#8:Toddler Portraiture, Interviews, Google Mars, and Pulling Our Weight.

I was over at my sister's house for dinner the other night and for dessert my nieces, ages six and four, did portraits of Nina and me. When I promised to put them "on the internet," the elder niece excitedly freaked out, although I'm not too sure how solid her conceptual grasp of the internet is. In any event, here they are in all their glory. I'm especially taken by Nina's blue eyes and my askew eyeballs. Click on the image for a bonus treat, my younger niece's rendering of me. Hint: the thing that appears to be impaling my frontal lobe is actually the brim of a baseball cap.

In very exciting news, Nina and I gave our first interviews yesterday, for The Greenwich Citizen and The Florida Times-Union, which is the largest newspaper in Jacksonville. As part of my pre-interview research, I was shocked to discover that Jacksonville is actually the most populous city in Florida and #13 in the country. This was corroborrated by our interviewer, a very friendly man named Mark Woods. We'll post the links to the articles once they're available on the internets; they should run today and on Sunday respectively.

Ever feel like Google Earth is pretty neat but so... 2005? You're in luck, my friend--behold, Google Mars. Those Google boys are unstoppable. If it's your bag, you can even view the terrain through topographical relief maps instead of satellite imagery. It's pretty awesome to spend some time navigating around the various craters and dunes of a planet that is sometimes as far as 250 million miles away from us.

My favorite album of 2006 has been The Radio Dept.'s Pet Grief, so I went scrounging for a video from it to post today. However, I was a little disappointed with the video for "The Worst Taste in Music," so I decided I'd compromise a bit: you can download the title track from the new record and watch the video for "Pulling Our Weight" (from the EP of the same name) here:


It's a beautiful clip reminiscent of some of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' old music video work. And you've seen Little Miss Sunshine, right?

xoxox
Danny