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Tonight's thought

What Steven Seagal should do, if the boy had any sense, would be to take a role in an action movie wherein, for once, he plays the bad guy.

But I'm guessing he would never do such a thing, on account of some spiritual reason involving eagles and untanned leather.

Here Come The Dalles!

You know, The Dalles -- that little town with the funny name on the eastern end of the Columbia Gorge, famous mainly for an incident of salad bar bioterrorism in 1984? I was reading up on The Dalles because there's a job opening there, when I noticed this little note on the "The Dalles" Wikipedia entry:

Disamb: For the German rock group The Dalles, see The Dalles (band)

One thing led to another and I found myself here, where I learned this:

05.03.2006 The Dalles bei iTunes

Die beiden Songs der aktuellen Vinyl-Single sind ab sofort auch im iTunes Music Store erhältlich. Zu einem Preis von 0,99- Euro kann man hier "All Goes Down" und "A Light Will Shine" in voller Länge downloaden. Hier ist der direkte Link: iTunes

So what we've learned is, there is a German rock group called The Dalles, and they're the sort of German rock group that sings in English, and they've got a couple songs on iTunes. After a little more research, I have determined that they sound like a cross between Oasis and Coldplay!

Friends, this is truly a glorious day.

Springtime nature walk

In between torrential downpours today, I managed a little hike out at Mount Pisgah. The mountain picked this weekend to turn green and push up some flowers, so it was quite pleasant.

In the woods, these little white bell-lookin' flowers were in abundance.

The grass was growing green and tall in the clearings.

The meadows were loaded with these purple lilly-lookin' flowers.

Birds were singing. Rodents were running about. Basically, what I'm saying is, spring was in the air and I was diggin' on it like a slobbering manchild.

And then I saw it. A rock cairn, standing improbably in the middle of a creek. With a little quartz crystal perched on top.

Something had been here.

A little farther down the creek, where it flows into the Willamette River, I came upon two more cairns. The larger one had three quartz crystals on top of it.

Suspicions began to take shape in my mind. I proceeded with equal parts caution and curiousity.

When I came upon an outright cluster of crystal-topped cairns, my suspicions solidified. I was now almost certain of the culprit. But how to confirm my theory?

Alert and intrigued, I began to see signs of my quarry everywhere, even in the innocent forms of naturally-placed boulders and bare patches of ground.

And then it caught my eye, up ahead in the distance. I scrambled closer, my heart pounding.

BINGO! A peace sign. I had my confirmation: Hippies had been here. Swarms of hippies, by the looks of it, rampaging across the countryside, pollutin' up the landscape with their opinions. A peace sign! Pshaw! Wouldn't it be perfect, I thought to myself, if a bald eagle sat down to eat a baby otter on this very rock?

Hippies, an introduced species to the Willamette Valley, have invaded the local ecosystem with incomparable virulence. The environmental damage they wreak is most obvious in spring and summer, although autumnal twig-weaving displays are also common. Although winter storms typically wash away the most obvious effects of their presence, ecologists question whether the landscape ever fully recovers. To learn more about the Willamette Valley hippie, please click here.

It's all about me

So I have it on good authority that my mom has been "scouring" this site for a graduation gift wish list I said I'd post (did I say that?) but didn't. This makes me nervous. So, to prevent future scouring, here's a list of things I want for graduation, in descending order of expense:

1. The Alvord Ranch.
   
2. Employment (on a paying basis) as an attorney-at-law.
   
3. A preserved (preferably in glacial ice) Bigfoot carcass.
   
4. A trip to Peru.
   
5. This camera.
   
6. Three iPods.
   
7. A nice pinstripe suit.
   
8. Two iPods.
   
9. A cheap pinstripe suit.
   
10. One iPod.
    
11. A mandolin.
    
12. A bottle of Johnny Walker Blue.
    
13. Personalized set of Achewood volumes I-V.
    
14. All of my knives sharpened.
    
15. One (1) whole mess of Kumamoto oysters on the half-shell.
    
16. A really nice stapler.
    
17. A decorative globe old enough to have large swaths of North Africa unified as one country with "French" in the name, but not so old that Russia has gone right back to being Russia.
    
