Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on January 18, 2022 by ksedinger

What do you do when you’re a prestigious university and you award an honorary doctorate to one of the greatest composers of your time, and the composer deems to respond with a nice “Thank You” letter? Why, you tell him that won’t do, and that protocol demands that he respond with a musical offering!

And what do you do if you’re said composer and you suddenly find yourself oddly obliged to write a piece for this particular school? Why, you write a sardonically humorous concert overture that collects several drinking songs and the like.

Or, that’s what you do if you’re Johannes Brahms. And if you are Johannes Brahms, the piece you write as almost a joke still becomes–because you’re a genius and your base level is higher than that of most other composers–one of the enduring concert overtures of all time.

Here is the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms.

Brahms himself called this overture a “potpourri a la Suppe”, referring to Franz von Suppe, the composer of popular operettas and light music whose work is mostly forgotten today except for the always-scintillating (and often featured on this blog!) overtures to said operettas. The degree to which Brahms towers over Suppe is quite something to behold.

 

Posted in music | Tagged | Comments Off on Tone Poem Tuesday

And now, cats.

Posted on January 17, 2022 by ksedinger

For lack of anything else to post today, here are Remy and Rosa fighting over the heat register. This particular heat register is the only one in our house that is set into the floor. All the rest of them are set into the baseboards, so this one has particular cachet for the cats.

That register is also right behind where I sit at our dining room table to do stuff, so on cold winter mornings when I’m just trying to warm up, having a cat absorbing all of the heat from the heat register closest to my position is just great.

Cats, I tell you.

Posted in Photographic Documentation | 1 Comment

For Mr. Teachout

Posted on January 16, 2022 by ksedinger

I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short-term. Earnest is long-term.

–Randy Pausch, “The Last Lecture”

Terry Teachout died the other day, at the age of 65.

Mr. Teachout was a critic, playwright, and commentator on the arts, primarily for the Wall Street Journal, but he was also a blogger from the early heyday of the format until his last entry, eight days ago. His blog was a daily read of mine for a long time, but as blogging went from Hot New Thing to Quaint Old Pastime in less than ten years, I regret to say that I lost touch with his work. A few years ago I suddenly remembered him not randomly, but when someone re-tweeted something of his on Twitter. I immediately followed him there and started reading his blog again, and my life was better for it.

Better writers than me have talked about Terry Teachout’s skill and perceptive criticism, and his enthusiasm for the theater and his other interests. Teachout was not the kind of critic to constantly hurl verbal knives and barbs at objects of his disdain. No, he was the kind of person to talk with endless and infectious enthusiasm about the things that moved him, the things that he loved. This is not to say that he loved everything, because he most certainly did not; but Terry Teachout was the kind of critic who even after his many years of doing the job, still seemed to approach each and every new thing he encountered as if it would be the next thing to change his life.

Teachout was also known for keeping a wide view of the theater world. He could have simply focused on the New York theater scene and left it at that; after all, the New York theater scene has riches aplenty for an entire life. Instead, Mr. Teachout would regularly travel and report on what he found in regional theater companies, in other cities, in places beyond the limits of Broadway and its environs. Even though he often wrote about things that I know very little about (if anything at all), his erudition and infectious curiosity and enthusiasm always shone through. His attitude toward the arts were a model for me.

Terry Teachout was devoted, openly so, to his wife, even through terrible health struggles that had her on the lung-transplant list for years. He frequently wrote about how they had to be prepared for them getting “the call” at any moment, at which time they would have to drop everything and rush to the hospital so Mrs. Teachout could get the transplant. This eventually did happen…but there was no happy ending, sadly; Mrs. Teachout died, and still, Terry Teachout soldiered on, taking in art and music and sharing the things that he found to try to keep some form of light in his life. It was the kind of poignant courage that often boggles the mind, even for those of us who have endured very awful things.

