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adventures / memories / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
6
Dec 22

Travel day photos

This is a filler post, as we spent most of the day traveling today. We woke up in Savannah, picked up our last little shopping treats, had breakfast, sat in the park and then got an Uber to the airport. It was after 9 p.m. when we got back to the house in Indiana. So, you can imagine.

I don’t know if Tom Hanks or David Moscow is still looking, but I found the Zoltar machine.

No one was as excited about seeing this banner as I was. Most things that interest me don’t seem to appeal to anyone else, which is weird. I’m sure it’s them, and not at all me. Anyway, Repurpose Savannah “is a women+ led 501(c)3 nonprofit establishing a sustainable future through the deconstruction and reuse of historic buildings.”

This is a movie prop poster. It is currently displayed in the window of an appliance story that’s set up to look like a 1960s retail shop. I want the actual poster, and some of the bakelite that was inside.

On the same block, the SCAD theater is also going to be a part of that movie. The parking spaces are also currently filled with period cars. For a time, this part of Savannah is pretending to be Cocoa Beach, Florida.

This is the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist, home of the Diocese of Savannah, which covers 90 counties.

The bumpy, yet smooth, bricked road that is River Street, the primary tourist trap of Savannah.

Another version of this will become a banner on the blog.

If you go down there, though, you get great views of the vessels moving up and down the river.

I don’t care that there’s a tugboat in the foreground for scale, there’s not really a way to accurately convey the size of this thing, which started its voyage in Japan, made ports of call in Tacoma and Long Beach, then crossed the Panama Canal to visit Savannah. Four years ago, that ship rescued 11 Tunisian fishermen who were victims of a hit and run by another large vessel.

Here’s one more shot of our tree at Forsyth Park. Just on the other side, and trending a bit to the right of the trunk, 14 years ago, almost to the day.

Finally, here’s The Yankee, who planned this trip — which is why it was excellent — hanging out with Santa Claus. (She planned a really nice trip. She should have just made it longer.)

Another picture of her with a slight less authentic, but more lifelike, Santa is going on the Christmas cards this year.

adventures / Thursday / video — Comments Off
1
Dec 22

Guess where we are

On the one hand, it takes all day to get some places. On the other hand, we made it a quarter of the way across the country today.

We’re taking a few days for a low-key pre-holiday vacation. But now you have to guess where we are. Otherwise, you won’t win the prize.

adventures / cycling / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Nov 22

More from Newfields

As promised, here’s a bit more from yesterday’s adventures. These are the first 90 seconds of the Monet at The LUME exhibit. You cover a fair amount of ground with the impressionists in the next hour or so. It’s a fine presentation. Go see this when it gets near you.

The giant image of an aging Claude Monet near the end of the exhibit, and before the gift shop.

Try as we might, and we tried mightily, we could not talk the folks into buying a beret.

We went back to Newfields after dinner to see the Winterlights demo. Much better weather this year. A lot of smiles, a lot of happy children. A lot of adults looking with the eyes of a child. (Just imagine if they’d seen someone wandering around in a beret.)

Had a nice bike ride today, I put 40 more miles in the books. That’s almost four loops on this specific Zwift course.

Someone decided two circuits, 21.50 miles, should be a Strava segment. Strava tells me I’ve done that segment seven times. And, today, I shaved two minutes off my best time.

Not bad for being under-caloried.

music / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
16
Nov 22

The beginning of Thanksgiving

I finally figured out how to take photos of autumn leaves. It is the shutterbug’s lament, how to express the majesty of autumn. Even the best, high definition lens, top-of-the-line processor, perfectly saturated image leaves something out. You can’t get the emotion, the smells, the crispness of the air and the texture of the foliage in a photograph.

So, of course, here we are at the end of fall, the beginning of winter (it has been snowing again) but I finally figured out something important.

Night, and light.

This stand of American sweetgums is right by the parking deck I use on campus. There’s a nice set of street lights that, just now, are doing some quality work. Those red and greens are terrific.

I would have stayed to admire them, but I mentioned it has been snowing again meaning it is just cold. All the time.

I stopped by the grocery store, hoping to get ahead of the holiday rush, and found I might have been already been too late. There are turkeys …

… but not the size we want. On the left side of the case a bunch of eight and nine pounders. On the right side they go well into the 20+ pound range. I got a bigger one (More leftovers!) but it is sensibly oversized. Someone else needs that 29-pound bird. I need to leave room for all of the other tasty things that will be on the table.

We wondered about freezer room, but that’s not a problem. I could put this thing outside, in the shade on the windward side of the house, and it’d probably stay frozen. I did not — we have coyotes within earshot, after all — but I could have. It’s cold, is what I’m saying.

