Tag: friends

and it’s root root root for the home team

A shoal of robotic fish which can detect pollution in the water are set to released into the sea off Spain.

Does anyone in Portland have a spare couch Jon from the UK could use for a couple of days next week? He’s spent the last few days at my place, an exemplary guest, Vancouver being the first stop in his couch surfing trip down the Pacific coast, all the way to Mexico.

Extreme Sheep Herding: What happens when you cover sheep in nets of LEDs and play pong with them.

today: plus ten for attending the lock-picking session. minus several hundred for missing breakfast.

Matt “blackbelt” Jones is a clever, clever man, enough so that his spiffy keen blog is in my bookmark folder marked Required Reading right next to my favourite traveler, adventurer and corporate anthropologist, Jan Chipchase. Today’s good news: Matt’s wicked design reaction to Keep Calm and Carry On, Get Excited and Make Things, has been turned into a t-shirt!


For Men. For Women.

No, I can’t twitter from there. I do not have a mobile phone.


A new comic in The Secret Knots: “On Spam“

Morning just wasn’t sporting today. Dinner last night, an improbable feast of only meat, cowboy delivered by sword to each table, led into a punishing bout of intense karaoke that lasted until an unwholesome, head smashing o’clock in the morning. I slept poorly at the hotel in a spare bed on the 19th floor offered by someone who lacks a real name, certain I should have simply tried to stay awake for tradition’s sake, curled up on the 31st floor, quick in a couch, a chatting apostle at the altar of party, until dawn wedged streaky fingers into the surgical gray sky.

Tonight instead, perhaps. Tomorrow almost certainly. Tonight, though, Dragos may have my house keys, but I’m not going back until later, until after I go home and dye my hair, charge my damned camera battery, and cook dinner with David. (It pained me almost physically to be on the rooftop deck of the Wall Center penthouse and not be able to take pictures.) I need rest. I am yawning at my desk, half baked, certain that I have not been eating enough to keep myself cohesive, and my eyes are trying to lock closed when I blink. No matter the addictive charm or ballistic voltage offered by CanSec, I am not quite caught up with myself for unrestricted thrills.

Hacker loses finger in motorcycle accident, replaces it with USB drive.

friends of so many friends

Crossposted from COILHOUSE, as Posted by Meredith Yayanos on March 4th, 2009:

Performer/Cyclist Hollis Hawthorne Needs Our Help


Performer/cyclist/activist Hollis Hawthorne. Photo by Alicia Sanguiliano.

There’s this awesome, beautiful gal I kinda sorta barely know through our many mutual circus friends here in the bay area; her name is Hollis Hawthorne. She’s a founding member of a cycling dance troupe called The Derailleurs, a fabulous velocipede-inspired dance team active in a bunch of bay area-based critical mass stuff. Their goal:

To educate and entertain audiences with the possibilities of alternative transportation. Our performances embrace critical inquiry that reaches beyond conventional thought and action. We promote radical self reliance and mine local talents to unearth their strength.

They’re wonderful and vibrant folks leading adventurous lives who are trying to affect some sort of positive change in their community. They smile and laugh a lot; they are very shiny people. To be honest, I rather envy them, most days. But not today:

Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn’t her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it sounds very bad. Now she’s in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury. (You know, that part of the brain that controls, um, everything?)

According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, “there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified.” When Hollis’ mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. “They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process.”

Through a series of fortuitous connections, Hollis’s case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world. As a charity case, even. (Just like me and most other starving artsy fartsies I know, Hollis has no insurance.) All we need to do is get her there. The friends and family of Hollis are reaching to everyone they can to raise funds to get her on an I.C.U. plane (aka air ambulance) to fly her back to California.

This is truly a matter of life and death. They need move her quickly as possible.

Before that can happen, Friends of Hollis must raise $150,000 dollars. They’ve already raised approximately $40,000. Can you spare a dollar, or five, or ten?

