And cobalt is goblin metal

For no good reason, I was reading about different kinds of metal, and I came up with this: Since bronze is copper and tin while brass is copper and zinc, a useful mnemonic to keep in your head is that each of these alloys gets exactly one Z. I’m so pleased with myself. I think this belongs right up there with Roy G. Biv or my very excellent mother just served us nachos. And what do you know; it happened again. See, I keep meaning to procrastinate but something interesting always diverts my attention and I end up being productive.

Double Dutch

Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist who, while not as famous today as his friend and fellow Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, also made paintings that featured strong black horizontal and vertical lines defining rectangles of primary pigment. They agreed that this was the best way to make art. Then Doesburg suggested that diagonal lines might be cool too, and Mondrian said nope just horizontal and vertical, and they stopped talking to each other for five years. Which might seem silly at first but the more I think about it the more I wish I cared about anything that much.

There's your trouble.

When I was a boy we drank water when we got thirsty. Okay, sometimes birch beer in frosted mugs from Royal Castle, but mostly water. And there was plenty of snow every year. But now there’s not enough snow and the Southwest could be looking at another dreadful fire season because they count on the melting snow to refill their reservoirs. And look, all this time ya’ll are enjoying these naturally essenced unsweetened fizzy beverages which (hello?) the bubbles in those cans are little balls of carbon dioxide which is a greenhouse gas and we’re burping our way to extinction.

In which bears ruin everything.

Looking over the score of a Chopin Etude, he was fascinated by the areas of paper that did not have ink on them. Thoroughly unmusical, knowing only that the black marks were instructions for manipulating the keyboard of a piano, he theorized that the white spaces could be interpreted as directions for what to do with the mute cracks between the keys. He was thinking of exploring this idea further. Unfortunately,  his investigations were brought to a sudden and tragic end when, while on a nature walk near his summer home, he was waylaid and fatally eaten by some bears.

capsule review

Everyone involved in this production can be justly proud. The dialog is clearly enunciated and for the most part entirely intelligible, for which both the onscreen performers and the sound department should be given a hearty bravo. The cinematography is also exemplary, with more than adequate attention paid to focus and exposure; you can really see what’s going on! And given the healthy vigorous appearance of the cast, we assume that the foodstuffs provided by the craft services crew were tasty and nutritious – no skimping on the rations here. All in all, this is a triumph of the cinematic art.

Surprisingly unsurprising

Why am I even watching this? Nowadays dark and quirky is a genre unto itself, so the people responsible for generating dark and quirky media content are as constricted by the form as Ford Beebe ever was by second feature oaters. You could probably make good money renting out a standing-set dark and quirky movie ranch with all the requisite dark and quirky locales in one place. Or maybe they already have and it’s Ashtabula. I’ve said this before: First it’s art, then it’s craft, then it’s shtick. (I’ll probably end up saying it again as well. It’s that good.)

Yo estoy embarazada

Constipado doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. It’s the Spanish word for head cold. Libreria means bookstore; you have say biblioteca if you mean library. Gift is the German word for poison, which could lead to some confusion. In Italian, preservativo means condom, which of course most foods contain none of, why bother putting it on the label? Maybe best of all, in Russian and a bunch of other Slavic languages, bog means god. But I said all that to say this: I have a neologism to offer. I feel like the best synonym for palindrome would be wordrow.