But then, just in the last year or so, Terry Teachout found love again. His life was again blossoming, and he wrote with new joy about the partnership he’d just found that was bringing light and love to him again. It really seemed like he was about to find some kind of happiness…

…but instead he died suddenly the other day. Word of his passing hit social media like a bomb, and the outpouring of love for him was astonishing. I am by no means alone in my admiration for Terry Teachout. Here is just one remembrance, from Alex Ross:

Terry had a great deal to do with the fact that I started this blog back in 2005. I saw him seldom in person, but he was a constant presence in my life nonetheless, through his writing and through social media. He was, as Ethan Iverson comments, an uncommonly generous soul who seemed incapable of holding a grudge. His inexhaustible attention to theater across the country was a model for me as a critic.

I like Mr. Ross’s initial point there: I forget it now, but Terry Teachout’s early entry into the blogging world did enormous good in demonstrating in an odd political time that blogs didn’t have to be about politics only. In the early 2000s, blogging was almost exclusively the purview of people arguing the merits of war in Iraq. Terry Teachout did something different, and he enriched the online world immensely in doing so. (Oh, and read the Ethan Iverson piece Mr. Ross links.)

I close, as Mr. Teachout liked to close most nights on Twitter, with a musical offering. I honestly have little idea how he felt about Ralph Vaughan Williams, although this article offers a hint. I’m offering this, anyway, as a reminder of the need to seek out quiet beauty in a world of noise. I think he’d approve. I hope he would, anyway.

Here is The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams; Sir Neville Marriner conducts the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, with Iona Brown as violin soloist.

 

Posted in Passages | Tagged , | Comments Off on For Mr. Teachout

Tony and Patsy

Posted on January 15, 2022 by ksedinger

Two giants of my early eating and drinking life, Tony Marra and Patsy Collins, died in 2021.

Patsy ran a bar. Tony ran a restaurant.

Patsy’s bar was called The Burton Hotel, or The Burton for short. It’s located on a street corner in Allegany, NY, and it was one of my parents’ favorite watering holes for much of the time they lived down there. I spent quite a lot of time sitting in The Burton with my parents as they quaffed beers and I quaffed grapefruit soda right along with them (at least until I turned 21).

I suppose The Burton was what you would call a “dive bar”, though I confess that I used to think describing a bar as a “dive” meant something disparaging: it indicated a place that was kind of dingy and crappy, dirty and dark and not a very nice place to be.

Not so, obviously. A dive bar is an unpretentious bar, and might be quite a few years–or decades–old. A dive bar is the place frequented by locals, and often you can tell where a dive bar is less by the bar’s sign than by the neon (or, nowadays, LED) beer signs decorating the outside. The clientele of a dive bar tends to be the locals; it’s the kind of place where, well–where everybody knows your name, if you go there with any frequency. It’s not the kind of place where you’ll get the best drinks ever, or where you’ll find cutting-edge mixology where bartenders experiment with smoke and a dozen kinds of bitters and CO2 canisters–but it is the kind of place where the beer is always cold, where there are packages of Beer Nuts for sale, where the game (or a game) is always on teevee.

The Burton is apparently well-known for its burgers–very well-known, as in, “often cited on Best Burger lists” well-known–though I never had one when we were going there. Apparently back then their kitchen was not open very often. Nights at The Burton would often go longer than expected, and there were more than a few educational conversations directed at me on the way home after such nights. It’s a dark underbelly of such places that…well, sometimes bar talk in places that are fairly rural, completely white, and generally conservative can veer into unpleasant areas. I’ll just leave it at that.

But things changed as St Bonaventure University, the local college, stared developing a reputation as a party school. The Burton was–and maybe still is!–the bar closest to campus, and as such at some point it started filling up with college students. Patsy Collins had been running a successful bar up until then, but after that he was running a local institution. The Burton was, first and foremost, a beautiful bar. I mean, look at this bar!

It was hard to find photos of the entire bar, but these give an idea. It’s changed a bit since I was going there with my parents, but…not really a whole lot. I don’t recall any signage listing available beers at the time, when the bar was frequented by locals who knew what they wanted to drink.

And here’s a better look at the Art Deco lights that flank the main body of the bar:

Like all such lights, they’re more effective at night, in the dimmer light of the bar itself, but how bad can a bar be if it has Art Deco tasteful nudes as part of its decor? Not bad at all, that’s how.

The Burton is still chugging along, keeping synapses of the Southern Tier well-lubricated. Patsy Collins’s legacy lives on.

Patsy Collins himself was a kind man who laughed a lot–I remember well his rich baritone laugh, there was always lots of laughter in that bar!–and who by the time we knew him was tending bar less; his son Chuck had taken over the majority of those duties. But Patsy was there a lot, holding forth on various items of interest from one of the stools in his low voice. He did not have a long commute: he lived on the opposite side of the same street, a few doors down. His house was quite lovely, and his wife did a great job of converting it to a virtual “gingerbread house” each Christmas. (If I can find a picture of that online, I’ll post it.)

When Patsy Collins retired, he gave over the Burton to son Chuck and his daughter Crisanne. Just last year (or maybe the year before) Chuck and Crisanne decided it was time for them to get out of the bar game, so they sold The Burton to a couple of investors who are St. Bona alumni. From all reports, they are still running the place true to what it always was.

And I’m still wondering about those burgers.

Then there was Tony Marra, who along with his wife Marilyn ran for many years a bar and restaurant on the same street as The Burton, just a few blocks down. Their place was called The Bird Cage. In retrospect, maybe it was a dive bar too–though it did have a beautiful dining room. We didn’t go in the dining room much, but it was a lovely place, decorated with all manner of avian bric-a-brac in keeping with the place’s name. Marilyn served and ran the bar; Tony did most, if not all, of the cooking.

We ate there pretty much once a week, every week, while we lived in the Southern Tier. We went on Thursday night most weeks, because The Bird Cage ran a special on chicken wings on Thursdays. I don’t remember what the prices were, but we’d get both breaded and Buffalo wings, along with some other deep-fried delight–Tony made “Irish Wings”, which were steak fries tossed in Buffalo wing sauce–and wash it all down with, well, more beer than we probably should have been consuming. (Our beer at the time was an ale called Red Wolf, which was discontinued a few years later, sadly enough. This may have been a good thing, though. Red Wolf certainly wasn’t a great beer, but it was smooth and very drinkable, especially in large quantities with deep-fried bar foods.)

Until we moved away from Allegany in fall 2000, we were weekly (or more than weekly) regulars at The Bird Cage. How regular? Well…The Daughter was born not long after midnight on a Saturday. The very next Thursday? We were at The Bird Cage, with our five-day-old kid along for the ride. This worked out pretty well, as there were plenty of folks among the bar crowd who were willing to hold a baby for a bit.

Before Tony and his wife, Marilyn, opened The Bird Cage, they worked for a restaurant down the way called Antonio’s. Antonio’s was a nice place that I remember fondly, especially its cocktail lounge section with plush leather chairs, low tables, and a sunken bar. Here’s what Antonio’s looked like:

It’s hard to tell in the photo, but those shelves are a massive collection of liquor bottles. I’m a bit fuzzy on the ownership of Antonio’s; I don’t think that Tony Marra actually owned it, but I may be wrong. Eventually Antonio’s changed ownership completely, becoming a place called Pasta Luigi, and Tony and Marilyn took ownership of a bar once called The Village Inn. This became The Bird Cage. The Marra family was once a major family in the Olean region’s restaurant community, but that dwindled until Tony and Marilyn were the last ones running a restaurant. All eras end, sadly.

As for Antonio’s/Pasta Luigi: the latter restaurant eventually closed too, and the building was demolished. Now, from what I can tell, a beverage-redemption place stands on that spot [that’s a store where you can buy beer and redeem all your cans and bottles for $.05 each, thanks to New York’s bottle law]. About a half mile up the road used to stand Olean’s once-beloved Castle Inn, which is also now but a memory.

I know that The Bird Cage actually moved some years after we left the region, shifting into a location across the street, and finally the place had to close entirely when Tony was diagnosed with cancer. This article, from Olean’s newspaper, indicates that Tony and Marilyn were holding out hopes of returning to their restaurant when Tony returned to health, but…it wasn’t to be.

