R.I.P. Randy Pausch

I missed this news; Randy Pausch, the professor whose "last lecture" encouraged people to appreciate life, died last Friday. He was 47, having lived five months longer his doctors expected. His last lecture was the basis for the speech given by the school superintendent at the Elder Pea's graduation this Spring.

If you've never seen the lecture and you have an hour or so, it's worth watching.

Christian's legacy

On the off chance you haven't seen this yet, get out the hankies and enjoy. The two young men in this video were London hipsters in 1969-70. They were on the Today Show this morning talking about Christian, whom they last saw in 1974 as a full grown lion with a large pride and cubs. The older man in the video is George Adamson, of Born Free fame. He helped re-introduce Christian to the wild. From the extended comments with the video:

Christian left the Kora Reserve in 1973. He made his new territory along the Tana river, but when the Wakamba herdsmen kept bringing their livestock to his hunting ground, he moved on. George Adamson said in his autobiography, "I used to count the days on which we hadn't seen Christian, but when they reached 97, I gave up recording them in my diary." Because a lion can live from 12 to 15 years in the wild, Adamson believed that Christian ended his days in the Meru National Reserve only a few miles up river.

As for the two guys, the Born Free Foundation tells me that Anthony "Ace" Bourke (referred to as Ace "Berg" in a Daily Mail article) lives in Australia as a lecturer and expert in the area of Aboriginal Art, and John Rendall lives in the UK and is a Trustee of the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust...

Adamson was murdered in Kenya in 1989. The Preservation Trust was named in his honor, for all the wonderful work he did in Kenya. They ask that donations be made through Wildlife Now.

Catfish

Way high up on the too cute scale.

Blender drinks

Good Housekeeping has a bunch of recipes for blender drinks - 30, actually - just in time for the dog days of summer.

INGREDIENTS
5 scoop(s)	vanilla ice cream
1/2 cup(s)	orange juice
1/3 cup(s)	milk
1/3 cup(s)	frozen orange juice concentrate
	Orange peel (optional garnish)
DIRECTIONS
In blender, combine ice cream, orange juice, milk, and orange juice concentrate and blend until mixture is smooth and frothy. Pour into 2 tall glasses. Garnish with orange peel, if you like.

Sounds yummy to me.

Hero bunny!

MELBOURNE, Australia - A pet rabbit is credited with saving a couple from a fire that swept through their home in the southern city of Melbourne.

Metropolitan Fire Brigade commander Mick Swift said the husband returned home from a night shift early Thursday and heard the family pet, named "Rabbit," scratching at the couple's bedroom door half an hour after he had gone to bed.

Swift said the husband, whose identity has not been released, discovered a fire in a back room and smoke spreading quickly through the house. He was able to escape the house with his wife unharmed.

Swift said the rabbit saved the couple from injury.

He said the blaze caused substantial damage to the house before it was extinguished by four crews of firefighters.

Bunnies can be heroes, too!

El Greco to Antonio López García

I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see El Greco to Velasquez today and spent the day seeing everything I could. I really need to do this more often.

I bought two tickets. There is a $4 charge for reserving tickets online, regardless of whether you get one or two, so I got two figuring I could give one away. I found a very nice woman who had driven out from the Amherst area for the day who had no ticket. She turned out to be from PA originally, had been a nurse and then late in life decided to become a painter, something she had been discouraged from doing when she was younger. Clearly it was my karma to give this woman a ticket. I hope she enjoyed her day as much as I enjoyed mine.

Good as the Philip III show was, there were other exhibits I found more interesting. An Art Deco jewelry exhibit was outstanding, so much so that I bought the catalog. Just gorgeous jewelry; when you see straight men oohing and aahing over an exhibit that you know they were dragged into kicking and screaming by wives/girlfriends, it's an impressive display of craftsmanship. I have to get Queenee in to see this, she'll love it.

A Japanese house interior was set up to display period furniture and artifacts. Another very interesting exhibit, and very empty. I was in there for a good twenty minutes and I doubt ten other people came in during that time. I even got to give myself a foot massage, courtesy of the museum.

