Ach! Once again, life on the home front has become very, very full! Nothing bad, but very busy. Posting here may reflect that. I’m trying to get a handle on it all, because posting content and writing are important to me–they’re my main form of release and mental relaxation these days–but bear with me as we keep working through stuff! I’ll eventually write about some of it, maybe.
Meanwhile, it’s time to close out some tabs again!
Yes, it’s another article about the constant, and quite manufactured from literally nothing, “controversy” as to the authorship of Shakespeare. I, too, find some of the notions out there as to who really wrote those plays and poems interesting and entertaining, but not one of them is based on any actual evidence. Quite the reverse, really: they all seem to be based on the lack of concrete historical detritus left behind by Shakespeare himself: no copies of his work in his own hand, no evidence of the personal library that he must have owned to have written so erudite a body of work, et cetera. But, as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Obviously I’m no legal expert, but it’s plainly obvious that we’ve weirdly evolved into this odd state where, rather than having three equal branches of government with checks and balances imposed upon each, we’ve settled on this state of affairs where the courts are pretty much unchecked entirely, with vast abilities to simply wipe away entire bodies of law “because of reasons”. This is increasingly untenable, if we don’t want this country sliding backwards into a disturbing blend of right-wing paranoid fascism and profit-driven capitalism. (Of course, if you do want those things, you are likely happy as a clam right now.)
Britain’s future is to become an American Red State. It already is. And America’s future is also, perhaps, to become One Giant Red State.
Lord, I hope not.
(I’m not sure why the yellow highlighting is there. Something to do with Medium’s functionality, which I don’t entirely get because I’m not a regular user of Medium.)
It’s a gray morning here. After a span of days with high temps and a magical thunderstorm, Mother Nature is taking the weekend off to relax. The highs are twenty degrees lower, the sky is overcast, and it was so chilly last night Friday curled into bed with me and I fell asleep holding her barrel chest like the little spoon she was born to be. Felt like camping in the best way. Like when your environment is just a tad less comfortable but you still can sleep in surrounded by soft things and warm fur.
One of my favorite bloggers, taking life day by day. She’s a great model for this.
Is smoke okay or is it bad and also Canada’s fault? Those are a few of the weighty ideas Fox News has wrestled with over the last week in attempting to craft a response to the United States’ worst-ever day of wildfire pollution.
Wednesday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham invited general-purpose reactionary Steve Milloy, whose career includes stints shilling for the tobacco and coal industry, to weigh in. “Look, the air is ugly, it’s unpleasant to breathe and for a lot of people they get anxiety over it,” Milloy said. “But the reality is just that there’s no health risk.”
You can always count on FOX News to tell you the stupidest shit. A good rule of thumb here is, if Steve Milloy says it’s good for you, stop doing it, because it’s terrible for you but someone rich is paying him a lot of money to tell you it isn’t.
:: Finally, a lot of weirdos online have been spreading rumors, based on nothing at all, that George Lucas is preparing to buy Star Wars back from Disney. This is, of course, complete nonsense, but it does remind me of a commercial I enjoyed back in the day:
The oldest extant text ever printed with movable type predates Gutenberg himself (born in 1400) by 23 years, and predates the printing of his Bible by 78 years. It is the Jikji, printed in Korea, a collection of Buddhist teachings by Seon master Baegun and printed in movable type by his students Seok-chan and Daijam in 1377. (Seon is a Korean form of Chan or Zen Buddhism.) Only the second volume of the printing has survived, and you can see several images from it here.
Impressive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the honor of being the first book printed with movable type, only the oldest surviving example. The technology could go back two centuries earlier.
Causey’s most successful TikTok videos follow her as she packs old-school candies, like wax bottles filled with sugary juice and vintage candy buttons, into boxes for customers. Her videos also show off new offerings that she eats on camera: Think gummy Nerds clusters and chamoy-drenched dulces enchilados, or Gushers coated in chamoy syrup and rolled in Tajin seasoning. Her account features imported chewy Puchao candies and Pocky sticks from Japan, along with a slew of other Asian candies. There’s also weird stuff — sour candy that you spray in your mouth, candy shaped like unicorn poop, and gigantic gummies, along with nostalgic favorites like fizzy Zots and lemon drops. But Causey’s taste of viral success really began when the jelly fruits trend emerged on TikTok.
In countless videos on the platform, users would eat the jellies — a type of candy sold in fruit-shaped plastic capsules — by popping the capsule with their teeth, causing the jelly to burst in their mouth, often to comedic effect. The hashtag #jellyfruitcandy has racked up more than 27 million views, and for a while Candy Me Up was one of the few places that sold it.
The article goes on to describe “freeze-dried candy”, which is something I saw in a store in Toronto recently. I thought about trying it, but that stuff was expensive, at least in the store where I saw it, and I’d already dropped a chunk of money in an anime-and-comics store that very morning. Alas!
