Part-time prevaricator
Walking behind two students:
1: Let’s kick this thing! [Super-enthusiastic]
2: Sorry, what? [Slightly confused]
1: Nothing.
2: Did you say something about cake?
Then both of them cracked up.
As my cow-orkers and I were headed off for coffee, one of the Library staff said, “There’s free cake in the board room fridge. Help yourselves.”
Full circle, man.
I headed out of town, hoping to catch Mars and Saturn before they set. I didn’t have a lot of time, and when I got to a decent dark spot, the view wasn’t great, and highway traffic to the south would have outshined the planets in any event.
Then I turned around, to face the north.
My disappointment faded away.
They’re tarring the roof of the Westman Centennial Auditorium. I bike past it every day on my way to work, and again on my way home. It’s actually on campus, so it’s near enough that I can smell the tar from my office if the windows are open.
I don’t like the smell of tar. I don’t think I’m alone in this. But I’ve noticed, the last couple days, that when I’m still about a block away, it doesn’t quite smell like tar. It smells like the grease my grampa Hrushowy used on his tractors.
Which makes me think of the farm, and about my grandparents, and all the happy memories well up.
We attended the première of the stage version of Craig Russell’s Black Bottle Man. The play, like the novel, was quite enjoyable. I was impressed at how the cast almost all took on multiple roles. This was helped by the stories-within-stories framing of the play.
The story held the same heartbreak and hope the novel did. The good-vs.-evil struggle remained the core of the story; the struggle of a family–of many families–torn apart was just as wrenching. The translation to stage was well done.
Years and years ago we showed a film at the Evans called Hard Core Logo, a mockumentary about a punk band that reunited for one last tour, and spent the bulk of the tour re-hashing all the reasons they’d called it quits in the first place. (Spoiler: It doesn’t end real well.)
The soundtrack was a “tribute album” to a non-existent band (the eponymous Hard Core Logo), and as such it contained some great compare & contrast moments, where two bands with radically different sounds covered the same song.
My favourite contrast was the two versions of “Son of a Bitch to the Core”:
Lugen Brothers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg0nte_VbL8
Headstones
I love both versions. If pushed to pick a winner, I’d probably give the edge to the Lugen Brothers’ country/roots version — their version of the character seems more bad-ass than the hard-rockin’ woe-is-me one in the Headstones’ version (I think the defining moment is “If you take me on, you’re gonna lose” vs. “If you take me on, I’m gonna lose”).
It must be summer — the Velvet Dip is doing brisk business.
I’m still learning how to do time-lapse properly. Here are my two most recent efforts.
Aurora Borealis (Photos taken May 4, 2014)
Storm movin’ in (Photos taken May 25, 2014)
(Well, useful for someone of my ilk, at any rate.)
Today I learned that there’s an Open Exoplanet Catalogue online, with all the currently-known extrasolar planets listed. This will come in handy, I’m sure, when writing science fiction.
It lives at the intersection of astronomy and Open Source:
The Open Exoplanet Catalogue is a catalogue of all discovered extra-solar planets. It is a new kind of astronomical database, based on small text files and a distributed version control system. It is decentralized and completely open. Contribution and corrections are welcome. The Open Exoplanet Catalogue is furthermore the only catalogue that can correctly represent the orbital structure of planets in arbitrary binary, triple and quadruple star systems as well as orphan planets.
It even has, as they put it, “an xkcd-style bubble chart” of the planets.
found via this io9 story
Musical pairing: “We Are Not Alone”, Voivod
It must be spring. I drove around with a window and the sunroof open. I saw at least two people riding motorcycles. I smelled barbecued meats on the air.
And I saw an adorable little blonde girl walking down the sidewalk with her father, wearing a pink raincoat, green dress, rubber boots, and a princess crown made out of a paper bag.
Now I just need all this snow to melt from my yard.
April 12th: The snow melted, and has now returned. That was rather an underwhelming summer.