Costa Rica 2012, Part 2.

February 12th, 2012

Bromeliads! Bromeliads are a type of plant. Here, I will let the Bromeliad Society International website explain them for you:

All bromeliads are composed of a spiral arrangement of leaves sometimes called a “rosette”. The bases of the leaves in the rosette may overlap tightly to form a water reservoir. This central cup also collects whatever leaf litter and insects happen to land in it.  Tank bromeliads (as the water storing species are often called) rely less heavily on their roots for nourishment and are more often found as epiphytes. The roots of epiphytic species harden off after growing to form holdfasts as strong as wire that help attach the plant to its host. Even though bromeliads are commonly called parasitos in Spanish-speaking countries, these epiphytes do not take sustenance from their host but merely use it for support. All bromeliads share a common characteristic: tiny scales on their leaves called trichomes. These scales serve as a very efficient absorption system. In species found in desert regions where the air is hot and dry and the sun beats down relentlessly, these scales also help the plant to reduce water loss and shield the plants from the solar radiation. These plants are so covered with scales that they appear silvery-white and feel fuzzy.

The most well-known bromeliad is the pineapple and the most well-known epiphyte (air plant) is the orchid. Epiphytes will attach any place they land on. Here are some epiphytes on a power line.

And here are some bromeliads scattered about growing on a horizontal branch in the forest.

We went to pineapple plantation to learn about the wonderful world of pineapples and I was taught how to choose a good pineapple in the store. It is not by sniffing it or squeezing it or poking it at its base to check for softness or tugging on its leafy crown. A good pineapple has large “eyes” in the pattern, it is shaped nicely (not pear-shaped or uneven), and the bottom part is golden-colored. I also learned that the bottom half of the pineapple is sweeter and less stalky than the top part, so save the bottom half for people you really like (or yourself). Here is a shot of the pineapple plantation that grows amazing organic pineapples. It is owned by the Collins Street Bakery in Texas, famous for having the best fruit cake in the world (their claim, not mine – I’ve never tasted their fruit cake, so I cannot judge).

They also grow ornamental pineapples. Like these cuties:

And these that I christened “tiny pineys”.

And now changing gears for a second: The Montezuma Oropendola! It’s a bird, not an ailment. A cool-looking bird, in fact.

What I loved about this bird was the amazing sound it made. It sounded like someone shaking a thick sheet of plastic. And apparently they are called “oropendola” because when they make the call, they will hang upside down from the branch for a second like a pendulum. I found a video on YouTube that kind of captures the sound and the motion. It’s way cooler in person, all tremulous and loud.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HjNZ1a0PTY

I could listen to that all day.

Check out this yard full of canna lilies being all flouncy and vibrant.

I like the way the seed pods look like unpeeled lychees.

I spent a great deal of this trip taking (or attempting to take) pictures of ferns. I’ve always loved ferns, but the second I would get them into my house, they would become very sad and die. The first day we were in Costa Rica, we went to a volcano and Cricket insisted we go on a walk. In the rainforest. 6,000 above sea level. On a mountain. This did not go well for me. At one point I wrapped my arms around a moss-covered tree trunk and whispered, “I love you, tree. I hate my boyfriend. I hate him so much. I will live with you forever. Because I’m going to die here. Right now.” At one point Cricket tried to take my pulse but it was too fast for him to count. Periodically we would stop so I could catch my breath and stare daggers at Cricket and I noticed this lovely baby fern leaf all curled up. I said, “Hey, can you take a picture of me pointing to this?” Cricket went to take the shot just as some NATURE! flew up into my eye aaaaaaaahhh nature in my eye. So now we have two lovely pictures of a curled-up fern leaf and me making low moaning noises while trying to get what turned out to be a piece of leaf out from under my eyelid.

(I’m real outdoorsy.)

I learned a neat fact about ferns. We passed some fern farms and the wee fernlets were under large tents covered in black mesh fabric. That is because ferns grow on the forest floor where 60% of the sunlight is filtered out, so the black mesh is attempting to mimic that.

Here’s a fern I saw one day that had spores on the underside of its leaves.

Here are teeny-tiny ferns growing in the rainforest.

And here’s my favorite fern photo. FERN FIST.

Other plants: a stilt root tree.

A red ginger flower. I don’t know if it tastes like ginger, but that’s what it’s called. It’s used a lot in fancy-pants flower arrangements.

And a passion flower. I’ve always known passion flowers to look like this:

But did not know they also looked like the one I saw, this one:

Birds are next. A lotta birds. Very exciting.

