Trivia that matter
Phalaenopsis, Dendrobium, Oncidium and allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. As usual, click to embiggen and see with better color.
Phalaenopsis, Dendrobium, Oncidium and allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. As usual, click to embiggen and see with better color.
Mostly Vandas, slipper orchids and their allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. As before, click to embiggen and see with better color.
Mostly Vandas, slipper orchids and their allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. As before, click to embiggen and see with better color.
Mostly Epidendrums and Cattleyas and their allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. Click to embiggen and see with better color. There’s lots more to come.
Mostly Epidendrums and Cattleyas and their allies at the Kansas Orchid Society show at Botanica in Wichita on November 4 and 5, 2017. Click to embiggen and see with better color.
There’s lots more to come.
“Neighbor” is a synonym for “jackass.”
A long time ago, back before the last ice age, I came across a short piece called something like “In Space with Runyon Jones” in a collection of science fiction stories. It was a series of vignettes in which the young Jones encounters a variety of aliens while traveling in spaceships, which the editor of the anthology had gleaned from a novel by Norman Corwin. I was curious to read the rest of the book, but it was long out of print by then, and has never been reprinted. I never found it in any library or used book store.
A few years ago, I remembered the story and thought that perhaps it might be possible to locate a copy of the book online. While searching, I found that Corwin’s story had first been a radio play, “Odyssey of Runyon Jones,” broadcast in 1941. It’s available here. Once you accustom your ears to the low-fidelity sound, it’s entertaining listening. Runyon’s dog Pootzy has been hit by a car and killed, and Runyon wants him back. He braves bureaucracy, meets Father Time and Mother Nature, and eventually finds his way to Curgatory and a trick ending.
Ten years later, Corwin turned the radio play into the novel Dog in the Sky, of which I eventually located an affordable copy. In addition to expanding the episodes in the play, he introduced a sub-plot involving a Mr. B.L.Z. Bubb, a bureaucrat very interested in Runyon’s quest, and adds details of Runyon’s adventures as he travels from planet to planet. The Bubb business is never very interesting and it eventually fizzles out, but the aliens Runyon meets are what caught my attention in the excerpts I read years ago, and are what might make the book worth reprinting someday. There are quite a variety of them, including an interplanetary perfume salesman, a lonely robot, a very important businessman from Venus, and a spooky cat/woman. And a certain 62Kru:
62Kru returned to his monologue as though nothing had happened. “Love is science. Science is love. That is all the protons and isotopes know, and all they need to know. The beta ray hankers for the gamma, both are enamored of the delta, and all in turn adore the lambda.
You see, friend, we Hankerites deplore the fact that the galaxies are rushing away from each other. This is because of a misunderstanding which occurred some billions of years ago. We aim to rectify, restore and reunite the estranged universe, to bind all together under the harmonious love of the true Hruh, whose throne is everywhere and anywhere. Blasphemers and atheists have tried to prove that Hruh is really nothing but
but the true Hankerite is unshakable in his faith, resolute in his virtue, confident in the supremacy and inviolability of love, and we have already killed several million disbelievers to prove this.
*****
Something else I stumbled across at Archive.org: the A.M. Yankovic/W. Carlos version of “Peter and the Wolf.” It’s not the best example of either’s work, but it has its moments. The recording is probably still under copyright, so it may disappear from the site at any moment.
(My favorite version is the that by the Royal Ballet School, with Anthony Dowell as narrator and Grandfather. It starts here.)
It’s the season when I search for calendars that I can stand to look at every day during the coming year. I recently visited a shop at a regional mall, where I was surprised to see not only a Hatsune Miku calendar, but also two of Sailor Moon, one large and one small.
I found a number of Japanese calendars online that might be of interest to some visitors here. Unfortunately, most listings don’t include a sample image. The calendars are probably like the ones I’ve bought in the past, with six poster-sized pages, each representing two months, rather than twelve foot-square images.
A curiosity: there’s a Crassula ovata calendar, though the illustrations displayed don’t much resemble a jade plant. C. ovata is an easy plant to grow, aside from being a magnet for mealybugs, but I wasn’t aware that it’s “lucky.”
Elsewhere, there are calendars of Edward Gorey and Heath Robinson, but none of Glen Baxter.
Those who play chess may be interested to know that there is not only a Halloween gambit in the four knights game, but also a Frankenstein-Dracula variation of the Vienna game.
*****
The annual fall orchid show is next weekend at the botanical garden. Perhaps this year someone will bring in a Dracula orchid or two. Most are native to the Andean cloud forests. They need both cool temperatures and high humidity to thrive, which is probably why one rarely sees them in Kansas shows. Species include D. diabola, D. vampira and D. vlad-tepes.
*****
Various people are recommending their favorite Halloween anime. There have been a number of series and movies mentioned, but they ultimately all fall into two categories: Mononoke, and everything else.12
From the Wichita paper’s online edition. Click to embiggen.
Let’s see ….
I’ll probably watch Kino’s Journey II to the end, even though none of the three episodes so far have been memorable. The older series is not streaming legally anywhere I’m aware of, which is a shame.
I’ll probably also continue with The Ancient Magus’ Bride, even though the third episode, about the last flight of an old dragon, was disgustingly sentimental. It was set in Iceland, a land of glaciers and volcanoes where continental plates meet, but instead of Hekla or Bárðarbunga, we get a linden tree.3
Urahara is like a can of pink icing: sweet, with no substance. Recommended only if you like pastel colors.
I wish I could like Recommendation of the Wonderful Virtual Life. I gave the third episode a try after quitting part-way through the second, but it was no use. The main character is too clueless to be sympathetic. I can understand being socially awkward, but MoriMori-chan is just plain stupid.
