Tag Archives: pictures

In Soviet Russia, bread bakes YOU!

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So I just got back from lunch at Schlotzsky’s. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a deli chain–they make sandwiches and pizzas on sourdough crust, that kind of thing. Very tasty. I don’t eat there nearly often enough.

Anyway, the Schlotzsky’s near my office has a huge mural on the wall over the cash registers, which pretty much dominates the internal decor. It’s quite a piece of work, though I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

The style of the piece might best be described as “Stalin-era Soviet Russia mets American Dustbowl.” I apologize for the quality of these snaps; I took ’em on my camera phone. The more I look at this mural, the weirder it gets.

It has that kind of flat color scheme and weird perspective of the old Cold War-era Soviet propaganda, but with a few odd little twists that just kind of make my head go all asplodey-like. Take the woman selling vegetables, for example:

Doesn’t look too happy, does she?

“Things just haven’t been the same since my husband died of gout. That was in…let’s see, must have been the summer of ’02 or ’03. I’ve been chipping out a life for myself since then by selling vegetables I raise out back behind the shed, and turning tricks in town for fifty cents. Most times, the only thing that gets me through the day is quiet thoughts of suicide. My husband left a .12-gauge in the shed; it’s a little rusty, but it might still do the job. But then, who would feed the kids? Screaming little brats they are, and they eat me out of house and home. I could give them to my sister, before I do the deed, but you know, she just hasn’t been the same since Bobby went to jail. What? Oh, yes, three cents.”

Now the baker, on the other hand:

“I bake bread! Good bread, for strong people! My bread feeds workers in glorious Worker’s Paradise! Much bread, for day of Soviet triumph!”

Except that, y’know, his eyes are closed. He still sees images of his father, up against the wall, cut down in a hail of gunfire after the Revolution. But it had to be done; all the bourgeoise stock brokers getting fat off the backs of the proletariat needed to be swept aside to give way for glorious worker’s paradise. He still remembers the family mansion in the country, and when he returns home every evening to his cubicle in worker’s dormitory #137, he stares at the blank wall and sobs…

Origin of Species

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Evolution of the human species

I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately thinking about anti-intellectualism in all its various forms, after I read a conversation thread about evolution on a different forum in which one poster summed up the “arguments” (if they could be called that) in the creationist crowd by saying something along the lines of “Evolution is just another way that evil scientists try to rob humanity of its specialness.”

That’s a telling idea, and its something I’ve talked about before, but it’s been pressing in on my consciousness again these days. I don’t really have time to write another in-depth post at the moment, but it was fun putting this pic together. 🙂

Leaving work this evening

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You can’t tell from this picture, but it’s snowing. Quite hard. By the time I got home, there was white, fluffy powder shrouding everything.

The house on the rock

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When I was last in Chicago, dayo and I drove about three hours into Wisconsin to see a house.

Not just any house. To understand this particular house, imagine that you were a space alien. Imagine that you came from a strange culture that did not build buildings. Maybe you lived in caves, or, I dunno, burrowed parasitically into the flesh of gigantic alien space walruses or something. Or maybe you lived in trees like the elves in The Lord of the Rings, and went everywhere barefoot because your fantastically advanced magic hadn’t ever got so far as to develop shoes.

Anyway, the point is that you don’t build buildings. And then, let’s suppose you’d heard of a thing called a “house,” which was an enclosed structure divided into “rooms.” Armed with this knowledge, you set out to design and build a house, but you weren’t quite clear on what exactly a “room” was.

If you were this space alien, the house that you built would probably be The House on the Rock. The Web site and the brochures describe it as the “grand vision” of a guy named Alex Jordan, but I’d say it’s not so much a “grand vision” as it is a study in ad-hoc chaos and arguably the world’s greatest monument to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It’s an enclosed structure. It’s probably about a hundred thousand square feet or so, and it’s three stories tall, more or less. I say “more or less” because it wasn’t so much “designed” as it was thrown together over time by a man whose grasp of architecture and construction was theoretical at best, and the result is…um, well, it’s hard to actually call it a building, really.

You go in, and you find that it’s a hallway. It’s kind of like being inside a living organism, like the organic space ship on that science fiction TV series whose name I can’t remember with the one chick who’s really hot and shoots lots of people, only more so. The hallway winds and twists and ascends and descends more or less at random, and occasionally it widens out into a place with a bed, or a table, or some other object of furniture you might expect to find in a domicile. It’s hard to say how many rooms there are in this house, because the house doesn’t really do “rooms.” Wide spots in the hallway-tunnel-alien-innards-thing pass for rooms, for the most part, and going from one place to another sometimes involves taking a route that’s…unexpected.

I took many pictures, and they’re very large. For those of you who don’t mind the crushing bandwidth: onward!

Chocolate!

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Back from Chicago. While I was there, dayo took me to a place that sells hot chocolate.

Now, this was not any ordinary place selling hot chocolate, mind you. Many places sell hot chocolate–Starbuck’s, grocery stores, even Amazon.com. But this place offered hot chocolate that was different. Better. Beyond the ordinary. I knew something as up when I saw the sign outside the door. It proclaimed, in neon green dry erase marker on shiny blackness, “Our chocolate kicks more ass than Chuck Norris.”

