The House of Blue Lights, a house transformed into the basis of a local ghost story in Indianapolis betweeen 1920 and 1960.
Appenzell canton (Switzerland)
Appenzell almost went to war with St. Gallen in 1579 when a printer of that city published a calendar ornamented with the arms of the Swiss cantons, and ignorantly turned Appenzell's bear into a female (simply by leaving off the penis). War was avoided when the printer offered abject apologies and St. Gallen destroyed every copy of the calendar they could find.
(with regard to this and this, via that daarn super-seekrit source again.)
So it would seem that the Swiss may owe some of their legendary independence and freedom from invasion and turbulence due to a willingness to fight for the right to cock-on-bear arms.
Find A Grave: Providence Quaker Church Cemetery.
The grave of Omie Wise is said to be located in the cemetery of Providence Quaker Church in Randolph County, North Carolina.
jkonrath's twitter stream has been leading me to chuckle daily of late. I swear he's angling for another visit from the feebs.
Adobe: Adobe Photoshop Express - Made You Look. Free image hosting and editing, 2gb storage. Interesting.
NYT: Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
"Researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians.
It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif."
First: EIGHTEEN SIXTY? Wah, cool.
Second: the editorial decision to use the word 'recording,' while semantically accurate, is misleading, as the use of the word in an audio context implies something which was designed for playback when it was, as we say, recorded.
The etymology of the word, however, permits its' misleading use in this context.
Imagine, for example, a seismograph being referred to throughout an article about an earthquake primarily by the word 'recording,' and noting in passing that the seismograph had been converted to audio from paper-based waveform records.
Anyway, this is still really cool.
Trees chopped, tweaked, twigged, and trimmed. Many plants moved out into the greening, cold spring. Speeding corn moved out of starter flat.
Dom Polski! Right in Capitol Hill. What else did I never know of back yonder? (Here's an old Rachel Kessler review. I hear they have longer hours with a $1 teporary membership these days.)
A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly - New York Times.
Intolerable. Unsurprising. Unchanged. Specifically American. Why I will never have a child. Why I fucking hate you and your entire family. Why my hatred exceeds that boundary. Fuck you. Fuck you all.
My starter sets are freaking the fuck out in their little hothouse tray. I was thinking I was gonna get 'em in the ground today, but there's a possible freeze tonight and I decided to skip the digging. Unfortunately, that means that the sprouts will now get a full three weeks in the starter bed, as I will not have time to plant until the second week of April.
I have frantic growth on two varieties of broccoli, two varieties of corn, lettuce, spinach, and some carrots. The carrots are the slowest out of the gate; the corn is the most party-hearty of the batch and I think I may need to move them out of the hothouse lid arena - two more weeks at the rate they are growing will make them into 4-inch shoots at a 90 degree angle.
I was NOT expecting to be dealing with too much of a muchness right out of the gate. Huh.
So my friend Andrea messaged me on Facebook wanting my thoughts on a building project in Louisville I hadn't ever heard of. I ended up kinda going on at length and I thought that my quickie analysis might be amusing. She mentioned Stonehenge as a descriptor in her initial take on the design.
--
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=127240
- bunch of renderings, better context and diff viewing angles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H-qhbIIMyk
- pitch film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisville_Museum_Plaza
At first blush I was reminded of some of the Ground Zero proposals, as I recall there were a couple of linked two-tower ideas. The pitch film seems to give the most context, visually.
I did not find info linking the design of the building to the Ground Zero proposals. BUT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Prince-Ramus
- "partner-in-charge of the Seattle Central Library"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/arts/design/14pogr.html
- "Joshua Prince-Ramus Leaving Koolhaas's O.M.A. to Start New Architecture Firm…"
The film clearly links the building to the Library; giant rooms with dedicated uses piled onto one another in ways that presumably reflect and express the use structurally - or so reads the promo literature, anyway.
I like the giant video screen thing as an idea because of Blade Runner, but in real life I HATE video in my field of view when I am driving, even other driver's little DVD screens distract the shit out of me.
