I'm totally excited for this IFC show!

On June 24, 2011, IFC will premiere the new show Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings. Now the premise of this show--it follows two indie commercial makers who make and love wacky local TV commercials--is already wonderful. What makes me totally excited for it though is that, according to the trailer, they appear to do a commercial for Super Shmuttle!!!
I heart Super Shmuttle for oh-so many reasons. My dear friend Anne was a client and huge supporter of Judy Rudin and her dogcare business in Los Angeles. Judy was, in fact, a favorite of Nemo, one of my most beloved canine friends. Since Nemo passed away several years ago, Judy's business has taken off and become the Super Shmuttle, complete with artwork by my favorite OC artist Shag. I think Judy has a dream job--picking up pooches and ferrying them to parks and canyons for walks and wags and so forth. I'd be her intern any day! So I'm super-happy to see that she and her pack might be on IFC soon. As Anne might have said, "Woof!"
My own gorgeous PWD Allie would adore a day in the Shmuttle.

Best Website Ever!

I love this site. It has everything I adore about the internet--user-submitted content, horrific images produced unintentionally, and a celebration of embarrassing, unplanned moments. What's not to love?
Awkward Family Photos
I found it via BBC via today's Since You Asked column by Cary Tennis on Salon.com. I've been reading Cary's columns since the late 1990s and he is a brilliant writer and someone who has been through much and learned from it. I really admire him and adore his writing voice, which is simultaneously smart, real, literate and empathetic. Good stuff. I can't believe how long he has been doing this column (with breaks for serious life-threatening illness). He took it over after Garrison Keillor stopped writing his Ask Mr. Blue column for Salon, back in the day (as they say).
In honor of Awkward Family Photos I'm including my own awkward self-portrait. Call it "SCMY as TinTin, or My Hair After a Night in New Orleans."

Garden update

I planted some of my tomato seedlings this week--a Burpee Long Keeper, a Roma and a Super Italian Paste. Already in ground are transplanted Brandywine, Amish Paste, Purple something or other (a Frog Holler I paid $ for at Downtown Home and Garden), San Marzano. Sense a pattern? I like paste tomatoes for sauce and drying.
Also in this year's line-up: butternut squash, patty pan summer squash, blue lake beans, peas, black simpson and romaine lettuces, arugula, thyme, basil of different sorts, rosemary. Still figuring out where I will put the pie pumpkin.
I'm up to three raised beds now and have my eye on the spot where S. cleared out his horrible bamboo invasive plant creature. it gets good sun...
Also reading garden stuff at You Grow Girl and elsewhere.

Our House Guest

Pickles is with us for the rest of the week. Three legs and lots of fun...I think she looks a bit like Nipper the RCA dog.

America's Subsidy Garden

From Huffpo, what the White House Garden would look like if planted according to farm subsidies:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/white-house-garden-subsidized-crops_n_869616.html

New Book Meet Book

Now that the winter term is waning, I'm soon to have much more time to really get cracking on my new book project. My last book project took an insanely long time (9 years) and an insanely short time (8 months!!!) to come into the world. With this project I'm hoping the timeline will be less " wibbly-wobbly, tiny-whiny" as The Doctor might say.
Right now the title of this project is All the world's a Screen: The Emergence of Internet Visuality. My plan is to analyze the historical emergence of images onto the Internet and the rise of moving images online, in conjunction with an analysis of shifts in Internet modes of access, software, and design aesthetics. And of course such a project would be no fun without a consideration of users online and their relationships with/in/as online image culture. And let's face it, online culture today=image culture=culture. Right?
Hopefully I have not bitten off more than I can chew. Thankfully I'm dusting off and rebooting some of my earlier work on online visuality in this project and I'm excited to go, go, go. Along for the ride this summer are Dmitri and Julia, my graduate student accomplices.

Hyperbole and a half makes me laugh...alot

Hyberbole and a Half is a webcomic I find utterly LOL, if I were the kind of person who used non-words like LOL.

1. The intentionally bad art is HI-larious, what with the kooky eyeballs of the heroine, which remind me of Admiral Ackbar, and the plethora of toothy grins in her draw-rings.
   
2. I relate to people who both resist adulthood and are grammar snobs. My peeps!
3. I also have a dog of the, um, mentally challenged variety who provides me with side-splitting laughs, total costernation, and the occasional dog-joy related injury in equal measure. Alot.