Noted without comment: kittens
10
Tag Archives: pictures
More back art!
I’ve written a couple of times before about zaiah‘s habit of drawing on me with Magic Markers. Last night she did an especially interesting bit of art that I have an especially bad photograph of; the one thing I don’t like about my iPhone, which is in all other respects a life-changing piece of technology for me, is the crappy camera in it. C’mon, Steve, you can do better than this.
But I digress.
Anyway, clicky here for octopus!
Noted without comment: Biblical marriage
Marketing Claims FTW
Last night, zaiah and I went shopping at Target for curtains for our new house.
There are, as it turns out, a bewildering array of different kinds of curtains, in different patterns and textures, almost all of which are stunningly ugly.
One brand of curtain carried by Target is Eclipse brand curtains, which are entirely opaque and block out…well, let me show you. Apologies for the poor quality of the image; it came from my iPhone. The bit I’ve circled in red is the interesting bit.
The wonder of the physical universe: Naica, Mexico
Naica, Mexico is home to a number of lead and silver mines. It is also home to a geological formation that appears to be unique in all the world: the Crystal Cave of Giants, discovered accidentally by mine workers in 2000.
The Crystal Cave is a gigantic underground formation containing the largest natural crystal formations ever recorded. The cave is superheated by a pocket of subsurface magma, and until recently was entirely flooded with water that was supersaturated with gypsum and other minerals. The combination of high temperature, superheated and supersaturated water, and time (lots of it–about 500,000 years, to be exact) produced one of the most mind-bogglingly beautiful things on earth:
The cave has been pumped dry by mine workers, who accidentally broke into it while mining for lead. It’s still superheated by magma; the temperature within the cave is a steady 122 degrees F with a humidity of over 90%. Explorers in the cave use special chilled suits and breathing masks, and even with this equipment can only remain within it for 15-45 minutes at a time.
The cave is doomed; when the mines are played out over the next few years, the mining companies will stop pumping the water out, and the influx of new, non-supersaturated water will destroy the crystal formations. There’s more about the cave, and more pictures, here.
I love the physical world. There is not a single day of my life that goes by when I am not boggled and awestruck by how magnificent this universe is. Should I live to be ten thousand years old, I will never, ever stop being awestruck by how awesome all of this is. Take a handful of basic particles, make them obey certain fairly simple rules, and the things you end up with are beautiful and magnificent beyond comprehension.
We, as self-aware entities, are the part of the universe that understands itself, and that one simple fact gives us incalculable value. I will never understand the tendency of some people to turn away from the wonders of the physical world into a tiny, feeble make-believe universe that’s a paltry six thousand years old and soon to be rendered obsolete by some invisible man with magic powers who lives up in the sky and spends a great deal of time worrying about what kind of clothes we wear and how we have sex.
The universe is incomprehensibly large and incomprehensibly fine-grained, ancient and mysterious and filled with so much beauty that it’s hard to imagine any person seeing it without being filled with reverence and awe. The more we learn about the physical universe, the more beautiful and magnificent it is. The desire to turn away from understanding the world around us and retreat into an imaginary bestiary of little gods and demons is the desire to turn away from the greatest beauty we can ever hope to bear witness to.
Urban Decay: Seattle’s Gasworks Park
Several weekends ago, zaiah and I went up to Seattle for the weekend. One fo the hilights of the trip while I was there was visiting Gasworks Park, a large public part down on the waterfront, built on the site of an old and long-abandoned coal gasification plant.
We met up with peristaltor while we were out there (and as a side note, if you don’t read his journal, you should–it’s one of the smartest reads on LiveJournal).
The old gasification equipment is still there, slowly crumbling into rust. Some of it is now fenced off, which is a damn shame–I’d love to spend an afternoon with a couple of models and about forty feet of rope out here. I’m told the fences are new; and to some extent, I can kind of understand it–if some damn fool falls off one of these things and busts his head open, I guarantee the first thing he’s going to do is retain a lawyer to sue the city, before he even gets stitched up, even though it’s not “the city” what put his ass up there in the first place.