Take my increasingly skeptical opinion of the new Seattle Library:
- it's confusing to navigate even when you know it's confusing;
- it's noisy pretty much no matter where you are because of the lack of interior sound baffling and the open insides of the building;
- it's hard to understand visually because of the solid intensity of the color schemes of all the interior spaces except for the top-floor reading desks and study carrels and the ground floor.
Looking at that list, the overriding quality underlying each of these critiques is a building that actually emphasizes noise, meaning sensory overload, at the expense of usability. The big video screen on the Louisville building actually takes that problem and expands it into the city itself. I rather doubt that interior of the building would be any more conducive to clear and rational thought.
Oh, look, Prince-Ramus worked on a Guggenheim museum project based in Las Vegas. The aesthetic line I am seeing looks at Vegas' lines of blinking distraction and robbery machines and casts that as a good and desirable thing. I see it as a mechanism to increase the concentration of power and wealth by making it that much harder for Joe Average to think clearly about his life and role in the economy, something that actually threatens participatory democracy itself.
So, Stonehenge? If Stonehenge is a place of religious spectacle and intoxication, maybe so. I think, however, it's currently thought to be a sort of astronomical observatory, right? That sort of constructed artifact celebrates the cyclical, the predictable, the knowable, and the real.
These buildings I looked at this morning don't seem interested in that set of values.
Ha, it's fun to just come up with stuff like this on the fly!
A review of TE Lawrence in print and film, and the relationship between the pop-culture hits and the legend: Trenches on the Web - Special: A Durable Lawrence (TE).
In the past, I've dabbled at Seven Pillars, but it did not hold my attention. It really seems my interest begins and may end with the film, probably because the film's central character is such an antihero.
For reasons not entirely clear to me, I stayed up too late last night and am very sleepy this afternoon.
Had a happy little lunch today in the ID with Greg, whose film is proceeding apace. Wandered around Uwajimaya for ten minutes while waiting for him, always an interesting experience. I was sort of halfheartedly looking for kooky cellphone charms (am I allowed to call them netsuke?) but didn't find any.
The complete transcript of a 1970 Interview with Frank Herbert and Beverly Herbert by Willis E. McNelly, encountered subsequent to a searchtrawl looking for commentary linking Lawrence of Arabia, the film, with Dune, the novel.
Here's the bit about Lawrence, near the end, which, I must say, is not a particularly thoughtful or nuanced take on the character of Lawrence as constructed for the film, but which does turn on the idea of Lawrence as akin to the Muad'Dib:
"WM (William McNelly, the interviewer - MW): Oh, I-I caught overtones of Lawrence of Arabia in the thing, for example.
FH: He could very well become an avatar for the... for the Arabs.
WM: Right.
FH: If Lawrence of Arabia had died at the crucial moment of the British...
WM: Say, when Allenby walked into Jerusalem.
FH: Yes. If he had died... if, for example, he had gone up and killed the people who were destroying his breed, walked into that conference and said, Gentlemen, I have here under my javala a surprise, Bang! Bang! Bang! and he had been killed...
WM: He’d have been deified.
FH: He would have been deified. And it would have been the most terrifying thing the British had ever encountered, because the Arabs would have swept that entire peninsula with that sort of force, because one of the things we've done in our society is exploited this power... Western man has exploited this avatar power."
On Sunday, the League convened for an all-too-rare - although much more frequent in Seattle than most other burgs - screening of the wide-screen amazement device entitled Lawrence of Arabia.
I've seen this film three times now in 70mm at the Cinerama, and each time, my head spins for days afterward, usually on new topics. For example, since the last time I had seen this, I participated in a couple of film shoots, and it clearly altered the way I was looking at the film. The clearest example of this was in my electric awareness of the frequent use of one-take shots in the film, shots set up by the film crew with the clear knowledge that the first-take of a shot in a setup would in some way always be visually superior to any subsequent takes.