I dropped A Sister’s All You Need in less than five seconds. That’s a record.
I would like to watch Hozuki no Reitetsu II, which is streaming on Hi-Dive. I’m also curious about Girls’ Last Tour, which is streaming on Amazon Strike, as is Made in Abyss, which apparently was the only series from last summer worth watching. Hi-Dive requires a paid membership. Amazon Strike requires an additional fee above that for Amazon Prime (which is less and less prime as time goes on; two-day delivery nowadays takes three to five days). There isn’t much else on these services that I want to see, and what they do have is mostly dubbed. I don’t have unlimited funds for entertainment, and anime is not a primary interest these days. (I’ve spent far more time recently comparing different recordings of Beethoven’s piano sonatas than I have watching animated shows.) It’s hard to justify paying for additional memberships when there are only one or two shows worth my time on each site. For now, I’ll stick to Crunchyroll.
Crunchyroll has been steadily adding older shows to its catalog, some of them very good. If you’re a speed reader, Masaaki Yuasa’s The Tatami Galaxy is worth your time. If you like vast international conspiracies but find Dan Brown stupid, there’s Koichi Mashimo’s Noir. The latter features a soundtrack by Yuki Kajiura; when Mashimo recycles animation (and Noir is partly an exercise in recycling), you can close your eyes and just listen to the music.
Crunchyroll has also added The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, albeit in the wrong, chronological order. It’s also the wrong Haruhi. The right one is Haruhi Fujioka from Ouran High School Host Club, a much better series than its distasteful premise would suggest.
Batman Ninja sounds ridiculous, but the movie might actually be worth watching. The writer is Kazuki Nakashima, whose credits include Gurren-Lagann and Kill la Kill, and who wrote the play that Oh! Edo Rocket is based on. He knows something about heroism.
Believe it or not, the New York Times posted an article on anime that I partially agree with. Their top five are also my top five, though not in that order. (#6, though, is way too high.)
Experimenting with “Orton” photography. Essentially, you work with two layers, one sharp and one blurred, and blend them together to get a surrealistic effect. Some images work better than others.
Experimenting with “Orton” photography. Essentially, you work with two layers, one sharp and one blurred, and blend them together to get a surrealistic effect. Some images work better than others.
Although the 2003 Kino’s Journey is a favorite of mine and the first series I would recommend to someone who thinks he doesn’t like anime, I don’t like all the stories equally. I occasionally re-watch “Land of Prophecy” for its blend of absurdity, whimsy and horror, for instance, but I’ve never much cared for the two-episode “Coliseum.” I was disappointed therefore when the New! Improved! Kino’s Journey remade the latter story as its second episode; I would strongly have preferred that all the new episodes be based on stories not previously adapted. Given that there are something like 20 volumes of Kino stories now, there should be plenty to choose from.
I notice that fans of the earlier series find the new version of the story, now called “Colosseum,” much inferior to the first. I recently loaned out the DVDs of the first series and therefore can’t compare the older episode with the newer. However, I do have the Tokyopop paperback of Keiichi Sigsawa’s Kino no Tabi, translated by Andrew Cunningham, that was available for 15 minutes in 2006. It includes the original version of “Coliseum.”
“Colosseum” (2017) is a serviceable adaptation of the original story, not outstanding but acceptable. It’s necessarily streamlined to fit within the limits of one episode, but the missing parts — mainly the details of the first four fights — are expendable.4 There are some inelegancies in Crunchyroll’s translation, e.g.,
Perhaps that’s accurate, but it’s clumsy. From the book:
Given their recent experiences, Hermes was not nearly so enthusiastic. “I hope you let me rest awhile when we get there,” he muttered. “Some place cool, dark and not too damp.”
Further comments will be increasingly spoilerous.
I’ve posted a few more portraits of cactus seedlings at the photo site.
All started back in May. The pictures are stacked focus, each assembled from between 17 to 73 individual frames in Helicon Focus.
All started back in May. The pictures are stacked focus, each assembled from between 17 to 73 individual frames in Helicon Focus.
I finally finished processing the pictures from last week’s ballet rehearsal. You can see them here.
Coming all too soon: Nutcracker season.
The final batch from the Friends University Ballet fall concert dress rehearsal, October 5, 2017. As usual, click to embiggen and to see with better color; right-click and open in a new window to see at maximum size.
The final batch from the Friends University Ballet fall concert dress rehearsal, October 5, 2017. As usual, click to embiggen and to see with better color; right-click and open in a new window to see at maximum size.
Friends University Ballet fall concert dress rehearsal, October 5, 2017. Click to embiggen and to see with better color; right-click and open in a new window to see at maximum size.
Friends University Ballet fall concert dress rehearsal, October 5, 2017. Click to embiggen and to see with better color; right-click and open in a new window to see at maximum size.
Friends University Ballet fall concert dress rehearsal, October 5, 2017. Click to embiggen and to see with better color; right-click and open in a new window to see at maximum size.
Friends University Ballet fall concert dress rehearsal, October 5, 2017. Click to embiggen and to see with better color; right-click and open in a new window to see at maximum size.
Further pictures from the dress rehearsal for the fall dance concert at Friends University.
Further pictures from the dress rehearsal for the fall dance concert at Friends University.
More pictures from the dress rehearsal for the Friends University fall dance program. (Click to embiggen, and also to see the pictures with better color. For some inexplicable reason, the WordPress algorithms make the reduced-size pictures look dull.)
More pictures from the dress rehearsal for the Friends University fall dance program. (Click to embiggen, and also to see the pictures with better color. For some inexplicable reason, the WordPress algorithms make the reduced-size pictures look dull.)
