i am still messing with css [seriously, i am i am] as 2009 is the year i catch up and make a complete site in css while using dreamweaver instead of my trusted GoLive. at the end of each month i will cap the css file and leave it for that month and continue playing with it for the next month. by the end of the year i should have a css flip book.

to get to the rest of the blog, go to the home page, go to the index page, or just crack the bit in the url of /YY-MM.html where YY is the year and mm is the month, just as you see it now

2009, consider yourself owned

look, i am back again, and i will be more consistent. i have asked a group of 20+ people to get back into writing, by journaling or hosting a blog. i think it will be good for everyone to work on their thinking and contemplative skills, and we will all be better writers and communicators because of it.

jan9

i have taken to reading time-life’s ww2 books for a few moments when i am able to at home. i have also worked on throwing down some ink in my sketchbook and it is surprising how quickly i was able to rekindle that elusive brain-to-hand connection. but the books, the books are great. there is so much history i know very little about and though my dad will often mutter, «what DID they teach you in school?!?» i did learn what they taught. i wonder if the problem is that they only covered a timeline instead of great detail. maybe they hit more with certain items, but really, a timeline is about all there is time for. i read both «rise of the japanese sun» and «island fighting» and there is so freaking much in them that i can see i am still getting a glorified timeline with more stories. emperor hirohito not wanting war, the japanese really only wanting to expand and hope the other countries sue for peace, how some islands were barren as a mall parking lot with the light posts as trees — i did not know all this. i am reading «the battle of the bulge» and time life does a good job of making a nice sandwich lunch with good mustard and deli meats. i may have to move further to ww2 history that is more complex.

the stories of the soldiers and battles are in themselves fascinating, both in the horror and gallantry, strokes of genius and poor choices, as well as innovation and sacrifice [more on the last one later]. the construction by the see-bees on the islands was a battle in itself. stories of heriocs [and often death] make me wonder if i am one hair shy of complete selfishness. i may have to add some of the stories here just to pass them on [i now understand the excitement in my friends as they tell stories from history they have just learned]. one was a soldier on a beachhead [or a newly beached landing craft] that had impressed a few major league baseball teams. a grenade is tossed into the ship and he grabs it and throws it back and hears it explode and screams coming from japanese troops. another comes and he catches it and wings it back. 3, 4, 5, 6 more come and he returns them. the 7th was held by the japanese soldier so that there would be no time for it to be returned and his plan succeeded. the american soldier caught it and it exploded, shredding his hand that needed to be later amputated. couple that with thousands of troops wading ashore and getting cut down by machine gun fire, stumbling into underwater shell holes and drowning or coming out of their landing craft into 15 foot water — that has got to totally suck. more on all this in the coming months.

jan11

kevlar had us watch a roberto bell video [tomato] and there were some good lines i took down as notes on my phone. a bunch of us will be discussing. most of it was about maintaining a certain image of yourself [which is exhausting] and one line that stuck out was «saying sorry means not propping yourself up and making more out of yourself». quite true. the ability to say «oops, i screwed up» vs «yeah, it was already like that» or «it was your fault too» is a big deal. apologizing admits to our own failures, which we have plenty. there is plenty more where those ideas come from, but somehow it jolted me back to a raffle held at one of the university of arizona volleyball games. all of us on the 2nd team ran the place while the first team played, and sarah and i were in charge of the raffle tickets. i think we drew 1000+ on a poor night and sarah and i bought $20 in raffle tickets to help out. we were standing by the doors and after the game started calling the winning numbers. sarah and i won pretty quick, then won again a prize or two later, and later won a third time. in my head all i was thinking was «we won stuff!» and if i had looked over to my teammates if i would have noticed anyone giving me the look to cut it out. these prizes weren't for sarah and i to win, it was for the fans. yeah, i was clueless. i am glad that i am having fewer and fewer of those experiences, though trevor is in for a lot of those. he doesn’t get those types of interactions either.

