I was clicking around last week, looking for some good background noise while I addressed some cards and discovered 2001: A Space Odyssey available. I remember seeing 2001 in the movie theatre when it came out and I remember a good deal of it; but even 5 decades later and a lot more science fiction under my belt, it is still weird.
Research led me to things I didn’t know. First off, 2001 was a collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke; it was not first a book and then turned into a movie. The movie actually came out first followed by the book, although by the time the book was published it only had Clarke’s name on it. I also found out that all the colored lights and psychedelic effects at the end were Dave becoming a “star child” after going through a star gate. Of course I’m not sure what a star child is – I haven’t actually read 2001 (although you all know it’s on my short list now) – and the movie certainly doesn’t elucidate any of this.
It seems as if Stanley Kubrick got a little lost in his special effects. And for 1968, they are great. And the whole Hal sequence is, of course, fabulous:
I’m hoping the book will make a little more sense than the movie. Fingers crossed.
Any special effects that you particularly like? Cinematic or otherwise?
Surprised because two weeks ago I discovered by accident that Andre Norton, a prolific science fiction/fantasy author was a woman. I didn’t have a clue.
The embarrassment is because not only do I read a lot and consider fantasy one of my chosen genres, but I worked in a bookstore for six years. Six years of shelving Andre Norton titles with my own hands and not knowing. How could I not know this? And despite knowing the name and the genre, I have to admit I’ve never read any Norton. I’m really don’t know why – it probably has more to do with the fact that at any given moment, there is a list of about 100 books that I’m thinking about as “next on the list”. I just never got around to her.
Her very first book wasn’t in the Hennepin County Library, but I did get it from InterLibrary loan, so we’ll see if I go for more after I read this one.
But I’m still flummoxed that I didn’t know she was a woman.
What’s a big surprise you’ve had recently? Extra points if you feel like you should have known….
You’re a minion. You work for an evil warlord. For years you have cheated, stolen and even killed for him. He pays really well and the benefits package seems great.
One day the malevolent machinations of your boss are uncovered. He decides to blow up his solar energy plant to cover his tracks and he heads to the helicopter pad with the damsel in distress to head away from the mess he’s made. He closes the door of the helicopter, leaving you standing on the helipad. Right then, as your boss flies away from his bomb-ridden plant, one of the good guys shows up. You fight him and fight him, even though it’s just a few minutes to the big boom.
You are part of a long-standing tradition. A truly loyal evil minion – you continue to plague good guys and fight until the bitter end, often for a boss who clearly kills off your peers rather than pay retirement and who always abandons you when the going gets tough.
Apparently this is big news and you can find it spun in several different directions. Personally the most interesting thing about this news item is that I don’t remember ever seeing a photo of her wearing it. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me; for the past 5-6 years, I’ve really worked hard to stay away from the news. Too much coverage and drilling down was just making me anxious and miserable, so I quit. I look at CNN usually just once a day and the StarTribune every few. I do Facebook but not too much (I’ve actually only posted once) and no other social media platforms. It’s actually made me feel better.
So back to the hat. In all the photos I could find, she wore it so far down that you couldn’t see her face most of the time and I’m not sure how she could see either. But it is a very striking hat. I wouldn’t want to give up a hat like that although I’m not sure where I would wear it these days. It would be a little out of place at Target and Trader Joe’s.
Tell me about something of yours that you’d like to auction off.
I’ve always been a reader. I have a photo of myself “reading” to my little sister when I was about three. I knew all my books by heart, even when to turn the page; many folks thought I was reading well before I actually was. For all of my school life, I was reading above my grade level. When I was in fifth grade, I pulled “Hunchback of Notre Dame” off the school library shelf and the librarian told me it was “too old for me”. Like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
I’m also a serial reader; there is a book on CD in the car, audiobook on my laptop and assorted books in the bedroom and the living room. Right now I’m reading Eragon by Christopher Paolini (dragon book – thanks for the nudge MiG), Elementary She Read by Vicki Delaney (murder mystery), I am Thinking of You My Darling by Vincent McHugh (science fiction recommended by our Steve), Selected Poems by Amy Lowell (she was a fairly well-known poet in her day, writing at the turn of the 20th century) and finally The Peacocks of Baboquivari by Erma Fisk (memoir of a woman who lived alone for five months banding birds for The Nature Conservancy – I have NO clue where I got the idea about this one).
