First names I wish I had.

Gabriel; Jorge; Tyler; Michael; Dieter; Jean-Paul; Eddie; Emil; Ronnie; Damon; Dean; Ernesto; Walter; Max; Kingsley; Ian; Clive; Bill; Chuck. Don't get me wrong. John is my father's name, and I would never in a million years change it. Besides, only people I know from from high school and grad school call me John. Pre-high school and especially in college, most people called me Johnny and still do. My undergraduate advisor still calls me Johnny. I remember at what time I met the people I know by whether they call me John or Johnny. There is a funny store where I didn't know my name was John and not Johnny until my first day of first grade (a story for another time). Nor am I necessarily dissatisfied what the name my parents gave me. Except my middle name. My great-grandparents were...uh, not from the city, and they seem to have thought that Frank was a name alone and was not short for anything else. So my poor grandfather was named Frank, which is worse than my father and I who are stuck with something so frank (moan) as Frank for a our middle names. I was going to be named Jean if I were a girl, I'm told. My Polish grandmother goes by Jean, though her real name is something no one in the family seems to be able to spell or remember, forgotten along with my grandmother's command of the Polish language. Names are funny things, but I don't really feel like waxing philosophical on the subject. Semantics and linguistic philosophy lie entirely outside my areas of strong competence. That, and I'm lazy tonight.

Boring because of being boring.

I have always been a huge fan of the band Tool. However, the typical Tool fan is generally perceived as an intentional misfit (as opposed to a genuinely unusual or unique person) and as someone who feigns depression and darkness and the like (my own occasional depressions are in fact not voluntary, to be sure, and I'd trade them for sunshine if I could). As such, I am usually not gigantically vocal about my appreciation of and affection for the very few albums that Tool has actually given us over the years and for the band itself. Anyway, I decided to check out the Tool site today to see if there was any news about a new album, the last one being released in May 2001, just before I graduated from college. The site has not been updated in some time, because there is not much going with Tool these days, they say. This is my very round-about way of explaining my web-absence lately. Not much interesting has been going on. We bought a front cover for the car and had splash-guards installed, since the amount of gravel and stones on the roads around here is nauseating. The cover ("bra") itself caused a small and very easy to repair chip in a joint where the fender and bumper meet, but the weather is too cold this week to apply the little dab of paint and have it actually dry properly. I'm kind of excited about being able to fix something on the car myself, after we had to pay the dealership to install the splash-guards. I did put on the bra on myself, which was not easy for someone as out of shape and technically-challenged as myself. I bought a pack of Uni-Ball Vision Exact pens on sale and three packs of some sweet and delicious Faber-Castell Grip 2001 pencils on sale at OfficeMax for a mere $0.70 -- a steal for such precisely engineered German pencils, which usually run for a buck each in the States. I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time in at least five or six years, and it was good to remember what I loved about that film in the first place. What that was exactly escapes me now. I have been drinking entirely too much coffee and have not been to bed before 3:00 a.m. in a few days. That's good. I'm also getting work done, as a result of drinking all that coffee. My current favorite morning drug is Sumatra. Darkly earthly to wake me up from not enough sleep. Lovely. Etc. Etc. Etc. Told you life has been boring lately. But with three sets of house-guests coming in the next few weeks, tons of work to get done, and tons of good non-school books to read, I have a feeling that things will get interesting this week. And that posting will become more frequent again. I leave you with some nice pencil links, via Faber-Castell: the history of the pencil and famous Faber-Castell pencil users. I hope the links work.

René Magritte.

Last year, I commented that some of Nicola's Mirror Project photos looked like Magritte paintings. I liked them a whole lot, and I wanted to try some of my own. In New York this past December, I was sitting in a restaurant with my brother and two cousins and all of their respective significant others and my wife. It was extremely cold outside and refreshingly warm inside, and we found a bright yellow balloon against the ceiling. I got it down and convinced my brother to pose for some shots with it in front of his face, like Magritte in his self-portraits (only I actually took the photos). Here is one, with the crowd cropped out. On the way to our table, I whipped out some Boy Scout skills and quickly tied the balloon to my brother's bag, sending him on a yellow-ballooned mission through a crowded restaurant, like a fish dragging a float. He realized what I did and got a little mad at me for a minute, but it was still funny to behold. Guess you had to be there.

Sexual instruction.