I find Tiktok kind of fascinating, and I hope it, or at least something very much like it, survives the current challenges. (I have to be honest here: I don’t get terribly worked up about the Chinese maybe “spying” on what I’m doing. If they think they can learn something insightful from the odd doings of a guy in overalls who lives near Buffalo, well, have at it, Hoss. Something needs to be done about the car-theft thing, though.)
I actually didn’t watch V the first time it aired. I don’t remember any buzz about it in school, and right around then all our geeky energy was laser-focused on the impending arrival of Return of the Jedi. I think I remember one kid talking about the V show that he’d watched the night before. Plus, V aired on NBC, which was at that point languishing in third place on the networks, and it’s biggest hits of the 80s had either just launched and had yet to gain traction (The A-Team) or hadn’t even come along yet (The Cosby Show), and in those days (wow, there’s a phrase I’m not keen on using to describe the 19-freakin’-80s), buzz was based pretty much on if you saw the commercials on the network you were watching at the moment. So, for me, V came and went very quickly, and I missed it entirely.
A year later, though, the sequel dropped, and that one, I saw. By then we were watching NBC a little (thanks, A-Team!), and I might have watched a movie that I wanted to watch on NBC’s weekly movie telecast, back when the networks actually televised movies. In fact, I think it was a movie, because I remember a long preview at the movie’s end–maybe five minutes long, maybe more–for the upcoming Big! Teevee! Miniseries! Event!, called V: The Final Battle. Now that I was properly briefed, I watched V: The Final Battle faithfully, and I was a big fan right from there. The original miniseries from the year before was re-broadcast soon after, and I was now fully briefed.
V: The Final Battle was produced by a different team than the original series from just a year earlier, which led to some differences in tone and story; the second series is much more action-oriented than the original and it doesn’t focus nearly as much on the allegory of fascism that the original did. Also, the second series features one of the most gobsmackingly bad endings I’ve ever seen, even for a thirteen-year-old kid. But the preceding five hours and fifty-five minutes of the six-hour miniseries was great, so if the ending sucked, I was willing to forgive.
V was a big enough hit that the two miniseries led to a weekly series later that fall (1984, I think), which started off strongly but then bogged down a bit. There’s some handwavey-stuff in the series opener explaining how the humans’ victory from The Final Battle actually wasn’t, and then a favorite character from the miniseries was killed immediately, and the show just wound up bogging down. There was a reboot many years later (ten years ago, maybe?) on ABC, but I didn’t watch any of it.
Oh, and The Final Battle boasted a wonderful 80s-synth score:
SO MANY BRILLIANT songwriters came out of Canada in the Sixties — legends like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Robbie Robertson — that the talents of Gordon Lightfootare sometimes overlooked by those who don’t know better. He never even appeared on a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot before his death at 84. That’s a raging injustice when you listen back to gems like “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Carefree Highway,” and “Early Morning Rain.” These songs earned him a sterling reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter, which you can see when you check the list of people who covered them: Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and countless others. Or you can take it from Dylan himself, who famously remarked, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Here’s a guide to ten of Lightfoot’s best songs.
:: Color Him Busy: A profile of heavily-tattooed actor Robert LaSardo.
In person, LaSardo comes across as a sensitive soul with a sense of humor. In an interview in his agent’s office he lifted his right forearm as if to prove it, and there, amid a roiling sea, is winsome Betty Boop in her flirty pose. “That’s my comic relief,” he said. He’s reluctant to make too much of the other tattoos — or as he prefers, “illustrations” — that cover both arms, his abdomen, neck, hands, fingers, back and legs. He’s even a bit self-conscious about discussing their significance.
LaSardo admitted the ink has helped him establish a 20-year career portraying thugs, drug dealers and gritty undercover cops. But he said landing roles through his tattoos was never his intention. “It’s my life story,” he said. “It’s the trip through my world.”
A bit of background here: a while back I found a YouTube channel that posts clips from the classic show NYPDBlue, and just this morning there was a clip that features a guest stint by Robert LaSardo. Now, La Sardo has been one of my favorite “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors for years–the proper term is “character actor”, obviously, but “Hey, it’s that guy!” or “Hey, it’s her!” works to convey the same idea. His work as a particularly nasty bad guy in CSI: Miami is a standout in my mind, but he’s always good when he turns up. A quick glance at his filmography reveals five different appearances on NYPDBlue, each time as someone different!
Actors like LaSardo tend to get lots of reliable work by being, well, not only good, but also professional and reliable. The linked article above, which I found on a simple Google search, is almost twenty years old, but LaSardo’s career does not seem to have slackened one bit since then.
