L o b a B l a n c a {dot} c o m

We heard you wanted to report a 459…burglary. What’s missing? Milk and cookies, you say? Oh, that’s all right. That was just ole St. Nick, making his annual rounds. Other than the milk and cookies, I bet he didn’t take anything, right? Bet he even left something behind…that’s his MO, you know. We’ve been processing his scenes for years.

We’ll go ahead and send over our best CSI (Christmas Scene Investigator, of course), Santa Sidle. She can be a little rough around the edges sometimes, but she gets the job done…

Yeah, this year I decided to give the sci-fi scions of my life a little break and go with another of my loves for my holiday card…CSI. I considered using Nick Stokes, since his name was the most appropriate for this particular holiday (St. Nicky)…but I had to go with my favorite: the dark, damaged, dentally diastemic one. Besides, if anyone needs a little holiday cheer in their lives, I think Sara Sidle comes at the top of that list. Plus, she wears that Santa hat well, no?

And, of course, I wish you all the merriest of holidays, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or the Blessed Solstice. And I thank you. This has been a year of slippery slopes for me, but I have found solace and unexpected smiles from so many of you. I know I kid about having “ImagiFriends^TM,” but the truth is…you are my friends. I just haven’t met some of you IRL…yet. You have made my days brighter, my laughter stronger, and my mind filthier (you know which ones of you I’m talking about…).

Enough sentimentality. Break out the rum and let’s get this investigation under way! I’ll be over here, helping to print the reindeer…

Colonel Kira guards my stash. All arguments are henceforth invalid.

(Oh, and ImagiFriends^TM inspire the silliness in me. One of many reasons why I love them so…)

The anachronistic fustercluckery of this cover delights and disturbs me in equal measure. Ro Laren in a dress that looks like a reject from a Smut Trek bodice ripper romance? Running from…what? A Jawa with a raging case of gigantism and osteoporosis? And she’s holding a Cardassian phaser? In her left hand?

[Loba Tangent: Yes, I do notice things like this...I'm left-handed, so I almost always register when someone is similarly dexterous. Ro Laren, however, was not a southpaw. Neither was Admiral Cain or Maryann Forrester. Michelle Forbes, however...also isn't left-handed. Just so you know.]

It’s all too much. And yet not even close to being enough. I want need to know what this comic is about. Although in my mind, I’ve decided that this is a really bad first date, and that look of murderous intent in Ro’s eyes is either: A) Because she’s now on her way to assassinate the creator of IntergalacticHarmony.com for completely botching her request for someone “dark and mysterious, with a sense of Old World adventure” or; B) Because she’s had enough of Tall, Dark, and Bony grabbing her…bustle.

Whatever is going on, I can’t stop laughing at this cover. Silly Star Trek comics, you just don’t care about continuity at all, do you?

If you find yourself needing to know more about this particular comic and my explanation just isn’t cutting it for you, then might I direct you to this electronic comic book collection, brought to you by Santa Timmy and his lovely worker elves at ThinkGeek. Consider it my gift to you at this festive Tribblemas…

Sometimes you stumble across something so bizarre…and yet so strangely entertaining…that you can’t stop looking at it. Perhaps that’s a statement only applicable to the truly obsessive by nature, but I do believe that I undeniably fall under the purview of this particular categorization (you may have noticed that I can sometimes obsess about certain things here at the lair [cough, cough] Star Trek [cough, cough]).

So it is with this video:

Bet you weren’t in a million years expecting that ending, were you? I mean, what about a Merengue-rapping dachshund, dancing girls in hoodie dresses and go-go boots, exploding avocados, and random Lucha Libre wrestlers, all undulating to the rhythm of a Latin fusion beat says “paper towel commercial” to you? It wasn’t immediately obvious to me either, but this write-up gives away a bit of the thought process behind this commercial, at the end of the article.

Whatever the reasons, I can’t stop watching this silly video. I even caught myself humming the tune as I was walking to my car after work. So I’ve decided to post it here, for all you lovely denizens. I figure, if I can’t stop watching it, at least I can maybe attract some company to obsess along with me…

Ay, mamita…

I told you, denizens: Once upon a time, we had a pet squirrel. My dad discovered this little tiny baby squirrel in our front yard. She was so small, her eyes hadn’t even opened, yet by some miracle of universal proportions, she survived without a scratch a fall that would have left a human with at least several broken bones.

When she finally opened her eyes, I named her “Peepers.” Not the most brilliant name imaginable, but cut me a break…I was 7 years old. We’d always let Peepers run free whenever we were in the kitchen. I’m sure that most people probably cringe at the thought of a little wild animal, running about in an area where food is prepared and eaten. What can I say, we’re hopeless pet lovers. Besides, how can you not think this is adorable?

