Self is always happy when she can participate in Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge!
Rose Bowl Parade, 1 January 2019
Straw Angels, December 2018
Reading, December 2018
Stay tuned, dear blog reader. Stay tuned.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: PAIRS
January 15, 2019 at 2:34 pm (Books, Flowers, Holidays, Links, Personal Bookshelf, television, Women Writers)
Tags: Cee Neuner, Christmas, exhibits, history, reading lists, Redwood City, Russian writers
“Girls Gone Wild”: Jenny Allen, Essay # 1 (I’m Awake)
August 19, 2018 at 2:53 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Sundays, Surprises, television, Women Writers)
Tags: essays, humor, reading lists
Self will put off My Cousin Rachel for a week or so, just so she can un-knot her nerves after reading Jamaica Inn (Five Stars)
She began reading Would Everybody Please Stop? by Jenny Allen.
Sometimes, when I first go to sleep for the night, I fall asleep to the television. And this is a strange thing: No matter what I have fallen asleep watching, when I wake up, what’s on is Girls Gone Wild. I never turn the channel to Girls Gone Wild, let alone turn up the volume, but the volume is ear-splitting.
If someone had told self that less than 24 hours after bidding farewell to Altarnun, Launceston, and the moors, she would be reading about Girls Gone Wild, she would have said: Shut up!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Poetry Saturday: Lucy Brock-Broido (1956 – 2018)
August 4, 2018 at 10:13 am (Artists and Writers, Surprises, television)
Tags: poetry, Saturday, The New Yorker
Giraffe
(By coincidence, self happened to be watching 60 Minutes last Sunday and it showed the scene the author describes in the poem, the ‘culling’ of a perfectly healthy giraffe by a Copenhagen zoo)
His eyes were liquid, kind.
His lashes each as long as a hummingbird’s tongue
His fetlocks puffed from galloping, his tail curled upward
From the joy of feeling fleet across the tinted grasslands
And the gold savannah there.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Saturday, Weekend After Fourth of July 2018
July 7, 2018 at 3:25 pm (Holidays, television)
Tags: Events, FIFA, humor, Redwood City, Saturday, Twitter, weekends
The goalkeeper Pickford just made a grrreat save.
England up 2 – 0.
According to this theory self saw on Twitter (lol), England will win because it has seven letters in its name, and the game’s being played on the seventh.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Twisted: Belmont, CA Farmer’s Market
May 27, 2018 at 7:03 pm (Food and Drink, postaday, Sundays, television)
Tags: California, farmers markets, happiness, indulgences, postaday, postaweek, Wordpress
Bought $11 worth of cherries.
The Warriors won last night. All’s right in the world.
Stay tuned.
“Blood, Romps, and Lashings”: The Guardian Review of VERSAILLES, Season 1
April 22, 2018 at 6:25 pm (destinations, Places, Sundays, television, The Guardian, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: adaptations, humor, indulgences, memories, review
Self is watching Versailles Season 2. She is so happy the series was renewed! It has proved extremely addictive.
The Guardian: With ladies in milky baths, ocular torture and piles of flesh, Versailles returns for more pre-revolution rumbustiousness (Shouldn’t that be rambunctiousness? Whatever). But is there depth beneath the bling?
Where were we then in Versailles, which returns for a second series? The palace is still under construction, and 1,000 workers have died so far. Versailles was clearly the Qatar of its day, and those gold gates are very Gulf State chic, no?
The writer is Sam Wollaston.
Self bows to your wicked wit, Sir. She bows.
From her visit to Versailles, May 2017:
Versailles, 28 May 2017: It was too bloody hot.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
#amreading The New Yorker, 26 March 2018: “California v. Trump”
April 18, 2018 at 4:17 pm (Places, television)
Tags: California, essay, politics, Protests, The New Yorker, Twitter
In March, the Donald toured the border wall, and the Attorney General flew to places like Las Cruces, New Mexico. Thank God for Jerry Brown.
Addressing the U.S. Attorney General, Brown said: “I’ll cooperate, Jeff, if you can get off this current maneuver you’re on, because it’s unbecoming.”
“California v. Trump”, by Connie Bruck
Early this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared war on the State of California. At least that’s the way many opponents of the Trump’s Administration saw it. Speaking to the California Peace Officers Association in Sacramento, Sessions announced that the Department of Justice was suing the state for passing three laws to protect undocumented immigrants — measures, Sessions said, that “intentionally obstruct the work of our sworn immigation-enforcement officers.”
