madeofglass.com

a collection of reflections by people i have known

by tripp

I now would like to subject you to numerous videos that perhaps best reflect the internet itself.

First up, “we like sportz” from lonely island. (via rex) it’s older, it’s no ‘jizz in my pants’ but i still enjoyed it for the 2 minutes it took to watch. and i say again, for the 100th time, this lonely island cd is going to clock in at 28 minutes (14 songs, 2 minutes each).

Ok. Now how about this weird sea creature: “This video, filmed at a depth of 770 meters, shows a bioluminescent deep-sea siphonophore – a large organism consisting of many different organisms.” (via neatorama)

And now the Lego masturbation machine. Right. (via Buzzfeed)

Honorable mentions to “a year in 40 seconds” and the “9″ trailer, which Josh worked on.

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by tripp

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by tripp

Yes, I heard yesterday. Yes, it is annoying.

But everyone is going to forget in about 3 weeks. And they are idiots, Tripp isn’t a ‘real’ name, it’s a nickname. They might as well have named him Junior.

More surprising, other than their not understanding what the name actually means, is that 1. only 3 people have said anything so far and 2. that Bristol is a high school drop-out.

Update: 4 people. Chrispy points out that she named him after me, which is true. I got here first, bitches. Though seriously, I do expect someone much cooler than her to name her kid after me in the future. Still, you don’t get to pick who you inspire in life.

Further update Up to 7, though it died out by about 10am. I’m not complaining.

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by tripp

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by ray

I’ve had two moments in the last 24 hours where I wished I had my camera handy. Because apparently dumb people make signs.

The first was one I wanted to send to Petunia for her online course. It read:

“Who” loves you …
God loves you

Right off the bat, there are at least three grammatical errors. Now, keep in mind that this sign was directly across the street from another wherein the name of the business was, for some reason I cannot fathom, also in quotation marks. As if to say, maybe this is the place you’re looking for, maybe it isn’t…

The other was a sign I saw today in the men’s room of a new Target store. As a father, I’m a bit peeved when there aren’t changing stations in the men’s room. So there, where the plastic changing station ideally should be, and where there was obviously space left on the architectural drawings for just such a facility, was a sign reading:

Diaper Changing Station is located in the family bathroom for your convenience.

Really? Wouldn’t it be more convenient for it to be … oh, I don’t know … right here? You know, the place where I’d conceivably be standing with the kid and the shitty diapers? Or perhaps this is a ploy of some sort so the dad can come out and say “Nope. No changing station in there. You take ‘im.” Frankly, I’m a tad flumoxed, because the tri-colored, laser-etched sign with stainless steel mounting hardware had to be almost as expensive as the changing station would have been.

It’s times like these when I realize why Ed Norton needed a fight club.

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by goose

Well Xmas is here, and i am at my parents house with not much to do except revel in a multitude of TV channels which brings me to how much Jaws 3D sucks. This film is a who’s who of who the fuck are these people and why did they never act again (oh yeah because they were in this film). The effects are really really bad, but they were the best 1983 had to offer. The cast list is never ending, and uniformly each performer offers up the worst possible delivery of their lines. The script it self is execrable. So bad.

Thank God its is immediately being by Jaws: The Revenge which is comparatively a tour-de-force. Peace out Lou Gossett Jr. Keep your crap acting.

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by ray

Reed fell asleep in my arms tonight. It’s the best gift I could have ever asked for. 

It’s been a while since he’s fallen asleep as I’ve held him. I know the gaps between these special times will grow and grow until some point they are gone forever. The thought of that is crushing. I guess in some ways that burden of knowledge for parents is the flip side to the blissful innocence we try to guard for our children. Last night, as I turned a toy box inside out and rolled it up in the dark outside by the trash bin (no recycling for this stuff, lest the jolly fat guy gets found out), I felt at once both complicit and dutiful, as though I were perpetuating a lie but at the same time alright about it. We were careful last night to cover our tracks, to deliver on that promise that Santa holds for the young. In a year when I’ve had to explain death to our son, I wasn’t about to have Santa flicker out of his life, too. 

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve wondered why the season felt ‘off’ for me, as if I or it (or both) was out of place. And I’d heard others say similar things. I don’t think I realized what was wrong until just a moment ago. It’s about hope. News media errantly so often tries to quantify the Christmas season in terms of retail sales, when what it is really trying to gauge is how much hope we have. And while perhaps we manifest that hope in  what we’re willing to spend at the store (i.e. here’s how hopeful we are about our economic situation, our relationships and therefore how we give), it can and should come in other outlets. 

But with death and the constant background din of the bad economy, layoffs, foreclosures, it’s been hard to shake the feeling of malaise. Indeed, of hopelessness. 

After days and days of bleak, grey skies, of my beautiful daughter asking in a worried voice “Where sun go?”, of, frankly, constantly looking down because there just wasn’t anything seemingly to look up for, the clouds parted today–literally and figuratively–and I saw the brightness of the sun, and (perhaps a more religious man than I would say) maybe even the Son. 

Isn’t that something we cling to in these cycles we experience? As the earth tilts from the sun and the whole world seems to wither and die, don’t we frail humans need some light to give us hope? 

I suppose in many ways, today was the kind of day we should try to have more often. We simply stayed in our jammies all day, played with toys and ate cookies. And it was great. I’d like to wrap today up and stick it in a snow globe, so whenever I needed to, I could simply take it off a shelf and have it all over again.

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