My mother adored Peepers. It seems to me that if Peepers wasn’t in her cage, she was on my mom’s shoulder. I know that’s not completely true, but that’s just the image I have stuck in my mind. It’s no surprise, then, that this is one of my favorite pictures of my mom:

No, I’m not referring to happenings at the lair…although I do believe that you are due an appy-polly-logy for yet another Friday come and gone and nary a Flashback Friday in sight. Do have pity on me, though, denizens. I was still in the glorious throes of food coma this past Friday, being the day after Thanksgiving and all. And the food was well worth the coma, let me tell you! Loba is indeed spoiled by a cousin with mad culinary skillz.

Besides eating, however, I did have several chances to try out my latest gadget. Seems that, after slightly more than six years of rather strenuous use, my lovely little point-and-click Kodak digital camera has decided it is time to rest. I’ve been so impressed by it throughout the years, that I decided to replace it with a new Kodak. I went for the EasyShare C195. Yes, I have the purple one. I didn’t order it in purple, but it was a lovely surprise and didn’t cost me anything extra. So I stuck with it.

I haven’t given this new camera a proper workout yet, but what I have done with it so far has been all right. Nothing mind-blowing, which I suppose isn’t the greatest review, eh? I find that I miss the ease of my old Kodak’s setting wheel when choosing different photo scenes. I also miss a view finder. That great big 3-inch LCD screen is lovely for reviewing photos, but nothing beats setting up a shot the old-fashioned way. Plus, I can see from the battery icon that this little camera is going to devour power like Augustus Gloop on speed!

However, it was quite reasonably priced, has lots of new photo scene options and, at 14 megapixels, I’m hoping it’s going to provide me with some great high-resolution shots. I just have to get used to it. (I also need to download the full manual, which apparently only is available online…yay for tree-saving!) So I’ve been carrying it with me to visit family, taking all the prerequisite animal photos that my family is required by genetics to take. This includes these lovely shots of two chubby, fluffy visitors to my aunt’s deck:

I know that my British compatriots are not fans of the American gray squirrel. I remember on my first trip across the pond, I was wandering through St. James’s Park, snapping photos of the wildlife. A rather large gray squirrel ran across my path and began to follow the woman slightly ahead of me and to my right. She was eating some sort of delightfully gooey-looking pastry, which the squirrel was obviously trying to charm her into sharing. Instead, she audibly “tsk”ed the squirrel, looked over at me, and said, “Cheeky little bugger, innit?”

I laughed but said nothing more, for fear that she would hear my blatantly Yankee twang and order me to take this fat, demanding American squirrel with me when I left. He was, indeed, cheeky…just like these voracious little visitors sneaking about, consuming anything they could shovel into their chubby little faces. Still, look at them! They’re so cute. I do have a soft spot for squirrels, obnoxious little tree rats that they are. I am sorry that they’re such bullies to their smaller British red cousins…but what can I say? They’re American

I hate being touristy. I prefer to blend into the local colors, to savor the flavors around me as if I belonged to that particular tribe. It’s how I’ve sneaked past HRH’s defenses defences three times now without being sussed out as an” other” on first blush (God save me and Queenie when I open my Yankee yap, though).

However, when I learned that I was going to get the chance to return to San Francisco, a city I adored upon first visit in 2007, I knew that there was a destination I’d missed that first trip that I needed to catch this time around. Pier 39 is grossly touristy, with its cacophonous cavalcade of gift shops, kitschy themed restaurants, and way too many people for someone with well-defined personal space boundaries. But there’s something at Pier 39 so special…so wonderful…so adorable-beyond-belief that even I was willing to put aside my inherent disdain for humanity to witness.

You can hear their bellicose barks all the way from the main turn-off for the pier. Sharp, stereophonic yarps…benedictions, banishments, or simple berating for sticking a cold, wet nose or flipper where one is least appreciated. As you walk closer, your initial impression is one of somnolent (and slightly malodorous) mayhem: soggy, stinky sea lions, piled in surly, sleepy stacks under sanguine sunshine.

What is there not to love about that?

Okay, the smell is indeed abrasive when you get your first few (hundred) whiffs. Then again, they’re not Chanel No. 9 perfume models. They’re sea lions! Adorable, cranky sea lions, napping anyplace they can find the room…even if that means sprawling in confused tangles with the rest of the denizens of this unique little diversion from the main frenzy of Pier 39.

