Consortium of Seven: Year 4

I sat at my desk early this morning and watched what feels like the beginning of winter outside. It’s been cold for the last few days, but it hasn’t been awful, just a few degrees below freezing, which means you don’t need to button up your jacket as you walk across the grocery store parking lot to the door.   (At least, here in Minnesota, we don’t.) Still, below freezing is more like mid-December than mid-November here, so it feels a bit early. And this morning, we have snow falling lightly but steadily. According to the weather guys at St. Cloud State University, we’ll get between one to three inches, and it’s likely to stay for a while.   As I looked out the window and watched the snow, I realized that this will be my seventieth winter. That round number – seventy – is kind of scary. So, I thought about winters past for a moment, and then turned to my computer and started iTunes to keep me company as I looked at the morning’s news.   And a couple of songs in, I w...

Scenes from the previous week giving reasons why, despite hurricanes and missing seasonal change, this is a beautiful place to live. 

“Paint slows the narrative down. A photograph can only capture one moment in time, whereas you can include a distillation of many moments with a painting” Arabella Dorman, war artist In the UK, we mark the ending of the First World War each year on Armistice Day, the 11th November often with a silence. There is a lot of store set by the time & date: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Since we are in the 22nd year of the 21st Century, I thought today we could have a look at some interesting war art.  Not all artists of war are official war artists. Sometimes a war artist will be appointed by an official body in order to depict a certain feature of a conflict, at times for the purposes of propaganda. In visually recording the different aspects of war, you’d imagine there must surely be something of the artist & his/her opinions or experiences brought to the work. Nevertheless, war art is seen as evidence, as educational, portraying many facets of wars & conf...

      Coming off (there's a presumption bound to draw the lightning!) a grueling two plus month stretch in the workplace - simultaneous loading with troubled projects and losing a key person - I'm trying to find some of that mythical work/life balance HR references. More achieveably, perhaps, I'm trying to reach the padded Thanksgiving weekend in a state where I'm not just numbly stumbling over the threshold and collapsing. Stuff to do, stuff to do...            Adding a mid-weekend piece, I decided to get out to see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever mid-morning Saturday. This was the first time I'd gotten out to see a movie during its opening weekend since late 2019. Noting that my most local theater had a very aggressive use of theater space for this latest Marvel movie, with showings running half an hour, perhaps even less at times, apart, I decided to try it out. Even pre-pandemic I'd found that early Saturday viewings of n...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Here in the States, winter is fast approaching, baseball has ended for the year and basketball is ramping up.  Meanwhile, for movie fans it's now Noir November, so ramp up your watcying of black and white movies with betrayal and gun play.  But none of that this week; let's see what we;ve got! _____________________________________ Short one this week folks until I can get a fuller post up, please everyone finally Punch-Drunk Love , the best movie that I've seen so far to use Adam Sandler's particular crazy angriness.  It's a melancholy movie with also sadness and joy and an abusive family dynamic, and it's absolutely worth your time.

I need to open this review by saying that Zin and I are friends. I purchased this book with my own money, and I have not been asked to review, nor compensated for this review by them. Now that the disclaimer is out of the way...   The Horror community was shaken by the 2021 release of Flowers for the Sea . Squeamish readers were sickened and others were offended by the contents. I personally feel that its beauty was misunderstood. We follow Iraxi, a passenger aboard a ship holding the survivors of her village. She is the only survivor of the fire that exterminated her family, and she is three hundred days pregnant.  Our cast also contains Amat, the would-be prince, and Ket, daughter of the last midwife. As you may have guessed, Iraxi's pregnancy is not the usual kind. It is absolutely masterful the way the author reveals new information with each turn of the page: delicate and full of senses. Smells are pungent, tastes linger at the back of the mouth, physical pain is ...

Last (for now) in my series on the songbook Heritage Songster . To see the first post with a basic intro to the book, go HERE .  It's Election Day. so I've gone with some patriotic choices. I'm so grateful that (for now anyway) we live in a democracy, where we vote in our leaders.   On to the songs... I remember Mrs. Weidermeyer, my fourth-grade teacher, led us in afternoon sing-alongs in that period after recess and before dismissal in which we were restless and impossible and all she could do was to have us sing. She was very fond of "When The Caissons Go Rolling Along," and even as a child I wondered why were were learning Army marching songs as we were nine years old. But the people at Golden Records were right there with Mrs. Weidermeyer.     This next record gives us a bit of the original song, and then the "G.I. version," which I find pretty funny. To conclude this Heritage Songster series, here;s John Legend, following in Ray Charles' footst...