Yes, I know, life is risk, and life is uncertain. Life is also precious. If we can help someone in our community to come back from the brink, in some small way, we really should. Click here to help.

it’s a good revival

http://www.isgeorgewbushpresident.com

My dear friend Joseph, who I unconditionally adore, rode his motorcycle up from Seattle on Friday to stay with us for a really nice weekend get-away full of long walks, Nicole visits, and good food, with a Sunday bonus of home made nut pancakes and an introduction to the Mad Max trilogy.

When he first arrived, I asked him what he thought of where I live:

“This place looks far too normal to have you living in it.”
“What on earth were you expecting?”
“At least a secret pet tiger.”

I’m still uncertain whether or not I should feel insulted or validated, as I did later chase him with a raccoon skull mouthing OM NOM NOM, which he thought was incredibly creepy, (or maybe it was the mouse fetus inna tube, I may never know), so either way, I’m sure I deserve it.

Past that, (and my sudden burning curiosity in regards to how my far-away-friends live and what they might think of my house in return*), it turns out he might be unexpectedly, oddly, at least metaphorically right, because…

Cue the drum roll please…

The Year of The House Guest continues as a word-smithing tiger of pure awesome is going to be joining my mad and crazy “entirely too normal” household of wacky, quiet, movie addicted doom! As of March 1st, my friend Shane, Internationally Acclaimed Slam Poet Extraordinaire, is going to be moving in with me and David for two months while he works on a poetry performance the Cultch commissioned for April. No word yet whether his band, The Short Story Long, will also be spending time on my couch, but if they do, that’s okay too. I always like waking up to random mandolin. Who doesn’t?

*Anyone want to play a game of I’ll show you mine if you show me yours and we all post photos of our chaotic living-spaces that we’ve oh so nonchalantly attempted to tidy before showing to the internet with a false modesty “please excuse the mess”?

biannual introduction innoculation

Twice a year I do a shout out, I ask that everyone speaks up, even if they otherwise stay silent. Like a good house party, it’s always fascinating to see who turns up.

So, please, tell me your names, post your picture, introduce yourself, tell me why you’re here, how you found me, and what inspires you.

I want to know who’s on the other end of my screen, what fun and fantastic people are out there, waiting to be met.

Even if I know you, introduce yourself to others, and tell me what you’ve done lately.

Explain a piece of your world with something beautiful, make something new, or dig up the grave of an old favourite. Anecdotes are welcome, as are pictures, job descriptions, inspiring links, stimulations, titillations, and your pretty hidden treasures. The name of the game is networking, so share what you want everyone else to know.

You are artists and scientists, nihilists and dreamers, comic book illustrators, archeologists, hackers, retail managers, photographers, teachers, librarians, hair dressers, and submarine captains. You are novelists, derby girls, musicians, and accountants. Optimists, pragmatists, magicians and politicians, fencers, film addicts, home owners and homeless. You are lighting designers, poets, animators, and lawyers. You are glorious, fabulous, interesting creatures, rich in colour, thick with story – and I want to hear from you all.

For those new, my name’s Jhayne. I’m a writer and photographer currently trapped in Vancouver, Canada. I live on the internet, work for a media company, and occasionally get paid to set off fireworks. I’m also an amateur taxidermist/cryptozoologist, play french horn and the saw, and edit other people’s novels. I once started a global initiative to save a local turn-of-last-century theater and turn it into a new multimedia venue called Heart of the World. It fell down, went boom, but oh well. Other people have recently managed to save it, at least, so I guess that’s something.

Welcome to my journal, a mixture of wonder, pointlessness, isolation, and community where I talk about life, love, art, technology, and try not to hate the world.

Now it’s your turn. Spill.

With this post, I am officially calling dibs on Oren Lavie.

