There's a species of cat owner that is convinced that their own personal feline is pretty much the best on the planet. For the past eight years I've been that kind of cat owner, as I shared my life with Mrrt, who joined us as Felicia from my sister, but quickly found a new onomatopoeic name thanks to her regular chatter. She's been a constant and welcome presence in my life as the us became just me, and it got to be impossible to imagine my apartment without her in it. Sadly, I'm going to have to start doing just that, as she died on Wednesday after a long decline from kidney problems. I am constitutionally allergic to being maudlin in public, but for her I'll make an exception: thanks for being part of my life. I'll miss you and always remember you fondly, and you really were the best cat on the planet.

PS: A big thanks to West King Edward Animal Clinic, who were always friendly and helped me keep her healthy for a long time.

Happy googling.

There were the conversations as well in which they began to take note of the curious way in which their noses severely narrowed the expanse of their depth of field. They became convinced that a person's nose, even though usually occluded by the operations of his visual cortex such that it tended to disappear from view, served to anchor the scene before him, though not in the way one might expect, as a beacon pointing the way ahead right down the middle of his visual field. Rather, it might be more accurate, in considering bifocal vision, to think of the nose as appearing doubled to either side of the visual field, as if it were bracketing or bookending the scene before us (blocking the right eye's leftmost view, and the left eye's rightmost). And this was a phenomenon, they came to feel, with implications not only for vision generally but for art-making in particular. One day Ryan was studying a recent suite of abstract paintings by Trevor and, never one to accept the arbitrary nature of anyone's mark, he took to focusing in particular on a seemingly recurrent triangular motif off in the lower corner of several of the paintings. "Wait a second, Trevor," he announced exultantly. "That's our nose!" Such shapes appeared not only in Trevor's paintings but in those of other students as well. And indeed, come to think of it, in those of all sorts of other, far more accomplished artists.

The Chicago Reader did a long piece on them last year; it also details how Weschler's relationship with them formed - he actually played a small but significant role in the development of their careers.

Sunday was a day of micro-climates, we drove from sunny to this to sunny again.

This was shot with my relatively new Flip Mino HD, which so far I'm enjoying shooting with, but is giving me that babe in the woods feeling whenever I'm editing/outputting. The provided software is great if you just want to slap titles on something and ship up to youtube, but making sure all the settings are right for proper HD and such is still a work in progress. I'm lucky enough to have access to some knowledgeable help, which is really the only reason this is up and actually in HD. (Thanks M!)

Today I realized that that's all just a way of making a problem interesting enough, and hard enough, that I never actually get beyond the half-baked design stage. Yes, I could spend hours figuring out a cool new publishing system that works just with plain text files and publish with rake (no really, there are two), or I could just start posting again, and see what happens. It's easy to do nothing and blame perfectionism, but I'm going to try, as Rilke put it in a wonderful phrase I read today in Lewis Hyde's The Gift, 'a continuous squandering of all perishable values'.

So today I upgraded Movable Type, reset all the templates to defaults (sorry to feed readers for the spam today, last time I promise) and now let's go. The only thing I can promise you is that you will never see 'Share This!' buttons littered under every entry.

I've read many heartfelt and beautiful remembrances today, and it's a shame that his ability to so precisely articulate the weird pain and loneliness that being wrapped up in your skull can bring, did not, in the end, give him freedom from that anguish. This passage -- from an essay on Kakfa -- has been richocheting around my brain today:

[T]he horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. ... [E]nvision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward -- we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

Goodbye Dave, and thanks.

As we drove away from the Choeung Ex Genocidal Center, my driver asked me if I was interested in going to a shooting range. While I turned down the offer, I couldn't help but wonder if a common reaction to visiting the Killing Fields was wanting to go do something pointlessly violent. It's an entirely helpless feeling, wandering about this quiet place that was host to such horrors, and knowing that the thousands killed there - most of whose skulls you can view in the memorial chedi - represent a tiny fraction of those killed by the Khmer Rouge. I really wish I could say something meaningful, or hopeful, about the memories preserved here and at the Genocide Museum, but it's hard for me to believe that such remembrances, as much as they honour the lives destroyed, have meaning beyond this when genocide continues to happen.

Beyond this, all I have to offer is silence.

