Some Idea

Ideas I've considered for tonight's entry:

• A poem involving the words "rhyme" and "time." Yecch. Didn't get past the first couplet. Lucky you! I can write decent doggerel from time to time, but you wouldn't have liked that particular _____.
• Some brief, impromptu fiction. As if.
• A sunset photo chosen more or less at random, taken this past Monday. All I've done is resize and sharpen lightly.
  
• An announcement that I just broke an unsolicited promise to someone at work that I'd go to bed before 1 AM.
• Some vague ramble about reading old Doctor Who books for the first time while I wait for more new stuff on tv, with reviews of a couple ten-year-old books. Illegal Alien (the Seventh Doctor tracks Cybermen during the Blitz) was particularly good.
  
• My reaction to a one-second clip of the Tenth Doctor taking liberties with the Fifth Doctor's face in "Time Crash," part of the Children in Need charity special airing on the BBC this Friday night. It's written by Steven Moffat and I trust him, but the clip made me squirm.
• I also wanted to urge you to vote for Doctor Who on the People's Choice Awards website, if you like Doctor Who, that is. If you don't like the current iteration of the series, then never mind.
  
• Perhaps I should apologize for mentioning that show this often.
  
• A full review of the new Murray Gold soundtrack. If I'd remembered this idea earlier I might actually have done it.
• In lieu of the previous, a brief reflection on the difference between soundtrack music and songs, due to their different purposes, with mention of Velton Ray Bunch, John Williams and of course Murray Gold.
• A report on what I did at lunchtime today. I drove all the way home, collected the dog, drove her to a McDonald's, bought lunch for myself and a double cheeseburger for her, drive home, threw the bun away and tore the burger up and put it in her dish. Tuffy didn't even eat all of THAT right away. But she did enjoy the car ride. I'm trying to get her to not be miserable whenever she's in the car, assuming she's going to the vet - which usually she is. John pointed out that she might think I take her to fun places and he takes her to scary places. I told him to take her somewhere fun over the weekend.
• Notes on the turkey roll I cooked last night, which took about an hour longer than it should have. Tasted good, though - and yes, I ate rutabaga with it. Dry run for Thanksgiving, I guess!
• An introduction to a Mickey Mouse Club serial I'll probably never see: Adventure in Dairyland. But I've got pictures now!
  

Huh. And I thought I had no ideas for tonight's entry! And now I've blown through them all. sort of. Good night!

Karen

Night Moods

Here's the other response to the Monday Photo Shoot, as promised. I'm not going on about it, because I need sleep. But here are some pictures I took last night at the Safeway shopping center. The lighting looks reasonably moody to me, especially as edited. Here we go:

Light over a pair of palo verde trees.

"Open" sign notwithstanding, this storefront stands empty.

There's a Liberty Tax? And wings come from a factory?

Another shot of that storefront.

Ain't No Cure for the Suppertime Blues

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Make a moody picture. By which you can use mood lighting of some sort, or possibly arty black-and-white, or whatever you need to in order to give the shot that certain moodiness. It's hard to describe, but you'll know it when you see it, I'm sure.

I love this topic! I'm not sure I did it justice, but I've given it my best shot. This is actually Phase One of my response, featuring my usual photographic subject. Phase Two, tomorrow night, will be Something Completely Different.

I shot these tonight as we tried to persuade Tuffy to eat some Mighty Dog canned food. She...sampled it. Reluctantly. Now she's on the prowl for something better, but we took away whatever was left several hours ago. She has her second radiation treatment in the morning, and isn't allowed food after 10 PM.


This shot was taken without flash, and then lightened considerably. It's a bit grainy, but you have to expect that. This light over her dish is a flower power nightlight, a gift from my friend Linda some years ago. Tuffy really does look moody here, and the lighting is part of it. She seems to be contemplating the fact that the food in her dish isn't what she wants, and her people are letting her down in that respect.


Here she gives me the Look. I took this one by holding my finger over part of the flash, resulting in the left half of the image being rather dark. When I lightened the image up a bit, parts of her face turned a color somewhere between hot pink and what Binney & Smith, the makers of Crayola crayons, used to call "Flesh." I've done my best to clone that out. Notice how the mouth isn't closed quite right, as if the tip of her tongue is in the way. It probably is.

