not falling down

Hugner is famous!

People really like that picture.

After nearly two months in one sort of transition or another, I have achieved something like a temporary stability: I even bought a flat hard bed, manufactured (I am given to understand) by svirfneblin. All of which is to say my name is on a lease, my belongings no longer fit in the Fit and I like it here very much. I live with the very droll Kara, at least until she discovers I used to play Warcraft and kicks me out, and I’m slowly coming around to the idea of a bike.

I promise I’ll get the rest of the Hugner pictures up soon.

A cool thing about the emergent behavior generated by Flickr’s embedded Creative Commons licensing: people can actually find your stuff and reuse it at will, the way CC was intended to work. That means that this year, my pictures have shown up in an abridged article about the scientific accuracy of the animals in 10,000 BC, a newsblog post about a stupid person claiming to have a phobia of little people, and an opinion piece about HIPAA usage from the father of a kid with ASD.

I like “Horse with No Name” so much, and I don’t think I have it on my iPod! Which means I can’t play it over and over again tomorrow, my last day of driving through desert. So far the desert has had the pleasant effect of being very pretty. It has also had the unfortunate effects of making me drink three times as much water as usual, making me run the AC all the time, and oh yeah, being like a fucking desert.

Also, it scared Hugner, and not without reason. I had to take these pictures from a rest area without him in them. Unless… unless he was hiding somewhere!

But today’s drive (the shortest of this trip) was worth it for the chance to hang out in Phoenix, which included my being the first Kentucky-friend to get a tour of the new digs of the Chinese Shao-Lin Center from its proprietors:

Then they took me home, fed me delicious raw vegan “cheese” “cake,” and permitted me to indulge my gadgeteering impulses in the process of watching Love Actually. Now I am falling asleep while writing this on their couch. Tomorrow is the big push: Phoenix to SF in one day, hopefully by 8 pm. It’s not going to be easy. Hugner, better set snuggling to max.

Day 3 also included Louisiana and Mississippi, but even before I left Alabama, Taylor and her friend Cheryl were mocking my car for its filthy appearance. When I took a closer look, I discovered something intriguing: that wasn’t dirt on it at all! It was pollen! My poor little Fit was encased entirely in a light, even coating of tree jizz.

Man, you know what’s going to be great? Not living in the South.

But after that: Texas! Things do not seem to be bigger in Texas, but Texas is definitely bigger than anywhere else. This photo should give you some sense of scale:

See, it’s like the star is Texas, and Hugner is Earth.

Kris and Erica were kind enough to put me up for the night, even under the stress of their still-in-progress move and its pipe-related disasters. While there I got to meet Oxford, who demonstrated that it wasn’t just Hugner, but all Jinxlets who make dogs want to chomp them. And snuggle.

That latter shot features not just Kris and Hugner, but the original Hieronymous B’Gosh himself. I’d label them but come on, they’re pretty easy to tell apart. (NO Kris is in the MIDDLE)

I spent the remainder of the day and most of the night trying to get out the other side of Texas. I made it just barely over the border before collapsing in Las Cruces, which is a little pilgrimage to me for Anacrusis-related reasons. Hugner was tired of the whole thing a mere five hours out.

After that he went over to the fence and peed because there was not so much as a gas station for two hours either way on I-20. Bad Hugner! But how can you even try to yell at that face?

Let’s out with it: in a blatant bid to grab some of that hot, sexy Starslip traffic, I am taking my new Jinxlet, Hugner, with me on the road across America. Now instead of trying awkwardly to take pictures of myself in different places, I can take pictures of the stuffed animal instead! No one has ever thought of this before.

Hugner was delivered to Louisville, so I don’t have any pictures of him from Day 0 (Winston-Salem), but there he is the passenging position which was once my purview on Day 1. Pretty cute, right! Except after that I had to stuff him in the back so I could put my giant backpack where he is.

The next two pictures are going to seem similar, but only until I explain that Hugner has a clever defense mechanism that makes all dogs think he is a chew toy. I’m… I’m not sure how the defense works. Up top he’s with the famous Brenna, and on the bottom he’s with my friend Taylor’s dog, Lizzie.

Once the trip is over I’ll put together a Flickr gallery of these, but even by tomorrow we should have a VERY SPECIAL Hugner road trip update! It’s a surprise, but I will say this: the next stop on our trip involves his home planet.

Of Texas.

Aha, Kevan points out that all the Shoot London photos are up, better illustrating the original-groupthink phenomenon Holly articulated and I repeated. It took me three tries to find our own picture on the Clue A page.

On Saturday, Kevan, Holly, their friend Ramesh and I shot London in an event put together by Shoot Experience. As with Hide and Seek Fest the weekend before (only a week? Gosh), this was something that one of my housemates discovered through arcane metainternet means. This used to say that the discoverer was Kevan, but I am hereby correcting it: it was Holly. I was a liar before! I will burn.

We got ten “clues” related to London, water and the area around the Tate Modern; these were pretty obscure to me but much, much less so to my teammates. Our memory card was due in at 5:00, and they sent us out at around noon. That seems like a lot of time, but we were one of 66 teams, all of whom were trying to come up with unusual ideas for the same ten things and get to them on foot. The walking took longer than any clue, and our best shots took almost an hour apiece.

We spent the last hour in increasingly desperate attempts to get anything at all for the last four clues, and ended up frantically paring 232 shots down to the required 10 on-camera, while speedwalking back to the venue. We were lucky to have time to back up some of the better extraneous shots onto my iPod before the culling was complete, which is why there are 24 pictures in the Flickr set (half mine, half Holly’s or Kevan’s). If we did it again, we agreed, we’d concentrate on getting really good shots for half the clues and not bother with those that didn’t strike us–there was no completion requirement, as long as you didn’t have more than one shot per clue. (Nobody else knew that either, which is why there were fifty hasty pictures of toilets for Waterloo.)

Those striking clues really did yield the best results. We won the category prize for clue A, about the Tower-Bridge-leaping bus, for which I think everybody did exactly the same thing–but ours was the prettiest.

We got some Norton software we didn’t actually need as a prize, but the peer recognition was nicer; there were only thirteen prizes awarded, and Tiny Richard Dawkins and His Komodo Dragon Band got one of them. (Holly will be glad to explain our team name.) There’s an multiple-city Shoot Experience gallery show in August, so I won’t be here for it, but I’ll make my housemates blog about whether we make it into that too.

Speaking of Flickr, Maria wants me to mention that I’ve been slowly, disjointedly editing and posting some of the twelve mojillion pictures I’ve taken this year; recent additions include touristy ventures to the Tower of London, Kent and the British Museum.

Idiotcams now completely redone, with occasional director’s commentary. I believe that just about doubled the size of my Flickr stream. It’s interesting to watch the annual picture count through the years: 39 in 2001, 89 in 2002, peaking at 115 in 2003, then suddenly dropping to 16 in 2004, 7 in 2005, 6 in 2006, and only two so far this year.