Gary Rocks on Keith Richards skull ring

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

Gary at GARY ROCKS has a great writeup on Keith Richards C&H skull ring. Over the past 30 years Keith Richards silver skull ring has taken on its own mythology and iconic status. The most famous ring in the world has come to signify not only Keith Richards the man – seen wearing it at […]

Gary at GARY ROCKS has a great writeup on Keith Richards C&H skull ring.

Over the past 30 years Keith Richards silver skull ring has taken on its own mythology and iconic status. The most famous ring in the world has come to signify not only Keith Richards the man – seen wearing it at every gig and in every photograph – but Rock and Roll itself. The ring has inspired both an international cult following and unlimited fake copies. There have been countless claims as to who designed and made the original but this is the true story.

Read the whole entry here.


handsnew09.jpg

Symphony of Science – Our Place in the Cosmos

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

One more from the brilliant John Boswell at Symphony of Science. This one features a chorus by Richard Dawkins. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vioZf4TjoUI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca&border=1]

One more from the brilliant John Boswell at Symphony of Science.

This one features a chorus by Richard Dawkins.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vioZf4TjoUI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca&border=1]

Sinners Skull

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

My new ring, courtesy of of my brutha Carlos of Sinners Inc. The first thing you’ll notice about this thing is, it’s freakin’ huge. I mean, absurdly huge. When Carlos decided to make a skull (after working with me for two years and seeing my double fistful of skulls every day), he decided he had […]

My new ring, courtesy of of my brutha Carlos of Sinners Inc.

iSkull.jpg

The first thing you’ll notice about this thing is, it’s freakin’ huge. I mean, absurdly huge.

When Carlos decided to make a skull (after working with me for two years and seeing my double fistful of skulls every day), he decided he had to make a statement. He did it with pure mass.

This skull weighs about a third of a goddam pound, and is nearly an inch and three quarters from the tip of it’s pointy chin to the top of it’s forehead. Below is a picture with some of the rest of the collection (left to right, that’s the Sinner, the Courts and Hackett ‘Keith Richards’, Deadringers ‘Classic’, a Dave’s Custom, a Ruby Crush jawless, and my old Elvis LIves skull from Tony Creed. You can see how out of scale this thing is when you realize that the Deadringers and the Courts and Hackett are both really, really big rings,

skullarray.jpg

The second thing you’ll notice is that it’s gorgeous. Carlos started with an anatomically accurate model of a skull; like me, he wanted the real deal, not some snarling cartoon. Like most of my favorite rings, there’s no exaggeration, just beautiful bone rendered in silver.

I love this thing.

It’s not a ring you’re gonna wear every day. I had to take it off to work a mouse; there’s no way I can work with it on. I’m almost certainly going to hurt myself with it. But it’s a ring I’m reaching for when I put on the full set.

Really, the only issue I have with this thing is that next to it, my other rings will be invisible; but what the hell. Sometimes you gotta go big.

Carlos and Sinners Inc’s work, by the way, is currently showing up on the great big ham fists on Guy Fieri. Keep an eye out on the current season of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives; Carlos’ signature piston ring should show up prominently in some of the latest episodes.

When I fall I drive the hearse

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

I fucking love Porcupine Tree. And silence is another way Of saying what I wanna say And lying is another way Of hoping it will go away And you were always my mistake… Play ‘I drive the hearse’ here: (let me know if you can’t play that, it should pop up with a quicktime music […]

I fucking love Porcupine Tree.

And silence is another way
Of saying what I wanna say
And lying is another way
Of hoping it will go away
And you were always my mistake…

Play ‘I drive the hearse’ here:

(let me know if you can’t play that, it should pop up with a quicktime music player)

RIP, one year later

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

One year ago tonight, my mother died. It feels like many times longer than that; the only reason I’m certain it was only a year is by checking the death certificate. This last year has been so absolutely brim full of business that I feel like I haven’t caught my breath but once or twice […]

One year ago tonight, my mother died.

It feels like many times longer than that; the only reason I’m certain it was only a year is by checking the death certificate.

This last year has been so absolutely brim full of business that I feel like I haven’t caught my breath but once or twice since she passed away.

365 days ago at this moment, I was sitting in a dark room, watching a heart monitor slow; waiting.

THe lead up to that night was an un-believable up curve of stress, as I watched my mother decline. I spent those last few weeks fighting with Kaiser to have them take her condition seriously, and tryinb to figure out how the fuck to get my mother into a nursing home without wiping out her small savings.