I have no intention of making this a sex-blog or a link to porn or other things for gross dudes to surf one-handed (ick). Also, to paraphrase Homer Simpson, I'm not telling anyone about my secret moves (ick again). But I've been busy reading Lucretius all day, and I though I'd share this passage that I found a while back, quoted exactly as transcribed here, in a book of poems on marriage from the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series (of which I have a substantial stash). From Lucretius' The Nature of Things: Women conceive more readily, if taken As animals are, breasts underneath, loins high, So that the seed reaches the proper parts More readily. Wives have no need at all For loose and limber motions, pelvic stunts, Abdominal gyrations. These, in fact, Are contraceptive; if she pulls away, Pretends reluctance, stirs him up again With strain and push and thrusting, she diverts The seed from its right furrow. This is why All whores are so gymnastic; they know well Such acts not only please their customers But also are a safeguard, good insurance Against a pregnant belly. But our wives, It seems, need no such nonsense. Finally, The little woman does not have to be A raving beauty; she can win your love, Without the help of any gods, without The darts of Cupids or of Venuses, Simply by being decent, neat and clean, A pleasant person to be living with. That's about all it takes, and love depends On habit quite as much as the wild ways Of passion. Gently does it, as the rain In time wears through the very hardest stone. [Translated by Rolfe Humphries, in Marriage Poems.] I especially like the last four lines, with their being so pragmatik.

Life Aquatic DVD date, very early.

You heard it here first. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou will be released on DVD May 10th, in two formats: a normal disc and a two-disc special edition with all of the goodies we Wes Anderson fans savor. I heard a rumor that it's another Criterion Collection edition (which Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums both were, along with Kevin Smith's underestimated Chasing Amy, definitely my favorite Kevin Smith film). Which would be even better. Of course, this is only if you are one of those people who watched the "DVD extras" for films you really like. Which I am. I know, I watch too many movies. And now I'm off to see Constantine.

Photo Friday: Rural.

My entry for this week's Photo Friday Challenge, Rural. I did actually post this before, in a smaller version of lower quality. Problem is, living in Southern Illinois with a digital camera, I have hundreds of megabites of rural photos. It's a lot to look through, and I just like this one a lot. The photo is of fresh potatoes at the Carbondale Farmers' Market, June 2004. I bought a ton of those potatoes, and yes they are as good as they look.

A whole year already?

Somehow, I neglected to mention that this here blog turned a year old last week, though it was then on hiatus for a few weeks while we started Blog Collective (which also turned a year old recently), then on TypePad, then back to Blogger this past summer (TP being one less thing to pay for, he whines). I suppose that a year is a hell of a long time in blog-time. You would think I would at least pretend I have something intelligent or thoughtful or reflective or interesting thing to post about this blogging milestone. But I don't. I'm too tired to post much. Too much Foucault and house-cleaning, not enough coffee. Sad story, that is.

Happy late V-Day.

I have always liked that Valentine's Day is like a teaser for spring. This was especially so two years ago in Boston, in the middle of a harsh winter, right after a blizzard in fact. My broken toe hadn't healed, so I hobbled (poor me) to the store in one of those stiff medical-type-shoe-dealys to get some flowers for my then-fiancee. The sun came out, and I took the longer walk home along the beach. Walking around for an hour with flowers and a big fat smile on my face was a good harbinger of the spring to come. It was a very nice Valentine's Day that year. I had another nice V-Day yesterday, and Southern Illinois' climate even cooperated, so we're having spring preview here. I was warm yesterday with no jacket and sandals, and I had to wear a light, short-sleeved shirt today. I almost had to put on the AC in the car, since a black hatchback gets pretty hot, but I didn't want to do that in February. Just seems kind of obscene. My wife and I set strict price-limits on Valentine's Day gifts this year, given the poor grad student status we enjoy and what we bought last week. I received a nice copy of Hunting with Hemingway, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, and "Wonderfalls" on DVD. A good booty, I think. What I got for my wife is another matter. What she picked out was in a small box and only one box and without the bright pink wrapping. But making someone happy with a gift is always fun, no matter how small the box is, I guess.

Sideways.

Finally saw Sideways, which is up for best picture this year, I believe. I don't really feel like waxxxxxing intellectual or philosophical or critical about it. I think that would certainly cheapen what the film was trying to do and trying to be, and really you should just go see it because it's more than worth it, and what the hell else are you going to go see this time of year anyway? Really, the only bad effect was that I really don't want to have any wine anytime soon, because I would really feel like a moron after the wine expertise displayed in this film. I should get my friend Chris (from Blog Collective) to teach me about wine sometime, or maybe he can guest-blog about wine here sometime or some such, etc. I hope you're not last-minute V-Day shopping, since that's less fun than last-minute Christmas shopping although I don't know why. I get homemade cookies and coffee and maybe some Asti, and that's pretty damned nice for a Monday.

Photo Friday: Lucious.

A little late, I know. But I haven't been keeping up with Photo Fridays lately, so here you go: my entry for this week's challege, Lucious. I haven't been using my French presses lately (for a long time, I only used them like a total snob). So I pulled the small one out when I got home from the university today and had some thick, black brew. Lucious indeed!