Shortly before each Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert is set to begin, someone discreetly walks onstage to place a score on the conductor’s music stand, then returns to retrieve it when that first piece is over — a process repeated for each selection on the program.
Those brief, easy-to-ignore trips across the stage are the only times that audiences get a glimpse at the three staff members who work in one of the CSO’s most important if little-known behind-the-scenes departments — its library.
Located one floor below the Orchestra Hall stage, this windowless space serves as a repository for the music the orchestra owns and a work space for three librarians.
Here’s a fascinating article about a little-known facet of professional orchestra operations: the library and its librarians. The music they’re playing–the actual physical music, consisting of the conductor’s score and the orchestral parts for all the musicians–comes from somewhere, after all!
In 1984, The Voyage of the Mimi debuted on PBS. The groundbreaking educational science series, part of the curriculum of many elementary and high school students (including this writer!), captivated kids throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, spawned a sequel, and kicked off Ben Affleck’s career.
If you’re my age, you may remember watching The Voyage of the Mimi, either in school or on PBS at some point. I’m honestly not sure when I first saw it, but it’s been on my radar for years, so I’m assuming it was in the 80s at some point. It’s a 13-episode series about a research expedition into the North Atlantic to study whales, aboard a ship called the Mimi. There’s a crusty sea captain, two research scientists, their graduate assistant (who is deaf), two teenagers, and the sea captain’s grandson, who was played by a young Ben Affleck, if you can believe that. The whole show is available to watch on YouTube, and it actually holds up pretty well, as period educational shows go. Each episode consists of fifteen minutes of story followed by a fifteen-minute mini-documentary that applies to that particular episode’s topic. I wish it was viewable in better resolution than YouTube’s max from eleven years ago.
Sadly, the Mimi herself fell on funding and ownership difficulties that led to her eventual scrapping (though she was a long-lived ship, originally built in the 1930s!), but I did get to see her once! We were on our honeymoon in May 1997 in Boston and New England, and we went one day on a whale-watching expedition that set out from Plymouth. On the way back in, the boat’s tour guide pointed out two ships anchored nearby: one was a replica of the Mayflower, and the other was none other than the Mimi. I wish I’d taken a picture, but this was in the days (there I go again) of film cameras and I don’t even think I took my camera with me on that trip. Alas!
There was a sequel series to Voyage of the Mimi that I don’t think I ever watched, and sadly, a proposed third series never managed to get funding. Anyway, I like to think that the characters from the show got together again for more adventurey science voyages in the future!
:: Finally, speaking of Tiktok, this particular creator has found an incredible pair of overalls. I’m actually envious of these! The Big Smith brand made a lot of funky-patterned overalls years ago, I’m assuming in the 1970s, and they do turn up on eBay and vintage shops now and again.
[O]ur Supreme Court does not exist in the constitutional order as much as it looms over it, a robed tribunal of self-styled philosopher-kings, accountable to no one but themselves.
I’ve been noticing this increasingly of late. Of course, Republicans have no intention of checking the courts, as they determined years ago that the courts were their clearest route to a complete usurpation of power in America, but it still galls me to see this system of “checks and balances”, which we were all taught in grade school is the most ingenious system of government ever devised by humans, has devolved into no checks of any kind, assuming the ideology is correct.
Checks and balances should work, to draw a rough metaphor, like Rock-Paper-Scissors, in which each move defeats one other move and is defeated by the other. Our judiciary now is like the logic applied in an episode of Seinfeld, when Kramer and his friend Mickey are playing Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Mickey claims a victory by playing rock while Kramer plays paper:
KRAMER: I thought Paper covered Rock?
MICKEY: Nah! Rock flies right through Paper!
KRAMER: Then what beats Rock?
MICKEY: [shrugs] Nothin’!
They resume playing, to no result because they both keep playing Rock.
Who is the most productive person in your office? Chances are, not the person you’re thinking it is. While it’s easy to believe the person getting the most quality work done is the person putting in the most hours at their desk, studies show this isn’t exactly true.
“The productivity, creativity, and bringing new ideas forward isn’t the person who’s working crazy hours,” Katie Denis, VP and lead researcher at Project: Time Off, told CNBC. “It’s someone who’s getting outside of their day-to-day life.”
As luck would have it, The Wife and I took a short trip just last week (post forthcoming). While our trip wasn’t quite “unplanned”, we did leave enough room in the journey for a bit of “Let’s turn here and see where the road goes”. For years we couldn’t afford much by way of travel at all, and I think it did hamper our mental acuity.
Scary reading, there. I will never stand with book-banners of any type, because they will never, ever, ever be content to just remove these few books because they’re inappropriate for “children”. You let these people ban one thing, and tomorrow they’ll look to ban something else. It will never, ever stop.
