Topic: The New Box!

Good morning.  notice anything different?  Yes, that's correct.  The litterbox is a bit different.  It's going to be a bit different every day for a while.  It's like going into the store dressing room with a zillion new outfits to try on.  I have to try them all on and in different combinations to see how they look on me.  So I'll be trying on a bunch of new clothes on the litterbox to see which one I like best. 

Not that new colours or graphics will clean up the stench around here, but it will make things pretty enough that I hope no one notices that while it's new box on the outside, it's still the same old crap on the inside!

Still patiently waiting for spring to arrive.  There's plenty of rain, and it is above freezing, but all that's doing is turning the snow into grey ice pellets.  We seem to have two choices, above freezing and rainy, or below freezing and sunny.  At this point I think I'll take the sun.  I don't get soaking wet from sunshowers.

I've been gluing crystals to a few things, notably some pink stretchy velvet.  I've really toned down my original idea for the one top.  It was way overboard when I laid out the crystals before gluing them down.  And for me to think something is way overboard...you get the picture!   It might have fit in back in the mid seventies disco glitter era, but in the 21st century...it was a bit much.

The tank top only needs its eyelets now.  Everything else is completed.  The pants have all the main seams done, all I need to do it attach the waistband to the pants. No crystals or doo dads here, that would look excessively tacky.  The pants are tacky enough as it is! 

I forgot to offer my pithy yet pointed comments on the latest episodes of Project Runway!  i know Christian wins, that's no surprise and the fine art challenge proved once again that someday he deserves to take over Dior.  The fine art challenge was interesting.  I loved Sweet P's peacock inspiration and hated what she did with it.  I would have made a bustled and trained dress, short in the front, long in the back and used miles and miles of layered organzas in blues, greens and golds.  perhaps with a gold bodice.  They had three hundred dollars and you can get some spectacular fabrics with that money --or you can get large quantities of fabric.  Of course rami the draper picked the grecian goddess...no surprise.  This seemed to be the first challenge where Gillian wasn't on the verge of a nervous breakdown.   

Next week is the reunion episode where Victorya exposes herself as a first class whiny bitch.  It's also the first new episode of CSI:Miami.  A malcontent from the production staff has been posting all sorts of stuff about David Caruso, AKA Super Cop and his Sunglasses of Justice.  Most of it is the "he can't walk and chew gum at the same time and he can't remember any more than three words at a time" variety.  Who cares?  It's just a stupid cop show!  I still say that Caruso is this generation's Shatner and twenty five years from now there will be CSI conventions and a CSI nerd cults.  It's all good fun and not meant to be taken so seriously.  I assume we'll be watching Miami.  I wonder if they will continue with the planned story arc leading to Super Cop having a Super Breakdown.  (that's what the broken Sunglasses of Justice are supposed to symbolize; Caine having a full scale mental meltdown.)

So that's all for today.  Perhaps I will fiddle around with some more blog settings and hope I don't destroy it!

 

I've Cleaned Up the Old Box!
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: The New Box!

As we can see the old litter box has been freshly changed.  A whole new paint job, fresh filler, a pretty new colour scheme that will be changing a bit...notice all the little stitches that look like they are on denim?  It's sort of a sewing theme! My plan has always been to change the box when I got to the evil satanic 666 entry, and since that was yesterday, Today it's a whole new box!

BTW-If anyone gets any images of cats, tiles, pinks poofies, art supplies...anything that isn't denim blue and stitches, please let me know.  I'm attempting to clean out any old images and there's close to six templates I need to change, I don't think there are any residual images so tell me if you see anything.

In the coming days I'll be adding a few graphics and things, or I could decide this design totally sucks ass and I'll change the whole thing.  Who knows?

So the heat wave is gone.  It's now a brisk, cool 23 degrees outside.  Yesterday we were all doing a bit more than sitting on the couch sweating and watching Aqua Teens and Monty Python.  I painted the patio furniture, did a bit of weeding, cleaned up the kitchen and tidied up some of my out of control fabric on the table and got all my knitting needles together.  I don't know about anyone else's knitting needles, but mine have a habit of wandering off to see the rest of the house.  They don't get out of their case very often, but when they do, they are like two year olds who have to explore everything and get into everything.  So I found a couple in the basement, a couple in the dining room, one in the kitchen and the set of 15MM big boys in the back porch with the barbecue tools.  Knitting needles are not for shishkababs!

