Support the City of Hope's continued research into finding cures for cancer. Donate blood products and save lives.


the emperor has a new fan

Most people aren’t excited by their vacuums, but having had the world’s worst, cheapest maroon behemoth violently spit kitty litter and dirt back at my feet for several years, when I finally purchased a Dyson – my life actually changed. It was worth the shocking sticker price to vacuum and later walk across wooden floors that felt like silk, instead of an emery board. I almost love vacuuming now. Almost.

fanLargeFaceOnHowever, Dyson apparently does more than vacuums: they’ve ventured into fans.  Strange, round fans with no blades that seemingly don’t blow air. It’s chic though, and certainly isn’t as fugly as the Vornado, even though my small, small brain doesn’t understand such cooling alchemy. Also good news: it’s only $300! Whee! I look forward to owning one in a decade.

If you like knowing about the future, like I do, peruse away: Dyson explains the face-melting abyss created by their new fan with pictures and video.

No Comments.




bizarre & wonderful homages to grey gardens

I confess: I have a thing for stories about eccentrics, mansions, cats, dilapidated glamor and makeovers – so I am pleased to see numerous Emmy wins for the gorgeous and haunting “Grey Gardens” tonight! I’ve been fascinated by the Edie Beales and Grey Gardens for quite sometime. And of course, HBO and I are not alone. There’s the devastating and charming Broadway musical, well decorated with Tony awards. There’s Rufus Wainwright’s song Grey Gardens. Then there’s Rugrats, the Nickelodeon cartoon where everyone’s crotch is suspiciously, upsettingly wide. You probably watched it if you were born sometime after 1982, or the battery died in your remote at very inopportune moment.

While not exclusively parodying Grey Gardens (dominate themes are ripped more from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Sunset Boulevard), Rugrats namechecks Grey Gardens and certainly captures the creepy. Did I mention wide crotches? What is going on down there? [Edit: YouTube videos were taken down due to a Terms of Service violation - if you search, you may find it]

But the best is by far, soap opera One Life to Live’s twisted fantasy daydream, which is a surprisingly well done and direct homage. Everyone could have phoned it in per usual, but if you know anything about Grey Gardens, you can see that many, many people did their homework.

No Comments.




woof out

My husband and I were in the mood for a movie last night, but having seen the majority of films on demand, we really scraped the bottom of the barrel with Swordfish. I had seen it, he hadn’t – but I guess my tastes were less refined back when it was released because I didn’t remember it being so horrifyingly stupid (a bus being picked up by a helicopter and banged into several Los Angeles skyscrapers). In case you’ve also blocked it out in order to live, it’s the movie where Halle Berry hoodwinked a million dollars for a completely gratuitous flash of her breasts.

kate-beckinsale-whiteout-posterOnce the credits rolled, I was expecting to see “Directed by Alan Smithee” but it was some guy I had already forgotten in the last 20 hours (I googled: Dominic Sena).  We joked that the director never worked again. Well, that’s not entirely true. While he  laid low for three years, ducking back into music videos, the director of Swordfish is apparently inacting his revenge with the upcoming Whiteout, the poster of which has quickly turned into the very bane of my existence!

Los Angeles is a place filled with movie stars, so consequently, there’s an unholy saturation of billboards, bench ads and bus stops featuring film and television projects. It’s an overkill you can’t even imagine until you cruise down Melrose, La Brea, Beverly, Hollywood and Sunset boulevards. Why? When the stars and executives are out on the prowl, drunkenly wrecking their careers and not wearing panties, they can see their projects plastered everywhere. This way, they really can’t point a finger at the studio’s marketing as the cause of the project’s poor success. The Los Angeles marketing cleverly presents the illusion that the entire country is blanketed in advertisements, when it’s not even remotely as dense in any other market.

So there’s not just one or two Whiteout promotions around town, there’s about 80,000 of the most hideous one sheet featuring the usually lovely Kate Beckinsale looking like Jennifer Aniston with blue acne. Did the designer die in the middle of making the one sheet?  I can’t fathom how this happened. Equally mystifying: stars can veto unflattering promotions.  Beckinsale didn’t care what she looked like. While I’m annoyed by the eye pollution, I respect her cool attitude. In her place, I would have grabbed the Wacom stylus right out of the designer’s hands and stabbed the “creative” executive who thought to do this to my beautiful, beautiful face.  Maybe stabbing is a bit dramatic, but you know: actresses are just passionate people.  (I would never actually stab someone – just lightly poke)

No Comments.




the treat treat song

We’re teaching Leonardo di Kitty to come to us when we have treats so we can fetch him from under the bed at any time. With light whistling and bag shaking and exclamations of “treat! treat!” he’s learned to come to the kitchen and pretend he’s a starving orphan.  However, we noticed when we played the song below that he would fly out from the bedroom with the same expectant look and pace the cabinets where we keep the treats. There’s something in the song that sounds like we’re begging to unload treats.  Hence this is Kitty’s treat treat song.

I know: Cool story, bro.

No Comments.




hello world!

I’m the very definition of a shoemaker with bare feet children. It’s quite silly – I create web treasure* for other people! I’m an illustrator and graphic designer who project manages custom web development. The five thousand robots that land on my site each month will be happy to finally index text. Real content!
Haters Gunna Hate
Be prepared for entries that will bounce between topics like the internet, what the future will be like, food, art, design, home interiors, health and beauty (okay – just beauty), embarrassing things I’ve been photographed doing, and kitties. And rad animated .gifs.

* Alright, I don’t really call my projects web treasure. Anecdote! One day while brainstorming different ways to say web development project without making a contract riddled with redundancies (with my lovely former boss, Ginny), I came up with some really bad ones: “your website result” (omnious) and the second being “your web treasure.” I admit, there’s a part of me that does like web treasure. Probably the dumb part.

6 Comments