Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

Happy Friday! I’ve had a crazy week. Luckily it gets to end with a calm Friday! Work has been busy, culminating in a big meeting and presentation yesterday. I didn’t have to give the presentations but I did prep them so I have to say the meeting was dull. I was saved when the meeting ended an hour early. That rocked. I also appear to have a stable assignment through August or so. It’s nice to know that I’m still useful to my boss too. I’m still having fun and feeling productive, always a feature.

I started collecting silly World of Warcraft videos on their own page. I’m still trying to find a couple that I really liked but haven’t seen in a while. Feel free to toddle over there and make suggestions. Some of them are particularly WoW-geeky others will amuse anyone. Yes, I am that flavor of geek. But some of these are really great!

Last weekend’s to-do list went well enough. Home Depot run, indoor gardening, grocery shopping, some office cleaning and some correspondence happened. I tried to mail my novel outline to my other computer but failed… so I kind of touched it! As an added bonus, I got through a ton of laundry. Outdoor gardening has to happen this weekend though. I need to prune some shrubbery before it’s too late. So this weekend the same list applies and we’ll see if I can finish it off. I really want to make space for the scanner so I can order it and start playing! (And get the box of prints and slides off the futon couch in my office!) And maybe I’ll even tweak things so I can post photos without having to align them all to the left.

Walking is still proving to be very good for me. I will in fact continue doing it. Of course, I keep seeing the Little White Dog Mafia when I go out. I think they’re stalking me! I have a little first generation iPod shuffle I take walking with me. Intellectually, I know that the songs are played in a relatively random order, but in my heart I think my iPod is trying to please me. Songs like “One Night in Bangkok” and “Rock me, Amadeus” come up a lot in the shuffle. Really fun walking songs! What I find particularly good about walking is that I don’t obsess over work while I’m doing it. I’m more often looking for nifty things to photograph (like the flowers I’m posting today) or just letting my mind wander. It’s really quite meditative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all those good things people say about exercise and walking are true.

The weather is still kind of crazy but pleasant. I admit that after one stupidly warm day I changed my gym membership from cancelled to frozen. If I don’t successfully shift my schedule to walk in the cooler parts of the day, I may reactivate it. I may eventually feel the need to go back to the gym and do actual training. We’ll see. I’m not counting my chickens or anything, just not cancelling the lease on the hen house. I hate the heat. A lot.

I hope this Friday Flower Fabulousness has entertained you! There’s a lot of yellow out there now. The magnolia trees are starting to bloom. The tulips should come along in another week. The cherry trees are starting to look like they’re contemplating spring while the dogwoods are preparing a little more seriously. There will be lots more flower pictures coming soon!

daffodils, flowers, spring, weekend, world of warcraft, irises, croci, crocuses, weather, exercise

It’s just the sort of gray morning that makes me want to curl up in my happy oversized chair and read all day.

My to do list for this weekend is kind of fun:

1. Home Depot run for gardening supplies
2. Optional Ikea run for … Ikea stuff and a belated b-day present
3. Grocery shopping
4. Indoor gardening – transplanting houseplants and such
5. Outdoor gardening – pruning stuff
6. Rearranging my desk to try to make room for the cat, the computers and the scanner… and maybe devote an entire cubby to work stuff
7. Bake grapenut bread or some other such tastiness
8. Write letters to various people I owe letters to and generally catch up on correspondence
9. Touch my novel outline

If I get half of these done, I’ll call it a win.

Speaking of 4, I made it out walking 4 times this week! Go me! Today’s walk turned into a walk in the rain kind of quickly so I cut it a few blocks short. I got home slightly damp but none the worse for wear. The problem with gray days like this is that the light is perfect for photography (at least how I like the light to be) but the danger of getting caught in the rain with an expensive camera is very real. I made the right choice by not taking my camera out today but there are daffodils desperate to be photographed! But, circling back to walking, exercise has been good for me the past 2 weeks. All those things that we know intellectually about the effects of exercise? Turns out they’re actually true! Hopefully I’ll keep it up!

In the interest of providing some sort of content, borrowed or otherwise… what do you think of this new take on Apple’s 1984 ad?

exercise, politics, random, to do list, 1984, Apple ad, Apple

Look what survived the snow and ice of the weekend! I took my camera with me out on my walk yesterday. I ended up taking about 10 minutes longer on my walk but I had fun seeking out little crocuses and irises. The tiny irises in the darker picture are just too cute. I’m impressed too – I expected the wee little flowers to be a lot worse for wear after weathering a long, icy, nasty storm. Apparently I should have more faith in the power of adorable early Spring flowers!

The snow is indeed melting again. Quite a bit disappeared yesterday and routed itself to our basement. (Go, go sump pump power! Go, go further procrastinating doing laundry!)

