I noticed that this old post was getting lots of views tonight, so I decided to go in and check on whether the embedded video was still live. Nope. So I found some new clips and also added some commentary about what is currently happening in Ukraine. Then I thought why not share a link to this old but still relevant (and newly updated) post—FIVE years old already, which I can’t believe is how far away we are from 2017!!!
It’s very interesting to see the roles played by social media in this Ukraine crisis. We see protests occurring in Moscow and St. Petersburg. We see English-language TikTok video messages of support for Ukraine from Russian citizens. We get instantaneous reporting from Ukraine. We have watched President Zelensky’s speech video, in which he speaks directly to the Russian people, hoping they will see.
And most interesting to me, we can see many experts in urban warfare sharing strategies with citizens of Kyiv so that they know what to do, how to fight and survive, if/when Russian troops arrive.
Here’s one of the Twitter threads I’ve found most compelling, from John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point:
So I've been asked what my advice would be to civilian resistors in Ukriane, especially Kyiv. Someone with no military training but wanting to resist. Here are a few things #Kyiv#UkraineUnderAttack :
I know states to our south frequently get ice storms, but they are rare in Wisconsin. We usually get snow instead.
However, we had a significant ice storm this week Monday through Tuesday evenings. Which, ironically, came exactly 100 years TO THE DAY after Wisconsin’s last massive ice storm on February 22, 1922!
Anyway, we had to spend quite a bit of time today cleaning up after this storm. Luckily the sun came out for a bit, providing us with some melting even though temperatures remained in the teens and low twenties all day.
I tried for some pictures as the sun hit the birch tree in our front yard. The big picture didn’t work with the sun behind the tree, and I could tell it was going to cloud up again by the time I’d be able to put on boots and coat to try from across the street.
But luckily when I enlarged portions of that iPhone pic back inside the house, some of the glittery ice showed up on the branches after all.
What I really wish I could have captured (but couldn’t because of impending clouds and the need to put on boots first) would have been a picture of our house from across the street, with our giant ice-covered birch sparkling in sunlight. Oh well . . .
Maybe we’ll catch it after the next ice storm, a hundred years from now! 😀
One final fun video, courtesy of WTMJ TV and a couple of creative guys out in Waukesha, a city on the western edge of the Milwaukee metro area.
This post is so old now (2014), but I just saw this news on Twitter from The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex):
BREAKING: Russian parliamentarian says Syria has expressed willingness to recognize Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states
It seems so odd that Syria would be expressing an opinion to the world on Donetsk and Luhansk . . . except for its relationship with Russia. A lot has happened since 2014, but Russian concerns over Ukraine’s West-leaning orientation and associated potential threat of NATO membership are clearly still an issue, as is the key military significance of Crimea. Not to mention, apparently, the Syria connection. So I thought I’d repost my old 2014 analysis here tonight, for what it’s worth. (Take a look at all the countries that have joined NATO since the end of the Soviet Union. Like all of the former Eastern European Soviet bloc countries! No wonder Russia is worried about Ukraine going the same route.)
I was making toast for breakfast and liked the look of grooves left behind when I sliced through the butter.
Wondered how it would look if all you could see were the grooves.
A little fuzzy in terms of resolution, but I like it! 😀
And thank you to Melinda and Wyrd Smythe for pointing out in the comments that these butter grooves reminded them of sand dunes. Melinda specifically called out the opening scene of The English Patient, so I found a clip online to share, just because 😀
The hand-drawn figure dissolves into those gorgeous sand dunes around the 2:35 mark.
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This is what I saw as I was drinking water from a colorful old Tupperware glass in the kitchen one recent night with the light above the sink shining through. This glass was part of a set my kids used to drink from when they were small. The snap-on lids (again: Tupperware) had holes for straws that made the glasses virtually spill proof.
Kind of the elementary school version of a toddler’s sippy cup 😀
The shadow of my hand, the ripples of light created by the thick-and-thin rings of the glass’s outer design, the elliptical reflective surface of the water, the ethereal purple glow—all of it suddenly converged to shout, “Take a picture! This is a photo!”
