I'll take a couple day break from the YouTube-fest just so your cache can clear and you can safely read my blog again. The 80s, part 3, will be posted on Tuesday of next week, and I'll keep the YouTubing to once a week from there. You're welcome, Calen.
Honestly, my browser is running really slowly if I load my blog right now anyway, so I'm okay with the new policy.
First the good news - Lion in the House, about which you've seen me blog before, and I thought I'd throw a shout out to the filmmakers as they won an Emmy this past weekend for Outstanding Accomplishment in Non-Fiction Filmmaking. It wasn't a solo win as they tied with Spike Lee's crap about a Levee or something.
I got invited to the local press conference by CET (the local PBS affiliate) as they congratulated and wished the filmmakers well. Kinda cool to think that I've been even the tiniest part of that, and if you're local, you can catch a reshowing of Lion this Friday night and the next couple of Fridays. If you're really local and have a few hours free time, I'd be willing to loan the DVD out.
Second, the sad news - I heard from an employee that Madison's Market in Glendale (another favorite that I've mentioned) is going to be closing up shop. Apparently the organic and specialty food market just isn't clearing enough cash to justify their rent, so they're going to cut back to just the Findlay Market store.
So very much sadness.
If you get a chance to stop by, buy your last bit of gelato and thank 'em for being there at all.
Well before he was an actor - DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince "Parents Just Don't Understand"
Weirdo political overlap - Genesis "Land of Confusion"
Weirdness reigns - Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams (are made of this)"
Ignore the gloves - Pat Benetar "We Belong"
Creepy Alice in Wonderland pastiche - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers "Don't Come Around Here No More"
And a bonus of the greatest live band owning the biggest concert of the 80s - Queen "Radio Ga Ga"
Can you even imagine having the sheer force of personality, the control to have half a million people in the palm of your hand, clapping in total unison like that? Freddy Mercury was an absolutely amazing individual, prone to such extremes in all areas of his life, but to be him for this one moment must be as close to being an absolute god as any human has ever known. The glimpse of the crowd at about 3:05 with Freddy in the center of the screen is rock and roll.
We've all seen rainbows - well, except for people with one eye, they've been deprived of the whole rainbow joy thing, but that's a story for another day.
Today's tale is about a weird, mutated rainbow effect that people see in rare occurances. The rare rainbow-type effect is called a glory - and there's a bunch of science explaining the whole thing. Something about light refracted within tiny droplets of fog or mist - check the science here if you're interested. I dunno about that, but the pictures are pretty cool.
The site Atmospheric Optics has loads of cool photos and explanations of rainbows, glories, ice halos, distorted suns, and all sorts of freaky optics in the atmosphere (shocking that they would have that, I know).
Tomorrow, YouTube of some of my favorite 80s videos - with no Michael Jackson, because we've all seen those too many times already.
Totally dug the movie scene at Fountain Square this past Saturday night.
The above picture - thanks to montecarlos for this and the one at the bottom of this post - show a scene from Nemo with the crowd below. Even though the photo shows an over-exposed screen, the showing of Nemo and Jaws were crystal clear - heck, way clearer than the broadcast stuff I've got on the TV at home. Sound was a little lower than I'd've wanted it if I were at home, but it wasn't a problem to hear the movie for probably 90% of the time.
The crowd was very cool - mostly white, admittedly, but probably 'bout a fifth black with a few other minorities thrown in here and there, mostly middle class with smatterings above and below. Most folks brought their own chairs, blankets, even an air mattress.
There was a simple concession stand set up, selling popcorn, cokes, and hot dogs - and another stand selling adult beverages. Plus Caribou Coffee was giving away free drinks in cans. The Girl got two of them and reports that they're a little sweet for her tastes. I'm not down with coffee, so I can't speak to it.
The night was a blast. Good times all around even though we did leave before Jaws really got good.
