Weekend Assignment: What Color Is Your Thumb?

A variegated whatsis

Weekend Assignment #211: How are your gardening skills? Do you plant flowers and trees and even shrubberies, or do you settle for weeds and concrete? Do houseplants die in your care, or grow and prosper?

Extra Credit: Is there someone you know who is better at this gardening stuff than you are?

I realize this is no great shock, but I'm not a gardener myself. Occasionally I will bring home a poinsettia or Easter lily or something from church, but when I do so I immediately place it in John's care. As you know I'm not a fan of flowers, but I do like green plants - coleus and cactus and trees and ferns and aloes and such.

refugee poinsettias

This veteran house plant has just been moved outside

John is...fair-to-middling as a gardener. He has kept certain house plants going for years inside, and taken adequate care of trees and shrubberies outside, even ones he would just as soon see die. But he wasn't able to save our grapefruit tree years ago. I don't think we ever figured out why it suddenly declined and died, although we had a few theories. It turned into a spooky dead tree of dark gray wood, and then one day it simply fell down.

Tangerine tree, but no marmalade sky

We recently picked out this tangerine tree to replace the grapefruit one. Well, okay, John did, after consulting with me. It's just part of John's project of landscaping the back yard, with a tree and a path and a garden and a porch-like area similar to what he built up front.

And does he get any help with all this? Well, no. Not really. I'm supposed to help him with one bit of manual labor tomorrow after work, but mostly I just watch admiringly and take pictures.

John's new garden: Tuffy was here.

The dogs are even less helpful, especially Tuffy. If you look closely at the back of the garden row in the shot above, you'll see the dirt has been disturbed. That's Tuffy's fault. John's worried she killed one of his new plants by digging it up.

Tuffy's interest in the garden has only one object.

It's not that Tuffy was interested in the plant, of course. She was just burying or unburying a dog biscuit.

Grass! Yum!

But hey, at least Pepper is willing to trim the grass.

Your turn: tell us of your adventures in gardening and house plant care. Write it up in your blog or journal, with a link back here. Then leave your link it the comments below, so we can come see your handiwork! I'll be back in a week with the roundup of links. And here's a bit of reassurance: don't worry if you don't get your entry in by the end of the weekend. It's called the Weekend Assignment because John Scalzi originally designed it to give folks something to write on weekends, but times have changed since then. Now the meme is launched on Thursday nights / Friday mornings, just a little later than Scalzi used to post it, and you have a whole week to respond. Still, I for one am grateful if you don't all wait until the last minute!

Karen

Weekend Assignment Results: Modern Oratory?

For last week's Weekend Assignment, I asked whether anyone since Martin Luther King Jr had been able to inspire us with a masterful and memorable speech. Unsurprisingly, most (but not all) of the respondents ended up writing about this year's U.S. presidential candidates, while pondering whether speeches have been largely replaced by sound bytes:

Saqib, writing directly in the comments thread, said... "I feel like sitting this one out. But if I were to add my two cents I would have to agree with you in that I found Obama's speech inspiring. I found solace in his words as he touched upon an important issue in American society.

Oratory as an art form can't die down. Humans need regular doses of inspiration just to keep hope alive. Most of the time I am recieving the dose as my shy nature has hampered my public speaking career!"

Mike analyzes the public speaking styles of the three major candidates.

Duane ponders the negative effects of speechwriters and focus groups.

Carly gives props to Chelsea Clinton for grace under pressure.

Florinda points to great speechwriters... like Aaron Sorkin.

Sarah, who has given speeches about turning off cell phones, checks out a recent speech on YouTube.

Kristi Wachter appreciates an Obama speech on habeas corpus.

Kiva writes about an uplifting "Last Lecture" by a dying professor.

Interesting stuff, folks, thanks.

Next Weekend Assignment follows shortly.

Karen

1966 and All That

The abandoned railroad bridge in Manlius, 1971

When I Googled for The Magic Toy Shop last night, I happened across a link for a YouTube clip from the same Syracuse broadcaster about the Blizzard of '66. I've written about that storm before, thus:

In late January 1966 I was a little short of nine years old. The Blizzard of '66 was a big deal at the time, as big as the Great Blackout of '65 had been. That Sunday morning, we could see it was more than just a snowstorm. My dad drove up to the P&C in Manlius right after the snow plow made F-M Road temporarily passable. Dad's Rambler American was part of a line of cars that followed the plow into the village. Dad wanted to stock up on bread and milk, in case we couldn't get out again for the next several days. I didn't understand why he was doing it. I figured the P&C wouldn't even be open, because this was in the era of Sunday Blue Laws. But I guess the P&C opened for blizzards, even on a Sunday, because Dad returned with the bread and milk, and a story about how many other people were at the P&C doing the same thing.

