Found Objects

Another installment of Town Centre Cat Blogging. The one on the right is the image of Hendrik, except younger and thinner.

As before, if you happen to be one of these cats’ human, please send me a message with your street address and I’ll bake you a dozen cupcakes of your choice.

If you happen to be the human belonging to either of these cats, please send me a message with your street address and I’ll bake you a dozen cupcakes.

The little white cat in the window we saw today, looking down on the antique market and generally being very cute. Here’s a closer view:

If I hadn’t seen them do it, I wouldn’t have known what had caused this.

This is part of the gate of our old house, where wasps have pared some of the weathered top layer of the wood away to make their paper nest. It makes an intriguing small scratchy noise when you actually happen to be there while they’re doing it.

Here’s a detail at full resolution:

It’s interesting that they do it only vertically; the rest of the fence is of the same wood, equally weathered, but with horizontal slats, and it doesn’t show any evidence of wasp-paring at all.

… that ‘dragon’ is the Dutch word for tarragon. But still.

The birds all came looking when I leant over the rail of the bridge with my camera, thinking I had food. When that wasn’t forthcoming they swam away. There were three grey cygnets and an off-white one, but I didn’t manage to get all of them in the viewer together.

I find myself rethinking scenes, seeing images from the films in my mind; even looking half-heartedly for widescreen wallpaper of any scene that appeals. But perhaps I’ll just have to get some pictures of random New Zealand landscape and make up my own stories in it.

Looking for other people’s experiences I came across The Purist, who seems to have seen exactly the same films that I have. The reviews are spot on, the parody summaries hilarious. And here is The NitPicker’s Guide to The Lord of the Rings, detailing changes between book and film. Especially the mail the NitPicker got, reproduced at the end, is instructive.

Here is a wiki article about a Purist Edit of The Two Towers: all Peter Jackson’s changes undone again. I may want to watch it some time, though I’m not such a purist; I appreciate that film is a very different medium from print, but I do question some of Peter Jackson’s choices. The rest of that wiki is worth perusing too.

Finally, here is a full synopsis, chapter by chapter of the book. Useful, especially if you’re trying to find a reference and know what the context was but not where in the book to search, as happened to me this morning.

Too many flashbacks. Too much cutting from one piece of action to another and back (I’m clearly not of the zap generation). Too much crawling up and sliding down mountains. Too much Gollum. Too much simpering by Arwen and, come to think of it, Éowyn. Too much Slow == Important. Interminable battles, interminable whitespace between events (people standing or sitting around and occasionally saying something), interminable horror scenes, interminable farewells. And still the head-to-one-side cuteness of Aragorn when he’s already been crowned king.

Yes, this is The Return of the King, of course. I watched it a few years ago on my own when I was ill, fast-forwarding most of the Gollum stretches and all of Shelob, joined by Secunda (who was also running a fever) for the coronation, and remembered mostly the good bits.

Read more ...

I stayed up writing this last night but the network didn’t see the laptop and I didn’t feel like fixing that at 2:15 in the morning; ah well, gives me the chance to add a few things I came up with while in bed and in the shower.

We watched the Lord of the Rings films again— the first two in one evening as a school-holiday movie marathon; we have the third in the house as well but the other two are so long that The Two Towers ended well after midnight, and everybody was just plain too tired to face another one even if it does have the happy ending that the others so sadly lack.

Read more ...

Midsummer 2008, about 10 pm, looking west from our roof terrace. After a while the gold went away and it became spectacular greyscale, but I don’t think the poor little Praktica could have caught that and I didn’t think of borrowing Boudewijn’s much better camera.

The bats that live in our roof must hate June: it stays light so long that they can’t go outside until the swifts have eaten all the insects.

As a long-time fan of the book by Diana Wynne Jones I was very wary of the Miyazaki film. I’d never liked anime —correction, I’d never seen anime I liked— and though, according to Prima who’s been watching some anime lately, this film is not at all typical, the characters still had the huge eyes and little pursed mouths that I associate with anime I don’t like. But the friendly DVD merchant around the corner, who knows our tastes, was certain we’d like it. I’d heard a lot of good things about it on the Diana Wynne Jones mailing list too: that DWJ herself liked it a lot, for one.

Warning: the rest may contain mild spoilers.

Read more ...

This is the sky over our roof terrace around 17:30 today. It’s now almost 22:00 and still not thundering, though it’s been getting steadily more oppressive since mid-day.

There’s currently an exhibition in The Hague (which we won’t be able to go to for various reasons, but we bought the book) of paintings by the twin brothers David and Pieter Oyens, born in 1842 and active in the latter part of the 19th century. Our paper had a scathing review: the critic said more or less that the brothers’ work was hardly worth mentioning, and certainly not worth a whole exhibition, because they were conservative in their choice of subject matter and not interested in political or social commentary like the “great” painters of their time, for instance Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. For this critic, a painting that doesn’t bring something “real” (read: negative) to the viewer’s attention is of necessity a bad painting. Like lit-critters who insist on “realistic” fiction, meaning fiction that emphasises only the gritty dark sides of human nature.

I say, piffle.

Read more ...

And the bag reads “biologische winterpeen” (organic winter carrot)…

I pass this bit of park several times a week and I’m used to geese sitting or walking in the road, but this time they walked faster, and one of them went “ka-PLECK ka-PLECK” in a weird way. Coming closer, I saw that it was not a goose at all, but a swan with a limp, presumably chasing the geese away from where its mate sat on eggs.

I took three pictures, but with getting the camera from my bag (while the swan got the geese well out of the threat zone) and a car trying to park off-camera on the left only the first was any good.

Location: Noordenbergsingel, Deventer. In the background is the railway bridge over the River IJssel.

On Tuesday night, when I was away playing the recorder (still have an earworm of Scarlatti), the art class people called to ask whether I could sit on Thursday morning. I called their voicemail on Wednesday morning to say yes, and this morning I sat.

This time, the teacher herself joined in: in between giving advice to students, she made dozens of small one-minute sketches and let me choose one (thanks, Danielle!)

If you’re at all in the neighbourhood of Deventer (Netherlands; there also seems to be one in the US) and want art classes, I can definitely recommend the Kunstlokaal. And if you’re not in the neighbourhood, perhaps you might like to buy some of the work of Petrus Franciscus or Danielle van Strien. The site is in Dutch; if you’re having trouble with it, don’t hesitate to ask me.