It's awesome to see that downtown Cincy is coming around to keep things open up after regular business hours. I'm certainly going to be checking the schedule on MyFountainSquare.com. I missed a heck of a summer movie festival this past summer, and I wouldn't want to do that again.
Saturday nights' movie night...
June 2 - Back to the Future & Ghostbusters
June 9 - Big Top Pee-Wee & Big Fish
June 16 - Fletch & Rocky
June 23 - The Greatest Game Ever Played & Happy Gilmore
June 30 - The Incredibles & Batman
July 7 - Karate Kid 1 & 2
July 14 - Ice Age & Jurrasic Park
July 21 - Harry Potter 1 & 2
July 28 - Ferris Bueller's Day Off & Uncle Buck
August 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark & Star Wars
August 11 - Shrek & The Princess Bride
August 18 - Men in Black & Remember the Titans
August 25 - Nacho Libre & Dodgeball
September 1 - Finding Nemo & Jaws
Oh, and one more pic before I drift into the night and some grading...
Check out the handsome, bearded devil in the orange t-shirt, black ballcap, and studly crossed legs in the front left of the fountain. Oh, and The Girl's there, too - and the Surrogate Family, as well.
A couple of months ago, The Girl and I signed up to donate $5 per month to Duke Energy's GoGreen initiative to subsidise sustainable energy production.
We're still waiting to get those energy-efficient fans installed (a couple of parts were on back-order).
We've test driven hybrid cars, and it's likely that our next car (hopefully still a few years down the road) will be hybrids.
I saw An Inconvenient Truth in the theater.
I've been called a recycling Nazi at school and at home - the latter by the guy living in my basement, but that's a story for a different day.
And through all of this, my view is that it won't matter.
We're here for an eye-blink as far as the Earth is concerned, and anything that we do to our planet will be undone a hundred-thousand times over once we're gone. We can dump battery acid in the streams, pile the world a mile high with PET bottles, pump the mercury from the ground and dump it into the ocean, nuke the world - and Earth will continue without us.
Life will continue in some form or fashion that we might not yet know of, that we might barely recognize as life, and that we most certainly can't conceive of.
Life will continue without us and most assuredly in spite of us.
Cut down the trees, fill in the lakes, dam the rivers, pave the planet, poison the rivers, pop a cap into every panda that won't reproduce just because it doesn't like the bars we've put it behind.
It won't matter in the long run.
The Earth has been here for four billion years already. Mankind has been around in some form or fashion for not even two million years. That's less than 0.05% of the planet's time. The dinosaurs ruled for one-hunred-fifty million years - not even 4% of the Earth's age, and I can't come up with a single significant way that their existance changed the planet (most oil didn't come from dinos but rather from microscopic creatures built up on the seabed en masse).
We aren't a blip.
We aren't a hiccup.
We aren't even as important, as significant as a flea on a midget's backside.
We don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
We are not beautiful and unique snowflakes. We are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all part of the same compost heap. (Much love to Chuck for that one.)
The world wasn't created for us, and when the last speck of our existances fades into oblivion, the world won't wink out with us.
When we do disappear, however, the world we leave behind will be drastically different from the one we came into. But it would've been whether we were the agents of change or not.
Species come and go.
Invading plants and animals drift 'round the world whether we take them or not.
One species gets wiped out, and another pops its niche-advantageous head up to fill that place.
It goes on.
We came.
We'll go.
We don't matter.
And yet somehow, for some reason, I want to leave the world better off than I found it. I want to compost so we don't fill the landfills just yet. I want to turn the lights off because I'm not quite ready to be stuck in the dark of a fossil-fuel-less world. I don't want my favorite views polluted because I like them in some version of pristine - whatever that means. I don't want too many people at the bottom of the Canyon because we'll crap up the river and the trails.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Now Cincinnati.com has gone and done what the interweb is made for. They've grabbed info from a bunch of different sources - Microsoft's VirtualEarth, the best views report, and some original photography - to allow us a chance to go through all the views without ever getting up off our backsides. They've got an interactive map with clickable points for each view, leading you to a description and photo of the view.