The place was Coco Rouge.

More Steve Jobs than Steve Jobs, more ass-kicking than Chuck Norris

At some time in the past, the place now called Coco Rouge was an alleyway. The sort of alleyway a careless traveller might get rolled in. The building was tall and very narrow, lit by crystal chandeliers and red neon, very BladeRunner-esque. One wall was rough stone, the others polished concrete like the floor. The decor might be described as Late Twentieth Century Pretentious meets Postmodern Gone Mad…very minimalist, very chic, very Apple. Down, even, to the black mock turtlenecks worn by the vaguely pretty, vaguely multicultural but in a non-threatening sorta way staff who took my order, and rung it up on an enormous antique mechanical cash register polished ’til it gleamed like a Terminator exoskeleton.

This was a hot chocolate place from an alternate future, a place like what Starbuck’s might have been in a version of reality where Apple, not Microsoft, ruled the earth.

I chose the house special. Select dark chocolates, it said, bitter and only slightly sweet, blended together to perfection.

Now, from that description, and the reference to Chuck Norris outside, I expected a well and good ass-kicking. You know, the chocolate equivalent of being hit over the head with blunt object and dragged off into some dark corner somewhere. I expected to wake up in an alleyway with a concussion and my wallet missing. That seemed reasonable, I thought, from dark chocolate, bitter and only slightly sweet, delivered in an insulated glass mug that looked solid enough to hit someone.

What I got was something else entirely.

The first sip didn’t blast me with Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! and also, Chocolate! The first taste was surprisingly subtle, complicated, with several distinct chocolate notes and none of the cloying sweetness and slightly burnt flavor you get from cheap hot chocolate powder. It was, in other words, very good hot chocolate.

Another sip. Definitely dark chocolate, heavy and brooding, with an understated hint of mayhem. This hot chocolate did not hit me over the head and rifle through my pockets; it seduced me, charmed me, lured me out into the alley on my own. Less work, you see, if you don’t have to drag your victim.

By the time I was nearly finished, I realized that I had been sacked by chocolate, so deftly and so subtly I didn’t even see it coming. No, this was not the chocolate equivalent of blunt-force trauma; this chocolate was more like the experience you get when you meet an exotic stranger in a bar, share a deep and intoxicating kiss, and before you know it you’re waking up in an alley with your pants down around your ankles and your wallet nowhere to be found. No concussion–that’s much to declassĂ©–but you still have no idea how you got there, or how you’re going to explain it to your partner back home.

All in all, a mighty fine hot chocolate.

DragonCon 07: People

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slouchinphysics. World of Warcraft players will get the joke.

dayo. With horns. She’s so ky00t!

Shelly, and the coolest T-shirt EVAR.

Andre the Giant has a possee

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Apparently, the Andre the Giant has a Posse crowd has made it to Atlanta. Spotted this sticker in Little Five Points a couple weeks back, stuck to the back of a road sign:

I’ve posted here before with examples of the same kind of agitprop in Tampa, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in Atlanta. I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the design work on this sticker.

Two steps forward, two steps back. That seems to be the general theme these days.

In the “two steps forward” category, I’ve finished the first go-round of the new SymToys site. I say “first go-round” because I have planned a LOT more content; in the interests of getting it online, I scaled back three times. Eventually, I’ll probably end up adding a very long list of kinky sex ideas and scenarios, several more BDSM tutorials (including a lot more do-it-yourself toys!), a review section, and a radical expansion of the flogging how-to pages. I’ll be adding a lot more photographically, as well, as I have time to do some more shooting–some of the current pages are pretty stark. (Thanks to Shelly, joreth, dayo, my non-LJ friend Stephanie, and everyone else who helped with modeling, suggestions, ideas, and proofreading!)

I’m very pleased with the look and content so far. It represents a lot more work than you might think. Check it out! If you feel up to it, add something to Whispers!

Now my attention has turned to the book on polyamory I’ve been off-again, on-again working on for quite while. It’s on again, and will be my #1 priority for the foreseeable future, with my #2 priority being to finish Onyx 3–which could conceivably be done (finally!) next week.

The “two steps back”–still dealing with all kinds of financial problems related to working for a small startup. Ugh.

Tonight I’ll be in Chicago to visit dayo! *bounce*

It’s shaping up to be a really busy weekend. Drumming and fire spinning (yay! I can hardly wait!) tomorrow; then clubbing at Neo. Saturday, we’re talking about doing the Ren Faire and then heading to GD. Sunday’s still up in the air, but I know that I’ll be having brunch with cunningminx at the least…I’m looking forward to meeting her in person (finally!). With a bit of luck, we’ll be seeing her before then, too.

I know that there are some other chicagoites on my flist; if you think you might want to hook up this weekend, drop me an email! tacitr [at] aol (dot) com.

Some time soon, I need to post a review of this:

I don’t normally gush about stuff like this, but… seriously, coolest sex toy EVER. Like, in the entire history of human sexual expression. Really, it’s that cool. dayo, I’ve already got it packed for the trip…