I went through with my plan and cancelled my gym membership. Of course, due to their clever terms of cancellation I end up having the membership through May anyway. Oh well. It doesn’t actually change anything at all! I will be free of my membership soon enough. If the weather gets really nasty this spring, I guess I could go to the gym, but the whole reason I’m cancelling is that I never did get in the groove of going to this gym. (It’s not convenient, close or otherwise conducive to handiness.)

I took today off walking though. I don’t want to over-do it in the beginning and I still feel pretty good today. Tomorrow I’ll be back out at lunchtime though. It’s a great way to break up the day and clear my head in general.

Okay, I also took today off from exercising because all of a sudden I was slammed with work. I got through most of what I needed to get done today but I still have a pretty serious to-do list for tomorrow. Oh, plus breaking the news to the business sponsor of my project that we’re delayed AGAIN due to the project we’re dependent on taking far longer than anticipated to get out the door. I think there was a lack of planning somewhere along the way though not on my part… we’ll see if the business sponsor is okay with the delay. It would not be unreasonable to send us back to the drawing board at this point. Of course, if she did that she’d have to send us back with more money. No one likes doing that! And we’d have already blown the budget if we’d gone with any of our other options. I think our current plan is great and will result in a great tool and build an awesome project management community. I just need the system to get migrated so I can get my ball rolling!
Now I’m clearly rambling because work isn’t all that interesting excepting the pace of it today. Despite feeling pretty good today I’m also feeling pretty tired this evening. I was “on” all day (a feature, given the aforementioned work) and now I seem to be crashing a bit. Perhaps an early dinner and silliness are in order.

Baseball season starts soon. Easter and Passover are both creeping up in appropriately slippered feet. (Easter in bunny slippers of course!) Only 2-3 months more to wait for the iPhone. Flowers survived the snow. Spring just might be on its way.

crocus, exercise, iris, photographs, photography, seasons, signs of spring, snow, spring, winter, work

So I’ve been quiet lately mostly because Civ IV has eaten my life. I won a diplomatic victory last night! (I was going to be about 5 turns short of a space victory too!) As usual I’m behind the times and only started playing Civ IV recently. I didn’t like Civ III at all so it took me quite a while to become interested in trying a new Civ again. (Civ II is still my favorite!)

It snowed the end of last week. Well, it kinda snowed. First it rained, then it iced up and turned to sleet and freezing rain, then it might have snowed a while, then it went back to freezing rain. The accumulation was dense, icy and a pain to shovel again. Think “packed powder” from snow making at ski resorts. Little tiny ice cubes! The temperature started to rise yesterday and likely today will be my last day with significant white on the ground. Of course, the folks at the church across the street are still trying to clear out one of the doorways to the rectory and finish their sidewalks.

Since snow is melting again, there’s water in the basement. Yippee!

I need to cancel my gym membership. I’ve gone out walking more times in the past 2 weeks than I’ve successfully made it to this gym in a month. So, out with the gym, in with the walkies. Of course, walking means I get to observe additional idiocy. Two public service announcements to the folks in my neighborhood:

1. Putting ice-melt pellets down on 3 inches of packed freezing rain and snow does not constitute clearing the sidewalk. And this is not the kind of snow that is going to be “worn away” by hundreds of high school students walking to school.
2. Just because it’s snowy and icy does not mean that you do not need to clean up after your dog.

So shape up before I get my clue-bat out.
My open tabs are getting kind of unruly, so here they are:

• Captain America is dead: Zach over at nosheep has the Colbert coverage.
• The MadMusicArchive: Crazy Dr. Demento tunes!
• Copper plating and etching Altoids Tins: Fun with chemicals with beautiful results.
• Polish lace-makers find a new market: Thongs. (I know you’re going to click now.)
• Digital infrared photography: I may have figured out what I’m going to do with my old digital camera. The sample images are really pretty and infrared photography is fascinating in general.
• For the math geeks who read my blog, a bit of a romantic tune, snagged from gillianic tendencies:

Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)

Perhaps I should have warned you how geeky the song was?

civ iv, entertainment, exercise, games, open tabs, random, snow, snow removal, walking, weather

So, about 300… Apparently you either love or hate this movie. I loved it and most of the reviewers are in the latter camp. Of course, I’m not sure what they were expecting. It seems they’re stuck in a lack-of-perspective vortex of some sort. The end result: 300 has been getting horrid reviews.

No spoilers below… well no spoilers that aren’t fairly obvious from the trailers…

I won’t disagree the reviewer who described 300 as “action porn” but I happen to enjoy “spending almost two hours watching a bunch of worked-out UK thespians battle for the survival of Hellenism in only sandals, leather codpieces, and vermilion capes.” (Though they were not codpieces at all obviously but anyone can publish a movie review these days.) I was drawn to this movie for 3 reasons: I love epic action films; I loved Frank Miller’s Sin City; mostly naked, hot men.

