It has been simply ages since I have posted anything! Just to prove I am still alive, here is a video clip of Genevieve and I playing with the dog



Actually, come to think of it, all this clip proves is that the Dog is alive... Maybe I am dead, and the dog is blogging for me. Whoa... creepy...

I just hear from Aran that his 48 hour film, Inside Me which I blogged about the day before yesterday won an award for best use of the line of dialogue: "What would Elvis do?"

Time to get that WWED tatoo.

Last weekend I helped Aran with his entry in the San Diego 48 Hour Film Competition. The genre was HORROR

You can view the results here


EDIT: Youtube link fixed. There is also a hi-resolution copy at sadja.com

Be warned, it is kinda gory, and there are a couple scenes I find disturbing myself, so if you are not a fan of horror, watch this other film instead

Shapes in the clouds,
breath in and out again.

Exhibit 1: (Not my artwork, this was a source of inspiration)


Exhibit 2: (Not my artwork. Fenrir-Lunaris drew this. It was a source of inspiration)


Exhibit 3: (Yeah, this one is mine!)


Bob the Fighting Machine will cut you! Ya! Ya! Ya!... Can't... quite... stand... up... *Rrrgh!*

Last night I dreamed that I was walking in the dark, and I was attacked and bitten by a rather large owl. I had to fight it off with my bare hands.

I'm not sure what it means...

Other than that I now suffer from Strigidaephobia...

I'm pretty sure that if you were to walk up to me and hit me in the face with an owl, I would scream like a little girl. Yep, that's how bad it is.

Good news! The earthquake I mentioned the other day came and went, and thankfully it was a very very small one!

The US Geological service has a page about it here:
A microearthquake occurred at 11:08:23 AM (PDT) on Friday, June 9, 2006.
The magnitude 1.0 event occurred 4 km (2 miles) NW of Cabazon, CA.
The hypocentral depth is 18 km (11 miles).

By interesting coincidence, this earthquake occured on the grounds of Morongo Indian Reservation, so since we have now established that I have psychic powers to see the future, I ought to go to their Casino and see if I can clean up on the roulette wheel.

According to my calendar, there is an earthquake scheduled for 11:00 pacific time tomorrow, Friday June 9th. I'm not sure where exactly, or whether it will be a big one or a small one, but that is when it is supposed to happen. It is kinda unusual to be given advance warning of these things, but you should definitely take this last minute opportunity to prepare yourself. The Los Angeles Fire Department has a great website about earthquake preparedness.

You know, it is amazing. I had something like five full months of advanced notice about this earthquake, and it is only today, less than 26 hours before the quake that I bother to think about it. I don't even have a full quake kit at home (although fortunately, i do happen to already own most of the stuff on this list) I guess it is contrary to my nature to pay heed to the oracle.

Here is hoping the damage is minimal!

So I got to work this morning, and I was on my way upstairs, and one of my co-workers comes after me saying "Hey! Big James! I need to talk to you!", And of course I expected a computer question, but instead he says "You like cats?" and he shows me this box with 4 little kittens in it.

I made the mistake of picking one up and holding it and bonding with it, which made it all the more painful that I can't take it home.

So if any of my friends in southern California needs a small soft fuzzy mewling ball of PURE LOVE, tell me double-quick and I can put you in contact with Fred. Hurry, before they all go to some random stranger in the super-market parking-lot!

I have been terribly neglectful of posting pictures of my sculpture work. For more than a semester I have been taking pictures, but not posting them. Here is a piece I started a little more than a month ago and finished last week (most of that time was waiting for drying and firing) The clay is Black Mountain Sculpture Mix fired to cone 10 with no glaze.





Almost everybody who sees this piece says something about Yoga although I was just thinking of angles and curves and spiraling of limbs, and I do not believe she is in anything close to any known real Yoga position.

Nevertheless, I hereby award 100 genuine curvyness-points to any real person who can get themselves into this position.

Today at work, while I was eating lunch, I checked out the news stories about the immigrant rights protest marches going on today (Monday, May 1st 2006). An article said that approx 100,000 people marched at noon in Downtown L.A. It also said there was another march scheduled for 4:00.

The photos I saw of all those people filling the streets were so exciting that I took the rest of the day off sick, and took the Metro Blue Line up to L.A.

It was easy to figure out which way to go. I just followed this guy:



When I got up out of the metro station at MacArthur Park, this is the scene that greeted me:



It felt like the world's biggest picnic. The air was full of waving flags, and full of noise. There were car-horns honking everywhere, motorcycle engines revving behind me, and drums playing in several directions. voices all around me, and drums playing ahead of me. Every time a new crowd of people would emerge from the Metro station, everybody would let out a cheer.



I went west, the direction that the crowd was flowing, and pretty soon I was marching down Wilshire with everybody else. Ninety-something percent of the marchers were Latino, and almost all the songs and chants were in Spanish, but I was not made to feel out of place in the least. I know this was a protest, but it had such an amazing positive vibe that it felt more like a celebration. Almost everybody had an American flag, and there were a lot of other flags too. Lots of signs and banners as well, about half-and-half English-and-Spanish. I was delighted to be able to read everything. Although I speak almost no spanish, I guess I read it pretty well.



It was really hard for me to capture just how many people were there using only my little camera-phone. I took a couple video clips, but even those do it no justice. Here try them:

Video Cliplet, from ground-level
Video Cliplet, from the top of some stairs

My phone creates dumb 3g2 files, but I am pretty sure they are just misnamed Quicktime MOV files, so hopefully y'all can view them.

If you Really want to get an idea of the size of this, I hope you were watching the news. There were a ton of helicopters circling the whole time, and I am sure they got better shots than I did ;)

I had a wonderful time, and I must say, that if every protest was as positive, and peaceful and POWERFUL as this one was, the world would be a better place. For all of you that stayed home, you missed out on one of the most wonderful parts of living in a free country.

Now, I am going to bed. I marched three miles today, and jogged two miles back to the metro station. I am exhausted :)

This morning, a co-worker forwarded me an e-mail which included this photo, along with a heartwarming story about how a Tigress in a zoo, distraught over the loss of her cubs, was brought out of her state of feline depression when clever zookeepers brought her a litter of piglets to raise as a surrogate mother.



I for one, did not beleive the story for one minute. This photograph clearly exposes a sinister government plot to geneticaly engineer a new race of deadly man-eating attack-pigs for military use. Your tax dollars at work.