Weblog 311
January 29, 2012~ 12:00 am
Owls. Owls have fascinated me all week. They're such BEAUTIFUL, unknowable birds... they're godlike spirit animals, those glorious raptors.
And I LOVE that one! She's a Snowy Owl, and looks so smug. (Because of the dark markings, I refer to that owl as 'she' because the males are pure white.) They're creatures who live most of their lives above the arctic circle, but prefer to mate in southerly climes, often choosing United States prairie lands whose vistas, flat and expansive, remind them of the frozen tundra. (I'm certain it's much more condusive to laying and raising their clutches. They have as many as a 14 at a time!)
Whenever I want to feel peaceful and contemplative, I'll think about this wonderful capture of this owl resting.......just...... being... right there, right then.
This week, I also enjoyed a 30 second film of a 'transformer owl'. He's an astonishing creature who can puff himself out about 3 times his width by fanning his tail feathers like a turkey! Other 'threats' have him standing sideways, elongating and slimming himself from the rounded little thing he is naturally, then shooting up those feather tufts above the eyes like pointy devil horns and pinching his face in a way that makes him quite comically menacing. LOL!!! It's the damndest thing I've ever seen! (Just do a YouTube search on him. You'll be happily entertained.)
Saturday was momentous. Wayne decided to have his long locks shorn and I accompanied him, watching as foot-long PLUS,wavy clumpets of hair fell to the floor beneath the styling chair. (I did take some as a keepsake. Told him I could cast as spell with them.) Gone is the iconoclastic rock star in a ponytail look....hello 'GQ'. (He does look wonderfully handsome with his salt and pepper beard and mustasche to go with it.) Tall and distinguished... I'm one lucky lady.
After dinner out at our favorite Asian restaurant where our waiter remarked, "You got hair-cut! You look GOOD! Look like Kenny Rogers" (to which Wayne replied, "Yah. You look like Don Ho." LOL!!) --after the meal, we settled in to watch
Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in 'Sherlock Holmes'. Bear in mind, I had NIXED seeing that when it first came out on DVD. I hated the idea of an 'action' version of one of my favorite characters, but I have to say.... I loved it. (Give me 5 minutes and I'll do a complete 180 degress turnaround on things.) It was plot-driven, FUN.... and had tremendous atmosphere. Seeing Watson and Holmes portrayed as younger men when I've been so used to seeing older men in those roles wasn't wrenching at all. Just different.
The two actors complement each other nicely, and the story was chock full of black magic, with secret-society Masonic/satanic(?) sort of underpinnings..... and it had a believable, hypnotic villian. A good recipe all round. Looking forward now to seeing the second one, "Game Of Shadows" when they release it to the home audience. Of course.......
NO ONE will ever replace whom I still consider to be the quintessential Holmes, the late Jeremy Brett in the long-running Masterpiece Theater series. Just LOOK at him!
Perfect in every way. (I've been reading how the actor had been not only bisexual AND bipolar, he had a damaged heart from suffering rheumatic fever as a child.) Poor fellow. Then the lithium he took for his bipolar disorder caused water retention and weight gain, and with an already damaged heart drowning in extra fluids which necessitated frequent oxygen-use on the set, he continued to soldier on during that last season of taping. From what I've read, Brett was so completely IMMERSED in the persona of Holmes, he had quite a difficult time trying to separate himself from the dark, gloomy, brooding side of the drug-addicted Victorian sleuth. (Doubtless it made an already complicated life even moreso) but he was determined to soak up and capture Holme's every nuance.
The man was MADE for that role.
Rest in peace, Jeremy. Calabash pipe, deer-stalker hat.. no doubt referring the angels to 'my latest monograph on cigar ash'. Ah... what a great character.
January 31, 2012~ 5:15 pm
I stayed put today. Had a GALLOPING case of stomach flu complete with pain, dystentary, and nausea. (Even did the one thing I HATE to do..... I threw up when I got up this afternoon after sleeping all day. Man.... that's the worst). Nothing in my stomach, so it was a sort of 'non-event', but the dry heaves are a torture device, let me tell you.
I have NO IDEA where I got this. No one was sick around me, and on Monday I felt fine.
I'll tell you who I do blame, the water and sewer authority in Pittsburgh. We had several days of hard rain and run-off and that results in the nasty stuff mixing in with drinking water. If extra cleansing addititves aren't mixed in, you can pick up a stomach bug from that. I can't find anything online about other folks suffering from this but it just 'feels right' to me.