As it turned out, when a doctor at Kaiser finally took the time to look, that my mother was barely hanging on. Her lungs where shot to hell by a lifetime of smoking, and everything in her was only weeks away from shutdown, starving for oxygen, poisoned by the C02 she couldn’t fully exhale.

When we took her off CPAP machines are artificial respiration, and dialed the morphine up, it was the first time in three years that she didn’t look afraid.

“I’m so happy,” she said, almost her last words, as a high dose of morphine freed her from pain or care.

I watched her breathing slow, and resolved to stay til the end. But I didn’t make it.

She died around 6am Sunday, NOvember 9. 2008.

I don’t really know, even now, how I dealt with it. People kept tilling me it would hit me; but it didn’t, not in any huge way. There were tears, and sadness. But there was massive relief, a pressure and worry I’d carried for years, alone.

It’s only in the last few weeks I’ve been able to miss her; only as the last few items of estate business have gotten resolved that I’ve been able to think of my mother, the person, rather than my mother, the burden.

Missing her feels better than worrying; I welcome it.

worst october since last october

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

So here’s how it’s been the last month or so.

First, about a month ago, Barb had to go in for abdominal surgery – a long story, which maybe I’ll tell much later. The short version is that the surgery was more complicated than planned, lasted twice as long as planned, and had a much longer recovery than planned.

The week before surgery, one of my kids brought home some ailment, the primary symptoms of which were dizziness and fatigue. Barb came down with it the evening she came out of surgery. Which means that in addition to pain and wooziness and nausea from surgery, she had spectacularly bad bed spins for the better part of a week.

At this same time (the actual day oo surgery), my eleven year old daughter Ruby sprained her ankle so badly we all thought it was broken (clearly she inherited my feline grace; she did it by trying to walk while her foot was asleep). She wound up on crutches, barely able to move; her whole foot wine purple and her ankle swollen up like a grapefruit.

Also around this time, we took one of Olivia’s favorite pet rats (Eddie, which is short for Edgar Allen Poe) in to the vet to have a cyst on his foot looked at. The conclusion was that it wouldn’t heal, and the choices were looking like euthanasia, or amputation. Now, normally I’m opposed to major intervention of any kind with pets that don’t live more than a couple of years; but I think we all transferred a bit of worry about the rest of the members of the family onto this big gray lump of a rat; we made a choice that’s opposed to my rules, and had him de-legged.

Since that time, Barb has caught every ailment that goes around. She’s had two or three different cold-like viruses (one of which might have been swine flu, her doctor says, though he can’t tell for sure). The last round developed into – in order – a sinus infection, then bronchitis, and then into full-blown pneumonia, with a lovely case of pleurisy (just take a look at the famous cases for a fabulous list of people who died of pleurisy.). She was very close to needing to go back into the hospital. She’s been fighting that – with an array of meds that makes me very, very glad I have good health coverage) – for well over ten days, and is still unable to do much of anything.

So it’s been a bit of a rough patch.

Last week, Eddie (legless ed, eddie the tripod, eddie three legs) took a turn for the worse. He’d been healing well; he was moving around like a tiny fuzzy elephant seal, eating like a champ, and seemed happy to get picked up twice a day for his medications. We figured he was out of the woods. And then infection set it.

I again had to make that hard choice; follow my rules and euthanize, or spend more damned money. I broke my own rules again. The vet had to remove a hunk of infected muscle the size of a sugar cube, and then stapled him closed again and sent us home with a double dose of antibiotics.

We though we were losing him; he pulled out his staples and left behind something like you’d see on a battlefield. And then, suddenly, the wound started to fill over with granulation tissue, stopped weeping, and Eddie started to come out of his little house to greet us when we come to get him out. He’s back to moving loping like an elephant seal, pathetically clumsy and yet fully able to get around his cage. He’s not, as they say, out of the woods yet. But we’re starting to hope.

Eddie and Barb and Ruby all seem to be on the same schedule; Ruby just got put of her cast, Barb’s ailment is slowly receding, and Eddie the Gimp is looking better. So (I almost want to knock wood here) maybe we’re past the end of one of the worst octobers in memory (at least the worst since last October, but more on that later.

Amazingly, Olivia and I have gotten through all this without ever getting sick, despite stress and severe lack of sleep. I’ve missed way too much work due to my nurse-and-single-parent role this last month, and I’ve been at no better than half capacity when I’m there; but I haven’t picked up a case of the flu, haven’t come down with a sinus infection, didn’t pick up the swine flu.

