Friends Don't Let Friends ...

Paint ANYTHING with a crackle finish. Before you ask questions, here's a crackle finish http://www.homedecoratingcoach.com/images/crackle.jpg

Don't do it. Yeah, okay it looks kinda cool, but there are two very major disadvantages. Firstly, to get a crackle finish to look like that ... well, it requires much patience, time, and discipline. Seriously. I'm a good painter, (not as good as my mom, granted) and I painted all of my furniture in my room with this finish. It turned out so-so, but not spectacular. Not stellar. Not fabulous. Just so-so.

So now, I'm redoing all of the furniture in my room, as I want it all to be black. Black is chic and clean looking. I figure, "Okay, I'll sand off the finish, throw on some primer and put two coats of black on." Oh... but this is SO not the case. I'll explain why.

You must understand what exactly a crackle finish is. Mine is originally a sky blue (where the white is in the picture) and a purple colour (where the black colour is in the picture.) However, after I painted the sky blue, and waited for it to dry, I had to paint on a clear layer of adhesive stuff that essentially made it so that the purple wouldn't stick all the way, which makes it "crackle." See where this is going?

Yeah. So you can't really just sand off the paint, because you have to get (okay, I have five notes playing over and over in my head and I don't have the slightest idea where they came from) that adhesive layer off. Ho-ho!

So. Everything must be stripped. And not just once. Twice! So here's the process you must go through if you have a crackle finish piece of furniture you wish to change to a sleek, single colour.

1. Paint on the stripper stuff (which, by the way, is the strangest, seaweed/oceany/old corn smell ever -- it's really screwing badly with my head. And you have to put it in a metal pan and not let it get on your hands. I put mine in a plastic pan and it got all over me... )
2. Wait 15 - 20 minutes.
3. Scrape off the stripper stuff.
4. Repeat steps 1-3.
5. Let everything dry.
6. Sand the piece of furniture.
7. Put primer on there (well, actually I think my furniture turned out better without primer).
8. Let it dry.
9. Paint on first coat of colour.
10. Let it dry.
11. Paint on final coat of colour.
12. Death from asphyxiation.

So in conclusion, with regard to painting furniture with crackle, or any related finishes, I advise highly against it.

In other news, this morning, some dude kept on asking me if he could "borrow" my credit card, and then if he could "borrow" some cash from me. Where do these loonies come from?

~musicalsparks

Man's Best Friend

Subdued Egyptian bitches begot sons
Who became friends of man, licking his hand.
The same hand that feeds is the hand that shuns,
And buries his best friend beneath the sand--
Seeing-eye dogs to find the other side.
Left to themselves on the dark, lonely ride,
Our faithful friends don't lead the Exodus;
It is their right to feast upon our hide.
Without disguise, nothing remains of us:
Bobby can't recognize Odysseus.

--
--
--

This is the first poem I've been able to complete in a long time. If it doesn't make sense to you, keep in mind that nothing I do makes sense. Plus, poems aren't supposed to make sense. But if you're REALLY eager to know what the hell this poem is about, read the following essay by Emmanuel Levinas--a man renowned for making sense by not making any sense. I'm pretty sure it's illegal for me to post the essay here, but Bobby wouldn't mind.

Emmanuel Levinas

"The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.

    You shall be men consecrated to me; therefore you shall not eat any flesh that is torn by beasts in the field; you shall cast it to the dogs. (Exodus 22:31).