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Costa Rica 2012, Part 1 (officially).

February 10th, 2012

My books arrived! Now my avian photos are labeled correctly, no longer things like “teeny-bird.jpg’ or “bird-that-makes-cool-noise.jpg”. Seriously, has anyone noticed how freakin’ weird bird names are? I looked through this book and now I realize I have to go back to Costa Rica to see the Marbled Godwit, or the Lesser Yellowlegs, or the Great Potoo. I did see the greatest bird ever, not for its appearance (it’s a nice-enough-looking fella), but for its name – The Violaceous Trogon. Seriously. Here’s a photo of a Violaceous Trogon:

And here’s what something called a Violaceous Trogon should look like:

(This picture is taken from a website called ZeroFriends, they have lots of great prints, go check ’em out.)

A Violaceous Trogon should be laying waste to the cities of man, not sitting benignly in a tree looking like it got hit the back of the head with a brick. But I’m not an ornithologist, so I can’t complain about the naming system.

First of all, I would like to thank Susan for her photographs. Susan is this really cool dame from Kansas City who was with me on the trip and took about fifty of the photos you’re going to see here. A delightful and talented lady, she has a blog she updates periodically and it’s got some great pictures of her paintings and her glasswork and her fiber (or, if you’re pretentious, “fibre”) works. We bonded over our shared craftiness. And if you like paintings of dogs, she’s your lady. I love her dog paintings. Thank you, Susan. You da bomb. I am also using three photos from another co-traveller called Ami, so thank you to you as well, Ami.

The first thing I noticed when I got off the plane in Costa Rica was the plant life. As I said, everything is huge and insanely bright. And more often than not, the plants look vulgar, like the engorged sexy-time parts of mammals. I found myself periodically holding my purse in front of various flowers, attempting to cover them up. I might have hissed, “You’re just embarrassing yourself,” at some of them. Specifically, the bananas gave me the most problems. At the bottom of the hands is a flower-thing that just screams, “Hey, lady, you lost? Want a ride?”

Unrelated note: Has anyone noticed how popular sloths have become of late? There are whole websites devoted to the awesomeness of sloths. And then today on Buzzfeed, I saw this:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/animals/sloths-are-so-hot-right-now-5685

They say it’s because of the Kristen Bell sloth-freak-out video that’s making the rounds, but I’d like to believe the entire internet is in a tizzy over sloths because of my recent trip. And I will continue to believe that. Please do not inform me of the truth. Thanks.

Back to plants: Heliconia! These are all in the Bird of Paradise family. They are, of course, are bigger and weirder than the regular Bird of Paradise. And the last one is hairy. I wanted to pet it, but I was afraid it would growl and bite my hand.

Concerning my houseplant comment of the previous entry, I had never given any real thought to where those plants originally come from. Imagine my surprise when I saw a poinsettia in someone’s garden, just hanging out. It was like seeing Santa Claus in the driveway of his house picking up the newspaper in a bathrobe. “Oh, you…live here. This is your home. Okay.”

The houses in Costa Rica are very simple and basic. Almost all of them are small, boxy ranch-style houses built out of cement blocks with corrugated metal roofs. I suppose if you live in vegetal bliss surrounded by glittering hummingbirds zipping to and fro, your house need not be particularly fancy. I got jealous of these humble dwellings. I hope the locals appreciate walking outside every morning into gorgeous weather and seeing something awesome like a monkey or an iguana. If I go outside my apartment, most likely I will see clouds and neighbor with a dog on a leash relieving itself. (The dog is relieving itself, not the owner. Watching the other thing would not be awesome, but it certainly would be something.)

Speaking of the weather, there’s a lot of NASA stuff all over Costa Rica. I saw them with a big tent at the airport, and then various other places after that. The reason is that large chunks of Costa Rica have the most stable weather patterns in the world. Every day: sunny. Nice. Little bit of wind, nothing drastic. So NASA does a great deal of testing down there. I thought that was extremely neat.

Not all of the plants were unfamiliar to me. I’ve seen bougainvillea before, just never this lush and in such a variety of colors.

And I’ve seen hibiscus flowers before too, but not double-petalled pinwheel duo-toned ones.

Anyone ever see Little Shop of Horrors? Well, Audrey II is real, and I have seen her.

Another gigantor leafy thing with a simply unacceptable flowering bit. C’mon, there are kids here, man.

Some of the plants I wanted to shove a clipping of into my bag and take home with me. Like this Powderpuff.

