Raglan Mardi Gras

one day lucy sez to osprey  "there should be fortune cookies in Second Life" and osprey grabs it and ran wid it!  

she made fortune cookies dat breaks open and gives you a fortune when you click's dem (fortunes made up by lucy and enjah and maybe more peeps ... dey so funny!) 

somma da fortunes only makes sense if you hangs out in second life.

den she went charging on an made fortune cookie avatars we wears so we is fortune cookies in ossem red sneakers, and we was in da Raglan Mardi Gras parade yestiddy - best second life parade i ever seen! 

it wuz Mysteries of da Orient so we fit right in behind a chinese takeout float! 
here some pics.  hunnerts of peeps wuz dere!

~ mudpie

dere we is lining up at start

 

dual alarm cats

one cat misty predawn grey
striped with wet deep brown bare trees
the beech still with their tan leaves
that hang on all winter to guide the deer
pats my face before cold sunrise
crawls in as i lift the blanket
to a warm ball against my tummy.

sunlight filtering thru blinds
the tiger cat comes stiped like
sunbeams thru dissolving mist
orange shadows cross white snow
a fire beneath glows brighteyed
pounce! on the purring lump
beneath the blanket
morning is here!

Mars - another excuse for human curiosity

why does the japanese astronaut selection process involve origami?

who ate the onions experiment?

what happens if you don't bathe or change clothes for 2 weeks?

how much will NASA pay you to stay in bed for 3 months? 

what happens to your bones then?

so how do old ladies benefit from space research? (get it?)

how do dolphins have sex under water?

is that why they don't let male dolphins in the swim-with-the-dolphins pool?

what is astronaut chow?

what concoction best simulates human shit for test purposes?

what tests are those??

what percent of people can light their farts?

why is drinking Orange County's water kind of like being an astronaut?

did you ever think that sustainability engineering and human spaceflight engineering are just different sides of the same technology?

PACKING FOR MARS by Mary Roach - a book by a science writer who walks the fine line between making fun of and seeing what is funny about space exploration and the research that is part of it!

i loved this book, and had a new view of the value of it all... all the research spills out into everyday life. her last paragraph is surely thought provoking - to summarize, any money saved from not funding space exploration would not go to any of the things you feel it should be used for anyway!  you know that!  so why not play and learn.

oh just read it, you'll laugh out loud at sentences like "The zero gravity fart has been a popular orbital pursuit, especially on all male flights."

some bad guy has a car like mine

a DRUG dealer! or maybe a TERRORIST!  -- somewhere around here i am SURE there is one with a car JUST LIKE MINE.
  you would NOT THINK they would drive a BORING looking vehicle like a blue subaru IMPREZA station wagon.
(granted it does GO like ANYTHING!)
why else would the cops KEEP STOPPING ME? 
ok i WAS speeding, but not enough to be given a TICKET apparently.
i just got a WARNING. and then--
ok i went through -- i DID go through a red light when that cop was BEHIND me,
but i had never BEEN in that town before, and i DIDN'T EVEN SEE IT! 
and HE didn't give me a ticket EITHER, so it must happen ALL THE TIME THERE.
and then YESTERDAY i was stopped because my INSPECTION STICKER is over a MONTH out of date.
i forgot! and i can't SEE it because of the rear-view mirror HIDES it.
and yet...who NOTICES things like that UNLESS --
they are already checking out your car looking for an excuse to STOP you?
no ticket again.
you SEE?
they just want to look in the BACK...
see if i have bombs or bodies.

we were meant to fly!!

should second life be a copy of a first life? for most, it is.
most choose to be humans, have houses, cars, horses, dogs, even kitchens and bathrooms! crazy!
why walk when you could fly?
live in a house when you can live in a bubble, a mushroom, underwater, or on mars?
look human when you could invent a life form for yourself?
or - ah - live in the sky!  YES!  people DO like this.
we happily take naturally to flying and off-the-ground life.
here's a snapshot of the sky high above Dunvegan, a sim where i hang out sometimes, with all the hang-outs and homes people have put high above their land.