Is the biblical verse guilty, as one will later accuse it, of attaching too much importance to what 'goes into man's mouth' and not enough to what comes out? Unless the sight of flesh torn by beasts in the field seems meat too strong fro the digestion of the honest man who, even if he is a carnivore, still feels he is watched over by God. This flesh torn by beasts in the field, and the remains of bloody struggles between wild animals that half-devour one another, from the strong species to the weak, will be sublimated by intelligence into hunting games. THis spectacle suggesting the horrors of war, this devouring within species, will provide men with the artistic emotions of the Kriegspiel. Such ideas make one lose one's appetite! In face, they can also come to you at the family table, as you plunge your fork into your roast. There is enough, there, to make you a vegetarian again. If we are to believe Genesis, Adam, the father of us all, was one! There is, at least, enough there to make us want to limit, throught various interdictions, the butchery the every day claims our 'consecrated' mouths! But enough of this theology! It is the dog mentioned at the end of the verse that I am especially interested in. I am thinking of Bobby.
    So who is this dog at the end of the verse? Someone who disrupts society's games (or Society itself) and is consequently given a cold reception [que l'on reçoit comme en chien dans un jeu de quilles]? Someone whom we acuse of being rabid when we are trying to drown him? Someone who is given the dirtiest work--a dog's live--and whom we leave outside in all weathers, when it is raining cats and dogs, even during those awful periods when you would not put a dog out in it? But all these, in spite of their misery, reject the affront of a repulsive prey.
    So does it concern the beast that has lost the last noble vestiges of its wild nature, the crouching, servile, contemptible dog? Or, in the twilight [entre chien et loup] (and what light in the world is not already this dusk?), does it concern the one who is a wolf [loup] under his dogged faithfulness, and thirsts after blood, be it coagulated or fresh?
    But enough of allegories! We have read too many fables and we are still taking the name of a dog in the figurative sense. So, in the terms of a venerable hermeneutics, more ancient than La Fontaine, orally transmitted from early antiquity--the hermeneutics of the talmudic Doctors--this biblical text, troubled by parables, here challenges the metaphor: in Exodus 22:31, the dog is a dog. Literally a dog! Beyond all scruples, by virtue of its happy nature and direct thoughts, the dog transforms all this flesh cast to it in the field into good flesh. The feast is its right.
    High hermeneutics, however, which is so caught up here in a word-for-word approach, allows itself to explain the paradox of a pure nature leading to rights.
    It therefore unearths some frogotten dogs lying in a subordinate proposition in another verse from Exodus. In Chapter 11, verse 7, strange dogs are struck by a light in the middle of the night. They will not growl! But around them a world is emerging. For this is the fatal night of the 'death of the first-born' of Egypt. Israel is about to be released from the house of bondage. Slaves who served the slaves of the State will henceforth follow the most high Voice, the most free path. It is a figure of humanity! Man's freedom is that of an emancipated man remembering his servitude and feeling solidarity for all enslaved people. A rabble of slaves will celebrate this high mystery of man, and 'not a dog shall growl'. At the supreme hour of his institution, with neither ethics nor logos, the dog will attest to the dignity of its person. This is what the friend of man means. There is a transcendence in the animal! And the clear verse with which we began is given a new meaning. It reminds us of the debt that is always open.
    But perhaps the subtle exegesis we are quoting gets lost in rhetoric? Indeed?
    There were seventy of us in a forestry commando unit for Jewish prisoners of war in Nazi Germany. An extraordinary coincidence was the fact that the camp bore the number 1492, the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain under the Catholic Ferdinand V. The French uniform still protected us from Hitlerian violence. But the other men, called free, who had dealings with us or gave us work or orders or even a smile--and the children and women who passed by and sometimes raised their eyes--stripped us of our human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes. A small inner murmur, the strength and wretchedness of persecuted people, reminded us of our essence as thinking creatures, but we were no longer part of the world. Our comings and goings, our sorrow and laughter, illnesses and distractions, the work of our hands and the anguish of our eyes, the letters we received from France and those accepted for our families--all that passed in parenthesis. We were beings entrapped int heir species; despite all their vocabulary, beings without language. Racism is not a biological concept anti-Semitism is the archetype fo all internment. Social aggression, itself, merely imitates this model. It shuts people away in a class, deprives them of expression and condemns them to being 'signifiers without a signified' and from there to violence and fighting. How can we deliver a message about our humanity which, from behind the bars of quotation marks, will come across as anything other than monkey talk?
    And then, about halfway through our long captivity, for a few short weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered our lives. One day he came to meet this rabble as we returned under guard from work. He survived in some wild patch in the region of the camp. But we called him Bobby, and exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men.
    Perhaps the dog that recognized Ulysses beneath his disguise on his return from the Odyssey was a forebear of our own. But no, no! There, they were in Ithaca and the Fatherland. Here, we were nowhere. This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives. He was a descendant of the dogs of Egypt. And his friendly growling, his animal faith, was born from the silence of his forefathers on the banks of the Nile.

From Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism by Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Sean Hand. London: The Athlone Press. © Emmanuel Levinas 1990. 151-153.

Um.......

I love Judge Judy. The best part is when she tells people in various tones of voices that "Um is not an answer!!!" Bird is also a badass. He seriously rules. Today was the best -- I had Tivo'd one where she had to keep correcting people when the misused "loan" and "borrowed," as the woman kept saying "I borrowed him the money," meaning she had lent it to him. At one point, they were arguing (the defendant and the plaintiff) saying "I borrowed him the money ...!" while he said "No she did not borrow me that money!" and Judge Judy is rolling her eyes in despair. Priceless.

I love watching people get yelled at like that, it makes my black little heart smile. Same reason why Chef Ramsay is awesome too. I love all these people, there need to be more like them.

~musicalsparks

Watch this guy -- now!

Title says it all -- I'm serious, this guy is really amazing. It's a piano cover of Comfortably Numb by ear. Listen to it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_o26nDWj-o&feature=channel_page

~musicalsparks