"The Old New World" (Photo-based animation project) from seccovan on Vimeo.

NYC (2)

(A walk through downtown, pictures by Chang:)

The 9/11 monument, partial view

Statue of Liberty, seen from the Battery Park

Cell phone use, skyline of Newark

The new World Trade Center 1

"My friends who live in the area, let me know! Is there some sort of zombie apocalypse hitting town?" --- Seattle 8)

 "My friends who live in the area, let me know! Is there some sort of zombie apocalypse hitting town"... 

The walk along the water front --- Seattle (7)

We're on 81 Vine Street, two blocks from the water front, which was remodeled during the 80's to provide the ideal outdoor experience of city living. We go for a stroll every day in the afternoon, especially now, with the weather picture perfect.

The Alaskan Way, on the water front, in Northern direction

400 meters into this (Americans are learning about meters), past Pier 69, where the Elliot Bay Trail begins.

Forks (2) --- Seattle (6)

"Forks (2) --- Seattle (6)"---we stay true to form with this incomprehensible title. Almost as incomprehensible as this sign...

...yes, YES, that's why we had to visit Forks, because the place is the purported hub of the Twilight franchise:

(This picture is mildly misleading...)

Forks --- Seattle (5)

Forks. Forks? Bear with us, we'll explain later (next post). For the time being, let's note that Forks is the most precipitous town in the continental United States, rain-wise. Precipitatous, as it were. It's perched between the Olympic Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. 150 miles to the west of Seattle. We must visit.

150 miles. That's a long drive. We must get up early and catch the 8:25 AM ferry to Bainbridge. That's the view this morning, from our apartment, of Mount Fuji Rainier.

Jamie 1.0 (teaser)

Today, our new flash story appeared on the pages of Gay Flash Fiction. Here's a teaser: 

Jamie

“I’m married to this gentleman,” I say to the immigration officer on SFO and point at Chang behind the yellow line. She beams at us and waves him forward. Some court has just overturned California’s ban on gay marriage.
“You’ll be staying in the city, right?”
“The first few days.”
“If you like go places, you must have lunch at the River’s End. You know the Russian River? She draws a map on a sheet of immigration paper.

*°*

We rent a cheap place in Guerneville (on the Russian River), an hour and a half north of the city. I’m working on my book, Chang is tending to the kitchen garden we inherited from previous tenants.

*°*

The weather is California-perfect and I’m sitting on the porch. I get up at 4 AM to write and can’t concentrate in the afternoon. The place next door is (even) more run-down than ours. And makes angry noises. It moans and cusses with the voice of a middle-aged woman---about---Jamie. A boy sits on a camping chair outside. His face is blank. He gets up and disappears.

*°*

Repeat, basically, for several days or weeks. We’ve met the woman in the meantime. We talked once, which was a mistake, we’re her enemies too, now.

*°*

“Jamie is a sweet name,” I say to Chang, “she must have loved him once.”

For the full story, follow the link. NB: The first paragraph is true-true. This really happened to us on our arrival in San Francisco this spring.

Find a caption

"They haven't built the Golden Gate Bridge yet."

Saturday matiné

San Francisco (10) --- Camp Meeker

À la recherche du temps perdu...along those lines: how does one manage to arrive in San Francisco? We apparently can't make it stick. So we're now in Camp Meeker, 1:30 hours north of SF, in serious Redwood country.

Easy

The view from the terrace

We already had dinner at the Bistrot des Garçon in nearby Occidental. 

San Francisco (5) Potrero Hill

Potrero Hill, that's where we reside, on 1229 de Haro Street. "Potrero" means paddock in English, and the place probably was a paddock before the city took over. The neighborhood is still Spanish (mostly).

1229, de Haro Street --- we're on the second floor, left (Chang in the left corner) 

Opposite side of the street

San Francisco (3) Flight 370

Lets start with a picture:

 Malaysia Airline advertisement (as found on Facebook; perhaps you can explain to us why a normal Boing 777 has only two engines, instead of four)

Flight 370, that would be Malaysian Air, the missing plane. Not Flight 545 to San Francisco though, because that would be Lufthansa, our flight from Frankfurt.

