Birds and book, day 110 of 2012
It's a few minutes before 11:00 so I should be listing birds and getting to bed but I'm just so excited to be posting on the day and not the day after. This evening we checked out happy hour at Il Bistro, which is a little restaurant I've been curious about for at least a few decades. It turns out to have a loudish bar and a fine last word. I hope to come into money and have dinner there some night.
We were at Il Bistro (and later Fran's Chocolates where they make a quite respectable macchiato) killing time until this week's installment of SAM's noir series started. Tonight it was They Made Me a Fugitive which the link there nicely summarizes. The acting was surprisingly good; the goofy parts were amusingly goofy; the dialogue was occasionally hard to hear/follow but snappy; and the violence ("brutality" is a better word but I don't want to sound like I'm getting all my terminology from Mr. Eifert) was really damned frightening and alarming. The story and the way it was portrayed was oddly Dickensian in some way; parts of it reminded me a lot of some old film versions of Oliver Twist, particularly, possibly, the David Lean version, which seems to have been made the following year. I once more observe that post-war England seems to have been a bleak little place.
Most happily, we had decent bus karma and Gradka was not sick all over the place while we were out: hurrah!
Birds
American goldfinches
pine siskins
house sparrows
chestnut-backed chickadees
Steller's jays
crows
gulls
pigeons
some sort of swallows or possibly even swifts
bushtits
white-crowned sparrow
starlings
Book
Seattle Sleuth page 32. I read this in manuscript form some time in the past but I've realized I've conflated it with a John Straley mystery, also set partially in post-World War I Seattle, so it's all somehow new to me--always a good thing in reading a mystery. I could wish that the proofreading had been better but I'm enjoying the characters and the language.
We were at Il Bistro (and later Fran's Chocolates where they make a quite respectable macchiato) killing time until this week's installment of SAM's noir series started. Tonight it was They Made Me a Fugitive which the link there nicely summarizes. The acting was surprisingly good; the goofy parts were amusingly goofy; the dialogue was occasionally hard to hear/follow but snappy; and the violence ("brutality" is a better word but I don't want to sound like I'm getting all my terminology from Mr. Eifert) was really damned frightening and alarming. The story and the way it was portrayed was oddly Dickensian in some way; parts of it reminded me a lot of some old film versions of Oliver Twist, particularly, possibly, the David Lean version, which seems to have been made the following year. I once more observe that post-war England seems to have been a bleak little place.
Most happily, we had decent bus karma and Gradka was not sick all over the place while we were out: hurrah!
Birds
American goldfinches
pine siskins
house sparrows
chestnut-backed chickadees
Steller's jays
crows
gulls
pigeons
some sort of swallows or possibly even swifts
bushtits
white-crowned sparrow
starlings
Book
Seattle Sleuth page 32. I read this in manuscript form some time in the past but I've realized I've conflated it with a John Straley mystery, also set partially in post-World War I Seattle, so it's all somehow new to me--always a good thing in reading a mystery. I could wish that the proofreading had been better but I'm enjoying the characters and the language.