Another photo I made at a belated Guy Fawkes Night party last weekend. It turned out so gloriously abstract I just had to share it right away quick.

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Oh! and by the way, happy Thanksgiving to all my USAmerican friends! Try not to eat too much, eh?

This is the first in what will certainly be a series of photos I made at a belated Guy Fawkes Night party last weekend. It was captured with available light (as were most of the photos I took that night); however, I will admit I cheated—for this and many of the other images the camera was on a tripod.

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sraun just blogged a thought that reminded me of a wonderful web site someone pointed out to me that I know you'd all enjoy: It's called Cheese or Font? and it allows you to test your knowledge of both cuisine and compositing in one fell swoop.

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I’d like to propose a new unit of liquid measurement: the Cosby. As I see it, the Cosby would be defined as “an amount of liquid which is too small to be of any use to anybody but large enough for somebody to rationalize not refilling the bottle, not starting a new pot of coffee, etc.”

G-d willing and if the creeks don't rise, I'm going to Windycon next month. It sounds like many of the Usual Suspects will also be there so there's a pretty darned good chance that music will break out from time to time during the course of the weekend. I hope that many of you will be there and that we'll get a chance to press the flesh … or at least snatch a chat.

The small victory was that I managed to get myself out of the house for Laura Jean's campaign fund-raising party. Even got there pretty much on time. Yay for me.

Unfortunately I found myself pretty far gone into the crazy by the time music rolled around. I finally managed to come back enough to do one song for my incredibly patient and caring friends, but that was the extent of it.

I did make it home okay, though, so I suppose that's a small victory as well.

I need to take a solid week (Sunday through Saturday) unpaid furlough from work (although I'm trying to think of it as a sabbatical) before the end of January 2010. As do all salaried employees at my company (the hourly employees get to take their 5-day leave a day at a time but the laws are different for us "exempt" employees. The bit that, on the face of it, is really weird is that the week cannot encompass a holiday. Which means I can't take the week between Christmas and New Year's to go somewhere with the family, and Gavi doesn't have any other big hunks of time off from school in that time period).

ANYway, it looks at the moment as if the best weeks for me would be one of the first three weeks in December or any week in January except the last. And I'm stumped.

When we first found out about this I thought it'd be easy. "Okay," I thought. "I'll just hop in my car and go visit somebody."

Then reality (and self-doubt) set in. Who among my friends and loved ones would be able to fit a visit from me into the middle of one of their work weeks? For that matter, who among my friends and loved ones would want to fit in a visit from me. What's the trade-off between how far I can drive and how much visiting time is left in a one-week timespan? Is there anywhere I can go? Anything fun I can do? I sure would hate to spend that time moping around the house.

So I'm totally stumped.

Therefore, I'm now throwing this up for your input. Do any of you have any provocative suggestions? Interesting suggestions? Or, whattheheck, plausable suggestions?

Thanks! I await breathlessly and with high hopes.

Just received the worst job performance appraisal ever (disregarding school report cards, which, you must admit, are a different kettle of kelp entirely). The h*ll of it is, the comments are pretty darned accurate. I still am not sure, however, whether I've been awful enough to merit all those "Meets Some Expectations" instead of "Meets Expectations." Ah well. We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it.

Listening, as usual, to my iPod dish up tunes on my way in to work this morning. "Everybody Loves My Baby". Gene Krupa. Lionel Hampton. Benny Goodman. Wow. That's all I can say: Wow.

It says here in this book I’m reading:

The [Babylonian] talmudic anecdotes reflect an attitude to death on the part of the rabbis very different from those attributed to the Palestinian sages R. Yehoshua b. Levi and R. Hanina b. Papa, who defy the Angel of Death and where R. Yehoshua b. Levi manages to outwit him and enter paradise bodily (B. Ketubot 77b).
—Yaakov Elman, “Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages” in The Cambridge Companion to The Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, (ed.) Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee, page 173.

This raises an image in my mind of R. Yehoshua b. Levi giving the Angel of Death a Bronx cheer and saying something like, “Hoo-ha nasty old Angel of Death! I fooled you! You didn’t get me—I brought my body along!”

I imagine, however, that some might call this a rather Pyrrhic victory…

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Funny. I’ve spent a lifetime honing my ability to communicate clearly, yet my readers would be ill served by reading peshat alone and ignoring derash.

As you will no doubt discover over the coming months we made many photos in addition to this one during our recent visit and photo session. But this is the one that caught my eye as I was scanning and making proofs and stuff so I opened it up in Photoshop and added the perfect finishing touches as it were and so present it to you now. Tra-la!

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I rather like this one. I hope you like it too.

It looked a little different when it was in Da Show, but I got to experimenting with filters…

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If you haven't already done so, read Atul Gawande's book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance. Now. Really. Read it now. Buy it, borrow it from the library, whatever it takes. Read it. It will make you a better person.