Trivia that matter
A new box of noisemakers just arrived. You will probably see even less of me than usual for the next few weeks.
Have a happy Ragnarök.
Update: It does take a while to install twelve DVD’s worth of applications and sample libraries, but not quite 90 hours.
What do you call a hexagon with ten sides?
Is there any correlation, positive or negative, between receiving a flu shot and getting the flu?
Winfield was good, and it’s going to take me another day or two to fully recover. I was hoping to get to bed early tonight, but the people who run the hair salon across the alley decided to throw a street party, complete with an obnoxious funky band. Bleah.
I hope to have the pictures and recordings edited later this week. Until then, here’s Shohei Toyoda, who placed third in the fingerpicking competition this year.
This sort of thing goes on all the time all over the place there.
Back Sunday, maybe.
Few people read. I went to the DMV this morning to renew my driver’s license. There were at least fifty people there waiting for their summons, but the only book in sight was the one I brought with me. I expected that there would be a few Kindles and iPads in use, but nope. Everyone just sat there, doing nothing.
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.
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.
All good things come to an end, but meetings go on forever.
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.”
The third Girls und Panzer OVA gave us a panoramic view of the school ship. (To see the full-size image, right-click to open the link in a new window.) In terms of Kansas cities, it looks larger than Haysville but smaller than Emporia.
Update: The more I look at this picture, the spookier it becomes. Where is everybody?
*****
You all had a narrow escape, by the way. I had a few posts in mind for tomorrow which I planned to type up this afternoon. However, my neighbors decided at 1 a.m. this morning that I didn’t need to sleep. (Curiously, when I called on them later they did not come to the door, even though the door was wide open and the teevee was on.) Instead of writing, I spent the afternoon dozing in bed.
… before spring arrives: fourteen inches of snow so far, and it’s still coming down.
Update: The view from the front porch Friday morning.
I was active for many years in the Society for Creative Anachronism. My interests were music, dance and costuming. However, the emphasis in the local group was on fighting, more fighting, still more fighting, and a bit of politics. I eventually got very thoroughly burnt-out, and I hadn’t been to an event in years until yesterday.
The Kingdom of Calontir (roughly, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa, plus Fayetteville, Arkansas, minus westernmost Nebraska) held its winter coronation at a school within trivial bicycle distance of where I live. So I grabbed my camera and spent a couple of hours there yesterday afternoon taking pictures of all the strange people.
Here are a few of the pictures I took. There are many more in the gallery here. (The photo plugin I’m currently using reduces the size of the image to fit the browser window. To see the pictures full-size, right-click to open the link in a new window.)
I wonder sometimes how accurate are my memories of the places I lived when I was young. It occurred to me that I might be able to find out through Google maps. I quickly located the house in Brigham City, Utah, where my family lived for seven years. Aside from my current residence, that is the longest I’ve lived at any particular address. The house looks very much as I remember it, only smaller. The mountains are smaller, too. The neighborhood has changed, though. The horse barn down the street at the right is gone, as is the row of magnificently thorny honey locusts to the east.
There is a loud party at the business across the alley, with twenty or thirty young louts and loutesses lounging about, a PA system, and very dull music played very loudly. It’s going to be a long night. Please excuse me while I bang my head against the wall.
Roger Netherton, a young friend of mine, placed second this year in the old-time fiddle contest at Winfield Friday. He celebrated by heading over to Carp Camp, where he led the assembled eccentrics in a couple of tunes. Here’s the first. It starts off with Roger alone.
There are more pictures of carp people below the fold.