that takes me back to the video — what are the things that i do that try to prop myself up and deceive others on who i really am — the things i do not know i do. one upping people in story telling, talking louder in a crowd to get attention, wanting to be X person in the group — i know of all those but i wonder what i do not see. still more to learn. sorry.

jan12

now i am thinking of my clueless years and playing volleyball. i was never a massively aggressive player, though i played hard i was much more of a smooth player. i think i may have been one of the greenest players on the team but i was fast and i could jump. one time during a drill, ryan blasted a ball right into my hands and it went straight down. he was a really nice guy [and not clueless] and i still wonder if he did to boost my confidence. other times i was just doing my job and putting everyball away and shutting down the hitters and another guy, glenn, would comment that i was carrying the team, which many times i was. i really do miss moving that fast. one time there was a high tip and i made it to back wall and jumped with a closed fist and booted the ball back almost perfectly to morey even though several of the guys yelled at me for chasing it down. after the play was over the ref said i saved the ball and they were all a bit confused. i remember shutting down the arachnid on the final play in one tournament and ticking off the top team [he was 6'8" i believe]. i stuff blocked him and it was beautiful. since i could jump i got to hit out of the back row a lot, but i never did much damage. i'm not even sure if i ever got past a defender. i remember a lot of the plays, but like the post on the 11th — how much bad playing did i miss? our traveling team went to the santa barbara invitational, one of 3 club teams to get invited and they won it, with press reports saying that maybe we should have played in division 1 instead of div 2. turns out everyone on the 2nd team skipped practice on their return and the 1st team had been all juiced to work harder. i think they all looked at me at the following practice with a «we really can't get mad at dann, he is clueless».

i do remember on one of the practices leading up to nationals [i was moved up to the first team to be the first guy off the bench which was really nice] and i threw it into high gear, really attacking the ball. i remember the guys on the other side of the net backpedalling and a step behind as i was really going at it. i got some pats on the back for that one.

i think i’ll stick with all the good memories, not how i failed to ever go out with the team to bob dobbs after practice. i just didn’t get it.

from june8.06, brian’s gchat status message:

Seeing Dann play volleyball last night was like seeing the Rolling Stones during halftime of the super bowl. You could tell they were really, really good once, but they've lost their edge — that and they both wear leather pants...

jan13

i have my little online portfolio and when i look at it i see a lack of illustration, a lack of original content, and more. i am good with color [well, MY color] and i sure can collage things well [take a whole lot of items and put them together in a way that looks good]. it is that dreaded head of comparison once again.

after reading all those ww2 books, i am not as worried. there were hundreds of thousands of soldiers, all trained to do specific jobs. i am sure they were all not equal, but they carried out their job in the place they were told. in a way, i think maybe i am an artist-soldier carrying out my job of creating good art in the place that i am at. there are millions of people who could do the job i am doing, as well as each creative job has dozens of solutions. do we hire plumbers on finding out the very best or the best doctor? not always. a good doctor or a good plumber will do just fine. we expect them to be capable and able to carry out the task at hand. i will continue to get better at what i do, but i can't sweat it that there are others who can do the same [is this socialist/communist?] but i happen to be the one doing it here. just like the soliders told to patrol this part on to guard this section, they do it as best as they can at the time. there are a handful that are good enough shot to be made snipers, while others will excel in other areas, but i get to excel at my post and that is okay by me.

jan16

my nieces do not get what LOL means. i believe they think it is how you end every sentence, sort of like the military's «over»

Andrea: Oh lol! I am doing pretty good I am home because I have strep throat lol! Well my dad is at college so when he gets back me and Natalie will get to have corndogs for lunch lol! No it is just me and Natlie and Luke lol!