I enjoyed 300 a great deal. No, I loved it. I like most movies honestly and have a special soft spot for anything vaguely historical. 300 was indeed epic. The Spartans were gloriously insane. Every one of them, man or woman, was quite attractive. The action was intense and gore-filled but in Frank Miller’s beautifully stylized way, if you can accept picturesque beheadings and bejeweled blood-spray as beautiful. The cinematography held the audience’s attention but did not let us forget that this was indeed a movie based on a graphic novel with all the spectacle of butchery painted graphically but neatly on the screen for us. Some visuals were cliché but most were simply iconic.

Origins: 300 is a movie based on a a graphic novel written in the late ’90s, inspired by a 1962 movie (The 300 Spartans) of a historic event recorded by the victors. Historical accuracy is not what I look for in this sort of movie no more than I looked for it in Braveheart or 99% of the numerous King Arthur movies. Instead of romanticizing the Middle Ages, 300 romanticizes Ancient Greece. The spirit of the event is captured well enough in both the graphic novel and the movie, even if the historical details are skewed for author’s purposes. I don’t think many people look to Hollywood for accurate history lessons as much as for inspiration to go learn more about a particular aspect of history. (Spartans did actually wear armor from time to time.)

News flash: This is a comic book movie. (Just in case you missed it in the last paragraph!) I am not a comic book or graphic novel reader at all. In fact, the only graphic novels I’ve looked at in the past decade are Sin City and 300 specifically because of their related movies. This time I did not actually start to read 300 until after I saw the movie. Frank Miller has a particular visual style that he endeavored to translate to film as closely as possible. He succeeded nicely in doing so with Sin City and I believe he did again in the case of 300. Some of the more most striking shots are pulled from the pages of a graphic novel just like some of the stunning visuals in movie Sin City matched corresponding pages in the graphic novel. If it were anyone but Frank Miller I might agree with many points brought up by the professional critics. But it’s Miller and he has a meticulous attention to detail. He clearly had a vision for the film and I don’t think it was to provide a moralistic action flick. It’s by no means a perfect translation, but it certainly a true translation.

Green screen: The movie was shot entirely in front of a green screen. All the visuals have been highly tweaked, enhanced, and otherwise mucked with. For me this presentation further enhanced the stylization that evoked a graphic novel. The film was almost monochromatic which I found very effective. Several reviewers called it “airless” due to the green screen. I can see that, but for me that further evoked the very texture of the colors on the 2-dimensional page which seemed appropriate given that this is a movie reproducing a graphic novel. The movie at once evokes the watercolors bleeding on the page and the grain of the paper. The graphic novel’s color palate is just as limited as the movies: red, brown, black, a pale dirty blue sky and a bit of gold.

Xerxes: The movie spends more time with Xerxes than the graphic novel did. The invading god-king is larger than life and over-the-top decadent in his attire, means of transportation and entertainments. Xerxes is basically a tacky holiday ornament in the film: all gilt and garlands. But there is no doubt that he is a tyrant and a madman. His armies hint at the “thousand tribes” he conquered on his way to Greece and his monstrosities are equally varied and fantastic. I enjoyed the monstrosities perhaps a little more than I should have perhaps. The executioner with the grotesque scythe arms, war elephants and what lurked behind the Immortals’ masks all heightened the nightmarish quality of the encounters and Xerxes’ armies.

King Leonidas: King Leonidas is, forgive me, spartan by comparison. He walks with his soldiers, eats with his soldiers, and dresses like his soldiers insofar as they dressed at all. They actually wear even less in the graphic novel, by the by… His Spartans are all devoted the glory of dying in battle, which is handy since they’re hopelessly out-numbered. The Spartans are not exactly sane either, as you might have guessed, but they embody a bygone spirit a lot of people yearn for.They are a brotherhood united facing impossible odds with smiles and jokes. They are devoted to a common goal and they are almost unerringly skilled at what they do. (How often do we in our day-to-day encounter something like this? This kind of spirit makes movies about sports teams and the military so appealing.)

These over-dressed underwear models strike poses in battle straight out of the pages of the graphic novel. The battles are beautifully performed and intensely and intimately violent. As a side note: their attractiveness seems to be more a side-effect of making a Hollywood movie than an artifact from the graphic novel.

In short, this is a niche film that happened to have mainstream appeal. Mainstream expectations will be confused or disappointed. Miller’s translation of his graphic novel to the screen is successful – as always, audiences can take or leave it as they please. Go in looking for Frank Miller’s vision and glorious gore. Go in expecting what one might consider some cheesy posing by hot mostly-naked men. Enjoy it, relish in it. And if you walk away from this film wanting to go kill some Persians in the real world, perhaps you walked in wanting to kill some Persians. Rest assured that the rest of the Greeks dealt with Xerxes and his armies already.

