butterflylike network

I got the following ad in gmail today:

Drive a Lamborghini - www.LongIslandLamborghini.com - All models, new or preowned Aggressive pricing, best selection

Apparently google’s contextual ads aren’t working so great today. Because how could this possibly apply to me? Not that I’d reject a Lamborghini if someone were to give me one. But I don’t foresee buying either a used or new one anytime soon.

In other news - there isn’t much other news, which is why I’m noticing google ads at all, which is a very good thing indeed. One wants life with a baby to be as uneventful as possible, it seems to me.

I rather loved the dooce interview on the Today show this Wednesday. Not because it was good. It was awful: Kathie Lee Gifford ought to be ashamed of herself. But Heather Armstrong (dooce) handled Kathie Lee’s stupidity SO elegantly. The woman is a gem, and she is also right: what she’s doing is important, it is something that makes public and visible a huge part of women’s lives that has, up to now, mostly happened in the isolation of the home, in secret, without anyone bearing witness. For the most part, mothering has thus far disappeared into silence. And all Kathie Lee could think of saying was, won’t your daughter resent you for blogging about her? Well, I don’t think Kathie Lee is really one to talk… if her children don’t already resent her for just existing, they will surely resent her for ever having asked that question.

This is currently my heart’s desire:

Small, light-weight, Linux (the one I want, that is). I have this fantasy of going to internet cafes with my little bitty baby and my little bitty computer. Reviewed very favorably here; becomes available in the U.S. on May 12. I’m tempted to preorder but maybe I’ll just wait a week or two. The previous version of this same machine (with a smaller screen and less memory) also came in pink… and I kind of wish this one did too. One could get very ironic with a Linux computer in pink.

Jon Harris and Sep Kamvar have a wonderful installation piece up at MOMA: I want you to want me. They take profiles from dating web sites and use the information in them to present a view of humanity & our search for self and identity - as seen through the lens of the search for love (read the artists’ statement here). The piece is part of MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show, up through May 12. If all goes well, I’ll be seeing it next Friday - yay! In the meantime, here’s a short video m ss ng p eces created about how the piece was made and how it works.

Jon is an amazingly talented and creative young artist - I met him while working on this project, for which he did the design work - very small potatoes compared with most of the creative work he does but it was wonderful to get to know him. Also take a look at his web piece The Whale Hunt, which is up for some Webby Awards (Best Personal Site and Best Visual Design) - go on and vote! This piece is about the spring whale hunt of a family of Inupiat Eskimos - one of the few people legally allowed to hunt whales in Alaska. Jon and A. took a trip together to spend 9 days with this family last May, and The Whale Hunt is what Jon created out of that experience. Me - I just worried they’d get eaten by polar bears, fall into icy cold water and die instantly, mundane things like that… In other words, I know how extreme the conditions were under which The Whale Hunt was created, which makes me have even more appreciation for its beauty.

Leonardo’s The Last Supper, viewable in incredible detail, at 16 billion pixels. You can see every little crack in the surface of the painting.