But why am I verklempt, you ask? Because I did not raise a reader. Saying this out loud is a little like committing hari-kari. I read to her constantly when she was young, she had a good library of books, she learned to read easily but to no avail; she has just never wanted to read. Right after Christmas I was amazed to see her toting a book around the house. Some kind of inspirational/self-help/current events thing. I teared up a little. Then three weeks ago she came to me and asked if she could use my Amazon account to buy.. wait for it… books! Now what you need to know is that asking to use my account is YA’s code for “will you buy it for me”. “OF COURSE YOU CAN USE MY ACCOUNT” I yelled as I hugged her. When the books showed up on Friday I was so excited — as I was taking the photo, you could have heard her eyes roll from a block away. She did tell me that I could read the books as well if I wanted to. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had already read two of them.
Have you infected anybody with the reading bug? What are you reading right now?
YA cares way more about her hair, her make-up and her clothing than I care about mine. I think I’ve said here before that I don’t even own make-up and I only take the blow dryer to my hair about once a year. And these days, wearing a pair of jeans instead of sweatpants is really dressing up. So it didn’t surprise me when she wanted a pair of really sharp “hair scissors” for her birthday recently. I assumed it would figure greatly into her quest to rid her world of split ends.
On Saturday we were watching the Olympics (the new mixed speed skate relay is fascinating) when she turned the scissors on me. She’d been hinting (rather aggressively) the last few weeks that my hair is getting too long and scraggly. Although I was a little worried she would chop off more than I wanted, which she has done before, when she brought it up again, I relented.
I should have known that wouldn’t be the end of it. Then she wanted me to blow dry it – I told her if she wanted my hair dry right away, she would need to do that herself. After she spent way too long (in my estimation) drying and fluffing my strands, she decided that she needed to bring the straightener into my room as well because my ends were “curling too much”.
All of this cutting and blowing and straightening took about 45 minutes and I will admit that I’m not the most patient. For some reason that I don’t understand, the commercials showing on the tv coverage of the Olympics were bothering me — and more than usual since I was already ramped up about the hair fuss. To combat my annoyance I grabbed a book off my bedstand and muted the tv.
So there we were, watching the Olympics, reading and running a hair salon in my bedroom all at once. Multi-tasking at it’s best!
I am one of those folks who keeps all my passwords written down. I know lots of people use online password software these days, but it seems to me that if you need a separate password on almost every internet site that you visit in order to protect your data, that having all your passwords on the internet isn’t the smartest thing. Considering how good hackers are at what they do, why should I give them a helping hand?
Starting at least 10 years ago, I realized that my method of post-it notes wasn’t going to cut it any longer and I made a spreadsheet that I saved onto a thumbdrive after I printed it out. And since I often needed passwords at home as well, I printed two copies.. always on really bright paper (I kept my office copy in the middle of a binder, so the bright color helped me find it). Any changes got penciled in and then every year or so, I would update the file and print new copies.
About five years ago I was cleaning up in my room and ended up once again picking up my password printout off the floor. In fact, it was two versions… I don’t remember why. As I picked them up I thought to myself “I should put these someplace safer where I’ll remember where they are”. You know where this is going. The next time I needed those sheets, I couldn’t remember where I had put them. I spent A LOT of time looking for them, but clearly wherever I had put them, they were definitely safe.
Fast forward five years. I’m doing a massive cataloging project in my studio and a couple of days ago, I emptied out the drawer in which I keep my stencils. Now I open this drawer a lot to get to various stencils but I haven’t actually dug down to the bottom of the drawer for quite some time. As I was sorting through everything, I found the password sheets. What possessed me to put them in the stencil drawer? I have never ever put anything else in there for safekeeping.
This experience has made me realize a couple of things. #1 – I need to use my stencils more often. #2 – my password situation is still out of hand. #3 — every time I say to myself “I’ll put this someplace I’ll remember it”, I should just slap myself.
