Summer Garden

Back where I was grew up in Texas, summer was a time when most of your garden would be strugging to survive in 110 degree (F) weather with little or no rain.

Out here, things are blooming :) The thumbnail of that lovely red snapdragon links to a larger picture.





In other news I'm still working on a head sculpture - taking digital pictures and overlaying the concept art to see where I need to adjust - since if I don't keep doing this, it keeps getting wolfier. It's not a wolf, and for some reason I can't seem to just eyeball with the artwork.

Grrrr ...

It's old news (happened Jan-Apr 2003) but I missed it at the time.

A family photograph of a mother breast feeding her child resulted in felony charges of "sexual performance of a child" and her two children being taken into custody of Texas child services where they remained for three months (as reported in this article and this follow-up). The image in question is reproduced (artistically filtered) in the article. The felony charges were dropped when the Dallas Obsever started asking questions about them, and the youngest child was returned a week after that. The older child is with his biological father.

Moral of this story: use a digital camera and self-service prints instead of film. This happened because the picture was on a roll of film dropped off at a Richardson, Texas one-hour lab in a drugstore; the clerk called the police, all of whom collectively thought a one-year-old breast feeding was pornographic.

There are times that I don't miss being in Texas.

On a side note, the original article is the sort of reporting that has become strangely lacking in the bigger news markets over the last few years - asking WTF when something that doesn't seem right is going on.

Pakistani Rumours

Can anybody point me to a source for this other than www.truthout.org ? (somewhere with a strong factual reputation would be nice) Right now I'm classing it as conspiracy nut ranting.

EDIT: The New Republic does indeed have the original article online here. No sources named, but I'd consider the story more likely now.

In Pakistan, security officials revealed that the Bush Administration was blatantly pushing Gen. Musharaff's government "to deliver" bin Laden or other HVTs - High Value Targets - "before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." As brilliantly reported last week by the often pro-Bush New Republic, a White House official explicitly told the Pakistani intelligence chief that the best date for good news would be the last ten days of July, just before or during the Democratic National Convention.

"It would be best," said the Bush aide, "if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July."

In case you're wondering ...

These mid-afternoon posts of mine are being done when I'm heating little bits of Roma in the oven to soften it up ... otherwise I'm beating on a large lump of Roma in the rough shape of an animal head and making utterances that would make a pirate blush.

I'm finally satisfied with the way the face and muzzle are coming out, after cutting up and rebuilding the muzzle - a lot like a custom auto shop turns a caddy into a hearse :)

Thank dog I put this sculpture on a turntable so I don't have to dance around the table to work on him (and it is a him), or I'd be throwing things.

Time to go work it some more - after I clean my hands off and get that bit of Roma out of my eye where I just forgetfully wiped it . . .

New werewolf flick

And it's on the net for legitimate download. 59.5 M as an MPEG4, just under 23 minutes.

No, I haven't seen it yet.

Werewolf Cult Chronicles, Part I: Chimera

There's also a web site here.