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Kate and I got into an argument at Waterloo Gardens this morning:

Kate: “I kind of want to find a planter that’s a statue head. I don’t know whether Beverley Nichols would have liked it or been horrified by it. And then there’s that poem, about the giant head…”
John: “Huh? Giant head?”
Kate: “Yeah, you know, the GIANT RUINED HEAD. You KNOW that poem, they made us learn it in seventh grade! With the giant legs, and the sand, and the desert…”
John: “That poem sounds awesome. But I don’t know it.”
Kate: “Shut up, you totally know it! Get out your iPhone and Google ‘poem statue desert‘.”

And so I do, and I am introduced for the first time to:

THE MOST METAL POEM EVER WRITTEN

OZYMANDIAS
Percy Bysse Shelley
=============================================
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
=============================================

I mean! Holy. Fucking. SHIT. That is the most metal poem ever. How did I not hear about this sooner? It’s got EVERYTHING:

• It’s got the Majesty of Rock, with the sneering, and the blowing sand, and the easy, melodramatic, and theatrical irony.
• It’s got that twelve-cylinder pomp that you see on Iron Maiden album covers.
• Tolkien nerd art is FULL of ancient crumbling fearsome king dudes.
• Charlton fa’ Chrissakes HESTON was influenced by it!

Plus, Shelley’s heavy-metal admonition is totally apropos for someone who spends their working day pushing electrons around on a magnetized platter; both in the positive and negative senses. Man, I could have been using this poem on a daily basis since… well, since seventh grade! Was I sick that day? Damn! DAMN!!!

The main reason that I can’t believe I didn’t know about this poem is because of this blog post in 2003, about our neighbor Todd’s placement of a GIANT, CRUMBLING SANTA CLAUS HEAD in his yard. God help us, think of all the cheezy blog-post titles I could have written!

Kate, thanks for finally closing this gap in my knowledge. This is as big, to me, as the Digitas co-worker who finally, belatedly introduced me to the Flashman series, after incredulously learning that I didn’t know about them. Sheesh, what else am I missing?

More great things about suburban West Chester:

My brother-in-law Matt has been rebuilding the wall extensions on local underground skating hangout “The Dust Bowl.” This is a place right near King of Prussia that I was nowhere near cool enough to know about as a kid (but Matt was.) It’s a concrete-lined ditch with angled walls, and local skaters had poured concrete wall extensions, added pool copings, and otherwise done Awesome Secret Skateboarder Stuff there. I think Bam Margera is at the Dust Bowl at about 0:20 here.

When route 202 was widened, the homemade extensions were jackhammered out. Trees were removed between the Dust Bowl and the hotel behind it, so you couldn’t skate there without a hotel manager calling the cops. I can’t count the number of times that a hotel manager has called the cops on me. Actually, yes I can, and that number is zero.

Anyhow, the trees have been replanted, and so Matt built a wall extension and installed it there, and posted some pictures to the straight edge hardcore forum where the skaters hang out, and they’re all a really courteous and genial lot (“Mind if I add some pool coping, friend?” “Why not at all, my good man! Please be my guest!”)

I’m posting this because I’m absolutely certain that my blog readership does not contain anyone that’s likely to go blow up Matt’s secret skating spot by parking stickered cars in the hotel parking lot and generally acting like jerks. DO NOT PROVE ME WRONG, MOM. Thank you.

Anyhow, that’s Awesome Local Thing number one. The other Awesome Local Thing is the tack shop right around the corner from my office. I went in and talked to Joe, and told him that I’m looking to sew plastic to leather, and can he…? YES OF COURSE it turns out he has these giant sewing machines that sew bridle leather together and he makes tack right there in the store:

He got down a patent-leather hide (actual leather! actually shiny!) and we started looking at different materials, and HOLY DAMN there’s nothing cooler than custom-made tack. Especially if it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything useful. More on that later. Here’s Joe, busy taking notes on all the bits of leather we’re sewing together:

West Chester is awesome. New York friends, I urge you to move out of NYC before the recession really solidifies. Come down here (housing is a buyer’s market, although real estate prices here remain strong!) and start a vegetable garden. We’ll weather the Coming Global Depression in style.

I love special-purpose gear. I especially love special-purpose gear in bright colors. And I freaking LOVE special-purpose gear in bright colors that conjures ADVENTURE. And helicopters.

So I’m incredibly fortunate that firefighter uber-outlet The Fire Store is just around the corner in Coatesville. I went there on a SECRET MISSION this morning to talk to their embroidery department, and I took some pictures, in which I start foaming at the mouth from excitement. Speaking of foam, did I mention they have foam depth charges just kind of casually sitting around next to the special-purpose Pelican Cases? And they have helmet crests (all the leather awesomeness of horse tack, with all the graphical punch of Fisher-Price Adventure People!) And Combine Soldier gear, if you’re into that.

Just check out all the helmets: each is heavy, like a motorcycle helmet, with all kinds of mount points for expensive flashlights with triangular cross-sections. And oxygen masks. And radios. Plus, they all have a kind of a new-car smell:

As icing on the cake, Declan the embroiderer instantly picked up on what I wanted to do, unlike every other embroiderer I’ve talked to who’s looked at me sideways and patiently explained to me why I’m an idiot. Plus, anything I do through the Fire Store is going to be just totally STEEPED in Rescue Ranger karma. Wow, what a morning!

Barack Obama was at West Chester University today, appearing on a road tour of Chris Matthews’ Hardball. Barb was stuck in Harrisburg, so Kate and I got to use her VIP tickets. Without Barb there, they were downgraded to semi-VIP tickets, but that was even better because we got to sit right next to the band and behind the cheerleaders and it was loud and boisterous and enthusiastic, and just what you would expect!