I treated myself to a movie last evening before I knew I was falling under the weather, and from 6 p.m. till 8, I watched a remarkable film. (I'd found it in the dumpster at work. Unopened, unwatched..... someone was simply getting rid of it.) Yes, I'm a garbage picker and cannot understand why there's so many wonderful things people simply 'dump'. The movie was a 2007 release of 'Talk To Me', starring Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
It's a biography of Petey Greene, an ex-con who becomes the raw, honest radio voice of black people in Washington D.C. in the tumultuous 60's and 70's. Petey starts as a DJ in prison and when he gets out, he looks up a successful brother of another inmate who works at WOL-AM. From his cocky self-assurance- pretended or not -and more than a little moxie, he wins over the Brooks Brothers wearing brother whom Petey describes as 'more white than black.'
"You know, most people hearin' your voice think you a WHITE MAN," Dewey tells him, laughing, grinning from ear to ear. "They call me.... Mr. Tibbs," he teases, referring to the famous Sidney Poitier role. But rough streets and Petey's punishing past make him a force to be reckoned with, a man who cannot, will not lie about what's going on either in the streets or in society as a whole. His listeners love his call-in show and ultimately he's the one they turn to during the D.C riots after the Martin Luther King assassination.
This was a marvelous film. I laughed, I cried, Cheadle and Ejiofor are so moving in their angers and their love for one another... but the making of the film was not without controversy. Petey died at 53 of liver cancer. At that point in time the rift between Petey and Dewey had become so deep that Dewey Hughes did not attend Petey's funeral. That part of the story was completely rewritten in the film, (a film by the way, produced by none other than..... Dewey Hughes.) They never reconciled, but there was magic in what they accomplished together. Here's the REAL Dewey and Petey.
I choose to think Mr. Hughes was crafting a work of love... an apology perhaps. It's a fine, fine film, and if you've never seen it, rent it. It's a journey into the this country's unruly years of social change and marked volatility. If you were alive then, this film is a time machine. If you weren't, and profanity offends you.... hey, dismiss the profanity, of which there is LOTS, and listen with your whole heart to a sliver of America's past that sat right atop a volcano. And watched it erupt.
***
(Return To Weekly Archives)
Owls. Owls have fascinated me all week. They're such BEAUTIFUL, unknowable birds... they're godlike spirit animals, those glorious raptors.
And I LOVE that one! She's a Snowy Owl, and looks so smug. (Because of the dark markings, I refer to that owl as 'she' because the males are pure white.) They're creatures who live most of their lives above the arctic circle, but prefer to mate in southerly climes, often choosing United States prairie lands whose vistas, flat and expansive, remind them of the frozen tundra. (I'm certain it's much more condusive to laying and raising their clutches. They have as many as a 14 at a time!)
Whenever I want to feel peaceful and contemplative, I'll think about this wonderful capture of this owl resting.......just...... being... right there, right then.
This week, I also enjoyed a 30 second film of a 'transformer owl'. He's an astonishing creature who can puff himself out about 3 times his width by fanning his tail feathers like a turkey! Other 'threats' have him standing sideways, elongating and slimming himself from the rounded little thing he is naturally, then shooting up those feather tufts above the eyes like pointy devil horns and pinching his face in a way that makes him quite comically menacing. LOL!!! It's the damndest thing I've ever seen! (Just do a YouTube search on him. You'll be happily entertained.)
Saturday was momentous. Wayne decided to have his long locks shorn and I accompanied him, watching as foot-long PLUS,wavy clumpets of hair fell to the floor beneath the styling chair. (I did take some as a keepsake. Told him I could cast as spell with them.) Gone is the iconoclastic rock star in a ponytail look....hello 'GQ'. (He does look wonderfully handsome with his salt and pepper beard and mustasche to go with it.) Tall and distinguished... I'm one lucky lady.
After dinner out at our favorite Asian restaurant where our waiter remarked, "You got hair-cut! You look GOOD! Look like Kenny Rogers" (to which Wayne replied, "Yah. You look like Don Ho." LOL!!) --after the meal, we settled in to watch
Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in 'Sherlock Holmes'. Bear in mind, I had NIXED seeing that when it first came out on DVD. I hated the idea of an 'action' version of one of my favorite characters, but I have to say.... I loved it. (Give me 5 minutes and I'll do a complete 180 degress turnaround on things.) It was plot-driven, FUN.... and had tremendous atmosphere. Seeing Watson and Holmes portrayed as younger men when I've been so used to seeing older men in those roles wasn't wrenching at all. Just different.
