Something for Thursday

Posted on April 24, 2025 by ksedinger

Here’s something genuinely fascinating: a representation of the constituent stars of Orion, if one was able to take a journey all the way around the constellation.

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Happy Birthday Billy Shakes

Posted on April 23, 2025 by ksedinger
My Shakespeare shelf. This is not all of my Shakespeare, by any means; I have several other Complete Works around the library, as well as some other ephemera here and there.

Today is the generally-observed “birthday” of William Shakespeare. The actual date he entered the world is not known, but April 26, 1564 is the best we have: that was his baptismal date. As babies typically weren’t baptized right at birth, the assumption seems to be that he was actually born a few days prior, and since his death date is known to be April 26, 1616, we’ve just gone ahead and assigned that date to his birth as well.

Shakespeare is an eternal “thing I need to learn more about”, no matter how much I learn about him and no matter how much I read him. I suspect he’s that way for people who know a great deal about Shakespeare! I find discussing him with people who know him well a bit intimidating, I must admit. This makes him a subject I generally don’t try too hard to bring up when my sister, a professional Shakespeare scholar, is in town.

I won’t make a long quote from Shakespeare here, because it’s late in the day and there are things to do and there’s a lot of places to get your Bard on out there. I will, though, note my single favorite line from all of Shakespeare! (All of him that I’ve read, actually. We’re not talking “encyclopedic knowledge” here.) It comes from Much Ado About Nothing, when Benedick says this to Beatrice when she has been summoned to her uncle:

Bene. I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes; and moreover I will go with thee to thy uncle’s.

I just love that. “My love for you includes all this…but also, the mundane.” The best part of love, after all, is the mundane, isn’t it?

Happy birthday, Will!

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Tuesday Tones

Posted on April 22, 2025 by ksedinger

It’s a very busy week, so as is customary around here when it’s like that, here’s some Franz von Suppe. Enjoy!

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It’s FAB!

Posted on April 21, 2025 by ksedinger

Via Roger comes this Sunday Stealing prompt, which is easy enough I may resurrect it every so often! Here’s how it goes:

F.A.B.

F. Film: What movie or tv show are you watching? 

A. Audio: What are you listening to?

B. Book: What are you reading?

That’s easy enough, innit?

F: We were actually out this past Saturday night, so we didn’t watch a movie this week. And we’re going to be out this Saturday night, so we won’t watch a movie then, either. So what shows are we watching? We’re in the midst of rewatches of both Brooklyn Nine Nine and Letterkenny, and we’re on a first watch of High Potential, which is a crime procedural in which a cleaning woman who is brilliant and observant on a Sherlockian level helps the LAPD solve crimes. And even though each case is a standalone, all teevee shows now must have an arc churning away underneath, and this show is no exception. The cleaning woman’s husband disappeared a few years ago, and she refuses to believe he just abandoned her.

A: Listening? Well, there’s all the usual stuff that shows up on this site, but lately I’ve started listening to The Killers. I like their sound, and they’re one of many bands I missed the first time around. I’m also listening to several podcasts, including James Bonding, for which I am a few years behind…it’s weird hearing them refer to “Bond 25”, as No Time To Die was known before its title was announced, and before its production ended up being a death march….

B: Book! I finished Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne a week ago, and now I’m reading Ione Skye’s memoir Say Everything. I’m actually doing a GGK re-read (though I’m pausing in between his books for other things), and I found myself rediscovering Arbonne, which I haven’t read in a long time. Skye’s book caught my eye because we just watched Say Anything a few weeks ago.

I think I’ll dust off this FAB thing every once in a while!

 

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Bloody big ship!

Posted on April 20, 2025 by ksedinger

I had a nice photo walk down by the Outer Harbor this morning. The inner canals and harbor inlets are still full of ice, but the main ship canal and Lake Erie itself are open. I saw this ship heading out to the open water from the Buffalo ship canal.

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Something that was supposed to be for Thursday but some stuff happened and the problem persisted into Friday but now it’s Saturday and I think the problem is fixed, so….

