Chipmunk or squirrel?

Chipmunk or Squirrel?
Originally uploaded by dizzy-miss-lizzy

I make no secret of the fact that I loathe squirrels with every fiber of my being. While other people find them utterly adorable, I sneer at their gray faces, fattened with campus scraps to the size of small dogs, ambling around devoid of evolutionary agility. I used to try to scare goody two shoes girls in college by talking in great detail how I wanted to kill and grill the campus squirrels (and this from a vegetarian!).
In Lake Tahoe last weekend, I saw what I thought was the cutest little chipmunk. He was a fast little guy so the picture is a little obscured, as seen above. I consulted a friend with animal behavior expertise and he informed me that it was, in fact, a golden mantled ground squirrel. The ears were a giveaway. So I guess I have to qualify my squirrel theory. They aren't all evil giant campus gray squirrels after all.

To nowhere...

Door to nowhere
Originally uploaded by dizzy-miss-lizzy

I took this picture at a vineyard in Sonoma Valley, California a couple years ago. Maybe it's just the Camus-loving existentialist in me, but I just adore absurdist things.
At times in my life, I've felt like I might as well be going through that door. Perhaps one of those times is now-ish. Argh, is anyone in their 20s not going through some type of quarterlife crisis?
Though the world is an uncertain place, at least we can all celebrate the yet-to-be-determined journey we're on together, courtesy of the always-absurd David Byrne:

I don't know where I'm going, I don't know where this blog is going, but I'll be damned if I can't bop along to the Talking Heads with the best of 'em!
----------------
Now playing: Talking Heads - Road to Nowhere
via FoxyTunes

My blog name, let me show you it.

macbook
Originally uploaded by Swansea Photographer

One unexpected frustration with setting up a blog: the name. First there's the whole "Ooo! I want to be original and clever and funny!" thing. It ain't easy. I was trying to think of foods I like, puns involving the word blog... all a no-go from a creative standpoint. Apparently lots of people have already planted their flags on everything from my favorite poems to random 80s songs to Depeche Mode lyrics. I realize I'm a little late to the blogging game, but come on people!

But then, scrolling through my iTunes favorite songs I found a little gem from the Lovin' Spoonful and figured it jibed with the vibe I was going for. And when I gave it a try...

What joy! What rapture! And thus a blog was born.
Incidentally, on a Mac running Leopard, Cmd + Shift + 4 does a screen capture. Hence the illustration above. Muchos, muchos gracias, Lifehacker. Without you, I'd still be using Internet Explorer on my Dell with XP and an ice box instead of a refrigerator.

Blog fall down and go boom

Greetings and welcome to my new blog of randomness and musings. Sit down and have a cup of tea, I hope you like it here!
So, first random thought. "Fall down and go boom" is a widely used expression that you're probably familiar with. A quick Google search reveals that everything from Naomi Campbell to the stock market to traffic reports(?!) is falling down and going boom these days.
I presumed that this expression was a product of the internet age and lolcats. But when I searched news archives for boomtasticness, it was in articles from as far back as the 1930s! Does this mean pre-World War II teenagers said things like, "Oh Jean's a really swell girl, but when she does the jitterbug, she fall down and go boom?" Going further back, did the French aristocracy fall down and go boom? Did Hamlet go to sleep, perchance to fall down and go boom? We may never know the answers to these questions, but suddenly the Oopsie Daisy doll from my childhood looks like a serious historical artifact.