Liquid Hot Mag-ma

Well, maybe not liquid hot, but you know, artistic license.

I'm reeeaallly excited about this. I got some lava beads (yes! lava!) and have been making all kinds of things with them. They're really cool- they have been carefully cut into beads, and polished, so they're shiny and smooth, but they're still porous and very rustic and edgy looking. I really like how everything is turning out, its just totally different than my other stuff, which makes it fun...

This is my "Manly Man Lava Keychain"

and my "Red Hot Lava Necklace"

Random Hobby of the Week

As you may have noticed, there's a lot of talk of being "green" lately (you know, green, like Kermit). So, in addition to having dutifully outfitted my living room with hideous florescent looking lightbulbs, I was thinking about ways to package the stuff I sell so its not so wasteful, since almost everyone throws the wrapping away anyways. The result is, I spent Sunday evening watching Harry Potter for the millionth time and trying to figure out how to make envelopes out of various random materials. Fortunately, the internets came to my rescue and explained it (because when you want to make random crap out of other random crap, thats where you go). I settled on old magazines, and immediately started lamenting the fact that I had just cleaned out my pile of magazines (see! this is why you should never throw anything away). But, there were enough, and actually, they're kind of cool. Here are the fruits of my labor... of course, now I'm all smitten and don't want to mail them to anyone, but I can only hoard so many envelopes (right?) so I'm sure I'll get over it soon enough...

Sunday Cinema Revelation III: You Have Got to Go See This...

So, this is completely different than my usual movie discussions, generally revolving around 80's movies that no one but me likes. Yesterday I went to see something that was really awesome... it all started sometime maybe 5 years ago, when I found this book while browsing in a used book store... it is this amazing story of a French man who suffered a terrible stroke and when he recovered, he had "locked in syndrome" and was unable to move- all he could do was to blink one eye- he wrote this entire book by blinking and spelling out words (granted, its not very long, but come on, he was freaking blinking). He basically was only left with his memories and imagination to keep himself occupied.

Anyhow, (as you must have deduced) now they have made a movie of it! It is only in limited release (even in LA it is only in a few theaters), but it is great... you should try to find it. First of all the story is amazing, you keep having to remind yourself that it is all really true. But its also really beautifully filmed, its the kind of thing you just keep thinking about. It was really powerful and you're probably going to cry, but I really recommend it, its one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly... go see it!

Blast from the past

This is very exciting. A while ago, while perusing the internets, BoingBoing alerted me to the fact that my favorite part of elementary school computer class was still alive and well. (this computer class was, of course, all done using enormous floppy disks and computers with black and green screens) What could it be???? The Lemonade Stand game? Oregon Trail? close, but not quite... I'm talking about Logo! (I can't believe kids these days are wasting their time exchanging porn on myspace when they could be doing stuff like this...)

Anyhow, being a giant dork, I investigated and apparently you can even still download it, which I obviously did immediately. I got the mac version here. I'm sure there are PC versions, but I don't like PCs, so, I don't care...

It seems basically the same, but they made the turtle look like a real cartoon turtle, while you logo aficionados will remember that its really supposed to be a kind of retro little triangle. While I seem to have lost a bit of my logo-mojo in the intervening 20-something years (yikes) since I was in third grade, I did manage to make, this, which I will try to get my mom to proudly display on her fridge, pronto.

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