Today’s farm/township update comes to us from Ben.
Kelly and I saw “Come from Away” last Sunday. It was fantastic. In the lobby we heard a guy walk up to his wife and say, “My glasses fogged up and I was following the wrong lady in a red jacket.”
It was so cold! How cold was it? It was so cold I wore sleeves. It was so cold I saw a duck standing on one foot. It was so cold the handle on the water hydrant by the barn wouldn’t move. Then it warmed up for a day and the chickens came out, and the hydrant worked, and the ducks just looked at their corn.
In the winter, we get pheasants coming in to eat the corn I throw out for the ducks. Each year there’s a couple more and this year it’s 9 or 10. It’s pretty cool. The crows have learned there’s free food here too. Kelly doesn’t like the crows.
Here’s a picture of some dark colored blobs down there. Those are pheasants.
I’m on our local townboard. Been on there since 1998. We have one house on a major road that is city on both sides of this house, and there is 100’ of sidewalk in front of that house. I don’t know if it’s a ‘walking path’ or ‘bike path’ or ‘sidewalk’ but It’s the only sidewalk in the township. (because the rest of the township is rural or subdivisions that don’t have sidewalks). The city clears the walking path out in this area because there are no home frontages here, but they have been skipping that 100’ in front of this house. And the property owner has never plowed it. As it’s in the middle of this stretch of path, it’s a problem for people using the path. I learned all this last winter when I got an angry phone call from a city resident who lives out there and uses this path. I didn’t even know it was a township problem. I didn’t know the homeowner and I didn’t know if he had health issues or what reasons there might be for him not clearing the sidewalk. Took me a few days to connect with him, during which, the county snowplow just pushed all the snow back off the sidewalks and so the path was open. Turns out the guy just refuses to clear the walk on principle. Huh. He figures he didn’t ask for this sidewalk, so he’s not going to plow it. We, as the township, don’t have a sidewalk ordinance and we don’t want to make one for 100’ of sidewalk when we have 33 miles of roads to deal with, therefore we couldn’t force him to clear it. And the city says it’s not theirs, so they don’t want to clear it (even though they’re clearing a mile on both sides of it). Last winter the weather warmed up and the problem went away.
This winter I’ve been watching it as I drive by this area. I’ve seen the guy out there with his small tractor and blower doing his driveway, but he still isn’t doing the sidewalk. And I can’t decide if I admire him for sticking to his principles or if he’s being a jerk. And the city now is clearing it as they’re driving through there anyway. Which makes sense, but I could also see them leaving it… on principle.
Twenty-five years ago, just after I got on the Townboard, we repaved some roads in a subdivision. One resident never paid his share believing no one would come and tear out the road. Jokes on him; the company DID tear up 100’ of blacktop, leaving a section of gravel on this road. Didn’t take long for him to pay up and the road to get fixed. Maybe the neighbors convinced him.
We have a mystery going on at our townhall. It’s an old building, looks like a one room school. (Maybe it was the school that got blown across the road in the great tornado of 1883, or maybe it was always a townhall; depends who you ask and what maps you choose to believe).
For the last 3 years we’ve been picking up Phillips vodka bottles in the gravel parking lot. I wish LJB was still around; we need a good story for this! We have our suspicions… once a week, there will be 1, 2, or sometimes even 3 vodka bottles. Very few are empty. Some have never been opened! Most will be between ½ and 2/3’s full. We’ve got a collection in the hall now of 14 bottles, and there are a lot that have been picked up and thrown out and don’t make it to the hall collection. The hall is at the intersection of two major roads. People park there in summer and ride bikes or jog. A school bus stops there. Sheriff deputies park there to do reports.
Why are you not finishing the vodka? And why are you leaving them there? Bonus points if you can tie in the glasses fogged up guy.
And I wave my magic crane . . . and, poof, it is gone.