I would embed this video if I could, but CNN doesn't seem to allow it.
Last year a couple of students told me they were planning their senior prank - they were sophomores at the time - and were asking my advice. I gave them these bits of advice:
Make sure nobody gets hurt.
Make sure no property is irreperably damaged.
Be willing to clean up whatever mess you make.
If you do that, you'll probably get away with a slap on the wrist, especially if it's funny.
This guy at Hillard Davidson (and oddly his girlfriend from Hilliard Darby) followed all those rules, came up with a really entertaining prank, and seems to be getting a bit more punishment than seems reasonable. The basics of the prank are that Kyle Garchar plotted out the words You Suck in black and white posters in the Darby stands. He and his girlfriend - seriously, she goes to Darby, I don't get it - set up the prank. They had everybody in the stands hold up their posters at the designated time, fully expecting to spell out "GO DARBY" but to no avail.
Their punishment?
Fully reasonable - three days in-school suspension. For good kids, this isn't all that horrible a punishment because they'll just spend the three days doing their work or reading. Simple enough.
But they also got banned from all school events for the rest of their senior year - all sports events and, I assume, prom. That seems kinda severe for what they pulled off. Ingenuity like that should be rewarded.
Here's the only YouTube video of the event that I can find. It's far less detailed than the above CNN link, but at least it'll embed:
The Girl and I - and the other family we hang out with a bunch - are heading downtown tonight for a double feature of Finding Nemo and Jaws. They're playing on the big video board above Macy's, and the sound'll be pumped throughout the redesigned Fountain Square.
Weather's supposed to be nearly perfect, and if they're going to throw down as entertaining a pairing of flicks as I can think of, then I'm all about supporting the downtown renaissance.
It's totally free and you can bring your own dinner and drinks.
In a last week before summer kinda celebration, The Girl and I headed down for our semi-annual downtown lunch celebration. We're both displaced from the city - by choice and job location, admittedly - and like to head into town any time we can just so we don't feel like total deserters.
On this late-summer trip, we started in Mt Adams, wandering around one of the highest points in Cincy on a hundred-degree day. It was certainly warm, but the views were gorgeous. From there, we headed into Eden Park for the Art Museum - which, it turns out, doesn't open until 11 am - we got there at 10. So down into the heart of the city, to a stop at the gorgeous main branch. Onward a bit further downtown to the find of the day - Bistro JeanRo on Vine Street, just below Tower Place.
Bistro JeanRo is labeled as a Cincinnati French Bistro, but I didn't see much Cincinnati in there. Instead, we were treated to a spectacular lunch of a croque monsieur (for The Girl) and a croque madame for me. Beside a healthy serving of marvelously crisp and flavorful pommes frites, I was served a marvelous concoction of ham and swiss on two perfectly butter-toasted slices of bread, topped with an egg over easy and a bechamel sauce. It can't get much richer and tasties than the croque madame. The sandwich - clearly eaten with a fork - was marvelous, tasty, hearty, a true find.
If you ever get a chance to drop down to JeanRo's, treat yourself to a croque monsieur deluxe. It won't get any better than that.
"You have to paddle really hard in the beginning, not so you can rest on your oars, but so that you can get down to real teaching and learning as soon as possible and actually get somewhere with your kids..."
Emily Wiley's commentary yesterday on All Things Considered, heard locally on WVXU and other stations...
She doesn't do a perfect job describing September (or August for lots of us) for teachers, but it's pretty close.
Check the sky tomorrow morning just before sunrise ('round 6am here in the Cincy area) when it looks like most of the US will be getting a full lunar eclipse. The ideal viewing areas will be more west coast than east, but that's life. To check the exact moment of most totality in your area, click over here and enter your relevant info. It's rare that we get this full an eclipse, so take advantage folks.
