mollynme80's mop

This is an ever-so-slightly modified version of a photo that I saw at http://www.flickr.com/photos/27566278@N07/3696575119/in/pool-donoteatbaybay/. I can't seem to figure out how to post this image in a flickr comment without putting it in my own photostream, so maybe I'll try sending the URL to this page to the photographer...
for no good reason that I can think of.

Did I mention that I finally have Photoshop?

I found an old copy of CS3 that was sooo cheap that I was able to buy it.

Chuck and Carl #5: The search for R'lyeh

Another installment in my Chuck and Carl series on flickr. Lately C & C have been reading H.P. Lovecraft's annotated Necronomicon, and the result, of course, is plenty way cool adventures!

Blog entry posted to the wrong blog

To sum up: go find some of Leonard Cohen's songs to listen to, and listen.

So many graves to fill; oh love, aren't you tired yet?

Tom Waits' Rain Dogs:

"There's a hole in the ladder
A fence we can climb
Mad as a hatter
You're thin as a dime..."

This has nothing to do with ducklings, so far as I know.

Blogger is resizing my pictures so they look terrible, and I can't remember how to fix that.

Thank god Rain Dogs isn't finished playing yet.

C & H from the outside

From the outside, it's necessary to cross the river to be able to see all of the C&H property at once. I did that one day and spent a few hours on the shore trying to get a photo, or a series of pictures, that would take the whole thing in, without much luck.



From town, you can see the place in pieces; you can see different parts of the property from various places. It sprawls out under the bridges, where you can see it from the Al Zampa bridge ped walk.



There is a no-man's land in a few places, where you might be able to claim that you weren't
really trespassing. There's one under the bridges, where people fish without being hassled (so far as I know), and where you can look for interesting grafitti on the boxcars on a siding. This one is behind the museum.



The Castle City is an integrated tug-and-barge; I think it transports C&H products from the refinery to the Oakland harbor, but I haven't been able to find that out. It's not possible for the public to visit the dock, and it's hard to get a good look at it from outside the C&H lot.



Crockett cogen is a symbiotic appendage at the refinery's east end, next to the dock. It burns natural gas for electricity, and the leftover steam is used to refine sugar. I don't suppose they like visitors, but I'll try to find out.



No trespassing, no tours, visitors should go away. Private, do ya hear me? I couldn't get on the grounds legally, so I've taken lots of pictures from the outside, looking in. The place seems like a different landscape from the various places where the edge of the lot is accessible.



The place is photogenic, depending on where you look: inviting, even, from a safe distance.



I think these are abandoned silos.



The refinery can be pretty at night. There are hundreds of lights, and in particular: the giant C&H sugar box, and ...



...the C&H sign. You can see this from the highway, and probably from the water, but you can't really see it in town. I'm temped to draw some sort of conclusion (or make a presumption, or something) about the attitude of the C&H management towards Crockett. They built a lot of the town, way back when, and employed most of the people who lived in the homes that they had built. Now they seem more insular.

Lethem's _The Ecstasy of Influence_ article

[this isn't finished, but it's all I have]

I think we can't create something meaningful that doesn't define its meaning in terms of existing ideas, so anything meaningful that we create can be seen as plagiarism if you define "plagiarism" strictly enough.