11 July 2012

I listened to Van Morrison's 1971 album Tupelo Honey this morning on the way in to work. As is the case with Moondance, I like it. And I'm somewhat surprised that I like it because Van Morrison, as a performer, has never really appealed to me. But his songs are persuasive. As Louie Armstrong said, "There is two kinds of music, the good and bad. I play the good kind." There is good music on Tupelo Honey.

I also finished listening to the Bizet First Symphony yesterday, the one he completed when he was seventeen. The second and third movements are pretty good; I like it. I have therefore ripped my CD to my iPhone to listen to when I'm on walks.

Last night I also digitized an Lp of Borodin's music, made a CD and ripped that to my various computers and electronic mp3 players. Doing this is a much easier way of hearing the music than plunking myself down on the sofa and listening to the vinyl; this way I can listen while walking, on my treadmill or driving in the car. I also selected some rarely heard Lps from my collection to digitize and listen to. I have a fairly voracious appetite when it comes to new music... fortunately I have a lot of Lps I have never had time to listen to. (Years ago a guy at work gave me nearly a thousand; I sorted through them and kept about five hundred.) As I now have a quick and easy process for turning these into CDs and mp3s I'll finally get around to hearing them.

Last night I watched the 1946 Disney feature film Make Mine Music, a collection of cartoon bits and pieces that Disney had accumulated during the war years, when the studio was primarily doing defense work. It's not that good, to be quite honest. The first segment, "Blue Bayou," is pretty but boring. The notion of having Nelson Eddy sing the part of a whale who wants to sing at the Met wasn't successful, and there's a love story between a fedora and a ladies hat sung by the Andrews Sisters that was just weird. The best segment in my opinion was a manic retelling of "Casey at the Bat." Also good was a segment of era teens dancing to juke box music. The longest segment, "Peter and the Wolf," was okay. I can see why this got broken up, with only some segments being shown often.

Yesterday my wife bought Baby Gibson some little pajamas with airplane designs on it. I notice that one of the planes is the famous WWII fighter the Lockheed P-38 "Lightning," final assembly for which took place about two blocks up from where I used to live in Burbank - ha ha!

We did a Face Time (Apple videoteleconferencing) session with my son, his wife and the grand baby. I am pleased to note that Baby Gibson is more alert than he was; for a time he was staring at our faces on the computer screen as we cooed at him. He's also taking on baby looks rather than newborn looks, if you know what I mean. He turned three weeks on Monday. He still has baby acne, which is heartbreaking, but we're assured that this will pass. One of my daughters had it for a time.

Speaking of Burbank, I posted a bunch of my pal Mike's discovered photos of City Hall. They look like the interior sets one sees in film noir, which is hardly surprising because the building was finished in the early forties, when noir became popular.

I donate blood tonight. I'm getting lazy. INNOVA, the local hospital system who administers the donation process, has facilities all over the area, but I only donate when they're nearby. Although, in my defense, I will state that the traffic patterns in Northern Virginia are pretty awful. Why drive when you don't have to?

The people "driving" around here while on cell phones don't help, either. It's contentious for me to assert this, but it's true: these are usually women. Nearly every day when I drive home from work I see a car swaying right to left in the lane or poking along more slowly than the prevailing rate of speed - pulling up and taking a look, a majority of the time it's a woman on a cell phone. An employee of mine got rear ended as he innocently sat at a light yesterday, in fact. I would be willing to bet that she (yes, it was a she) was texting, or otherwise futzing with a cell phone and not paying attention. Naturally, this being Northern Virginia, she was driving a gigantic SUV.

Cell phone and texting accident statistics.