The Girl has a subscription to Cooks' Illustrated and their companion website. She's had the subscription for a number of years, and I absolutely dig the magazine...and the website...and their recipes...and pretty much the whole crue.
The recipes are really the thing, and they do some really cool stuff to create the recipes. It's this little thing called the scientific method, and it makes their recipes just about as foolproof as any that I've ever tried.
They start by defining the problem. For example, they might want to find a recipe for pound cake that is moist throughout, crusty on the outside, and strongly enough flavored that it can hold up to some fruit sauce.
Next, they do their research, checking out dozens of recipes from cookbooks and websites. They look for commonalities and sort of average out the recipes to make a simple starting place.
From there they adjust each variable up and down to see what the perfect amounts and procedures are. For example, if the recipes call for everything from one egg through three eggs, they'll make a half dozen cakes - identical in every way except they'll vary the eggs until they get that amount right. Then they'll move on to repeat the process with the flour. Then they'll adjust the type of flour. Through every ingredient - amount and type - through every procedure - adjusting the order, adjusting the length of mixing or whatever - they make dozens and dozens of the recipe until they've figured out the perfect recipe.
Then they write the whole thing up, including everything from their impetus to perfect the recipe through the process they went through to find it, and then finally the recipe itself. Sadly the website doesn't have the full stories like the magazine does, but I can safely say that between The Girl and I, we've made probably a hundred of their recipes, and there hasn't been a dud in the bunch. Everyone turns out exactly like they've promised.
Seriously, any monkey can make their stuff and make it perfectly if you just follow the recipe.
Plus they've got all sorts of science to back things up.
Check these clips from the show...
First, behind the scenes, part 1...
Then, there's behind the scenes #2...
Their recipe for blueberry cobbler...
Some funny moments from the show...
Taste testing the best parmesan...
And I realize that I've blogged about these buggers before, but I'm highly impressed with them, so I'll do it anyway.
So we're gonna have breakfast at good ol' PHS this year.
We've finally reached whatever magical threshold of free and reduce lunch-eligible students that we're required to offer those students a free breakfast as well. Other students can get the same breakfast, but they'll have to pay for it. I knew this was coming back in the spring, but it was just a couple of days ago that I found out the details of what the kids would be getting for their breakfast - cereal bars and juice. Nothing too tough to cook each morning, and nothing terribly nutritious either, I'm guessing.
In a conversation not entirely surprising for me, I used this as a jumping off point (not intentionally, mind you - things like this just happen inside my brain) for considerations of how we might be able to get a little more nutrition into the breakfast. Maybe we could throw in some Pop Tarts, particularly of the blueberry variety so that the kids could get a little more fruit for breakfast.
Ah, but do fruit-flavored Pop Tarts really have fruit in them? And if they don't, how exactly would you label them to try to trick people into thinking they were truly fruit-filled?
In a world where food isn't cheese but it is cheesy...where Chik-Fil-A sells ice dream...where food isn't beef but it is beef-flavored, what is the best appellation for Pop Tarts that don't have blueberry in them (I can't find the actual ingredients anywhere on the web because the official Pop Tart website - while fun - is about as useful as toilet paper to a centaur)?
Would you call them...
Bluererry-y Pop Tarts - the addition of the extra y makes pronounciation tough
Blueberryesque Pop Tarts - a little more high-brow a version of the previous
Blueberryish Pop Tarts - and a little more low-brow
Pop Tarts Reminiscent of Blueberry - a little wordy but doesn't actually say there are blueberries in there - the definition just says it "bring to mind"
Pop Tarts with a hint of blueberry - you can give hints without really giving away the real food, the answers
Pop Tarts not entirely unlike blueberry - my personal favorite but probably a little obvious
Blueberry-Flavored Pop Tarts - lame, predictable
Pop Tarts with the essence of blueberryness - what, though, really is the essence of a blueberry if not real blueberries - could be trouble
Pop Tarts that make you think of blueberries - it clearly doesn't say there are blueberries in there
Spike Lee has evolved into a truly amazing filmmaker. His initial films (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, School Daze, Malcolm X) are impressive, don't get me wrong, but all of those were so strongly product of Spike Lee, that the message almost got lost in the hype, the style, the Mars Blackmanosity of the whole thing.