Or this Queen’s Wreath.

Next entry: more plants and some birds and other cool stuff.

Addendum: I have been informed by one of my co-travelers that the bird in the photo is not a Violaceous Trogon, but a Black-Headed Trogon. They look very similar. I’m guessing none of you give a crap about Trogons, so I’m not changing the blog entry.

Posted in Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Nature, Random Art Bloggery, Travels - I Has Them | 1 Comment »

I have returned from Costa Rica. Many photos await.

February 7th, 2012

I have sorted through my 1,000+ photos and picked out the juiciest and tenderest morsels but I can’t post them yet because the books haven’t arrived from Amazon.com. The books I ordered are “The Birds of Costa Rica”, “The Wildlife of Costa Rica” and “The Plants of Costa Rica.” I need them because half of the time I had no idea what I was taking a photograph of. Specifically birds. Hoo boy, are there a lot of birds in Costa Rica. Periodically people would say the name of this bird or that one, but after a while it all sounded like, “That is a Yellow-Necked Deep-Vein Thrombosis, very rare in these parts,” so until the books come I have my photos labeled things like Plant1.jpg and Bird3.jpg. I can give a rough overview of the experience, though. This was my first trip to an America other than North America, so I was enthralled by everything I saw. I had never been to the rainforest either (the southern part of Africa is all savannah) so that was exciting as well. Lemme tell you about the rainforest – it looks really prehistoric. I kept waiting for a velociraptor to show up.

The name is super-accurate. It’s wet all the time. The rainforest gets something like eighteen feet of rain a year. If you stand still for five minutes, a fungus will take root on you, guaranteed. The picture below, they called this a “light shower”. By the end of the trip all my clothes smelled like I had washed them, immediately shoved them soggified into a non-breathable garbage bag and then chucked it into a corner of the basement for a month – even the clean clothes. I was charmed by the optimism of the local villagers, hanging their laundry out to “dry”.

You know all your house plants? All those sweet little leafy friends of yours? Well, they’re from the rainforest and they’re big. In their natural habitat they are enormous and they look like they are going to eat you. Here, look, some leaves with a hand for scale:

And I want to apologize to the artists of Central America. I never really liked the artwork from there because I thought it was a little garish, a little overly bright. Seriously, you don’t have to use the colors straight out of the tube, mix a little brown in there, fer cryin’ out loud. Now, having been there, I admit I was wrong. They were painting accurately because everything really is like that. A lot of RED and YELLOW and BLUE, so bright it buzzes in your eyes. When I correctly name my plant ‘n’ bird photos, you shall see for yourself.

This trip can be summed up by how many times I said the phrase, “Holy crap, look at the (fill in the blank)!!!” Everything was so big or so close or so much more than I had anticipated. I am already planning my next trip there (turtle-hatching season happens in July) and I’ve only been back for three days. I highly recommend going to Costa Rica. It’s only a five-hour flight, it’s relatively inexpensive, and their number-one industry is tourism (number two, technology; numbers three, four and five, coffee, bananas and pineapples) so they tend to know what they’re doing. If you have any questions about where I went or stayed, feel free to email me and I’ll hook you up with all the details.

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Costa Rica.

January 25th, 2012

I am leaving for Costa Rica in two days for a nine-day vacation, and one of the places I’m going is a butterfly farm where hopefully this will happen to me:

I’m sure I will have a million photos when I return. Start getting excited about that.

Addendum: I’m back. That did not happen to me. Still a phenomenal trip, though.

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Burning Man Costume 1.

January 23rd, 2012

Even though I studied some costume design in college, I always have problems when I make a costume. One specific problem, actually. I keep forgetting that it is not important that the costume look good up close, it has to have impact from twenty or thirty feet away. I get so obsessed with minutiae that I end up fussing over these tiny little bits that from a distance don’t look like anything. I promised myself I would attempt to rectify this error, so every time I design an element for this Burning Man costume I like I pat myself on the back, good job Jess, and then I immediately make the thing twice as large. I try to make it so big I feel ridiculous about wearing it. Then I know I’m in the right area. So far I have made a kelp necklace, 56 barnacles and three orange seastars.

I made the kelp necklace before I had my “bigger, simpler, more garish” epiphany, so it is small, delicate and softly colored. But I had beaded it already, so I’m incorporating it nonetheless.

