If you read the comments on yesterday's post, you'll know that today leaves the bonobos in the dust for VOLES!
Voles are a small rodent and are often confused with mice, moles, and rats, and are only found in the northern hemisphere. There are 155 species of voles (although these guys say 124), including pine, water, mountain, etc. They will eat a wide variety of food, from bark to dead animals and insects. They are quite fond of roots and bulbs, often killing the plant before the gardener realizes the animals are even there.
And hey, voles even have their own website! I think they should send one of their own out to design classes, though, to spruce the page up a bit. They're small, they could sneak into class in someone's backpack.
Apparently voles deserve more attention. Purdue University states that they are the fastest evolving mammal and are a bit of a genetic enigma.
Today's final vole lesson is taught in pictures:
Last weekend I went to the Butterfly House at Faust Park in Chesterfield, Missouri. I'd never been before and didn't know what to expect. Some guy suddenly yelled "show me some leg!!!" You do know Missouri is known as "the show me state," but even I couldn't believe what happened next....
The little hussy obliged as she dangled her leg off the leaf.
Yesterday was just glorious in St. Louis...
All sorts of best buds were at the park.
English title: Grand Illusion
part two of a doubleheader. part one was yesterday, and today is Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion: a war movie with no battle scenes, where friendships go across enemy sides, where the futility of war (any war) is noted, and the coming social changes in all of Europe are presaged.
is going to sound awfully familiar if you've been following this series-of-movies-I-like, but whatevs. 'tis all true
“
For many years, the original nitrate film negative was thought to have been lost in an Allied air raid in 1942 that destroyed a leading laboratory outside Paris. Prints of the film were rediscovered in 1958 and restored and re-released during the early 1960s. Then, it was revealed that the original negative had been shipped back to Berlin by Dr. Frank Hensel to be stored in the Reichsfilmarchiv vaults. In the Allied occupation of Berlin in 1945, the Reichsfilmarchiv by chance was in the Russian zone and consequently shipped along with many other films back to be the basis of the Soviet Gosfilmofond film archive in Moscow. The negative was returned to France in the 1960s, but sat unidentified in storage in Toulouse Cinémathèque for over 30 years, as no one suspected it had survived. It was rediscovered in the early 1990s as the Cinémathèque's nitrate collection was slowly being transferred to the French Film Archives at Bois d'Arcy. It was restored and released as the inaugural DVD of the Criterion Collection.
“
from the always helpful wiki , full of details, linkage, synopsa, and I hope you already knew, *spoilers*. so be careful
I can talk about the movie, but rather do so after y'all watch it. I am unable to discuss a plot without giving the movie away; the secret of being a good writer-about-films. but I will mention some movies you may have watched that are very influenced by La Grande Illusion:
- The Great Escape
- Casablanca
- Stalag Seven
clipparinos:
this first one is Renoir himself introducing the Criterion Collection DVD.
Renoir is adorable, self-effacing, and I want to hug him. he also reminds me of someone...
in this scene, POWs of several nationalities come together during a talent show in a German camp
When Michelle & I went to the Outer Banks of NC in September, we stopped by a really nice store called Sandy Bay Gallery. After making our jewelry purchases and chatting with the owner, we walked back outside and stopped to admire the hippo pottery. But oh look! Hippo Mouth has a resident!
Is that the blurpiest little frog ever? The shop owner saw us looking and came out and said he lives in there, and that sometimes there is another one that hangs out close by. But before I could get more photos inside the hippo, she coaxed him out onto the wall:
and that is about half of my vacation photos right there....
Hope to have some personal content up later today, but in case I don't, here's Bad Reporter making fun of the GOP, people who text, and the media's coverage of Obama. Not as LOL as the last one, but okay.
And life in a comic strip can be dangerous, as we learn from our little ghoulish pal
(I love Lio -- he's like I imagine Kirk S. was as a kid)
Today's MUTTS is also good, esp. for those who have tuxies, but it's not online yet.
I was going through some photos I took at Tumacacri Mission a few weeks back and I saw a lot of photo with diagonal lines. So I'm just going to post a couple for this quest. For this one I changed it to black and white added some noise and artistic stuff and lighting. The diagonal lines are the stones on the grave site.
I played a little more with the next photo. I selected the church and didn't select the brick tower. Then I changed the church to black and white, worked some on the contrast and brightness, added an artistic filter and erased the black and white from the top arch and the two diagonal columns. By added color to the the diagonal lines I wanted to push the viewers eye up to the arch and the cross on top of the church.
In this photo the main subject the pots are in a diagonal line. In the original photo the pots where in a dark shadow. I cropped the photo then selected the shadow and lightened it and added saturation. Then I selected the light wall that was too light, added contrast, darked the highlights and added saturation. Now the shadow looks more like a stain or paint on the all and less like a shadow.
The last photos is of the columns supporting the covered over the walkway for the visitor's center. In this photo the diagonal line formed by the columns draws the eye to the door.
So, I've been using my Typepad account instead of VOX, and whenever I come back over this way I have shit loads of spam comments to delete. Surely, VOX, if you delete a spam account, it should automatically delete all of the spam comments they've left as well?
Note on photo above: Me n friends went down to check out the art museum party on Saturday. Some of them looked they came right out of a nightmare.
