Coming Up

The Indian blanket flowers aren't visible yet, but the small daffodils in the same bed are starting to appear.

Winning

The last two times I lost at Wordle, I had four of the 5 letters, but there were multiple possibilities for the final letter and I guessed wrong.  

The same situation came up today.  After 3 guesses, I knew two letters and had a pretty good idea that the answer would be _OUND.  But would it be BOUND, FOUND, MOUND, POUND, or WOUND?

Three more guesses, five more possibilities.  A statistician would be able to tell you the exact probability that I'd guess correctly.  All I knew is that I didn't like my chances.

Different tactic:  put together a wrong guess containing as many of the possible letters as... um... possible.  

After guess #1, I'm positive that the last letter is a D, and that B and M are out.

After guess #2, I'm positive that P and W are out.

Leaving just one possibility.  And there's the answer.

Only works in standard mode, of course.   Hard mode won't allow guesses that don't contain the already-established letters.

At It Again

Further creativity in my off hours:  The single of Perfume by Sparks is about 75 seconds shorter than the album version.  I liked some of the single version better, and some of the album version better.  All of which impelled me to dust off and update GoldWave, first to record a copy of the album version, then to edit it down to my version, which clocks in at 4:26.  That's something like 30 seconds less than the album, 45 seconds longer than the single.

Not that I can post a copy here today, but if I'm still walking around on this planet when the Hello Young Lovers album goes into public domain, you can be sure that I will.  Never mind how old I'll be; suffice it to say that 2006+95 years=the 22nd Century.  

Brought up TikTok for the first time, watching a young woman DJ on a jazz station.  No ideas for that platform, but I have imagined myself lip-syncing to Was (Not Was) and their song I Feel Better Than James Brown.  After seeing TikTok, I'm thinking about what it would take to record that video.  Don't worry, I'm not about to do that, although I can imagine some scenes from an animated version.  But that's a job for someone with a talent for animation.

Told Ya So

I was telling my wife about the John Waters interview from the previous post, and emphasizing how much the "stops me in my tracks" meant to me.  Then I wanted to follow up by comparing the artists who create audacious art to the schlockmeisters of kitsch, but couldn't remember the name of the example of the latter I wanted to cite.  The guy had been pretty famous, but faded away before his early death.  But what was his name?  I even tried googling kitsch and schlock art, but no luck.  

Still, remembering my past experience, I told her that I would probably soon see that name somewhere, when I wasn't looking for it.  It's happened to me several times already, and I've learned not to stress in the moment.  Just give it a little time.

Today, in Walmart, we were walking from the department store side to the supermarket side, when in a display of 2022 calendars, I saw one that featured the art of Thomas Kinkade.  

Funny how it works, but it does...

Me, really?

Thoughts that occurred to me over the weekend:

(1) pooshka 1 year later: Coming up on April 17, the last day I saw the little black pooshka in our yard.  It was the same night I saw what might have been a coyote on the deck, looking for food but getting spooked by the motion-detector light.  I want to believe the pooshka recognized the danger and found another territory.  I took a bunch of stills and video, and maybe this might be the time to put together a short video.  Maybe a minute per year, six minutes long.  Not on fire for it, the way I was for other past projects, but the mere fact that I'm thinking about it at all...

(2) Photography blog with a post about ideas for a 365-day project.  I hadn't thought about doing one since stopping the last one halfway through.  I think that was in 2017.  

The ideas included someone who was taking photos that included her.  Not so much pictures of her, but pictures where she was in the shot but not the point of it.

But then I thought, what about a series (if not 365) of me at age 65?  Small things, like a single hair on my left thumb, or ropy veins on the back of the hand, emphasized by lighting.  I can see someone doing that about themselves.  But me?  I'm not on fire for it, but not dismissing it, either.  Don't let 365 be the enemy of something interesting.

(3)  John Waters, interviewed for the Times.  A guy who's as outrageous as I am subdued.  But what he says about art in his answer below... the rest of the interview was like, this guy's totally different from me, and it's fascinating in a way.  Then in the last paragraph, he says something and I understand I've never heard it put that way before, but I agree with him.  

It's what macro photos of tiny speedwell flowers do for me.  It's what chicory flowers in the inhospitable dirt along country roads do for me.  It makes me want to record an image and say, this stopped me in my tracks.  Look at it!  

Very well, thanks

A quick walk around the yard today revealed two things to me: first, we have a shingle missing on the roof near the chimney, and second, it's shaping up to be a very good year for the speedwell.  They're everywhere.  I can only hope the wood violets thrive to the same extent.

