plumtreeblossom and I have been watching a lot of really interesting stuff lately. ( This is kind of long, so click here to read a little more about The Imitation Game, the third Hobbit movie, Big Eyes, Crossing the Line, and the first episode of Ken Burns’ Baseball. )

I’ve put photos from yesterday’s tour of the Simpson Spring plant up on Flickr.

Mediaeval word puzzles, courtesy of Retronaut. I can’t quite tell whether they’re actually puzzles of some sort or just passages written in a grid like Seek-and-Find. They’re not that; they’re legible Latin left-to-right, but I suspect there’s something deeper hidden in the layout. (The phrasing seems a little odd, and the lack of spaces - the ( Read more... )

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and especially to my darling beloved plumtreeblossom, with whom I’m sharing my seventh Thanksgiving today, and to my mother silverlibre, who came out from Illinois to share it with us. And happy Thanksgiving to all of you!

( Cut for politics of Thanksgiving. )

No time to do it justice, but plumtreeblossom and I saw Theatre@First’s production of Bent last night, and it was incredibly powerful and moving and truly spectacular. It’s about gay men in Nazi Berlin and Dachau, and it’s just as intense as you might imagine. The acting was stunning. You may not be able to sit through the whole thing, but you should try ( Read more... )

The rest of our trip to the Cape was great. On our way back, we spent a few hours at the Edward Gorey House, which was great. It’s a fascinating place celebrating a fascinatingly weird person. (He let raccoons live in one of his rooms for quite a while, for instance. Whether that was because he didn’t want to inconvenience them or because he ( Read more... )

Saw PMRP’s Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular, which was great. This included an encore performance of “Red Shift: Havoc over Holowood”, which plumtreeblossom was in, and which was originally performed at an Arisia a couple years ago. That was a lot of fun. And the other show was a radio adaptation of The Day the Earth Stood Still, originally broadcast in 1954 by Lux ( Read more... )

Great weekend! Not enough time to do it justice, but:

• plumtreeblossom taught me how to make cheesecake on Friday! Om nom nom.
• She had borrowed I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang from me (I haven’t actually read it yet), and wanted to see the movie (same title, minus “Georgia”). Netflix didn’t have it, but Amazon did, and we really enjoyed it!
• And today, ( Read more... )

So I finished The Swerve, which I briefly mentioned earlier, about the composition, loss to obscurity, rediscovery, and impact of Lucretius’ Epicurean philosopical poem On the Nature of Things. Utterly loved it. I learned a lot about a lot of periods of history that I didn’t know very much about, and it presented a very convincing account of the ( Read more... )

A weekend of documentaries and food with my honeywuzzle. First the documentaries:

Last night we watched Life Beyond Earth. We didn’t learn a whole lot we didn’t already know, but it was fun to see all the interviews (including Stephen Jay Gould - who at one point said something [I forget what] that made me say “That’s silly!” aloud before ( Read more... )