The best examples of these are in some early shots of the journey to Feisal's camp, in which Lawrence and his guide traverse sand which has clearly not been previously marked by earlier takes, and in a shot depicting a lost Hadith raider, stumbling across an 'impassable' desert just before dawn. As the camera catches the actor, the actual sun appears, camera left but very much in the center of attention, a burning sliver above the horizon. What a shot! It defies the imagination to consider the difficulties the setup poses, and yet it's clear that the result is wholly worthwhile.
Seeing this again, now nearly five years into the Iraq war, shifted meanings within the film one more time. Now I knew several of the physical sites mentioned in the film as places referenced at one time or another in reportage of America's campaigns in the desert, not least of which is the name of the film provide for Sherif Ali and Prince Feisal's tribe, the Hadith. It rings with the sound of a town in Iraq: Haditha.
Watching the film directly after an afternoon spent in the company of Roman sculpture was interesting, too. Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq were all under Roman dominion after Pompey's campaigns, so these places have an arguably closer tie to the culture of Rome and Greece than we do here in the New World. In the film, the characteristically arabesque decorative surfaces and architectural details owe much to the late-period art of the Roman empire.
It should be noted, though, that the film's interiors were all shot in Spain; while it had been hoped that Jordan and in particular Petra might be used as location scenes, illness disrupted the plans. I'm guessing that informed the choice of the stone city as a location in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
As the League was in attendance, after-film imbibery led to a number of questions and I chased a few down.
Picking up a few threads:
The wikipedia article includes some interesting notes on casting - Marlon Brando was considered for Lawrence, and Laurence Olivier was originally set for Feisal.
Also, I had said that the film was shot in Tunisia (as was some of Star Wars). I was incorrect. The film was set to shoot in Jordan but mostly was shot in Spain and Morocco.
As Lawrence arrives at Feisal's camp, it is under bombardment by a pair of Turkish biplanes. Much to my frustration, I was unable to ID either the planes actually used by the filmmakers or the model of airplane they had been dressed to resemble.
The planes were DeHavilland 82 Tiger Moths, a 2-seat british trainer of the 1930s, dressed as Rumpler CIVs, sez here.
Finally, for years I have associated the journalist character in the film with Lowell Thomas, correctly (note lower left pic in first section of the page linked to). Here is a link to the Google books result for Lowell's "With Lawrence in Arabia," oddly treated as an under-copyright work although it was published in 1924.
For years beyond my certain knowledge of Lawrence, I have associated Lowell Thomas with a Saturday afternoon matinee show shown on WGN Channel 9 Chicago throughout my childhood. I had thought he hosted the show into his dotage. I was entirely mistaken. The actual host of Family Classics was a longtime WGN employee named Frazier Thomas. I still think it's possible that Family Classics showed Lawrence in a bowdlerized form; the show did introduce me to more than one of the great masterworks of midcentury Technicolor spectacle.
At work today, a co-worker was listening to a Philly sports radio station when he heard a promo for some St. Paddy's Day shows by Philly's own The Bare Knuckle Boxers.
He and I both found this amusing, having been founding members of Seattle's own BKB. Given the Google results for bare knuckle boxers, it seems unlikely that the Philly gents are unaware of our now-departed Pacific coast enterprise. Thinking back to my own days of four St. Paddy's gigs in a day, I'll doff my hat to the youngsters.
There are some odd resonances that I wish to note, as well.
At work we commonly play one or two episodes of the absurdist, cynical, and potentially nihilist sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and consequently I will always imagine the Philly BKB playing in Paddy's Pub.
When Seattle's BKB started playing, another post-Pogues Irish rock band was active locally (and may still be), Saint Bushmill's Choir. As is currently visible on the website I just linked to, the band would occasionally give a shout out to your Philadelphia Flyers.
So, far be it from me to make sense of this. But it seems plainly apparent that Philly, Seattle, and Irish music times the rock and the roll are somehow bound by destiny. Take it up and shape it, 'cause I'm going to bed.
We spent Saturday out and about, getting starter plants and seeds for the garden after starting our day at SAM's twin traveling exhibits, The Gates of Paradise (hurry, it closes April 6) and Roman Art from the Louvre, through May 11.