And so it is! 😄
Update: My daughter just told me that this photo reminds her of computer screen backgrounds of the early 2000s. “That’s not an insult,” she hastened to reassure me. “I really liked those background pictures.”😂
Well. Here is something I’d never heard about before, never once in all the years since I first read the grisly details of Sharon Tate’s murder in the Sunday newspaper’s Parade magazine when I was just a kid under ten years old.
Cult-leader and killer Charles Manson and Beach Boy drummer and surfer Dennis Wilson were friends. For a while, at least. Good enough friends that Manson and his “family” of young women lived with Wilson for several months. Good enough friends that Wilson convinced the Beach Boys to include a song written by Manson, who had musical ambitions, on their album 20/20.
For reference, on the off chance that you don’t know who Charles Manson is, here is a photo. You can tell by the source that he’s not the most upstanding citizen.
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Here is Dennis Wilson, playing drums with the Beach Boys in 1964.
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And here, in a 1971 promotional shot for the film Two-Lane Blacktop.
Universal Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
While I’m at it, here is Sharon Tate, who was murdered in her home with several other people by the Manson family in August 1969. This photo was a publicity shot for Tate’s appearance in the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls.
20th Century-Fox; Restored by Adam Cuerden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I haven’t yet seen Quentin Tarantino’s film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but over my Christmas break I began reading Tarantino’s novelization of it. It’s not quite the genre or style of book I usually read, but I’m enjoying it. Tarantino’s writing style sort of reminds me of his films: quirky characters, nonlinear narrative, shifting points of view, playful refusals to judge while at the same time delivering commentary on characters and situations.
I’m really enjoying the way fact and fiction are so mixed up in this story. The book’s title, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, captures this well. Not only is it a tale about Hollywood as it actually existed once upon a time, but it’s also a complete fairytale about events that (emphatically) never happened.
So I’m reading along (with little prior knowledge of the film’s/book’s plot) and being surprised by the introduction of a young blonde hitchhiking to Hollywood who turns out to be Sharon Tate. And then finding out that one of our main characters lives next door to Sharon and her new husband, Roman Polanski. I know how this will turn out. Until I discover a few chapters later that apparently it won’t. Something about a flamethrower. Tarantino’s little leap forward in time regarding this is disconcerting and is inserted into a discussion of how the main character had too much to drink the night before because he is bipolar, a diagnosis he won’t learn of until much later in his life but which he understands at a future date (even further into the future than the future flame-throwing incident) to have also been the cause of his good friend Pete Duel’s suicide at yet another future date. (Duel was a real person, whom I remember from television and whose death shocked and saddened me.) Anyway, as the strange insertion of future flashbacks implies, the Sharon Tate murder is apparently not going to go down exactly the way it did in real life, and it’s also apparently going to be really fun for us as readers to experience the bad guys getting their just desserts.
Which brings me back to the main bad guy, Charles Manson. I knew as early as the Parade magazine article that Manson and his “family” had gone to Sharon Tate’s house looking for Terry Melcher, who did not live there. And I knew that Manson’s actual target was this Terry Melcher, who I also knew was Doris Day’s son. This constitutes the entirety of my previous knowledge. I had no idea that Terry Melcher was a big shot in his own right, apart from being Doris Day’s son. As it turns out, he was an important producer in the music industry.
Anyway Manson met Terry Melcher through his friend, Dennis Wilson, who was one of the Beach Boys. WHAT??? After the flamethrower incident, which I knew was totally fictional because it directly contradicts real-life facts, I figured this Dennis Wilson appearance was fictional, too.
NOPE! True fact.
Dennis Wilson’s connection to Charles Manson began when he (Wilson) picked up hitchhikers who turned out to be women in Manson’s “family.” Manson showed up at Wilson’s house later that day, and the whole cult commune lived there at Wilson’s house for several months.
Several months!
A very weird story, and one that does not appear to be especially hidden, as there’s a lengthy section about this interlude in Wilson’s life in Wikipedia’s article about him. Plus that song Manson wrote even has its own Wikipedia article. Apparently, Manson knew Wilson well enough to have observed tensions between him and his Beach Boys siblings/band mates, which is the song’s subject matter.
