12/28/02
L. and I are back from four days in Florida, visiting her side of the family. Today, we went to the Wildlife On Easy Street sanctuary, which gives several dozen wild cats that have been "domesticated" by everything from circuses to drug dealers, and then dumped when their owners realized that they were wild animals and not cuddly as such, a place to live. (They have a bunch of ringtailed lemurs, too, but they're mostly a home for big cats. Ocelots make a very creepy sound, I discovered.)
Yesterday, we visited John Ringling's estate, including an art museum (lots of pre-20th-c. art that hollers Look How Culturally Freighted I Am, some of which is really good anyway; one wing is currently devoted to a visiting Rodin exhibit that confirmed that Rodin really is about three times as pretentious as I'd ever imagined he was), a circus museum (thing L. and I decided we must have: a ca.-1895 poster, reproduced in miniature in their lobby, which claims that the giraffe that was then appearing in the circus was the last and only giraffe in the world, and that when it was gone human eyes would never again behold a giraffe...), and the Ringling estate, probably the single most ostentatious building I've ever seen (bathtub carved out of a single piece of marble &c.), which of course was the point. J.R.'s bedroom has twin beds that look rather short, especially considering that he was 6'2", according to our tour guide. But they were exact replicas of beds that belonged to Napoleon. That tells you everything you need to know right there.
We spent a couple of evenings playing "Kill Doctor Lucky," a really, really well-designed game from Cheapass Games. And I somehow ended up seeing almost all of Dude, Where's My Car?--it was on HBO, and on Thursday I saw the first half in the morning and the second half at night.
And Lisa designed some really nice-looking graphics for the lacunae relaunch. It's really going to happen, once I work out some hosting/CGI issues.