Pastiche

It's been a very busy (too busy) month, what with two conferences, a trip to Cooperstown, a 50th birthday party, a wedding, and all the attendant stuff. Not to mention the Move.

So, I haven't had time to read a lot of stuff on the Internet; heck, I've barely had time to post. Even when I do see interesting stuff, I haven't had time to comment on it. So these are a few things that struck my fancy in the last couple weeks, in no particular order:

Comic book artist Alex Toth died recently. If you've never heard of him, it is very likely you've seen his work. Read about him here and here and here and here and here (May 28) and here, but, annoyingly, not here.

Serene, who BTW put together a lovely CD compilation, wrote a review of the CD I put together, and only gave me a 9 out of 10. Just for that, I'm adding her to my blogroll.

Friend Judy's personal fundraiser page for the National Kidney Foundation, in anticipation of a walk this coming weekend.

Greg's reading about baseball.

America's identity theft capital is Maricopa County, AZ, which includes Phoenix, though they're TRYING to combat it.

Lefty wanted to know if we do math equations. Gee, I do them all the time. Halving or quadrupling a recipe is a math equation. So is figuring out the floor plan for my office space where an inch equals a foot. More than that, I do square root with pencil and paper, just to keep my mind sharp.
And I make equations out of license plates; I try to find the lowest common denominator. Since most license plates are letter heavy, I assign numerical values to some letters. First, the Roman numerals. If I need more, I might use 13 for B (mush the numbers together), 3 for E (backwards computer lettering), 100 for K (kilo), 10 for O, 5 for S, 25 for W (V times V) and 2 for Z.

Even China Daily talked about American Idol, with one picture of the two finalists, and one large picture of the runner-up by herself.

Tosy talked about the Who's best songs, coincidentally the day before Townsend's 61st birthday. At the wedding I attended Saturday, Darrin and Suzy's first dance was to "Let My Love Open the Door", not the hit version from 1980 (it went to #9), but the five-minute remix from a decade and a half later.