feed the animals

Holy shiitake, I didn't know that Barclay from Star Trek and Murdoch from the A-Team were played by the same actor. And that actor is Dwight Schultz, who I almost confused with Dwight Schrute.  TV character crossover overload!

Excuse this bit of geek spasm. In fact, this realization is a decade or two late. It's just that I was such a big fan of Murdock that I named my first pet dog after him, albeit spelling it as Murdoch. Murdoch was a black and white spitz-mutt and was given to me by the parents of this chick of a classmate in pre-school. That's what I remember, but I was five then.

I used to be such an, dare I say it, animal lover, even if, nowadays, I couldn't care less for PETA unless I was shooting the naked women in their ads. I think part of it was because my dad loved animals too and had them all over the house. We had dogs, birds, and I'm not sure, but maybe fish too. Even now, I think my dad can't wait to retire so he can have more time to hang out with his avian friends.

Part of it was also because I was fascinated by the About Animals volume from that Childcraft set of books that any self-respecting child of the 80's must have had. I loved that book. I had a hard time getting through the Reptiles and Amphibians section though, and that full bleed page of a snake's head still makes me shudder at the memory.  But the book fed my love for animals, so much so that I wanted to be, at one point, a veterinarian.

But then things didn't quite work out for me. I had a pair of white mice that I got from the pet shop. I got them a nice cage, a water feeder, and that little running wheel they could exercise on. They died the same day I got them. I put them in a little matchbox, dug a hole in my grandma's garden and buried them. The next day, the hole was there but my mice were gone. My grandma said the cat might have dug them out. Over twenty years later, I have a feeling that my grandma, God rest her soul, might have poisoned them, dug them out, and disposed of them properly. The hell she was going to have mice in her house.

Then I got one of those nice colored birds that they used to sell outside churches. It had a nice bamboo cage that we hung on the veranda. That afternoon, the cage was torn open, and my little colored maya was gone. Grandma blamed the cats again.

I finally got a pair of small turtles. I made sure I fed them right and cleaned their round goldfish bowl religiously. One day the maid said that one of them had escaped by piling the rocks up against the side of the goldfish bowl and climbing out. What The Hell, right? After a few days, the second turtle stuck it's head under the rocks instead of inside his shell, and broke his neck. I think it committed suicide, out of the sheer loneliness of being left behind.

Also, by this time, my parents had broken up, and I had to grow up really fast as a self-preservation thing. I also found books, comics, and eventually girls. I wanted to be a businessman, a lawyer, a detective, a spy. Animals fell by the wayside. I am still freaked out by reptiles and amphibians though. They're the worst things in the world.

HNY

I just wanted to make it to the next day, and I did. Thanks everyone, I love you all!

Not for anything other than I finding it interesting how I sounded four years ago:

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November 23, 2005

Lighting up Christmas

Aside from the chilly climate we’ve been getting sporadically lately, I know it’s Christmas when I start liking tobacco ads a little bit more.

I’ve always been a huge fan of tobacco ads, ever since the first time I saw the taciturn Marlboro Man ride his faithful horse across rivers and plains of the American Midwest. And they’ve been running that ad, in various forms, for practically forever.

There’s a huge part of me still wants to be That Man, weathered, strong and silent, but minus the lung cancer. There’s a part of me that still longs to be damned to riding my horse, all by my lonesome, with the snow-capped mountains of, er, Montana, in the background. (It’s gotta be Montana. I saw a publicity photo of Kevin Costner and his latest bride. They were married in his ranch in Montana, and it was That Mountain they had in the backdrop. A ranch in Montana with that sort of view is almost enough to convince me to eschew the idea of having the sea in my backyard. As long as they have wifi, a decent movie theater, and a nice, clean photo lab. And an honest-to-goodness Chinese restaurant.)

Back to tobacco ads. I like them even more during Christmas, when they show these nice log cabins with orange-tinted windows, to imply that there’s a fire going on in the fireplace, keeping the cowboys comfortably warm. I even like the ones by Hope, where they show a barkada skiing off a mountain (in Montana), and then coming together by the familiar fireplace to light a cig, as they drink hot choco in their nice, and neat sweaters.

I get warm and fuzzy all over just seeing these ads. And that's Christmas for me, forget the giving. It's the chance to dream about being the cowboy in Montana, or about having preppy friends over by the fireplace for a hot drink. It's the chance to get all silly and sentimental, without feeling stupid for it. Because, really, there’s a light of hope, when you light a Hope.

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I now know that Kevin Costner's ranch is in Colorado.

Alec Soth and Larry Sultan

Alec Soth is up blogging again, somewhat. He's a guest blogger at Little Brown Mushroom, an independent publisher. Very art.

Alec's last post is on the recent death of Larry Sultan, a photographer whose photos inform my idea of photography. He's known for photographing his parents and the porn industry in California.

The NY Times obit is HERE. More obits and tributes to Sultan can be found linked at Alec's post.

cable car

I forgot to tell you that, last weekend, I was in Hong Kong again. Last time I was there, I told myself I'd make time to take the cable cars on Lantau Island to the Po Lin Monastery. There's a giant Buddha on the mountain with a swastika on it's chest (apparently the symbol's very Buddhist and not at all racist).

Whenever I travel, I try to do a bit of the pseudo-cultural, touristy thing. Partly because I like taking pictures of people taking pictures (tourists!). So this trip to the monastery was it. Also, I've never been on a cable car, suspended hundreds of feet in the air. I have a heights thing, a real fear of it, to be specific. So this was supposed to be cathartic.

And cathartic it was. We got stuck in mid air for what felt like an hour, but was most likely for fifteen minutes. It was a bit terrifying for me but we've been in tight spots before (elevators, during fire drills), and I was really laughing at the incredulity of it all. We even have a video of the event for posterity, and for leaving behind messages, just in case the cable snapped.

But we made it, we're alive, and that cable car fiasco made it to the top five moments of 2009.