Either there’s a crash coming, or it’s my immune system doing that hyperdrive thing it does when I’m under extreme stress. We’ll wait and see how that plays out this next week or two.

one damned thing after another

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

I have, I’m not kidding, five entries sitting in draft state that I’m almost done with. But trivial time suck keeps eating my final touch ups. The latest one; a reminiscence about my fondness for pulp writers, interrupted by the need to go buy pet supplies. My war against the ants, nearly won, has moved […]

I have, I’m not kidding, five entries sitting in draft state that I’m almost done with. But trivial time suck keeps eating my final touch ups.

The latest one; a reminiscence about my fondness for pulp writers, interrupted by the need to go buy pet supplies. My war against the ants, nearly won, has moved into my kids guinea pig’s cage. I just had to race to the store and buy some supplies to build a temporary cage, until we can either figur eout how to get all the ants out of coroplast without insecticde, or until we can get more coroplast to build a new cage.

Of course, I can’t do that now, because in ten minutes, I’m leaving for a friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah in the Napa area (which is an over-night run).

So one more entry almost done, goes into mothballs.

This is getting frustrating. I’d describe all the travails of the last month (surgeries, injured limbs, amputations, illnesses), but i don’t have time.

On the other hand, if we’re lucky, Ray will post an entry so at least there’s SOMETHING to read!

Meanwhile, it’s time to kilt up and run. The good thing about Lisa’s mitzvahs (bat and bar) is that she knows how to throw a fuckin’ party.

Kraken are the New Vampires

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

I haz crush on on maggie stiefvater. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwM6uoQAh50&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca&border=1]

I haz crush on on maggie stiefvater.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwM6uoQAh50&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca&border=1]

blog like no one’s reading

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

I was helping out a friend of mine the other night – a blogger who’s stopped blogging but wants to start again (i’ll leave the question of exactly who that is open, in case he doesn’t actually get so far as starting). While working on importing his entries into a current movable type install, I […]

I was helping out a friend of mine the other night – a blogger who’s stopped blogging but wants to start again (i’ll leave the question of exactly who that is open, in case he doesn’t actually get so far as starting).

While working on importing his entries into a current movable type install, I remembered how much a miss doing this; not just the blogging, but the tools and support stuff – the technology itself.

I enjoy problem solving, and for some reason I have a particular gift for it. If I were a medical doctor, I’d be the hack and slash guy doing battlefield surgery, or I’d be doctor house solving the mystery while not really getting all that involved with the people (and gobbling all the vicodin I could get my hands on). This is why I’ve wound up doing what I do at work. I’m not a programmer (though I can program), not a hardware engineer (though I work in hardware engineering). What I do, when I’m at my best, is to delve into why something broke, what made it break, and how to un-break it as quickly as possible. It’s a combination of pattern recognition skills, memory for trivia (I remember why we made some choice eight years ago, and what wraps what where, and why), and the ability to step back and look at the whole system, not just the micro-point that broke.

I’m not, however, your guy for long range planning. I’m an improviser. I’m Ornette Coleman, not Gil Evans. I wouldn’t write symphonies, and I’d never play it the same way twice. I cook the same way; when I write down a recipe of mine, every line contains an implied ‘or whatever’.

That’s why I like this sort of work; I can help solve one specific problem, for one specific person, tuning and customizing to need. A can find the tools to solve something and make them work in ways they’re maybe not intended to work. And that? That’s just fun.

The trouble I have, of course, is that I suffer from a lack of attention span. That I’m significantly ADHD should not come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever had lunch or dinner with me; I’m visibly thinking three different things most of the time, and I can’t really sit still without fidgeting for more than 15 minutes unless I have something useful to do with my hands. I have both the classic short attention span and lack of attention to detail, and the occasional hyper-focus state that lets me drill into something intensively to the exclusion of everything else.

The trouble, obviously, is that there’s no known on switch for hyper-focus. We can’t shout ‘engage!’ and have it come on like jump. It comes, unfortunately, when it comes; and task switching on a constant basis seems to make it all the harder.

Working with Movable Type more the last few days has reminded me of how much I miss the days when we were all blogging with a frenzy; when we’d all sit at some social function and think this would be great in my blog. I knew that my words would be read and commented on my people all over the globe, and in some cases, I’d inspire my friends to write on similar themes (or they’d inspire me, in those classic ‘started as a comment in someone’s blog’ posts). There was a wild energy in the loose community of bloggers; like a party where people came and went but the music didn’t stop.

What I miss isn’t just my own easy productivity; what I miss is that community dialog.

Read more “blog like no one’s reading”