This cat has spice eyes from Dune.
Last year when we moved out to San Diego from Virginia we took many, many photos starring this dog: Pickles. Here he is at the Petrified Forest in Arizona.
That photo has now been published in Fodor’s The Complete Guide to the National Parks of the West, 2nd Edition.
Way to go, Pickles!
Anne Rice’s cat… I follow her on Facebook.
Cat… cat… can’t remember his name.
A lot of people apparently hate the idea of e-books. I like my Kindle.
Things I like
1. I can take 250 books with me on vacation. I can also buy a new one easily, while I am sitting in bed listening to the zombies groaning softly from beyond the barbed wire fence.
2. It will read books out loud in a charming robot voice. I like this, especially when I am painting outside.
3. A nice hardback is wonderful. But… a nice hardback costs $25 and to save money I tend to read mostly trade paperbacks anyway. For those, as well as the Classics, the book design runs towards fat, clumsy paperbacks with tiny print and ugly cover art. I do not find this very joyful. The book design is vastly superior on the Kindle at the same price point.
4. Free sample chapters. This prevents me from making impulse purchases of books I will never read. The only problem is that sometimes you will get the prologue instead. I know I am not the only person who has noticed that prologues are usually boring beyond belief and written in a completely different voice from the rest of the book. Anyway, getting a free sample prologue on my Kindle is usually the kiss of death, not just for buying that particular book, but for everything that author has ever written because I can’t just skip ahead and see if I like the real part of the book.
5. Entire free books. Aside from the Amish romances I download most of the freebies and have discovered several authors I really enjoy.
Things I don’t like
1. You can’t read during the tedious takeoff and landing of your flight.
2. I don’t think it makes sense for e-books to “go out of print.” I get really aggravated that I can only buy “Lincoln’s Dreams” if I live in England or that “Howl’s Moving Castle” has sold out and is no longer available as an e-book even though it was last Thursday.
3. There is no equivalent of a used bookstore for the Kindle; a place where you can download $2 e-books that have been previously read. I think there should be.
4. You could buy 20 books for the price of the e-reader itself; on the other hand, I have probably downloaded 50 free Amazon titles for my Kindle.
A Persian Tom.
In the name of art, I had to unfollow LACMA- Los Angeles County Museum of Art- on Twitter.
I am a LACMA member. I drive all the way from San Diego which you know, on a weekend could take like 16 hours because it is almost 100 miles through LA traffic. I like the museum. They have a great collection. The french fries at their cafe are also very good.
But their social networking presence makes me want to scream and die. It started when they decided to tweet in the voice of Melendez, an 18th century Spanish still life painter, and made him sound as mature as a middle schooler. It continued through Cell Phone Stories, which spammed me with equally juvenile and unwanted narrative tweets… the latest is Rainn Wilson from The Office tweeting on the LACMA account… enough.
I don’t find it funny, I don’t find it to be a groundbreaking new form of experimental art, I find it annoying. I don’t even use Twitter for professional reasons. I use Twitter for entertainment.
From LACMA, I really just want to find out when the exhibits change or when something is happening at the museum I might make time for. Call me crusty, that’s fine, but I expect a certain level of professionalism from a major museum. LACMA’s use of Twitter makes me never want to go back, let alone spend $90 on a membership.
So in the name of art I unfollowed them. Hopefully when I am less irate I will feel like visiting them again.
Don Giovanni- no joke. That is really his name.
Oh, and WordPress hiccuped, so this didn’t get published on Tuesday. Instead, it has been “Pending Review” all week.
Our neighbors in the building behind us do not know how to use their inside voices. I guess they might be inside voices on, like, the stage at the Opera house. Both of them have a really funny Valley Girl way of talking.
Sometimes they stay up all night, yelling and carrying on.
Loud Chick: WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF COCAINE!
Louder Chick: (RAUNCHY LAUGHTER)
Some mornings they get up at 5 and shout about what to have for breakfast.
Loud Chick: DO YOU WANT EGGS? OR CEREAL?? HOW ABOUT BREAKFAST BURRITOS??
Louder Chick: I CAN’T DECIDE SO I AM JUST GOING TO BANG PANS AROUND FOR 20 MINUTES AND THEN TURN ON ALL THE KITCHEN ELECTRICS. BUZZZZZZZ! I LOVE THE BLENDER!
But tonight I overheard this:
Loud Chick: BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH, ALLIE!!!!!
Louder Chick: I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!!
Mama Cat
It’s my 30th birthday on Tuesday and we are off to New Orleans to celebrate!
Kindle books for the plane: Blackout by Connie Willis and Conquistador by S Stirling.
Totally stoked about this trip!! Now must back up computer and pack.
Something a little different this week. This is a mixed media piece in ink, watercolor, and pastel, instead of the usual oil.
Oh, and it’s our new kitten! She’s only four weeks old, so we’ll be adopting her in another month to two months. Cat names I think you really have to get to know the personality, but for now I’m thinking maybe Toblerone is a good name.
I worked on these still lifes and landscapes in between painting cats.
They are for sale- please contact me if interested.
What’s black, white, and cat all over?
That makes no sense, but it’s OK. Things don’t have to make sense on Cat Painting Tuesday.
We are going to a wine auction tomorrow for a women’s scholarship charity. We are supposed to bring two bottles as well as a description of the wine. We will sample the first bottle, and then, once everybody is too tipsy to resist, we will bid ungodly amounts on mediocre bottles we can’t remember. Similar, you know, to an art opening.
I couldn’t find much information about ours- I went with the always acceptable Marques de Caceres Rioja Crianza- I did copy what I could from a distributor’s website, and I embellished with my own magical writing sense. Fortunately I did once take a class called “Human Geography of Spain” in which we learned about Spanish wine, and also fortunately, I have subscribed to Food and Wine magazine for the past nine years.
So I didn’t find it too hard to write the description.
Enjoy.
Marques de Caceres Crianza 2006
This classic example of Rioja (REE-Oh- HA!) style red is a mix of Tempranillo, Graciano, and Garnacha grapes and was aged for two years in French and American oak. Bright, deep ruby red color. Intense bouquet that reveals notes of sweet spice with a depth of vanillin red ruby fruit. This wine glitters on the palate like Christmas tree lights and has a smooth finish soft as a kitten’s fur. Full in the mouth with ripe tannins that highlight its structure. Good length that suggests an excellent development in bottle, but not for too long. Drink by 2011.
