aka “Things I’ve Seen” since 2004
Been listening to Insomnia Radio podcasts lately. Lotsa great indie music from the Association of Music Podcasters. From May 26: Tracks from eight bands, including one of my new favorites, the Republic, out of Seattle.
If you don’t have an iPod or MP3 player, download iPodder and play podcasts on your computer.
This has been all over the news, but here’s a Michigan connection. Rep. Dudley Spade (D-Tipton) wants to introduce legislation to ban the weed-flavored "Pot Sucker" sold at Spencer Gifts.
Reality check, folks. These things can’t actually taste good. They’re a novelty, fer gawd’s sake.
An "expert" I’m acquainted with confirms the flavor’s bad and nobody’s likely to mistake these suckers for the real thing. "There’s three grades," he tells me: "’mersh’ [short for commercial; I wonder how you'd spell that?] being the worst, middle, and chronic. Now if these tasted like chronic, that would be something," he says. "But they taste worse than mersh."
There you have it, Dudley. The sense of child advocacy is appreciated, but this is maybe not something we want to spend too many hard- earned legislative dollars on. The kids are all right.
–with a nod to Boing Boing for the Lenawee link
Taken Feb. 5 at Lamoreaux Park
I finally got around to playing with the photo hosting site, Flickr, posting a few sets of photos over the weekend. Don’t know for sure, but I think photos look better if they’re not compressed. Of course, that also uses more space. These are depressingly wintry, but they’re my favorites.
My friend Lori has some great pics of downtown Grand Rapids. Hey, looks like a nice place to live!
France’s vote on the EU referendum shown as a red state/blue state thing. Hmm, I’d have guessed a little more blue in Europe. Guess not …
Ross Park at Mona Lake in Muskegon
You’d think we’d know better by now than to plan a family picnic. Memorial Day in our home town on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore is almost never warm, especially if you’re near the water. Temperatures will be in the mid to upper sixties if you’re lucky. And If you’re really lucky, you’ll see sunshine.
Still, it’s the first big family get together of the year. Plus it’s Mom’s birthday on the 26th, with birthdays for cousins Evan, Meg, Sus, and Jonathan falling in the first few days of June. Tradition is stronger than weather, I guess. So we gather and we feast. Play kickball. Catch up on what’s been going on since Christmas. Make plans for the next get together. Bicker a little, and go home.
This year, nice surprise. It was warm enough in the sun that we didn’t have to wrap ourselves in blankets. We had enough charcoal, and somebody remembered the grill tools. My baked beans were redundant, but oh well, you can’t plan everything.
Except for the fact that we were missing one family of four (somebody had to work), the day went pretty well. The next gathering is June 18 for nephew #2′s wedding, an outdoor deal on campus at MSU.
Probably the weather will be warm by that time.
Movin' on to something different
No, it hasn’t been updated much, as those of you who have visited more than once already have seen. For the past 6 months or so, I’ve poured all my energy into that other blog, and this one has suffered.
And now that the object of my most intense effort is gone from the web, I need some time to recover. Some time to think about what’s next.
You see, even though Things I’ve Seen came first (the present version moved over from an earlier effort), I feel like I really cut my blogging teeth on the blog that I quit. It’s where I really became aware of what was going on in the world of blogs and the internet; where I began to see that I could make even the slightest difference in people’s opinions. I had loyal readers (even though most didn’t comment) . I was asking people to think; beginning small dialogues; contributing in my own small way to the conversation that is the internet.
So why did I quit? The blog had become too much effort for too little return. Its timing was not right. It felt less and less worthwhile to pour my heart and soul into something for which I was the sole cheerleader and enthusiast among my peers. I guess you could say I had a crisis of confidence; a failure of heart.
Whatever the reason, I’ve bounced back here, to my beginnings. With a big hole in my sensibility, as well as in my schedule, that was filled up by producing the other blog. I can’t go back. But neither can this blog ever be the same. I’ve come too far for that.
And so it’s going to take some time for the blog to figure out what it wants to be. Please be patient while I work through it. Feel free to offer comments and suggestions. But keep coming back. I promise I’ll be better at updating. Just don’t expect the moon. Not right away, anyhow. ;-)
Perusing Northview's Aquilo
It’s that yearbook time of year and Sus and Meg spent some time looking through Meg’s. Showing me the “hot” guys. It wasn’t that long ago that all these guys (and girls) were little kids! What’s up with that?