After 13 seasons, 1,154 games and 4,494 plate appearances in the Minor Leagues, Maggi was finally going to have his opportunity to step into a Major League batter’s box to enjoy his first at-bat, to take his first swing. He had envisioned how this would play out on countless occasions, but as the fans at PNC Park rose to honor the journeyman, Maggi found himself unsure how to proceed.
Maggi got called up when there was a sudden need on the roster (Bryan Reynolds went on a bereavement leave), and Maggi was the closest option, playing with the Pirates’ AA team in Altoona, PA. He struck out in his first at-bat, but so what? He got that at-bat, after 13 years of toiling in the minors. He has already been optioned to go back down–he was never going to be sticking around, everybody knew this–but it’s still a great story. Maybe he’ll get a “good guy promotion” at the end of the season when rosters go to 40 players for the last few weeks. He seems to have earned it.
(Maggi was called up to the Majors a couple years ago while with the Twins’ organization, but in two games up with them he never left the dugout.)
The guitar—a Martin N-20 classical, serial number 242830—was a gorgeous instrument, with a warm, sweet tone and a pretty “mellow yellow” coloring. The top was made of Sitka spruce, which came from the Pacific Northwest; the back and sides were Brazilian rosewood. The fretboard and bridge were ebony from Africa, and the neck was mahogany from the Amazon basin. The brass tuning pegs came from Germany. All of these components had been gathered in the Martin guitar factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and cut, bent, and glued together, then lacquered, buffed, and polished. If the guitar had been shipped to New York or Chicago, it might have been purchased by a budding flamenco guitarist or a Segovia wannabe. Instead it was sent to a guitarist in Nashville named Shot Jackson, who repaired and sold guitars out of a shop near the Grand Ole Opry. In 1969 it was bought by a struggling country singer, a guy who had a pig farm, a failing marriage, and a crappy record deal.
Willie Nelson had a new guitar.
Forty-three years later—after some 10,000 shows, recording sessions, jam sessions, songwriting sessions, and guitar pulls, most taking place amid a haze of tobacco and reefer smoke and carried out with a particular brand of string-pounding, neck-throttling violence—the guitar looks like hell. The frets are so worn it’s a wonder any tone emerges at all. The face is covered in scars, cuts, and autographs scraped into the wood. Next to the bridge is a giant maw, a gaping hole that looks like it was created by someone swinging a hammer.
Most guitars don’t have names. This one, of course, does. Trigger has a voice and a personality, and he bears a striking resemblance to his owner. Willie’s face is lined with age and his body is bent with experience. He’s been battered by divorce, the IRS, his son Billy’s suicide, and the loss of close friends like Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, and his longtime bass player Bee Spears. In the past decade, Willie has had carpal tunnel surgery on his left hand, torn a rotator cuff, and ruptured a bicep. The man of flesh and bone has a lot in common with the guitar of wire and wood.
Read the whole thing! It’s just a wonderful piece, and I never tire of linking it.
Few things in life sicken me more than book-banners. I detest that impulse with every fiber of my being. I hate how book-banning is so often cast as “protecting children”, and I hate that it’s now framed as a “parents’ rights” thing, because the immediate question that I ask is, “What makes those parents the ones whose rights have to be honored? Why do they get to choose what everyone reads?” It’s generally my experience that the people who want to ban this book or that book won’t stop with any one book, and also that these are almost certainly the kinds of people who really don’t make books a major part of their lives in the first place. These are the people who question the need for any book but one, and if you have to ask which one that is, you’re not paying attention.
The subject of book-banning came up on a friend’s Facebook page recently, and I found myself in discussion–very briefly–with a couple of enthusiastic book-banners. Of course, they will refuse that description; they will insist that they are protecting children. It’s interesting to note the similarities in their rhetoric, right down to the “If parents want their kids to read this, they can go to Amazon.” The other obnoxious tactic they use is to present some excerpt or citation of a book to which they object, carefully phrased to put the anti-banner on the defensive: “Would you defend having a book in your kindergartner’s library that describes in specific terms how a boy can perform oral sex on an adult, as happened in my district???!!!” This came up in the thread from two different people–one of whom shared a video of some cherubic little boy reading a shocking excerpt from a book he found in his school library in front of the school board!–and I pointed out each time that it’s interesting how that rhetorical gambit always involves omitting the title of the book in question, because heaven forbid anyone would want to look it up and see if the context sheds any light on the situation.
My parents weren’t super-rigorous with rules on my reading, as I recall. My mother wouldn’t let me dive into the Ian Fleming novels as soon as I discovered James Bond via Moonraker when I was all of 8 years old, and there might have been a few other examples that I don’t recall. But she took active interest in my reading and always had recommendations at the ready. With The Daughter,, my general rule was basically, “If you can reach it you can read it,” under the theory that she wasn’t going to be interested in anything I owned with too much adult theming, and a lot of that would go over her head, anyway. I remember seeing Grease in theaters when I was 8 (the same year as Moonraker!), and then watching it much later as an adult and realizing how much adult innuendo from that movie just went completely over my head when I was a kid.
