Arty Pics

This is Bob, a great, great guy. Bob stood up for me at my wedding and helped make my Cape Canaveral bachelor party interesting by shooting up insulin at the children's section, just after we saw all of the Mennonites go into the robot exhibit. This story is starting to read like a Palahniuk novel, but, honest to gosh, it's true. Bob also improvises, directs, writes, draws, and teaches his new puppy amazing tricks because he is better to his dog than Shaggy ever was to Scooby, and all of that art in his life breathes a lot of life into a dumb off-the-cuff lunchtime shot like this. I swear, women in bonnets and men with the crazy beards, making a big beeline to the robot exhibit while my bachelor posse stood by and made jokes about making a horse drawn spaceship... but while we laugh now, perhaps we won't be so amused when our robot masters place their Mennonite best friends in the food mines while the rest of us labor away in the solar drilling fields.

This is a picture of a pole on the way to work in the morning. I like it because I think it looks like a modern take on a Jurassic forest, with metal apatosaur heads looming in the distance, while a bestickered tree stands in the foreground, advertising the dominance of the alternative punk band mammals that will dominate the landscape after the great Lawsuit descends on all from the skies. Watch the punk bands swell absurdly large, then give rise to a strange new lifeform in the musical scene: intelligent record execs! Seriously, though, if you're running late, try not to do it in Roscoe Village, because it is impossible to catch a cab there even though there's a gas station on the corner. They just don't come through. Roscoe is one of those middle streets, sitting between the much larger arteries of Belmont to the south and Addison to the north, but Damen, the north-south cross street, is too far west to be lakefront and too far east to be the highway. So you sit and wait for the bus even if you're running really, really late.

What's that sound? Why are you moving your fingers back and forth like that? Oh, damn you, World's Smallest Violin, you always ruin my Pity Parties! Someone fetch me more Pity Punch.


Someday, my kid will ask me, "Where do you work, daddy?" and I'll eventually tell the wee one that I support two offices' networks at a state university. Then I'll pull out these pictures to show that it's really not as bad as it seems. First, though, I'll probably say I'm a super spy with a bunch of documentaries about my adventures called, "Thunderball," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and, embarrasingly, "Octopussy". By that time, I hope to say that I have been played by a number of different actors, including Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalten, Pierce Brosnan, and that guy from "Layer Cake" nobody's quite sure is going to work out. And since I'll have all the usual gadgets one has working on a network - Cat5 Ethernet cable, laptop, palmtop, flash drive, USB hubs, network switches, flat panel monitors, and the kid won't know any better, I can say that they were gifts from Q, my inventor, and that anyone else who has them is just copying, and can't press a button for the keyboard ejector seat. Probably, the only way my kid will see through my ruse is by calling out my lack of British accent, which I can rectify in advance by always having one around my children.

I took this shot of downtown Chicago looking out from I290, which I cross every day to go between both of my offices. I mean, when I'm acting as a double agent between East and West Germany, both of which still somehow exist as political entities. I know it looks like that dark zit in the top half of the photo is a plane about to run into trouble, but you have my word that it is not going to collide with anything and we don't need to pass any more Patriot Acts to assure ourselves that Big Brother is looking out for our best interest. The building to the right of the Sears Tower (center, black, ugly) is nicknamed the cake building, for reasons that have nothing to do with what the food court serves. I know. I asked. I think the footprint somehow resembles a cake, although if I had a cake shaped like that at my wedding, I don't think I would have been able to top it with Transformers, because my weird quotient would already have been filled. The cake building looks orange in this light, but is actually a shade of pink, and very tall, though not as tall as its friend across the street, who cheats by adding all the spires to its official height.



Chicago for the Legally Blind

Finally, these are a few deliberately blurry shots showing off the power of not using autofocus. I guess you can click on them for the larger shot, but as alternative that uses no bandwidth whatsoever, you could also lean closer to your monitor.