But Spike's late career work (25th Hour, Inside Man, and - most recently for me - When the Levees Broke: a requiem in four acts) shows that he has evolved so much further beyond where he started, that he is beginning to edge toward being mentioned in the upper echelon of greatest American directors of the last century. he has taken his persona, his previously-omnipresent personal style and subsumed it almost entirely when it better serves the story to let the words speak for themselves. Instead of Spike screaming into the camera with vulgarity after vulgarity, racial slur after racial slur, we get Spike sitting behind the camera and letting things roll, happy in his position of framer of the story rather than ranter of the tale.
Most recently, I saw this impressive maturation in Spike's sublime and painful HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke. I sat down this past week and watched all four acts, finding myself drawn more and more tightly into the world of the Katrina victims through the simple act of hearing them tell their tales. There were no fancy camera tricks, no tracking shots through the city, no scripted screaming at the screen (as Spike has used so powerfully - even recently in 25th Hour, though I can't link to it because of the strongly school-inappropriate language search for it on YouTube, really, Ed Norton does a hell of a job). Spike is, in fact, heard only once in the documentary's four hours when he prompts a subject to tell a little more of her story.
The documentary is amazingly well put together, beginning with the storm warnings and briefly tracing back the scientific community's previous attempts to warn the government of what could happen if a huge hurricane hit New Orleans. The first act continues through the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, while the second act covers the immediate aftermath - in the Superdome; on the expressways out of New Orleans; in the lower Ninth Ward; in the corridors of power where the state, federal, and local governments each attempted to both barge in and fall back, saving neither their backsides nor the lives of trapped New Orleans residents; and on the rooftops of New Orleans where so many people risked their lives to save those of the stranded. The third act covers the late storm repurcussions of New Orleans residents scattered to the winds and trying to find their families, returning home to ruined or missing houses, and beginning to consider rebuilding. The final act sees New Orleans host their first post-Katrina Mardi Gras, take on the insurance industry, and begin to lay blame - and there is much to be laid, at many feet.
Never does Spike give us an answer, however. He doesn't say what should have been done or who is to blame. He lets people of New Orleans tell that they believe that the government bombed open the levee walls to save more affluent neighborhoods, and he even shows that there is prescedent for that, but he also lets other people tell that the explosive sounds were from barges hitting the eye walls or even just from the walls themselves failing and being thrown back into the city they were built to protect. Spike seems to know that the tale is too big, too messy for any tidy answers, for any certain conclusions, so he never steps forward to offer even his opinions as to what he thinks probably was the case. (That's a problem I had a year or so ago with another documentary.)
We all know what happened in new Orleans with Katrina.
I knew. I'd seen it on the news and heard the stories on NPR.
But I didn't have a clue as to what it was like to be in New Orleans when Katrina came to town until I saw When the Levees Broke.
If you have the time, you could do a lot worse than sitting down to learn something by immersing yourself in this film.
The Cleveland State Vikings are changing their viking logo. Apparently the old logo wasn't exactly fierce enough - even though the new Lil' Vikings logo for all the Princetonelementaryschools was just changed to a logo remarkably similar to the CSU viking just a year ago.
Looks like it's a good time to get clearance CSU gear with the old logo on it.
And I know that I should have the red viking killing the green viking in the picture, but I'm too lazy to make my own graphics. I just steal them from various sites and do minor modifications. Deal...
And yet another post begins with "So I heard this story on NPR..."
