Love's birth

Here's a beautiful entry that elisem pointed out.

Retrench!

Rob and I hold money meetings on every Monday night, and we're in the beginning process of trying to reexamine stuff. We're going to be looking anew at our insurance (I'm going to be trying to get quotes from several new companies), trying to come up with strategies to manage debt, etc.

I'm looking for ideas: Give me your best frugal tip, your favorite sneaky way of saving money. Or can you suggest some good web or LiveJournal resources for me?

Thanks!

The Sloganator

I hesitated over posting this one, because yeah, it's sorta unfair. All right, grossly unfair. And I do have conservative friends I don't want to tick off needlessly. But deep down in the darkest corners of my soul, it strikes me as hilarious. Who said that liberals don't have a sense of humor?

Earlier this year, the web site for the Bush-Cheney campaign - the real one, paid for by MBNA America and Richard Scaife - featured a "create your own banner" tool, where you could enter your own slogan and print out your own poster, with the Bush-Cheney logo, and a note at the bottom "paid for by Bush-Cheney '04, Inc."

Democrats, of course, couldn't get enough of this. The original sloganator accepted everything - then it started censoring profanity and words like "Hitler" "dictator," and "evil." Nevertheless, many clever folks exploited the sloganator to their own ends before its sad demise only a couple of weeks after its birth, and its mourners assembled some of the best for the slide show here.

[Warning: Politically biased humor, and at least one of the slogans probably not work safe]

Fish

Thinking about the book. It's time to start writing again, so I'm going to try to give it some attention every day. I have been thinking about the fish. I had always planned to set a scene, somehow, in the Frank Gehry Glass Fish pavilion (enlarged picture here). What I learned, doing a little sleuthing, is that Gehry is actually obsessed with fish.

Partly as a joke, an answer to his post-modernist colleagues whose recycling of old forms extended back to Greek temples, Gehry decided to challenge them to go even further back, to fish. He made a series of giant fish, in glass and other material, and realized the fish were more than a joke.

"After making them, I started to take them seriously," he said.

They became the symbol for his enterprise, his desire to create architecture that embodies a sense of movement and life. Gehry was also thinking of traditional Chinese landscape painting, how the suggestion of a dragon's tail animates a mountain.

See also the picture here. Still trying to figure out what the fish are doing in the book, and what happens at the Glass Fish pavilion. What do they say to Solveig at the Aquatennial boat race? What do they have to tell her that leads to the turning of the tables that defeats Rolf? What are the connections that Gehry sees between fish and architecture?

I've been asking it over and over again in complete exasperation and still don't have an answer: what are the fish up to???

Must do some more folklore research re: fish. Here and here is some thematic stuff for me to ponder.