When is a horse not a horse, of course?  When it's a Zorse!  This allegedly is not a photoshop, it's what happens when you cross a zebra and a horse.  Talk about identity crisis!  But even in his worst moments he will never be like this poor catfish, who choked while eating a basketball.  The oddest part of the story is that the people who saved the catfish didn't save him for a nice cajun dinner of blackened catfish fillets.

Here's a whole bunch of  fractal videos.  Some feature that oddity known as fractal music. I like Julia set music, but Mandelbrot based music sounds...weird.  But not good weird, like Amy Winehouse, just weird, like a machine spit out the sounds based on its own gear ratios. Many mercifully, have no music so you can just enjoy the motion of the fractals as they fall to ever smaller and smaller pieces, then get bigger and bigger. This is part of an odd site known as sytes, a collection of odd sub-domains filled with links to other places.  This is from the Video wall page, and you too can make your own video wall.  This must me some type of web2.0 user content places that seem to be spring up like weeds in an abandoned Field.  The kitten videowall is sort of cute, if you like videos of kittens.  And who doesn't adore cute little kitties?

And that's all for today.  I spent so much time getting this new layout to work without destroying all 666 previous entries, that the morning in now all gone!  Later!

 

Mood:  celebratory
Topic: The New Box!

Once again I am writing in a brand new box. The first new box kept on crashing...at one point it crashed while in the BIOS setup! Then the hard drive started to complain...then we took it to the shop and now everything is working fine. Except for a few cookies that have been cleared out which contained a couple user ID's and passwords that I set up over three years ago and which I will likely never ever remember as long as I live!

I want to give shout out to a certain fan of the box who has wanted to know where I've been. Now you know! Now you can go back to polishing your bald spot.

So --plenty of weird things are happening in the world. The CBN/700 Club guy, Pat Robertson is once again proving why atheism is the only option for people with working brains. I must have been asleep in that part of sunday school, where they negated the "Thou shalt not kill" commandment. That one was probably declared null and void around the same time as the prohibition against boiling a young goat in it's mother's milk. I get so confused...first he says we must kill all those who espouse terrorism of any stripe, then he promotes terrorism by calling for the covert assassination of the president of Venezuela, and then says that the guy is a communist and a habourer of Islamic extremists. (In south America? A very Catholic continent? Where does PR get his news from?) and by his standards if we are to kill the ungodly terrorist who tell lies to further their cause then we should be killing him, but his holy book says thou shalt not kill but PR says it's okay because...Suddenly I feel like those androids in that Star Trek episode...the one where Harry Mudd has all those robots who do his bidding until they try to take over the enterprise...I feel like someone said something that doesn't make sense and my circuits are in danger of burning out, then my hard drive light will glow rather than flash...As I said, atheism is really the only way any of this makes sense. They're all whacked out loonies and should be ignored.

Speaking of odd experiences, There's an on line scientific study being done about Out of body experiences. It takes about five minutes if you've never had one, and about fifteen minutes if you have. Sadly, it doesn't give you a blog button to display when you are finished. The survey is found here OBE's are one of those things that are hard to prove and just as hard to disprove. As far as this skeptic is concerned...My mind is not yet made up one way or the other. Let's face it, the human brain is one place where the science is still in it's infancy. There's more we don't know about the brain that we do know. So OBE and telepathy are things that are still grey areas. I don't believe psychics like Sylvia Brown and her type, they're street corner magicians using tried and true cold reading methods. And when they have contracts with more personal space riders on them than Jennifer Lopez or Mariah Carrey, then you know what they really are about...fame and fortune and shameless self promotion.

My one son is obsessed with Mythbusters. His favourite one is Adam He will love this article in The Sneeze! The sneeze! Half blog half zine half bad with fractions! and if you weren't aware...Adam is also a Farker. So next time someone questions you science on Fark, it might be a mythbuster!

That's all for today! I have to get ready to go to Toronto Bye!

Mood:  celebratory
Topic: The New Box!

