I have been enjoying a tour of wine maker’s blends, and I can occasionally be talked into a purchase because of a catchy name and interesting description. This is how I ended up opening a bottle of Dead Bolt red winemaker’s blend.
I like a strong flavored wine. In fact, I like strong and challenging flavors in many things, and this part of me was delighted to be drinking Dead Bolt. I am also pretty indiscriminate when it comes to wine varieties. I notice flavors in the wines I drink but few ever stick out enough for me to remember a brand or why I wanted to get it again. My consumption of wine is based on geographic availability and pricing, mostly.
Dead Bolt will not suffer from my poor wine memory. I will forever remember the wine that tasted like liquified summer sausage with a hint of pepperoni. The taste was so convincingly meat and spicy that I fancied I’d develop heartburn. Though impressive, Dead Bolt, for me, will not be an all the time kind of wine.
You too can protect your online identity without hiring a company to do it. You will need to 1.) change your passwords, 2.) change your passwords, 3.) don’t share your passwords with anyone, and 4.) change your passwords.
Just a friendly reminder. There’re always security leaks and system bugs out there so making password changing a routine is always a good idea. Just think how strong your brain will get with constant memory challenges!
I inherited a strange little picture from my grandmother of two horses frightened by a storm, perhaps, or running towards some lightening. I remember staring up at the horses’ pop eyes during nap time, and am terribly satisfied having it in my house. This terrible cell phone picture is of my dining room wall, horse picture included.
It never crossed my mind to find out more about it, even though I had never seen its like anywhere else. You can imagine my surprise when I saw it included in the gallery wall of interior designer Lauren Liess | Pure Style Home while flipping through a home decorating magazine. Liess’ style is much more polished and muted, but the horse picture has the same kind of punch, I think. It is an oddity: something banal enough to look past and yet odd enough to furrow the brow upon closer inspection.
Lauren Liess | Pure Style Home.
After a little searching I found that it is called Spirited Horses by Henri LeRoy (1851- ) a still life painter in France (*05/11/2015 now in question, see link to continuing research below). LeRoy’s catalog, as far as I could find, revolved around prints of fruit and flowers with a few landscapes thrown in. All of his pictures have the same feel: a controlled and factual reproduction of the subject, but strange–like looking through a warped glass. They are just a little bit naive.
I wanted to find out more about Henri LeRoy, but have been unsuccessful. He, like several other Victorian chromolithograph artists, produced much in a new and flourishing world of consumer driven art. Many chromolithographs were known for their publishers over their artists. They found a champion in Harriet Beecher Stowe who lauded them as an asset to interior decoration (Rotskoff). Perhaps because of Stowe’s support, and perhaps because a new and thriving middle class had grown from industrialism, consumption of these prints soared between 1840-1900. They were so popular, as was using the technology for cards and advertisements, that the time period became known as the “chromo civilization” (according to Wikipedia). Like any pop-art, they were not made to last and the numbers of undamaged prints out there have dwindled over the years, which is probably why I’ve only just seen Henri LeRoy’s Spirited Horses on anyone else’s wall.
cited: Lori E. Rotskoff (1997) Decorating the Dining-Room: Still-Life Chromolithographs and Domestic Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America. Journal of American Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Apr., 1997), pp. 19-42
I have a crush. Richard and I watch tons of Lawrence Welk (only not recently because PBS has stopped playing it for some reason). Myron Floren always steals the show, and over the years more and more of the show seems to be given to him – as if the producers know that he is the sexiest accordion player on the planet.
I am speaking as someone who likes the sound of a well played accordion; but I imagine his chops would be appreciated even by those who don’t. What’s more, he always has the happy little grin on his face while playing and seems completely at ease being in front of a crowd and/or camera.
When I mentioned that more and more of the show is given to him through the years, I didn’t mean more accordion spots. Eventually he starts to MC half the show in place of Mr. Welk. And he does this better than Mr. Welk.
Raccoon Dog at Fukuyama, Hiroshima prefecture, Japan, 663highland, GFDL+creative commons2.5
So, I was learning about Trophic cascade and how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone changed everything, down to the land and rivers. And then I was sharing this knowledge with a co-worker when her mind turned to coyotes and then to their interbreeding with wolves. And now I am learning something else.
The Coywolf is a coyote-wolf hybrid. They have been in the north eastern part of the country for near a hundred years and are sometimes lumped in with the group of Eastern Coyotes (DNA testing has shown that most Eastern Coyotes have Wolf genes). This canid is one of the rare, successful, natural hybridizations, probably due to depleted wolf populations and lack of mates for wolves (Wikipedia entry).
