Month: March 2021

Dark Monday

It’s dark outside but these amazing sugar flowers will brighten your day! Michelle Nguyen is an award-winning Australian confectionery artist who created these amazing flowers.

Artist Makes Amazing Realistic Sugar Flowers That Are Hard To Believe Are Not Real
Artist Makes Amazing Realistic Sugar Flowers That Are Hard To Believe Are Not Real
Artist Makes Amazing Realistic Sugar Flowers That Are Hard To Believe Are Not Real
Artist Makes Amazing Realistic Sugar Flowers That Are Hard To Believe Are Not Real

or check out this embroidery art by Anarudha Bhaumick…

Embroidery Art of Daily Life by Anuradha Bhaumick
Embroidery Art of Daily Life by Anuradha Bhaumick
Embroidery Art of Daily Life by Anuradha Bhaumick

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

Life is so hard!

Laugh!!

Note to my fellow old people. Do not sit on a floor without a plan on how you will get up.

Felt uncomfortable driving into the cemetery. The GPS blurted out ‘you have reached your final destination’.

I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.

A truck carrying Worcestershire sauce crashed.Dispatcher: What’s the situation?Deputy: It’s hard to say.

The four horsemen of procrastination…NappingSnacksSocial MediaNetflix

Interviewer: We’re looking for someone who can do the work of two men.Female interviewee: Oh, so the job’s only part-time?

I fired myself from cleaning the house. I didn’t like my attitude and I got caught drinking on the job.

It’s getting close…

Today is the birthday (in 1941) of Mike Love! Here he is with some other guys.

Posted by Tom in Art, Humor, Music, sixties and seventies

Miss Iceland

Miss Iceland' by Audur Ava Olafsdottir book review - The Washington Post

I just finished reading ‘Miss Iceland’ by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. I enjoyed it very much. It’s an atmospheric novel set in Iceland in the early 1960s. In this time of COVID, sometimes we want to be transported to another place and this book will do it. A fair warning though, Iceland of 1963 is not a particularly wonderful place.

The story is narrated by Hekla, named by her father after a volcano. She is a talented young writer but she encounters many roadblocks to publication in a time when the only acceptable roles for women are beauty queen and plaything of men, or wife and mother. Hekla leaves the family farm in Dalir ( spent some time looking up place-names in Iceland) and takes the bus to Reykjavík to pursue her dreams. She meets two childhood friends there, David Jón John Stefánsson Johnsson, and Isey.

Jón John, named for both a famous poet and his unknown father is gay in a place and time where that is simply not tolerated and considered criminals and pedophiles. He feels he will never fit in anywhere. He’s periodically suicidal because of the treatment he gets and the only jobs he can get are horrible voyages on fishing trawlers where he is punished by the other crewman. He allows Hekla to share his attic garret.

Ísey, Hekla’s other childhood friend, leads a suffocatingly lonely life, married to a barely literate construction laborer and homebound in a dark basement flat with one baby and another on the way. She struggles to stay sane by keeping a clandestine diary in which, since so little happens, she records what doesn’t happen.

Hekla lands a job as a waitress and discovers that her pay is exactly half that of the male waiters and she is constantly harassed by the male patrons (and that’s considered part of the job). One constantly remarks on her figures and tries to get her to become ‘Miss Iceland’. She works all day and writes all night.

She finds a boyfriend – a poet. Reykjavík appears to be overrun with poets and aspiring poets – all men of course. She moves in with him. She knows that what he wants is a subservient, attractive girlfriend so she hides the fact that she is a writer until he discovers her typing in the middle of the night. After he pries the truth out of her, he transfers his jealousy of her close friendship with Jón John, whom he invariably refers to as “the freak” or “the queer,” to her disciplined output and clearly superior talent.

There is a lot of discussion of volcanoes, which are a constant feature of Iceland. While she is in Reykjavík she notes a number of volcanic eruptions as well as events such as JFK’s assassination. Eventually it becomes clear to her that she will never be allowed to succeed in Iceland and she and Jon John leave for Denmark.

Denmark turns out not to be the place they thought it would be although Hekla does make some progress in her career. Eventually, they opt for something else in an ending that is a bit surprising but believable.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s a fairly easy read except for the Icelandic names. Give it a try, I think you’ll like it and it will open your eyes to, perhaps, a new author and a new world.

Posted by Tom in Books, Literature

Fry-Day?

Good Grief! How do I get in on this????

Something by ‘Beeple’

Christie’s says it has auctioned off a digital collage by an artist named Beeple for nearly $70m, in an unprecedented sale of a digital artwork that fetched more money than physical works by many better known artists. The piece, titled Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, sold for $69.4m in an online auction, “positioning him among the top three most valuable living artists”, Christie’s said via Twitter on Thursday. Christie’s said it also marks the first time a major auction house has offered a digital-only artwork with a non-fungible token as a guarantee of its authenticity, as well as the first time cryptocurrency has been used to pay for an artwork at auction.

A man went to a psychiatrist and said he was worried that he was a dog.

“It’s terrible,” said the man. “I walk around on all fours, I bark all the time, I howl at the moon, I want to chase every cat I see, and I can’t go past a fire hydrant any more.”

“I think I can help you,” said the psychiatrist. “Lie down on the couch.”

The man replied, “I’m not allowed on the couch.”

Yesterday was the anniversary of the premier performance of Rigoletto which features, of course, this popular canzone by the Duke of Mantua, here played by Luciano Pavarotti. It’s a great performance!!!!

Posted by Tom in Humor, Music, opera

Nice Thursday!

There’s this…

But this…

Nice dig…

and a bit of irony

Today is the birthday, in 1944, of Ric Rothwell, drummer for the Mindbenders.

Posted by Tom in Humor, Music, sixties and seventies

Warmish Wednesday

Before we get down to business, I want to show you this. After more than a century in a private collection, one of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings has been shown in public for the first time since the artist painted it in 1887. “Street scene in Montmartre (Impasse des Deux Frères and the Pepper Mill)” It is distinctly impressionist and depicts a couple walking in front of an entertainment area in Paris.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-x53RKyBKIQQ/YEfSnI9LBHI/AAAAAAABd-Q/PxA7xBnc614xHFbjG4TM0nj_B9eWZiH0wCLcBGAsYHQ/s2000/van-gogh-2.jpg

CDC gets questions

Vaccine Guidance

Seems reasonable

time for more cats…

This meme is actually very ancient…

all via ‘She Who Seeks’

Signssssssss

One of the other birthdays yesterday was Mark Lindsay who had a couple of hits with this group.

Posted by Tom in Humor, Music, sixties and seventies