Kablammo!

Springtime seems to have laid an ambush while I was away, wielding the brutal one-two punch of Daylight Saving Time and unseasonably warm weather, either of which would have been unpleasant enough on its own. Thankfully March’s lion still had some life in it, evinced by the hailstorm going on outside. It suits my mood, and it makes for an easier adjustment from last week’s weather.

In other news, I finally figured out what had been eluding me (well, one minor yet possibly significant piece of what’s been eluding me, anyway). I’d noticed the shoes, how light they looked; I thought they looked almost like ballerina slippers, or whatever they’re called. It’s far too late to be of any possible help now, but I did put two and two together at last: she wanted to dance and had obviously been planning on it since before she got dressed. Thankfully there was someone else who was on top of things, but next time maybe I’ll be better prepared.

I got so used to saying “undskyld” that I keep almost saying it now. I’m just waiting for the look I get when I finally slip and blurt it out.

This has certainly been a momentous week or so in terms of my ever-burgeoning addiction to obscure &/or foreign musics, as not only did I wisely use my time in Denmark to flesh out my Junior Senior and Kashmir collections, but today Cantafabule and Cei ce ne-au dat nume were sitting in my mailbox, in a plain brown envelope festooned with Romanian postage. I loves me some Phoenix, I certainly do.

Incidentally, I should take this opportunity to note that if I hadn’t had a chance to download music by the above-mentioned bands, I wouldn’t have had any reason to scour the world for their albums. As RMS pointed out, sharing is caring.

or: Wasn’t Notes from Underground meant as a guide to happiness?

Doubting, qualifying, hesitating;
Waiting for the moment
to pass me by.

Dithering, agonizing, considering;
Wishing to be left alone
then wond’ring why.

Doubting, fearing, loathing;
Watching men of action make
decision look so easy.

Distracted, disgusted, defensive;
Wondering just what it is I want
then having a drink.

Getting rather sick of this.

So, after an enjoyable week or so in Danmark, I find myself right back where I was before I left. Hopefully I’ll have something more substantive soon, but for the moment here is a “teaser”.

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To Denmark, or not to Denmark, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of the 40-hour workweek,
Or to use up all one’s leave time
And go to Copenhagen. To live: to drink.

$425 roundtrip fare, how could I say no? Now that the non-refundable ticket is booked, I should probably make sure I’ll actually be able to take all that leave time a month from now.

Boston Reaches Settlement in Bomb Fiasco

It’s just like the boy who cried wolf, except there actually was a wolf nobody was prepared for that ate up a bunch of sheep, and then the mayor of the village told everybody to be extra careful of wolves in the future, and to pay attention to the color-coded ‘wolf threat level advisory’, and to be sure to tell the constable if they saw or suspected or imagined any wolf-like or wolf-related activity. And then one day a man came to the village with a fluffy poodle with one of those ridiculous poodle haircuts like you see in cartoons, and the poodle’s name was Ignignot, and nobody paid them any mind until some guy shouted “Hey! That’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing!” and the village made the man give them two million dollars in “goodwill funds”, and everybody lived happily ever after.

Like any reasonable person, I’d rather see a movie on the big screen than on a smaller one. So it is that while I enjoy going to the cinema in general, I particularly like going to see revivals and rereleases, and I’ve been lucky enough to see such classics as This Is Spinal Tap and a few parts of Kieslowski’s Dekalog in theatres. And one of the biggest perks of the cinema classes I took in college was not just having an opportunity to see Orphée, Броненосец Потёмкин, and The Magnificent Ambersons, but seeing them on a proper screen.

So it was that I was happy to discover that a (fairly) nearby movie theater was having a Kubrick retrospective of sorts, and last Saturday I watched The Shining, which I’d somehow managed to avoid seeing before, and Spartacus, which Mr Lang sacrificed a week of my 7th-grade history class to show us. For both films, it was quite bizarre to see preview and “note the location of the nearest exit” reels that were in better condition than the main features.

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By decade:

Edit: Updated, since I’d inconsiderately left a decade out originally.

It’s snowing outside, and the snow appears to be sticking. Snow in January—what a shocker, right? This really shouldn’t be noteworthy, but I’m just happy that the weather has finally caught up to where it should be this time of year. I mean, it was 65° outside a week ago. That ain’t right.