Anyway, I spent a good bit of time taking pictures, because that’s what I do, and now I’m going to bust your bandwidth, because that’s also what I do.
Art meets sex
Back when i was still living in Atlanta, zaiah came out to visit a couple of times. During her last visit, I ended up with what I thought was a nasty cold but which actually turned out to be antibiotic-resistant pneumonia.
Now, I don’t know if you have had any experience with pneumonia, Gentle Reader, but in the likely and fortunate event you have not, I can inform you that it will cause certain biological urges of a licentious nature to wither in much the same way that a snowman wilts under a flamethrower. Which is a damn shame.
Anyway, while I was miserable in bed and sleeping most of the day, zaiah started drawing on me with Magic Markers, and took a picture of the result with my iPhone.
Since then, it’s become something of a standard part of our sex lives. She loves drawing on me, and I love being drawn on…and yes, it is sex. Many things other than the insertion of Tab A into Slot B are sex, legions of horny teenagers who’ve taken Purity Pledges but still want to get their funk on notwithstanding (“you mean if you do me in the ass I’ll still be a virgin? Oh, okay then!”).
I have quite a collection of iPhone photos now, which are all kinda fun and cheerful and which you can see if you don’t mind looking at possibly not-safe-for-work images that might include some portion of my butt
Exploring Portland: Bull Run
My sweetie zaiah has her master’s degree in engineering with an emphasis in water resource engineering, so last weekend she scored us seats on an eight and a half hour tour of Portland’s water collection and distribution network.
Which was pretty cool, actually, even if it did mean getting up at 7 AM.
Of the thirty or so people on the tour, I was the only one without a degree in engineering and/or working in the field of water resource management.
Portland’s water supply is interesting. The city’s water comes from the Bull Run watershed, which includes streams, rivers, and lakes in the Federally protected Bull Run watershed district–a largely pristine temperate old-growth rainforest.
It starts in places like this–streams fed by rain and springs. You can almost drink the water straight out of the stream here (at least if it weren’t for the possibility of microorganisms)–the water’s so clean that Portland doesn’t do any filtration at all. They chlorinate it to kill bugs, and they let it sit for a while in huge underground bunkers to give sediment a chance to settle out, but other than that it’s straight from here to the pipeline.
Well, with the exception of a couple of dams along the way.
And the dams are, heh heh, pretty damn cool, heh heh. Clicky here to see more!
Rural Decay
If you drive along Interstate 80 through Nebraska, you’ll see a lot of wheat fields, a lot of corn fields, and very little else.
If you keep at it, and drive until you feel the endless flat landscape pressing against your sanity like Nyarlathotep descending on a tasty morsel of virgin consciousness, you’ll reach exit 382.
There’s nothing there, really. A golf cart store, a gas station, a sign advertising an inn that’s been closed for years…that’s about it. There is also, just to the north of the interstate and a little more than a quarter of a mile from the exit, the ruins of a tiny wooden church, collapsing into decay.
The church itself is here:
When we drove past the church, I had no choice but to stop and photograph it. The ruins are beautiful beyond all comprehension. It’s a pretty hard slog from the exit, through thick brush, and a barbed-wire fence along the interstate prevented me from getting behind it. Plus, I got ticks while getting these pictures. Ticks! *shudders*
Some of these pictures would make awesome posters.
High Weirdness of the Week: Lawson’s Vaginal Washer
From the depths of Victorian sexual prudery comes this device, the Lawson’s Vaginal Washer, designed to clean the inside of one’s vagina by means of a perforated water-spraying tube surrounded by–and I shudder to say this–rotating squeegee scrapers.
I can think of about a dozen uses for this in a BDSM context right off the top of my head. Just over half of them involve joreth. That brings two questions to mind:
1. Anyone know some person in the Portland/Seattle area with the necessary craft skills to build one of these?
and
2. Hey joreth, when are you coming to visit?
