Some of you will do some dot-connecting here. Others will just enjoy the somewhat skewed musings of a very interested and curious blogger with eclectic interests.
Enjoy Vestigial Tails. I recommend it highly (and so does Mojo).
Not Chinatown, as M.E. guessed, but a dragon arch set up in Officer's Square for the Cultural Expressions Festival which began last night and runs until tomorrow.
Here's a shot from farther away giving it some context.
And here's the main stage beside the York Sunbury Museum all decked out and ready for performers. The lynchpin of the festival is the Chinese lantern festival "Night of a Thousand Lanterns" and there are lanterns hanging from streetlamps all throughout downtown Fredericton.
Unfortunately there have been intermittent showers all day so the activity will probably be moved inside a massive tent that's set up onsite. Either way, it's sure to be an interesting day.
Some of you may have noticed that comments below some of my posts have disappeared. (At least, I can no longer see them.) The option to post new comments is also gone, as is the "posted by ronnie at [time]" line which allows direct linking to the post.
It's some kind of a glitch with blogger, I assume - 'cause I'm not doing it, and I'm not happy it's happening.
I have been checking the posts to make sure comments are still turned on, and they are. It seems to happen completely randomly. On one - and only one - occasion I've been able to make the comments reappear by "re-posting" the blog entry.
So, sorry if you commented and it disappeared. It doesn't seem to be a known issue with blogger, and I've sent an email, but I'm not optimistic.
The book is just a gorgeous thing in and of itself. Brian had hinted at some of the artistic choices and technical innovations that they were hoping to incorporate into the book, but the final product exceeds, I am sure, their wildest expectations.
Congratulations, Brian. (And Charlie, and everyone who made this a reality.) You should be really proud of this book. Like Mom's Cancer, it's more than a book - it's a conversation between author and reader about something that really matters to us.
(Incidentally, looking through the book reminds me once again that, for all his self-effacement, Brian is a hell of an artist.)
"There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in."
Cats have a multitude of wonderful things to recommend them, but when it comes to the sheer, unadulterated expression of pure joy, well, there's just nothing like a dog.
Enjoy this video of a truly remarkable - a truly remarkable - dog.
(If you like, fast-forward to about 1:25, when he starts running in the field. If you can watch that and not feel uplifted, you've lost something essential and need to retool your internal self.)
The damaged, imperfect and broken have joy in their souls too.
I have a feeling that a lot of the readers of this blog are going to have the same shocking jolt of recognition I did when this young Bulgarian Idol contestant begins to sing. That's partly because I didn't even know Mariah Carey had covered the song in question.
Lest you think I'm being mean by posting this, read the bit of text that's below the video - but not before you watch the video.
*spoiler space*
I think it was 2/3 of the way through the first line that the almost alarming light of recognition went on in my brain.
I don't think Badfinger saw this coming.
I initially hesitated to post this because it did seem to be mocking a very young woman's ignorance. However, according to Wikipedia, Valentina Hasan, the woman in the video, has taken the whole thing with great good humour. When the popularity of the video on YouTube led to her being invited back to the Bulgarian Idol program, she accepted, and performed a much more accurate rendition of the song, good-humouredly singing the last verse in her original mangled phonetic English. She may as well enjoy the brief fame the episode will bring her - a Google search for her name returns 1,270,000 hits, and that's just in the Latin alphabet. A search for the Cyrillic spelling of her name, Валентина Хасан, turns up another 343,000.
