August 2009 Archives

my latest doily project:

three guesses as to who this is a tribute to.  no, make that one guess.

and if you were doing this and someone asked you what letter you were on, what would you have said?

a friend who knows I've been working on this for many months asked me as we were driving.  as ordinarily as I've ever heard myself say that word, I said, "the 'u' of cunt."

hey! progress!  of course, we both busted out laughing at how it sounded as ordinary as if I'd said the U of Kentucky.  I dunno ... imagine if we all could just simply say what we wanted to say... .

thanks to the photographer (who chooses to be Anonymous the Chicken) for asking for this photo while on a camping trip.  the best backdrop we had was the tailgate of a pickup.

I've been working on a new art piece and had it hanging at one of several places I share my ideas in progress.

a friend walked by responding to its latest improvement of little beads hanging below, "ooh, it now has ejaculant."

"like coolant?" I replied.

after an awkward silence, he asked, "isn't that what it's called?"

umm ... I decided to go ahead.  "well, it's e-jac-u-late," I enunciated each syllable, "not e-jac-u-lant."  he looked at me dumbfounded, like I was speaking a different language and these two different sounds were not discernable to him.  I tried again but I got the same look.  we dropped it.

later I was relating the story to another male friend.  I told him that someone had called it ejaculant.  my friend looked at me, waiting for the punch line.  I said, it's e-jac-u-late, not e-jac-u-lant.  three times I repeated it, but same as the last guy, we got nowhere. his chemistry background prompted him to say it's just like precipitant.  I said yeah, it IS just like precipitant, only the word is precipitate. after more online dictionary consultations, he finally agreed although loudly proclaimed that he liked ejaculant better and stomped off muttering something about how nouns and verbs should never be the same word.

just as I was going to post this, I decided to see how many other occurrences of this misspelled word there were.  according to a google search today, there are 145,000 listings for ejaculant as compared to 1.8 million for ejaculate.  seems it is a word fetus on its way to becoming a true individual word of its own someday, maybe, and the joke is on me.

well, that's what they look like up close - caverns of pointy sugar surfaces.

the straight-ish line across in the above image is about 1/8 inch long.

below is a little less of a close-up. these tiny objects moved just a bit while being etched, hence the wiggly lines.

ok, here's one complete item.  recognize it?  it's edible.  you probably had your last one at a wedding.  they're often given away as favors although if you ever get an etched one, Let Me Know!!

above and below, you can see the vector lines with more irregular markings.  they look like strings of jewels, or maybe glass that's fractured sideways into a drip shape.  the raster seems a lot more regular and dense.

above, closeup of the "m" raster.

5

above, closeup of the vectors.

for scale, the whole bottle.

and after all that, the raster line retained its regal position of making the best line in glass.

in case you've ever wanted to know, the Epilog will interpret any vector outline thinner than 0.5 pt as vector.  0.5 point is the smallest thickness that can be treated as raster.  and I know some of you are going to ask what's the difference between a hairline specified vector and, say, one specified at .3?  probably nothing.