The top part is a large tube so that if it’s possible I can slide a thin strip of LEDs into it and they will shine through the glass seed beads. I’m creating a lot of semi-translucent and / or pierced and / or hollow elements in the hopes that some of them can be wired for light. I’m not expecting all of them to be, but I don’t know which ones will be feasible and which won’t, so I’m making a bunch of them lighting-friendly.

Seastars. Big, simple, orange, with reflective sequins. I’m making two more seastars in pink, and they will be slightly larger and have more reflective sequins.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of ocean research, and the thing I have learned about the shores and most coral reefs (which is where I’m basing my costume on) is that it is not very colorful. The rocks and the sands and the kelp and the seaweed and the coral is predominantly four colors: medium brown, bottle-green with some yellow in it, muted grape-purple, and sickly dusty pink. Mostly the brown and the green with a smidge of the purple and the pink. A jazzy yellow fish or a bright blue anemone pop up all over, but the majority is rather bleh. So the base of my costume will be brownish-greenish with brightly-colored characters scattered about. And I won’t be making any fish. I will have crabs, sea slugs, sea worms, the above-mentioned seastars, snails, anemones, urchins, clams maybe, and an enormous jelly. The closest thing I’m going to have to a fish is putting scales on my corset. It’s just everyone when they think of ocean think of fish, and there are so many other under-appreciated oceanic beasties that I want to highlight.

Speaking of one of those beasties, here are my barnacles. I put a pencil into the photo to give you a sense of scale.

I’ll keep updating as I create more pieces of this exciting ensemble.

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Unacceptable.

January 20th, 2012

The Moomins likes African art, which is fine. She’s from Africa and she’s entitled to like whatever she wants. (I do not, by the way, tend towards African art in general. It’s not persnickety and perfection-oriented enough for me. I lean more towards Asian art, specifically Japanese. But I digress.) Normally I tolerate the fact that her house is filled with odd figurines that look at me funny in the night and weird bowls with jacked-up-looking animals painted on them. However, on her last trip she returned with a sculpture that is not okay. She can have whatever wacky art she wants but this is just gross and my father and I are perpetually creeped out by it. And OF COURSE she insists on it being displayed right above the television where it’s in your face and you cannot escape its horror. Let me clue you in. It’s a clay sculpture, about ten inches tall of a goat standing upright like a man. A goat whose front is covered with leopard-print boobs that birds are drinking from. The feet are pig snouts and birds are eating from them as well. You with me so far?

That’s all fine, sort of. Until you turn the sculpture around and WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE OH MY GOD GET IT AWAY FROM ME.

Why? Why, Mom? At one point she attempted to explain how it represents the artist’s rage at his treatment, blah blah blah, but all I could think of was a bunch of birds chowing down on the poop coming out of a goat’s ass and I couldn’t hear anything else she said. I would simply break it “unintentionally” but it’s expensive and The Moomins would be so sad, I can’t bring myself to do it. Now my father and I are stuck watching TV with this atrocity grinning down on us. But The Moomins is happy, so I guess that’s all that matters. And I don’t live there. That helps.

10/17/2013 Addendum: She broke it! She was cleaning it and it broke! It’s an early Christmas miracle. I’m so happy.

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I’ve been watching movies and television, which should really come as no surprise to anyone.

January 15th, 2012

First, I watched Pee-Wee Herman’s Big Adventure for the first time, which was exciting. Not so much the movie, but watching it with Snorth. See, this is Snorth’s most favoristest movie ever, she has seen it approximately eighty times. So naturally I invited her over to Cricket’s house to watch it in his movie theater. One might find her hysterical giggling and, “Oooh, oooh, best line ever coming up!” and, “This scene scared the crap out of me my whole childhood” annoying, but I found her enthusiasm infectious. I think I enjoyed it more than if I had watched it alone or worse, with Cricket, who is a fun-sponge and has a God-given talent to suck the excitement out of the room merely by walking into it*. As a gift to Snorth I made two animated gifs from the film. One, Large Marge’s epic facial moment (thank you, Tim Burton):

And two, the expression Pee-Wee makes when he is forced to carry snakes out of a burning pet store:

The second thing I’ve been watching is Battlestar Galactica (the new one from 2005, not the older one from the late 70s). I normally don’t care for science fiction, but this isn’t really a show about science fiction. It’s more a show about struggling to survive all alone while something you barely understand tries to annihilate you, which makes it an inherently interesting premise. I have a couple of thoughts about the show.

