Who needs leeches?

If you need a quick bloodletting, go out and get a kitten. Yes, one of those cute, adorable little puffballs that attacks anything that moves, and thinks that a good way to get onto your lap (where there is an easy shot at your shiny glasses) is to climb your leg! And, if you loose balance, just dig in with those talons!

If it weren't cute, it'd be dinner.

The Secular Liturgy of Public Penance

You know something, dear reader, I have done some unspecified horrific things, not the unspecified horrific things that those articles, all full of lies, have suggested, but I apologize for some other unspecified horrific things.

The solution to the above, which sounds like some sort of spoof, but can be found here is just to have a Day of Public Atonement for all sports, political and media figures (music figures seem to be amazingly immune to allegations of bad lifestyles, in fact, it sells more records (see "Sinatra and self-enlarged ties to the mafia"), so they will not be allowed to participate in this).

It is sort of like my proposed food label for allergens:

Warning. This product contains every allergen known to man. You will die if you eat it. You will die if you don't eat it. This product is not sold to be consumed, but only for entertainment purposes. Do not actually open this product.

Cinco de Mayo

I am torn on this one. On the one hand, one should never celebrate the defeat of a Hapsburg, especially knowing the disaster that follows for poor Mexico.

On the other hand, any excuse to drink tequila and eat Mexican food is not to be sniffed at.

However, I need no excuse to drink tequila and to eat Mexican food.

So, I will drink tequila, I will eat Mexican food, but I still say "Bah! Humbug!" to celebrating Cinco de Mayo.

Label Art

I like a lot of label art. Some of the most compelling images of California came from crates of citrus. My favorite Art Nouveau lettering is found on the packages of Italian sweets. I am no socialist, and the fact that something is designed to make a product attractive does not shock me one iota. Also, unlike the sort of feeble minds who take Ways of Seeing seriously, I can distinguish between advertising and fine art (and, yes, there are those examples where the line is blurred), and yet do not disdain one for the other.

And now I find myself doing a series of labels for salsas, which is fun and exciting on two levels. One: they are salsas that we are making. Two: we are targeting the market that most goes for the sort of label art that I like.

So, for the next week my visual art mind is going to be focused on the gloriously crassly commercial, and I love every minute of it.