Since we left the Southern Tier more than twenty years ago, we’ve never found a bar/restaurant to fill the same role in our lives that The Bird Cage or The Burton once did. That’s for various reasons: finances, family stuff, and later on, The Wife’s celiac disease. We’re just not “bar people” anymore. But I have a lot of great memories, some sharp and some that are admittedly pretty hazy (remind me not to write about “Pig Roast Weekend” at The Bird Cage any time soon, because let’s just say that if we didn’t manage to convince Annheuser-Busch to keep Red Wolf Ale in production after those three nights of consumption, nobody was going to do so), of the handful of years when we were bar people. Tony and Marilyn Marra also helped send The Wife and I off in the first place: Who else would we have trusted to cater our wedding?

I think that in 2022, though, I’m going to at least try to figure out how to make Irish Wings. I think that would make Tony happy. 

(Oh! And Tony was a Seattle Seahawks fan! At least he got to see his team win a Super Bowl!)

Photo credits: The photos of The Burton are from here and here. I found the photo of Antonio’s on a Facebook group called “Olean Memories Back In Time”, which is exactly what it says: a group dedicated to nostalgic remembrances of a once vibrant small city in a region that the world has mostly left behind. I wasn’t able to find any photos online of The Bird Cage in its original incarnation, the one I knew so well before we moved.

 

Posted in On Buffalo and The 716, On Travels and Adventures, Passages | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Rainbows, Moonbows, Sunsets, and the Stars: Adventures beneath the Hawaiian sky

Posted on January 14, 2022 by ksedinger

So much of one’s time in Hawaii is spent looking up, or out. Up to the sky, or out to where the sky meets the sea.

And there’s a rainbow almost every day.

In Buffalo, I might get to see a rainbow three or four times a year. In Hawaii, there were rainbows almost every day. I’d get up, make coffee, go to the balcony to greet the morning, look to the right (west) to the rain clouds descending (and breaking up) from the mountains, and…rainbows.

And then there were the sunsets, and the lingering light once the sun was down:

On this trip, the planets got into the act. Here, from top to bottom, are Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus:

One morning I was awake quite early, so I got up at 6:00am…just in time to see Orion setting. Orion is a winter constellation, which I associate with the colder times of year…which of course this is, even in Hawaii, though it doesn’t seem like it.

The most magical skyward sight of all, though, was something I’d never seen before, something I don’t even think I knew was possible until late one night, on a drizzly evening, The Wife and I both saw it at the same time: a moonbow. Though we didn’t see much of the moon on our trip, because we were mostly facing south so its path through the Hawaiian sky was mostly behind us and out of view from our south-facing balcony, there was a full moon while we were there, and on that night its light was bright enough to shine through the water droplets in the air. The result was this:

Hawaii is quite a place for those of us who find magic in the sky….

 

Posted in On Travels and Adventures, Photographic Documentation | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Rainbows, Moonbows, Sunsets, and the Stars: Adventures beneath the Hawaiian sky

Something for Thursday

Posted on January 13, 2022 by ksedinger

Listening to SiriusXM last week, I was struck by a song I’d never heard before…or rather, a performance of a song I’d never heard before.

“Mr. Bojangles” is most famous as Sammy Davis Jr.’s “signature” song, I suppose; until the other day that was really all I knew about this song. I’m not a big Sammy Davis Jr. listener, so I’m therefore really not very familiar with this song at all. (Disclaimer: That is to say, Sammy Davis Jr. is an artist with whom I am largely unfamiliar. I’m not a big listener of his in the sense that I haven’t heard much of him, not in the sense that I don’t care for his work much. I have almost no opinion.) All I do know of this song is that it has a gently rocking kind of triple-time waltz rhythm and that it’s about a guy named Bojangles who dances.

But last week, SiriusXM’s 1970s channel served up “Mr. Bojangles”, performed by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I’m not a whole lot more familiar with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band than I am with Sammy Davis Jr., but I know that they’re a country band whose album Will the Circle Be Unbroken is one of the great bluegrass albums of all time, so this got me wondering about “Mr. Bojangles”, which I had always figured was an older song, to be so strongly associated with a Rat Pack guy like Sammy Davis Jr.

