these are not the hammer

In preparation for AWESOMEFEST 2009 (i.e., Blythe coming to NYC TOMORROW), I have been watching this masterwork of awesomeness: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. i'm sure that I am only about 9 months behind on this, but whatever. To watch it is to love it:Please refer to 24:50-25:05. Thank you, Joss Whedon.

How To Accurately Label Your Pets, PSA

[Posted in tandem with Kittenheads.]

Have you ever been frightened by an animal whose identity is unclear? Confronted by a strange beast in the morning that may or may not be a flesh eating dragon? How do you know? The most effective resolution is to ensure all non-humans are appropriately labeled. These videos were part of the short-lived public service program "How To Accurately Label Your Pets." For example, as you can see from the label, the animal in these videos is a cat. What a relief!

Step 1: Create a label. It is especially helpful if the label has some sort of directional indication system (e.g., an arrow) so as to avoid confusion.
Step 2: Afix the label to the correct animal (please refer to chapter 4.37 of the Label Guidebook regarding matching animals with names). Note that this may be harder than you anticipate, especially if said animal has experienced many previous labelings.
Step 3: Voila! You now have an accurately labeled pet. Watch carefully for any hints of shapeshifting (see Example II, below).
(Step 4: Re-afix label to animal.)

Example I:



Example II:



Easy as pie.

temporary blog weirdness

...I'm trying to figure out a way to post summaries of my longer posts so that the gentle folks who don't want to read 3000 words about Louise Bourgeois don't have to, so there may be some oddness going on here for the next hour.

EDIT: Success! It took some finagling with Javascript and CSS, but we're all set now with the expandable post summaries.

But it wasn't a dream—it was a place. And you—and you—and you—and you were there.

Let's try, this time around, to be proper about this. First, the facts about myself that I am happy to share:

I am at a fabulous graduate school for art history.
I am female.
I own two fabulous cats.
I live in New York City with a fabulous roommate who works at a museum.
I work part-time at a fabulous art gallery.
I am fabulous (check the header).
I am a huge dork.

Though my audience hasn't exactly changed, I need to be constantly aware that the following people may look at any of my posts:

Parents
Professors who write recommendations for jobs and internships
Potential employers at museums, galleries, and universities
Roommates
Friends of friends

...While I don't think this means I have to be positive about everything, it does mean that anything I'm negative about should be extremely well reasoned. It also means I will not be writing about--and shall endeavor to avoid entirely--the following things:

Dating
Drinking
General stupidity
Things about people/jobs/work/etc that piss me off

Okay, NO, that does NOT get rid of 90% of my posts. Don't worry! That still leaves me (us?) with:

Random absurdity
Art
Cats
Movies/music/etc (all that culture besides art)
Things that I think are fabulous about people/jobs/work/etc

...I'm still moving some of the older posts on to this blog. Bear with me.

third time's a charm

This blog has attained the lucky third strike of unintentionally offending people I actually like, so it's time to wipe the slate clean and start over, blog-wise, that is.

However, I rather enjoy my cozy little family of 11 regular readers, and I think the simple act of blogging is good for me. What's not so good for me is being embarrassed by the content of previous posts. Unfortunately, this sometimes happens despite my best efforts to prevent it--for about a month over the summer, this blog appeared when someone searched my full name, even though I had very assiduously removed all instances to my full name over a year ago.

For the reasons cited above, I've decided to shelve the old blog and all its pesky google-cached archives and start afresh, with a brand new mission statement and everything! This way, when someone from a museum googles me and I don't know if it's an old professor or one of my friends who's got an internship there, I feel [mostly] confident they won't run into any unflattering posts. I may transfer some of the completely inoffensive/unembarrassing-in-any-way posts over in a few days, but the archive thing... there are four years of annoying archived posts that I just can't deal with "draft"ing.

So welcome again to my blog of random observations on New York, art, grad school, and the absurdity of my everyday life.

-G