18. An autographed 8X10 of Dan Brown, with a lipstick kiss incorporated into the autograph.
    
19. A nice pen.
    
20. This plug-in air freshener I just saw on TV that totally unintentionally looks like a pig's snout.
    

New at MeTube

Hot damn friends, we got three new videos up and at your service on YouTube.

What's new:

1. A brief clip from the Eiffel Tower at midnight. They do a nifty strobe light thing every hour on the hour during the night, so that the unemployed, unassimilated immigrant youth out in the faubourgs can see where best to direct their frustration. (Besides at themselves for violently opposing a law that would make it easier for them to get jobs.) (Anyway, the Eiffel Tower's purty.)

2. A longish clip of my dumber dog, Pepper, posting up and charging birds on the beach. I know it's video of my dog, but look: if this doesn't entertain you, you have no soul.

3. EXCLUSIVE! It's my first YouTube video available only to demonstrated friends. It is a slightly embarrassing clip of yours truly demonstrating the complete Beavis & Butthead dance cycle, with a humorous conclusion. Want to see it? Sign up for YouTube and ask to be my friend. Go here first if you're not a friend already, click on "Add to Friends," follow the steps, and then the video is available here. This is not some YouTube membership drive. I just have funny videos that are slightly too embarrassing to share with the world at large.

UPDATE: I have made the Beavis & Butthead dance cycle public. It's not that bad, and the hassle to you didn't seem worth it. Plus, if you don't know who I am, what do I care what you think?

Is SO cool...

...Is this photo essay of the Los Angeles River, brought to you by the Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures (FOVICKS). I don't know about you, but I've always been a little fascinated by the LA River, a stunning engineering feat which is owed partial credit for a number of Jackass's stunts, a great set piece in Terminator 2, all of my grandfather's great salvage finds during flash floods, and my mother's never-diagnosed childhood arm fracture. (She was crawling across it on a pipe under an overpass, and fell.)

Say what you will about a city that pretends it Has No River. The LA River is a product of engineering genius that these photos force you to admire. (And if these photos don't work, try the aerial view {scroll up if the list of links doesn't immediately appear}, which nicely shows how the Army Corps of Engineers turned a wild riverscape into a system of water freeways.) (And if you still think LA is silly, realize that every city from London to Eugene has, to a great extent, taken steps to pretend that runoff doesn't naturally flow over the surface of the earth. It's part of being a city.)

Yep, been drinkin' and lookin' at urban architecture sites for a couple hours now. So what?

UPDATE Links added to "London" and "Eugene" that lead to some other cool things in a similar vein.

WhoTube? MeTube!

I have videos to share with the world. A substantial fraction of them don't involve how cute my pets are. So I got off my ass* and signed up for the YouTube, and now present to you the first of these videos. Here:

This particular video, of my brother mocking Central Park joggers, is available to the entire world. Some, in the future, might be available only to friends. So go try to become my friend. I can be found here.

*All activities mentioned herein were actually undertaken while on ass.

A Man From Dogs -- FINALE!

Hoo boy. I imagine the three of you who still click past every now and then have some questions:

Where the hell have you been? Well, same place as ever, just without any posts.

What's your fuckin' problem? Can't think of much to say, generally. My creative energies have been focused elsewhere: I spent Spring Break building three vegetable gardens (WHOO!), and I have recently begun to try my hand at acrylic painting. (With awesome results: FLOGette took a look at a sad stab at a twilight desert landscape last night, and suggested I stencil in "MEGADETH" in the foreground.) I spend much of my time in a career-panic fetal position that makes it hard to type. And every fortnight or so when I do get a wild hare up my netherwheres to post something, WITHOUT FAIL that is the exact time something has gone horribly wrong with phooeyhoo.com.

Do you think your problems with phooeyhoo.com might have something to do with your being $100 in arrears with the proprietor? I am certain of it. My advice to new phooeyhoo.com team member Zerlesen: Pay the man. Even if he hasn't asked for anything yet. Pay the man.

What can we expect from FLOG in the future? An even greater silence, most likely. Come mid-May I'll be moving into a house connected to the interweb via AOL dialup. On the other hand, I'll be in bar review classes three hours a day at Lewis & Clark, so maybe I'll be even more prolific. Why are you even asking? Every forecast made by FLOG about FLOG has turned out wrong.

Can we see the cartoon now? Yes. This second half I'm rather proud of, for all its storylessness and lack of penmanship. Stick with it; you'll be glad you did: