Is It Still January??

 

There are two new things in my life since last Friday:  I’ve added weight lifting to my daily gym workout, and I have become 100% addicted to Twitter.

I get it now, why people are always checking their phones. It seems there are tons of people out there who share your obsession (whatever that obsession is, birdhouse building, knock-knock jokes, cute Koreans) but they are ten times funnier and filthier than you and you can’t wait to read what they will come up with next. I check Twitter way too many times a day, and when I do, I’m scrolling for at least half an hour. I love Twitter.

Once in a while something in your feed will trend and then everything explodes. It’s like being at a party with a thousand people, all of you screaming THIS IS SO COOL!!

I spent a lot of time on Twitter this past week because it was blowing up every day because some particularly cute Koreans were in America for the Grammies on Sunday night:

And then on Tuesday night, they were on TV again, on James Cordon’s Late Late Show:

The bare feet got a lot of attention; funny, filthy attention.

So after the show, one of BTS’s fans, which are known collectively and individually as ARMY, tweeted that since James Cordon has always been a great supporter of BTS, ARMY should thank him by donating to his favorite charity. She name-checked Magic Breakfast, an organization in London that provides free breakfasts for poor British schoolchildren, and in two days BTS ARMY from 54 countries had donated enough money to buy 36,271 breakfasts.

It’s nice to know that our dirt-bag president hasn’t ruined all of Twitter. I’m not sure the same can be said about what he has done to our country.

A while ago, a Dear Reader asked me about the ChrisHanuKwanSolstice card that I sent out this past holiday season.

She asked me how I got the background so sparkly — was it paint? Or a filter?

This is a good week to answer her question, since I’ll do anything to avoid discussing how the Republicans are destroying our democracy. There will be plenty of time for that later, as we survey the smoldering ruins and look into Canadian citizenship.

My first idea for the ChrisHanuKwanSolstic card was to photograph the snow-white book against a nifty map of the constellations that I have:

But no, that background was too busy. So I tried going with the classic, auction-house catalogue style of nothing but a velvety black background:

The problem was that this did to look very ChrisHanuKwanSolstice-y. I wanted sparkle!

So the next day I went out in search of glitter. Yeeesh. Michael’s arts and crafts store has a lot of glitter to choose from. This is not necessarily a good thing.

America, are we putting too much emphasis on glitter in our scrapbooking??

I bought the most elegant glitter I could find and did my best to be-dazzle the scene:

No. No way. Nope. NO.

I carefully gathered up all that glitter and put it back in the jar. If anyone wants some elegant colorless glitter, let me know.

I next fiddled with some lights I have.

Back-lit:

Front lit:

I even tried using a blue filter:

THEN I had a dream, and the dream told me to poke holes in the velvety black background. Literally. Poke holes.

So I randomly poked holes into the heavy, velvety black paper I used as the background. I actually forget what I used to poke the holes; maybe it was a Korean chopstick?

This is my set-up, in the window-seat of my dining room:

Daylight is shining through the holes I poked into the backdrop.

I got this:

Meh. It could use some color, don’t you think? So, I used a blue filter:

Then I heard a voice, and it was complaining that there was no easy way to get this photo to sparkle, it was going to take some old-fashioned hand work that was going to be very annoying.

I took a string of tiny colored lights, and poked tiny bulbs through the tiny holes that I had previously poked. This is the back of it:

And by then it was night, so only the colored lights showed up when I photographed the front:

 

This is it with correct lighting, so the front of the snow castle isn’t in shadow:

The next morning, the sun rose and I had daylight poking through the holes that didn’t have a colored light poking through it:

And that’s how I got both white and colored lights in the background of my ChrisHanuKwanSolstice card.

I think the moral of todays blog post is, If At First You Don’t Succeed, Just Poke It.

Time for the usual round up.

Ted Lieu is the Democrat representing California’s 33rd congressional district.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have a great weekend, everyone. We know what the verdict is going to be; let’s not obsess over it. Let’s take comfort knowing that history will look back on these shit bag Republicans and hold them accountable for perverting the constitution and for being the biggest ass-wipes in American history.

XXOO