Today's NPR-provided news is of Gordon Lee, founder of Legends, a comic book store in Rome, Georgia. According to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's website (more on that group later, by the way), the case comes down to this:
During Halloween week 2004, Gordon Lee’s comic shop, Legends, of Rome, GA, participated in a trick-or-treat event in downtown Rome by distributing free comics. "Alternative Comics #2," the Free Comic Book Day edition from publisher Alternative Comics for 2004, was inadvertently included in the mix of books being given away. The comic was a single copy among thousands of comics being given away that day, and was accidentally handed to a minor, whose parent filed a complaint with the police.
The comic book features a variety of stories from the company's line, including an excerpt from Nick Bertozzi's now published graphic novel The Salon, depicting the first meeting between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. On three pages of the eight page section, Picasso is depicted in the nude, a factually accurate detail for the period during which the story is set. There is no sexual content in the story.
Upon learning of the error in distributing the comic, Lee admitted that a mistake was made and offered to make a public apology for the first of many times. That apology was rejected, however, so days later, Lee was arrested.
Now upon initial reading, I wasn't entirely sure that such an action should be forgivable. The man gave a comic with nudity to a child - depending on when the details of the case were given - of the age of either six or nine or children of both. Perhaps the parents overreacted, for I certainly doubt whether seeing a comic book with a fat, nude artist in it would scar a child for life, but giving the kid a nuddie mag doesn't seem quite right.
Upon further reading, however, the law with which Lee has been charged sates that it is illegal...
(1) for “distributing a book, pamphlet, magazine, and printed matter containing pictures, drawings and visual representation and images of a person an portion of the human body which depict sexually explicit nudity, sexual conduct, and sadomasochistic abuse and which is harmful to minors;” and (2) for knowingly furnishing and disseminating to a minor materials “containing explicit and detailed verbal descriptions and narrative accounts of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, and sadomasochistic abuse and which taken as a whole is harmful to minors.”
...doesn't seem in the least to describe a graphic novel (note the change in terminology there...it's subtle but powerful to use semantics in the argument, I'll admit) that lacks sexual content and retells a historically-signficant (in the art world, at least) event which happens to involve a rather gnomish, naked man.
The prosecution changed the charges on the eve of the April, 2006 trial.
Prosecution changed the charges a second time in special session of the Grandy Jury without notifying the defense team.
Lee has a history with this prosecution office:
In fact, this is not his first run-in with a Georgia obscenity law. In a 1993 case, Lee was convicted of selling a pornographic comic book to an adult. In the process, says Cadle, who defended him in that case, police illegally seized hundreds of “obscene” comic books, and refused to return them. Cadle sued the city and the district attorney’s office on Lee’s behalf and won an $18,000 judgment along with a court order requiring the return of the books. “I think what we’re seeing today is in part retaliation from them,” says Begner. Paterson denies this, saying that she did not work on the 1993 case and that the prior conviction is only significant as an aggravating factor. Cadle did not comment on possible retaliation, saying only “I think [Lee] would be possibly facing a stiffer penalty if convicted. You’d rather take a client into court who has no record.”
...but the fact that one prosecutor has acted oddly and is pursuing a case that seems, at best, overly harsh if not downright spurious.
Instead, the part that truly bothers me is in the continuing erosion of our freedoms that we see happening all around us. The text of the first amendment is simple, and it is something that should be memorized and learned by every person in the United States. It is probably more important to know and defend the following words than it is to be able to quote the first lines of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution Itself:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Thankfully there are a few organizations out there that regularly fight to defend the first ammendment.
We all need to remember that any erosion of our freedom that doesn't happen to catch us this time just lays the ground work for our own freedoms to be taken later down the road.
I'll close today with a plea from Jim Lee for donations to the CBLDF. So get out there any buy a t-shirt or something, folks.
And thanks, by the by, to any friends and fellow bloggers who might've pushed the limits themselves last year.
I'll take a couple day break from the YouTube-fest just so your cache can clear and you can safely read my blog again. The 80s, part 3, will be posted on Tuesday of next week, and I'll keep the YouTubing to once a week from there. You're welcome, Calen.
