What I said

1. I need a mounted woodcock.
2. Someone stole the bag of extra body parts.
3. Why are you puckering?
4. I had to unplug the time machine.
5. Where are the monkey balls?
6. It’s between the barfing panda and the orange fuzzy man.
7. I’m really looking forward to mounting his head.
8. I just need to cut the baby’s face off and it should be ready to go.
9. My… that’s a lot of decapitations
10. “Oh no, I’ve lost my eyeballs!”

What it actually means

1. I was looking for a taxidermied bird.
2. Aside from being puppet parts, that’s exactly what it sounds like.
3. Fabric on a puppet was bunching unpleasantly
4. We use a standing hair dryer with the brand name, “time machine.”
5. I needed some wicker balls that we had used when building a set of monkeys.
6. Er… this one is hard to explain, except both descriptions are accurate and refer to toys.
7. I was looking forward to being finished building a puppet’s head so I could install it.
8. I was making a bloody child for a production of MacBeth.
9. A friend was working on project making thirty custom dolls. She had a whole bunch of headless bodies laying on her desk.
10. A friend was doing a sculpture and couldn’t find the eyes she needed to embed in it.

There’s a tendency for people to focus on things that go wrong in their life, or the ways in which they’ve made a mistake. On balance though, we get more right than wrong, it’s just that a lot of the things we get right we take for granted. Or they are too small to feel like pointing out. Or we don’t want to be perceived as tooting our own horn.

Well, darn it, sometimes we have to do that because no one else will. So, I’m here to toot my own horn and encourage you to do the same. See that measuring cup of rice? The recipe called for a half-cup and I had the 1 cup scoop in my hand so I just eyeballed it. Then I thought, I wonder how close this is to right, so I poured it into the half cup. Behold. That is an excellent guess.

How about you? Tell us what you’ve done recently, even a small thing, that made you think, “Dang, I’m good.”

So, I keep seeing all these people who’ve added “Hussein” to their middle name in order to point out the silliness of get worked up about it. What I’m wondering is, how many new babies now have the middle name “Hussein” for real?

I’m not even making it up.

I don’t know about you, but I need a break from my angst.

You know, I’m not sure who pointed out the video highlight reel from the Alfred E. Smith Memorial dinner, but I’m glad they did.  It’s an annual roast that features the two presidential candidates.  McCain and Obama each do a comedy routine, roasting themselves and their opponents.  Obama is amusing.

McCain is hilarious. Not only that, but in the second of these two videos, he’s gracious and reminds me of the man that ran in the 2000 elections.  If he brought that to the table now, I wouldn’t have become so apprehensive about seeing him in the White House.  I’m glad I got to see these, because it reminds me that the two men are human and that at their core, they are both good people.

The first half of McCain’s roast. Honest, it’s really funny.

This is the second half of McCain’s roast and, if you’re only going to watch one of these, you should watch this.  He is gracious and about three minutes in, genuinely moving.  I was impressed with him.

Here’s Obama’s.

Eric James Stone pointed this out and had I seen it earlier, I so would have posted this instead of the Feist video for songs that make me smile.

Deanna Hoak posted a music video today that, as promised, made me smile. Introducing the video, she said,

Music has a lot of power to affect mood, from soothing to energizing to frightening. Every once in a while, a song comes along that will make me smile every time I hear it. … Will you post a song or video that makes you smile?

And you know, with everything that is going on lately, posting something that makes me smile seems like a darn fine idea.

Your Mama is a very simple animation toy. It’s fun to play with as you manipulate each part of the face individually to build an overall expression.

There are times when explaining things doesn’t work and you just have to witness it for yourself. This is the ambient sound at my apartment today.

Bear in mind that all my windows are closed and we have no walls that face the street.

Edited to add: “After listening to this, record the ambient sound where you are and post it on your blog.”

I was heading downtown during rushhour last night and somewhat miraculously had a seat on the train. The usual crowd was trying to push in and this guy started shouting, “Move the f**k in. Move to the center. I’m getting on this train.”

Not unusual.

A tax broker type in the middle of the train shouted back, “You’re in the train. Shut up already.”

“Come on and make me.”

“Why are you still shouting? You’re in the train.”

The shouting guy continued unabated. “You want to come over here and make me. Move into the train.”

Tax broker was standing dead center of the train. It’s unclear exactly where shouting guy wanted him to move. The doors were shut and we were moving at this point, so you know, shouting guy didn’t have a case for being angry. Tax broker said, “Just shut up already.”

“You shut up.”

“Shut up.”

“You shut up.”

The three-year old level of conversation continued for a bit and then shouting guy sayid, “No, you shut up, you devil!”

At which point we pretty much all laughed. Shouting guy nodded, “Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about.”

A woman from another section of the train said, “They’re laughing at you.”

Silence. Shouting guy got off at the next stop.

What makes me really curious is where he came up with “You devil!” I felt like I’d run across a time-traveler from the past who’d been told that to pretend to be a contemporary New Yorker he had to be antagonistic but wasn’t given the full vocabulary list of expletives.

This game says it can read your mind. Go ahead. Give it a try.

A red-tailed hawk, apparently confused by a puppet shaped like a bird, swooped into a Midtown Atlanta parking lot Friday sending two workers ducking for cover.

Jeff Domke and Alan Louis, employees at the Center for Puppetry Arts, were in the facility’s parking lot at 1404 Spring Street taking pictures of a puppet designed to look like a brown thrasher, the state bird of Georgia.

Thanks to Deanna Hoak for the heads up on this.

I took Sean Markey and Beth Wodzinski over to Powell’s before their flight out yesterday.

I love Powell’s, City of Books. It’s one of the major draws to Portland — not just that we’ve got a giant bookstore, but that we’ve got the sort of literate culture that requires the giant store. In the science-fiction and fantasy section, there’s this column, signed by SF & F authors who visit. Inspired by Cherie Priest’s visit, I wandered up to the SF desk and said, “Hi, I’m the Campbell Award winner for this year. Could I sign the column?”

This was cool because:
a) This is the first time I’ve introduced myself that way and it was sort of like playing dressup.
b) I didn’t have to explain anything else. His eyes sort of lit up, he congratulated me, and grabbed the key.
c) My name is on the column at Powell’s! Like I’m a real author and everything!

I know, it’s ridiculous that it has that effect on me, but holy cow! Do you know how many times I’ve looked at the names on there and marveled?

Sean was very accommodating and took photos for me. Look! You can see him in the reflection on the column.