The Best and Worst Cats in the History of Art; Proof of Secret Society?

I recently visited Paris, where I ate lots of Nutella and, even more importantly, saw what I believe to be both the best and worst cat representations in the History of Art. (Or, the History of Art That I Have Seen. But let's not quibble.)

Veronese's sumptuous Wedding at Cana at the Louvre (which puts up a great fight across the room from that smug attention hog Mona Lisa), one of my all-time favorite pictures, features such a realistic cat that I can't help but tag Veronese as a cat lover. That cat is playing with that urn just like a cat would!

Meanwhile over at the Musee D'Orsay, Henri Rousseau's Madame M. poses with that hideous freak in the lower right. Forget Madame M's enormous hands and displaced shoulders -- what about that freaky kitty? And yet, as with all things Rousseau, it is an appealing and unforgettable freak, and points for the ball of string. He was playing with his ball of string, then looked up and saw a STARTLING TERROR!

Both master cats are in the lower right hand corner of their paintings; coincidence? Both are playing, attempting to destroy the string and urn (of the world? Of the Vatican?). The Madame extends all but her middle finger toward the cat. The water that has just been turned into wine at the feast is near the cat. Are these kittyphilic signs intentionally coded into the paintings by the painters? Could Veronese and Rousseau have been members of a secret pan-generational Opus Felis organization? Quick, call Dan Brown!!

"Picnic at Hanging Rock": Disappearing Schoolgirls, Serenaded by the Pan Flute (Master Thereof)

I watched the most excellent and unusual Peter Weir 1975 suspense film "Picnic at Hanging Rock"; it's worth checking not least for its rather bizarre origin as a novel, and the missing last book chapter that "explained" everything but was wisely left out. Good on ya, IFC channel, for scheduling this one.

The action (such as it is -- girls go on picnic, climb rock, disappear) starts in an Australian girl's boarding school in 1900. The genius of this film is that the atmosphere of suspense and dread comes from the pre-Raphaelite beauty and dreaminess of these girls and their upright Victorian minders and the rugged working men lurking nearby; the girls with their fluttering white dresses and pressed flowers and invocations to St Valentine barely concealing raging suppressed passions and merciless personal denials; the teachers with their leonine updos and perfect posture and desperate attempts to stick a firm finger in the dyke of sexual awakening. (No pun intended; seriously, what do you take me for? You need a cold shower.)

Best of all, the dreamiest scenes are scored by the pan flute stylings of the Master himself, Gheorghe Zamfir. I knew there was something menacing about that guy.

Google Ad To Help You Survive Becoming Mormon

See that first Google Ad that showed up (in the blue boxes on the right) on the BBC News home page today?

Why? What is so awful about becoming a Mormon that you need a special kit just to survive the first 72 hours?

How will a radio help you?

How much does it cost...your soul?

Always be prepared!

Bully, looking klassy

Rough night, Bully? Too much PBR and spare ribs? For heaven's sake, make yourself comfortable.

Dear Starbucks: Your Pastries are Disgusting

Look at the size of these things! Are these pastries or really ugly decorative pillows?

These are surely designed to tempt every diabetic giant in the land.

Starbucks, must I remind you that you sell $4 coffee? These ginormous, cold, dense, sticky-icing nightmares are the stuff of highway rest stops -- not the kind with the Subway in the corner, but the kind with lottery machines by the door and chili dogs cowering under the heat lamp.

Listen, Howard Schultz: Unless you plan to stick a bowl of beef jerky by the register, you'd better get fancy pastry to match your fancy coffee. Either that or lower the coffee to 50 cents and pass the bear claw.

Seriously, America? Operation brand fruit flavored snacks?

Who doesn't want a "fruit flavored" (as proven by the pictures of actual fruit in the lower right corner; very convincing, Kellogg's) snacks based on a board game that itself is based on that yummiest of experiences: surgery?

I'm not saying it doesn't make perfect sense to make a snack based on a board game; I mean, duh, I'm eating Trivial Pursweets right now. No, the true stroke of genius here is in choosing Operation, because with that choice comes your cover boy; the face that launched a thousand fruit flavored snacks. Which makes you hungrier: the red nose, the crossed eyes, the mercury thermometer, or the Ronald Reagan haircut? I can't choose!

The "fruit" flavored "snacks" seem to be shaped like a bell, a dog?, maybe a turtle?, a bird, a red thing, and is that a lemon wedge? I don't know about you, but when I go in for laparoscopic surgery, I always bring my turtle and my red thing. I suppose the alternative choices were treats shaped like a blue bedpan, a green syringe, and a purple insurance claim. So, good choices, Kellogg's.

If Michael Pollan sees these, he's going to need a doctor.

Applescript for Journler: puts Contacts in Comments

Ok, now I'm just being annoying. I didn't want to be mucking around with Applescript at all, but Journler is so cool and so useful that I just can't help myself. With just a few little scripty tweaks, I'm able to use it as my dream PIM (that's a personal information manager for those of you who aren't annoying).

[p.s. Did you know that when you hover over the date of an entry in the browser list for a few seconds, the tip will show the amount of time that has elapsed since the date of the entry? So hover over 9/8/08 a few seconds, and underneath the tip showing "~ 8 months 4 weeks and 2 days ago". That is so cool! Make your savant computer slave calculate for you!]

Anyway, I used the script from my last post to import a bunch of iCal entries for meetings that I've had, each with one attached contact. In Journler, I needed to be able to see a list of all those meetings, see the date, see the topic of the meeting in the title, and also see the contacts so that I could see at a glance when I last saw who in comparison to everyone else. Because the contacts/resources have a many-to-one relationship to the entries, they aren't easily listed in the grid view. The entry Comments to the rescue!

This script makes a list of all the contacts names and copies it to the comments column, which can then be shows in the grid list and sorted on and so forth. Voila (hey, those French lessons are coming in handy, too).

All warnings apply; again, this was quick and dirty scripting.

-- place in ~/Library/Scripts/Journler
-- Copies selected entry's contact resources to comments
- Created by Courtney Lamb 6/7/09 (www.courtneylamb.com)
-- Use at your own risk!
tell application "Journler"
set theEntriesList to selected entries
repeat with theEntry in theEntriesList
set theNames to ""
repeat with theResource in resources of theEntry

if type of theResource is contact then
if theNames is not "" then
set theNames to theNames & ", " & name of theResource
else
set theNames to name of theResource
end if
end if

end repeat
set comments of theEntry to theNames
end repeat
end tell