleased about it. Today has been a good day too. This morning I worked on an orchard of plum trees in blossom — suddenly a tremendous wind began to blow, an effect I’d only ever seen here — and came back again at intervals. In the intervals, sunshine that made all the little white flowers sparkle. It was so beautiful! My friend the Dane came to join me, and at risk and peril every moment of seeing the whole lot of it on the ground I carried on painting — in this white effect there’s a lot of yellow with blue and lilac, the sky is white and blue. But as for the execution of what we do out of doors like this, what will they say? Well, let’s wait and see..." Read the entire letter here.

The painting he was working on was The White Orchard.

Observations from the Window 4.11

Jay Hayes is the senior captain of the men’s volleyball team at New York University who organized and directed this "It Gets Better" video featuring the coaches and athletes of NYU. Jay is also gay. This is only the second in the It Gets Better campaign done by a major university’s athletic program, the other is Northwestern University.

What the fuck Penn State?

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Observations from the Window 4.9

It may be a bit late but first I want to wish a Happy Easter to my peeps. Hopefully you found many golden eggs under your tree. For me it was a totally mellow weekend, took some pics, visited Vinnie, had some ribs, and banished politics from my mind. So here I give you some boring fluff from my scribbles.

I was going through some boxes of CDs that I never really unpacked just looking for some to rip. I have at least a thousand CDs so it's easy to lose track when they are stacked in the corner. What I did was re-discover Sheryl Crowe whose music I always loved but who just got lost in that corner. She looks totally stunning in the pics for c'mon, c'mon.

Than, keeping with the same line of thought, there is Anne Hathaway whose Love and Other Drugs was the featured attraction of a VQ movie night. In my dreams Hathaway is the girl I run off to Paris with. What we do there while not roaming the Louvre is a story for another time. There is a scene in the movie, a movie which is actually quite good in a fluffy kind of way, where she is stretching and smoking at the same time, to die for. Her naked breasts are a very, very, prominent part of this film which may explain why I like it. Utter perfection.

There was a good article in the Sunday Times about Ralph Lauren's niece Jenny. Her jewelry is awesome but what grabbed me was how the writer described Lauren's style which she said was "more eclectic artist than all-American, accessorized by the chipped nails and pallor of a type A creative sort who works mostly at night." That just sounded so familiar.

You know I can't totally stay away from politics so also in the Times was a good column by Maureen Dowd about Augusta National still not allowing women membership. In it is an awesome quote by President Obama as he spoke to a women's forum at the White House. "Women are not an interest group. You shouldn’t be treated that way. Women are over half this country and its work force — not to mention 80 percent of my household, if you count my mother-in-law. And I always count my mother-in-law."

Smart man that Obama.

Observations from Amerika 4.7

So you think you don't need to vote. It doesn't matter, it doesn't count. It's raining, snowing, cold, you don't have time, the voting location is out of my way, they all lie anyway. If that sounds like you watch this clip from Thursday's Rachel Maddow Show. Or, if it's too long for you, just read the transcript of the last few minutes that is just below it. After you do please, seriously please, leave me a comment explaining why you don't need to vote. I need to know.

I'll be drinking a beer while I wait for the Reichstag to burn. Google it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"On Monday, a county judge issued a temporary injunction ordering Michigan House Republicans to follow the law, to follow the constitution, to let the minority vote even though the minority are Democrats. The court put on hold several bills that Republicans have passed using this kind of technique. Passed what appears to be illegally, including about that one about the grad students union.

Republicans are appealing the judge`s ruling. Their arguments boil down to, A, they say no court can interfere with the legislature, and, B, they say this is dog bites man. This is standard operating procedure. There`s nothing to see here. This is totally normal. Keep moving. This case has implications for what happens in Michigan over the next few months and to some extents what happens nationwide. Michigan Republicans are now considering a law that would make it much harder to register to vote in the state. If that passes, under immediate effect and goes into effect right then, that will become a factor in 2012 race in Michigan.