The two actors complement each other nicely, and the story was chock full of black magic, with secret-society Masonic/satanic(?) sort of underpinnings..... and it had a believable, hypnotic villian. A good recipe all round. Looking forward now to seeing the second one, "Game Of Shadows" when they release it to the home audience. Of course.......
NO ONE will ever replace whom I still consider to be the quintessential Holmes, the late Jeremy Brett in the long-running Masterpiece Theater series. Just LOOK at him!
Perfect in every way. (I've been reading how the actor had been not only bisexual AND bipolar, he had a damaged heart from suffering rheumatic fever as a child.) Poor fellow. Then the lithium he took for his bipolar disorder caused water retention and weight gain, and with an already damaged heart drowning in extra fluids which necessitated frequent oxygen-use on the set, he continued to soldier on during that last season of taping. From what I've read, Brett was so completely IMMERSED in the persona of Holmes, he had quite a difficult time trying to separate himself from the dark, gloomy, brooding side of the drug-addicted Victorian sleuth. (Doubtless it made an already complicated life even moreso) but he was determined to soak up and capture Holme's every nuance.
Rest in peace, Jeremy. Calabash pipe, deer-stalker hat.. no doubt referring the angels to 'my latest monograph on cigar ash'. Ah... what a great character.
January 31, 2012~ 5:15 pm
I stayed put today. Had a GALLOPING case of stomach flu complete with pain, dystentary, and nausea. (Even did the one thing I HATE to do..... I threw up when I got up this afternoon after sleeping all day. Man.... that's the worst). Nothing in my stomach, so it was a sort of 'non-event', but the dry heaves are a torture device, let me tell you.
I have NO IDEA where I got this. No one was sick around me, and on Monday I felt fine.
I'll tell you who I do blame, the water and sewer authority in Pittsburgh. We had several days of hard rain and run-off and that results in the nasty stuff mixing in with drinking water. If extra cleansing addititves aren't mixed in, you can pick up a stomach bug from that. I can't find anything online about other folks suffering from this but it just 'feels right' to me.
I treated myself to a movie last evening before I knew I was falling under the weather, and from 6 p.m. till 8, I watched a remarkable film. (I'd found it in the dumpster at work. Unopened, unwatched..... someone was simply getting rid of it.) Yes, I'm a garbage picker and cannot understand why there's so many wonderful things people simply 'dump'. The movie was a 2007 release of 'Talk To Me', starring Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
It's a biography of Petey Greene, an ex-con who becomes the raw, honest radio voice of black people in Washington D.C. in the tumultuous 60's and 70's. Petey starts as a DJ in prison and when he gets out, he looks up a successful brother of another inmate who works at WOL-AM. From his cocky self-assurance- pretended or not -and more than a little moxie, he wins over the Brooks Brothers wearing brother whom Petey describes as 'more white than black.'
"You know, most people hearin' your voice think you a WHITE MAN," Dewey tells him, laughing, grinning from ear to ear. "They call me.... Mr. Tibbs," he teases, referring to the famous Sidney Poitier role. But rough streets and Petey's punishing past make him a force to be reckoned with, a man who cannot, will not lie about what's going on either in the streets or in society as a whole. His listeners love his call-in show and ultimately he's the one they turn to during the D.C riots after the Martin Luther King assassination.
This was a marvelous film. I laughed, I cried, Cheadle and Ejiofor are so moving in their angers and their love for one another... but the making of the film was not without controversy. Petey died at 53 of liver cancer. At that point in time the rift between Petey and Dewey had become so deep that Dewey Hughes did not attend Petey's funeral. That part of the story was completely rewritten in the film, (a film by the way, produced by none other than..... Dewey Hughes.) They never reconciled, but there was magic in what they accomplished together. Here's the REAL Dewey and Petey.
I choose to think Mr. Hughes was crafting a work of love... an apology perhaps. It's a fine, fine film, and if you've never seen it, rent it. It's a journey into the this country's unruly years of social change and marked volatility. If you were alive then, this film is a time machine. If you weren't, and profanity offends you.... hey, dismiss the profanity, of which there is LOTS, and listen with your whole heart to a sliver of America's past that sat right atop a volcano. And watched it erupt.
(Return To Weekly Archives)
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