Yet I never heard a whisper of any of this in all the decades I’ve been aware of the murders and of Charles Manson in general. That includes the book and movie about the murders, Helter Skelter, that came out in the mid-1970s when I was in junior high and high school. If Wilson showed up in either of those, I sure missed it.
Here are links to the relevant Wikipedia articles in case you’d like to see for yourself 🙂
I’ve been sick the past week and a half with what I assume is Omicron, despite being double-vaxxed, boosted, and perpetually masked. Drugstores have been sold out of Covid tests, and lines at drive-up test sites are several blocks long. Police had to shut down a testing site near our house, in fact, because traffic was so snarled. After trying and failing to get a Covid test early on, I gave up. Because really, knowing exactly what virus I have doesn’t even matter. It’s not like I’m going out and spreading my germs around town. Plus I’m not sick enough to go to the hospital, so regardless of whatever the specific virus, the treatment is basically the same: drink plenty of fluids and get lots of rest until I recover.
Which brings me to today’s photo. I’ve been wearing my bathrobe a lot this week. The dirty dish situation is not horrible, but there are always plenty of them lying around the kitchen counters. Earlier today I was standing next to the sink and noticed my long, stretched-out reflection in the handle of a metal travel mug. (No one is traveling, but the lid keeps coffee nice and hot.) It was such an odd, striking image that I had to take a selfie. Kind of reminds me of an elongated, stylized angel on a Christmas card, except I don’t think angels wear red. Those are pots hanging from the rack over my head like the Sword of Damocles, by the way.
As people have noted elsewhere, this is a strange virus (if indeed what I have is Covid). Every morning brings a new adventure. How will I be sick today? The symptoms morph continually from headaches to sore throat to earaches to upper-back pain to nausea to stuffy nose to cough, etc., etc. And all I can think is: Thank God these symptoms are all I have. Thank God the vaccine and booster were available in time to keep me and my family (because, of course, we all got sick together😂) from getting seriously ill enough to require hospitalization.
(Several hours later . . . )
I’m watching the Green Bay Packers game tonight and suddenly realize that for the first time in 10-11 days I feel GOOD! Like, not sick! Now that could be because we are totally beating up on the poor Minnesota Vikings (score: 20-0 at the moment) and I’m high on endorphins, but maybe it’s because the virus is finally gone? Just like that? I woke up with a headache a week and a half ago and now I feel fine?
If this is my Covid story, I’m glad it’s so boring.
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I’m watching documentaries on PBS tonight about the Great Pyramid of Giza (aka the Pyramid of Khufu, Wikipedia article HERE), and seeing bird’s-eye views of the pyramids situated right next to Cairo reminded me of this heartbreakingly sweet children’s picture book that my daughters regularly checked out of our public library when they were young: The Day of Ahmed’s Secret.
Written by a mother-daughter team (from Kenosha, Wisconsin, I later discovered, which is just about an hour’s drive south of Milwaukee), the book tells the story of Ahmed, a boy who delivers butane gas to customers all over Cairo in his donkey cart. The pyramids stand silent beyond the city’s chaos of color and sound as Ahmed cheerfully goes about his day and looks forward to the evening, when he will share an important secret with his family.
Sadly, neither of my daughters remembers this book today. However, thanks to the Internet (YAY!!!) I was able to find not only the authors and illustrator (Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland, authors, and Ted Lewin, illustrator) but also this YouTube video of someone reading the book aloud and turning the pages so you can see the illustrations. Isn’t that wonderful? If you have a few minutes, watch and listen to the story. And then tell me if you don’t tear up a little when Ahmed reveals his beautiful secret at the very end!
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What a lovely idea talked about in the blog post shared above from Dina-Hanne Siebers and her Fab Four of Cley family, including the two wise Bookfayries, Siri and Selma. I love reading Dina’s popular blog (“The World according to Dina”) and learning more about life as lived in her corner of the world, especially the always-astute observations of Siri and Selma.
For more info about the advent calendar windows of Cley next the Sea, here also is an article from the North Norfolk News. And for some background on this charming, historical coastal village in the UK, here’s a link to the Wikipedia article.
Katherine Wikoff 