dayton is not in ohio

If you’re reading this I know you must all be concerned for our well being right now…

I’m just kidding, but it WAS a little scary to get shaken awake.

Karen, the California girl, thought: Earthquake, and went right back to sleep.

Dayton thought:

1. Plane crash in the neighborhood 2. Bulldozer crushing house 3. Tornado 4. Apocalypse 5. Earthquake 6. Factory exploding 7. Nuke in NYC 8. Obese intruder

Actually, I was dreaming, and I began to notice shaking that was pulling me out of my sleep… I remember thinking that Karen was shaking the bed in her sleep, and I was just about to tell her to stop, when suddenly I realized OH-MY-WORD-THE-ENTIRE-HOUSE-IS-SHAKING-BACK-AND-FORTH!!!! The house is old, so everything was creaking, and and the doors and appliances were shaking back and forth. It was noisy.

Karen is sleeping again. Although, the earthquake being near Louisville caused her to quip before going back to sleep about God’s judgement on the Presbyterian Church. She also thought about the apocalypse, but to her that was a scary thought. I was thinking “Apocalypse. Awesome!” And remembering the last verse of “It is well with my soul.”

This is actually my second earthquake, the first being while I was in Azusa, CA two years ago, but I was outside and didn’t feel a thing. I felt gypped. Well now I can say I’ve felt one.

I can truly say that the MOST interesting thing about this thing is how many people have called the TV station and mentioned that the first thing they thought was: Ghost. I’m not kidding. I did have the quick thought that maybe Haley Joel Osment was the one shaking the bed, though.

And what does this have to do with art? Well, take a guess what I just heard has to undergo inspection this morning… All of the cranes in downtown Chicago! Good thing, but there’s one structure that didn’t make it:

Oh, Brother…

Oak Park has an arts district that’s located two blocks from our house. It’s a community based endeavor that includes a few small galleries of the mid-level commercial, and arts and crafts variety (you know, the kind with names like “Art Gecko”). It’s not exactly my thing, but fantastic for what it is. It’s got the perfect independent coffee shop, boutique maternity clothing store, high-end thrift shop, mom and pop barber, yoga studio, and a few nice little restaurants.

And now it has new signs demarcating the little corridor on Harrison Street. I think the signs are a great way to establish the district, draw in more businesses and help it grow… There’s just one little annoying thing: they look a lot like gigantic, red, disposable razors.

These drawings don’t illustrate too well that the signs arch back at the top, finishing off the razor design. It is beyond me how designers, arts district coordinators, and community leaders can work on something like this, and no one notices in any meeting (or has the jewels to say it) that you’re about to pay $120,000 for something that looks an awful lot like a gigantic shaving tool. I can understand the community folks, but the guy who designed the thing? The artists? It reminds me of the first time I saw a Mexican guy in a sombrero on the front grill of a Toyota about 15 years ago.

(The fun part of this is that I have an idea brewing for some guerrilla art in the form of a giant Barbasol can.)

The class that I TA for is currently doing a mapping project. They are supposed to come up with some kind of autobiographical map. There are several shows in Chicago dealing with the same idea such as William Pope L. at the Art Institute and Mapping the Body at the MCA, as well as one on maps in general at the Field Museum. They all correspond to the Festival of Maps taking place this winter in Chicago.

As is often the case when I TA, I came up with my own, (not autobiographical) idea. I may develop it into something more, but for the time being I decided to see what would happen if I began plugging the Illinois Lottery Mega Millions Jackpot numbers (six numbers between one and fifty-six) into Google Earth, as GPS coordinates. I chose the north and western hemispheres since this is where the lottery takes place. After discovering that most of them were located in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, I decided to plot the boundary of all possible lottery combinations. To find the four corners I plugged in the following lottery coordinates: (1 2 3 N 4 5 6 W) (1 2 3 N 56 55 54 W) (56 55 54 N 53 52 51 W) (53 52 51 N 1 2 3 W). I then plotted a path connecting these locations and creating a boundary. I ended up with a trapezoid that covers approximately 12 million square miles. The lower boundary sits right on the equator, and the Mid Atlantic Ridge runs right down the middle.

Each unique combination of numbers represents about 1000 square feet. But there is some empty space in there because numbers can’t be repeated, meaning, finally, that within this 12 million square mile area there are 176 million evenly-spaced 1000 sq/ft parcels of land (or mostly ocean, in this case) that you can stake your claim to for one U.S. Dollar. Being a visual/spacial person this gives me a much better idea of how ridiculous the odds are for winning the lottery. It’s like guessing exactly where our current apartment is located if given an area about the size of, oh… Asia.

Next I plan on plugging in all of the winning combinations for 2007 and seeing where that takes me… I’m also gonna buy a few tickets.

In a recent post I mentioned that my parents were on an American Airlines plane whose engine caught fire and almost crashed. When they finally arrived in Chicago the news crews were waiting to interview passengers. Well the ABC affiliate in Chi-Town decided to do a little vignette on my folk’s reunion with their granddaughter.

Now, usually the excitement surrounding being ‘on the news’ amounts to a whopping 1.3 seconds of screen time, and turns the family gathering around the TV into an inevitably anti-climatic moment. There’s a pause for a moment, then someone says something nice about it, but no one says how really disappointing it can be to have minutes of interview time turned into a one word quip. Who’s to complain? It’s better than nothing. I had prepared myself for a flash of screen time for Anna and the folks…

And speaking of disappointingly brief exposure, if you look really closely, there’s a part where I’m on my cell phone and you can briefly see one half of a Rob Matthews drawing on the wall behind me…

I nearly killed my computer. I’ve been wanting to put up a post about my recent show in NJ, my trip to the East coast in general, and a salute to a great year and a tough post-season for the Phillies… This would be happening, but I have inadvertently scrambled my computer’s brain and have very little control over it right now. If you want to read a little on the show you can go here.

What happened? Glad you asked. I changed a setting to not allow my computer to go to sleep when it was unplugged. It was supposed to be temporary but I forgot to change it back. So I closed it, put it away, and then left for 9 hours. The poor computer was just sitting there in NYC, wide awake, suffocating in my backpack. It wasn’t until 16 hours after I put it away that I took it out. I thought it was dead. I plugged it in and it started but everything was messed up; Lack of oxygen to the brain… no email, no calendar, no address book, no bookmarks.

I drove back to Chicago with the thing asleep in the back, not sure if it was gonna make it. I spent about six hours on the phone today with Apple support and finally, thanks to the great technicians Leo and Andrew, have all of my essentials back up. It’s gonna live, but my computer is still very, very confused and it may take some more surgery… I promise to update with pictures and stuff (about real life) when we get rolling again.

My parents were coming to visit us in Chicago today. They were on this plane.

I think they’re gonna drive.