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The lakes are melting out. Which is bad for skating… but looks great in the sunlight.

The mallard is my second favourite bird, I’ve decided. After the hooded crow.

This is a test post. This photo is doubly mine: I took it of me. If I post the link to fb, does it become the other fb’s as well? I don’t think so.

The first year of the millennium with four different digits.

On December 19th in 2007 my friends Rob and Sportember and I went to see an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Vienna entitled Wilhelm Reich. Sex! Pol! Energy! It was bitterly cold and my car had no heating. We took extra coats and blankets. The trip, some 180 km each way, was definitely worth it.

One of the exhibits was an audio recording that Reich made on April 3rd, 1952, when all his colleagues abandoned him and he was left alone, “the recording apparatus his only witness”, at Orgonon. I listened to it, found it fascinating, and proceeded to record it from the headphones provided, using my mp3 player. Here it is:

Wilhelm Reich, Orgonon, April 3rd,1952

In other news, winter this year is mild. At times more like a mild autumn, really.

The lakes have frozen and thawed repeatedly while the wind was playing various tunes. The result is a fractal pattern of some beauty:

And finally, the same thing from a wider perspective:

The prince of ukulele after a 36-hour translate-o-thon. Shuffering and shmiling.

later, in our daycare centre: those essential early ukulele sessions…!

Firstly, I tried a different approach with the webcomic, basing the drawing on an actual photograph rather than just two random portraits. I’m not sure what to think about it, and I have no definite words for it, though the following exchange is top of the charts:

Bruno: Everything seems to have gone white around us. And sort of sketchy. There’s no detail in the distance anymore.

Naomi: Don’t worry, Bruno, you’re just depressed.

Bruno: Do you think that is barking up the wrong tree? I’m increasingly suspicious, but it’s hard to let go of it.

Naomi: I like this one. Really. Bruno, I think this, too, can be a viable avenue to explore.

(just imagine the bubbles, willya)

Also, I’ve finally been commissioned to produce an advertising jingle for a laxative. Quite apart from fulfilling my life-long ambition of going to live in a Woody Allen movie, this is proving to be quite a engaging experience. My first attempt at a mock-up was rejected for several reasons: the advert was going to have a more feminine feel, so the metal intro was out, and anyway, apparently Hungarian medical advertisers want all ads to be kind of sedate, hush-hush, smily, possibly smily with slight melancholy for antidepressants, but with a soft light-source and several stereo hope-o-matics running full blast, preferably with only the slightest hint of the actual illness their product is intended to cure.

The lyrics, which I was given to put to music, go: “I take it in the evening – and in the morning it works (being a pun in Hungarian which also means “six in the morning” – hence the alarm-clock). And then, after the break, “Another great day is just beginning”.

stadalax makett 1

Bear in mind that this is a mock-up, the barest indication of an actual recording I would have made had the customer liked it. So I got briefed some more: they wanted no indication of pressure, the fraction of a second of a bog with the lid down is all they want to put in to remind the viewer that constipation is not actually fun. They wanted something delicate, like Sting doing Not The Shape Of My Heart live , only not sad, but more sort of slightly happy. Benign. Leisurely. In fact the mood that most pharmaceutical companies exude these days in the medication ads that I get to see on the very rare occasions I get to see some telly is best described as ever-so-slightly stoned. Spaced out, or, probably better still, except I have no experience of the matter, some form of legal anti-depressant or similar.