LKL’s Blog

I love cute images/drawings/paintings of people, so as you can imagine I’m a huge Keith Haring fan. When I found out about a special exhibit of his work at the Musée d’art contemporain in Lyon, I had to go. This was an exhibit like no other. The entire museum (3 stories) was filled with his work - over 250 pieces, including a number of huge paintings. There was also a slide-show of some of his sidewalk art; a movie about his murals in New York, Chicago, and Pisa (yes, as in Leaning Tower of); a room covered in photographs of his life and art in New York; and the actual Tokyo Pop Shop. It was spectacular.

Seeing so much of his art in one place was fantastic, but it was also fascinating to learn more about him. I knew that he died of AIDS, but I hadn’t known that a lot of people thought his Pop Shop made him a sell-out. In fact, what he wanted was to make his art accessible to as many people as possible (he had stopped doing paper drawings in subway stations and such when people started stealing them) and he donated most of his profits to charity, notably for AIDS research. I just wish it had been enough to save his life.

Got an invitation to join Plurk, and even though the interface seems a little strange, decided to go ahead and do it. Come visit me: LKL at Plurk

I’ve been writing so much for my new chick lit blog that I felt it was time to review a completely different kind of book. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, is one of the best books ever written, and I actually envy you if you haven’t read it yet, because the first reading of this five-part trilogy* is out of this world. (But don’t get me wrong - the second and third and fourth reading are great fun too.) Squarely in the realm of science fiction, it’s screamingly funny and wholly original. I can’t recommend it highly enough. (The original radio scripts are fun to read too.)

*A little joke of the author’s

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved construction paper. Making art with construction paper (or any kind of colored paper) has always sparked my imagination much more than painting or drawing. My latest spurt of creativity has involved flowers, and while I know it’s not fine art, it’s colorful and fun and definitely helps brighten up my excessively white apartment. I’ve made two collages (for lack of a better word) so far - you can see the first one here (click the picture to see a larger image). I’ll post the second collage in a week or so.

OK, I’m going to do a little free publicity for something that I couldn’t live without - my mailbox. When I moved to Costa Rica last year, I realized that I needed a permanent solution to the mail problem. While I pay all of my bills and check my bank accounts online, and I got rid of all the junk mail, there’s still always a bunch of stuff coming. The post office will only forward it to an address in the US, and I didn’t really want to ask a friend to take care of that for me, so instead I researched mailing services. The one I chose was USABox, and I couldn’t be happier. Read the rest of this entry »

So it took me a while, but I finally watched all four seasons of the show Lost. I loved it, I really did, but I have to say that I’m a little disappointed that it’s going to run for another two seasons. I felt like the fourth season was wrapping things up, and even with the unanswered questions remaining at the end, I just don’t think there can be that much more story left to tell. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

While I don’t recommend using online translators, sometimes you just have to - like when you don’t speak a word of the source language. However, online translators only work (as well as they can) when you can identify the source language - and I just discovered a handy little tool for this. Paste a couple of paragraphs into into the What language is this? tool, click “identify,” and it will tell you what you’re dealing with.

I don’t watch a lot of online videos, but I had to make an exception for this one: Swan Lake by Chinese acrobats. “Phenomenal” doesn’t begin to do it justice.

Chinese acrobats are some of the most incredible performers on Earth. I saw the Golden Dragon Acrobats perform in New York City a couple of years ago, and it just blew my mind. If you get a chance, run, don’t walk, to buy tickets to the performance.

I was having some trouble with my blogs the other day (they were loading properly but then in FireFox the top half of the page would dim/fade and all the links within that section were unclickable). I couldn’t find any info about similar problems on Google, but I did run across a FireFox plugin called the Web Developer Toolbar which makes it easy to find problems with your stylesheet. I installed it and found that the problem was a little something called ga_shade and when I Googled that, I finally discovered that the problem was with the Google Analytics plugin. I disabled that, cleared my cache, and all is well. So I don’t have those stats anymore, but at least my blogs are usable! And I’m keeping the Web Developer Toolbar - I’m sure I’ll be able to use it again.

I’m addicted to chick lit, and I’m finally ready to talk about it. You can read all about my guiltiest pleasure on my new blog:
Chick Literate - Confessions of a chick lit fanatic

To make my new blog a little more fun and playful, I created a rating system of 0 to 5 hearts, with an appropriately cute graphic for each rating. Since I started with some of my favorite books, only the 5 hearts award is visible on the blog so far, but the others will all show up soon enough. Hope to see you there!