Posted on April 19, 2025 by ksedinger

The problem was that my Samsung Galaxy earbuds suddenly stopped producing audio with my Samsung laptop. They would connect and I could use the tapping motions to make videos stop and start, but the sound refused to come through the buds! It would only come through the main speakers. My buds still worked normally with my phone, so after a couple restarts and a re-pairing of the buds with the computer, I think we’re back on track. That was weird…I love tech when it’s working perfectly, but not so much when it ain’t.

(And yes, I could have just listened to this song on my phone and then posted here, or I could have posted from my phone directly, but I like my workflow and it annoys me when it’s screwed up!)

So anyway, the other night we were watching an episode of The Repair Shop, and one of the people who brought something in to be fixed was an old British folk singer named Ralph McTell. He brought in a large stuff kangaroo that had something to do with a kid’s show he did songs for, but what caught my ear during the “profile” section of the segment was that McTell had a big hit in the late 1960s called “Streets of London”. I gave the song a few listens, and it really hit me. Not only is it a beautiful song with a touching, lilting melody, but McTell’s voice is exactly the kind of deep baritone you would want for a song like this.

The lyrics at first seem to be thematically simple, though the imagery they use is definitely poetic. It’s easy to listen to “Streets of London” and hear a kind of “People have it worse off than you” message, but I think it goes a bit deeper than that. The song seems to me a kind of statement about a society that allows these levels of loneliness and despair to exist at all. Anyway, here is “Streets of London” by Ralph McTell.

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Something not for Thursday….

Posted on April 17, 2025 by ksedinger

Apologies, folks, but I experienced some annoying audio issues with my computer this evening, so Something For Thursday will be delayed until tomorrow. Tech: I love it when it works and I want to strangle it when it doesn’t!

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Spring in the Woods (supposedly)

Posted on April 16, 2025 by ksedinger

The other day I went to Chestnut Ridge on what was the first sunny Sunday morning in what felt like months. Of course, being a typical Western New York spring, it was a cold morning and nothing at all is growing up there yet. But nature is nature, and photography is photography!

One of my favorite trees.
I almost love this shot…but the focus is off. I needed to change it to Auto-focuse Continuous, and I needed to set my auto-focus for detecting faces.
A bed of acorns and moss
I love all the old crumbling stonework in this park.
My new content-creation tripod fits perfectly in the leg tool pocket of my overalls!
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Tuesday Tones

Posted on April 15, 2025 by ksedinger

Some pieces of music, like Beethoven’s Fifth or the William Tell Overture, become so overplayed as to become virtual cliche. The same can be said of Mozart’s Serenade #13 in G Major for strings, which is better known for the title Mozart gave it: Eine kleine nachtmusik,  or “A Little Night Music”.

What kind of night was Mozart thinking of here? Clearly he wasn’t thinking of the night itself, with its darkness falling over Vienna or its surrounding landscape. I think he was rather thinking of inside, with candles and fires burning. This music is too bright, too joyous, and too elegant to suggest an external darkness.

Eine kleine nachtmusik is likely best known for its opening movement and its opening bars in particular. Milos Forman uses those bars to convey how well-known Mozart’s music is known even years after his death, when a bitter Antonio Salieri plays that famous opening phrase for the priest who has come to hear his confession, after the priest has previously failed to identify any of Salieri’s own melodies, each one having been “very famous in its day”. The inner movements and the finale contain their own sparkle and magic, though. 

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“What’s the meanings of this?!” –Squirrely Dan, LETTERKENNY

Posted on April 14, 2025 by ksedinger

A startling development from yesterday morning:

Yes, that is the Sun, rising in the east like it is maintained is still the protocol for this sort of thing, behind Casa Jaquandor, and its rising is visible and not obscured by the April cloud-cover in The 716 that can only be properly described as “Venusian”. Our last sighting of direct sunlight was February 27*, and normally this time of year we would not expect any hope of such a thing happening again until the day after Mothers Day, at the earliest. And yet, there’s the Sun, in the sky, being all bright and stuff.

Someone needs to answer for this, I tell you what.

  * This date may not be accurate.

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