The toaster is toast

Last year I posted about the ambitious prose accompanying my Toastmaster Toaster. Apparently the words were all the thing had going for it, since the thing stopped working without warning a month ago. Last week I finally got my hands on its replacement (with help from Alex, who drove me to the UPS depot). This time I invested a little more cash with hopes that I'd get a longer-lasting bread-crisping companion. I selected the KitchenAid KMTT200 (how's that for a catchy name?), in plain ol' silver. It's downright classy, if not as posh as my parent's KitchenAid PRO LINE Series toaster. It certainly recalls for me William Jay Smith's wonderful little poem "The Toaster":

A silver-scaled dragon with jaws flaming red
Sits at my elbow and toasts my bread.
I hand him fat slices, and then, one by one,
He hands them back when he sees they are done.

This was one of a score of poems I memorized in Mrs. Tobler's second grade class. It's one of the few that has stuck with me totally intact.

The Man Behind The Curtain

I just did something I rarely do: I clicked on a banner ad. I feel that I made a solid decision, as this website both amused and astounded me. Amused and astounded you ask? Yes. I was amused by the content, and astounded when I realized that it was an advertisement for a porduct of Microsoft, a company from which I've never before seen the slightest sign of a sense of humor.

DSC-III

While a handful of posts to this blog have included pictures taken with one of my digital cameras, I've yet to give the devices themselves much attention. My first camera, the DSC-P71, was a dual-graduation gift from my parents (as a congratulations for earning both an Associate in Arts and a High School Diploma in the spring of 2003). Its 3.2 mega-pixels served me well through my first year at Madison (including my first trip to Scandinavia) and my summer at Columbia University.

After returning from NYC I took my camera in for an alignment, since the blue was being recorded slightly offset from the red and green. Best Buy declined to fix "Li'l Digi" (as Marget and I had called it), so I was allowed to select a new camera from the shelf. Picking the DSC-P100 was an easy choice. The upgrade cost me the price of new batteries, but I was able to reuse the old case, which housed the new, smaller camera reasonably well. That 5.1 mega-pixel beauty served me for over two years, earning me a few bucks from James Block's political campaign shoot and gaining attention with a photo in a major newspaper.

Like the P71 before it, the P100 ended its days with me on the road. It was my constant companion in Los Angeles, but I made a last minute decision to stow it in my checked luggage when I discovered that we'd be flying home on rather small planes. I certainly regretted the decision when I arrived home to find the case in my bag and the camera missing from the case. My pilfering claim is still being processed, but I couldn't waste time in finding a replacement. Thus, on Monday UPS and Amazon.com connected me with my new photon-collecting friend: the DSC-T30. While I'm pleased that it boasts a cushy 7.2 mega-pixels, I'm still getting used to the feel of it, and it'll be while before I stop missing the old camera. I get rather attached to these things.

Form follows function

I'm still pretty happy with the overall appearance that this blog has had since late 2004, but its functionality hasn't been all that fabulous. I just couldn't put up with the linear archive any longer. I'm adopting this modified Blogger template, and I will attempt to tweak it until it more closely resembles my own design.

The Return

On my way home I looked up into the night sky and watched a plane descending slowly for landing at Hancock, its magnificently bright lights casting beams a quarter mile ahead of it.

Plumtree is back from Florida. I'm back from L.A. It's time to get back to it.

Driving Force

I've agreed to help out Martin Houge, the professor who led the Landscape in Flim course I took last semester, on his semesterly film series. This semester will be centered on Road Films. We finalized the lineup over the past couple of days. Our schedule will be:

07 Oct - Easy Rider
14 Oct - Two-Lane Blacktop
21 Oct - O Brother, Where Art Thou?
25 Oct - Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond)
04 Nov - Y tu mamá también
08 Nov - Stranger Than Paradise
11 Nov - Badlands
18 Nov - Vanishing Point

I'll be hanging posters and running the projector, which shouldn't be too bad. The fun part will come as we plan next semester's theme and line-up...