1. If everyone is wearing the same uniform, maybe you should not hire four handsome strong-jawed chestnut-haired men to play four different roles. I keep getting them confused. If you know the show, it’s Chief  Tyrol, Helo, Hot Dog and sometimes Apollo if the camera is zippin’ around enough. What, are there no Aryan Nazi-looking guys in the future? No Anthony Michael Hall-lookin’ folks? That is unfortunate.

2. Does anyone else find the theme song unbearable? I think it reminds me of that damn Sarah McLachlan song they use in all the ASPCA commercials, and I have been trained Pavlov’s-dog-style to hear that “Angel” song and immediately get sad about all the doggies and kitties with their woeful eyes. Gotta say I love all the drumming and didgeridoo-ing in the background of the battle scenes, very tension-filled and exciting.

3. It’s hard to take the mechanical-looking Cylons seriously when they have Knight Rider woosh-woosh red lights on their faces. I always hear Kit saying “Michael” over and over when I see them. That being said, their fingers that just pop out all blade-like are super-rad and I want them. If I was a Cylon who looked like a human (spoiler but not really because that is the premise of the show and is revealed in the first episode) I would insist on keeping the long stabby magic metal fingers.

4. Lieutenant Starbuck is BAD-ASS. That is all I have to say about that.

5. I say “fracking this” and “fracking that” all the time now. It really is brilliant, substituting “frack” for the other f-word. It sounds similar enough that gets the point across beautifully and no one at the FCC can nail you for cursing because technically, you’re not. Between me saying “frack” from Battlestar Galactica and “gorram” from Firefly, I am getting too nerdy for words.

Everyone says that it gets really crappy halfway through Season Three, so I’m bracing myself for that. However, I’m presently in the middle of Season Two and everything’s great, so I prefer to not think about the lameness to come.

 

*You will know it has happened by the “shluuuurrrrrp” sound, followed everyone putting their heads down on the table and falling asleep.

Addendum on 2/15/12: Now at the middle of Season 3. It did get kinda dumb. But now I have to watch until the end because that’s what I have to do. Ehhh.

Posted in Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., The Telly | No Comments »

Several HIGHLY unrelated things.

January 11th, 2012

1. I watched “Intervention” on Monday and it was the usual. “My name is Brooke / Steve / Vanessa and I am addicted to meth / Oxy / huffing Febreze / whatever.” Followed by them getting rehab in thailand. If you’re wondering how rehab facilities can change you, then you may check out some client success stories here. The super-bummed-out family tells how he / she was a precious little angel as a child. One of them inevitably says, “Always smiling, always happy.” The drug enthusiast who is the focus of this particular episode makes a comment about how they don’t know how they’re going to go on like this, and if they’re on an opiate they doze off while they say it. Cut to commercial. It’s the same every time. But something stood out for me on this week. The chick was addicted to black tar heroin and had been for five years, since she was sixteen. I was impressed with her. She was practically an advertisement for the stuff. She looked great (aside from the slurring of the words and the small weird bumps on parts of her arms from injecting in one place too much) and her description of how heroin feels, mmmm, it sounds delicious. Something about warm honey flowing through your veins – I wanted to whip out anything that could be construed as a tourniquet right then. (Relax, I am not going to start dancing with Mr. Brownstone. Everyone stay calm.) But that’s not the thing that stood out. At one point, they talked about how she’s homeless and sleeping on the street with her boyfriend, and then they showed her wearing a white shirt. A white shirt that is white. Following that they showed her shooting up in the white shirt, which remains white. I wear predominantly black because of a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones is that I find it damn near impossible to not stain my clothes with soy sauce or any other food I might place in my mouth. It will, guaranteed, end up on my boobal area. So I am to understand that a homeless heroin addict who is making pinholes in herself that then cause her blood to leak out is more capable of keeping her clothes clean than me? Because that’s what I’m taking away from this. And gosh darn it, if that don’t make you feel bad about yourself, I don’t know what will. Interestingly, there has been a rise in UK residents choosing recovery overseas, drawn by the appeal of personalized care and peaceful environments for healing.

2. Eels! Specifically moray eels. They give me the heebie-jeebies because their mouths extend too far back, or maybe their eyes are too far forward and close to their nose, one of the two. I was watching a special on them recently and thought they had reached maximum creepitude but I was incorrect. Scientists were wondering how the moray eel pulled its food into its mouth and throat, and through careful scientific study it was discovered that the eels have a second set of jaws that pop out, grab the food and drag it inside which, I don’t know about you, is one of the most horrifying things I have ever heard. Want to see some video of it? Think carefully before you answer that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv2DkzOPBXw

Guhhhhhhhhh.

