here’s a whirlwind tour of everything i haven’t been blogging about over the holidays:
over the holiday i wandered through austin’s "trail of lights", a mammoth funnel of children and plywood cutouts of spongebob squarepants. this cybernetic santa, courtesy of Dell, was the most avant garde xmas display. unless you count the performance stage at the end of the trail where middle-school girls performed burlesque dance routines from "cabaret".
my co-worker stuart spent a large portion of his life making the "guitarpsicord". everything is handmade, including the keyboard and the string-plucking devices. here’s a clip of how it sounds.
while in dallas i visited mad-scientist dr. von hagen’s "body worlds" exhibit. my girlfriend thought the flayed woman posed with the disembodied capillary systems of a pair of doves was particularly beautiful. and it was beautiful, and underneath the anatomical majesty it was also horrific. i think the giftshop bags sum up the experience: without the context of the exhibit, they look like they’re covered in bloody handprints.
i found an extremely large spider in my room which my housemates assured me was not "particularly venomous."
i bought this mexican candy at a late-night taco place.
the pacifier device is a tamarind-flavored hard candy which you’re supposed to dip/store in the soccer-motif plastic cup. the cup is filled with chili powder and salt, so everytime you dip the spit-wettened pacifier into the cup, you get a brand-new coating of eye-opening mexican flavor. the only drawback to the design that i can see is that after a couple of days, the flavor powder in the cup gets all gummy and clumpy from the repeated applications of spit.