1) For my actions: Because I want to be happy.
Note on photo above: Neither my friend nor I dared to enter the room at the back... it was too eerie.
2) For The Boy: Because she wanted something different.
Note on photo above: Some installations were dreamy, cosy and wonderful.
3) For The Bear: Because you hunted me down after 10 years and found me.
Note on photo above: I can bring my G10 everywhere!
4) For the cheesy TV dramas with perfect families: Because you are a lie. Blatant. Foolish. Lie.
Note on photos above: And the forest sleeps on. Beds of flowers are left untended by their winged counterparts.
5) For Mr and Mrs Gandalf: Because both of you evoke happy memories.
Note on photo above: I took ages to get a good shot of this pair.
6) For Love: Because you taught me to be independent and self-sufficient.
Note on photos above: Pickings are far and few between.
7) For the butterflies: Because you all irritate me so much by being so uncooperative but I can't help but be happy when I see you all flutter around drunkenly in the sunlight.
Note on photo above: I found a stretch of quiet trail. Where there was literally nothing except a low gutteral rumbling amongst the trees and this butterfly. I can't figure out what's making that sound.
8) For the monsoon rains: Because you drive me nuts when you are hot and sunny and beckoning while I'm in bed and then cold and rainy and forbidding when I'm outdoors. But then again, recently you've been very nicely aligned with my activities so I'm grateful.
Note on photo above: What a nice lil forward strutty pose you got there with all your tails nicely straightened out.
9) For the labrador shaped chocolate: Because you just make me wanna give you a nice biiiig hugga!
10) For Raymond: Because he's pretty much disappeared and I wonder what's happened to him.
11) For Nikki: Because she made so much progress in only 1 year. And I'm proud of her.
Note on photo above: That is so true. But only if you also learn to let go.
12) For the hunters: Because the difference between an avid hunter and a real friend is the selfish motive for a kill.
Yep..it's another perfect day.
And what am I going to do about it?
I am going to wash a few windows, change a few critter cages and go for a Bike Ride!! I can't wait on the bike ride...but I'll wait until this afternoon when the temps get out of the 40s!
Have a good one, y'all!
A mass of conflicting impulses. - Spock and V'ger Nomad
The Great Star Trek Project of 08-09 has been slowly drawing to a close. While Mr. Val and I finished Enterprise last month and will soon tackle the pre-boot on blu-ray we've been busy with fan films and parodies for a while. My intention was to blog my progress throughout the project but that was overly ambitious. I think I am at the point, though, where I can step back and make some pretty good observations about the project as a whole.
Star Trek: The Original Series
Oh joy, what fun. There are few shows that can be so genuinely wonderful but still have enough cheese that they don't even warrant parody. TOS does enough to parody itself, so much so that, at times, it's painful. Let us all recall Spock's Brain. Ok, let's not. Instead, let's let some genius with a YouTube account condense it into 4 minutes that are far more enjoyable than being subjected to the entire episode.
This clip is also sure to highlight one of my favorite lines from all of Trek: Brain and brain, what is brain!?!
Clearly the original series stood for a lot of good in addition to the cheese. Yay brother. The show was one of the first to spotlight minority actors and actresses and show them working alongside white people as if it was no big deal. And despite some seemingly sexist overtones, I feel like Gene Roddenberry saw much of the sexiness of the women on the show as an expression of female empowerment. Let's face it, throughout all of the different series it's clear that women can do anything, however, the amount of quality face time by powerful women in Star Trek pales in comparison to that of the men. To me, that shows that we have a longer way to go in current society.
One of the primary missions of Captain Kirk was to destroy every Eden he could lay his hands on. Apparently space is populated by peaceful and beautiful worlds that all hold a different, dirty little secret. Each has its own version of the snake. While I kept a list of characters who said, "I'm a doctor, not a ______", I should've also kept a list of Edens destroyed by the glorious Captain Kirk, a man with no need of a Prime Directive. Every time it happened, I know I turned to Mr. Val with my best Kirk imitation and spat, "so this...is...your...Eden".
For the best of the original series we turn to the first, and shockingly, the third season.
Easily one of the most famous episodes of TOS is The City on the Edge of Forever. I dare you to watch it and not shed a tear. According to the Wiki page, writer Harlan Ellison recently settled with Paramount over royalty issues despite at one time disowning the script. Ha! Sounds like Ellison. But he certainly deserves credit for this, even if the final version is someone dissimilar to his original script.
Another outstanding episode in the catalog was penultimate episode of the entire show's run. They should've ended the series with All Our Yesterdays since the final episode, Turnabout Intruder was a poorly executed look at what the glass ceiling in Star Fleet can do to a poor girl. Anyway, back to the good one, here's All Our Yesterdays, featuring one of my favorite Ladies of Star Trek.
Now for the fun part. Let's turn to YouTube for some hilarious splices and clips.
First, there's the ever-famous video featuring all of the variations on: "he's dead, Jim".
I love this next one. The person who uploaded it simply calls it, "Shatner at his finest":
All in all, the Original Series is a wonderful show, I can't wait to get the remastered versions on blu-ray with the beefed up effects. I'm always happy to revisit this universe.
Coming tomorrow (if I feel like it): a look at the Original Series Films