Soon she’s down the stairs
Her morning elegance she wears
The sound of water makes her dream
Awoken by a cloud of steam
She pours a daydream in a cup
A spoon of sugar sweetens up		 Sun been down for days
A winter melody she plays
The thunder makes her contemplate
She hears a noise behind the gate
Perhaps a letter with a dove
Perhaps a stranger she could love

Today, using addresses given to me by friends on the internet, I prepared and mailed tiny packages to London, Seattle, Atlanta, Brooklyn, Carolina Beach, Herts, Cambria, Dumfries, Burlington, Urbana, Roanoke, Phoenix, and Manhattan. A fine spread, beautiful evidence of the far reaching influence of modern communication.

I sat in a puddle of white envelopes at the park, addressing them, tipping ingredients into one, and then into another, slipping cards into each, slipping in cards, rose petals, and my smile, wishing I had through to bring more tiny plastic dinosaurs. The sky was almost like summer today, except too pale, as if seen through a film of soap.

Curious pedestrians would stop and ask what I was doing, wanted to know if this was a business I had, sending interesting letters to strangers. I told them this was far too bare bones, that I was too poor to be anything but kind in a nostalgic way. “People have trusted me, wouldn’t you want to reward such behavior?” This seemed to satisfy as, once I said that, they would gently walk away, glad to have asked, but not interested enough to stay.

Making the impending mayhem official

Cross-posted from the ever sassy Cherie, cat mother, darling friend, and author extraordinaire:

paranormal_bender_tour Mario Acevedo (Jailbait Zombie), Mark Henry (Road Trip of the Living Dead), Caitlin Kittredge (Second Skin), and Cherie Priest (Fathom) are cruising the west coast (Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland) for five evenings of witches, vamps, shapeshifters, zombies and all things weird. Just look for the classic Impala and listen for the questionable content, as the authors read choice selections from their latest works, bandy about prizes, and sign their new releases.

The Paranormal Bender Tour is for mature audiences only –- though an immature sense of humor is welcome and even encouraged. So bring your fangs, your cauldrons, and your appetite for brains. This is a night for kindred spirits and killer stories, from the demented minds of four of the most twisted purveyors of paranormal fiction (and a few special guests).

Think you’re brave enough to attend the Paranormal Bender Tour?

Mark, Cherie, Caitlin and Mario are terrorizing the population in the following urban areas:

    March 11th: Las Vegas • Clark County Library, Jewel Box Theater @ 7 PM
    March 13th: San Diego • Mysterious Galaxy @ 7 PM
    March 14th: Los Angeles • Dark Delicacies @ 2 PM
    March 15th: San Francisco • Borderlands @ 7 PM
    March 16th: Portland • Powell’s Beaverton @ 7 PM

spreading the love

Canadian fetishwear designer Slinka, (an especially darling acquaintance of mine), has recently come upon a pet-related financial crisis. Her cat Pooh needs dental surgery she and her partner can’t quite afford. Thankfully you can help her by helping yourself, (if you’re the sort who’s into such things), by buying her sexy, sexy latex designs for you and/or your loved ones, just in time for Valentines:

Ego-Assassin

ps. wristbands are only $20.

I’ll be what I am

This month is apparently The Month Of The House-Guest. Not only has Will moved into our library until February with his sweet, darling cat who continues to hiss at my sweet, darling cats, Christopher and Jordan just spent the weekend, now Nate is over, soon be followed by Tony.

This, my friends, is fabulous.

I like having company over. According to me, it doesn’t happen enough. (David, on the other hand, has completely given up on keeping anyone’s names straight.) Most days my social life lives in a strange limbo, caught between the hundreds of local people I know, but barely see, and the few on-line friends I talk to almost daily, but have mostly never met. House guests bridge the gap nicely. It’s a Win Win situation. Not only do they get me out to fun restaurants and the aforementioned terribly neglected locals, they also continue to fortify my belief that my friends-who-happen-to-live-far-away and ‘internet friends’, a term that does no one a good deed, are not in fact baby eating basement dwellers who shower once a month and brush their teeth with blood. (A possibility that, in spite of the media, I refuse to worry about, as proved by my utter and complete willingness to come sleep on your couch.)

So, that said – if you’re coming to Vancouver, make sure to drop me a line. If you don’t mind cats, it’s very likely you’ve got a place to stay.