One of the recent Windows must have undone whichever update added the weather icon to the taskbar. No matter. According to Google it's 76 F in Providence now. Which is hot for nighttime, obviously. During the day the humidity has meant that if you're out for long time your eyebrows will be dripping.
Have to keep in mind that it will eventually pass. Good. This kind of heat can disrupt your concentration. Which means that just because you start doing something, that doesn't mean you'l
So, buses around here require you to wear a mask or cloth covering on your face as long as you're riding. For all I know they're going to require this until the end of time. And they're TSA related, which I guess the fed gov can get away with because RIPTA has a couple of buses that cross the line into Massachusetts and therefore it's engaged in interstate travel.
Anyway, today when I saw the bus I was waiting for in the distance I realized I didn't have a mask on me. I'd left it in the pocket of my shorts and at that point I was wearing jeans. The other day I'd seen a guy take off his shirt and put that over his face, but he'd been wearing a leather vest as well.
But building on that idea, I took off one of my socks. It was a longish sock so it tied in the back, and also big enough in the heel area to cover both my nose and my mouth. Further good news: I don't have overpowering foot odor.
As for the bad news, if you've read up to this point you know what that is.
One word pair I'm seeing online more and more is "net worth." At first I noticed it in clickbait headlines about the deceased, as in "Robin Williams's net worth when he died left his family stunned." (Guessing that was pretty low down on the list.)
But now if you look up the name of anyone famous you get all these stories about their "net worth." Which raises the question of how these internet tabloid reporters who never travel on assignment would know. And moreover, why would I care? I'm not a divorce lawyer.
Anyway, I'm sure this is all a good sign and not an omen of looming techno-feudalism.
This video depicts a sculptor I'm not familiar with. She's very good, though. Her works share elements with both Greek and Hindu models, while being their own thing. It's enlightening to watch her in the studio.
The video is titled "Sculpture and Puppetry." Apparently she does make puppets as well. They look good, but I regret that there's no moving footage of them.
Based on Erskine Caldwell's 1933 novel of the same name, Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre is about gold fever. A man in Georgia dirt farming country thinks gold lies on his land, despite the fact that he's never found any in fifteen years of digging. He won't get a dowser for the task because his methods are scientific. Of course a dowser who happens to be an albino is a different story.
This is an extraordinarily weird movie to watch. It's well-cast and well-acted, from Robert Ryan's gold-crazed but decent paterfamilias on down. The cinematography is also quite good, establishing a solid Southern Gothic feel, although I don't know whether it was shot on location or in Hollywood. But it's rather nonsensical, repetitive in some aspects and undercooked in others.
It's also bizarrely horny, straining at the edges of the production codes. Some of the results are questionable. Like, early on, a fledgling politician played by Buddy Hackett(!) finds his lady-friend lolling outside in a bathtub. She tells him to pump more water into her bath, and he handles the pump in a manner that's not so much suggestive as confessional. The scene is pure saltpeter.
Yesterday I started reading Ian Tattersall's The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack. Tattersall is an accomplished paleoanthropologist and the title refers to the initial judgment on the identity of the first discovered Neanderthal skeleton. He writes personally and personably here.
The introduction relates a trip he took to the Comoro Islands. Due to a historical quirk, the Comoros is the only place to see lemurs in the wild other than Madagascar. Just a couple of species, but if you can't get to Madagascar it's nice to have a backup.
As it happens, though, the islands were in the hands of a very ad hoc revolutionary group. Armed teenagers representing this group greeted him when he first got off the boat. Let's just say that you learn something new every day, and Tattersall's lesson was a little more vivid than mine.
Okay, this topic has been covered plenty of places, but still...
The above ad used to run in comic books everywhere. The illustration, of course, implied that you'd have a humanoid race living in your fish tank. If you looked more closely you were at least led to expect trainable animals. What they were really selling was brine shrimp. Brine shrimp that didn't always even come to life when you put them in water.
How did this company never have their headquarters burned to the ground?