There is a room full of Winslow Homer work, some paintings and a bunch of prints. He really is a master of watercolor, and he was a trained printmaker as well. It was very interesting to see how he re-worked his paintings into prints. One in particular stood out - The Life Line (Saved) verges on erotic in the etching, far more than the painting, and apparently Homer did this intentionally. It is a beautiful print.

The pièce de résistance was the Antonio López García exhibit. Garcia is a Spanish realist painter born in 1936, who stuck to his vision through the abstract art period, and thank god he did. This is, amazingly, his first solo show in the US. His work is exquisite. Incredibly detailed, yet not photographic, the work is real enough to be appreciated by the "my five year old could do that" crowd, like PopPop. PopPop wouldn't care for Garcia's subject matter; too much simple home life and nude men, but even he would have to acknowledge the mastery of form and space. Although Garcia is perhaps best known for the baby head sculptures of his grandchildren, his drawings and paintings are outstanding. He is an artist I knew nothing about, though I had seen some of his sculpture work. In my defense, he's not much interested in being well known, but I've got my eye on him now. What a treat.

You can't play in my yard

Wow. What a tortoise! I found this video online in several places and just had to add some music...

Hens in the band

When I need a break from working up a website or reading something that will hopefully be of some use to me in the future, I surf. I've found some interesting things drifting around out in the cyber-ocean. This is one. It is a story about a performance from about ten years ago involving a musical quartet, comprised of two man and two hens.

I played percussion on a modified vintage typewriter miked up loud enough to sound like the thunder of an angry God. At that volume, the space bar and shift keys rumbled like a kick drum, and the letter keys snapped like a tight snare. My friend Tim Gordon (the band’s other human being) played the guitar and bass semi-simultaneously, wearing the guitar up by his collarbone and the bass slung low at his hips – he’d loop the bass notes through a pedal and play rhythm guitar against himself while I thumped and cracked the typewriter. Once we hit a stride of sorts, we’d pull a blanket off the top of the cage where Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline sat with two little Casio Keyboards...

There is a link to the only known recording from this quartet, made at their first live performance. Check it out. It is surprisingly interesting, a lot more interesting than some of the crap making millions of dollars for gangstas.

If you keep up on what's being blogged, you may be familiar with Jeff - he's the guy who had the audacity to ask for iced-espresso. It makes for some pretty funny reading. Hard to believe the controversy this little brewhaha (sorry, couldn't help that) has created.

Mamma Mia

I doubt anyone who knows me would mistake me for an ABBA fan. Fernando not withstanding, I just didn't get their music; it always sounded so insipid to me.

Queenee and I went to see "Mamma Mia" last night with a couple of her friends. It isn't a great movie. It isn't really even a good movie. No matter what you have heard, Pierce Brosnan cannot sing. Not at all. And the dancing isn't really dancing. But if you don't catch yourself smiling, your heart is made of stone. Turn your brain off, dial down your expectations, and go with the flow.

Greece looks amazing in this movie. Meryl Streep is god. She can sing, she can act, she can take weak material and make it look fun. Her daughter is played by Amanda Seyfried, who also has a pretty good singing voice. The only other real voice from the main cast belongs to Christine Baranski. The three men are all good actors, but not singers. Julie Walters isn't a singer either, but she doesn't bother pretending, she just sings the songs like the rest of us do, which means like crap. And except for the SOS number, during which I found myself feeling embarrassed for poor Pierce Brosnan, you mostly forgive the non-singers. After all, it's ABBA, not Cole Porter. The supporting players are all quite good and often very funny.

The Dancing Queen bit was really cute, sweeping up all the women in the area and skipping along waving their hands in the air ... yep, it is dumb, but it's fun. If you are an ABBA fan, you should not miss it, and if you aren't, you won't want to slit your wrists if you find yourself sitting through the movie with someone.

Stick around at the end when the credits roll. Trust me on this.

I had a thought once the movie was over. I said to Queenee that I could see this movie doing the rounds as a participation movie, ala The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but on a much smaller and less messy scale. People would dig out their platform shoes and sequined suits and dance in the aisles and have a blast. Seriously. It could happen. You heard it here first.