• The night market is several city blocks of stalls selling the usual Thai market stuff: buddhas, clothing, wallets, watches, massages, etc. etc. The odd thing for me is that I really enjoyed strolling through it but I ended up buying pretty much nothing, as it wasn't that kind of trip for me. What was fantastic was the open-air food section, which was a large seating area surrounded by different restaurants. You picked whatever section looked good and the wait staff took care of you from then on. I never had a meal that wasn't delicious (and cheap, as per usual in Thailand).
• Doi Suthep, just outside Chiang Mai, is almost ridiculously photogenic, as can be seen on the right. I visited early in the morning, and as I approached the (three @#*@#!!* hundred) steps up to the temple proper, rays of light pierced through the mist steaming through the canopy of trees, at which point I almost started looking for mist-generating machines, so postcard-perfect was the moment. The entire temple was beautiful (more pictures here), and really shouldn't be missed if you're anywhere near it.
• I took a one-day cooking class (another thing-to-do in Chiang Mai) at a place called Baan Thai that was a lot of fun, and well worth the $25 cost. We made and ate five dishes over the course of the day; and I can definitively state that Thai cooking is easy when you don't have to do any cleaning and there are several sharp-eyed Thai women watching over your every move. Oh, and if there's one secret to Thai cooking, apparently it's fish sauce, as we used it in everything but deep-friend bananas.
• I was pleasantly surprised to come across several excellent used bookstores in Chiang Mai - I found two books by Niall Griffiths that I haven't been able to find here, and - the real prize - a 1950s Penguin edition of Brazilian Adventure by Peter Fleming (of whom I've written before).

Pattaya is a beach community not far from Bangkok with a reputation for seediness that it's trying hard to live down. I'm not sure it's really succeeding. The economy seems to be based around white guys looking for cut-rate Thai girlfriends (and/or boyfriends; at least it's equal opportunity). The most visible aspect of this is that pretty much every restaurant or bar we passed had a cluster of attractive Thai women outside who would attempt to entice us inside. Their greetings didn't vary much: "Helloooo, where you froooom? What's your naaaaame?" From this they were quickly and unimaginatively christened Hello Girls.

This, of course, explains why we ended up at a shooting range, where I shot a gun (a 45mm semi-automatic, if you must know) for the first time. Poorly. Thai shooting ranges don't go in for silly Canadian ideas like safety orientations, so we were shooting about three minutes after we walked in the door. I'm happy to report I felt no great surge of testosterone or sense of manliness as a result of doing it, I don't think I'll need to do it again.

Judging from my notes from the days in Pattaya, the only other thing of note from our two days there (aside from some very tasty meals at non-Hello Girl restaurants) was reading McCormack's harrowing The Road; it's about the worst beach reading material imaginable, I suppose, but it's an amazing piece of art.

You can see all my pictures from the trip at flickr, and read on for the first installment of my notes.

Suvarnabhumi Airport, the new international airport in Bangkok, is a massive complex, but you exit out of Customs into a space that feels cramped; this is mostly due to the large mass of greeters and touts waiting at the exit. Every guide book will tell you the same thing: unless you're actually part of a tour group that is being greeted, head straight for the official taxi stand, which is on the first floor. On the way, there will certainly be friendly official-looking people with clipboards asking you where you're going; these people should be politely brushed off unless you feel like paying twice what you should for a taxi ride to your hotel. You're going to be saying no to a lot of tuktuk drivers as you make your way about the city, so take it as valuable practice.

As I had been up for about 25 hours by the time I landed, I was reasonably impressed that I managed to negotiate this and get a proper metered taxi; the awake-but-out-of-it feeling was probably the best state of mind for the 140 km/hr ride to the hotel where my friend Paul, who I'd be travelling with for the next 2 weeks, was already staying. Head finally hit pillow about midnight local time, which was about 10am according my body.

Aside from a couple typical stops (Golden Palace, Reclining Buddha), we don't hit a lot of the main tourist attractions in our two days in Bangkok, choosing instead to wander and see the city. A few highlights from doing just this:

• Our first night, we went east over across Chao Phraya river via the Krungthon bridge, and all the streets were flooded. The steps off the bridge lead into an alleyway that looked into someone's livingroom; the room was covered with about six inches of water, and a man lay on his couch watching TV.
• Also at the tail end of the bridge, I spotted a place named 'Joan of Arc Business Administration School'. Sadly, my picture of this ends up not turning out.
• The tail end of the rainy season produces some truly impressive storms (and we Vancouverites know from rain); unlike Vancouver it remains very warm and is pleasant to walk in, especially with a rain poncho that removes any worries about your camera equipment getting wet.
• There are markets everywhere, usually right on the sidewalks. There tend to be a numbing sameness to them, really (red bull tshirts, yellow we-love-the-king shirts, silk, buddhas, tasty fried snacks), but on the second day we came across a market that seemed to specialize in false teeth and large wooden phalluses.
• Thanks to Paul deciding on a whim that he needed a haircut, we learned that Bangkok barbers still use straight razors (and rather deftly).
• There is a riverboat stop along Chao Phraya that will sell you a bag of fish food for 20 Baht so you can feed the hundreds of catfish that live there. The feeding frenzy that results pushes some fish completely out of the water; this is strangely compelling.
• There are few things I enjoy when visiting a strange place than just sitting in a cafe watching life go by:

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