More confession time! 😀
Along with being a big fan of Jessica Fletcher, I’m also a big fan of Hercule Poirot. And Murder on the Orient Express is probably one of my favorite mysteries ever written. So imagine my excitement when I caught wind of the following trailer:
This is likely what all those people angry that Alamo Drafthouse will be doing women-only showings of Wonder Woman on opening night believe is actually going to happen…
We at the Alamo Drafthouse would like to officially apologize for our role in the end of mankind as we knew it, and the ascendant Gynocracy that followed. We didn’t know our women-only screening of Wonder Woman would result in the overthrow of all world governments and the total subjugation of men, but in hindsight we probably should have seen it coming.
“Why can’t women have one night to enjoy a character that’s meant so much to them over the years?” asked the Shadowy Figure. The woman came into our offices in a cloak as black as the grave, followed by three wild-looking dogs. Her voice had no age, or every age, it was hard to tell. Sometimes it sounded like more than one woman was talking. The Shadowy Figure made good points about Representation Mattering and Safe Spaces as she idly flicked raw flesh to her dogs. Around her swirled plumes of sickly sweet incense from a source unknown, but this is Austin, so we figured she was just keeping it weird. How naive we were.
About halfway into the film, Gal Gadot put down her sword and shield and turned to the camera.
“Who has hurt you?” she asked. “Who denied you, violated your person? Who has defiled your temple? Name them now.”
Another one from Cassini’s Grand Finale mission…
Here’s the text from the photo page; the image is below the fold (and, as usual, you can click on it for the tiff download)…
Before Cassini entered its Grand Finale orbits, it acquired unprecedented views of the outer edges of the main ring system. For example, this close-up view of the Keeler Gap, which is near the outer edge of Saturn’s main rings, shows in great detail just how much the moon Daphnis affects the edges of the gap.
This image was part of a mosaic that included Daphnis (The Realm of Daphnis).
Daphnis creates waves in the edges of the gap through its gravitational influence. Some clumping of ring particles can be seen in the perturbed edge, similar to what was seen on the edges of the Encke Gap back when Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ring plane. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 18,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) from Daphnis and at a Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 69 degrees. Image scale is 581 feet (177 meters) per pixel. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 16, 2017.
Chantel. McGregor. Is. Fucking. Amazing.
Here’s a video of her performance at the HRH Blues festival on April 16, 2017, playing a new progressive piece she called “April”. It’s an instrumental, so the entire 11 minutes is a guitar solo.
“The cosmos is also within us; we’re made of star stuff.
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
I’ve decided to drop “Self Care” from the titles of these posts. It’ll still be a category and in the tags; they’re still Self Care posts.
This is one of the greatest endings of one of the greatest movies ever made. Obviously, spoilers for The Usual Suspects, but this movie’s been out for 22 years. I think we’re well past the point where spoilers matter… and yet I’m still gonna put it below the fold… (there is a bit of ableism in this clip, BTW… and no, we’re not debating that)
A little late today. Sorry about that.
Obviously lions are wild animals, and things like this could always turn. But I find this adorable nonetheless.
I’m showing you this for two reasons:
1. Jeff Beck is amazing.
2. Tal Wilkenfeld is a phenomenal bass guitarist that more people need to know.
This one is an instrumental, so it’s mostly Jeff Beck playing an incredible guitar solo. But do not miss Tal Wilkenfeld’s incredible bass guitar solo, starting at 1:34 and ending at 2:27.
If you don’t know about Tal Wilkenfeld, please check her out. She’s incredible. I might actually bend the rules* of my GGS series to show you some of Tal’s solo work, as well. She’s definitely worth it.
*You could definitely argue that bass guitar solos count as guitar solos, and you would not be wrong. And in that case, I wouldn’t be bending the rules at all. In fact, now that I think about it, I never actually established any rules for the series, so… how about this! Any solo on a stringed instrument played with a pick or fingers, a slide, etc counts. This would rule out violin/fiddle solos (for example), but would include sitars, mandolins, banjos, lap steel guitars, and other such instruments. What do you think?
I’m moving another post over from my old blog. I’ve thought about putting this here in the past, so here it is. Also, yet again I’ve got another series of days of just Self Care posts. I’ve decided to stop getting myself stressed over the daily disgusting Agent Orange headlines darkening the news and focus on two posts I’ve been promising for a while now… the policing post and the ableism and slurs post. Both of these have taken me so long because they both require a lot of research, formatting, editing, and so on. I can’t just bang these out in a few minutes and throw them on here. Which, of course, means I’m procrastinating. But not any more. I’m getting them done, whether I want to or not!
But anyways… let’s talk about Led Zeppelin…
As a collector of unofficial Led Zeppelin material, there are so many things I wish to have but don’t. A few rare things are simply because I haven’t been able to find them. Some more are because they’re being horded.
But there’s some material that, as far as most collectors know, simply isn’t being circulated. Indeed, for some of this stuff, whether or not recordings exist is a question hotly debated.
But my interests aren’t limited to unofficial stuff. They extend towards potential official material, as well.
I got in to collecting unofficial Led Zeppelin material on an old, sadly no longer existing forum known as Planet Zeppelin. My very first unofficial recording was known as “The Secret History of Led Zeppelin”, which was a 1-cd compilation putting together some of the material from the BBC sessions that wasn’t officially released. I can’t put in to words how I felt when I listened to it for the first time, but it certainly made me addicted, and I haven’t stopped collecting since.
I’d like to go ahead and list, with short explanations, my top 10 “holy grails” of Led Zeppelin material, both official and unofficial.