Two items seen in my hotel room (I’m attending an academic conference in Chicago). We humans are a remarkably flexible species. To wit:
I repeat:
So . . . an ethical dilemma. Chicago sits right on Lake Michigan, one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world. If I drink from the tap instead of this bottle shipped literally halfway around the world, is it okay for me to use a clean towel? 🙂
The Wisconsin Gas Building’s flame was such a pretty shade of blue beneath the overcast sky this afternoon that I had to stop and take this picture. The flame changes color to announce the weather forecast:
When the flame is red, there’s warm weather ahead!
When the flame is gold, watch out for cold!
When the flame is blue, there’s no change in view!
When there’s a flickering flame, expect snow or rain!
Today was gray, dry (after the morning snow fizzled out), and seasonably mild (highs in the low thirties). For a December day, that’s not bad. A little blah, but very livable. “No change in view” sounds good to me! 🙂
Paw Paw Incident: James McCoy Deposition (1889)
https://brandonraykirk.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/paw-paw-incident-james-mccoy-deposition-1889-2/
— Read on brandonraykirk.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/paw-paw-incident-james-mccoy-deposition-1889-2/
This is an eyewitness account of an incident related to the infamous feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. From Brandon Ray Kirk’s excellent blog, where he posts lots of primary source materials on West Virginia history.
Stopped by Colectivo at 68th and Wells Streets today to pick up a latte and some of their fabulous Hot Cocoa Mix for home. (Truly, their cocoa is the BEST! And they don’t pay me for this endorsement😄) I was lucky to get a parking spot right across the street on Wells and noticed this Little Free Library box outside the Samson & Delilah Salon.
Isn’t it clever, the way the box mimics the architecture of its parent storefront?
And speaking of Little Free Libraries, it has been a while since I posted one of these photos. (Obviously, as this post is #10, there are nine others I’ve written about so far😄) Either I’m not noticing as many of them lately, or they’re not springing up as frequently as they once did. Anyway, a few weeks ago I saw that Todd Bol (the Hudson, Wisconsin, man who founded the movement in memory of his mother) had died. What a rich legacy he left behind for the world!
While doing some background research for the academic article on movie trailers that I’m writing with a psychology professor in my department, I stumbled across a book by Michael Caine titled Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making (published in 2000, Amazon page here).
In its “Introduction,” Caine says that actors should always be auditioning. Every moment of their lives is basically a screen test, because you never know who in the film industry the people around you may be connected to. “If you wind up on the screen,” he says, “it’s because you’ve done something right since the cradle—and long before you ever made it to a producer’s office.” If you have a drink at a bar where no one has ever met you before, if you pass the “screen test,” the bartender may remember that some random guy who comes in on Tuesdays is married to a woman whose sister is a makeup artist on a sitcom. That kind of thing. Caine’s philosophy is that you need to be “on” all the time—even after you’ve “made it”— basically doing the right thing, being a nice person, and always finding a way to make some lemonade when life hands you lemons.
Then he recounts a story from his own life to illustrate the what-goes-around-comes-around karma of these random life encounters. I liked it and thought I’d share.
I remember doing a film with Shirley MacLaine: Gambit. A tour bus pulls up pretty smartly as the actors are crossing the studio lot. Fans come piling out of the bus. The driver is trying to corral the actors into signing autographs on our way in. Most of the actors escaped the crowd through a side door. I, on the other hand, knew the bus driver had a job to do, and I was going to make him look good. I signed every autograph on that bus. No big deal, right? Until I tell you that the young driver of that bus turned out to be Michael Ovitz. See what I mean?
Oh, yeah. Not only can I imagine Michael Ovitz never forgot that small act of kindness, but I also have no doubt that earning the lasting gratitude of a major Hollywood mover-and-shaker might give one’s acting career a boost.
I’ve always liked Caine as an actor. His book looks intriguing, and even though I have no plans to pursue an acting career, my “to read” list just got a little longer 🙂
WordPress used to have a nice “rebloggung” feature, and maybe they still do if you’re on your computer, but I tried to reblog a neat post on the Armistice earlier today using my phone and was not happy with the result. My WordPress app’s reader has also given me trouble here and there over the past few months. Anyway, the Armistice post, reblogged from Ici & La Nature, is about the end of WWI and the spot in a French forest where the train cars of the German envoys and French general met and the armistice was signed. Here is a link to the original post.
France – November 11, 1918 – 100 years ago , the Great War ended there : The clearing of the Armistice – 40 photos
Found this dandelion among the fallen leaves on Monday. Kind of a cheerful sight, but talk about terrible timing: Milwaukee is predicted to get approximately three inches of snow this morning (Friday, November 9)!
Maybe you’re not a Twitter user, in which case you’re probably not going to be interested in today’s blog post 🙂
But if you do use Twitter, maybe like me you didn’t know about Twitter’s bookmarks. The bookmark feature has been around since the end of February, but I only just discovered it last week. Here’s a blog post from Twitter on the day the bookmarks were introduced. I’ve bookmarked things several times since I realized I could. Bookmarking is exactly what it sounds like. You can “bookmark” a tweet to save it to a list, where you can later go to retrieve it for reading when you have time. Because of the extreme speed at which tweets fly through my feed, I would not easily be able to find things again without this feature.
Before now the only way for me to “save” tweets I wanted to refer back to was to “like” or retweet them. Which led to awkward moments like this one, in which The Paris Review appears to be reacting happily to the news of Robert Stone’s death.
Actually, in looking at that old image, a screenshot I took on the day Robert Stone died, January 11, 2015, I now realize that Twitter’s “like” is an even newer feature than I thought. As you can see, The Paris Review actually “favorited” the LA Times Books’ tweet about Stone’s death; they didn’t “like” it. I did a quick online search and found that Twitter replaced the “favorite” feature with the “like” in early November 2015. Here’s a great article from The Verge on the switch from the “favorite” stars to the “like” hearts.
Personally, I am grateful for Facebook’s “like” alternatives. It’s so nice to be able to put a tearful face up as a reaction to sad news instead of a thumbs-up or a star or a heart.
Twitter’s bookmarks are private, which is another really nice feature about them. Sometimes if a person I follow has “liked” tweets that I’ve found disturbing, then I think badly of them as the kind of person who likes that kind of tweet. Yet occasionally I’ve wanted to save something myself for later reference, maybe for teaching, that I would ordinarily never decide to “like” because it was an unlikable subject even though it was useful for making a point in class. Now I can bookmark that tweet and find it again without accidentally causing people to judge me or unfollow me because they think I am liking and supporting something heinous.
Sort of. One day I suddenly noticed the bright red of the bathroom stall in my building. Took a photo. Decided to edit it so that it no longer bore strong resemblance to a bathroom stall. Because, really: Who takes pictures of a bathroom stall?
edited version
original
Tell the truth. If you saw this photo and didn’t know what it was, would it still scream out “BATHROOM STALL”? Not that it really matters, I guess. I liked that red, and I liked the lines. So then I took another one just to change it up a little. I don’t know; the red is way too dominant. Maybe if there was more light so the other side would balance out the red’s intensity? And I would need to bring my good camera to work one day so I could get a sharper focus.
Except that getting a better image of this subject is probably not a very worthwhile use of my time 🙂
Oh hey, look at what I just noticed on the card advertising the Grohmann Museum’s current special exhibit!
Coincidence???
Well, yes, of course it is.
But maybe also a case of great minds thinking alike. Although probably not 🙂
Katherine Wikoff 