Consortium of Seven: Year 4

        Very busy on the work front for me, so I cut out an in-progress section so this could go live Friday morning. If I get back to it as planned Friday evening I'll finish that and add it in --  and maybe one or two other timely things I've momentarily forgotten about -- adding it in Blue text so they'll be easier to find if you've already been through this once.       Before getting to the themed bulk of this week's piece, I want to follow up one of last week's tips: The second season of Reservation Dogs (on Hulu) wrapped this week, and remains both funny and touching. While I like aspects of most of the characters, I emerge from the second season with Cheese (more formally Chester, played by Lane Factor) as my favorite character. At first they played him in a more forced way, with a formulaic introduction in which he identifies himself, including his pronouns, which seemed a little programmed. While part of the core gro...

Happy Thursday!  Best of luck to everyone south of us; Richmond is getting some wind from the north edge of Ian and we'll get the rain as well, but we're nothing like anything down in Florida.  (And as always, you can help by donating money to the Red Cros s, which is equipped to deal with these sorts of things.)  ________________________________________ This is one that's not a new addition but I've been shelving things and I wanted to highlight what I think might be the best Superman book ever published, albeit one that is not mainstream Superman.  Superman: Secret Identity  is a four issue limited series by Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen about a kid, Clark Kent, a perfectly normal child in Kansas whose parents have the unfortunate sense of humor to name him Clark in a world where Superman is, like here, just a fictional character. Until the day Clark wakes up on a camping trip and finds himself floating in mid-air. The whole series follow Clark over the next ...

Tessa Woodward is moving from Sunny Florida to... Chicago. Cold, damp, rainy, Windy, Chicago. She is with her Dad who just took a job with the Chicago Symphony, her mom a water-colorist who has always done beachy-type landscapes inspired by her Florida surroundings, and her little brother who is really into ventriloquism just at the moment. As if a new town, and a new school, with new kids, her own best friend back home in wonderful Florida isn't bad enough, Tessa is haunted in their new house by a spirit that draws in her sketchbook while Tessa sleeps. At its heart, this is a story about a move and a ghost, and making friends in a new place. Reading this book right before my own major move helped me prepare and calm my nerves. Even if you aren't planning to move any time soon, our ghost is spooky enough your youngsters might like it for a bedtime tale. Narrated by Heather Wynn, Youtube's Calluna, the audio is worth checking out. ⭐⭐⭐3/5

    When I go to the local library, I like to grab a random book or two off the non-fiction shelves, and this last trip, this was one of my selections:   When I got home and took stuff out of my library bag, I asked myself why I chose Notre Dame of Paris by Allan Temko. I'm not Catholic, not a medievalist, and I'm sort of interested in old architecture but not magnetically drawn to it. I realized, eventually, that mostly I liked the physical book itself. That's why I took it off the shelf. It's a 1963 second printing of the 1952 original from Viking Press , and the style and construction really say mid-1960s to me. I remember that period as a happy time when the library was my favorite place. Once again happy at having gone to the library, in 2022, I knew what I wanted from this volume. I sat down with it, paging through and looking at various details. Modern books are probably superior but I have warm feelings about this one. What do I like? I like nearly everything...

  One of my – well, I guess you’d call it a quirk – is that I have a strong affinity for songs with geographical references in their titles: States, cities and towns, rivers. Foreign countries? Not so much. Foreign cities? Again, not so much. I pretty much stay stateside with this quirk.   It’s kind of difficult to figure out which location is mentioned most often among the 88,000-plus tracks in the RealPlayer. I’d have to make a list of locations to search for and then run through that list one at a time, and it’s entirely possible that I’d overlook the eventual winner while making the search list.   But I’m pretty sure it’s Memphis. The Tennessee city’s rich musical history attracts me, with its connections to the blues, to early rock & roll, to the jump blues and R&B that were some of the antecedents to rock & roll, and – perhaps less obvious but still significant – to country and gospel. And – as I noted in a post here last year – I have more than nine...

/ˈsəndrē/ Learn to pronounce noun plural noun :  sundries various items not important enough to be mentioned individually. "a drugstore selling magazines, newspapers, and sundries" It really is a sundry post. I even had a virtual drugstore shopping experience during the writing of this post  On top of completing hurricane preparedness, I’ve fallen down a few rabbit holes the past few days. Feeling under the weather, haha, it’s been slow going, but I really did make arrangements for a worse case scenario. In restful moments, I googled perfumes, perfume spokesmodels, and Linda McCartney (her birthday was last week).     I have a few friends on social media who also love perfumes, and it’s fun when they post about one I know. Looking back, it’s interesting to think about how you perceived the scent during its time in your life. For example, Heaven Sent. I loved that one when it was made by Helena Rubenstein, before it was bought and changed by Dana. The perfumer’s ...

Medical professionals. Where would we be without them? Long gone, I should imagine or even more broken, sick & tired than we already are. Infections, limbs hanging off & covered in open wounds, we’d be like something out of a horror film. But there they are, ready to patch us up & send us back out into the world in a hopefully better state. They have often have a horrible time, are overworked & underpaid & they rarely know what they’re going to face from one day to the next. I’m glad someone can do it – I am not one of those people. When you’re teaching small to medium children, you do encounter some injuries & illnesses but you’re not really expected to fix them long term. It’s good if you’re not squeamish (I can deal with vomit, but not poop) & are able to breathe through your mouth. Over the years I’ve had bouts of First Aid training, but will not hesitate to call up the professionals if it’s much more than a graze. I know my limits. Today we celebrate me...

     One day I'll get more organized... I'll likely die a few hours later, but it'll be something while it lasts!       I'm once again bowled over by the speed of time's passage. A week from now we'll be on the final day of September. October's nearly here, and even a couple of items this week are heralding October. The exhausting press of day-to-day obligations, made worse by having to adapt to unexpected work issues, sees me too tired to get to so much that needs to be taken care of -- including myself.       Instead, too often, I'll instead collapse and watch something until I'm too tired to pay attention.       This Wednesday, Disney+ launched a new series set in the Star Wars universe. Set about 8 years before Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star (known to the Star Wars cognoscenti as The Battle of Yavin), this introduces us to a fresh slate of characters and some new locations. Mainly people who a...