Faster Cars and Smellier Air

Heart-felt congratulations to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the United States of America, and the Earth.

Audio I recorded from the celebration in downtown Washington DC at 2:34 AM Wednesday morning.

Troubling news here at the only blog with an Irish Pikachu category.

The heavily-anticipated Super Smash Bros. Brawl is out in the United States, but apparently without our beloved Hibernian Hero! [ Gamespot forums post | entry on disturbingly-named blog ]

This proud member of the diaspora cannot recall a comparable disappointment since the tragic failure of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and I have read two whole books on Irish history!

I for one am holding out hope that Pikachu’s leprechaun hat is tucked away hidden inside the game somewhere, waiting to be unlocked by the right combination of moves (perhaps right then left then 70 consecutive Peach/Wario match-ups.)

A sad development indeed with St. Patrick’s Day just a few days off.

This year, I outfitted my Festivus Pole with an ornaments rig.

If you didn’t watch TV in the Nineties and don’t read the Style Section, Festivus was created by American Philanthropist and Inventor, Frank Costanza, as a less commercialized alternative to more familiar and incompletely-secularized winter holidays.

As a convert from one of those holidays, I had a lot of cool ornaments lying around, but no tree to put them on. Would it be against the rules to put them on the Festivus Pole? According to Costanza:

instead, there’s a pole. It requires no decoration. I find tinsel distracting. [emphasis mine]

So decoration wasn’t required, but it wasn’t forbidden, either - as long as I avoided the “distraction” of tinsel.

The next problem was how to hang ornament hooks on a thin, Aluminum cylinder.

Many Festivus observers favor heavy, solid poles. My own is a light, segmented, telescopic pole from Home Depot. These are typically attached to specially-made clippers, cybernetic claws, etc. Because the top segment collapses into the bottom one, my pole is not uniformly cylindrical, which enabled me to suspend a chicken wire sinusoid from the joint.

This design, inspired by the work of George Hakkio, has three attractive features:

1. the appropriately inexpensive, even shabby aspect of the chicken wire
2. gobs of usable surface area
3. the entire rig can pivot to be viewed at any angle

Here are the results.

Note my great-grandmother Mary Kathryn Moir’s hand-made angels, kitten, sled, boots, clowns and elephant, as well as the traditional California Sea Otter (from Shani’s trip to Sea Otter Shirts in Monterey) at the rig zenith.

The base is a display box the folks at Home Depot let me have. The pole’s bottom fits snuggly into a (hidden) slot.

After covering the top with a sock to protect my ceiling, I extended the pole out and locked it at a length ever so slightly higher than my living room. Then, I wedged it in vertically.

Happy Festivus, everyone!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

This article about the historical St. Patrick may be a repeat for some of you, but it’s both an oldie and a goodie.