Now I need to go see The Dark Knight and Hellboy II to get ABBA out of my head. Those movies are much more my taste.

New pickup for PopPop

The Toyota pickup I bought several years ago finally required repairs that would cost more than the truck is worth, by a not insubstantial amount. Last week Dawg spotted a likely replacement, a Ford Ranger, and PopPop negotiated a cash/trade-in deal. He is now the proud owner of a new used pickup! It seems like it was a good deal to me, the tires look very good and there is a cab cover on the back, which will prove its worth to PopPop come winter or in case of a sudden downpour. And the color is so lovely...

Actually, we're hoping for a sudden downpour, along with however much lightening is necessary to clear the humidity. 95F and high humidity = YUUCK. No rain forecast until tomorrow afternoon or evening.

Last weekend the washing machine decided it no longer wanted to go through a spin cycle, so it too needed replacing. I found a good deal at a local store and PopPop and Dawg went and picked it up in the new used pickup truck. It was a pretty good day for spending around here!

Hosting a parasite

Someone videotaped a Gordian worm exiting its cricket host in a swimming pool. Must be a Spinochordodes tellinii. Viewing not recommended for the queasy, though there is nothing gory or really gross-looking happening.

MLB All-Star game

I didn't make it to the end of the game, but from what I saw it was a good one this year. By the ninth inning, Tito had used all his field position players, so his team (except for the pitchers) was set for the duration. After a record-tying 15 innings and a record-shattering four hours and 50 minutes, after every player on each team that could be used was used, the AL finally put away the NL, 4-3. The last All-Star Game that will be played in the soon-to-be-demolished Yankee Stadium continued the AL's mastery of the poor NL, which hasn't won an All-Star game since 1996. There was the 2002 11-inning tie in Milwaukee; after that game the All-Star rosters were increased to 32 players per team and home-field advantage in the World Series was awarded to the winner.

For a while, it looked like this might be the NL's year to win...

The NL took a 2-0 lead, the first run coming on an opposite-field home run from Colorado's Matt Holliday. The AL tied it up with -- horrors of all horrors in Yankee Stadium -- a two-run homer from Boston's J.D. Drew. The NL struck back in the eighth with a run off Boston's Jonathan Papelbon (to the delight, somewhat strangely, of the Yankees fans). The AL tied it in the bottom of the inning.

And then they played on and on and on. And on some more. The NL got its leadoff hitter on in the ninth. Nothing. The AL had its first two on in the 10th. Nothing. The AL had its leadoff man on in the 11th and 12th, the NL in the 12th and 13th. Nothing. And some more nothing.

Then finally, in the bottom of 15th, with the NL on its last pitcher, Minnesota's Justin Morneau singled off Philadelphia's Brad Lidge, Tampa Bay's Dioner Navaro singled Morneau to second, Drew walked to load the bases and Texas second baseman Michael Young -- who hit a game-winning two-run triple in the 2006 game -- lofted a fly ball to right field that was just deep enough.

The throw from Milwaukee's Corey Hart was a little on the first-base side of home, and Morneau slid in just ahead of the tag from Atlanta catcher Brian McCann. Somewhere, commissioner Bud Selig -- who took the blame for the 2002 debacle -- let out a long, slow exhale...

Congratulations to Boston's own JD Drew. He was the fifteenth player to his a home run in his first All-Star game, and he did it with his first at bat. That tied the game at 2 runs each and won the MVP for Drew.

Some people should not be allowed to vote

Alright, seriously, there needs to be some kind of civics exam given before people are allowed to vote. Nothing to do with race, religion, gender ... strictly civics. If you haven't been paying enough attention to know where KFC is from, if you think Yugoslavia begins with a U (or even still exists), you fail. We make people prove they know at least some of the rules of the road before we give them a license to drive, why not do something similar for voting?

This explains how the shrub got elected, doesn't it?

Fun with cornstarch

Awesome.