Turns out, though, that “Me. Bojangles” was written in 1968 by country singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker. The song got covered a bunch over the next batch of years, but Sammy Davis Jr. really made it his song. For more on that, read this wonderful article–but for now, here’s that rendition that stopped me in my tracks, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and “Mr. Bojangles”.

 

Posted in music | Tagged | 1 Comment

“I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right”: A MAGNUM geek visits Paradise

Posted on January 12, 2022 by ksedinger

Longtime readers may remember that I was a big fan of the show Magnum PI back in the day. That is, the original show, the one that ran in the 1980s, and not the new reboot show that is running, well, now. (Nothing against the current incarnation, which I’ve watched a couple of times; it seems like a perfectly acceptable procedural show, but it’s never going to replace the original for me.) Being in Hawaii, where Magnum was set, gave me a chance to see some familiar locations from the show up close.

The biggest draw for an old Magnum fan would almost certainly have been the old estate that on the show doubled as “Robin’s Nest”, the Hawaii estate of the famed novelist Robin Masters, for whom Thomas Magnum and the estate’s major domo, Jonathan Quayle Higgins, worked. This estate was on the eastern shore of Oahu, and we did drive past where it was…but note the past tense there. Sadly, the location–in real life, the Anderson Estate–was demolished a couple of years ago after a long period of neglect. However, we did stop at a beach park a mile or so down the road from where the Anderson Estate once stood, and I took this photo of Manana Island, which is now a bird sanctuary:

You could often see that island in the distance when Magnum was swimming in Mr. Masters’s tidal pool.

Along the same shore, to the south (we drove by this first, actually), we stopped at an overlook with a stunning view. (Overlooks with stunning views are rather a thing in Hawaii!) Here’s a bit of that view, isolated:

 

That little island with the building on it, connected by bridge to Oahu, is the Makai Research Pier, belonging to Makai Ocean Engineering, a company that works on oceanic tech like sea cables and that sort of thing. That pier doubled, on Magnum PI, as the headquarters for Island Hoppers, the helicopter excursion business run by Magnum’s buddy, Theodore Calvin (TC).

I didn’t realize this at the time, but the lookout where I took that photo, Makapu’u Lookout, is on the same cliffs that become Makapu’u Point, a bit farther to the east. We briefly stopped there but realized that the hiking trail was much longer and more strenuous than we really felt up to that day, so we didn’t go…but it ends at Makapu’u Lighthouse:

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew_wertheimer/32922164913/

Fans of Magnum will remember this lighthouse for one of the series’s most surprising, and unnerving, episode endings. In the episode “Faith and Beggorah”, there’s a subplot where Magnum is supposed to be investigating if a boxer’s wife is cheating on him. In the episode’s final scene, Rick and TC are watching from a distance as the wife and her putative boyfriend-on-the-side are at this lighthouse–but they are arguing constantly. We can’t hear what they’re saying, but Rick is bored because they can’t prove that she’s cheating on the husband if all they ever see her doing is yelling at the boyfriend. Rick is watching through a telescopic camera lens, while TC is lazily dozing off to the side. TC says “Oh, just keep watching, maybe something interesting will happen”…and at that moment, the boyfriend picks the woman up and tosses her off the lighthouse and down the cliffs. Yikes!

Anyway.

Then there’s this place, the War Memorial Natatorium in Waikiki. This was right down the street from our resort, and yet, I never walked down to get a closer look, alas! Next time, I swear! (Unless it gets torn down, which is apparently a possibility as this location has been an ongoing preservation struggle for a while.)

 

Built to honor the veterans and fallen of World War I, the Natatorium is not unlike all the various “War Memorial Stadiums” built across America, except that this one is a salt-water swimming pool. It has been closed for decades and is, as noted, an ongoing subject of debate between preservation and demolition. On Magnum, it featured prominently during the climax of an episode titled “Death and Taxes”, where a serial killer forms a fixation on Magnum, for some reason that the episode leaves unstated (to creepy effect).

