Towse: views from the hill

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished me to the Seventh Level of Hell!

Here is how I matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

The Wave Magazine — a local Bay Area phenom — has an article by Seanbaby this issue titled The 10 Best Internet Fads.

Bet you’d forgotten about Bonsai Kitten.

Seanbaby tells us that there are 25,580 Google matches for “bonsai kittens” and 277 matches for “bonsai kittens” on the same page as “hitler.”

From the article:

While Japanese workers are slaving away for 22 hours a day, pausing only to rest in cybersleep tubes while they’re injected with fortified protein worker paste, the American workforce is angling its monitor away from its boss and passing around a video of a fat chick falling off a motorcycle. It is hard to quantify exactly how much better off our economy would be if our workforce didn’t have to spend precious time trying to download the Bananaphone song, but when asked to quantify the loss in American productivity, a spokesman for the Treasury Department told us, “I’ve searched for ‘Paris video,’ ‘Hilton sisters nude,’ and ‘night vision nasty’ and still can’t find it!”

Your tax dollars at work.

We came across an old woven container filled with small objects in an box of filled with stuff of mine from long ago, as we were sorting through things for the move and clearing up for the party.

The youngest was taken by a button I held up for him to see.

What caught his attention?

Something from back when I was his age, a button that looked like this.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

David G. Willey explains the physics behind four amazing demonstrations.

A family friend who teaches high school physics has been known to wow his students by lying between two beds of nails and having someone bust a concrete block on his chest. David Willey does that and more, and explains how the physics works.

Check him out: http://www.pitt.edu/~dwilley/bio.html

Twenty-five years we’ve been giving this party now. Twenty-five years spring and fall. We were giving the party before the younger guys were born, we were giving it while I was eight months pregnant, while the guys were in nappies. Back when, we started cleaning for it weeks beforehand because of the inevitable trash and destruction that two toddler types could wreak.

As the younger guys got older, they helped with the process and we got to where we started clearing up only the weekend before, with a final polishing a couple hours beforehand.

This year is different. The house is a-shamble. We still have an overflow of stuff from Casey’s place which sold two years ago which we never dealt with, just tucking it all away in any spare spot. We have added to that all the stuff from the condo that we cleared out and leased out earlier this year. Added to that all the stuff from the place down south, which sold two months ago, which we’re slowly sorting through. We’ve been toting boxes and bags to the Goodwill once and twice a week.

… but now we have a dollop of added upheaval thrown in.

We’ve decided … almost … to sell Dale.

We’re in escrow on a loft in Dogpatch that we found on one of our prowls a week ago Sunday. The loft is perfect for holding my books and all the stuff we can’t bear to part with that won’t fit in Hill. Escrow closes the last Monday of this month.

We’ve decided … almost … to cut our ties to this bucolic village nestled in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, this place that I’ve lived in for over a quarter of a century and which his nibs has lived in off and on for the last fifty-five years.

We’ve decided … almost … to stop the city-peninsula existence we’ve been living.

We’re talking to an agent we know, he’s given us comps, we need to get back with him.

We found out on Friday that our Dogpatch offer’d been accepted. We’ll need to clear out (um. de-clutter) Dale before we can show and sell it. (Have we really decided to sell it? Sounds like it. Yikes!)

We spent the three-day weekend clearing through stuff, sorting through a huge pile of kitchen utensils, recycling bags full of back issues of magazines that I’ve been saving for decades, tossing out plastic plant pots, boxing up books.

The house is more a-shamble than it’s ever been and the party is Friday 7:30P and I am on the hook to finish the clearing up in time for the spring fling and we just got a call from Bay Alarm that the alarm’s gone off at Hill and I need to go check up on what’s happening.

Aaaaarrrgh …

If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because …

One of the wonders of the blogunity is finding someone with a passion that you might not be attuned to but which, once you read about it, you think hey … this guy really nails his subject.

Such a blog is QueerJoe’s Knitting Blog which I found via the just-up excerpt from Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook at Blogger Central.

Check out rebecca’s pocket while you’re at it.