Saw one on a flight. A flat top layer of clouds above and another flat layer below the plane with perfectly clear skies in the middle. As the sun came up above the lower layer, it lit everything up in wild colors.
Another I recall, this one also on top a mountain, Kinabalu. As sun came up, the twin mountain peaks' shadows traveled the valley floor surrounded by rainbows.
When it's cold like this, it's not only the images that get weird but the sounds. Hard to describe, it's like silence you can hear.
This is going to betray me as being just as shallow as people I profess to disapprove of, but what the hell, I no longer care about such things:
I only learned to like Sarah McLachlan after she took a few years off between 1999 and 2003 to unwind and become a mother, and then she came back all girly-looking and seemingly having a late-bloomer ball with it.
Ironically, the actual songs on her concurrent album, Afterglow, were rather weak (at least the ones chosen as singles), but the videos were delightful, especially "Stupid", where she plays the reincarnation of the same woman over the centuries, including one scream of a sequence set in the tacky 70s:
But the whole brilliant bit of self-publicizing became my gateway towards listening to her earlier songs without preconceptions, and finding a lot of them to my liking.
So maybe I am kind of shallow, but lately I feel I've been going through an awakening similar to what I imagine she went through around the beginning of the 2000s (minus the motherhood piece.) I'm almost 10 years older than she was at that time, but better late than never, I guess.
One key bit of trivia: when Sarah was in high school in the early-mid 80s, she was known affectionately to her friends as..."Boy George." I think that says a lot.
I shook some m&m's out of a bag earlier today. 6 came out, one of each color. There were only 5 red ones in the whole bag total, and an average of 55 pieces in a bag. I don't know where that puts the odds but they seem fairly long.
Related, I was bored at work last year and tracked the distribution by color of 10 straight bags of m&m's. Orange and blue were dominant, making up about half the bag.
On Dec. 20, 1946, the Frank Capra film "It's A Wonderful Life," starring James Stewart and Donna Reed, had a preview showing for charity at New York's Globe Theatre, a day before its official world premiere.
Having temporarily rechristened myself Fanfie Claus for the weekend, I now demand that Ruth Pointer, the awesome-est of the Pointer Sisters who found her amazing deeper range circa 1983-85, and used it to exhilarating effect on her group's most popular tunes, record a cover of this tasty & timeless Louis Armstrong Christmas chestnut, with lyrics & title altered to "Zat you, Fanfie Claus?"
Because it's sexy. We just finished checking out this very buff guy whom we suspected was gay. Turns out he is, he is Filipino and has an Australian boyfie who is also totes buff and they have the same profile pic and similar uber buff bods and now that's our new boyfriend goal and I feel terrible for eating so much during Christmas bah!
Aaaanyway... one of the great joys of unemployment is the time it frees up for tinkering with stuff. I was at a record store in the fall, and had to buy a record I broke when I carelessly set in on an angled surface. It rolled out of its sleeve and onto the concrete floor. A chip about 3/4" popped out.
From tooling around eWikiHow, I learned techniques for repairing the break. It worked, too! The record still plays, though there's some noise where the repair is. And you have to handle it very gently now, of course.
I also tried some last-ditch CD repairs. Those didn't go so well. But mr_cleome has a more forgiving player than I do. So he transferred them onto thumb drive for me.
Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on DeviantArt! Drop by and tell me that I sent you. *updated often!*
After all these years, I still find Chet Baker to be one of the most annoying & overrated vocalists on Earth. Even when I play The Other Side of 'Round Midnight, one of my all-time favorite discs, I have to skip over his appearance.
Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on DeviantArt! Drop by and tell me that I sent you. *updated often!*
Vanuatu is the country with the highest density of languages per capita in the world: it currently shows an average of about 1760 speakers for each indigenous language, of which there are at least 138.
Found some fruit in the back of the crisper that should've gone off weeks ago. Yet it looks perfectly okay inside. I'm gonna' eat it, because I live on the edge. Also, there's that whole always-broke thing.
Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on DeviantArt! Drop by and tell me that I sent you. *updated often!*