Boo, boo, etc.

It’s Halloween today, right? Time to get the bag of chocolate out of the freezer.

There’s a fine line between spooky and silly, as Frëd illustrates in this footnote to American history.

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There’s a lot of anime suitable for Halloween, from the many iterations of Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro (including in particular Hakaba Kitaro) to Soul Eater and Hozuki no Reitetsu. If I had to pick just one, though, it would be Kenji Nakamura’s Mononoke. Here’s one of the two-episode stories:

The entire show is on YouTube, but it’s available for such a reasonable price that there’s no excuse not to buy your own copy of this probable classic. ((I don’t declare anything a “classic” until it’s at least ten years old, and Mononoke is from anime’s year of wonder, 2007.))

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Boris Karloff drinks tea.

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If you’re looking for a proper Halloween post, Isegoria has a bunch of them.

1941-2014

Lorenzo Albaceate and friend

Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, a colleague of my father’s years ago on Triumph magazine, passed away this week. Lorenzo was an interesting guy, charming, intelligent, funny and a pleasure to talk with and be around. He lead an interesting life. Trained as a physicist, he was ordained a priest and obtained a doctorate in theology. One of his friends was a certain Karol Wojtyla, better known these days as Pope John Paul II. He wrote for a surprising range of publications, such as The New Yorker and The New York Times, and often appeared on television, once debating Christopher Hitchens. He was deeply involved with the Communion and Liberation lay ecclesial movement.

I snapped the above picture when Lorenzo visited Wichita not quite ten years ago.

Arriving at Harmony Row

I early acquired the habit of listening to music from the bottom up. A tune with an energetic bass line is far more likely to catch my attention than one in which the bass merely marks chord changes. I took to Cream immediately, partly because of Clapton and Baker, but mainly because of bassist, singer and songwriter Jack Bruce. There are many musicians whose bass playing I’ve enjoyed, but Bruce has always been my favorite.

Jack Bruce passed away today. R.I.P.

Here’s Bruce with Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton:

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Hooks, blurs and frogs

Recently I’ve been going through my older pictures, taken back in the age of film, and putting some of the better ones on my Flickr page. Here are a few recent examples. Click to embiggenify.

Mammillaria pennispinosa

Transplanting the seedlings of Mammillaria pennispinosa into individual pots requires an unusual technique. With the hooked spines embedded in your left thumb and index finger, hold the plant in position as you fill the pot with the potting soil with your right hand. Using a pair of embroidery scissors, free the plant from your fingers by snipping off the tips of the spines. Then extract the hooks from your fingers.

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Seeing red

“Is She U.N. Owen?” is probably the best-known piece of music from the vast Touhou Project, ((except possibly for “Bad Apple“)) and you can find innumerable versions in every style, from orchestral to nightcore, on YouTube. I stumbled across the one above recently while looking for something else.

Another version of the tune, impressive yet ridiculous.

Incidentally, “U.N. Owen” is not “Death Waltz.” This is “Death Waltz:”

Release the penguins

Update: Yet another version of “U.N. Owen,” this one by Floating Cloud.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VpNvGNRlFaE

Kiss kiss attack

Pupipo

Pixy invoked Haibane Renmei in his post on PuPiPo. Pete also was impressed. I’ve watched the series of fifteen four-minute episodes twice now, and I’ll probably watch it again. I’m not going to discuss it in any detail; it suffices to note that it is funny and poignant, and that there are indeed parallels with the tale of the charcoal feathers. Instead, here are some screencaps.

Wakaba

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