Consortium of Seven: Year 2

 by whiteray  One of the things about music that fascinates me is my reactions to pieces I’ve long loved. When one of those songs cycles randomly through the iPod or shows up on the radio while I’m driving down Division Street, what are the first thoughts, the first images that come to mind?  Mostly, those long-loved records bring back people, times and places that are also cherished. Sometimes, the connections between the record and the images of memory are harder to figure out. “Desiderata,” the spoken-word record that was a hit for Les Crane in 1971, takes me back for just a moment to 1971 and a corridor outside the bookstore at a college in St. Cloud, Minnesota, my home town. I’m not sure why.  Another record, one I like much more than I like “Desiderata,” presents me with an odd collage of images. Whenever I hear its percussive introduction and its swelling harmonies, I see in my mind – jarringly – Soviet tanks and troops entering Prague, Czechoslovakia, i...

 A gray, Florida morning walk. Then a Sandy feature, Walking the dog, Who’s a good girl?  Can you tell?   One thing I love is how, while trotting, Sandy manages to wag her tail in pride and happiness when I tell her she is a good girl. I never get tired of that. ~Dorothy Dolores  H

Once upon a time several years ago we first encountered Lachlan Goudie on TV. We like a great art presenter in our household. Someone with knowledge, enthusiasm & good communication skills, someone that can teach us something new, or at least give us a new perspective. Someone like Lachlan. He’s an artist first & foremost but also an art expert & writer. He has appeared as writer & presenter of several wonderful TV programmes, notably The Story of Scottish Art, Mackintosh: Glasgow’s Neglected Genius, Painting the Holy Land, Stanley Spencer: The Colours of the Clyde, Inside Museums & even Life Drawing Live! which was exactly what it sounds like. But on TV. It’s my firm belief that you can never have enough Lachlan – his ebullience is infectious & his words & ideas easy to listen to. He’s convincing, he knows his stuff & he covers things no-one else seems to bother with. For me it was catastrophic when publication of his brilliant book The Story of Scotti...

      While it's almost always sad to see a show one's enjoyed end, at least if it gets to go out on its own terms, where the writers and cast knew it was to be the final episode, there's a sense of completion. Where this has been done, and especially where it's been done right, I'm going to leave for another piece.       But this is still 2020, and bitterness is in the air.       The frustration of episodic shows that were unceremoniously canceled, sometimes on a cliff-hanging season-ender, often where the showrunners were making a Hail Mary pass in hopes of being picked up for a new season, is something I'm reasonably sure we've each faced at least once.       I'm not going to try to make a list, but instead to just mention several of the ones that came quickly to mind as the topic came up again. By all means, please, feel free to chime in with your own unresolved losses in the Comments below...

 Happy Thursday!  The leaves are falling, the snow is coming and no one responsible is going anywhere for Thanksgiving, sadly.  (Seriously people, stay home, wear a mask if you have to go out and care for your fellow humans.  Don't be one of those COVID-denying jerks.) Look, did I grab this from a Little Free Library mostly for the fantastic cover from 1972?  Absolutely.  Do I kind of want to read a little more Crichton, since I've only read Coma and I for a long time thought that was him, but is actually by Robin Cook?  (I mean, I read part of Crichton's stupid diatribe against the well-established truth of anthropogenic climate change, but that's terrible fiction and I want to read some of his good  fiction.)  Crichton to me has a bit of a fascinating career path, similar to Scott Turow in how he was a practicing doctor (where Turow was a lawyer) who wrote novels based on their respective professions (hence why Crichton ended up as on...

                                                          You can make it last for days. Or not! I had a conversation yesterday with a friend who is dreading the Thanksgiving holiday alone in a small apartment, being rightfully cautious about virus exposure, longing for social contact, and nostalgic about family holidays in the Old Times (pre-Covid).  I got a little nostalgic, remembering times when I spent holidays alone, and so I mentioned how I coped. It helped my beloved friend – at least they said it did - and I hope it’s helpful to you. I hasten to add my apologies for the preachiness. Sometimes I gotta preach to hear my own feeble advice. Hint #1:  My mother’s advice:  “If you are feeling sorry for yourself, do something for someone else.” You have every righ...

Blogging may save your marriage. No matter how much someone loves you, it's unlikely they they want to hear you explain how many devices exist to help people make versions of golf balls in the form of ice cubes, candy, silicone toys, dollhouse miniatures, and so many more.  Better parental communication. Your children are not as likely to slump into the sofa and stare into their phone screens if you refrain from extolling how great your favorite cartoon characters were when you were a kid. But if you make a blog about Snagglepuss, you'll have people tdebate episode rankings with online.   It's free. So many hobbies, from gardening to collecting things to music, can easily run into money. You can pay to blog on platforms with special features you want, but there are a number of free sites, or sites with a tier structure so you can start off free and then go premium later if you want.  From my personal experience, bloggers are less prone to tech failure than podcast...