There are also turkeys living on the hillside behind us, but I don’t think those turkeys and this bird would … ahhhh … get along, seeing as how mine doesn’t have much to gobble about.

Since I mentioned, yesterday, the band playing in the studio, here’s that show. Hank Ruff and The Hellbenders:

He’s popular, and the studio was full of people who enjoyed their set. Tonight was sports, and, because we’re in the upside down, World Cup soccer talk, in November. I spent the rest of the evening reading, and being smothered by cats, who are presently desperate for attention, and body heat.

It’s cold.

IU / memories / music / photo / video — Comments Off
15
Nov 22

‘It’s all pop music,’ is a thing I said today

Tonight there was a band in the studio. Hank Ruff is a recent IU grad, and he’s making it as a performer. Beats grad school classes! He’s been on one of our shows before, just before Covid, he said. He would have been a sophomore then and I had no memory of that … until I looked it up just now.

Look how young everyone was! February, 2020:

Since then, a pandemic happened. Charlee went home to Green Bay and became a reporter there. Kendall is reporting in Milwaukee today. Hank topped the iTunes all genre chart for a day, knocking Encanto out of the top spot, which he rightly, casually, mentions.

I’d mention that every day.

Anyway, they have new single coming out in January, Hank Ruff and his band played for us this evening. I don’t know how many country acts have a saxophone player these days, but the guy in the far background has figured out how to make his spot work in this group.

I was going to make a “Is that country music?” joke, but about that time they played a song that Hank said his dad wrote decades ago. The song was “I’m Not Crazy (But I’m Out of Her Mind)” and that’s about as country a song title as you can imagine.

Safe to say they’re on their way, too. He said he and The Hellbenders played 15 shows in September. Good for them. They played three songs, ran their own audio and did a thoroughly professional load out.

I wonder where local band members go after they’re done for the evening.

“Evening.” Their mini-set was wrapped by 7:15 p.m.

After the shows I pointed the car to the house, checked the freezer for turkey room, set up some sanding for later this week, heated leftover chili for dinner, petted the cats and straightened up my home office. It needs more than a straightening, but it was in such a state that a straightening itself was a transformation.

Now I’m just waiting for the Artemis rocket to launch. Maybe everything will work right for their window, anyway. (Sometimes being a fan of science and amazing thing leads to long hours.)

Let’s spend some of that time on the Re-Listening Project. I’ve just working my way through all of my old CDs, in the order I acquired them. It’s fun, it’s nostalgic, it’s an excuse to post videos.

First up today, a soundtrack for a movie that was bad then and hasn’t improved with age. The movie gets terms like “cult hit” and “zeitgeist,” and the dreaded “mixed reviews,” but sometimes words get used without the writer knowing what they really mean. It made good box office money, and most importantly the music was good! Good enough, I suppose. The soundtrack was a platinum hit in Australia and Canada, and twice certified as platinum in the United States. Presumably that was on the strength of Lisa Loeb’s breakthrough single.

I’m sure I bought this because it had three or four songs that I wouldn’t buy on their own. I can tell you how important this was. I never listen to the thing. Almost never have.

There’s a good Juliana Hatfield Three song in there, and it’s always good to have The Posies to point too. Dinosaur Jr. makes you seem well-rounded, and there’s Loeb’s smash hit, not that I bought this for the Loeb song. “Stay” was good, still is, but “Stay” was already everywhere. And then there’s a Me Phi Me classic. It’s aged far, far better than this movie.

Maybe I should look up Me Phi Me’s full catalog.

Up next, the followup to Radiohead’s surprising smash hit, “Creep.” That song took over the airwaves off their debut album, and so the pressure was on when it came to producing and releasing “The Bends.” The record broke the top 10 in Belgium, Scotland, and on the UK Albus chart. Certified as a gold record in at least four countries and platinum in the U.S. and New Zealand and it’s a multi-platinum record in Canada and the UK. They rolled out seven singles, half the record, between September of 1994 and July of 1996. The angular guitars and the emotional falsetto helped draw a line in British rock of the period.

This was great car music for me. Probably a lot of late nights in the car. I drove a lot during this part of college, and so there was me, and, often, Thom Yorke.

“Blackstar” wasn’t a single, but was definitely a late night, car-clinging-to-asphalt track. That chorus is really something.

“Sulk” was a political song, addressing a 1987 mass shooting in England. Pay attention to what Ed O’Brien is doing with the effects on his guitar here.

Title track? Title track.

The Beatles, The Smiths, a David Bowie pastiche, and as critically divisive as a pop song can be, I guess.

After this brief toe dip in Brit rock, we’ll return to Americana pop … probably on Thursday, only on the Re-Listening Project.