It was wonderful to see the Ghiberti panels so intimately. Unfortunately, as the Louvre show is a certified blockbuster, they use timed ticket entry and I was unable to head directly to the panels for some leisurely, intense looking prior to joining the jostling masses one floor up.
The Roman show is flat-out terrific, with a couple of minor exhibit-based quibbles. First, audio-guide numbers are sparsely sited and hard to see, leading to much poking and jostling as people try to figure out what entry they should listen to as they observe this patch of mosaic over someone's shoulder or that left eye of a head between those two tall persons standing very very close to the sculpture.
The effect is to divert attention away from the art and artifacts, both for the persons desperately seeking a layer of interpretive information to mediate their looking and for other members of the onlooking throng as the seekers dodge in and out of the knots of would-be viewers. Especially in chilly Seattle where personal space is so important, that produces room after room of people uncomfortably twisting away from one another, casting their eyes about in order to mee no other's gaze, backing away from that tiny grey-haired woman only to bump into the gladiator-huge man standing directly behind your head.
And that, of course, is the other issue. Certainly, by attending the show at midday on a Saturday, we almost certainly experienced the galleries at maximum attendance. That maximum, to put it simply, was too much. The art was not satisfactorily observable. It was truly impossible to look at any one object long enough to develop the least moment of concentrated observation.
However, the objects in the show and the arrangement of them in relation to one another were really quite stunning, well worth another trip at a less trafficked hour, and I surely intend to return. Vivian especially enjoyed comparing the information and nonsense (surprisingly little of that, really) obtained from our relatively recent viewing and appreciation of
the HBO miniseries Rome, which included historical accuracy as a primary production goal.
Viv's favorite pieces were the twin full-figure sculptures of Augustus and Livia that announce the main body of the show, in a room mostly occupied with portrait sculptures of the family of that founding dynasty of the Empire. I'm not certain what my favorite was, but the amazing mosaic panel in the introductory section of the show may be the one I'd choose.
Given my recent home projects, I would have loved it if a bit more time had been invested in information concerning both formal residential gardens and kitchen gardens in the Empire, but obviously that is outside the scope of the show. Still, I'd like to know about Roman spices and herbs, for example. My intuition is that many of the European herbs we commonly use today such as lavender and oregano would have been in the garden and in the larder, while most Asian and Oceanic herbs (such as black peppercorns) would have been unknown.
Afterwards we drove all the way up to Sky Nursery in Shoreline and returned with a wide array of starter veggies and flowers. Despite all my pissing and moaning I have been forced into book-larnin' to grok the intrickasees of the planter's art, which appears to revolve, in spring, about the last frost date for your area. Hereabouts it is March 26.
Thus, most of my flats will go out the weekend before the 26 while I hope that the cold won't come in those few days. Over the next week I'll be starting sprouters inside, too.
One unexpected wrinkle is that the books seem to suggest I should wait until mid April to start working on outside tomatoes, which is a pain in the butt from my perspective - I moved my plants in over the winter and they have grown into enormous, vining monstrosities that make it hard to move around in the solarium. I guess I'll just cage them inside for now and disentangle them from the furniture and so forth.
Oh. Again, I am an eejit.
Download GardenSketch 1.0b5.1 for Mac (OS X).
Not that this will actually get the job done more rapidly than pen and paper, mind you.
WSU Gardening in Western Washington.
God I hope this has a planting guide for a 4x4 grid. I'm really surprised that I haven't come across some plant otaku's obsessive archives of what they did last year, and the year before, and...
I suppose it will be up to me. All I want is a completed planting map that I can run off to the store to get seeds for and whatnot. I'll learn as I go, I don't really have time learn why plant X is next to plant Y or to think about what matures when. I wish to stand upon the shoulders of others and it seems that the intarweb is letting me down. Looks like I have to go to the bookstore.
Lucky them.
Being an eejit, it came as no surprise - or at least didn't piss me off - to learn that I had misremembered the specs on SFG-style raised beds. Not four feet by four feet by 16 to 18 inches, but four by four by SIX TO EIGHT inches.
