Maggie wants.

Maggie Wants.

The first time Maggie did this, I thought I was going insane.  She was less than six months old, and she was sitting on the desk while I was working on the computer.  I was not paying attention to her (at least, not as much attention as she thought I should be paying to her), and she started this beckoning, fast and frustrated and very, very serious.  It worked.  She got my attention.

Ever since then, this has been her universal sign for "I want."

"I want food."

"I want something that's out of my reach, so bring it to me."

"I want to destroy that thing you just took away from me."

"I want you to pay attention to me."

"I want you to know that I'm feeling lots of free-floating anxiety right now, so make me feel better."

"I just simply want."

We've been trying to get video of this for thirteen years.  But, of course, by the time you get the video camera ready, she has stopped.  Or the act of getting the camera distracts her from what she wants.  But Chip managed to capture this video on his iPhone last night.  Finally.

New Toy

Union Square 12/26/2010

New camera....

Inevitable, I suppose.  And long overdue.

Lunar Eclipse

Lunar Eclipse December 21, 2010

At around 12:40 last night (this morning), I realized it was supposed to be around the time the lunar eclipse should be reaching its peak.  So we went outside and took the video camera.  I honestly did not expect that the camera would be able to pick up anything at all (well, nothing visible or even vaguely in focus).

Much to my surprise, I got a couple of shots of the moon while it was completely red.  So I went back inside and got the humongous zoom lens and a little tabletop tripod.  Then I sat outside on the cold wet driveway (not in the rain, mercifully) for an hour, recording the shadow leaving the moon's surface.

Then I thought I'd quickly splice something together and slap it up on YouTube.  But I figured that speeding up the video would make it a whole lot more interesting.  As it turns out, Premiere takes about one hour to process one minute of fast-motion video.  I finally went to bed around 4 a.m., unable to stay awake any longer.  Then I let it finish rendering everything when I got back up again around noon today.

And that's why I didn't get this video posted on YouTube until around 4:00 this afternoon, more than twelve hours after the eclipse ended.

My favorite search term

As previously mentioned, I keep an eye on this blog's traffic, just for fun.   I'm resigned to the fact that about 60% of the traffic here is from people searching some variant of "Playboy" or "Play boy" ("play boy naked videos," "gay play boy," "play gay boi," etc.).  Plus a lot of people get here by searching for variations of "Castro naked."  But every once in a while, I see truly entertaining things in the details.

I just saw my current favorite reason for someone to arrive here:

"San Francisco, California arrived from google.com on 'Go, Play, Boy, Play: Naked guys in the Castro' by searching for Why are there naked people in the CASTRO? Why?"

(Answer: Because it's not against the law.  As luck would have it, one of the Castro's naked guys found the above-linked posting and left a fairly lengthy comment detailing the reason why they wander naked around the Castro, so at least maybe this blog helped someone just a little....?)

What I like about it is the conversational tone.  Whereas I am (and, if my traffic stats are to be believed, a lot of people are) strictly utilitarian in my search terms.  I would search this topic as "naked Castro" or "Castro naked men."  But this search term gives me the image of someone sitting at their keyboard, poring his/her heart out to the computer, crying, "Why, oh, why must there be these naked people in the Castro?  Please make it don't be true!"