Some places I did not get pictures of include the Iolani Palace, used often on the show as the location for various government agencies (such as when Magnum had dealings with the local PD)–

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aa4on/14396166855

Also Honolulu’s Chinatown, which we passed through twice, once by car and once on the bus. This area served as location for when Magnum PI did stories set in the “seedier” part of town, such as the show’s fictional Vietnamese neighborhood, “Little Saigon”.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/81454274@N07/14058078021

There’s something exciting about seeing places you only know through movies and television, isn’t there? This is not a Magnum location, but it is one of the most famous locations in movie history, thanks to a very steamy scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity:

And I didn’t get into any places where Elvis Presley filmed at all, I’m sorry to say. We did go to Pearl Harbor, though, and Elvis Presley was a major contributor that fundraising for the Arizona Memorial back in 1961.

It’s also always interesting to note how much poetic and cinematic license play into how movie and teevee locations work! There’s a Magnum PI episode from late in the show’s run where everyone is after a literal buried treasure, and after some tromping through the wilderness they all end up jumping off a cliff into a pool with a waterfall in order to grab some of the money that has ended up floating there. (I don’t remember the particulars.) I looked this up, figuring it to be located someplace deep in the island’s mountainous interior, but…not so! It turns out that if you stand on that exact spot, in no direction are you more than a couple hundred feet from a parking lot or a four-lane highway.

Anyway, folks, be careful when arranging your vacations, because if the place you’re going is where filming took place for a movie or show a member of your party is a big fan of, you’re going to hear about it. A lot.

Even if the place that person sees has nothing to do with the movie or show being mentioned, like this revolving restaurant in Waikiki. Doesn’t it look a bit like Piz Gloria, the mountaintop lair of Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service???

 

Posted in Fandom, On Travels and Adventures, Photographic Documentation | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on January 11, 2022 by ksedinger

Somewhere in my online life, I saw someone recently mention Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu. I don’t remember who or where, though! This is what happens when you scroll too quickly: some things make enough dent that you remember them, but try and give credit, and…nothing. So if you’re the one who clued me in, thank you!

Takashi Yoshimatsu is a Japanese composer, still living, who was born in 1953. I’ve only heard a very small portion of his work, so I’m not really comfortable describing his style, but from what little I’ve read, Yoshimatsu composes in a neo-Romantic style, preferring lyricism and harmony over modernism, atonalism, or avant-gardism. The present work is meditative and evocative, almost impressionistic in nature; its structure reminds me somewhat of Alexander Scriabin, though without that Russian giant’s wild leaps of color and range.

Ode to Birds and Raibow apparently memorializes the composer’s sister, who died in 1994. He does not call it a “requiem”, but rather an “ode to a soul at play” (credit). The work is full of complex chords and deft orchestral writing, with snatches of melody constantly coming and going, almost the way birdsong is always just there but never sounds really complete in our ears. The work is by turns gentle and passionate, but the overall emotional tone is one of warmth.

Takashi Yoshimatsu has a large body of work for exploration, and I look forward to digging into it more. Here is Ode to Birds and Rainbow.

Posted in music | Tagged | Comments Off on Tone Poem Tuesday

Hawaiian adventures

Posted on January 10, 2022 by ksedinger

Sigh….

Our trip to Hawaii was…amazing. Just amazing. In fact, it was quite nearly perfect.

My mother dreamed all her life of going to Hawaii, and at some point after she had safely seen her two children off to lives of their own, she put her foot down, announcing to my father that they were going. This was sometime in the 1990s. Since then, she has gone to Hawaii something like a dozen times. For this last visit, she treated my family and I to going along with her, as part of her celebration for having turned 80 this past August.

If I count this Hawaii trip as a gift, and I do, it might well be the greatest gift I’ve ever received. This would probably blow the mind of my second-grade self (that’s the year I got an electric train), but seriously, this trip was a gift that to be surpassed would probably have to be along the lines of someone giving me their kidney.