For this one I covered a little too much of the flash, which turned the whole shot red. I've desaturated it a bit as well as lightened it.

Same shot. The lighting effects "Moonlight" and "Cool" didn't look good on this picture, so I used a new-to-me tool, "Magnetic lasso," to outline Tuffy, and then selected the inverse. After I changed the hue on the background to blue, I used Autoenhance. That shifted the blue toward turquiose/cyan, and the red back toward Tuffy's normal color, so I went with it.


Poor Tuftuf! She really doesn't look happy in these photos, but it was all about her suppertime ennui, exacerbated by her tongue, which is probably giving her some discomfort and awkwardness. But the oncology assistant says she will feel better with each treatment, cumulatively. Hope so! This is another shot for which I had to clone out that nasty "flesh" color. It was taken with a slow flash setting, which I had never tried before. Some of the chrome of the chair behind her to the left caught the flash and came out white, so I toned that down, too, again using the clone tool.

Tuffy's tongue will never be normal again, but we hope it will at least be healthier after all this. But Tuffy, who has always been a picky eater, will undoubtedly remain so. She'll probably do better after the treatment is over, but for her, there really ain't no cure for the suppertime blues. That we can afford, anyway.


Karen

P.S. Part Three of "Later This Somewhere", in which Sandy of "The Jace Letters" discovers a time traveling theatre troupe, is now online. Thanks, Sarah, for collaborating with me!

What Time Is It?

Okay, I have to laugh at myself first. I typed in the subject line of this entry, hit the Enter button, and voila! A totally blank entry, successfully posted!

And it's not just because I'm tired. Probably.

Not necessarily.

Actually, what I wanted to talk about is an incident that happened a little before midnight, about an hour and a half ago. It's notable for the fact that it gives me a rare opportunity to laugh at John when he's not being intentionally funny. John is a funny man--"He makes me laugh," as I'm always quoting Jessica Rabbit as saying--but this was something else. This was John making (gasp!) a mistake!

Sorry, John, but I was desperate for a topic. You don't mind, do you? Much?

Clocks can lie. So can computers.

Here's what happened. John asked me what time it was. I told him it was almost midnight, which it was. He then went into the kitchen, where the wall clock said it was after midnight. (It runs a little fast.) He went on to protest that according to his computer, it was only 8:38 PM (or something like that).

"Did you really think it was only 8:30?"

"I lost track of the time. I just thought I was really getting a lot of work done, and it was only 8:30! It was a nice change from looking up and seeing that it was midnight."

"Except that it is midnight."

"Yes, but I didn't know that."

Okay, the above may be slightly fictionalized. But that's the gist of it.

On this computer, if I let it go idle, the clock in the lower right hand corner stops advancing until I bring it out of screen saver or sleep mode. At various jobs I've seen one slightly-wrong time on the office computer, another, even more wrong time on the telephone display. Or maybe they were the same wrong time, whatever. The point is that I knew not to trust them.

But what about the clock in my car? I figure I have five minutes to spare, and I make a five minute stop, and suddenly I'm running five minutes late. How does that work?

Why do these clocks keep lying to us?

I've done work on TWO pieces of fiction today. Go, me! Go to bed, that is.

Karen

Umm, well...

This is the part where I cobble together an entry because it's nearly 3 AM and inspiration hasn't hit yet. Hey, I'd like to be brilliant every night; I really would. But sometimes I have to settled for something less than that. Stick around, though, because sometimes these things get better as I go along.

I've accomplished a few things today, though:

1. I got ten hours of sleep, the benefit of which I'm losing rapidly as I styay up late tonight.

2. I replied to some comments as promised.

3. Okay, maybe it's not an accomplishment, exactly, but I finished watching the Doctor Who box set the first time through, all the episodes with the commentaries turned on and all the special features except the edited down versions of Doctor Who Confidential. I already have full length copies, thanks. Now I'm starting on the episode again, this time with the subtitles on and the commentaries off. I plan to pay particular attention to the music, the better to review the new soundtrack one of these days.