You guessed right, our conspiracy theories would revolve around sex and crime, and our departure would be supposedly a real story (I mean, we would start with a real story), told by a stewardess (female flight attendant) who enters the cockpit---spoiler alert---never thought about this, no word is safe in English---and finds the autopilot on, and---spoiler alert---pilot and copilot in the nude, and in a significant embrace. They got fired, supposedly, the---no spoiler alert---fucking pilots. Perhaps they went on to work for Malaysian Air, and---spoiler alert (in the sense that the remainder of this sentence is real silly)---and had it in their contract that they would have to fly Flight 69 only. No, that's not what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that one fine day, namely on March 7---spoiler alert---that they forgot to switch the autopilot on.

Along those lines. In the meantime, let's marvel at the brilliance of our colleagues from the Huffpost blog, who use the following picture---spoiler alert

"I wonder where they are."

---to illustrate a post about the search for the missing plane.

Next SF post here. Previous SF post here.

Not photoshopped

Downtown Los Angeles

Relax (Tony)

(0.5 million page views in one week. 10k likes. Where could that be?)

Adrift from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

Yes, it's San Francisco, CA, the city of our dreams.

The mice of the world are meeting to invent a worser mouse trap

Emma Thompson recommended it as compulsory literature for all politicians.

You is deliberate done hurt the child's feelins
It's set in the Okefenokee swamp, only a few miles from Waycross (where the offices of Doyle-Roy Hunnsbruck are located).

I is more the human bean type


And only a few miles from Monroeville, where Ben's parents live.

Pardon my beg to differmints, sir
We knew nothing about it, of course, it never traveled to Europe.

You is a mite loose in the flue
Pogo Possum, the comic strip by Walt Kelly

This is earthquake weather
These are a few lines gleaned from the strip

Don't seem my pot luck gone be so good
We'd love to use the dialect as well, if we only could learn it...

If I cooks you and you cooks me, who gone be around and enjoy us?
...perhaps after living a few month in Georgia, somewhere in a rural community...

Christmas is coming again
...where people are eager to share their vernacular with strangers?

Hydrogen, nothin' but the best hydrogen an' high grade oxygen --- a steal

Forget it.

Here are a few more lines:


We gone put you countin' snow Early morning volcanoes Oh, posterity has been dealt a cruel blow Oh, I knows they up to some sort of privacy It's gotta be did The mice of the world are meeting to invent a worser mouse trap

Walt Kelly

The Kingdom, debt, and Paul Ryan

We received several political emails from Perry (him from the Kingdom). In the first email, he writes:

Perry

On the VP Ryan front: He has our vote.

In the second, he writes:

The US problem is debt. We are floating in debt and O'b [Obama] is simply not willing to address the problem.

And in the third, he writes...

...let's interrupt briefly here, and go to a source that has shown it ability to bring a syllogism home, to quote a source correctly, and to win the Nobel price in economics, and this source writes in its latest post:

Let’s look at what Ryan's budget actually proposes (as opposed to vaguely promises) in its first decade.

VP hopeful Ryan

First, there are a set of tax cuts for higher income brackets and corporations. The Tax Policy Center estimates the cost of these tax cuts, relative to current policy, at $4.3 trillion

Tell me why America is the greatest country in the world

This is how Aaron Sorkin's HBO series Sixty Minutes opens, folks:

On the cover of the Rolling Stones --- no, wrong, the New Yorker

You get it? It's about Seamus, Romney's wonderdog, the dog that was driven by the future President on the top of the family car to Canada (a country with universal health care). After that, Seamus ran away. Want to know more about Seamus? Click here.


In her NYT column, Gail Collins remarks that "Neil Swidey, the Boston Globe reporter who first broke the Seamus story in 2007, wrote recently that he had been avoiding a return to the topic for fear that some day the dog would wind up in the lead of his obituary." Haha (means: "lol").

Egg on your face

"You are not my long-lost half-sister. No-no. Not you!"

Inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracteds (restrooms, showers, barracks, tents, etc.)

Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann have signed a pledge, which obliges them to monogamy and more.

Michele Bachmann (note the flag)

Rick Santorum (note the flag)

The pledge, in its preamble, carried the following statement (later removed from the website):

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA‟s first African-American President.

As to the pledge itself, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum "vow":

Support for the enactment of safeguards for all married and unmarried U.S. Military and National Guard personnel, especially our combat troops, from inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracted (restrooms, showers, barracks, tents, etc.)

You've any idea what this could mean, "same gender commingling among attracted?"

M& is glad to help out (ranking on the scale of 1 - 10)

Same gender commingling among attracted (3)

Same gender commingling among attracted (6)

Same gender commingling among attracted (9)