300, 300 movie, entertainment, frank miller, movie review, movies, sin city

I put up a generous handful of zoo photos to finish out the Janaury visit posting. There are cute ducklings and happy peguins as well as more excruciatingly cute snow leopards and a bunch of tiger photos. Trust me, the penguins were happy. (Check out the happy honking penguins too!)

I think I’ve chosen a scanner too. The Epson Perfection V700 will probably be mine once my tax return comes in. Oh and once I figure out where the heck it’s going to live in my office. I need to do some massive spring cleaning and then some I think. And after that my next major photography purchase will probably be either an IS lens to replace the one the came with my camera or a proper macro lens of doom. But first, organizing the office is required. I should really dump a bunch of my old technology detrius… but you never know when you might need a 100MB Zip disk!!!
The Flower Show on Saturday was… frustrating. I did get some good photos, but they used more gels in the lighting than I remember from last time I went. Oh, and going on the preview day is actually a Bad Idea. Too many people. The Legends of Ireland theme was lovely and there were some very creative displays… I just couldn’t get close to many of them without being rude or without someone bumping me while I was trying to take photos. Next time I’ll just take Monday morning off to go or something. I did buy a whole bunch of tiny little shrubs and trees for bonsai and a fresh supply of training wire! Retail therapy! I also picked up a brochure for a Bonsai studio, Rosade Bonsai Studio, that offers classes and workshops. They had a gorgeous exhibit that included a bunch of hand-made rocks (which they offer a class for of course!).

After the the “adventure” that was the Flower Show we hit Reading Terminal Market, where neither mshireman or myself had been before. It’s a pretty nifty place! I love urban markets like that – lots of stalls of cool stuff, almost all food in this case. This market has been up and running for over 75 years! Despite being closed in, the fish smells from the many seafood vendors didn’t permeate the market – total bonus. There were some amazing baked goods (we got cookies), chocolates, specialty kitchen shops and oh the cheeses! We had a late lunch at a diner in the market and I had the best BLT I’ve tasted in years. Words cannot describe how incredible it was, so I won’t try, just trust me. I’d like to go back on a non-Flower Show day and see more. Unsurprisingly the market was also packed but considerably less scary probably because people were moving. For my next trick, I’ll make it to the Italian Market.

reading terminal market, philadelphia zoo, penguins, humbolt penguins, philadelphia flower show, tiger, amur tiger, duckling, scanners, technology, bonsai, gardening, food

February stats because vanity is part and parcel of having a blog!

• 189 hits and 21 new photos added to Flickr
  
• 1319 hits to 17 posts on Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

Yesterday (since that’s when I started writing this) was a very blustery day. The sky was a stoic blue, bright and flat with a hint of a gray undertone. It was trying not to give away its secret but I already knew that snow was in the forecast for today! Another inch or two will bring back winter nicely. The church across the way was still showing its petticoats yesterday at least: the last bits of snow are evident along the shaded side of the building in among the shrubbery.

This morning I woke up to snow. Looks like the plaid children have a snow day. (For the uninitiated, the plaid children are the students at the Catholic school at the church across the street.) The traffic reports sound horrible this morning too. There’s not that much snow here yet – just enough to make a mottled white and green mess of the lawn. But sometimes that’s more than enough to screw up traffic. Later maybe I’ll post some real content but now: time for coffee!
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statistics, snow, weather

In memory of Ed Yeung, fabulous person extraordinaire, I ask you all to be a little nicer to someone today and look at things a little more positively even if it’s implausible or even causes physical pain.

My heart goes out to Ed’s friends and family. I hope that their pain eases gently with time. He was a amazing guy and his passing leaves a big, Ed-shaped hole in the universe.

I worked with Ed when I was in Vancouver. He came in early for the 6 a.m. shift and I came in early to try to juggle Eastern and Pacific time zones to get my job done. He had an exothermic good attitude and was generally an excellent influence on this jaded IT chick from New England. He was easy to talk to about everything. We’d chat in the kitchen or I’d get side-tracked at his desk (which was between my office and my team’s pod of desks). Ed would have a good question or perspective on the evils of our job politics or just an encouraging smile when I needed it. I’d ask after his friends for whom he cared so much. Ed was one of those genuine, wonderful, caring people who passes through your life and reminds you that it’s good to be nice and that the world can be a better place. He was part of my “West Coast transformation” and probably never knew it. I am grateful he wandered through my life and deeply saddened that he will not be able be such a good influence on everyone.

So, brighten someone’s day or make it a little easier. Together we might be able to make up for the bright light the world lost when Ed passed away last month. And if it it works, maybe we can do it again tomorrow.

ed yeung, in memoriam, be nice