NE Aquarium

Our NE Aquarium membership expires at the end of July, so we decided to go yesterday afternoon. Queenee picked the Peas up on her way home from work, then stopped for me (I am the designated driver) and we headed into town. The aquarium doesn't change much between visits, but there's always at least one thing you see that you haven't seen before. I watched the seals swimming upside down in their outdoor tank, and inside the octopus, who is normally quite sedate, was having a crazy legs day - suckers all over the glass. He needs a Rubik's Cube.

Queenee didn't have to work today, so at about 1pm we headed out to do some errands. She has been wanting to drop candy off at the Fire/Rescue and Police departments for a while, so we dropped off a basket at F/R. She'll get more for the Police and we'll drop that off another day. We got our library cards, since we were right next door. Then we dropped off two bags at the SS Hospital for the two nurses who looked after her.

We went to Marshall's and got a few things - I got two bras and a bathing suit, which someday I may wear in public. Then to TJMaxx so I could return a different bathing suit. It fit me, just didn't have quite enough coverage for my baggy boobs. Don't want to scare the dogs and small children. You'd think I could have returned it at Marshall's, since they are essentially the same company, but I guess they are still keeping the books separate.

We're having gorgeous weather here, today was sunny, about 80F with a light breeze and no humidity. Yesterday was just a tad cooler, maybe 75F. It will be warmer over the weekend, but looks to be lovely. This is my kind of summer weather.

Music of Nature

I don't know if anyone pays any attention to the layout, images or links on the this blog, but I actually take the time to change/update things every so often. Today's update is a link to Songs of Insects. You all know my passion for birds; I am only a bit less interested in insects, and was delighted to trip across this site today. I have my own cicada recordings, but to hear a clear difference between the cyclical 17-year cicada and the annual and familiar Scissor-grinder cicada was a good find, imho. Our local pod is hatching now, though we don't have any noise here. I'm up for a drive down the Cape to hear some cicada singing before it's all over. We are in a light area for Pod 14. When I lived in PA, our local pod was the largest, Pod X, and they were so loud in my backyard that I could not hear the tractor I was sitting on over the din of their singing. It was spectacular!



Key Dear and Mr. Bill are working at a new place these days, the 7-Mile Marina (and they actually get paid!!). The marina has a viewer-controlled webcam, so when Key Dear called me this afternoon, I was able to swing the webcam around (after much frustrating finagling) and get a quick shot of her on the balcony. How cool is that?!?

Trash bag balloon animals

From NY Magazine: Artist Joshua Allen Harris Turns Garbage Bags Into World's Greatest Balloon Animals.



I miss NYC.

Tropical Update

Hello everyone, sorry for the absence. I feel like I'm coming out of a long ether binge that has lasted about a month. Although I know nothing about what it would be like, somehow it must be much like how I feel, dazed, crazed, and wondering what day it is.

I guess I can start from the end and work my way back! Happy 4th of July everyone, although I worked and got home at 1:45am. I did see spectacular fireworks from the observation deck of the restaurant with a mass of folks enjoying the 360 view of the island of Marathon, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic (Straits of Florida). The city of Marathon put on a fantastic display as did many people doing their own displays seen everywhere else in Marathon, and I'm talking these folks had all the professional huge ones too. We could see beyond the 7 mile bridge as well and many of the larger islands doing their sky rockets. About 10 we at the restaurant/marina also had a display. It was as massive as the Cities and it seemed to go on endlessly, a real kick off to the start of the new business. Mr. B's food is hands down the best around and folks are raving about the new place, and it's all true. I don't know how he can even stand today, but he is already out the door going to tackle yet another 14 hour day. Today I'll go in after noon. R & L stayed home and I doubt they watched them from our top deck; we can see Sugarloaf's and Key West's displays and all the surrounding ones. Not much of a holiday was celebrated here due to working. Such is the life in the hospitality business.

Mr. R's friend/co-music collaborator called yesterday morning to say one of the songs was playing on the radio up in the Orlando area and was all excited. Mr. R has had one on the radio down here that he was on and that makes two for them and hopefully good things will follow.

