I got nothin’ else today, so here are two dogs…
…and two cats.
Have a great night, y’all!
And now, some Cosmic Perspective
Here’s a photo from the Hubble Space Telescope:
From NASA’s Flickr stream:
In this image, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a side-on view of NGC 3568, a barred spiral galaxy roughly 57 million light-years from the Milky Way in the constellation Centaurus. In 2014 the light from a supernova explosion in NGC 3568 reached Earth – a sudden flare of light caused by the titanic explosion accompanying the death of a massive star.
Photos of entire galaxies always blow my mind a little…and that photo contains many galaxies. What an amazingly grand universe!
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C-c-cold
We’ve been in something of a Deep Freeze here in the 716 of late, with several days in the last couple of weeks bottoming out near zero, a similar number of days never getting much above ten degrees, and (I think) zero days in which we’ve gone above freezing. We’ve also had a good walloping of snow since January, as if to make up for a very mild December. That’s supposed to end this week with a brief warmup (we actually go into the 40s on Tuesday and Wednesday, so we’ll be able to melt some of this off before the next round possibly hits on Thursday or so), but…wow, it’s been cold.
Our house has a couple front-facing windows where we raise the blinds during the day and put them back down at night. Rosa (one of the two cats we adopted last year) loves looking out these windows, and she comes running each and every morning at blind-raising time. In warmer months she gets to sit on the window sill of the open window and watch the world go by, but in colder months she has to content herself with sitting atop the litter box’s roof and peering through the window.
The problem is that when we put the blinds down, moisture gets trapped there, where it condenses and eventually freezes. The result is that Rosa’s morning view looks like…this.
It’s hard being a cat, is all I’m saying.
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Two Doggos and a Cat
For lack of anything else to post today, here is Cane awaiting his breakfast:
Here’s a diptych of Carla sleeping:
Here’s Rosa, in a box:
And finally, here’s Remy being a dick to Rosa because she’s on the heat vent and he wants it:
So goes animal life in my household!
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“I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right”: A MAGNUM geek visits Paradise
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:
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)–
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”.
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???
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“I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams”
It is, Red. It is.
I didn’t want to blog about this until we were at the very least on the plane (I felt like I was jinxing it by even pre-scheduling a Daily Dose of Christmas post obliquely referring to it!) but…we are in Hawaii.
Specifically, Oahu. More specifically, Waikiki.
Strange thing about Hawaii…it’s never been a place I’ve really even dreamed about visiting, because for many years it just didn’t even feel like a possibility. And even this trip owes everything to someone else’s good graces (Thanks, Mom!). But…well, it’s just a place, isn’t it? It’s a place where people live and work and do stuff. They just do it in the shadows of lushly green mountains and by the side of a wide blue sea.
Just a place.
But what a place!
I mean…come on now.
And then there’s the sea.
Have you ever wondered why the word sea is so much more packed with poetry and romance than the word ocean? Maybe it’s because the sea is a much more primal concept, a more basic one. I know that mariners think of the Great Lakes as seas in their own right. Oceans are specific things. But on this particular morning, I find myself remembering one of my favorite quotes (which I should probably track down at some point in its actual context):
The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. (Isak Dinesen)
Well, like many others, I’ve had sweat and tears in damned good measure. Let’s give the sea a try, shall we?
For someone who loves water, who can’t fathom the idea of living in a place where water is a scarcity (Phoenix? Vegas? Never!), there’s still something about the sea that overwhelms my brain on a primal level. My whole life has been spent near water, but I think of streams in a wood, waterfalls, bubbling small pools, swimming holes, rivers, lakes, ponds, whitewater rapids. The sea, though, is something else. You come to the sea and you realize that eventually, on this world of ours, eventually all the water comes back to the sea.
Anyway, those are my somewhat jet-lagged and under-caffeinated thoughts on this, the first morning I’ve awoken to pink clouds over a darkened sea where people are already surfing. Now, we’re gonna try to find some coffee and get our rental car and see what a Hawaiian grocery store is like. As one does.
Further dispatches as events warrant!
(And the Daily Dose of Christmas is prescheduled for every day until the 25th, so we have that going for us, at least!)
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And now, an airplane.
Just because, here’s a cool-looking plane. It’s meant for really big cargo, and it’s called–get this–the “Super Guppy”.
You can see the full size version of this here.
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Gap, with stripes (or, New to the Collection)
Back in the 90s, The Gap (along with everyone else) made some really nice overalls. I still have some from that period, and they are now officially Vintage.
Maybe you wouldn’t have expected it, but Gap’s overalls from that period were actually pretty well made. They used denim of decent thickness and good quality hardware in the buckles (cheap buckles breaking is a thing, unfortunately), and they included standard details like hammer loops and side pockets on the legs. The bib pockets are large and functional, even if I generally don’t tend to keep things in my bib pocket. These are some favorite overalls of mine, so I have a saved search for them on eBay, if I ever spot pairs at decent prices. As time goes by the ones I like, in my size, show up less and less frequently, and the prices are higher and higher, but you never know. So I keep an eye out.
And then a listing caught my eye, and I couldn’t believe it. I had no idea, but back then Gap didn’t just make those overalls in blue denim; they had Hickory-striped pairs too! This I never knew. Hickory stripes have always been the also-ran in the overalls department, but I love the way they look. (Hey, Carhartt! You make Hickory striped overalls for women, so get a men’s version out there!) So I anguished a bit over these when the listing popped up, because the seller wanted a little more than I really wanted to pay, and because they are one size bigger than I really want. (I am not as big as I used to be, and I continue heading in the right direction: just yesterday I had a doctor visit that confirmed I’ve ditched eight pounds since my last visit several months ago. Huzzah!)
Ultimately I concluded that I couldn’t pass these up, so I grabbed them with the thought that I’ll just make sure to wear them under multiple layers. Especially multiple poofy layers. Like, a mock turtleneck and a nice warm sweater.
By the way, it continues to be obvious to me that a greyhound is an outstanding fashion accessory.
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Two dogs and one cat
SNOW!!!
Feels like it took longer than usual this year, but it’s finally here!
I reserve the right to get sick of the stuff once my traditional cut-off date, St. Patrick’s Day, rolls around (though for some reasons to be revealed later, my tolerance for snow this year might actually be increased). But for right now, I am happy as a clam, because SNOW!!!