«jan20»

well, that is over and that other stuff has begun. let us see what this guy can do. i have a hard time explaining how i feel, though as my neighbor said, she may weed out her facebook friends list by their status, such as:

"What a sad & disappointing day. Ignorance must be bliss for you people. Enjoy. I hope & pray I'm wrong for the sake of this nation. All we can have is hope...."

or

"X s glad the media can't blame the wrong guy anymore."

what this makes me think is that these people are either entrenched in a mindset that i can no longer fathom and i can't see their side anymore, or that they are missing out on something new and different, like the allied generals at the start of ww2. they built 1,500 person fortresses with underground railways and planned for battle as if it was trench warfare where nobody moved for 4 years and they sacrificed millions in a war of stupid moves. hitler blasts through with tanks and troops and 80 guys drop onto one huge fortress and demolish it in hours with no losses. western europe falls because of their failure to see something different. i can feel someone reading this right now and comparing obama to hitler, or an us vs them argument, but that would still be missing the point. this isn't about you and what will happen to you. this is about how we can all help and work together. it sounds cheesy, but all that fighting energy is gone. to have a republican/democrat debate is like two kids arguing about who gets the last ice cream cone and failing to see that someone else walked up and took the cone away. well, that and pharisees, who were so caught up in right/wrong that they failed to see the possibilities.

what i do feel is that there are thousands of places in the world that are breaking into dance, similar to this t-mobile commercial.

jan 20.1

i was bored and looking through a «how to learn russian online!» site and it was rather fun so i was trying out different gist translators to make new facebook staus messages. the interesting part is that russian doesn't use the verb «to be» so «i am a student», «she is a doctor», and «the book is big» becomes «i student», «she doctor» and «book big» which one of the pages says «You'll also notice that Russian doesn't use words for a and the, either. To speakers of English, this sounds like dialogue from a really bad Tarzan movie, and they are tempted to think of Russian as primitive. It's not; Russian is just very economical in its use of words.»

i am going to like learning some russian. of course, this is very impractical seeing how i am all of 100km from the mexico border and i do not believe russian is their secondary language, much less any language.

i forget how it got up into texting but i was talking about how i would translate my english phrase to russian and then back again to make sure what everyone would read was what i wanted:

jan 21

another intersting item [other than i love maps] is what latitude europe is at vs. the americas. take my hastily viewed map for a moment.

notice how chilly paris sets nearly on the us/canadien border, and how italy is at that same level as nebraska through north dakota? rumania is right near green bay, the warmest of all cities. turns out the airflow across the atlantic keeps europe warmer than the states at their same latitude. that airflow better not get messed up or they'll be in trouble. thus ends the lesson for today.

jan21 — slightly sad

things have gone a little facebook nuts. months ago everyone from church seemed to have discovered it, then they all posted old photos of all of us, and now sarah and i are in a wave of finding old high school chums. one guy found me, and we played hacky-sack every day for lunch. he also started the best food fight EVER that destroyed the cafeteria with us sitting in the middle table and him tossing food to the table on either side as if they were throwing food. we ran out unscathed. he also told teeny freshman arturo [he was the size of a 4th grader] that he reminded him of his butt: small, dark, always following him around and making obnoxious noises. so i hear from his wife that he has a brain tumor and a form of gigantism, and the photos of his hands are monstrous - triple the diameter of every finger. she says:

ah, carlos - that sure doesn't sound like much fun. we need to have lunch soon

jan23

on my way to work it began to rain and at one stoplight i noticed a little bubble on my front tire. i now have a slow leak. it is kind of cool that i know exactly where the puncture is. my red tires are now clean again [they were black] and they look quite sharp. i have now ridden to work 5 days in a row, which may be a record for my injured self.

injury history:

jan23

i received a postcard from thomas kincaid today. click on it if you want to see the full card. i am glad he wrote me, but i already knew it — anyone with any art training knew as well.