God dammit. Not 22 cubic feet of soil, eleven. Not four eight-foot 8'x8"x.5", two. Et fucking cetera.
Oh well. Apparently a double-capacity bed is good for stuff you expect to need more than six inches of depth, carrots, corn mebbe, who knows what else.
As I write this hundreds - possibly thousands - of crows are chattering and squawking over space in our trees. I believe I will step out into the rain to hear the chorus. Atonal it may be, and crows such a successful urban creature that I will grow to hate them in time, but at the moment I do not. I root for them each time I see them climb the skies en masse, pursuing an hallucinated or real raptor or opportunistic gull.
someone's old-skool page of redrawn RPG Maps, including a version of City-State of the Invincible Overlord, that while reproducing the specific details I recall from the map of my childhood, lacks the handmade aesthetic appeal of the original.
The first bed is filled. I shot for a 1/3 each peat, compost, vermiculite deal, per Mel. I ended up with 4 ft vermiculite, 4.4 ft peat (which was a bitch to declod, it was hard and dense like rocks - therefore the peat might be more than 4.4 ft), and SEVEN feet of compost. The mix is still not black enough for my tastes, so I might add some more gook.
I was projecting 22 ft to fill the 4 x 4 x 1.5 bed, and that still seems right - 16 + 8 = 22, but what I have in it now was sold as 15.4 feet. So color me confused.
Oh, the bill for today's dirt, NOT free like air, was $94. At this rate it will indeed be cheaper to just buy thedamn veggies at the store, and a sight faster besides.
I should note that I while I am committed to this process, I am HATING it. It's much more physically pleasant in Seattle's cool climate to perform the tasks associated with this process - measuring and cutting and digging and shit like that - than it was in the climate I was raised in.
My parents encouraged me to help them with their gardening and so forth, and I HATED every second of it. My awareness of that antipathy led me to avoid buying a house for years after I realized it was in my - and Viv's - financial interest. Three years on, I have certainly confirmed that my antipatthy to homeownership is not reflective of adolescent rage or of Midwestern summer swelter - I still hate it the associated labor just as much as I did as a kid, and I certainly do not subscribe to the 'safe as houses' superstition.
I regularly awaken in fearful anxiety dreams associated with our mortgage. In essence, I genuinely do not believe that owning this house is in my economic, financial, or emotional interest.
Yet my rational analysis of my goals is at odds with this.
Returning to gardening, I have found - YES! - something else to hate. When I am engaged in heavy physical labor, I tend to be extremely goal focused, and become incredibly rageful at the least little goal diversion, such as rain, clay-dense peat, a cramped workspace, or other such quotidian challenges.
I don't enjoy spending time with myself in this state, and there's little doubt in my mind that my lifelong avoidance of, you know, sports, housework, and exercise is due to the painful self-loathing that these helpless, vicious rages generate. I'm told, of course, that the rest of humanity does not experience that murderous anger whenever their adrenals spin up, but do not believe a word of it.
You do not want to spend time with me, nor I you.
4x4 Kitchen Garden potential plans.
First bed built, not filled.
Back of the excel spreadsheet calculations forecast more-or-less $125 per bed construction costs. So far, before soil, I'm at $64. I estimated 24 cubic feet of soil for a 4x4x1.5 fill (4x4=16+(4x2=8)), at $3/cuft, $72+64 = 138. Looks like right now I'm coming in high.
Also, these prices seem TOTALLY OUTRAGEOUS.
On Friday as I began my drive home from work, I was at a stop light on Royal Brougham Way, between the stadiums and right across from the main entrance to Safeco Field.
As I waited, a big, balding man with shoulder-length white hair and a soup-strainer mustache, also white, came out of the stadium, holding a fistful of Mariners literature close to his actual vest and pocketwatch chain.
He was trim and tall in the jacket and vest of a grey tweed three-piece suit over jeans and black boots, sort of a cowboy look, sans hat. His boots were square toed and plain.
As I looked at him, I thought to myself, geez, that guy looks a lot like David Crosby. The light changed, and I dove off.