For various reasons, I’d never really thought about going to Hawaii myself. It was a place that I knew about, but didn’t really hold out a great deal of hope for visiting personally. Now, all I can think about is going back.

I’m not going to wax poetic at length here about that trip (though I will have a few more posts about it, focusing on a couple of specific things), but if you’re curious, you can see a lot of what we saw via my Flickr albums. I’ve organized just about every picture I took in Hawaii into these albums. I haven’t gone through and captioned every photo, but I’ve done a lot of them.

  1. Hawaii 2021: This album was going to be my “All the Hawaii” photos album, but then I realized that I needed to split them up more, so this one ended up incomplete. (I put all of the selfies and photos of The Wife and I in this album, though!)
  2. Hawaii 2021, Food and Drink: Self-explanatory. I have never eaten so well on a trip as I did on this trip. I have also not imbibed so well as I did on this trip, which is quite a thing given that we live near one of the United States’s great wine regions. (Food will probably be a post of its own, but meantime, here are pics.)
  3. At the Byodo-In Temple: I took a bunch of pictures in this one place, so it gets its own album.
  4. Pearl Harbor: Another location-specific album. We did not get to go to the USS Arizona Memorial, due to damage to the docks (Oahu was hit by a big storm the week before we got there), but Pearl Harbor is still a deeply moving place to visit.
  5. Sunsets and Rainbows: Self-explanatory. See this post for meditation on a theme.
  6. Candids and Streetscapes: Photos of people and places. I love people-watching, and Waikiki is a fantastic place to do so.
  7. Landscapes, Seascapes, and all the rest: This is the biggest album, encapsulating just about all of my “Oh WOW LOOK AT THAT!!!” moments throughout the trip. Even my crappy photos looked good!

Enjoy!

 

Posted in On Travels and Adventures | Tagged , | Comments Off on Hawaiian adventures

Back in the Saddle!

Posted on January 10, 2022 by ksedinger

It’s January 10, so here ends my brief hiatus! As I get my bearings again, here are some links to things:

::  First, I have no idea how long this may last online (copyright holders may squash it), but here’s the BBC telecast of the 2022 New Years From Vienna concert. If you’re familiar with the version that runs every year on PBS as part of Great Performances, you’ll note differences: this is just the concert, recorded live, with none of the “Vienna travelogue” stuff that forms much of what Americans see. There is some Vienna travelogue stuff, during an extended film in the middle of the program that pairs some lovely chamber music with some wonderful photography of Vienna and surroundings. (This takes up the concert’s intermission period.) Still, since the featured attraction here is still the great Vienna Philharmonic and the music of the Strauss family, you’re in good stead if you watch this!

::  I thought about writing an essay about the 1-6-21 Insurrection, but really, there’s nothing I have to say that Jim Wright, John Scalzi, and Kevin Drum didn’t already say, so check them out. (And if you’re looking for “debate” on what was most certainly an attempt to set aside the results of an election to reinstall an authoritarian President, go somewhere else. I do not value “debate” and I will not even approve any pro-insurrection comments to appear on my site.)

::  It was Elvis Presley’s birthday two days ago. Sheila O’Malley has this covered, here and here.

::  I’m not generally a big fan of “Why I hate this person” pieces, but…well, here’s a gem of the form, if you feel like hating on soon-to-be-retired Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

::  Are you following the ongoing developments in the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope? You should be! Space.com has you covered. Spoiler: So far, it’s going pretty well. Note the body language from the folks actually running the mission:

::  I have not yet seen the movie Licorice Pizza, but Roger has. I do want to see it.

::  I made Cioppino the other night!

What’s Cioppino? It’s a fish stew invented in San Francisco, and it is delicious. I found an easy recipe for it in one of my Instant Pot cookbooks, and I have fallen in love with this stuff. (It’s a little pricy so I don’t make it too often.)

::  And winter finally showed up in Western New York…though as I write this on Sunday morning, it’s all melting. (And will apparently be replaced tonight and tomorrow, as we’re on a temperature roller-coaster.)

That’s about it for now. How are things in your necks o’ the woods?

Posted in Life | Tagged | 3 Comments