Miscellany

[capri0mni]

• I finished the logo for my Zazzle.com store, today.
  
  I realized, after I'd saved my settings, that I had a typo in my store name, with an "i" in the middle, instead of an "a." Careless, I know... And I didn't want to have my logo be different from the url. So I put the Webdings "information i" in the middle, so it was a hybrid between graphic and letter.
  
  I tried a couple of different versions. The one I ended up with is low res, black and white, kinda blurry and with random specks. But I like it.
  
  Why?
  
  Back in the 1970s and '80s, Mother would take me along to protest marches and rallies for enviornmentalist and anti-nuclear causes, and my new store logo reminds me of the mimeographed pamphlets and booklets we got -- the ones filled with the lyrics to protest songs.
  
  It just seems fitting, somehow. You can see it here: Chimerigons (I don't mean to spam you with it, but as it is now attatched to a store, I don't want to post the pic in a public gallery...
  
  
• While I was working on it, this afternoon, I heard the first ice cream truck of the year, broadcasting its electronic music box version of "Turkey in the Straw."
  
  *Sigh* When I decided to move south, fifteen years ago, I was motivated by my desire to get away from harsh winters. What's taken me by surprise is how much I miss the slow transistion from winter to spring -- what I've come to think of as my "Hibernation Time."
  
  It's "summer", here, from the middle of April to the middle of October. We get six weeks of recognizable winter, three weeks of spring, and then, it's full Summertime, and the full cultural expectation of high energy until October again. I need more cave time! I need a little more slow and melancholy time! You know?
  
  
• I just finished watching two documentaries on PBS. The first one was about the sport of Noodling: diving into rivers to wrestle full-grown catfish (40+ lbs) and pull them up by hand -- Actually seems more like a fair fight, than with hook and line, you know?
  
  The second one was "Four days at Dragon*con". Now that I've seen it, I don't have to think about going. Being in a closed space, like that, with so many people? It does not appeal.
  
  
• Today, my cousin Toni forwarded me an article about "An amazing woman born without arms who rides a horse!!" (and yeah, it pretty much filled out the "Inspiring Crip!" journalism bingo card). *Sigh,* again. It's things like this that remind me that Toni is really a stranger. She first saw me through the nursery window when I was born, and she was 18. Then, we didn't get to know each other at all until 27 years later, after my mother died, and Dad started reaching out to the family he had left. But really, I can count on my fingers and toes the times between then and now when we've been together face-to-face in the same room.
  
  
• Signal Boost: an Excellent Post by haddayr: On the dangers of the charity/pity model of illness and disability. Go. Read! Spread the Gospel!

Comments

[spiralsheep]

I've never heard a British ice cream van play Turkey in the Straw, although it's a well-known tune over here too. /notes cultural difference

(No, I can't recall what they do play, sry.)

[capri0mni]

Well, "Turkey in the Straw" is most closely associated with the American "cowboy"/farmer tradition (the cartoon version), via the Hoe-Down and barn dance (Country dances, in Britain?). So it has a certain connotation of Summertime and frivolity.

It could be that each franchised Ice Cream seller picks his or her favorite tune from a set playlist, and just plays that. And the one in my neighborhood just likes Turkey in the Straw best.

And maybe you have folks who change their music every so often (Because it's not so much the tune itself that announces the ice cream, but the timbre, I think)

*Shrug*

[pedanther]

In Australia, the traditional tune for ice-cream vans is "Greensleeves". (I remember one of my parents telling me about a song they'd heard during the Vietnam War on the theme of "We're better than them because they don't have vans that play Greensleeves", though I don't recall exactly how it went.)

By the way, you seem to have been concentrating so hard on making your logo and url agree about the i that one of the other letters slipped through: the url is "Chimerigons" and the logo is "Chemerigons". (And the browser title bar says "Chimeragons".)

[capri0mni]

Re: The store -- argh!

Curse all those schwa vowels, and the American Education system of learning to spell by sounding it out!

Well, at least I can change 2 of those three. I'll do that this weekend.

[capri0mni]

Okay, renamed the browser bar to Chimerigons, and redid the logo. I'm actually happier with this logo, because I got a better scale (or feathers, or spotted fur) pattern for the golden background than in the first version). The changes aren't visible yet, thanks to Internet caching (or whatever the mechanics are over on the Zazzle side), but they should be by the end of the day.