jan26

my inability to hear and understand lyrics wins again, but this time it is new and improved! in peter gabriel's song «games without frontiers» he isn’t singing the line «she's so popular» but «jeux sans frontieres». i never would have gotten that. not only could i not understand the lyrics but i don’t even know the language. go ahead, go and listen. [okay, it sounds more like «she's so fropular» but that is picking it apart too much].

if you want to try another song, i think this primitives song has the last line of the chorus singing «more cowbell» similar to the blue oyster cult/snl skit.

speaking of all this music, we finally unlocked all the songs on rockband and purchased another guitar so one of us can play the bass line. i love playing rush's «tom sawyer». i have been humming that bass line for a while.

jan 27

someone sent out to a bunch of xians this clipping from the bible:

and then wrote:

so i reply:

i think i will be going to hell soon, just for being persnickity.

jan 27.1

i have been looking for the following animation for years, and finally someone coughed it up on youtube. a few of us saw it at the loft in college [i am guessing 1990] and i can still hear kenyon injecting «bim bim», «po», and «kwieEeee» into conversations. after watching it, the memory was far more entertaining than the poem. maybe i have been dulled with so much animation on the computer to be impressed by it, or maybe i just remembered it as something better than it was.

jan28

got this in the mail. it was addressed to the prior resident so i can’t open it [i think they are dead] but all i needed is to read the corner on the outside. i wonder if i can get on this deal.

jan29

jan29

yesterday was the poop and today wasn’t much better. man it was bad. everyone in charge getting rid of all of our systems and running willy nilly. add to that a job that an employee never entered a job and the customer wanted it by the end of the day and after 2+ hours of work it turns out they wanted something entirely different but that never got back to me. then there was a huge coupon rescue job with 14 pdfs that were mangled and we didn't have their fonts so i was deleting and fixing items this entire morning and the job still isn't written up correctly. great. i am sure they will want all the files set up by the end of the day and that isn’t going to happen [as i am typing this in at 2:56pm]. so many simple things that can mess up the day. not knowing who the job is for is a mess. i put it on the server under the names of some of the files but without it written down it took me a while to find it. this job is SO going to screw us over. watch it not be legal.

all of this really chaps my hide. i do not like to have entire days wasted as i am perfectly fine with wasting my own time. i can't help get the job out if i don't know what it is i am to do.

bastards.

to undo some of this pain i have returned to listening to flight of the conchords. easy to listen and smile along and work.

something else i just remembered was trevor’s love of appliances. he would drag out our blender, iron, hairdryer – anything with a cord – and plug them in between the cushions of the couch. one day he did it with the iron in his room and fortunately we caught it before there was a fire. we have a cartoony burn in the shape of an iron in our house. we are lucky as not everyone has one.

jan29.1

todd and i took a 400 level course when we were freshman [we had no idea what we were doing] and it was every monday night from 6 to 9 taught by an ex-mayor. about an hour into class i started shifting my book bag around and acted restless. todd picked up on it and did the same. somehow it worked and others in class did the same, but not because they were being goofy like me but because they really were agitated from out motions. the teacher picked up on the mood and let us out early. we did that every class until we rightly dropped it.

stuff to be expounded upon one day

[johann olav koss, speed skater for norway]

unintentionally pooping on others

«some day you will get married»

«just pray about it»

«you are letting the terrorists win»

«we'll allow you to do that»

position of control as well as knocking the other down, even if it is meant well

[spencer, big red, and my loupe]

[shortest distance between two points is a straight mime - there has got to be a better joke in there]

ari and seth’s dogs, the small one that follows along the other being called «sidecar»

In 1932, the Soviet state proclaimed that all artists must embrace the Socialist Realist philosophy and style. Its three principles were: partiinost’ (loyalty to the party), ideinost’ (correct ideological stance and content), and narodnost’ (ready accessibility to the people). In 1936, Stalin publicly attacked Dmitry Shostakovich in Pravda for his atonal music. This marked the end of artistic experimentation and the beginning of the purges in the creative unions.

mines in ww2 with sappers and tunnels. just crazy