I also note how often the Thing That Will Pervert All Your Children RIGHT NOW! ends up being a normal part of pop culture years later. I hear songs on the Muzak at work by the same heavy-metal hair bands that were scaring all the parents in the 80s, and hell, I remember The Music Man, when a con-man makes getting an entire town to panic out of the blue at the presence of a pool table! the first part of his plan to get all their money.
The folks on the Facebook page also didn’t seem to take too kindly to my pointing out that the book-banners are never content to stop at just this book or that one. Kind of like how the people that want to eradicate just one group of people never seem to stop at just one.
What I love about this movie is that much like Han Solo, Danny Zuko is presented as a cool leading man but is actually a complete awkward doofus.
Oh good, it’s my favorite part of the movie, the one where our HERO attempts to force himself on his girlfriend then sings a whole song about how he is THE VICTIM of said attempted assault AFTER gaslighting her about dance-cheating with Cha-Cha! Danny Zuko you are a TRASH BOY. AND A BOOB-ELBOWER.
I’m a huge fan of the “we are so heterosexual we have no choice but to comb our hair about it” move.
:: Speaking of movies, here’s an interesting article about Moneyball. That’s the baseball movie that focuses more on the front office than the action on the field. It’s a really good movie…and yet I have issues with it, which I suppose I should write about sometime. If you watch it, keep in mind that its version of events is heavily fictionalized.
:: I was looking through a Flickr gallery of photos from the 1970s the other day, and I found this lovely photo of singer-actress Suzi Quatro. No reason here, but I note that her outfit here is pretty close to what I’ve been trying to gear my own fashion concept toward as of late. Hmmmm!
:: Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes and commitment to reclusiveness fame is returning to bookstores as the illustrator, along with caricaturist John Kascht, of a new book. Wow.
I think it’s the place I feel most useful. It’s what I know the most about. I lost my chops as a carpenter. I haven’t ever played fiddle. But I feel comfortable wrestling with how to make behavior out of words on a page and tell a story, and I’m still excited about the prospect of telling a story. I think this is a service occupation — telling stories. We need it. Whether it’s drawing on caves or religious tenets, we love telling stories.
:: When The Onion decides it’s not taking prisoners, the results can be brutal. Perhaps it helps to understand the context of this from the days preceding it–the New York Times‘s insistence on platforming anti-trans voices with little questioning, the response in the form of an open letter signed by many (including myself), and the Times‘s pouting response to that, followed by their running an appalling op-ed titled “In Defense of JK Rowling”–is best found on one’s own. Meanwhile, The Onion opens fire:
“Quentin” is a 14-year-old assigned female at birth who now identifies as male against the wishes of his parents. His transition was supported by one of his unmarried teachers, who is not a virgin. He stole his parents’ car and drove to the hospital, where a doctor immediately began performing top surgery on him. Afterward, driving home drunk from the hospital, Quentin became suicidally depressed, and he wonders now, homeless and ridden with gonorrhea, if transitioning was a mistake.
We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.
This piece, in a local site for investigative journalism, came out in the wake of the recent blizzard during which 40 people died and also during which Mayor Brown was pretty much a nonfactor, if not directly MIA.
Problem is, if Brown is the worst mayor in America, whose fault is that?
As Jim Wright often says: If you want a better nation, start by being a better citizen.
Sarah Gailey is running a feature in which people wrote in with personal stories connected to the recipes to which they return again and again, and this was the first installment. If this is how the series starts, it’s going to be something special to watch unfold.
A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.
Having spent four years in the 90s putting pizzas in boxes, I can attest that indeed, the pizza box isn’t the best thing in the world. However, a big problem is in the pizza itself; unless you’re the person who never eats more than a single slice, the texture of the pizza is already changing from the time it comes out of the oven. If the texture you encounter in the first slice within minutes of emerging from the hot box is your Platonic ideal, you’d best stop eating after that first slice, because with the second slice, things are cooling and congealing and the crust is absorbing moisture again. The best the box can do is vent steam through those little vent slots, but if you got delivery and the box got shoved into that thermal bag? Fuhgeddaboudit!
I’m not sure what the solution is here, but maybe a part of it lies in Americans getting beyond crispy being the texture they desire in so many foods. (Oh, and the best way to reheat leftover pizza is not in the microwave or the oven. It’s in a pan on the stove. That way you can, yes, crisp up the crust again, and slap a lid on it during the last minute of reheating it to get things good and melty again.)