3. In honor of ten years of dating, I forced Cricket to express his love for me through a sparkly object I can wear on my hand. I love this ring. It’s big, it’s old, the stone is an antique cut, it’s platinum, and it’s got rubies (my birthstone) all around the edge set in gold. The first few weeks I had it I couldn’t stop looking at it, so my co-workers nicknamed me Gollum. And when we moved to our new offices this last week, A small Gollum figurine managed to make its way onto my desk. I took a picture of my ring with Gollum holding it. It just seemed right.

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Pumpkin Fest.

January 3rd, 2012

Welcome to 2012! We’re all gonna die in either May or December, so that’s a fun thing to look forward to. Two things I want to cover. One, Snorth and I went to the local cat show and it was the same old same old of insanely beautiful cats and their super-odd owners. I didn’t take any pictures (you can go here and see previous cat show pics if you are so inclined) but I did have to take one specific shot. This one.

Okay. You don’t just put that sign in the water fountain, right? This implies that one, or possibly more than one, persons or peoples have attempted to cleanse their yewling felines in the water fountain. Right? I won’t lie, it made me want to wash a cat right then and there. Just grab any random one hanging around and SOAK IT ON UP, YEAH, SOGGY CAT TIME! Cats don’t like that though, so I didn’t. But I thought about it.

Two, I’ve been meaning to talk about this pumpkin festival I went to back in October. It was called the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze and there were a whole lotta pumpkins (not surprisingly). It covered the grounds of a fancy country home on the banks of the Hudson River. Seriously, illuminated pumpkins everywhere. My college classmate Jay Woods did the lighting design, so mad props to him – some of the pumpkins had candles in them, but many of the pumpkins had electrical lights because, hey, keeping 4,000+ candles lit is a hellish task meant for no man. It was indeed great, mainly because it felt like something one would go to in ye olden tymes. “Oh yes, Edward, let us venture into the countryside via carriage to look at the carved pumpkins strewn all over the estate. They have been lit with candles, it’s all very festive. We’ll drink mulled wine and then die of typhoid, etc.” Here’s the entrance.

I think there were professional carvers working for a month beforehand, but to create the full effect of OMGGOURDSALLOVER they had girl scouts and various other children’s groups carve other pumpkins that were on the lawn as you walked up. It was impressive to say the least.

There was an abstract snake shape over the entire left section that was guarded by ghosts.

The jack o’lanterns weren’t all on the ground. Whoever designed this came up with some really cool ways to use the pumpkins to their full potential. Like the corn and sunflower stalks.

And the beehive.

And the spiderweb.

And King Kong on top of a side building.

And these warrior-type figures. I don’t know if they symbolized anything, but they were neat nonetheless.

I had a couple favorite things. One was the sheep skeletons.

Another was the dinosaurs. Specifically the baby hatching out of the egg. I took a picture with flash and one without to show the full awesomeness of the egg idea. I suspect after seeing this you will make one for your front porch next year.

But my favorite thing was the intricately carved pumpkins, most likely using drills with different-sized drill bits as an integral part of the carving. They remind me of those Ukrainian painted eggs.

I recommend that if you’re in the New York area around Halloween next year, you give this a look-see.

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The Nativity Scene.

December 27th, 2011

I just saw this on Buzzfeed:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/fjelstud/the-most-awesomely-inexplicable-nativity-scenes

And it reminds me of when I lived in Harrison. I lived in a predominately Italian-American neighborhood where the gardens were impeccably manicured and the properties were always tidy. Except for two houses: the one I lived in and the one at the end of the street. Ours was fine, the hedges weren’t clipped perfectly and there was a saint without a head hiding behind the stoop, but the house down the street…yikes. A mentally-ill fortyish man and his elderly mother lived there. The man was prone to wandering the streets talking loudly to himself, and I saw the old woman very infrequently. However, they did have a nativity scene outside their house. For me, it was the nativity scene of nightmares. I guess the woman had lost the donkey or the cow and had decided to replace it with a large plastic light-up goose, so looming over the Baby Jesus was this enormous Japanese Godzilla film extra of a goose that glowed in the most unholy way. Also, one of the stray cats that hung around this old lady’s house liked to stretch out and nap in the cradle, basically smothering Baby Jesus to death while the nuclear goose looked on. Let me tell you, coming home late at night all alone and seeing that at the end of the block was akin to turning a corner and seeing those freaky-freak twins from The Shining. I have attempted to make an artistic rendering of what it was like:

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