Absolutely great piece in the New York Times about touring Paris with a 200-year-old guidebook written by a gourmand (Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière) in hand.

Win.

The most modest President since... Jeez. Truman, perhaps? Not too many modest Presidents. Anyway, the Commander-in-Chief makes a stop in Arlington.

The Busy Buddy is a toy that allows you to put kibble, snacks, or other treats inside. We picked this up at our local Mud Bay today.

Like the title says. Photo by akirlu.

Just watched 2004's Primer for the first time through Netflix' streaming. I've been wanting to ever since I saw this review by Kottke.

Very enjoyable. I dunno, though. Primer has the reputation of being very difficult to follow, but perhaps because I was expecting that, it didn't seem so much to me. It felt like a weird mashup between Robert Silverberg's Project Pendulum and the solution(s) to The Prestige, with a bit of fairly realistic mock-documentary of a tech startup.

Fun to know it was made for only $7,000 with auteur Shane Carruth writing, directing, editing, scoring, and acting in it. It was filmed in five weeks, and then Carruth spent two years in post-production. Let's be conservative and say he started mulling it over in 2000. I note The Prestige came out as a book in 1995.

Seems David and Victoria Beckham have bought a pair of "micro" pigs. Micro in the sense that they would currently fit in a tea-cup. "Micro pigs weigh just 9oz at birth and still only weigh up to 65lb when they become fully grown two years later. They stand at around 14in tall," sez the article.

That's not the funny bit, though.

"Posh is said to want to name the pair Elton and David after their close friends Sir Elton John and his partner David Furnish..."

OK. Makes sense. What a warm, loving tribute to two of your friends, to name your pigs after them. {cough}

"...while the football star is keen to call them Pinky and Perky."

Pinky and Perk...? OH MY GOD! David Beckham is a closet fan of The Good Life! I wouldn't trust him alone with Felicity Kendal, Posh! (Interesting Q&A with Kendal here.)

Hm. Actually, googling around a bit, it seems the piglets Pinky & Perky on The Good Life were named for these two puppet singing pigs from a BBC children's show of 1957.

Still. I'm not sure if that makes Beckham any more au courant, seeing it predates the sitcom by almost two decades.

akirlu wrote a while back about the odd paw print medallion we got as part of the package of Sarah's cremation package, and how it didn't look quite right.

With all due modesty, rooting through some of the beach pics tonight, I think this one is more the feel she was looking for.

The Adventures of Lil’ Cthulhu -- so you can see fluffcthulhu as a wee animated tyke.

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A day of firsts:

* We went to French Lake Dog Park in Federal Way. Our first time there, and possibly Kaylee's first time at any dog park. She interacted with the other dogs fairly well, and there was lots of room for her to run around.

* We took her to the beach for the first time, at one of our local places, Saltwater State Park, also in Federal Way. We went a few hours later, though, so there was good light to photograph by. (that's not the reason we went -- we went because it was so nice and sunny today. still.)

She's progressively getting better at commands, leashed walking, etc. She's picking things up fairly quickly.

A pretty bright candle, considering she was due to be snuffed out 36 hours ago.

I think this is the best picture I've managed of Kaylee so far. If she'd had this on her shelter profile, I bet she'd've been picked up faster.

...and the aforementioned video.

This is Kaylee, who we picked up today. We're fostering her. She's very kinetic, so this is about the most stable pic I could get during a first attempt. I did a video as well, it'll probably be coming later.

She's a rescue dog, and has been in a shelter in Pasco since 7/30. She literally would have been euthanized today if we hadn't agreed to foster her.

She has a very sweet disposition. Even in the few hours we've hosted her, she's been fun.

Her paperwork spells her name as "Kaylea," but I suspect that's just a question of someone previous who was looking either for uniqueness, or couldn't spell. Either way, I figure she's Kaylee now.

Shiny!

4 minute video here.

I would normally give credit, but it was a friends' post. OTOH, it's public content. A dilemma.

As I watched, I kept thinking, "How can this possibly be sustained for four minutes?" Yet, it is.

Anyone know what language is being spoken at the end? I almost want to say Czech or Brasilian Portuguese, but I don't know for sure.

Olivia Judson at the New York Times posted an interesting piece on the relationship between languages, facial expressions, and emotions. I first came across the idea that facial expressions can change your mood when Malcolm Gladwell profiled the work of Paul Ekman, especially regarding microexpressions.

Here's the interesting bit Judson adds in:

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"As anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language will know, different languages make you move your face in different ways. For instance, some languages contain many sounds that are forward in the mouth; others take place more in the throat. What’s more, the effects that different languages have on the movements of the face are substantial. Babies can tell the difference among languages based on the speaker’s mouth movements alone. So can computers.

Which made me wonder: do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose — in a subtle way — their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?"

...

"A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o."

Fascinating idea, and a nice example of putting pieces together.

From the pilot episode of A Bit of Fry & Laurie. See if you spot the reference to a fannishly significant year.

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The Republican Party (and attendant media sphere), emboldened by their "successes" against ACORN have decided to move on to the next shadowy, little-known special interest lobby and investigate the hell out of them for daring to espouse positions contrary to Republican orthodoxy.

The organization? The AARP.

Have they not figured out seniors support Republicans more than any other group? And now they want to antagonize them?

Leading the charge, it seems, is Dave Reichert, local retiree-in-place-posing-as-a-Congressperson. So now we can't say he doesn't do anything -- he persecutes seniors for disagreeing with him, pisses off his base, and is actively working for the destruction of his party.

Way to go, Dave. I guess when Frank Atchley, your former supervisor in the King County Sheriff's office, said you, "actually was more of an impediment to the investigation (of the Green River killer)," he knew what he was talking about.

"He was probably the worst detective I've ever worked with," Atchley went on to say. "He developed tunnel vision."

Good to see things haven't changed.

Random Harvest is a fun little film, which we saw partly because of Terry Carr's Fandom Harvest, and partly because we'd been watching an episode of As Time Goes By and they made a reference to it.

Some quotes:

"Miss Hanson."
"Yes, Mr. Rainier."
"Owing to lamentable weakness of character I'm having lunch at the Savoy -- with your approval, I understand."
"I thoroughly approve."

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The character Smithy, speaking to a Registry clerk about his newborn son:

"You can form only a very inadequate picture of him from what I've given you."
"I'll have to struggle along."

You know, I think it works:

"There are two works that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable hero, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

If you're a voter in Kent (or Renton, or elsewhere in the Public Hospital District served by Valley Medical Center), and you don't belong to the life_in_kent community, I just made a post I think you should see.

If you're not a voter for that district, the details don't directly apply to you (thankfully).

Executive Summary: One of the Board members has not been able to build consensus among his colleagues to his satisfaction. Rather than do his job and either compromise or try to be more persuasive, he's out to replace Board members to ones he feels he can work with more easily. My own course of action will be to vote for existing Board members Carolyn Parnell and Mike Miller, if for no other reason than to discourage this type of gamesmanship and shirking of public responsibilities.

I take Valley Med a little personally, since that's where I was first taken in response to my heart attack.