4. With a little prodding from Sara G., I worked on the Heirs opening scene tonight. I managed to cut 70 words from the first 300, rearrange the first two paragraphs, and change Bil and Jord's argument to be more dramatic - which added back about fifty words. I'm not sure it's better overall, but bits of it are. There's a lot of work to be done, and it's not easy for me to make major changes at this late date, let alone this late hour. But I'm trying!


5. I added to my "pumpkin anything" collection tonight with this purchase for tomorrow's post-Mass Coffee Hour. It's a "9 Pumpkin Cheese Pecan Streusel." I'm assuming the "9" is supposed to be the diameter in inches, not the number of pumpkins used in the recipe!

No, it really didn't get better, did it? But at least I got some fiction work in. I can feel good about that. sort of.

Karen

Commentary

Blog comments folder

I've been having this thought. It's been coming on for a while, since before I put a comment policy thingy in the sidebar, inspired by great comments people sometimes leave for one entry or another, and by what I've seen other people do in the comments sections of their own blogs. What will happen is this: someone leaves a comment, containing an interesting insight, a thoughtful question or additional information, or some combination thereof. The host blogger then replies in the comments section, and maybe emails the commenter as well. The result is a nice little interaction, of value not only to the blogger and the commenter, but potentially to other readers as well. For most blogs, this give or take will never expand into long, amazingly entertaining comment threads such as are found in (the) Whatever or Making Light, but they're certainly a step in the right direction. The thought is this: maybe I ought to make an effort to leave comment replies, not for every comment, but at least for the ones that are particularly insightful, questioning for informative.

Over the last week or so I've actually done a little of this. Two or three of my Halloween entries from past years had new comments this past October and into November, particularly the one about Danse Macabre. That got four of them (plus two from me), as people sought and posted info on a Danse Macabre filmstrip from the 1960s and a possible modern-day upgrade thereof. Becky's left a few comments that I've either responded to or thought about answering. And just today, I got a long comment on another 2006 entry, this one about Charlie Rocket. Apparently this person became interested in the actor after seeing him on Quantum Leap, was shocked (as I was) upon learning of his suicide, and did some research into his life and death. The narrative she put together on her MySpace blog is somewhat speculative, but I have no doubt that she's got the gist of Charlie Rocket's sad story: abused as a child, scarred by the SNL firing, chronically depressed, relatively isolated and not getting many roles, which all added up to his cutting his own throat. I would send Yasmin the text of my Rocket tribute for The Observer, but I don't have her email address and don't to join MySpace to get it. So I'll settle for plugging it here and in my original posting.

And that's the iffy thing about replying to a comment. Will the original commenter ever know you did it? I'm guessing that the answer is no, probably not. Heck, I can't keep up with the actual blog entries or my closest online friends, let alone revisit their comment threads. I'm guessing that many of you are much the same way.

Ah, but now there's a link at the end of Blogger entries, allowing you to subscribe to comment threads. Online services are starting to make it easier to keep up by sending alerts only when there's something new to see. So if you do leave a comment, and especially if it's insightful, questioning and informative, you may want to subscribe to that comment thread, in case I remark on your brilliance.

some of my new Who stuff

Meanwhile, obsessive Doctor Who fan that I am, I've now listened to the brand new Murray Gold Doctor Who soundtrack 67.5 times (okay, no, but perhaps 15% of that in a day and a half), and I'm already listening to the commentary for "Utopia", the first episode of the season's 3-part finale. It's been a hoot, particularly listening to David Tennant, Murray Gold et al. make off-the-cuff remarks about Axons and Kinda and The Green Death from the show's classic era. I love that these folks are fans, too! Once I get through the rest of the episodes and DVD extras I'll probably go through the box set a second time right away, this time to watch with subtitles instead of the commentary, and to listen to the musical cues. I love, love, love the new soundtrack, but there are still a few tracks that don't automatically bring the relevant scenes from the show to my mind's eye and ears.

Enough. I suddenly feel a profound need for bed/sleep. Good night!

