I started writing this on the 27th, not knowing for sure if I'd do another one between now and the 31st. I still don't want to do a summary of the year, or a year end top 10 list of something.
In fact, just at this very moment, I don't quite know what I'm going to write, or what photos might be included, but I suppose that's nothing new. (Goes away to drink more coffee and give the demanding mammal a fuzzy blanket lap.)
It was one of these bags of coffee. They're all amazing!
Just lately I've revisited Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's been 50 years since it came out, and before that it was a stage show. I'd heard of it, but didn't see it till sometime late in 1980 when I went to a midnight showing at one of the local movie theatres. It was quite the experience with people singing along or shouting at the screen.
At the time I was a repressed white boy kind of down on sub-cultures, and no real awareness of how sub some of the cultures could be. Then again, recall that one of my high school teachers thought, and said out loud, that anybody 'found in' during one of the bath house raids then taking place in Toronto in the 70's should be shot in the street.
I've seen it any number of times since, of course. Usually in a midnight showing, and that could be fun depending on the theatre and the crowd. The wildest was during a showing where the theatre was going to be closing down for renovations, and they said have at it. The quietest happened at a science fiction convention, of all places, during a late night showing. I started singing along to the opening, and was shushed. I made some of the standard responses, and was asked to leave. Several of the audience wanted to actually watch the movie as is, and were taking notes. Imagine that. We have the DVD. I sing along. Without shame. The cats hide.
What got me going on all this was one of those reaction videos. The Charismatic Voice reviewed the whole thing, and it was more fun watching her face than anything else. She had no idea what to expect and was somewhat shocked.
In one sense the reaction videos are fun, watching young people 'discover' things that are familiar to me and nearly anyone else my age. Sometimes they're interesting, in that they are picking out things I hadn't noticed. But some of them are hard to believe, like the young-ish (he appears) music producer (he says) that has never listened to The Beatles (he says with a straight face). How is that possible? Some rapper kid who has never heard of Pink Floyd I'll give you.
Some of that gets driven by current events, like Brian Wilson dying. People dive in and listen to work they might only have heard in passing, and suddenly appreciate that one of the great musical geniuses of all time has passed away.
Us boomers are going to get a lot of that over the coming years. Brigette Bardot died yesterday at age 91. There's a lot of people who remember her frolicking around wearing not much in various 1960's movies. Mick Jagger seems to be going strong at 82, and the same for Paul McCartney (speaking of one of the other musical geniuses of our time.) Dick Van Dyke just passed 100, still doing his thing. I remember him from the Disney movies of my childhood. Good for them and all the other creative people out there still doing their thing, whether anyone is paying attention or not. Don't get me started about attention seeking, and brands, and chasing the algorithm.
I sometimes envision a map in my head, sort of like the famous Tube map for the London Underground. My time line is of course a nice straight line. Along side it for a while are the time lines for people active in my life, colour coded for different roles, such as family, work colleagues, friends might be different shades of colour depending on if they are triathlon, or SCA, or photography buddies. Most of these veer in from left field, track with me for a while, and veer off again. They, of course, would say theirs is the straight line, and I'm the one the veered in and out. Fair enough.
Every now and then I wonder what happened to all those people. I might miss news of someone because I'm not on Facebook much anymore, and Facebook screwing with the algorithm to determine who sees what has nothing to do with it, oh no. Some of them have died, I know that, including a kid in my home room class in grade 9 who barely got out of high school. Some people I knew have almost certainly died, and I might never know it. I understand why some people read the obit page first. I could die and them not know, which is almost a certainty given that I'm such a low profile person leading a low profile life.
So you knew I had to. The Herald obit includes a Dick Argatoff, 1951 to 2025. I'm pretty sure he was a contractor I interacted with during my time at Amoco. There are a few people listed that are younger than me, including a child, which I'm sure is heartbreaking for their family.
If you've been following along you probably heard I had an MRI done on Halloween, and shortly after got told I DIDN'T have cancer. Reassuring news, though that could change next year, or next decade. After all, everything causes cancer. As an aside, sometime next month I send the radon testing thingie and my toenail clippings in and sometime later I'll find out if our house has radon in it. Which it probably does, though the actual level of exposure is unknown. After living here for 40 years I kind of wonder if it's worth mitigating the exposure for whatever time we have left. I'm trying not to think about the reaction of field staff during a gas plant turnaround being told they had to wait for benzene testing before they could start some kinds of work. They were unconcerned, thinking it was all a make work project for the health and safety people.
So I've let this germinate a couple days and it's time to send it.
Of the Day
Driftwood (NZ)
Driftwood (NB)
Film
At least I didn't have to worry about dust spots on this one.
Linda
Newfoundland
New Brunswick
Finding this one took a bit of doing, with Mrs Google once again telling us what is the shorter path, but longer drive. Parking for it is kind of tricky, involving a hill and a blind corner. Good thing there wasn't much traffic.
Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did
Probably because I'm dying of envy at the people living there. Can you imagine?
I think this is somewhere on the Coromandel peninsula, maybe Hahei beach.
90 days, or so ago
Inside the Miscou lighthouse.
Flower
Landscape
One of the main roads in New Zealand.
Dino related
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