February 2012
16 posts
I took pictures of a grandmother who was introducing Flat Stanley to the big Calder hanging in the East Building.
Russell Greenberg gave an interesting presentation on his team’s research into birds beaks as thermoregulators, specifically among sparrow subspecies of the coastal salt marshes and California.
The Artist (2011): [Silent applause]. 4/5
The Wikipedia page for Chandler Robbins is live.
Hugo (2011): seen in 2-D, at least, the film drops into the uncanny valley. Blue-eyed and lifeless. 3/5
Oh, my. Truman Bradley, a face and voice from the past, in a fake Person to Person interview as the opening segment of a Perry Mason episode. Where have all those Science Fiction Theatre episodes gone?
A musical that I haven’t seen before, for WATCH: Baby at PWLT in Manassas.
Multiple phone calls for two-agent informed consent today.
Another noisy conference call, another couple of months of care from the nice ladies at ACC.
Sunset Blvd. (1950): Leta’s first time. 5/5
Next up in the studio, The Practice of Public Relations, 11/e, by Fraser P. Seitel. Marred by (among other things) an appallingly disrespectful dedication.
And today I received my refund check for my remaining escrow funds. Now I’m really on my own.
Something I used to know and have completely forgotten: how to invert a matrix.
“Sadly, frictionless sharing has the same drawback as ‘effortless poetry’: its final products are often intolerable.”
Yes, the AC adapter for the music keyboard has definitely gone missing.
“We don’t want to feature pictures of starving children, dead cattle and dried crops.”
January 2012
27 posts
Mixed feelings about Google Maps’ new municipality boundary feature. It’s nice to have county lines drawn for you, and to trace the nearly fractal demarcation between Crystal and New Hope, MN. But the service also draws hard borders for places that have none, or several, like Reston and Silver Spring. Qui iudicat?
Mildred Pierce (2011): Lovely work, and a primer on the L.A. restaurant biz. But there was no Food Stamp program in 1931. 4/5
I think that was the first time that conversations in the tech booth were competing with the Sunday matinee “what’d he say?” chatter.
Well, that turned out better than I deserved.
Leta opens this weekend in The Royal Family for Rockville Little Theatre. And I’m seeing RCP’s Lend Me a Tenor for WATCH.
100 pages down, 300 to go for Tuesday.
My friends don’t misuse punctuation. It’s just unevenly distributed.
Tomorrow, Leta and I are seeing Dead Man’s Cell Phone at the Stage.
A first that was a long time coming: I used materials made available through interlibrary loan.
Ach, fruitless drive to Annandale for a meeting cancelled by a power outage.
Oh, Mom, the time I have spent listening to bad on-hold music for you.
Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Stone works in big strokes. 3/5
And, as usual, some of my scores were the bottoms of their ranges and hence set aside.
Common name of the day: Vigor Wren or Vigor’s Wren, the spilurus subspecies of Bewick’s Wren (Thryomanes bewickii).
Two lessons learned from this festival: where to call a show from at Three Notch, and where not to have lunch. No, three: not to feed me Cosmopolitans.
Two parties, two sets of keys, one hotel room. And wackiness ensues.
“We’ll find a way to get our rats into the commonwealth, whether we have to air-drop them in over Richmond with little parachutes. Occupy Virginia indeed.”
The Naked Kiss (1964): Sam Fuller lobs words for taboo topics like grenades. 2/5
One payment to go: I received a payoff quote letter from my mortgage lender.
OK, it looks like Verizon Wireless has finally cleaned up the identifiers for my account.
Thank you, Verizon Wireless, for a 50-minute phone call that did not correct the account problem; the upshot: going back to the store to queue up again to get this issue resolved.
For the two shows, we used all but 1 minute of our scheduled 160 minutes of tech time.
The Tempest (2010): Gonzalo as Gandalf, eh? I liked the (unexpected) way the epilogue was handled. 3/5
New desk, back on the other side of the building, in hailing distance of a window.
Posting from my new device is spiffy!
Cold, cold Canada is blowing its raspberries across my leaky window sashes.
“If the entire symphonic tradition were incinerated, a team of conductors could write it all out again.” (Thx: AJ)
December 2011
26 posts
It turns out Amazon doesn’t offer 6-hour delivery for last-minute birthday gifts.
4 empty baskets of paper to be filed.
So the New York Times doesn’t think I canceled my subscription after all.
Leta’s pumpkin pie for lunch and Audrey’s fruitcake for dinner. Mmm.
Last trip on the 551 for a while.
The Sniper (1952): Never have the streets of San Francisco looked so in need of a good coat of paint. Nice cameo by Charles Lane. 3/5
Buildings again: I’d never noticed the 4 unfinished pyramids of Indiana limestone piled atop the 8 columns of the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Metropolitan, until Shorpy pointed them out.