I'm scratching a way in a new litter box! A few days ago the power supply for our computer decided to sacrifice itself and fry its brains out to protect the rest of the 'puter from the evil power surge! Since it was in the shop, we decided to get more RAM and a bigger hard drive. We now have almost 200 gigs ready willing and able to handle whatever we throw at it! There are a few problems that we will need to take back to the shop, but with the extra ram and the new hard drive, it's working better than ever!

The local fabricland has some interesting fabric. It's fake fur on one side and fake suede on the other, like the sealskins that the Innu make their parkas from. I'd like to make a a coat from this, I liked the slate colour the best. The coat would be one layer construction and I would need to use overlapped seams because I would like the fur to come out from the seams, like in the authentic parkas. There was also a pale blue denim with sherpa type fleece laminated to the wrong side. I'd like to make a cowboy inspired coat with suede embellishments, which they also had there!

We were hit with a series of horrible storms yesterday. We spent most of the afternoon under a tornado warning...not a watch a warning. An F-2 touched down just north of here. A large wall cloud churned overhead for a while but I didn't see any funnels. It was strange, the front of the house was blue sky and the back of the house the sky was black as night. And radiating from the clouds was a "Glory" with brilliant silver beams going across the blue sky. Once the sun came out from behind the wall cloud the glory was gone. Too bad there wasn't a funnel cloud, that would have been quite the photograph, a black storm cloud, a wall cloud almost touching the ground, and a "glory" beaming from behind it!

Now, to weird links! A man's tie is the one place in the business world where he can express his individuality. He can express so much like, "I'm incapable of tying a knot" Or, my mommy tied this for me" or "What do you mean the skinny end shouldn't be longer?" That's why there is : tie-a-tie-dot-net!with everything you never needed to know about tieing a man's tie. Now you have no excuse to look like a slob!

The dumbest thing a woman ever has to wear is a white wedding dress. Seriously! I believe there is a certain hellaciousness to that dress know as the wedding dress. I never once dreamed of my weding dress, I didn't think of it as a once in alife time fantasy dress, (Not with the type of clothes I wear every day!) And quite frankly, I find large white dresses unflattering to all skin tones and all body shapes. And too often they are taken to extremes like in this site: What the bride wore! which chronicles the best of the worst and the worst of the best in ugly wedding dresses. With titles "sleeves as big as my head and as if my butt isn't already big enough...you know what kind of laughs you are in for!

I do, however, like boots. As a matter of fact, I love boots! I got my first pair of go-go boots when I was a wee lass of five. Since then I've been addicted to all boots and not just gogo boots. Here: is a website devoted to go-go boots > I would love to have a pair of classic white Nancy Sinatra go-go boots! I would love to have go-go boots in every colour of the rainbow. For a while in the eighties they were considered totally out of fashion, those little flat heeled cuffed boots were de riguer, but in reality, they were just the eighties version of the gp-go boot.

And now for today's totally loony x-tian site! Christian mathematics. It's not quite A+B=C therefore god exists. It's totally loony and has little to do with math...or religion for that matter! From the site:

Tools to Prevent Deception
Matt 24:24, 2 Corin 11:13-15, Eph. 6:10-17
In calculus we use technology freely; in particular to produce graphical images with graphing calculators and computer algebra systems. Technology is not perfect, however, and those who use technology must be aware of times when the graphical images we see are not representative of the true nature of the object. We use mathematical experience and developed intuition to judge whether an image is flawed or deceptive.
Satan is the angel of light and his disciples masquerade as "servants of righteousness." [2 Corinthians 11:13--15] But we read in Matthew 24:24 that it is impossible for false Christs to deceive the elect. We must follow the example of Jesus and use scripture as a standard against which to measure truth. We must also put on the full armor of God to protect ourselves from Satan's attacks. In both situations, knowledge helps prevent deception.

And don't forget to check out statistics! I have "mathlexia" but even I know none of this adds up!

Speaking of loony, how'd the foil beanie work? Still having trouble with mind control? Perhaps you should look here Radiation Helath Foundation! and see the truth behind mind control and radiation health stuff. According to the information packet page:

Update: Electroscalar wave jammer, force field, and energy sink: (picture)
If we create a series of alternating conductors (metal) and insulators (dielectric) (rubber or insulating dielectric metal), for instance 4 (rubber, metal, rubber, metal), which are energized with a whole set of full spectrum frequencies in parallel by a set of frequency generators in the magneticelectrical current in the conductors and in the potential electromagneticscalar wave voltages in the insulators; and which are grounded and connected to current and voltage batteries and capacitor plates, used to power the current and voltage in each of the metal and rubber conductors, we may then be able to channel all of the full spectrum of directed energies from the magneticelectrical and electricalmagnetic current, the scalar wave voltages, and the photonic into a ground, a series of capacitor plates, and the batteries so that they do not pass through the energized alternating metal and rubber walls.