In our back yard

Last year's leaves, making way for this season's wildflowers.

 

 

Senator, you should know better!  We should have gotten *those* planes long ago... 

...ohhhhh.  

We should have gotten planes *for them* long ago.  

English.

I love cats.  -- Yes.

I love them. -- Yes.

I love them cats. -- NO.

I love those cats.  -- Yes.

I love those. -- Maybe?  Now we're getting into rules versus experience and "feel", always a weak spot with me.

    Here is a roomful of cats.  I love those black ones over there.  Do you like these white ones?  Yes, but I prefer those.

What's Up With That, Doc?

So I got a bonus at work, and just in time, because I need to fill up my gas tank and this should just about cover it.

But not only that, but Giant sent us coupons worth $10 off $50 of groceries and $2 off $5 of produce, and BB and I played them well, which reduced our bill this afternoon from $58 to $46.  Let's see, there was the $8 jar of Rao's marinara sauce, and the $1.29 Snickers ice cream bar, and another $3 left over of free-ness.  It makes me smile.

And to celebrate (hey, a man's gotta live) I splurged on a $1.99 movie rental from Amazon, "What's Up, Doc?"  A great screwball comedy, they called it, in the tradition of Hepburn and Grant, Stanwyck and Fonda, Stanwyck and Cooper, Lombard and Powell, and I'm cocking my head and trying to see what they're seeing.  

I mean, in the old screwballs, didn't comedy come from people being stuck with something they couldn't get rid of, and in this movie, I'm asking why the one guy needs to carry around the golf bag, and why Ryan O'Neal doesn't just set down the champagne glasses.  He could, it'd be easy, and then Peter Bogdanovich and Buck Henry could have looked for something funnier. 

 

In honor of today's Wordle

Batch

Catch

Hatch

Match

Patch

Watch

After four guesses, I had four letters and two more shots to guess the fifth.  I failed.

They know me so well

YouTube recommended the 1966 CBS production of Death of a Salesman, and they were right.  I watched the first 25 minutes during the workday yesterday and the rest after work.  Almost all the things I want to see:  color videotape, and in this case, not a blurry, mushy copy of a copy of a copy, but a sharp color close-to-first-generation videotape; Arthur Miller adapted his own play for the 2-hour block, and the NY Times TV critic said the cuts weren't obvious and made the play even better by tightening it up; the lead roles were played by the original actors from the 1949 production, Lee J. Cobb and Martha Dunnock, and now that they were in their fifties instead of their thirties, it fit better with the ages of the characters.  The network even relaxed its censorship guidelines to permit several four-letter words.  I just got the impression that they wanted to get as close as possible to The Definitive Version of DoaS for the ages.  And 56 years later, I'm glad they did.

9 1/2 stars out of 10.  There were glimpses of a boom microphone at the top of the screen, kind of a hallmark of live television productions in that era.  Wish they'd included the original Xerox commercials, and there was one bit of probably unintentional humor -- it certainly broke the realistic mood -- when the owner of the business played a recording of his children for Willy Loman, and one of the voices was basically Rocky the Flying Squirrel reciting the U.S. capitals.  Well, June Foray was already in the cast in a small role as a woman of easy virtue, so you can see the thought process.  Finally, the kind of acting that would have been perfect for the stage, where the audience can be a couple of hundred feet away, seemed too hot for television and its closeups.  That's a long paragraph to explain a half-a-star ding, and probably too long.

Fun with facts

Twenty years ago, I'd have wondered just when this picture was taken.  Now, I just google "Groucho on the cover of TV Guide" and get my answer in seconds.

Then, there's this.  In the Laurel and Hardy movie "Sons of the Desert", this front page appears:

Recognizing New York Times type, I decipher the headline in the far left column...

... do a search, and find the answer.  While Wikipedia says SotD was released December 29, 1933, the original Times was published more than a year earlier.

March Forth!

10:00 Credit Union:  deposit Costco free money; cash 2 savings bonds; swap out external hard drive

10:15 Giant:  Milk, Sargento pizza cheese on sale, kettle chips

          Big Lots:  cheap outdoor cardinal thermometer (didn't find it, but did find Mexican Coke and several boxes of Special K Cinnamon Pecan, which has disappeared from area supermarkets)

11:45 Lunch:  Wally Hog

1:30 Haircut

3:00 Make pudding

4:30 Nora to vet

ALLRIIIIGGHTTttttt... oh.

 TFW the big brown UPS truck stops in front of your house...

... then you remember that your employer was sending a bunch of COVID-19 tests.

In honor of today's Wordle

Hasty

Pasty

Tasty

Nasty