Earlier, self had watched the AG on TV make a rhetorical device of “How dare you?” and finish up with, “California, we are coming to get you.”
While 45 seems lost in his own alternate reality of The Apprentice (“You’re fired” seems to be his favorite slogan), Sessions is lost in his own version of a western, where the Good Guys (Whites, self presumes) battle it out with Bad Guys (Native Americans, self presumes — aka, Non-Whites). The “coming to get you” had her rolling on the floor, because Sessions in person is rather petite in stature. And moreover, has elf ears. The idea of him as a gunslinger is patently ridiculous. But, it must have been an image dear to his heart, his own private childhood fantasy. And now he gets to act it out! On behalf of a President who likes talking loud and waving a big stick! As if the whole country — nay, the whole world — could be reduced to black and white! Or, if you prefer, white and white!
It’s a ridiculous performance.
Some weeks ago, Brown hit back with a tweet of his own:
Thanks for the shout-out, @realDonaldTrump. But bridges are still better than walls. And California remains the 6th largest economy in the world and the most prosperous state in America. #Facts
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
The Alienist Ends
March 27, 2018 at 3:20 am (Conversations, Eavesdropping, Lists, Surprises, television)
Tags: adaptations, humor, Mondays, mysteries, Twitter
Self didn’t get to see the final episode. She’s here in Mendocino, reading tweets.
She didn’t get to watch last week’s episode either, but there were lots of tweets about CATS. Wait, what?
Then, there was almost a Twitter silence. For about five minutes. Which meant, everyone was watching and something was going down.
This evening, the tweet-storm began with something about coulottes. Sara?
- Oh my GOD! THE CAT! I wanna unsee that so hard rn
- I have anxiety.
- I don’t understand why they had you go through with that charade. Laszlo could not have shaken them some other way? So what if they followed? They couldn’t be less conspicuous than Roosevelt and his horsemen.
- Okay so that’s him.
- I suspect there’s something about this opera specifically that mirrors the plot of this episode. If only I understood Italian opera . . .
- Geez, does EVERYBODY carry around a chloroform-laden rag with them?
- Nothing like going after a brutal serial killer in your opera’s finest.
- Keep making noise!
- Joseph!
- HURRY!
- This seems like a bad idea.
- I’m barely breathing.
- The suspense is killing me.
- Laszlo, your ego might get you killed.
- What?!
- Heart is beating so frickin fast!
- “It’s not only love that resides in the heart, it’s pain.
- My nerves tho.
- I can’t take it!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Sweet(er) in Redwood City, California
February 20, 2018 at 9:00 pm (Filipino Writers, Places, postaday, Surprises, television)
Tags: adaptations, Brian Geraghty, crime, Dakota Fanning, indulgences, mysteries, performances, postaday, postaweek, praise, Wordpress
After years of hectic traveling, it is sweet indeed to be back in Redwood City:
Even sweeter: having The Alienist to look forward to every week.
New episodes air every Monday night on TNT.
Dakota Fanning is just killing it in the role of Sara Howard, secretary to Teddy Roosevelt. In this incarnation, Roosevelt is the New York City Police Commissioner (circa 1896).
It is also grrrreat to see Brian Geraghty in the cast. Self lost track of him after The Hurt Locker. Geraghty plays Roosevelt! (When self watched Geraghty in The Hurt Locker, all those years ago, she never imagined that the next thing she saw him in would be The Alienist, portraying a future American president)
Also great are Daniel Bruhl (who self hasn’t seen on the big screen since Inglorious Basterds) and Luke Evans (who self has seen in the Lord of the Rings movies and in Immortals)
Stay tuned.
#amreading GRRM’s A CLASH OF KINGS
February 8, 2018 at 10:53 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Fan Fiction, Personal Bookshelf, television, Writing)
Tags: adaptations, fantasy, Game of Thrones
In preparation for Game of Thrones‘ final season, airing sometime 2019, self has set herself the task of reading the books. She’s read one so far; it was in her cottage in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig two years ago, and it was still there when she returned last year.
Writing dialogue is hard. Writing Game of Thrones fan fiction dialogue is even harder, especially when one hasn’t read the books. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones dialogue is so on point!
Examples:
Maester Luwin to Bran Stark, p. 442, A Clash of Kings:
“We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem . . . but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.
“Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. Valyria was the last ember, and Valyria is gone. The dragons are no more, the giants are dead, the children of the forest forgotten with all their lore.
“No, my prince. Jojen Reed may have had a dream or two that he believes came true, but he does not have the greensight. No living man has that power.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
