The Urban Pantheist

On Monday the new Bowling for Rhinos shirts arrived! Nice design, Sarah.

While visiting the MSPCA today I had to get this t-shirt. The front of it is a pit bull face that looks suspiciously like Maggie.


While I was there, a video monitor that cycles through pictures of adopted shelter pets happened to show my friend's pit bull!

In case you haven't noticed, I'm momentarily obsessed with a certain band. Unfortunately, I keep writing their name incorrectly.

They are: The Darkest of The Hillside Thickets. My apologies for past instances writing "darkness" and omitting one of the "the"s. They are a Canadian concept band making music inspired by the works of HP Lovecraft.

I came to be aware of them on account of this song being available as Rock Band DLC:



I just bought their album "The Shadow Out of Tim" on the strength of the songs "Nyarlathotep" and "Marine Biologist" (best chorus ever? "He's got a bathyscape...!")

I'm trying very hard not to buy this t-shirt since I already have too many t-shirts and 25 dollars is too much even for one this spectacularly amazing. I would totally buy it at a live show, but I would have to go to Canada, since they refuse to cross into the US since our border security is obnoxious.

Members of the band are also involved in the Caustic Soda podcast, which I tried to listen to once and got annoyed with it. I'm going to try again.

Home early for a predicted snowstorm, we take a break in the Rock Band playing to see the weatherman admit he blew it: no big storm for Boston.


This is very important. They have made ice cream featuring the best girl scout cookies. I don't want to hear from you thin mints people.

I'm not buying any new t-shirts until I unload a few dozen of mine. But when I do, I'd like this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. That reminds me, would anyone like any of my old t-shirts?

When I lived in San Francisco for a short time, I was taken care of by a wonderful Granny, who loved art. Her house was not just full of art, it was made of art. One of the artists who made her house was a collage artist named Jason Mecier; he did amazing mosaic assemblage portraits, often of pop culture icons. It's good to see he's still active and producing relevant work.

Cartoonist and animator Nina Paley has taken on various causes in her life that have occasionally become more high profile than her comics. Lately she's been examining the problems with copyright law, and how it restricts artists from building on the work of others. She's produced a wonderful video addressing the long tradition of derivative art (embedded below), and then detailed the process of making the video (hint: she took lots of pictures at the museum).

I'm very happy with my new shirt (even though I don't look very happy).

T-shirt from here.

Animal described here. (lots of alarmed and alarming comments to that post)

I was thinking about my third day of posting what made me happy (the thank you letter to the Chief was my second, by the way) and I had a few contenders after spending the day with my dad yesterday. We had lunch at a place to dispel a bad memory of it (it worked). We went to the nursing home where my mother lives, and Charlie brought joy to many of the residents and visitors there (less so to a lot of the mostly Caribbean staff, who probably have different associations with pit bull type dogs). But these old photos definitely win for what made me the happiest.( Read more... )