Posted on by mwhybark

Then he strangled it.

Boing Boing: Man kills attacking bobcat.

It is impossible, of course, to predict how one might react to being attacked by a non-domesticated animal. Personally, I pray I would have the wisdom to spare myself the experience of choking a cat to death.

I am, I assure you, warming to the dog. But there will be no more dogs. There may be more cats, I do not know.

Years ago I swore off houseplants because I was not ethically able to care for them. My ability to care for pets is unsurprisingly – if you follow or care about the predator hierarchy – less distinct than my plant-care skills. Yet I keep two pets and a dog. Sleep easy: there will be no children.

Posted on by mwhybark

Strummer

Eric recently added a Strummer bio to his Amazon wishlist, and a new Julien Temple biopic recently screened at SIFF. The Amazon info page notes that Strummer was born in Ankara, Turkey and known by the name ‘Woody’ until he adopted the nom de punk Joe Strummer. I can’t be the only one to hear echoes of Bob Zimmerman’s Turkish and folkie heritage here. Strummer didn’t teach me to hear or play music; those honors go to other abstracted fathers. He very much did teach me that it’s necessary to know your own mind and not to be shy about stating it, lessons lost to an extent in my life of late for many very valid and inescapable reasons.

Joe, here’s to ya.

Posted on by mwhybark

Burn

This weekend was mostly spent out in the yard, uprooting dandelions.

As a consequence, the back of my neck and shoulders are fried to a crisp, crackly red which is currently most painful.

Posted on by mwhybark

For the love of God

Damien Hirst’s Skull – a photoset on Flickr.

It may surprise some, or perhaps it will not, that I think this is clearly Hirst’s greatest work and possibly the greatest work of art of all time.

I suppose if I had the opportunity to closely interact with the piece, the first thing I would do is take the jaw off and flip the cranium so that I could look up into the braincase. My understanding is that the piece was made with a cast as the base for the jewels, and that the cast came from a real skull the artist (ahem) scared up in the flea markets and costermonger stalls of Airstrip One.

I see, Montresor, some of the work’s aesthetic aims as:

to create the most impossibly highly valued work of art ever
to present a grinning selfportrait of capital at work
to provoke examination of the iconography of the skull (my favorite!)

My aim in flipping the head and removing the jaw would be to examine the delicacy and faithfulness of the cast’s re-rendering of the initial bone’s nasal cavities. The bone inside the nose is impossibly delicate and filigreed, layers weaving and dancing like flower petals. The degree to which this post-Faberge egg cup proffers that delicacy and fineness might provide a viewer with a measure by which the craft and craft value in this presentation toy is genuinely present.

My guess is that the nasal cavities are smoothed and not presented with delicacy, as the piece does not appear to be about the heritage traditions of craft-work pieces created to legitimize wealth in a domestic context. Instead it appears to be about craft in this time, and the importance of delicacy has passed, I think.

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Evening coolth

The sun nears the horizon and the temperature finally dips under 80, welcome relief.

Insurance will not cover the sewer work. We’re working on second calls to alternate providers for differing estimates and the like. On reflection, I am livid that we paid over $2k to a service company that left things more broke than when they arrived. That’s just about $700 an hour of breaking my shit. And I do mean my shit.

In fairness, the (still unusable) toilet has been reset and at last ten dollars worth of new PVC pipe installed. What price arm deep in sewage?

I should note that it’s not the whole house that’s affected, only the upstairs, so we can still shower and use the can. Although the can in the basement also probably has a bad basal seal. Can you guess what company won’t be getting that job?

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Rewards

Item: our plumbing sprung a leak.

Item: over the phone, I got a ballpark figure out of the plumbing company, five to seven hundred bucks.

Item: when the guy presented his quotes, they totaled just over two thousand dollars. What could we do? We okayed it.

Item: when the guy finished, he’d found that one of his line items was not enough to clear the sewer-line blockage.

Net result: two thousand dollars poorer, no working toilet or shower upstairs, and a new quote in hand for about seven thousand dollars, work which will entail a backhoe, a jackhammer, giant trenches in the lawn, and a torn-up expanse of concrete.

BONUS: I have diarrhea this evening and now must attempt to trot up and down the stairs with my own personal plumbing valves held firmly in the off position, no mean feat.

I am a less-than-satisfied homeowner tonight.