See? They don't pass through rubber walls! This guy had to research his theory by spending time in a room lined with tinfoil then rubber and he found peace and freedom! So there's the final answer! If you are having your mind probed against your will...find a nice rubber lined room and all your troubles will be gone! Just report to the local mental health authorities and they will be glad to help you find a nice rubber lined room! Trust me! This is almost too funny for words. I don't know if this guy actually realizes what he just said, the rest of the site is very serious!

And now for this week's squirrels in the news link!Squirrels gone wild! and the lead line includes the words overpopulation extermination and propane! They are using something called the rodenator pro and you know that can't be good news for the squirrels!

In two hours last Thursday, the propane mixture was released in 30 to 50 already-open holes. When ignited, Lightfoot said, it sounded like an M-80. Nearby resident Mary Golich heard the explosions and doesn't advocate the Rodenator Pro.

To paraphrase the car song on radio station Z-103, I like a fast squirrel, I like a squirrel that goes boom.

And I like a game that goes poom! POOM! is a flash game that goes bounce bounce bounce...addicting and fun!

Finally, today's do it yourself fun, inspired by squirrels gone wild. This is a a fun do it yourself project that requires nothing more than PVC pipe, a stop valve, hose and short pipe nipple, all found at your local home depot. If you can find these then you too can make your own homemade flame thrower! Complete with pictures of it in action! Perfect for taking care of that pesky set of bagpipes you made earlier in the week!

And That's all for today! Later!

Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: CNBC on my computer
Topic: The New Box!

This is quite the experience...listening to CNBC's Squawk Box on the computer with no picture...disembodied voices...talking without the heads...what's really strange is when someone is holding up something and all these voices are commenting on said object yet they give us nary a clue as to what the heck they are looking at. Is it a picture of the anchor's children? Is it a game on a PSP? Is it a logo emblazoned coffee mug? Who knows! All we know it that it's toatally cool and amazing. Streaming audio without the video is too weird for me. On the plus side there isn't that vertigo inducing ticker crawl on the bottom of the screen.

now playing...nothing. I changed the images on this page. I hope they show up. I tried to put mu little grey kitty background in these entry panels. Can someone tell me if they show up! When I'm done I'm going to fiddle with some other settings and see if I can jazz things up a bit.

now...on to some comments! Even though I don't post them, I do read them and I do appreciate them. First, from Ron, who isn't afraid to share his first name with me... I said it before and I'll say it again...yes, it should be MLB's responibility to regulate steroid use...and they've done such a bang up job so far...that's obviously why the US government decided to step in. Honestly, they've had so many chances over the years to handle the problem, and they haven't. It takes the criminal investigation of BALCO and other crises for them to respond. And then the penalties are mere slaps on the wrist. I think the penalties need to be much harsher...and we are of the same mind on that...yet to say that it's only recentl;y the its become a crisis is false. When I researched minor league baseball back in 1992 it was mentioned by all the managers as a problem...that every year they have one or two episodes of roid rage, and at least one player that puts on more muscle than humanly possible. They all said they do their best to discourage roid use by showing what long term use can do to the player's health, yet the short term benefits seemed to outweigh the long term problems. If it got them in the show with the accompanying fame, fortune and money; then any problems with acne, shrivelled testicles, and woman breasts seemed to be a small price to pay. And it seems to have trickled down to high school and college players...So while it seems a good argument to let the players at the major league level use the drugs...adults and know-what-they-are-doing and all...it poisons the well for all those who follow. It sets standadrs so artificially high that no one can acheive them without the use of drugs. That's why they must be stopped, for the health of all those who will follow in these tainted footsteps.

On the other hand, the most flagrant steroid users have all left the game under various pretenses. The most egregious abuser gave his sob story... how he's a victim in all this last week. I doubt it was ong term abuse of his knee...I think long term abuse of drugs is the problem...and he knows he couldn't pass the new tests. Therefore retire with a whimper rather than a bang.