A few years ago I wrote a blog about this sculpture which sat on the MSU-M campus, including my ambivalence to it. It is carved in the same Kasota limestone from just north of Mankato which is used at Target Field. Someone, I think maybe Jacque, did some digging and told me it is called the Pillars. And objected to my critique. All is fair in art criticism. My picture then did not show it settled in as does the header photo. It looks better in that photo surrounded by the vegetation. I even like it in that photo.
I had not driven past it in years, out of my way for everywhere I was going. Then Sandy went into memory care. As a result, I drive by it twice a day. After a few trips with my brain overloaded with the transition in my life, I looked that way, hard not to really when waiting at the stop light at a major pedestrian crossing on campus, and saw it is all gone.
My son got taken up by the question and did some digging. The MSU-M website says it is still there and makes no other comment. I drove around campus, which has quite a few sculptures strewn around, but did not see it anywhere else.
So it is a mystery. I can imagine a few reasons it is gone, such as various departments upset about being upside down or absent. One statue inside the student union is a hot topic right now with students and others. (See below.)
Mankato itself has many sculptures in it these days. It has a sculpture walk through downtown with some of them permanent and some changed out periodically. My own favorite is near the sculpture walk but has a different purpose.
This is the memorial to those Sioux/Lacota people who were hanged here after the Lacota Uprising. (It used to be called the Sioux Uprising but its name has been changed. But one tribal group near here still call themselves Sioux.) Behind the buffalo is a scroll, not shown in my photo, listing the names of those executed. It is a touchy issue how to memorialize that event, an event once portrayed on such things as a beer platter. The site is now part industrial and part library. It is a tiny little park almost under an overpass and next to a busy railroad track. It was carved by a native artist. It was once vandalized with paint but was easily cleaned and remains untouched, surprisingly. I find it perfect for the space and the purpose.
In the student union is a very nice sculpture of Abraham Lincoln, a little larger than life-size in a busy student traffic area, which is the hot topic issue. I am sure I do not need to explain. Without making any comment on that topic, I suggest maybe all sculptures of real people should be shown with feet of clay.
History is about changing points of view, changing taste, changing truth. How have your truths changed and your taste in art changed?
I saw a headline last week that Oreo cookies are now 110 years old. To celebrate, they have come up with another flavor of filling – confetti birthday cake. I was surprised because I figured there already WAS a birthday cake Oreo. After all in the last few years we’ve seen caramel apple, jelly donut, mint chocolate chip, pb & j, even Peeps – according to Oreo, there are actually 85 varities INCLUDING birthday cake. But apparently Confetti Birthday Cake Oreos are different than regular Birthday Cake Oreos.
Thinking about all these cookie varieties reminded me of a conference call I was on the week before on which one of my co-workers asked my boss what she takes for her headaches. Boss said Excedrin because a couple of years ago, she compared Excedrin to Migraine Excedrin and they appeared to have exactly the same amount of whatever it is that kills headaches. To avoid the marketing hoo haa, and the additional expense, she sticks to the original.
And this makes me think about the sixteen (at least) kinds of Crest toothpaste on the shelf at Target. One variety for every possible thing that could be an issue with your teeth. I’ve never compared ingredients but if I had to bet my own money, I would imagine there’s not a lot of difference.
When I was a kid, there was just one Oreo, just one Crest, just one Excedrin (actually I don’t remember Excedrin as a kid, although their website says they launched in 1960). I’m not advocating going back to a “simpler time” or anything like that, but it is a very interesting evolution of how products are now brought to market. It’s like many companies are trying to bring every niche market under their own umbrellas.
I guess I’m not even sure how I feel about this but I will say that I think 85 varieties of Oreo is rather silly, especially with 2 kinds of birthday cake cookies. You all know that I can’t stay away from Oreos with holiday colored filling (orange at Halloween, red in December, yellow in the spring) but those are the regular flavored filling. The couple of flavored Oreos that I have tried over the years didn’t appeal to me at all; I was expecting that the peanut butter one would taste really good – it didn’t. I don’t even like Double Stuff that much. So I’ll stick to my original Oreos and pass up the birthday day variety, although truth be told, I prefer Hydrox (if you could actually get them anymore).
Do you have a niche product that you like?(Alternate question: dunk or no dunk?)
Trail Baboon 