b1-66er: Here's a guy with an arm...
D4rw1n: I love all the appreciation of the obvious talent. The crowd goes wild, the skipper blows the horn, even the dog is going mad with joy
31.10.23
Happy Hallobig'un!
b1-67er: Easily the biggest pumpkin I've ever bought. Now if I can just get it out of the car.
b1-66er: How much was it, and what made you decide to go for it?
67: I like carving pumpkins. The bigger the better. $25 was too good to resist.
66: SUPER BARGAIN!
...
Just off stage left The Actore intones:
Whoa!!!! That size for $25?!!!!!!!!!!
Insane, good for him. Looks amazing.
...
67: For sure. The pumpkin lots around here are disappointingly uniform in basketball sized pumpkins. But not this place. They had maybe 50 pumpkins this size.
66: How'd you pick that one?
67: Upside-down it has some nose/cheek type structure I think I can work with.
66: Absolutely.
If you wanted to do
punkin passing a human through its digestive system
that could work too.
67: The rinds are thick on big pumpkins like this, so you can think about carving features into them too.
66: $50 Jack o lantern!
{$25 for the punkin.
$25 for a one-off chainsaw.}
67: They had a pumpkin that had a high relief carving of an eagle in it. Pretty cool looking.
66: Okay.
Don't compete in that contest.
[Pic ©2023 Size Matters You Bonehead, Unlimited
Ask rights and seeds reserved
Used by permission]
18.10.23
Herbie's herpes
b1-66er:
https://youtu.be/K3lgmnsTdcA?si=S5oDTNSJWd2yIuhJ
D4rw1n:
Like the commenter says, I feel measurably cooler listening to that Herbie Hancock Wah Wah Watson track. I tell you, I feel 3-4% cooler just looking at those outfits
This reminds me of an odd thing that happened in jazz music in the 70s. For many young people (and certainly for me), Herbie Hancock funk tunes were great, but they seemed simplistic compared to earlier forms like the bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. (And by the way a much younger Herbie Hancock played on a lot of bebop records too, which is important). So a lot of us thought we were making our way up the ladder of virtuous music from simplistic funk to much more complex bebop.
But what I didn't really grasp at the time was that Herbie Hancock was making his way in the opposite direction. I somewhat disdained funk and disco, because bebop was more complex and, I thought, therefore more authentic.
I now think Herbie Hancock and many others were seeking to return to the real roots of jazz, which were urgent originally dance forms
If I thought about Herbie Hancock's musical direction at the time, it would've been to think of him as a bit of a sellout. Thinking he was following a trend toward disco, to cash in.
I also think he was just trying to reconnect with a human audience. The bebop audience was shrinking into nothingness because it had gone so complex and inward-looking. Looking back at these tracks like the one you sent really brings it home. They were reconnecting with the joy and beauty of creating music that people could clap, and sing, and dance to
Burst
The Dear Hunter: Today. No clouds. No mist. No rain. No gloom. This has been a long time coming.
<Pic © 2023 Dark in front Party in the back, Ltd
All rights reserved.
Used by permission.>
When the world is your entertainment channel
b1-66er: "
Hooters' Dumbass Pun Cost Them a Fortune
A Florida Hooters promised a free Toyota to the employee who sold the most booze in a month. Jodee Berry, the waitress who busted her ass to win the contest, was understandably pissed when she was cheekily given a toy Yoda doll. She sued them for breach of contract, and won enough money to "pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants," according to her lawyer.
"
D4rw1n: That's the perfect outcome because we all got a delicious bad pun, and she got both a toy Yoda AND a Toyota. Win-win-win.
b1: That's such an incredibly sick -and absolutely perfect- way to look at it.
I can tell you came from the country that produced "Cocaine Bear."
17.10.23
Our walk home after dinner
The Accomplice:
<Pic © 2023 Standing Stills, Ltd.
All rights reserved
Used by permission>
Smells expensive
b1-66er: My in-flight movie on UAL was "Cocaine Bear."
b1-67er: There is a movie truly worthy of air travel viewing. Every bit as good as a silent
16.10.23
What about when you clean your bazooka?
b1-66er: I clean my gun...
... And dream of Galveston•
b1-67er: Ok, so that's a creepy lyric, Glen.
13.10.23
Optimism?
The Accomplice: <pic>
Image © 2023 Spectral Emanations
All rights reserved
Used by permission
10.10.23
The dissolution of microbial chance
b1-66er: 16:00
Just in from shots¹ & lunch.
First time in 3 years where it didn't seem like pandemic anymore.
¹i could get jabs for flu & RSV, but not COVID (there's a localized shortage on that one).
My RSV was free under my insurance. The Accomplice's wanted US$300.
***
b1-67er: Weird. I went to doc the other day, passed on the flu vaccine this time. Will probably start getting it in a few years when my risk is up more.
