One, Two, Three, FAH!
I've started my day with a blast from the past, a clip of the Beatles singing "I Saw Her Standing There" in concert. What a kick, especially the shots of the audience, including one girl juggling her binoculars with her clunky eyeglasses, getting bumped on the arm by a frantic fan beside her. I found this on Terry Teachout's excellent blog, About
Last Night. He's a drama critic for Wall Street Journal and mixes perceptive comments about the arts with personal asides, like what a fancy drama critic watches when he's in bed with a cold. And the answer is: Dumbo and Twelve O'Clock High.My friend Kes Woodward recently turned me onto a new videoblog habit, ZeFrank, who ends each piece with "I'm ZeFrank, thinking so you don't have to." I particularly like this episode, which includes an adorable "power move" by one of his younger fans, and this one, a savvy riff on how the availability of inexpensive creative tools like iMovie is revolutionizing rules of good taste. "Ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool," Ze says. And speaking of taste, some will find ZeFrank's language quite lacking in it, so viewer beware.
Sir Paul says that the original lyrics of the Beatles song opened with, "Well, she was just seventeen / never been a beauty queen," but John Lennon insisted on changing it to "Well, she was just seventeen / you know what I mean." So was she ugly? No way. Every time I've heard that song in the last 40 years or so, I've pictured her as perfection and felt happy inside.
It's nice to be back in the blogging biz, following my nose around the internet, cutting and pasting links, experimenting and learning, starting my day by making something new.
Monday, August 28, 2006
Pre-Trip Compulsions
By this time tomorrow, Darlene and I will be on the road to Boston, checked into a hotel in Fort Morgan, Colorado. I just finished loading a Robert Ludlum book onto her Nano, and mine is full of podcasts. The plan is that whoever is driving will listen to the Volvo's sound system, and the passenger will listen to something else on headphones. I'm not sure this will work, and I may get drawn into the Ludlum yarn instead of my usual diet of MacNotables, Adam Curry, Andy Bowers, Buzz Out Loud, and Loic Le Mur.
I get jumpy before a big trip, but today has been fairly calm. Maybe tomorrow I will go bats with anxiety and worry, but there's a meeting of the condo association board that I'm on, so that will distract me right up till the moment of our departure at the end of the meeting. I always feel a big need to get my affairs in order before leaving on a long trip. Today I plowed through paperwork that had been composting since February of 2005, including the taping of old newspaper articles I wrote 39 years ago at The Woonsocket Call into a scrapbook. Well, that was a must! I tried to explain to Darlene why there was no point disuading me from any task which I thought I had to do today, no matter how irrational it seemed. Before a trip, I feel strong compulsions and I've learned not to fight them, as long as I leave enough time to pack my bag. And the bag is packed. Darlene went to bed three hours ago, and I'm headed there soon. We are very lucky to be able to do as much travel as we do. I can't wait to pull out onto I-25 tomorrow night and get this new show on the road.
I get jumpy before a big trip, but today has been fairly calm. Maybe tomorrow I will go bats with anxiety and worry, but there's a meeting of the condo association board that I'm on, so that will distract me right up till the moment of our departure at the end of the meeting. I always feel a big need to get my affairs in order before leaving on a long trip. Today I plowed through paperwork that had been composting since February of 2005, including the taping of old newspaper articles I wrote 39 years ago at The Woonsocket Call into a scrapbook. Well, that was a must! I tried to explain to Darlene why there was no point disuading me from any task which I thought I had to do today, no matter how irrational it seemed. Before a trip, I feel strong compulsions and I've learned not to fight them, as long as I leave enough time to pack my bag. And the bag is packed. Darlene went to bed three hours ago, and I'm headed there soon. We are very lucky to be able to do as much travel as we do. I can't wait to pull out onto I-25 tomorrow night and get this new show on the road.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
New Digital Digs
Thanks to Stuart Paul of Denver, I have this shiney new home page and a new, separate page for the Mile High Pod Chronicles, my podcast and video blog. Stuart did a terrific job translating my yearnings for a new look and functionality into a clean interface befitting the place where we met, the Zen Center of Denver.
The project is accomplished, except for some tinkering, in time for the start of the Great Fall Foliage RV Ramble to New England and Québec, which will begin Monday night with the 2,000-mile drive to Boston. The RV part of the Ramble won't actually begin until September 9th, when we pick up the rented Southwind near Portland, Maine. The plan is to head north to Québec
and wait for the leaves to turn, then drift down through New England following hunches and chance encounters, podcasting and quilting (my wife's work) as we go. She has fabric everywhere in the apartment, and I am collecting tech gear, so the Volvo is going to be maxed out for the first leg of the adventure.
So welcome to my new online home. Please feel free to leave comments here on the blog, which will be visible to others, or click on "Contact Me" to leave me a private e-mail. Either way, I look forward to hearing from you and hope you will check out PodChronicles.com for the Ramble. You can also subscribe to the Mile High Pod Chronicles RSS feed on that page, with iTunes, Podcast Alley, or Yahoo Podcasts.
The project is accomplished, except for some tinkering, in time for the start of the Great Fall Foliage RV Ramble to New England and Québec, which will begin Monday night with the 2,000-mile drive to Boston. The RV part of the Ramble won't actually begin until September 9th, when we pick up the rented Southwind near Portland, Maine. The plan is to head north to Québec
and wait for the leaves to turn, then drift down through New England following hunches and chance encounters, podcasting and quilting (my wife's work) as we go. She has fabric everywhere in the apartment, and I am collecting tech gear, so the Volvo is going to be maxed out for the first leg of the adventure.So welcome to my new online home. Please feel free to leave comments here on the blog, which will be visible to others, or click on "Contact Me" to leave me a private e-mail. Either way, I look forward to hearing from you and hope you will check out PodChronicles.com for the Ramble. You can also subscribe to the Mile High Pod Chronicles RSS feed on that page, with iTunes, Podcast Alley, or Yahoo Podcasts.
Friday, August 25, 2006