Also, Michigan voters voting on a bill that makes it harder to get a referendum on the ballot. That could affect the current drive to put the Rick Snyder emergency manager law up for appeal. Do you think Rick Snyder and his fellow Republicans would like repealing his law to be a harder thing to do? And does anybody else get a say in that? The 2010 elections ushered in a lot of radicalized Republican legislatures and governors across the country and have done a lot of radical things. Scott Walker is famous for a reason.

But what`s happened in Michigan is the most radical thing Republicans have done anywhere in the country. They have eliminated democracy. They have eliminated voting rights at the local level in their state. They have tried to eliminate Democrats` voting rights in the state legislature. Whether you`re on the left or you`re on the right or you`re in the center or if you don`t particularly care about politics, if all you care about is that we have a form of government in this country called democracy, we vote. If you care about the idea that we still use voting here, we still use democracy, if you care about the Constitution -- frankly ...

Michigan ought to have a flashing red light siren on it right now."

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Observations from the Edge 4.6

"Help defend women's rights and pursuit of equality. Join Americans all across the United States on April 28th, 2012, as we come together as one to tell members of Congress in Washington DC and legislators in all 50 states, "Enough is enough!" UniteWomen.org strongly supports diversity and welcomes men and women of all ages without regard to their race, color, creed, political affiliation, disability, religious or spiritual beliefs, sexual orientation, gender identity, education or income level, marital status, employment status, or immigrant status. Everyone is invited to join, plan, and rally as we unite to demand that every person be granted equal opportunities, equal rights, and equal representation."

UniteWomen.org

More to come ....

Observations on the 2012 Election

And so after all the negative ads, all the carnage. all the political blood letting of the GOP primary season, it will be Willard after all. A far different Willard than the one I always thought would be President Obama's toughest challenge. This Willard is but a shadow of his former moderate self and a full fledged member of the war on women and the blitzkrieg of the middle class. I just can't wait for the full campaign to begin because Willard is already such a fool. Having given up on labeling Obama a Muslim he now says he fears Obama is a secret atheist. My main fear is we all aren't. He also said Obama is "out of touch" with the American people. I that an argument he honestly thinks he can win? If so he may just be out of touch with himself.

Sadly all this means Bishop Santorum will soon have to return to Pennsylvania and the marcellus shale he crawled out from under. After leading by a wide margin in his home state Santorum and Willard are in a dead heat in most polls of primary voters. What I totally don't understand is that Santorum leads Willard among Pennsylvania women who consider themselves conservatives. It boggles my mind but evidently some women want to be second class citizens. Santorum guarantees a victory in Pennsylvania which goes to prove the man has a very short memory.

Finally did you happen to see Sarah Palin hosting Today on Tuesday? For years the Queen of half term governors has raged against the msm and their anti conservative bias. Guess it doesn't mean a damn thing when the pay is good.

As Napoleon said, “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap."

Observations from the Edge 4.2

Not to repeat myself but I have been saying for some time that it would be an interesting year. Anonymous joins the May Day protest.

The fine folks at American Thinker would like to warn you that Occupy Wall Street is inciting violence on communism's, yes they said communism's, favorite holiday. "Our federal government stands by silent, as forces such as OWS and the New Black Panthers openly encourage vigilante justice, riots, insurrection, and obstruction of elections. Barack Obama has a lot to answer for, but the encouragement provided to OWS and the NBP, not to mention SEIU, in lawless intimidation will  be remembered by history as an attack on civil society and law and order."

For a round of sick entertainment I would suggest you browse the comments to the above link. The following one is my personal fav. "Therefore, as you go into the voting booth, just think of what OWS has given America: Democrat rapes, Democrat murders, Democrat drug dealing, Democrat vandalism, Democrat anarchy, Democrat public defecation, Democrat rat infestations, Democrat public masturbation, Democrat hate, Democrat racism, Democrat flash mobs… do voters really want that sort of country?"

Hide the children, the drug dealing rats are defecating in public! The person, I awesome it's a person, who wrote that comment has no profile but has managed to post 233 comments to American Thinker.

And some dare argue against birth control.

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Observations from the Window 4.1

I found this video lurking in my drafts where its been for some time. I totally forgot about it and thought I would post it before I did again. I think I would add ...
Je vais vous rejoindre bientôt.

EF - Live The Language - Paris from Albin Holmqvist on Vimeo.