The oldest photo I have to illustrate this memory, seen above, is from five years later, when I got first a hand-me-down cheap plastic camera from my dad, and then his old Instamatic, which believe it or not was a step up. (My next camera was a Poloroid One Step, but I think that wasn't until college.) I've never had anything but my memories to go on in writing about the Blizzard of '66 - until now. I don't know whether the following has been online all along, waiting for me to notice. I suspect not.


(Left: a lamppost at Niagara Falls, February 1986)

First: a photo gallery on Syracuse.com. None of the shots are from Manlius, as far as I can tell, but several of them might as well be, especially the ones of sidewalks hemmed in by walls of snow. I'm not going to infringe on their copyright by posting one of the pictures here, but do go take a look!

Next: the YouTube clip. It confirms my memory: the warning came the last Saturday in January, and the storm really hit on Sunday. We were all snowed in for a week. The reporter mentions that the facilities for digging out improved dramatically in succeeding decades.

There's also someone's 8 mm footage of kids playing in the snow, but the picture quality is so poor that it's not terribly illuminating.



That's it for tonight. I had a three hour nap earlier, and I don't want to waste it by staying up any later! But having had my memory jogged last night about the blizzard, I wanted to share my finds with you.

Karen

The Play Lady and Mr. Trolley

My friend Howard emailed me a few days ago to say that Jean Daugherty had died. If you've never lived in or around Syracuse, that news is unlikely to mean much to you. But I know what it means: the Play Lady is dead.

For 27 years starting in 1955, there was a local children's show in Syracuse, produced and directed by Jean Daugherty. Until the very end of the run it was called The Magic Toy Shop. Until it morphed into The Toy Shop Corporation or somesuch, it always began like this, give or take a word or two:

Announcer: This is the door to the Magic Toy Shop. But to open it, you need a key.

Merilee: Mr. Announcer Man, Mr. Announcer Man! I'm Merilee, and I know the magic key. Listen closely, boys and girls, and I'll tell you what it is. A smile is the magic key, to the magic door, to the wonderful Magic Toy Shop. All you do is put your thimbs at the corners of your mouth, like this, and then you turn them up, into a smile, you see? Now you try it. There! A smile is the magic key, to the magic door, to the wonderful Magic Toy Shop. Keep smiling...keep smiling...!

The hosts were Merilee, who spoke in a somewhat Shirley Templesque voice and wore clothes out of the juniors department of a local department store, and Eddie Flum Num, who wore Little Lord Fauntleroy/French painter clothing, including a floppy beret. Both of them sang, but primarily Merilee as I recall. The other two major characters were Twinkle, a clown who played the Magic Piano; and Mr. Trolley, basically a man standing behind a wall so that only his head, encased in a trolley mask, was showing. When Twinkle was on vacation, the Magic Piano (an upright) played itself, with unseen help from my high school music theory and music composition teacher, Leighton Tiffault, better known as Mr. T. And of course the Play Lady, played by Daugherty, would often stop by. On the photo above she's dressed more or less as Little Bo Peep, but in my memory, she wore a house dress with big pockets. The show had songs, stories, and film clips and cartoons, played by Eddie Flum Num on the Magic Projector. It was all extremely innocuous, and more than a little boring once I got to elementary school age.

And that's pretty much all I remember about the show itself, except that it was on WHEN (originally Channel 8, and then Channel 5 when the ABC station WNYS entered the market as Channel 9) right after Captain Kangaroo. But once, when I attended some sort of carnival in Fayetteville, NY, I saw Eddie, and asked where Merilee was. Merilee, who was sitting right there, laughed, well, merrily. "I guess you didn't recognize me with dark glasses on," she said. No, I hadn't!

Apparently Mr. Trolley was played by college professor Dr. Lewis B. "Doc" O'Donnell, who died last August. But that means he and the Play Lady lived long enough to be part of a Magic Toy Shop reunion show in 2003. I was thousands of miles away at the time, of course, but otherwise I would have stopped by. After all, I have the key!




Karen

See also Weekend Assignment #242: Local TV Host

All That Trouble for a Movie Review!