(people's sky places! click to enlarge)

Blue Lagoon

yesterday i installed phoenix standard on my old laptop. 

right away mudpie went to raglan to test it out, and ended up at a kind of charades game.

the contestant had to create clues from prims (simple 3D shapes) --

clues to the words or phrase the rest had to guess.

mudpie didn't know how the game worked exactly,

but got all caught up and correctly guessed one!

wow she won 25 lindens!

but then - uhoh - turns out she had to be the next one up!

how the heck do you create prims using phoenix? omg.

i did figure that out, and her words were "blue lagoon."

after a few false starts i managed to make a flat oval

and fill it with BLUE. 

then i decided to add water texture.

then i found a fish in mudpie's inventory and added that.

the fish swam round and round - and someone guessed "blue lagoon"!!

what i hadn't noticed was that the moderator, awenbunny, had

been hollering at mudpie in chat "you can't use textures!"

and then with the fish, she completely lost it!

that was totally against the rules!

luckily it was raglan, home of the fun-loving tinies,

so everyone laughed and laughed.

awenbunny said she laughed so hard her dimples hurt!

snow body

knock knock!

who's there?

Snow Body

Snow Body who?

's nobody gettin' to YOUR front door!

my front door -- good thing we haz back doors too!

after i opened the windows and shoveled awhile to keep them from breaking, i went off on my snowshoes.  wheeeee!

i was the first one out after the 15 or so inches of snow....ugh it was hard going!

painting the magic

"i hate to tell you this...but..."
this is what carpenters say to you when you get home from work.
that is, they do if your house is a little cape built in the 1800s.
i've been hearing it for years.
pull off a wall, some clapboard, some flooring, and it's -- uh-oh!!
one of our first carpenters was a young guy i'll call bob, mostly because that's his name.
carpenters here are like new york waitresses ...they are really something else.
bob was an artist.
we named our bathroom after him. 
i wish we had gotten him to sign it!
not long ago i went to his house on an open studio tour, and -- whoa!  $1000 and up?
wonder what our bathroom is worth now!
i love his paintings.  take a look!
i love them because he paints the things i love; 

and he knows how to capture the radiant magical energy of the world's display.

phoenix creates butterfly cat-woman

the viewer phoenix has been good on my w7 64 bit lappy, so based on new info, i decided to get all my old viewers off, and then download the phoenix 818 SSE2 viewer.
it worked beautifully! looks so good, and so far not crashy and stuff rezzes!  here's a picture...(it dint make me a better photographer)

HOWEVER i must have deleted a cache or failed to create a separate cache or SOMETHING!  because....
when i logged into my old 32 bit lappy on SL, i got a little of my current fairy look, plus a little of my new year's eve tiny tiger look all jumbled together!  what a hoot!

chilblains?

for years i've heard people discuss painful finger cracks they get in winter, and what to do about them.
i never experienced it until this week, when suddenly my right thumb got one!
first stop - google!
is it chilblains?
is it really?
wow!
didn't i read that word in some musty book we had to read in 6th grade about dreary new england depressives?
wow, cool!
immediately i begin a series of experimental treatments.
honey?
may help but too slow and kind of messy.
my plan was to go on from honey to try yogurt, vinegar, and super glue, holding back on cortisone cream as a last desperate measure.
unfortunately i lost interest and just went with a thick layer of johnson's first aid cream (disclosure - i have some shares of j&j) and using my left hand for everything.
using my left hand is an endlessly fascinating hobby i developed the year my shoulder was frozen.
it's more fun than curing chilblains.
i love seeing what it can and can't do.
oddly, my wii bowling scores as a lefty are about the same as righty.
all in all, i feel extremely lucky in life to be so easily amused!

barney and hank a few weeks later

we did wonder for awhile if Hank would kill Barney!

we hoped they would become pals.

i think it has finally happened!

they fight like brothers, and play like friends.

it is still a circus!
a ruckus!
the cat-town races!