Karen

The Days Are Just Packed

Weekend Assignment #190: Share some of your favorite boredom-alleviating tactics from when you were a kid. "Kid" in this case can stretch from the ages of about six to eighteen; just pick an age where you did something particularly ingenious (or alternately, just plain weird) and go with it. One caveat: avoid the boredom alleviators where the story could end "and then nine months later little Jimmy was born." Because that's in the realm of too much information.

Extra Credit: When was the last time you were really, really bored?

And you expect me to remember this, do you? I mean come on, it was 40 years ago!

Sigh. I'll try, although I'm less than inspired on this one.

What I remember is starting out the window, knowing that no friends were available to me on that particular day, either because someone was busy or I'd had a falling out with someone, or because I was just between friends. From there I might have chosen, in my desperation, to watch tv shows I didn't like, such as Gilligan's Island, or visit the most annoyingly boring friend I had (and no, I won't reveal who that was), or reread a book. When I was a kid, I didn't have a huge book collection, but I had my Whitman versions of Little Women and Black Beauty and Tom Sawyer, two or three books each about Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins, and my grandmother's hand-me-down copy of Winnie-the-Pooh. I don't recall doing anything especially ingenious or weird, unless you count acting out scenarios with china animals, starting a Batman club (membership: three), creating my own secret identity (Bat Friend) and trying to fool my friends, catching salamanders near the old railroad tracks, scrubbing my old ballerina wallpaper, or imagining my own Utopian country (The Place) only to discover how very boring it was.

A slightly more effective boredom-reducing activity was to walk into the village of Manlius, look around at Manlius Pharmacy and Weber's, and maybe even buy something if I had the money, even if it was just wax lips or bubble gum cards, or a comic book from Temple's Dairy Store about some character I didn't even like much. (It took a truly desperate level of boredom to make me to buy an issue of Blackhawk or Sgt. Rock.) Really, though, the walks into the village were better with two people. I imagine nowadays a ten-year-old wouldn't be allowed to walk a mile by herself on a suburban main road, just to buy an ice cream or look at china animals. But in those days it was fine, as long as I told my mom I was going. Sometimes I even walked home facing backwards.

The most boring times of all, it sometimes seemed to me, were on vacation at the Speakman summer house we sometimes rented on Lake Ontario. My parents' idea of a good time was to lie on the beach with a paperback book (John D MacDonald for dad, gothics for Mom) and a transistor radio tuned to Arthur Godfrey on WSYR. For me that was the dullest thing in the world! I would take a rubber raft and ride the waves until I'd thoroughly depleted the entertainment value of that activity, and then there I'd be, wishing I had a good book, or a friend to talk to, or a village nearby where I could purchase wax lips, china animals and comic books. The library books I got on vacation never seemed to be anything worth reading; I particularly remember my mom picking out something for me called The Clothes Horse, and my being annoyed that it wasn't about a horse. Eventually my parents did invite a friend of mine to visit us on vacation, and that helped a lot. So did Dell and Penny Press puzzle magazines with as many logic problems as possible.

Nowadays, as Scalzi says, there's little time to be bored, except possibly at work if I'm doing the same old thing (which assuredly does not describe my present job!). I'm not limited to three or four tv stations, and whatever they happen to show on a weekday afternoon. Nor am I limited to whatever friends might happen to live in my neighborhood. Heck, there's always more to do than I can make myself do. Here I am with Doctor Who on pause on one computer, the Doctor Who Series Three soundtrack (which is glorious) on pause in iTunes on the other computer, just to free my brain up so I can write this blog entry. I've also got a flash game open, and eight more Firefox tabs, Chapter One of Heirs (still untouched), AIM and an inactive IM, and PhotoStudio, except that I didn't take any photos today. There's a Thurber book on my desk from looking up the publication order of several of his books, and my sonic screwdriver, which I've been comparing with the "real" one as it pops up on screen. Who can be bored, with all that going on? As Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes says, the days are just packed! Well, the nights, anyway.

Extra Credit: Well, I'm really bored with this blog entry. Does that count? (And no, that's not a slam at the assignment. It's not you, John, it's me!)

Karen