On Sunday I went to see Nim's Island with a friend. She was looking to get out to the movies for the first time in ages, so I read through the choices on Fandango for my two closest theater complexes and that film sounded the most promising. Barely. I'd never actually head of it, and the synopsis (which appears on Fandango, Flixter and the film's own website, for starters) is very poorly and ambiguously written:

Anything can happen on Nim's Island, a magical place ruled by a young girl's imagination. It is an existence that mirrors that of her favorite literary character, Alex Rover--the world's greatest adventurer. But Alexandra, the author of the Rover books, leads a reclusive life in the big city. When Nim's father goes missing from their island, a twist of fate brings her together with Alexandra. Now, they must draw courage from their fictional hero, Alex Rover, and find strength in one another to conquer Nim's Island.

Okay, first off, the magical place thing is poetic license. I thought it might be a fantasy film, but the closest it got to fantasy was in having a superintelligent pelican (sort of). Second, her life isn't all that similar to Rover's. Third, Alexandra doesn't help to "conquer" Nim's Island, whatever that means.

It doesn't matter, though. It was enough to get me to recommend the film over the next best choice. I bought the tickets from Fandango, and we went. It turned out to be quite a good film, with 3 1/2 great central characters, real pathos that made me cry, real danger that kept me in suspense, and real affirmation as Alexandra is forced out of her self-made cocoon and learns to like it. I strongly recommend it, especially for those of you with a taste for YA and Disney material. Nim's Island is actually quite a bit better than most live action Disney.

So okay, I went to an obscure film and enjoyed it. (Actually, other people must have heard of it, because it was #2 for the weekend.) So what? Maybe nothing much, had I not seen an email today from Fandango:


The email asked me to rate and review it. But wait, isn't that what Flixter is for? That's where I normally do my movie reviewing, such as it is.

Are we movie
compatible?

My Flixster
profile

So I reviewed it on Flixter. Then I took that review and adapted it for Fandango. Then in trying to find my review, I ended up clicking on a rotating menu of films to rate, some of which appear over and over, as if to force an opinion from me about films I've never heard of. You know, I remember when Fandango was just a way to check what's playing and when, and buy theater tickets ahead of time for a fee. Now it's got trailers and interviews and avatars and ratings and fan reviews and critic's reviews and goodness knows what else. It's turning into Flixter, only not as nice from a user generated content standpoint. On the other hand, why should I generate content for them? As it is, all this stuff I write online is taking me away from the stuff I hope to get paid for. That's my excuse, anyway. Come on, then. Just one more screen of films to rate, and I'll stop, I swear.

But I've escaped that now, and also the Doctor Who Forum, for which I made this icon/avatar yesterday. In deference to those of you who may want to watch Doctor Who on Sci-Fi this month without spoilers, I won't tell you what happened on the premiere episode on Saturday. But it was...oh, just watch it, beginning to end.

Bed now!

Karen

Monday Photo Shoot: Tower Power

And here we go!

New Monday Photo Shoot #15: Photograph a tower, lightning-struck or otherwise. It can be a skyscraper, a silo, a turret, an observation platform, or even a CD rack. Whatever it is, if it's a tower, let's see it!

Here are a few from me:

This is the Benedictine Sanctuary on Country Club Road in Tucson. I assume the greenish dome is the top of a bell tower.


And here's a modern fake-up of the same kind of Spanish colonial(?) architecture. This is the entrance of El Con Mall. It's been undergoing renovation for years and years now, and just gets emptier inside, while they add more restaurants and "big box" stores to the outside.

Across the street from El Con, just beyond a midcentury modern bank, is this old tower, the only remaining structure from the old El Conquistador Resort for which the mall was named. There is a luxury hotel by the same name, but it's now at the northwest edge of Tucson, in the Catalina foothills.

Your turn! Find and photograph a tower, any kind of tower that appeals to you. Post it to your journal or blog along with a link back here, and then leave a link to your entry in the comments thread below. I'll be back in a week with a roundup of everyone's entries. Have fun - and try not to strain your necks!

Karen

Monday Photo Shoot Results: Seldom Seen Sights

For last week's Monday Photo Shoot, I asked you to show me unusual sights, stuff one doesn't see every day. Here's what people came up with:

Julie comes up with a MASH-style military ambulance.

Carly finds a ghost hootenanny, in broad daylight!

Jama Hameed shows us formula racers in full skid, and a wedding day rainbow.

Martha brings us a tour boat that sails the streets.

Kiva finds her glasses in the freezer.

Laura finds a mean hamster for sale, an unusual support ribbon and more.

Well done, folks! New MPS topic coming right up!