The art world is wild, innit? This is a fascinating story and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out:
A painting by Vincent van Gogh on display at the Detroit Institute of Art was stolen, a new lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday by Brokerarte Capital Partners and its sole proprietor, Gustavo Soter, a Brazilian art collector. It claims the DIA borrowed the painting from an unnamed party that is not its legal owner.
The painting in question is an 1888 oil called Une Liseuse De Romans, or The Novel Reader, which shows a young, dark-haired woman reading a yellow book. It is on show as part of the Van Gogh in America exhibition, which features 74 works by the Dutch post-impressionist, borrowed from 50 sources.
According to the lawsuit, Soter purchased the painting in 2017 for $3.7m, whereupon “a third-party immediately took possession of the painting”.
The suit says Soter “never transferred title to or any interest in the painting to this third party. Since the third party took possession of the painting in May 2017, plaintiff has not known the painting’s location.”
Hat tip to Nerdishly, who actually saw the painting in question before this story broke.
My only hard-and-fast rule was that he would not rub cake in my face at the reception.
Being a reasonable man who knows me well, he didn’t. Instead, he grabbed me by the back of the head and shoved my head down into it. It was planned since the cake was DESTROYED, and he had a bunch of cupcakes as backup.
The advice columnist advises:
I think what he did was a red flag about not respecting you and your wishes—to say nothing of the physical aggression—but even if it wasn’t, the fact that you really didn’t like it is enough. Make a mental note about which of your loved ones don’t seem to value your happiness, and continue with your divorce.
And maybe this is surprising coming from a fan of the pie-in-the-face, but I couldn’t agree more. What this guy did was shitty and disrespectful, and it was aggressively so, right in front of everyone. There is nothing lovable about violating someone’s wishes in so brazen and humiliating a way.
(If anyone’s wondering, no, The Wife and I did not do that cake-smashing bullshit at our wedding. I honestly think it’s stupid and tacky and I’ve hated it at every wedding I’ve seen it happen at.)
OK, that’s all my open tabs! Yay! Time to open more tabs!
Our Thanksgiving table. The VAST majority of the food was on various sideboards.Desserts: Apple crisp with French vanilla ice cream, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Yay!
Good morning, y’all! It’s Black Friday! Yes, I’ll be going out later. Briefly. I do like getting out of the house a little on Black Friday, but generally the extent of my tolerance of the crowds is a quick jaunt to Barnes&Noble. Gotta start shopping sometime, right?
I hope you all had the very best Thanksgiving possible. Most people I follow online seem to have done all right by their Thanksgiving holidays, though I did see a brief discussion about meal times. When do you all eat Thanksgiving dinner, anyway? In my family, it’s always been an evening meal, sometimes hitting the table on the early side (between 4 and 5) or more regularly between 5 and 6; last night’s was around 6:15. It’s dinner, after all! I remember the first Thanksgiving I spent with The Wife’s family members (not her immediate family, who were too far away, but relatives who lived in Iowa) when we were first dating, and that aunt of hers had dinner on the table at noon. I didn’t know how to process this. It was a fine meal, though. I’m guessing this is why the “post-Thanksgiving meal nap” has never been much of a thing in my world.
A pre-meal nap is a thing, though: that lull in the action when the cooking prep is on hold while things bake, roast, or simmer. Also oddly, as much as I cook at home, I generally have little role in the Thanksgiving meal prep beyond lifting heavy items like the turkey itself. I’m not sure why it’s evolved thusly, but I can do other useful things, like walk the dog while others are cooking.
And now for some open-tab clearance:
:: I meant to link Roger’s list of songs about thankfulness earlier in the week, and then I forgot to. Hey, I had stuff on my mind! Who has time to be thankful when you’re digging out your house from 80 inches of snow! (OK, that’s the last time I’ll use that lame-o excuse.)
Anyway, I’m not one to complain much about Christmas music showing up before Thanksgiving (related post on that forthcoming), but it does seem to me that making more space for songs about being specifically thankful wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
:: What state is “Take Me Home, Country Roads” actually referencing? Apparently it’s not actually clear, even though the song actually specifically name-checks West Virginia! (I was going to link a piece from Defector.com here, but that site is aggressively obnoxious about paywalling its content, and I, for one, am getting very tired of everything being paywalled.) “Country Roads” is more than just a favorite song of mine; it’s one of the songs of my life. I literally do not recall a time when that song was not part of my personal musical soundscape.
:: Wine coolers are making a comeback! I remember wine coolers with…well, maybe fondness is a bit of a stretch, but in the late 80s, they were my main introduction to the world of, well, drinking. Especially in college, when I took my time transitioning to beer. I always figured that wine coolers were a fad product that vanished when the fad died, thus explaining their disappearance from the market…but it turns out that Congress played a big role in killing them. Interesting.
I’ve little to no plan to start sampling wine coolers again, but never say never, you know?