I couldn’t get enough of them and spent a good portion of my stop simply observing. You’d think that watching sleeping sea lions would be boring. However, they were a constantly shifting mass of fur and flippers as they moved across, over, under, about, aboard…prepositional beasts of perpetual motion all of them, vying for the best position to catch some rays before that infamous San Francisco fog rolled back down through the Golden Gate (which, indeed, it did only a few hours later).

I did finally snap out of my observational mode to snap several photos of this whimsical behavior. Here, then, are three of my favorite shots. As the sea lions would undoubtedly say: “Arrr! Arr arr arrrr! ARRR!”

I’m still working on putting together a pictorial account of my latest adventure, but I’m keenly aware of each day that slips by me without a visit to the lair (especially after the tour de force blogging event known as Doctober!).

So, quick though it might be, here is a shot I recently snapped of some gorgeous autumnal color. Guess all my worrying about the fall foliage was for naught.

I love serendipity (the word, not the movie…although I do find the movie to be a lovely bit of diversion on a rainy afternoon).

In 2006, I found myself wandering the streets of Dublin, slack-jawed and amazed that I was in a place that perhaps had been walked a thousand times before by ancestors from my very own “long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” It was our first day in Dublin, in fact, and we were pretty much giddy and groggy from the long flight and virtual lack of sleep, and just ambling about without much of a point or purpose at all. That’s when I stumbled upon this lovely fellow:

He was located in a center island on O’Connell Street, not too far from the “Stiffy on the Liffey.” A nearby placard explained that he was part of a series of sculptures that had been commissioned for the Millennium celebration (the same celebration, we were later told by a tour guide, that had brought about the, er, erection of previously mentioned stiffy).

Of course, being a true member of my particular family, I happily photographed this rather pensive rock-dwelling rabbit. We are renowned for our propensity to photograph anything non-sentient or non-human, so a bronze bunny? Double win. Then we were once again on our way and I pretty much forgot all about this sculpture.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered this during a perambulation through the National Gallery of Art’s sculpture garden a few weeks ago:

Needless to say, this was an unparalleled delight to discover that my hippity-hoppity friend had somehow found his way across several years and several thousand miles to appear right in my own backyard. I also learned a bit more about the Thinker on a Rock, thanks to a little handout available at the garden entrance. I was a bit surprised to see that he was originally created back in 1997 since I was still under the impression that he had something to do with the millennium. Although, three years isn’t all that much time in the grand scheme of things, and perhaps he had merely been brought to the streets of Dublin because someone enjoyed Barry Flanagan’s artistry in general rather than having been actually commissioned specifically by Dublin for the purpose of this celebration.

Who knows? All I know is that, in the midst of what was already an extraordinarily enjoyable day of wandering through museums and the Mall, my happiness meter pinged off the scales when I found the Thinker.

Serendipity, FTW.

So I may or may not have ever mentioned this here at the lair, but I have a HUGE fangirl crush on Keith Birdsong. Not familiar with the name? That’s all right. I bet, if you’re a geek like me, you’re familiar with his work. He’s an extraordinarily talented artist who has done work for almost every major fandom imaginable, including my all-time favorite, Star Trek. In fact, if you ever picked up a TNG or DS9 novel back in those shows’ heydays, more likely than not you were looking at a Birdsong original on the cover. I happily confess that, on several occasions, I bought a novel based solely on the fact that I thought his cover art was gorgeous.

Imagine my delight, then, when I realized that he had done a fantastic piece for Creation Entertainment’s annual Xena convention back in 2007. I immediately fell in love with this one: Not only is it Birdsong’s recognizable style giving life to familiar scenes of Xena and Gabrielle (and Argo, too!), but it’s done on a beautiful abstract backdrop painted by Birdsong as well. Top it all off with the fact that Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor signed each of the limited-release prints of this artwork and you’ve just pushed the geekery over the breaking point for me.

But how could I make this even more special?

Look at the bottom left of the picture and you’ll get the answer to that question (sorry for the lack of detail and glass reflection in this photo, but I kind of wanted to make sure that no one could copy this image). See, my Mirror Universe self knows people, including the amazing Keith Birdsong. My Mirror Universe self rocks…but Keith rocks way more. He very graciously signed this print for me, and I can’t even begin to express how awesome he is for doing so. All I have to do is look at his signature and I’m suddenly 15 again, standing in the aisle of the Crown Books Superstore and looking for the newest TNG book to bear a Birdsong original.

If you’d like to see more of Keith’s artwork, you can visit his online gallery or check out some of his more recent work, sold through Lightspeed Fine Art.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some more squeeing to do…