a keystone cats show!

but now it's a fun one.

auspicious coincidence or loss of entropy?

i wanted a joke-a-day calendar
but border's in mid-january had none.
so i have a metropolitan museum of art
page-a-day calendar.
i love it!
on my birthday i was amazed
to turn the page and reveal
a tibetan buddhist painting
tanka style
of Onpo Lama Rinpoche (1251 - 1296)
in his indian incarnation as
Jnanatapa
surrounded by
the progenitors and abbots
of Taklung Monastery.

how did they know?

jack frost paints our windows

 the responsible thing would be to replace all the big old loose windows in this 1850s house with smaller tighter windows. but we get so little light in the winter!  and when it's clear and -24 F (-31 C) at night, and the sun rises bright and low, our morning glows with crystals and feathers thanks to jack frost!  at least we don't have ice on the inside of the windows, like we did in one place we lived!

now at noon it's up to 50 on our glassed in porch, from the sun!  (the predicted high today is 4.

silence of the yams

clocks hum, cats ticking,
refrigerator purrs --
the snow makes no sound
                                
                                              ~mudpie

the monster is gone, but things are still bad!

the only vacancy in shanghai seemed to have 3 dead bodies stored in it.

so much for my whim to move back to the beautiful steelhead sims!

(click to enlarge)

things had not been this bad when i had my shelter open there.

a little research, and i discovered more than i wanted to know and concluded that i'd stick to higgins and raglan a while longer!

here is the latest from Dr. Beck 

driving route 1

i always think it should be fun to take road trips in second life, along the public highways.  but vehicles are difficult to control, and the scenery went by too fast to rez, so i didn't see much!
today i noticed a car in my lost and found, so i rezzed it, and decided to take it for a spin on rte 1.
driving seems much smoother now!  even getting a bit of the scenery and buildings as i tooled along!  sim crossings didn't crash me either.
the only problem was finding a place to stop!  i drove on and on -- no spot where i could park and resume my journey next time i logged in.  if i stop just anywhere, i have to go back to the beginning to rez my car.
finally i found a parking/rezing stop!  like finding a rest area on a real life highway!  yippee! 
however, i must say, it could win a prize for most boring spot in second life!

click for total boring effect - car was freebie from burning life or man or whatever it was

stranger than second life

Poorly Dressed

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan


another book i actually finished!  it started out as interesting enough to keep me coming back to it, although not compelling.  when the pages turned sideways i got really annoyed, then intrigued once i caught on to where it was going, then i skipped the graphs entirely.


but the LAST CHAPTER could have been standalone. i was totally hooked at the end. loved it.


(the last chapter has to do with a rock concert come-back by a long forgotten musician -- the music biz is a recurring theme throughout the book.)

harnessing the mind!

great news in medicine!

tiny mention in NYT science section a few weeks ago.

this could change lots of things.

doctors have discovered

that if they TELL THE TRUTH

then in certain illnesses, such as I.B.S.,

they give the patient a placebo, and

they say something like

"this is an inert substance, like a sugar pill,

that has been found to produce significant improvement

in I.B.S. symptoms through mind-body

self-healing processes"

the patients given the sugar-pills

in a bottle marked "PLACEBO"

reported significantly better pain relief

and reduction in severity of other symptoms

than those who got nothing.

not just a little better!

"The magnitude of effect here is very large."

said Dr Ted J Kaptchuck a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

think of it!

trigger the mind-body self-healing process

by giving a pill!

Winter's Bone

a beautiful movie on many levels.

kinship, clan, crystal meth and above all, What Is.

the young heroine stays the path

avoids the pitfalls

goes through the trials

she does not have a scar on her forehead

well actually maybe she does by the end!

all in the stark color-richness of

children's book paintings.

if only Howard Frank Mosher's books

could have been movified so well.

if you thought the beans of egypt maine was

a depressing book, instead of a book about

real people and their lives, skip this movie!

i don't live in the ozarks, 

yet i know these people -

some of them are my neighbors.