Oh yes, I'm feeling better! Thanks for asking!

Look At My Pretty New Litter Box!
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: The New Box!

Tripod unveiled it's new Blog builder! Yay! It's just what I need! even the free account allows advanced customization and build from scratch options! I can add pretty colours, backgrounds and play with custom setting to my heart's content! Now I don't have to spend hours coding nested tables. I can even specify fancy fonts if I want! So I'm switching my blog to the official tripod blog builder!

If you are new and you've never ventured into the Kat's litterbox before, you might want to take a look at some of my previous litter boxes. which can be found here! To recap...we all know what goes into the Litter box. You never know what you will find in the litterbox, so don't be surprised. There might be buried treasure. There might be buried crap. You never know.

One thing you will always find is links to unique, wild and wonderful web sites. If it's out there...and it's *out there* You'll find it in here! Here's the post I made on my old page earlier today:

Yesterday while I was hard at work finding new and useless places on the web, my son Dan called me upstairs. He found something new in our junk drawer. Sorry...tool and other stuff drawer... he opened it up and showed me what he had found. He found a small brown dead mouse. We seem to have a bit of a mouse problem. At least once a month we are gifted with dead mice. It's nice that the cats are doing their jobs, however...I would prefer no mice at all.

By odd coincidence...my weird site of the day is... The Mouse Trap collection! If it can be collected...some one will collect it and then put up a web site about it.

Next in the line of weirdness is is World Jump Day! these people want everyone on earth to jump at the same time and knock the earth out of orbit. According to them, this will solve all the world's ills. Yeah right, all our problems will be solved as we go careening through space on a one way trip into the sun! I can hardly wait! How about you? In our time zone, EST, we are to jump on July, 20, 2006 at 16:39:13. They don't specify if that's standard time or daylight savings time. I suppose we'll have to jump at both times...just to be safe.

Someone has put Every Calvin and Hobbes Strip on Line! Obviously this man is doing the world a great service and deserves all of our support. There can be no higher calling than that of archiving my second favourite comic strip, after Krazy Kat.

Only You Have the Power to Save Toby! I say let the little rodent die and don't make this dweeb rich. Some people will do anything to suck money out of people. Remember, according to Bush, if we give in to bunny terrorists we let the bunny terrorists win...or something.

Perhaps you don't like fuzzy bunnies, perhaps you prefer Magical Dragons! Here's a downloadable toy for those moments when you need your toys to stare back at you. The main page of grand illusions has other such fun diversions to keep you away from what you are supposed to be doing.

That's enough web weirdness for now. On to other things.

I've been playing with different designs for skirts. I was inspired by something I wrote on a message board, that skirts are very basic, front, back, darts for shaping, not much else. That inspired me to think outside the old box, to discard the basic front back configuration, forget about the darts, and move into shapes that don't look the least bit skirt like. I started with the old fashioned skirt gore shape and went from there as the six gored skirt offers the most flexibility in drape and design. The gore became swirls, the swirls became circles. I broke the circle apart into fractals, adding the fractals at the hem, causing it to flip and ruffle while preserving the clean lines of the upper skirt. It ruffles but without having to add a gathered tier, which look too little girl or too "Little House on the Prairie." Then I took apart the swirls, turning it into a patchwork and adding further godets into the patchwork spaces, adding another layer of complexity to the skirt. These drape in new and interesting ways. I'm working in one third scale, I want to move up to half scale, then to full size.

After exploring the curve skirt shapes I want to move to "inside the box" shapes...where the skirt becomes a series of squares and rectangle, exploring the possibilities as these basic squares and rectangles are draped on the figure. Some develop a bias cut drape, some are severe lines, some form new and exciting patterns to their prints as gravity takes over and the drape to the ground. It's quite interesting to take something so simple and turn it into something new. I might post a picture of one of my patchwork swirl patterns.

Next. I plan to abandon the gores and use just pieces of fabric cut randomly and attach them to a waistband and see what happens.

Today is web site maintenance day. I'm moving my photo albums elsewhere and then recoding my pages so the links go to the new site. I need more space for pictures and the albums are taking up too much space. I may have to break down and get a paid site with more picture space. Well...time to get busy. Bye.

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now...to work on more settings and stuff! Later!