$300 seems steep, doesn't it?
66: It seems outrageous for an illness that's considered epidemic (and is being warned by the CDC).
Special K: $300 seems criminal. America!
66: Before we went, I figured my drop/take on that jab was US$150...
... And was trying to figure out how I would feel about being hospitalized for passing at $162.50.
(That's backgammon logic, RIGHT THERE.)
***
Dr. ENT: I got my flu shot, but haven't gotten Covid or RSV yet. Probably should.
***
Lawrencian: Wow, that's crazy expensive
9.10.23
Cell A Brate
Special K: "The most appropriate way to celebrate Columbus Day is to get lost, go to the wrong house, and kill everybody there."
8.10.23
Uniformly wrinkle your rod
b1-66er: Oh man oh man oh man OH MAN!
b1-67er's brain is going to absolutely melt on THIS MOST SATISFYING TO WATCH HYDRAULIC PRESS VIDEO EVER MADE•
b1-67er: I'm amazed how uniformly those tubes fail. Also, the high end stainless they test isn't something I've seen in the US. The Europeans seem to be ahead of the US on high end steel.
7.10.23
Frog in edge of bonsai pot
b1-67er: <pic © 2023 Make Dew Prods.
All rights reserved.
Used by permission.>
5.10.23
New! High Chaparral Flavor!!
b1-66er: "Amazon MMO Finally Adds Horses, Skyrockets In Popularity"
Special K: Tasty.
3.10.23
Spin the top
b1-66er: Awake after a 75 minute nap.
Ended with a dream where I had woken up and then meditated.
b1-67er: You're right on the edge of inception.
1.10.23
MIssing U - a photo essay
The Dear Hunter in-and-around Tawas and Oscoda
{All pix ©2023 Daughter of a Beach Industries
all rights reserved
used by permission}
Descriptive Marbeling
b1-66er: Be sure to at least watch the opening video as well as the last one...
The use of the dome as projection is superlative. It's remarkable how good landscapes look on "the screen."
•••
entropy Dave:
Thanks for sending this, it was interesting to see. I particularly liked the optical illusion they created in which it looked as if the concrete segments of the sphere were warping and letting light in through cracks. The still of the quasi-Bosch ceiling of birds, fish and asps was extremely impressive and I am sure would have been quite a spectacle to those in person. Similarly, the scope for 16k-resolution panoramas on the spherical surface made for some remarkable distortions of perceived space.
Another thing that struck me immediately from years of concert-going was how the lighting was done. Gone was the framing of the space by an overhead lighting rig. That completely changed the way you saw the band, no longer enclosed in a presentational frame. (Even outdoor venues with their rectangular backdrops do not achieve this.) Immediately I thought, this would be even better as a venue for a play than for a band. That in turn led me to notice how spare the stage was, with no amps, no monitors (well, two little ones) and almost no gear. They even had the drummer in a shower cubicle--the likely effects on the acoustics of the drums filled me with scepticism. This had to mean the audio had a different quality than a normal concert with its walls of speakers. (It reminds me of seeing Iron Maiden in 1985 when they had assembled the loudest audio system ever--225,000 watts--and the ambient vibration was so great that the music was like a series of footnotes to fluctuating cacophony.)
Second, the thing with which I am most struck when I see any public spectacle nowadays is the way people hold their phones up. It seemed as if fully one third of the audience were holding up their phones to record. This image is itself the mottled skin that marks a symptom of a sickness in our 21st-century consciousness.
Third, when they flashed up the slogan, "Everything you know is wrong.," I almost horked my coffee. That is some smug shit. In that moment, the collusion between band and audience was so great and so squalid that had I been there I would have immediately felt the need to immolate myself with hand sanitiser. Even now I feel a tide of expletives rising in my throat. Loathing to the third power would go some way to saying how I feel.
I love Achtung, Baby and I remembered how much I enjoyed the deliberately dirty production. It seemed to me a real advance on Unforgettable Fire and the Joshua Tree which, while catchy, seemed like deposits in a 401k. I try only to listen to songs from those albums live on Rattle and Hum. I'm curious as to how the performance sounded, not because of the venue, but because of the band. I wasn't feeling much in the videos in that regard. My worry was that the overall experience--disregarding the social element--was of audiophile headphones within an Apple Vision Pro-like curated visual experience. If that were right, it would be interesting to determine how much of that is a consequence of the venue and how much the band. Again, if I'm on the right track with the limitations, then the kinds of acts they can host may be limited. It strikes me that Springsteen and the E Street Band on that stage would be a joke, no matter how much effluent flowing through Jersey rivers you put on screen. Kraftwerk or Philip Glass or Grimes all seem like home runs. Celine Dion, that could work. Oddly though, not Taylor Swift for example.
eD