but…uh…

Somehow, I made it to my 35th year without ever having carved a pumpkin.

I’m not exactly sure how that is. I haven’t actively avoided it. I’ve seen people carving around me. Last year I even saw a million pumpkins being carved at the Boston common. When my band did Halloween shows, I remember Jason carving pumpkins. Yet, for some reason, I was never around to pick up a knife. I don’t know why that is.

Since Emily is a huge fan of Halloween, this year would be different. After a trip to the pumpkin patch a couple of weeks ago, everyone was going to be carving some faces. Now, what kind of pumpkin should I do? I thought about a pirate. Or maybe something computer related. Is it web 2.0 if it has rounded corners and spelled like Pumpkn? Decisions, decisions. Then, as fate would have it, I saw these instructions appear in my RSS feeds. Perfect.

Who cares that I’d never carved a pumpkin before? What does it matter that aside from some smelly clay during a game of Cranium I have no sculpting experience whatsoever? Who needs talent when you’ve got enthusiasm? This wouldn’t be the first time I bit off more than I could chew.

First things first. I needed an inspiration and this picture was it. Emily had sent me this picture from her camera phone a couple of years ago and I always liked it. It was super silly, but awfully cute. I was sure that carved into a pumpkin it could be pretty scary, too.

Working from a printout of the image, I removed the brightest portions of the image.

Unlike a normal jack-o-lantern. You’ve got to carve your gourd in a dark room with a light inside the pumpkin. You aren’t carving like a normal sculpture. To make items lighter, you have to carve away the pumpkin. To make them darker, you leave them thick. This often leads to things being inverted. Stuff that should stick out is going back in, etc. But not always. It’s really a bit of peculiar optical illusion and a little tricky at first. In fact, I wasn’t sure it was going well at all until I saw this photo as I was carving. It looked way better in the image than it did in person.

The fact that it looked so good in the camera led to the brilliant idea of carving with one eye closed to see the image in 2D. I could then focus on the contrast without worrying about depth.

It really didn’t take as long as I might have thought. A couple of hours all told. Initially, I was trying to keep the subject of my carving a surprise. It was quite funny when the kids would ask me what I was making. “Is it a witch?” “It looks like a monster.” All I could reply was, “Sometimes….”

The final product is far from perfect, but I think you can definitely see the likeness. I’d like to try again next year, but I’d choose my photo differently. This image has a lot of fine detail in the areas where her nose is scrunched up. That area is really key to making it recognizable and was extremely difficult to get right. In fact, I don’t think that I did. The areas between light and dark were so thin that it became a bit of a mishmash. Coupled with the somewhat unusual expression, even things that are intentional can look somewhat like a mistake.

Emily-O-Lantern joins the others in the front window.

I have to say, the best moment was as soon as I put the pumpkin in the window trick-or-treaters walking by started noticing and taking pictures. They were talking to each other. “Look at that face!” “I wonder who it is.” “Do you still have your camera?” I certainly wasn’t prepared for that, but I have to admit it kind of made the whole thing worth while.

Happy Halloween!

Let me start by saying that I’ve never been one for decorating for holidays other than Christmas, but I think that might have to change next year. It might be wrong, but I think this is a great idea.

In other fun news, I just found out that the Matt Groening approved the filming of a live action opening for The Simpsons. Check it out, it’s great.

I’m sure by now that most of you are familiar with the phenomenon from the December 17th Saturday Night Live that is Lazy Sunday. 

The trio primarily responsible for that great video are new cast member Andy Samberg and writers Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone.  Prior to being on SNL, they were better known on the internet as the group behind The Lonely Island.  Those 3 are responsible for perhaps my favorite viral video ever created, Just 2 Guyz.  It’s just perfect in so many ways.  You might even say it’s Kablammo.

However, the one thing of theirs I can’t get out of my head to save my life is Wait (You Guys).  It’s impossible not to repeat it over and over.  Go ahead, click on it.  It’s ridiculous and great.  It’s also not safe for kids or some work places so proceed with caution. 

