Brian's quite remarkable blog of wonder.

Oh God, I love Pes.

His films are kind of like the stop-motion films they used to have on Sesame Street, except less about learning how to count and more about copulating furniture. I had to watch Roof Sex about fifteen times in order to fully believe it.

The "Short Shorts" are lower-concept but equally creative. I enjoy the anthropomorphic peanuts in Rogue Peanut and Baby Nut.

When your internet connection goes out, you go instantly from cosmopolitan to troglodyte. If you have no life outside of the internet, that is. Speaking of which, my site has been updated.

Lot of great musical stuff going on these days...
1) The aforementioned AAD.

2) Dirty Sixty's first ever live show is coming up this weekend. Saturday, 7 PM at Uptown Bill's (401 S. Gilbert St.). We're playing a short set, opening for The Michael Tabors. It's going to be interesting to say the least.

3) The UI Symphony concert on Wednesday. We're playing Mozart's c minor Mass.

4) I'm putting the finishing touches on the viola sonata I've been writing. It's a good one! It'll premiere next semester sometime at Clapp (I'll be attempting the piano part).

My internet connection's been out since Tuesday morning. Blast.

On Monday, however, I got good use out of it; when I spent the bulk of the day making an album with fellow cartoonist/musician/quiet genius James Roberts, who lives in the UK. Quite a bizarre project, really. I'm not sure if any trans-Atlantic albums-a-day have ever been made - not that I'm expecting this fact to win us the notoriety of a Charles Lindbergh.

All gimmickiness aside, though, it honestly is good stuff. I wish I could have contributed more to it, but I suddenly had to bail at the 12th hour when I realized I had to drive a bus in 15 minutes. One of my more left-handed moments.

Remind me to keep myself away from musical instruments of any sort when trying to do schoolwork. Idly strumming my ukulele while researching for my chemistry paper, I ended up starting to write a pretty catchy song about Perfluorooctane Sulfonate. I'm tempted to submit this song as my assignment, thereby making my GPA a martyr to the cause of interdiciplinary education.

Remind me to keep myself away from my blog when trying to do schoolwork.

I picked up some freelance work this weekend:

This is for my good friend Chris Renk, who composed a band piece entitled Metropolis Dawn a few years ago. He's going to try to get it published, and needed a picture for the cover of the score that he actually has the rights to. Let's wish him a lot of luck!

This drawing is inspired by Lewis Wickes Hine's nausea-inducing photography of the construction of the Empire State Building.


And why not show you the cartoon I submitted to the DI for tomorrow:

I had two ideas for a "bird flu" cartoon. One was a more serious one, and one was this stupid funny one. I've done a lot of serious ones lately, so I went with this one. I can always use the other one later, I guess.

I never pass up a chance to make fun of mascots. No doubt an angry mob will run me out of town with pitchforks for picking on Herky the Hawk, whom, I'm to understand, many football fans think is real. I guess I'll deal with that situation as it arises.

The vote has been cast. Public power failed, 33% to 67%. The champaigne glasses are clinking at the MidAmerican headquarters as we speak. Another year, another disappointment.

On a brighter note, the two council candidates I voted for - Amy Correia and Mike O'Donnell - both won (by a slim margin).

MidAmerican has spent $500,000 on their campaign to sway us to vote "NO" on the public power referendum (contrast with the opposition's $16,000). This campaign consists of commercials which essentially say "startup energy projects are risky, and you're all stupid and would probably screw it up!". But the thing that bothers me is that they've convinced everyone through their ads that the election decides whether or not to kick out MA and start our own utility. What we're actually deciding is whether or not to authorize an inexpensive study to determine the practicality of a public utility, and if it is feasible, to draw up a business plan to make it happen. In other words, voting "YES" is basically voting "Hey, let's find out what the best option is, and then do it; and be glad that we live in a country whose democratic process affords us the privelege to decide things like this for ourselves!" MidAmerican has spent half a million dollars to stop this, and that is quite shitty of them, in the present writer's opinion.

I'll stop the fist-shaking just briefly enough to tell you about a few things I've enjoyed lately: first, Jamiroquai's new video for (Don't) Give Hate A Chance. On the subject, Michael Tabor wants me to make an animated music video for his band The Michael Tabors. I want to do it, but I'd need to figure out new methods of doing animation that won't take insane amounts of work. I'm thinking Gilliam-style cut-outs.

Another thing I've been enjoying: Jamal's new album ion. It's so good. Buy Jamal's new album!

The Iowa City city council election is next week. It's probably not a little fallicious to compare it with Iraq's recent constitution referendum election, but then again I think it's interesting to contrast the level of support for the Iraq War to the relatively low voter turnout in this country. People shouldn't tout freedom and democracy if they can't even be bothered to visit their own precinct polling place once in a while, methinks.

And some great news: apparently my "eight week internship" is over and the Daily Iowan is actually going to start paying me. It's quite funny, because I honestly did not know I was an intern until I found out I was getting promoted to "paid contributor".



So this is what happened at Cambus today. Good old 71 caught fire inexplicably and is now pretty much demolished. I picked a pretty good day to ask for work off! (Here's a great picture of the gross melted inside of the bus.)