More snow….

Snowy #wny #winter

This really hasn’t been a very hard winter, in terms of snow. In fact, there’s only been one or two really “big” snow events, and one of those was really only notorious by virtue of when and how the snow hit: intense snowbands that stalled in place right during late afternoon and evening rush hour, back in November. That made a huge mess, and there were even kids stranded on school buses or who didn’t even make it out of school.

So now the “big storm” is hitting the Northeast, and it’s not sparing Buffalo. We’re not really on the docket to bear any of the brunt of this one, but we will get a good amount of snow. Luckily it will fall over three days instead of three hours, which makes it much more manageable. There’s some kvetching going on because Governor Cuomo declared a state of emergency not just for Eastern NY and the NYC metro area, which are the regions that are in the crosshairs for a big hit, but for all of New York State, which has a lot of people in Buffalo going, “Huh? We’ve functioned normally in worse than this.” I dunno…I can see that point, but we have seen storms turn worse than expected in recent memory (see above), and just last week there was a nasty wind storm that still has several thousand homes in WNY without electricity. I don’t think erring on the side of caution is always a bad thing.

Anyway, stay warm, people!

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Tone Poem Tuesday

An American in Paris.

Is it a tone poem? You bet! Or rather, a “symphonic poem”, which is really much the same thing. Gershwin intended the work to reflect the energy and rhythms he experienced while traveling in 1920s Paris himself, and the work really does buzz with a certain cosmopolitan energy, at least until the pace slackens and we turn to the plaintive blues sung by the solo trumpet. It’s amazing to me that such an optimistic work could be inspired by a European city so soon after the cataclysm of World War I, but in the roaring twenties, I imagine Paris was a place of amazing energy. I tend to see this work as a companion to the Rhapsody in Blue, but an older, more mature one.

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Happy Pi Day!!!

UPDATE 3/14/2019

I see this post is getting a lot of traffic all of a sudden, so if you like this sort of goofiness, check out my similar post from last year, which features a newer video in which I may or may not get pied. (Spoiler: I get pied.) Happy Pi Day, everyone!

UPDATED below!

Yes, it’s Pi Day, 3-14, the funnest of all the various goofy geeky holidays! (Well, May 4 — Star Wars Day — is right up there.)

UPDATE!!!

I posted the earlier material to hold this space until I had my own material ready to go. I didn’t properly observe Pi Day last year, so I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice!

Pi Day preview: The pie, ready for dispatch! #piday #whippedcream

Final Pi Day preview! The last second, Prismafied. Video and other stuff tomorrow! #piday #pieintheface #pieinface #pieface #splat #pietotheface #overalls #vintage #Lee #bluedenim #dungarees #denim #rawdenim #doubledenim

Pi Day impact, close-up

And the final bit of #piday content for this year! Aftermath, Prismafied. Huzzah! #pieintheface

(These photos have been modified with an app called Prisma that makes nifty “artistic” images out of source photos.)

Happy Pi Day 2017!!!


Happy Pi Day, everyone!!!!!

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Instaweeks

I haven’t done this in a long time — just a feature of a number of my recent photographic adventures via Instagram or Flickr. Here’s some stuff that’s been going on of late!

Reviewing notes. FORGOTTEN STARS III isn't gonna publish itself! #amwriting

No filter. Lighting fail. #Cane #DogsOfInstagram #greyhound #ChestnutRidge #wny #OrchardPark #winter


(This was a total FAIL of a photo, because of the lighting, but the look on the dee-oh-gee’s face makes it look like he’s just realized that the Horror Movie Murderer is behind him. Look out, Cane! Beware the Double-Denimed Doer of Dastardly Deeds!

Repping the double denim today #ootd #overalls #vintage #Lee #bluedenim #dungarees #denim #rawdenim #doubledenim

(You know, I doubt I’ll ever decide to agree with people who say you shouldn’t wear double-denim. Denim is awesome…especially the raw denim of those overalls. Need to blog about those….)

(These next photos I took while walking about with The Wife and The Dee-oh-gee in Geneva, NY. We went on an overnight getaway there a couple weeks ago.)

Rain or shine...PLAY! #sidewalkart #genevany

Hop Twist Twirl!! #sidewalkart #genevany

Another neat building. I like the cut of Geneva, NY's jib. #genevany #architecture

Sun and rain on Seneca Lake #fingerlakes #senecalake #genevany

Muddy driveway at a Seneca Lake winery #fingerlakes #senecalake #winery

Fingerlakes wine tasting! Look at the pretty bottles we bought! #wine #yum #fingerlakes


We visited a couple of wineries for tastings; hence the six bottles of wine. Wine is a big thing in the Fingerlakes Region.

Day three of mini-vacation! (And I didn't wear overalls at all for the first two days. Weird, I know!) #ootd #overalls #vintage #Lee #bluedenim #dungarees #denim #sweater #redandblue

Wow. The cookies were in sync today. #FortuneCookieTellsAll #chinesefood

Is anyone here a marine biologist!!! #seinfeldquotes #Cane #DogsOfInstagram #greyhound #beacheddoggie


Life keeps on goin’, man!

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Something for Thursday

I’ve featured this piece before, but it’s turned up a number of times recently in my life — a couple of times on the radio, and the other night two movements from it featured in The Daughter’s school concert. So here is one of the grandest of orchestral showpieces, the Capriccio Espagnol by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Here’s a strange work by Ludwig van Beethoven, written to commemorate a victory in battle by the Duke of Wellington. The piece is viewed as one of Beethoven’s lesser works, and probably rightly so. Even Beethoven himself admitted as much, saying “What I shit is better than anything you come up with!” Still, it’s worth a fun listen once in a while. It’s basically a potboiler of a piece. Here’s Wellington’s Victory.


Of course, this type of thing would be done a lot more convincingly decades later by Tchaikovsky in the 1812 Overture….

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