Disclaimer: I'm no music critic; we've got brilliant people like Joe Gross for that (hi Joe). But sometimes I just blab a lot about stuff that strikes me (this guy's neon artwork, my old car dying, a photo of Mark Twain when he was 13). Thank you for hanging with me. And thank you Jim... Continue Reading →
How to wrap canvas neatly over a frame? Don’t use a frame
This method/kit just struck me as a really genius way to make a difficult task very easy. Three difficult tasks, in fact, because -- Stretching canvas evenly is hard -- it puckers -- Wrapping canvas around corners is hard -- you get those annoying thick wodgy triangles of fabric, and your nice neat corners suddenly... Continue Reading →
Fireflies in a jar, at dusk – in neon
Update, November 2017: Todd has made several more of these signs (they're now priced at $8,500 apiece, dammit), and one has popped up in my new hometown! The Stella Hotel in Bryan opened in April 2017, and up on the wall in its Campfire restaurant blinks one of the pretty "Fireflies" signs that I love... Continue Reading →
Car broke down in the desert? Print yourself a wrench
Utterly flabbergasting, this is. (Yoda would agree... no, wait, Yoda probably has one of these in his kitchen.) A recent Economist issue discussed 3-D printing with a cover image of a working violin they said had been created on such a printer. Not the strings and some other parts unsuited to plastic, but the body... Continue Reading →
To the Republic for which they stood
My illustration for Memorial Day is a cross-stitch done, we are 90% sure, by my grandmother (known to me as "Mamma"). We know she did needlework, and I've seen other items she stitched on linen. This seems to me like it's a kit or at least a pattern, and it resembles a kit from Bucilla,... Continue Reading →
Nightfall at the Alamo, March 5: The tweets so far
For the 175th anniversary of Texas' independence, I decided to walk myself, day by day, through the events of the Alamo siege and battle in quick bursts on Twitter, a medium uniquely suited for short, timely updates. Sometimes I was even able to tweet an event at the time of day it actually happened, which... Continue Reading →
Aggie ring under a digital microscope
Out here visiting my folks, and we got to playing with Dad's USB digital microscope. Here's what the numbers on a 10K Aggie ring really look like after seventeen years of daily wear... (I got it when I was a junior, whooooop): Fightin' Texas Aggie Class of 1994!
You’re going to need to know about the brain-eating amoebas
When you move to Austin, right after everybody tells you how much cooler Austin was X years ago, everybody tells you that if you don't have allergies now, you'll get them in X years. Here is what you do about that. It is kinda gross, but you'll live. When you get desperate enough, and you've... Continue Reading →
A quick New Year’s how-to: Convert pierced earrings to clip
Ladies like me who don't have pierced ears but occasionally like to wear big sparkly earrings, I am about to share something I wish I'd known 20 years ago. Look at the earrings you're thinking of buying. If the main part of the earring dangles from a small ring, you're in business. Like these dime-store... Continue Reading →
Bono and Ali are the sweetest thing
Somehow, though I've loved U2 for decades, I've only just learned that U2's song "The Sweetest Thing" (lyrics here) was written by Bono as an apology to his wife, Ali, for missing her birthday back when the band was in recording sessions for "The Joshua Tree" (first album I ever bought on CD). Originally the... Continue Reading →
sue's news 