I really wish I'd brought the Polaroid with me on my winter holiday, because the results would have been a lot less anticlimactic than the actual first Polaroids of the new year.
I was trying to take a picture of the artist trading cards on the Polaroid first, but for reasons unknown to me, it malfunctioned and spit two pictures at me instead. They are abominations:
And since I hadn't taken a picture of the dog for a while, here is Sadie.
I think some of my gentle readers may not realize exactly how tiny the artist trading cards are. So here is a photograph to assist you:
The images as they appear on your screen are actual size, basically. Painting in acrylics at this size is a challenge.
I finally caved and got a Tumblr for posting all the dumb/awesome stuff I find on the Internet (and in real life (but mostly on the internet)) without feeling obligated to write useful commentary about it.
Subscribe to it and enjoy.
The "Finds" category will still be operational here, but it will only be used when I don't feel like exercising my skills in brevity.
Depressingly, Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby, died this morning. As a kid I was completely crazy about Gumby: I had the Gumby board game, a bendy Gumby doll that I took in the bath tub (which I think rusted the wires in it because it eventually stopped being bendy), smaller Gumby and Pokey figurines, and this one VHS tape of Gumby cartoons ("Gumby and the Moon Boggles") that I watched over and over again.
From that tape, in honor of Mr. Clokey, here is my favorite childhood Gumby episode, "Mystic Magic":
I'm actually not entirely sure why that one appealed to me so much. Not much of a story there! But it did include the terrifying prospect of accidentally transforming all your friends into inanimate objects, at least.
And Prickle! Prickle was my favorite Gumby character.
Now I think it's time we all also watched "Robot Rumpus" again:
I'm back home, and I've got a mean case of the post-vacation blues. There are two different ways to gauge how much I've enjoyed a given trip: how unbitten my fingernails look right before leaving, and how crappy I feel when I get home. Those fingernails were lookin' great before I went back to work.
I had a pretty excellent time. Saw family I hadn't seen since last year, met up with a friend in Michigan for an evening of drunken fun in East Lansing, and then took off for Toronto to see my friend Sam, who is always a delight (and his family is so lovely putting up with me, such wonderful people). Due to the way the weekends and holidays fell this year, everything was unfortunately cut a little short, but I had a superlative adventure regardless. We went to a burlesque show on New Year's Eve instead of just getting roaring drunk, and it was the best thing ever. Ribald entertainment! My favorite kind!
Sam got a new LOMO camera for Christmas and consequently he took a ton of cool-looking photos while I was there (including the one above). Check 'em out. The fisheye kind of makes it look like my eyes are trying to wander off the sides of my head in a couple of these, but the effect is pretty rad. I probably should have brought along the Holga or the Polaroid, but I was a little strapped for space in my luggage as it was.
So I had a great time. You may be wondering what my New Year's resolutions were, but I don't really believe in making them, so you will need to be disappointed in that regard. But here's to a new year and a new decade, hopefully vastly improved over the last one.