:: Toss your copies of Gibbon, folks: they’re worthless now! (No, not really, but it’s always amazing to me to see how many lives are notable in their time and are then lost to memory for centuries until a random coin or two show up someplace…and then those very coins are deemed fakes…and then those same coins are deemed genuine….)
OK, that’s all I got for right now. Enjoy your shopping or your staying home or even your days at work, folks!
Interesting article about the proliferation of numerical analysis for just about everything these days:
Smarties approached baseball like an equation, optimized for Y, solved for X, and proved in the process that a solved sport is a worse one. The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore. In the 1990s, there were typically 50 percent more hits than strikeouts in each game. Today, there are consistently more strikeouts than hits. Singles have swooned to record lows, and hits per game have plunged to 1910s levels. In the century and a half of MLB history covered by the database Baseball Reference, the 10 years with the most strikeouts per game are the past 10.
On another note, I should write a post sometime about the movie Moneyball, which is a fascinating sports movie from the standpoint of the front office, a good piece of evidence for my belief that Aaron Sorkin is at his best when he’s paired with another writer to neuter his more annoying quirks, and also an interesting case study in how to not manage.
:: A post about the title song from the movie That Thing You Do!, the wonderful 90s flick about what happened when a bunch of teenagers from Erie put together a garage rock band and ended up being a national one-hit wonder. The film was directed by Tom Hanks, and he directed it very well, which is why I’m often surprised to think how he never really pursued directing much at all after this one. Maybe he just didn’t want to. That’s fine!
As for the song, though, I did not know that it was written by Adam Schlesinger, the brilliant songwriter who was behind a lot of the amazing satirical songs that formed the backbone of Rachel Bloom’s masterpiece series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Schlesinger, sadly, died at the too-early-age of 51 in the first wave of COVID-19.
Oh, here’s the song, if you don’t remember it. It got quite a bit of airplay in the 90s when the movie was a thing:
When Jeri Lynne Johnson made it to the finals of an orchestra tryout in California and didn’t get the job, she didn’t think much of it.
“It happens. It’s like dating — you kind of work or you don’t,” says Johnson of the chemistry that gets tested when a conductor stands before an orchestra for the first time.
But when Philadelphia-based Johnson asked the head of the selection committee what she could have done differently, “He said, ‘We just didn’t know how to market you. You don’t look like what our audience expects a maestro to look like.’”
Orchestra conducting has been the almost entirely-exclusive bastion of white men for just about the entire two century period that the job has even existed. Woman conductors have only started breaking through into the mainstream in the last couple of decades. Black conductors? Imagine that quote above: “We didn’t know how to market you.” Why not…as a thrilling and exciting musician? The same way you market every new conductor who takes a music director position with an orchestra?
My God, we have so damned far to go.
(Classical music’s racism is often obvious, but it’s also worth noting the crustacean-like resistance to change at all in the genre and in people who follow it. I remember attending a Buffalo Philharmonic concert some years ago where the first half of the program was a modern work, and the second half was a Beethoven piano concerto. At intermission I heard the old ladies behind me saying things like “At last, now we get to the good stuff.” I can hear them now, exiting the concert hall after a Black conductor has led a performance of, oh, Brahms’s Third: “Well, I like Brahms, but I suppose he’s woke now.” Ugh!)
If that sounds confusing–and it did to me at first, too–it’s referring to fictional writers who also end up being detectives, like Richard Castle of my once-beloved show, Castle. (Who is on the list, by the way. He’s not Number One. If you’re wondering who Number One is, I won’t give it away, but it’s really kind of obvious, especially considering recent events.)
I, myself, have never been much for the notion that people are to be automatically afforded massive amounts of deference and respect because they have simply managed to amass some large amount of wealth. But in this country, I am in a distinct minority in this viewpoint, I think.
That’s all for now. Time to start letting the tabs pile up again!
Yup, I’ve got a bunch of open tabs, so time to clear out some stuff!
:: Some good discussion (prompted by me, yay!) over on Roger’s site about (among other things) baseball, home runs, PEDs, “real” records, the degree to which people’s distaste for Barry Bonds is racism versus Bonds being a generally unpleasant guy, and more!
:: One of the original Buffalo Bloggers from way back when is still going strong at All Things Jennifer.
I’ve always been amused at the ironic notion that Avatar had no cultural impact because nobody can name its main character; maybe that’s because the story hasn’t been crammed down viewers’ throats year after year since its release.
That’s a pretty good observation, isn’t it? The “Name one of the characters!” notion interests because, well, isn’t that true of a lot of big singular hits? I very much doubt if, outside of major franchises driven by lots of sequels, people remember the names of major characters much at all. And really, not even then. Sure, the average movie-goer can name some, if not most, of the superheroes on display in all the MCU movies, but how many can you then name by their real (i.e., not their superhero monikers) names? “What’s Iron Man’s name?” Everybody is going to know “Tony Stark”. But: “What’s the name of the bad guy in Iron Man 2?” “Uhhhhh….”
