What's everyone up to right now?

[ignoramus]

Don't take it personally LL. You know cat's love nothing better than crapping on a sandy beach! lol

[onlinebiker]

About six months ago I filled a small concrete tray with sand, used a stick to make a rippled effect like the beach, meticulously placed hundreds of extremely small shells, rocks and driftwood to create a beach scene.
I then used a barbie doll's foot to create footprints like you see at the beach in the mornings.
Then I placed it in the middle of my dining room table and it was lovely.
So anyway, the cat just shit in it.

That's a cat.

Always the critic.


 

[T.J.]

I've been writing four stories and building my own universe to allow for crossovers to happen in my stories and I've been becoming an advocate for mental illness.

[Rev. Rye]

Went to a concert at Ravinia, an all-Tchaikovsky program culminating in a performance of the 1812 overture with real cannons, well technically Mortars. Here’s a picture I took after the concert was over.



Somehow, likely related to the pain I’ve been dealing with (significantly better than it has been) leading to me doing less walking than usual, I did not find the location of the cannons until the first shots were fired. Fortunately, I ended up getting just enough time before the finale to get a good shot at the cannons. Here’s a screenshot of a video I took of the mortar fire of the last minute of the piece.



I figured it would be easier to film the whole thing and select what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment from a frame rather than hope I would snap it at the right second. And now, I got a frame that had the smoke from one mortar and the orange blast from another. It did not disappoint. (Edit: I replaced the old version with a higher quality version since I figured out that old one was only 640 pixels wide and it deserved more. Thank you, free Grabber clone, for letting me take a proper screenshot in Blu-Ray quality.)

Other things of note, while going to a bathroom, I found a guy who looked almost exactly like Joseph Fritzl. I didn’t take a picture of him because I didn’t think it would be appropriate, even if, judging by his white cane, he was probably blind.

Also, I’ve been reading The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes. It’s an excellent book, and it turns out some friends of Dad who also went to the same concert noticed I was reading one of his books and told me he studied under him. Apparently, he had a beard like mine, and spent his whole time telling stories and not explaining how to write, although he was pretty incisive when the time came to critique his students’ writing.

[Kitty Galore]

Second day back at work. It's going well.

[Rev. Rye]

My back pain is acting up, and I figured it might not be a good idea to go to my writer's group tonight.

[Kitty Galore]

Having some coffee on the deck..

[Rev. Rye]

Saw a Rachel Maddow piece on Epoch Times, detailing a video which claims that the government saved the people on the planes, but kept them in underground bunkers so they'd never see sunlight again, for some reason. You know what would be a hell of a lot easier? Hiring people to hijack those planes with those innocent people inside for real.

Seriously, the whole "government goes to absurd lengths to fake a tragedy when it would be easier to just make it happen for real" thing is really getting out of hand.

[Rev. Rye]

Went to see this guy at Ravinia. It was in the Bennet Gordon Hall, the small but modern theater on the grounds. It was kind of surreal seeing the lawn entirely deserted, since that was the only concert scheduled that day.





And, to escalate it, Philippe Quint removed the sound from this scene:





And performed Hungarian Dance #5 to match the action LIVE. He said this was going to be the only time he'd do it.

Also, I did not know that Charlie played violin left-handed, strung right-handed like I play guitar, but according to Quint, he did.

Overall, I think he covered at least one piece from every film between The Kid and A King in New York, except for A Woman of Paris and The Circus. Then again, it's not like most of the fans don't forget those films anyway:

• The Kid: Fantasia on musical pieces
  
• The Gold Rush: Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Waltz
  
• City Lights: Suite (With "Au Clair De La Lune", accompanied by a story about how Chaplin met Debussy but didn't know who he was)
  
• Modern Times: "Smile."
  
• Great Dictator: Brahms' "Hugarian Dance #5"
  
• Monsieur Verdoux: Bitterness Tango  (With a tango from Stravinsky that may have been inspired by a meeting with Chaplin and a highly surreal and blasphemous pitch that unnerved Stravinsky to no end)
  
• Limelight: Terry's Theme ("Eternally.")
  
• A King in New York: "Weeping Willows." (With Heifetz' arrangement of "It Ain't Necessarily So.")
  
  

It doesn't cover ALL the bases, especially since it doesn't include the nonsense song from Modern Times or the music for the roll dance from The Gold Rush, and while those might lose something without the visual element, there's also one piece from The Gold Rush that's stayed in my head for decades, and, thanks to Chaplin having the sense to upload the soundtrack he composed for that film uploaded to YouTube in its entirety (minus his narration), I now know is called "Thanksgiving," that, while it is composed for one of the most famous scenes in silent comedy, is charming in its own right:

[Jackalope]

245 am, woke up three hours ago in pretty bad pain. I have to leave to go into the office in four hours. IT is here from Houston to distribute new laptops and even though I'm a remote worker they don't want to FedEx the fucking thing.