This morning, I as I read the paper, I noticed an ad for the June 6 appearance of Crosby Stills and Nash at Chateau Ste. Michelle, which features current headshots of all three musicians.
There's no question: the guy I saw emerge from the ballpark was David Crosby, looking fit.
Now, I do hear tell that the Mariners have signed a Crosby lately. I wonder if it's a two-fer.
Or, I could just use the shared internet over bluetooth feature that comes with The Missing Sync.
As I am right now.
macosxhints.com: Share internet and TCP/IP services over Bluetooth, Mac to Palm. Dating to 2003, and yet untested by me.
Let it be known: dulce de leche + nilla wafers. Unstoppable.
In fact, I need some more right now. Anyboody gots some cool iPhone app ideas? We have, like, a week.
A Gmaps dulce de leche finder app won't cut it.
(Reposting a Leaguemail to ensure dissemination)
Fellow fezzes:
Spencer (note Cha-Cha League headshot), myself, and the lately-befezzed (on the Lake Union jaunt) Agent Cooper are planning to take in one of the 70mm Sunday matinees of Lawrence of Arabia at the Cinerama. Danelope has noted his availability as well.
March 16 or March 23 are the Sunday showings, at noon. My preference is March 16. Please advise!
As the fez carries a peculiarly negative significance in realtion to this film in its' association with a character portrayed by the father of Miguel Ferrer, I declare this outing fez optional and come one, come all.
Spencer, Coop, and myself have all seen this film at the Cinerama before in 70mm, and it is really among the most amazing moviegoing experiences one might have. Spencer and I also caught a super-clean 70mm 2001 there a few years back, and while I caught many compelling details I had missed in lower rez incarnations, I would personally say that Lawrence in 70mm dominates 2001 in 70mm.
You may recall my thoughts in 2004 or in 2002.
Apparently, Tom will recall them with especial clarity; Manuel may take some selling.
Holy shit, how long have we known each other?
On my way to NWFF tonight, I walked around my old neighborhood gawking at the massive changes that two years have brought. I was gawking at the new buildings, but evidently crime is up as well. Lots of shiny new restaurants targeting an upscale demographic, lots of closed mom-and-pop storefronts and empty old standbys.
The old standby I selected ws Bill's Pizza and Pasta, mostly empty (as were the majority I walked by).
The first song to roar off the jukebox as I settled in was Siouxsie and the Banshees' Your City Lies in Dust.
Spencer screened the oddball 1929 silent/sound hybrid The Mysterious Island at NWFF tonight, and according to his presentation notes, the film was budgeted at over $4m - the equivalent, according to this, of from $40m to $400m today.
You could, as they say, see the money on the screen, in huge and elaborate sets and miniatures and in a peculiar grand finale involving what must have been a thousand midgets in rubber suits.
All in all, a film I found worth seeing, but one which must be characterized as muddled in construction. Other folks have written about it at length.
Tonight I foisted 1948's Act of Violence on Viv over dinner, which largely drove her to bed. I was quite taken with the location shots in Glendale and one presumes Pasadena, the wartime fallout plot, and the lady leads, a very young but no less striking Janet Leigh and a ripe - even naturalistic - Mary Astor.
According to that link up there, director Zinnemann followed this noir up eventually with From Here To Eternity. There's no beach in this flick, the architecture is superior, the women are better looking, and the moralizing is less obstreperous. Oh, and this film's in black and white.
After a week of struggle, correctly identifying crufted permissions applied in layers dating back to around 2000, when I first installed OS X on the home server, I concluded that a drive wipe and clean reinstall was the only way to sort things out.
This has proved partly true, in that permissions have been the cause of my pain and suffering, and partly untrue, in that the frustrations I have been experiencing with them can now be definitively attributed to the Mac OS X default user structure.
I am quite close to a resolution, however. I have been able to connect to my crufty MySQL databases via PHP. Perl is still complaining, but does appear to be trying to talk to the databases.
With luck, tomorrow, I can extract the data needed and start shifting miscellaneous stuff over to the hosted environment.
