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Saturday, February 5th, 2011
Here are three pictures I took while Sylvia and I were looking at the Egyptian exhibit at the Met this afternoon.
This is from the beginning of a long scroll, it stretched across a full wall. I am in general not careful about reading labels in museums, so cannot tell you much about the scroll.*
Ibis-headed Thoth, facing himself in the center column, is the god credited with the invention of language and writing -- an appropriate frontspiece for the document.Three small Thoths** are grouped together here:
In addition to an ibis' head the god may be depicted with a baboon's head. The ibis in the middle, watching over his likeness, must be related. I felt lucky to spot this relief on the way out of the museum: 
Just breathtaking. I had not been to see this exhibit in quite a while; indeed this may be the first time I ever really gave it any of the attention it deserves. Very happy about Sylvia's newly blossoming interest in mythology and ancient cultures.
 *(added) Aha! But they have much of the metadata online. I think it was likely a papyrus belonging to the Priest of Horus, Imhotep. **These are: Striding Thoth, Thoth as Ibis, and Figure of a Cynocæphalus Ape.
posted evening of February 5th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, January 15th, 2011
We got video!
videography: Sylvia
OK, this is bugging me: where is the "Finneganagainagain" thing from? Some kind of children's song about Jim Finnegan? Aha! No, "Michael" Finnegan.
posted evening of January 15th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, December 26th, 2010
...in the winter-time... Sylvia and I worked a puzzle together, a gift she and Ellen got for me this fall when they traveled to visit Sybil. I hereby declare the persistence of memory officially disintegrated! We also spent some time playing chess -- I won but she gave me a good run for my money. The set is a gift from my father and mother, an old set which I remember from our household growing up:
posted afternoon of December 26th, 2010: 4 responses
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Sunday, November 28th, 2010
 Sylvia and I watched a lovely movie this evening, "The Secret of Kells." References a hugely diverse set of source materials from My Name is Red* to Alice in Wonderland/Golden Compass/Chronicles of Narnia to Borges (specifically "The Theologians" but also "The Immortal" in places), and of course to the Book of Kells itself... And on top of it all, a real treat of a story in itself -- highly enjoyable without reference to any of these parallels I'm thinking of being necessary.
 *No clips of The Secret of Kells are online besides the trailer; if they were, I would post the scene of Brother Aiden and Brendan making green ink side by side with the passage from My Name is Red narrated by red ink.
posted evening of November 28th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, September 19th, 2010
 Sylvia's birthday party at the Raptor Trust was great fun and for me, a chance to see something new; I had never been there before. Sylvia got this great shot of a turkey vulture peering out at us.
Mountain Station played the Lenox Pl. block party and we had a ball with it. Several mix-ups on both our parts in terms of what lyrics were coming next... But from where I was standing it came out sounding very good. In the next few days I should get a chance to listen to what the recording sounds like.
posted evening of September 19th, 2010: 1 response
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Saturday, September 18th, 2010
Lots of stuff going on this weekend! Sylvia (a child of the millenium, a dragon baby) is as of today, no longer able to write her age with a single digit (assuming of course that she is writing in decimal notation). We are having a birthday dinner with some friends this evening, and tomorrow afternoon her party will be at the Raptor Trust in the Great Swamp. The other big activity for me, outside of celebrating Sylvia's birthday, is fiddling. Barbara Lamb is in town this weekend, she's giving a concert at Menzel Violins tomorrow afternoon -- I can't make it because of the party, alas, but I've arranged for a fiddle lesson this morning. Really looking forward to it! I've learned her jig "Twisty Girl", I'm hoping she'll teach me "Älgen på taket". And the fiddling continues this afternoon, when Mountain Station (i.e. me and John) will have its first gig, at John's neighborhood block party. I'm pretty shocked at the amount of music we are comfortable playing -- we didn't work out a set list exactly, but we have enough songs to play for an hour set easily, and the order of the songs will determine itself...
posted morning of September 18th, 2010: 4 responses
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Sunday, August first, 2010
We dropped Sylvia off today for her first vacation away from home -- she's spending the next two weeks at Journey's End Farm Camp in Sterling, PA. Here she is with her bunkhouse counselor Michaela, in the sunflower patch just outside her door... (Click the image for more camp photos.)
posted afternoon of August first, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, July first, 2010
Thanks to a note at The Wooster Collective, I see that Hampton Beach, NH held its annual sand-castle competition last week; pictures of the winning sculptures are up at hamptonbeach.org. My favorite is Marielle Heesels' entry, "Drowning in Love": Bonus readin Family Album content below the fold.
As it turns out, we were in Hampton Beach once, about 8 years back. In July, 2002 I took a chair-building class at Mike Dunbar's Windsor Institute, just down the road from there in Hampton. One of the earliest pictures from our family album, Sylvia on the beach mugging for the camera:
↻...done
posted afternoon of July first, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, May 15th, 2010
I wonder how much J.K. Rowling's diction actually resembles Charles Dickens', and how much that is a figment of my imagination inspired by their nationality and by the audio book format. I've been listening to Bleak House on tape for the last few days, and loving it (though to be honest, I don't think I would be digging it as much if I had not read the book already); my previous experience with audio books is mostly overhearing the Harry Potter books that Sylvia listens to from noon to night... but the expressions (and the characters' names) in Bleak House are definitely reminding me of Rowling! To be sure, Robert Whitfield (who is reading Bleak House) has a similar voice to Jim Dale's, and similar affectations -- I wonder if the creaky old-person's voice is a standard element of audiobook-reader training... Anyway, I got the idea that Sylvia might enjoy reading Dickens. So when we were at the bookstore today, I bought her a copy of David Copperfield, which neither of us has read, which I am hoping she will read and recommend to me... Virginia Woolf called it, in a pull-quote on the back cover, "the most perfect of all the Dickens novels."
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, March 14th, 2010
I went to see Alice in Wonderland with Sylvia this afternoon. (That is to say, "Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3-D"...) I was kind of expecting not to like it, based on a general inbred aversion to commercializing the classics and on a negative review I had read in the NY Times; but it won me over, mostly. Burton really succeeded in completely imagining the world of the movie, with gorgeous photography and animation; the world of Carroll's books was present but Burton was not tied in to imitating it, and there was a reason given in the screenplay for why this was so -- the world of the books was assumed as part of the background of the world of the movie. (I also really enjoyed the use of 3-D in this film, maybe moreso than any other 3-D movie I've been to so far.) I had a hard time getting fully inside the movie, but I'm blaming my own blinders for that rather than the director's vision -- I set out trying to find fault, and spent too much of my time internally carping about how it was not that way in the book, instead of letting myself go. (And to be sure, the adaptation of the elements of Carroll's plot to a Narnia-style battle between forces of good and evil is heavy-handed, there's no getting around that -- part of the letting myself go that I did intermittently was laughing at the sillyness of this, so that I could get into it.) Sylvia was not doing this kind of nit-picking, and she paid it what seems to me like the ultimate compliment on our way out of the theater, that you could really tell Burton had read the book before he made the movie.
posted afternoon of March 14th, 2010: Respond
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