A couple of Wonderduck’s relatives dropped by the botanical garden yesterday.
The usual pretty pictures are below the fold.
Author: Don
Notes from Nineveh
The bishop administered Confirmation this Pentecost Sunday at the Cathedral this morning. While he was annointing the confirmandi, a string quartet in the choir loft played the “nocturne” from Borodin’s quartet. I would have enjoyed it under other circumstances, but this was the wrong place and time for the music. I suppose I should grateful that it wasn’t Marty Haugen or the St. Louis Jesuits.
Chicken emergency
Miscellaneous notes:
• I’m mostly taking pictures these days in my available time. Wichita, perhaps the least interesting place visually in North America — it’s not even ugly — is as photogenic as it ever gets right now. Although it’s already summer (spring lasted most of one morning last week), temperatures haven’t yet hit 100°, and I can ride around town without risking heatstroke.
• My route home from work yesterday was more circuitous than usual, with one intersection closed off by the police. I missed the excitement, but that may be just as well.
• I watched several more episodes of some current series but ended up dropping them all. I probably will eventually watch the rest of Suisei no Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. The first three episodes showed more thought than any of the other shows I sampled, and the art looked good, too. The Brickmuppet and Steven both praise what they’ve seen so far. Valvrave the Liberator features not just mecha, but vampires, too (and in recent episodes, I gather, boys and girls trading bodies). It might be of interest to Wonderduck when he’s recovered from the horrors of Vividred, but I’ve had enough.
Instead, I’ve been rewatching some older favorites, Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, Mouretsu Pirates (for the third time) and Shingu (I’ve lost count).
• You can download the materials to make a paper model of a tank at the Girls und Panzer website here. Also, Brave Combo has worked its magic, or whatever it is, on “Katyusha.”
• It’s been a while since I mentioned ponies. Here’s a list of several with their Civil War general counterparts. (Via Dusty Sage.)
• The title of this post is from Looking for Bobowicz, which I listened to earlier this evening. You can download it here.
This is not going to end well
Some years back, one of the local Walmarts stocked rhododendrons in their gardening department, and I saw a number prominently planted in yards around town. Every single one was dead by midsummer. I spotted these for sale this past weekend. (It is possible to keep some species of rhododendron alive in Kansas in the right spot, but it’s not easy, and they don’t flourish.)
Binary bonsai and hyberbolic chanterelles
Discovered while looking for something else: Botanica Mathematica: a textile taxonomy of mathematical plant forms. See also the associated Flickr page here. (The photos at the latter link remind me of Karl Blossfeldt.)
Observation
All good things come to an end, but meetings go on forever.
Just because
Is it really spring now?
I suppose I should explain why I’ve dropped every show of the spring season and have instead been re-watching Shingu and reading Alan Coren, but I think I’ll just post a few more pictures instead.
Update: A climatological footnote from this morning’s forecast.
… Coldest April since 1997 across the area…
Wichita… the average April temperature was 51.3 degrees… which was
the 7th coolest April on record since 1889. The normal April average
is 56.1 degrees.
It might snow tomorrow.
Old-time kawaii
(Via Kansas City Old Time Music.)
Quote of the day
Oh for the days when primitive transportation delayed communication such that one could go years without having to speak to another human being! The silence. The isolation. The peace.
While we’re at it, this explains a lot.
April is the silliest month
I could do with a little global warmening right about now.
Hmmm
Discovered while browsing in Wikipedia:
[Graham] Greene’s film review of Wee Willie Winkie, featuring nine-year-old Shirley Temple, cost the [Night and Day] magazine a lost libel lawsuit. Greene’s review stated that Temple displayed “a dubious coquetry” which appealed to “middle-aged men and clergymen”.[16] It is now considered one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of children for entertainment.
It may be just as well that he didn’t live to see moe-licious anime.
RenFoule
I rode out to our local little Renaissance Faire yesterday, the first time I’ve been to one since I got fed up with the SCA years ago. It was a rather drab affair overall, though I did find a few things worth looking at. I doubt I’ll be going back any year soon.
Cherry blossom season is ending …
… but crab apple season is just starting.
More pictures from yesterday’s trip to Botanica below the fold.
Minor anniversary
Ten years ago today, my first weblog went live. 1 It was called “Mixolydian Mode.” My gimmick was that I would post a MIDI arrangement of a public-domain tune every day, such as the “Celtic Society Quickstep.”
Not an abstract painting
… just a close-up of the fountain in the kids’ garden. More pictures from yesterday’s trip to Botanica are below the fold.
And now for something completely unexpected
(Via Darwin Catholic.)
Bulletin
Etna is doing her thing right now (10 p.m. CDT). You can watch the fireworks here. Also here (you might need to manually refresh the view periodically) and here.
Update: The show’s over for now. There’s a spectacular video taken close to the vent here. There’s also this snapshot of a less familiar sort of volcanic activity.
Sparkly
If yesterday was November, today is March. It’s still chilly, but the sun is out, making all the icy trees glitter.
Which equinox was that?
Unlike most places in temperate regions, in Kansas the seasons don’t follow a simple spring-summer-fall-winter sequence. This year, for instance, we had a few weeks of spring back in February, followed by heavy winter snows. Today I woke up to find that it was November outside. I wonder if we’ll see any more spring here, or if we’ll go directly from winter to summer.