I finally got all my taxes done, going over past years with all the deductions etc. and rehashing 2005 was depressing. I had spoke with the IRS regarding putting Miss P as a dependent due to her injuries etc. but with all 4 hurricanes that year, it was ridiculous to even add in the medical expenses. All told the damage figure came to approx. $150,000 and will take years of taxes to deduct. Believe me going through all the old photos and paperwork wasn't easy, then looking at the medical bills and all the other "crap" that fall in detail like the loss of 4 vehicles, it was just nuts. Four cars! How the heck did I lose 4 cars?? My rabbit, B's camaro, P's explorer, and yet another explorer that was sitting at the repair shop and off road at the time. All the insurance papers, deductibles, work that was done, replanting an entire yard that was stripped bare...but as always, it's the cleanup that kills your spirit at times like that, it is endless. The shining light was that the Peas had come that same year and we had a fantastic fun time in the middle of the summer with them, although they had to deal with a roof being put on during their stay. Many Mexican Siesta's were observed that summer.

I'm getting my fish shirts together for a line to sell and that excites me. I've had opportunity to paint and create which also is something I love doing, so I've been busy.

Miss P and I drove to Miami to fight two wrongful tickets (improper lane change, improper turn) about 300 bucks worth. Her car broke down in the middle of the road and she put her flashers on, then blinkers, and did everything possible to pull off the road before getting hit from behind. An officer pulled up after she was parked and started harassing her and Bo, and instead of advising them of the nearest gas station/repair he questioned why they were in Miami when they lived in Key West, etc. Which she explained, they were taking a anniversary holiday out of the Keys for an overnight at a booked hotel, showed him their online printout of the hotel etc. He continued to harass them, asking were they drinking etc., at 1:00 in the afternoon! Miss P said, are you kidding? We just drove from the Keys and are en route, two blocks from the hotel and the car broke down. He then searched her car and found nothing of course; neither of them smoke so not even an ash in the ashtray, her car is always meticulous... anyway, with finding NO reason for his BULLSHIT, he then writes her out two tickets.

Back to the ending to this story - at the court "hearing" in Miami, the judge refused to let her speak. She told Miss P, "Either pay these tickets today or get a lawyer for trial. What are you going to do?" I even at that point stood up and raised my hand and started to speak, "Your honor, her car broke down, can she explain here today?" the judge put her hand up and said, "I can't hear you today and pointed to Miss P and repeated, "Are you Paying today or going to trial?" She paid and off we went. It's a huge courthouse, mass of people everywhere and nothing like the Key West court house, where if an out of town person comes to their hearing, they are HEARD and a case/ticket is dismissed if reason is explained to the Judge and they make the decision to go further or not on the matter. Well, La Te Da... not Miami.

It was a long drive, long day, but we enjoyed having the together time, she really is a trooper that Miss P. Please someone find ankle replacement for her PLEASE!!!

Well, this is enough for now I guess, boring as it is. Believe me I could go on and on!!! OH, and I will! more later folks.......

July 4

I was reading something last night about the best fireworks displays in the US. Philadelphia came out #1, with Boston third. Not too bad, we beat out NYC and Washington DC, along with a whole host of other big cities.

The baby birds are out and about in force. As I'm typing there is a baby tufted titmouse in the redbud tree chirping and hollering to be fed. The parents are still very attentive, but obviously expect the baby to start doing a little bit for himself. We must have had ten sparrow nests this year, because there are dozens of young sparrows and do they ever make a racket! Sometimes there are twenty or so of them in the redbud tree at the same time. We have one young squirrel, probably about 7-8 weeks old, who also comes to the redbud, and the young sparrows chase him from branch to branch.

The adult birds bring the babies to this tree to show them that there is food here. Two suet feeders that Dawg refilled for me the other day, along with a seed feeder. No birds starve here!

Queenee went to work this morning, but will leave by 11am. She saw Rain last night and said they put on a great show, that they really do make you feel like you are seeing The Beatles. She is going to see fireworks with the D's and Peas tonight. Anyone else have plans?