“Can you even name these characters?” is really absurd, when you come to think of it. I can name only one half of the main couple in Brokeback Mountain, but that doesn’t argue against that film’s impact.
The Wife and I rewatched Avatar a few months ago. I found it as involving and engrossing as I did back in 2009; it creates a fascinating world full of, yes, interesting characters. And it remains as visually powerful as it was then. One point the Atlantic piece makes is that Cameron’s 13-year-old visuals, which should look a little dated due to advances in technology, actually still look better than most spectacle-laden movies these days, for various reasons. I found that to still be the case. (Plus, Cameron has never really gotten his due as an action director. I love the MCU and can honestly say that I haven’t disliked any of those movies (though there are a few that we haven’t seen yet, from the most recent batch), but there are times when the action sequences in those movies get hard to follow. That is never a problem with Cameron, who always makes it very clear who is where and who is trying to do what.)
Finally, out of curiosity, I looked up the current list of highest grossing films by year. Scroll through this list and notice how just about every year the biggest hit is either a sequel, or an installment picture in a larger franchise (look how many MCU movies take their year’s title), or the year’s big Disney release, or the first installment in a film franchise (HarryPotter, which had a built-in audience because of the juggernaut nature of the books). The notable exceptions (setting aside 2020, which was a bad year for movies for obvious reasons)? Avatar, which is still a singular film, though for not much longer, and Titanic.
Our nation once idolized astronauts and civil-rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now it worships tech innovators who generate billions of dollars and move financial markets. To justify that adulation, we made shareholder returns the sole metric of success, and so shareholders are the most successful.
It’s hard to disagree with that. Witness the cult surrounding the likes of Elon Musk.
My response to this movie was so strong I had to interrogate it a little bit. What is this bringing up in me? Why such a personal reaction? This calls into question the whole film critic thing in general. Why distrust a personal reaction? Isn’t that the whole deal? The problem with totally trusting your first reaction is sometimes you can get swept away by something that – on a second look – is fairly empty. And so you “relating” to it or something is actually a filter that might have more to do with where you are at at that particular time … and once you move out of that time, the film will reveal all its flaws. Meanwhile, you are on record praising it to the skies. This has happened to me. I have gotten things wrong.
This is why I really could never be a professional critic, i.e., someone required to write intelligently about their opinion of a given work–be it a book, a film, a symphony, whatever–after experiencing it a single time, and quickly, too. I have too many times had the experience Sheila describes above, where I loved a thing at first but later thought “Wait, hold on a second,” and the reverse of this where I dislike a thing at first and only later came to realize how good it was.
Sheila is always very introspective in her writings, which I always prefer in my critical reads. I tend to be deeply suspicious of critics who write in such a way as to erase themselves and their own biases and emotions from their work; this kind of thing tends to feel as if these critics are trying to imbue a sense of objectivity to their work in a field where things are inherently subjective. And few things irritate me more in criticism than the assumption of right or wrong answers.
Over the past 22 years, he has won 17 tournaments in the United States and Europe, generating ESPN coverage and a documentary film. In September 2013, he threw a rock that skipped so many times it defied science. This year he hopes to smash records on both sides of the Atlantic, giving him a platform for sermonizing about a sport he believes is nothing short of a means for the redemption of mankind—“a legitimate path to an essential inner balance,” he says.
This is a fantastic article. I’ve always loved the writing in Outside Magazine, and this is a case in point. I was surprised, reading it, that Kurt Steiner’s life unfolded just south of mine, in the hills and wilds of northwestern and northern Pennsylvania. I’ve been through many of the towns and places named herein. The article begins on Sinnemahoning Creek, a stream whose name I remember; I must have accompanied my parents to that stream in our canoeing-and-kayaking days. Steiner is 56, I’m 51.
And ultimately I’m amazed to discover that competitive stone-skipping is a thing.
When one gets home from work to start a vacation, one puts on overalls and pours a Scotch. It’s just what one does.
I like Scotch. Scotchy Scotch Scotch. Here it goes down. Down into my belly.
:: Teevee show you should watch: The World According to Jeff Goldblum, on Disney Plus. It’s a series of light-hearted and fascinating mini-documentaries about mundane subjects, starring some actor named Jeff Goldblum.
:: Finally, a photo I took of my street on a dark morning in early autumn, when the sky was gray and the streetlights weren’t off yet. One thing I like about the rise of LED technology is that the streetlights now cast old-school pools of light, like they used to in all the old noir films. I processed this photo through the Prisma app to get this effect.