I find it especially interesting that this hybridization combines the strongest behavioral characteristics as well: a coyote’s comfort with populated areas and a wolf’s tendency to move in packs. This is kind of creepy. Especially since coywolves are bigger than coyotes.
As interesting as the coywolf is, my favorite canid is still the raccoon dog (pictured above). Raccoon dogs, aka tanuki, have the most ancient canid DNA for a living species today, and they have a wealth of legend and story.
And since we’ve gone to Asia with the raccoon dog, it would be remiss of me to not mention Pallas’s Cat (pictured). This fuzzy, solitary, house cat sized felid, looks to me like someone mixed a cat and a monkey, specifically: a tamarin. They also remind me of my cat, Sparkles.
If canids and felids aren’t your thing, perhaps you are a bird person. I know quite a few of those. The Potoo bird is native to Africa, and looks like some trick of taxidermy, or as if it under went a treatment with Kai’s Goo. Ya’ll remember that program, right?
In any case, muppets are real people too (images from a Google search and unfortunately without attribution anywhere I could find them posted).
My original intentions for this post didn’t quite pan out. I was watching some Pocahontas on TV and got to thinking about the most common name among English speaking countries and how beyond John Smith the explorer, there were several other John Smith’s who were amazing historical figures. But the other John Smiths I was thinking about at the time weren’t actually John Smiths once I reminded myself about their history. They were Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism) and John Jones (ally and brother in law to Oliver Cromwell). Outside of John Smyth the baptist minister, and Wikipedia’s list of notable John Smiths, I don’t really have the post I thought I did.
Why then am I posting anyway, you might ask. ‘Cause it was a good idea! It just wasn’t real. It’s like finding a wealth of information on the Christopher Cotton who was a cousin to your ancestor but from whom you are not lineally descendent. Or like that guy in your genealogy database who lived for 120 years and none of the other genealogists who have the same guy in their trees seemed to have caught this. Can you tell I’ve been doing a lot of family searching lately?
A little over a year ago I found this plant on my porch. I thought my Mom had put it there, and I thought the little seedling was sprouting from the lychee nuts that we saved from a snack. As it grew, I figured better.
Lychee trees don’t sprout tendrils of roots from their dropped leaves; my plant does.
It got taller and taller, though is so spindly, that I have to tie it to keep it upright. And then it sprouted bunches after bunches of these pod thingys. When the sun hits them you can see shadowy figures inside.Continue reading Alien plant
So, I’ve mentioned TPP before, and I’m sure I’ve advertized my love of educational comics. Of course I love Economix: How our economy works (and doesn’t work) in words and pictures. And economics is important because it has a lot to do with trade and intellectual property laws, laws that often include strange little bits about internet monitoring, whether people own what they buy, and how much the government and other organizations can snoop on the casual consumer through what they buy. Included in the book is a nifty segment on TPP:
Shelf Life (2005) arrived in our mailbox a while ago. I had added it to our queue ages agon and had since forgotten exactly what it was about. In the meantime, both Richard and I developed the idea that the film was foreign and subtitled. I specifically developed the idea that the film was Korean.
These aren’t the reasons why we avoided putting the disc in the player and instead chose movie after movie, including plenty of subtitled Korean movies, to watch instead. Eventually, we decided to get it over with and just watch the thing.
I remember that I wanted to see this in the same way I am interested in all movies and TV shows about libraries and librarians. It’s a weird introspective, self mocking, others mocking type of enjoyment I get from depictions of these people and places. AND BOY DOES THIS MOVIE DELIVER! Sorry I had to shout. Shelf Life is not Korean, nor is it subtitled. It is a stark, yet funny, slow starting, acerbic look at small library hierarchy and personalities. It reminds me of The Librarians. It is less big laughs than small furtive, guilty chuckles (at least for me), and it is utterly impossible to stop watching.
It starts like a quite school assignment production with the characters awkwardly exchanging dialog and then it grabs your attention with a fishhook to your face (not literally). Suddenly you are wrapped up in the mystery of an unfolding story of miscommunication, misconception, quick judgements and terribly questionable human behavior. This is love, ladies and gentlemen. Though, I have to admit, not the marrying kind of love. I probably will not want to watch this movie over and over again. No, this is a summer camp romance kind of love. The kind that you deny ever happened when you catch each other’s eye in the hallway on your way to class, but secretly you review over and over again in your diary at night.
I am thoroughly wrapped up in copyright law studies and enjoying it, yes, but also feeling like I am falling behind on other bits of professional news. I do not want these to get buried:
I have been enjoying a tour of wine maker’s blends, and I can occasionally be talked into a purchase because of a catchy name and interesting description. This is how I ended up opening a bottle of Dead Bolt red winemaker’s blend.
to have your event added to the list.