Come back birds, please?

Forget Hitchcock's The Birds.

The Mice or The Rats is far creepier, and actually taking place in my own home as we speak.

They are threatening my way of life!

I feel I'm in some kind of "your mother told you so" hell.

This can only mean war... Peaceful cohabitation will not be possible.

Heat and Hatred in Cairo

The heat of the summer seems to have gotten everyone around me in a bad mood. Or at least definitely me. S. thinks it's the lack of escape from chaotic Cairo, which everyone seems to agree needs to be escaped on at least a semi regular basis.

The heat hasn't let up, but my hatred has, for at least a little while. Long enough for me to, in the little cracks between hating, think of ideas of things to do in an upcoming zine workshop I want to conduct.

No, I haven't conducted a workshop before, and yes, I'm excited.

I think the idea was at least partially inspired by finding my beloved missing "Invincible Summer" zine anthology by Nicole J Georges.

Also (this is kind of to a side) I am really loving Summer Pierre's blog these days. She just posted a variation of her 'traditional' fliers that she does - leading me to dig into the archives of other wonderful fliers she's done - an illustration a day combined with stories from her past. Very inspiring and just cool to look at. Plus they're cross posted on her blog itself (the archives link takes you to flickr).

Back to battling the heat. And Cairo.

High Speed Car Chase

I forgot to add yesterday that I found the knuckle tattoos website featured at 52 projects. You can read more about the project here. Nathan Black, who created the project, explains why he started it.

And this is old news, but this article at BBC finally gave me a proper explanation of what happened downtown in Eid.

Reading: I am actually reading again. The reading fast is over, thank God. It was very beneficial (and so recommended) but also highly irritating. So I'm reading officially now The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell (a novel). Pretty nice so far but haven't gotten very far.

I was going to say I wish I had more exciting things to say, but I realize I do: I witnessed briefly a real high speed car chase while driving home tonight that looked really really dangerous. Very don't try this at home, kids. Who knows what was going on, but this guy was driving like a maniac (not stopping at all while driving at a very high speed through an intersection), followed by another car backing up quickly, stopping to pick up a passenger, then driving back down super fast. It sounds boring but it was exciting I swear! Oh well you had to be there; I was in awe.

Shari3 Faisal Bling

Check out the bling due to a store opening in my neighborhood... Not bad huh? Not only that but there are flashing colored lights going all the way down the street. But thankfully no loud bass-heavy music pumping out because it's Ramadan.

Some quotes

"Drawing is about reaching for pure being. Not making pretty pictures to put in
frames and on websites. The world doesn't need more pictures. It needs peace
and connection. It needs people who can accept reality and don't feel compelled
to control their environments."
- Danny Gregory
Nice site about creativity and art, with a big emphasis on drawing and sketching.

"I'm just a guy with a graphite pencil and a spiral notebook trying to maintain
some of the small chunks of cerebral tissue still floating in my head."
- Jim Bumgarner on his blog Sketches & Stuff. "A compilation of bad sketches, good sketches and bunch of who knows what."


"some people
do not feel compelled
to push their heart onto a stick
and roast it over someone's fire.
well those people suck, i said.
what kind of passionless monsters
live their lives like that?"

excerpt from the poem "Advice for the Lovelorn" by Michelle Tea, in her book The Beautiful. Link takes you to fan site which includes some of her writings and interviews with her. Her book 3amatan is great.

Dino Comics; il kobry

Good news: I have a great link for today! Rejoice, comic lovers and also comic not-minders. It is Dinosaur Comics. It predictably features dinosaurs, and I found it featured on the good Jim Munroe's website, No Media Kings. So double link then, because both sites are worth checking out, dudes.

Featured in the photos: On the left, a sign that says Obeying Traffic Lights is a Civilized Behavior, and below, a lovely view of the billboards on a certain bridge we all know and love. (Guess which?).

Til later, cheers.

P.S. The creator of Dinosaur Comics, Ryan North, appears to have a pretty cool livejournal thingie that should also be checked out, especially the third post that now appears there.

Speaking of that post (check out the post already so you get what I'm about to say), a word to the wise, using Google as a divining source, especially Google image search, doesn't really work out that well. Still, it's a fun exercise. To try: insert relevant phrase into the google image search and interpret the picture that appears. If you try it with the names of your friends, you'll see what I mean. You could always try Bible dipping, as outlined by Augusten Burroughs in Running with Scissors, his most excellent memoirs. (Bible dipping involves asking a question, flipping through the Bible [feel free I guess to replace with holy text of choice], flipping pages and stabbing your finger at a random word for the answer).

Free hint from me: If you're trying to be a writer sometimes, you can modify the Bible dipping for a cool writing exercise in which you use any book to stab a word then write about it for a certain amount of time (timed writing). It's great.