I’m not one to propogate stereotypes and jokes informed by various "isms" but… oh, screw it.  This is just the best blonde joke ever.

Yes, I’m really here. 

Now that everyone and their father has a blog I figured maybe I should get off my ass and actually post something.  So, I figured I’d do something simple.  As you can see, I clearly stole the idea for this return post but what are you going to do?  At least I’m writing.

There’s this really cool site that allows you to upload a picture of your face and it will attempt to morph it to match the characteristics of people that aren’t you.  Some of them work really well.  Others, not so much.

 Of the "real faces," I think the kid and East Asian look the most realistic.  I do find the woman one makes me look a whole lot like my sister Julie.  I guess that is just the proof that it is working. 

So, that’s all for now.  Now go try it for yourself.

If you’ve ever found yourself bored with the bulletproof accuracy and scientific rigor of horoscopes, I suggest you give biorhythms a shot.

Biorhythms. I haven’t thought about these things once since learning to plot and compare them at some point in middle school. They’re one of those peculiar things buried deep enough in the grey matter to avoid recall, but always at the ready to be recognized when least expected. Like yesterday, when searching for Konfabulator widgets and finding one designed to track the emotional, physical, and mental cycles that were started on the day of my birth.

Interest piqued, some reading and Googling refreshed my memory. A biorhythm is based on the idea that your body undergoes a natural, predictable cycle that can foretell the highs and lows among 3 different axis. The complication is that each factor is a sine wave running at it’s own speed. 23 days for the physical, 28 for the emotional and 33 for the intellectual. The times when your cycles are all high, you’re firing on all cylinders and life is good. When low, the doldrums are at hand. In between you get all sorts of complicated variations based on the addition of sine waves that only repeat as a group every 58 years or so.

The site I went to for my free biorhythm reading also offers the option to check your biorhythmic compatibility with a number of celebrities as well as with non-celebrities, if you happen to know their birthday. While I’m sure that Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Garner will be sad to know that I think our 94% matches are pure bunk, the idea behind this feature got me thinking about the idea of compatibility and what that really means. At this site, they compare how often the 2 biorhythms line up in each of the 3 categories. Since the overall length of each person’s cycle is the same, there is no variation over time when comparing one factor. For example, if your physical lines are completely out of alignment, they will match only the very small percentage of time when passing each other on the way from top to bottom and never come into alignment. This would be considered a bad match. The idea here is that the more often your rhythms are aligned, the more often you will be experiencing highs and lows of yourself and the relationship at the same time and will thus be more compatible.

At first blush this seems to make perfect sense. It would seem to be bad news if every time one person was feeling frisky the other had a headache or something like that. However, further examination of the composite curves leads me to another conclusion.

When the 2 cycles are most matched, this leads to wild combined swings in the composite curve. The highs are really high and the lows are really low. That may make for some excitement but what does it mean at the low points? If both people are feeling angry or distant, what keeps it all together? Where is the steady, guiding hand?

When the cycles are offset, the combined waves dampen each other and minimize the wild swings from high to low. When one person is perhaps least able to find emotional fortitude, the other has an excess in that area to draw from and cross that distance. Sort of the metaphysical equivalent of the cheesy Jesus "Footprints" poem. In this scenario, only one person is going crazy at a time and there is always someone manning the wheel. Each person takes turns keeping it all together.

I don’t know. While I have about as much faith in biorhythms predicting a successful relationship as numerology, it does make one examine which sorts of things should be valued in a partner.

Then again, maybe I’m just rationalizing.

At 3 days we definitely need some sort of CNN news crisis theme music. Something heroic enough to give us hope but mournful enough so as not to betray the gravity of the situation.

As you can see, I didn’t leave for Nashville yesterday but I will today. I swear. For now, I’m catching up on my bloglines (which I HIGHLY recommend) at Otherlands and I came across this article on Wired which comforted me. It’s nice to know you’re not alone.