I took a lot of blurry pictures on my iPhone, but Kate got the only good picture of The Man Himself, looking suitably presidential in the spotlight:

I thought Senator Obama did a decent job with the questions. He kept the answers to the softball questions short (“Have you had any really strange experiences on the campaign trail?” “Daily, until I stopped watching cable news YUK YUK”), and went into more detail on the actual question questions. He came across as straightforward — when he wanted to avoid answering a question, he would declare that he didn’t want to answer it and why. All in all, I was impressed, but I didn’t have a Shining Camelot Moment like I’ve heard my parents’ generation describe.

The crowd was the most fun — outspoken, enthusiastic, energetic, and a definite mix of black and white.

Like Slim Pickens, I never met a meme that I didn’t want to ride all the way down. So I went ahead and registered the inevitable URL. Announcing NERDLEPOINT DOT COM! Look! I have a header and everything!

I’ve been looking for an excuse to use both my Tintin fonts, and so I was delighted when they looked good next to each other.

I’m really enjoying the offline part of this. And so a part of me wants to get into the thing business, where I make things that just happen to have these magical properties of being able to summon URLs. So I’m filling out a vendor application for the West Chester Festival of the Arts on May 4th. I’ll sell hand-painted needlepoint canvases (each one unique, since each one will have a different URL), and stitch charts (also unique). The URLs will point to a password-protected proxy system, so you, the purchaser, can configure the URL to go anywhere you like. And the passwords will be included along with the canvas or chart, in a little sealed envelope as much like the envelope in Clue as I can possibly get it.

A photo of your booth is required in the application, so I borrowed my stepmother’s Official Craft Show Tent (it previously saw action as the World Famous Pontani Sisters’ changing room), and set it up in the back yard for photos. Lydia is hiding behind the table. And behind the Photoshopped signage (I’m making it clear in my application that this is a mackup):

Right now, the booth is very science-fair, what with the table front and center. I guess I’ll need to put it catty-corner, or something. Or have a white pedestal with a single iPhone on it, showing the iMatrix barcode reader, all tastefully picked out with a halogen spot. Or an erlenmeyer flask with some dry ice in it? I’m floundering. Any suggestions for booth design? The space is 10×10, and the actual things I’ll be selling (stitch charts and hand-painted needlepoint canvases) fit into an 8x5x11 manila envelope.

I really like how QRcodes —cryptic, digital, unintelligble — are at one extreme end of the “real versus digital” numberline, and needlepoint — dense, wooly, handmade — is way way waaaaay at the other end of that same numberline. I get a little bit of a worlds-colliding, mad-scientist thrill when I can coax a URL and a target website out of a piece of starched canvas and wool. Especially when I can do it using a frickin laser beam.

I’ve been generating QRcodes using the Kaywa tool, after trying some of the others. The javascript rails plugin doesn’t seem able to create the smallest version of code, and Swetake’s Perl/PHP tool generated images that crashed my iPhone’s alpha reader. The Kaywa generator is very easy to use: put in a URL, get a .png file back, which you can save. Then you can zoom that file up to a zillion percent in Photoshop and start transferring to canvas. By hand, painting each thread intersection with black acrylic paint.

The hard part of the pointing process, for me, is figuring out EXACTLY where to mark the canvas. Because on the computer screen or on a printout, a box is “between” the coordinates, but on the canvas, the box is on top of the intersection between two threads, so it’s “on” the coordinates. So when I’m painting the canvas, I’m always scratching my head and thinking “wait, the pixel is HERE, so I’ll paint the intersection that’s up… and to the right…” and it’s oddly draining. Especially when I’m using four stitches to represent one box, so it’s a little bit arguable where the first junction should be.

I’ve tried adding lots of red reference lines to the canvas, to match red lines that I’ve drawn on the chart. This clutters up the canvas. Actual needlepointers stitch threads into the canvas to mark lines, then pull them out later. That solves the clutter problem, but even the red lines don’t help me with the “always up and to the right” mental gymnastics, and so I’m reluctant to baste in marker threads.

Inspired by the really excellent pattern charts included in AMH Design’s kits, I took some time to start a pattern chart in OmniGraffle, which should look an awful lot more like the canvas than a flat stitch chart. This diagram is for a version 1 QRcode, which is the smallest possible size at 21 modules wide:

It was fun to make (for some definitions of “fun”), but I’m not really sure how much this chart will help me. For instance, cross-stitchers apparently have no problem doing the mental juggling between boxes-between-the-lines and boxes-on-the-lines, because they work from stitch charts without ever painting the canvas. Maybe it’s just my spatial-relations challenge that makes that part of the process seem so confusing.

UPDATE: Hey, looks like this meme is breaking! My colleague Todd Bender linked to me and an article in about QRcodes in today’s NY Times that mentions the needlepoint pillow top. Cool!

I started putting up Guerilla Drive-In flyers around West Chester. It’s got nothing but the GDI logo and a QRcode with a special landing URL on it.

If even a single nerd out there sees the flyer, snaps the QRcode with a cameraphone reader, and hits the special landing URL encoded in it, I’m going to declare victory and immediately try to enlist their help in the final assembly and placement of the Guerilla Drive-In MacGuffin.

UPDATE: THREE SHORT HOURS after putting up those flyers, my nerdbait got its first response, from Stephen W, who is the IT guy at Taylor’s Music Store. He used a camera to grab the image, Googled 2d barcodes, then used a Java app to extract the URL. VIC-TORY!!!! Stephen, you are awesome. The MacGuffin is gonna be built in no time.