….that duct tape is excellent for everything with the exception of ducts, which require foil tape or mastic?
I read that duct tape was developed during WWII for sealing ammo boxes.
This question leads to others, even more difficult (like why do we park on a drive-way and drive on a park-way?). Let’s not even go there.
This morning I had a few errands to take care of. That’s what happens when you take a stay-cation. The errands catch up to you. First I had to take my car in for an oil change and brakes. We’re taking it on a road-trip to Maine in late August so I wanted to be sure Frank the amazing mechanic checked the car out before the trip. That done I headed back to Long Branch to get my hair cut. These days I get my hair cut at the local outlet mall. If you want outlet mall style, you have to go to the outlet mall. Anyway, after getting my hair cut, I headed back out to the car, only to find that outside it was almost dark as night. I just got in the car as thunder boomed and lightning flashed and the sky opened up. Driving anywhere was out of the question for about twenty minutes. After that the rain slowed down for long enough for me to drive to the No-Frills – not the one beside the outlet mall – the other one. Don’t ask me why I think one No-Frills is a better grocery experience than any other. As I pulled into the parking lot, the rain started again in earnest.
Conversation with the cashier at No-Frills.
The iced tea came up as $1.99. The sign said $.99. That’s why I bought it.
Just a minute. I’ll do a price check.
On the pager: a;dlksjkl fjksahjfk sdfd sdfdsadjk;sv
Phone rings. Discussion. Sir, it’s $1.99. It’s the other brand that’s $.99.
But the sign in front of the product says $.99.
I checked. It’s $1.99.
I’m just saying someone should look at the sign or the way the shelves are stocked. It’s really deceptive.
Sir, look, I don’t work in the dairy section.
Right.
I finally rolled into 27th Street and parked the car in the drive. As soon as I stood on the driveway I heard the unmistakable sound of a pissed-off cat. It’s Jacques. He was outside through the storm.
Let me inside now, stupid human.
Ok, Jacques. I’m opening the door.
Hurry up. And get me some kibble. I want kibble now.
Little Jack Shadbolt was not impressed with Tuffy P’s attempt to snap some photos….
Today’s Daily Dose takes us from West Memphis Arkansas up to Chicago. Many of my favourite blues were written and performed by Sonny Boy Williamson. I mean the Sonny Boy Williamson often known as Sonny Boy Willamson (II) even though he claimed to be the original. Another day, I’ll post tunes by the other Sonny Boy who was also a fantastic harmonica player.
Here’s Eyesight to the Blind
Nine Below Zero
They were too close together…
Now here’s John Hammond, covering Sonny Boy’s Fattening Frogs for Snakes
And finally, one more cover…here’s a very hot James Cotton Band covering Don’t Start Me Talking
I decided to take a quick look this morning at the Enchanted Mushroom Forest to see if anything had started happening after the rain. The short answer is that there were a few tasty edibles around and the forest was good and wet. I found enough hedgehog mushrooms and lobster mushrooms for a couple dinners.
The hedgehogs are unusual in that they have teeth instead of gills or pores under the cap. They’re firm and tasty. Keep in mind though, that I don’t recommend eating any wild mushrooms….if you go and poison yourself because you mis-identify something, remember I warned you.
Look at the intense colour on this Hypomyces lactifluorum (lobster mushoom)!
Two of the new gardens are about ready to plant – the canoe garden and the one on the near side of the new path. There is a third new garden you can’t see in this picture. It’s tucked back in behind the stern of the canoe between the peonies and the driveway. I still want to enhance the soil in that one some before planting.
These new gardens are all partially shaded by a locust tree located on the lawn. A surprising amount of sun sneaks into the canoe and peony area and less to the garden on the tree side of the path. The canoe area is sunny enough that the peonies in there do great. They start blooming a few days later than some in sunnier locations but once they show, they’re beautiful.
Tuffy P and I will now talk about what to plant in the new gardens. The bow and the stern areas of the canoe garden are going to be for annuals, with perennials in the middle two sections. I bought a couple nice grasses that can handle part shade on sale at my local home improvement centre. I think those are going to go in the garden on the right in the picture. If you have any suggestions for perennials in the canoe or any other plants for the new gardens, I’d love to hear what you think.
Yesterday I met up with my old friend Tim at the Art Gallery of Ontario for the Picasso exhibition. When I say old friend, I mean that Tim and I were at high school together back when dinosaurs roamed the planet. I mention this because of a comment Tim made at the show which requires a little explanation. We were looking at a portrait of Dora Maar and Tim said something like, “I think that one was a must know.” His comment takes us way back in time to high school art class.
Our teacher was an eccentric fellow with a very odd way of teaching art history. He had a huge collection of slides and as he showed them to us, talking about the work and the history, he would designate slides as being must knows, should knows or could knows. The deal was that if we saw a must know on a test, we had to be able to identify the artist, the work and the period or style. We had to be able to identify just the artist for should knows and for could knows, just the style or period. The approach was quite mad. I learned to identify a lot of art, but I didn’t learn the context all that well, and while the ability to identify works from slides was handy, I know it would have been much better to focus on understanding the history and the culture rather than on identification.
So there were were at the Picasso show, looking at a must know. As someone who started making paintings in the last decades of the Twentieth Century, I see Picasso as a problem figure. He was just so BIG, so studied, so influential, that getting past old Pic was a real challenge for a young painter. His vision was just so….Picasso. And Picasso the artist was such a larger than life figure.
The exhibition at the AGO is billed as Picasso’s own collection, 147 works he kept for himself. I wonder what that really means. It could mean they’re paintings he forgot about in some warehouse, or maybe ones he didn’t think were good enough to sell, or maybe some of them really were paintings he liked to have around the house. Who knows. The idea that Pic kept these particular ones for himself seems odd.
The exhibition covers work done from the early part of the century right to the early 70s – a huge span by any account. As we walked through the rooms, I could not help thinking that the early work seems really ordinary now. I once thought it was important because we studied it and it was after all Picasso…but yesterday, walking through the galleries, the early material was ordinary. There were some compelling works from the teens and the twenties in the show but really I perked up when we came to a group of larger paintings from the 30s. Large Still Life with a Pedestal Table seems decorative today, but also confident, playful, bold and colourful. The 1934 Nude in a Garden, a strange, fleshy, erotic painting hanging near it stopped me in my tracks. Wow, this guy really treated women as objects in his work, didn’t he?
The painter in me was very interested in a series of photos shot by Dora Maar of Picasso’s Guernica in progress. How fantastic to see this painting emerge and change along the way, starting with a line drawing, white on black ground, with the painting build in sections and transformed considerably along the way. I found that glimpse into Pic’s studio to be exciting and fascinating.
I can understand the focus historians have in the cubist works, but for me the highlight of this exhibition were Picasso’s later paintings. I loved his 1970 Matador, and The Kiss from 1969 and most of the other late works. It seemed to me what were previously stylistic constraints had become tools or elements he could use or not use along the way. The late paintings feel direct, inventive and playful and have a feeling of spontaneity that I appreciate. Walking through the exhibition, I thought it must have been difficult for Picasso to keep painting, to keep it interesting under the weight of his own body of work and his own stupendous fame. And yet the paintings suggest that the old guy improvised with the ease that most of us breathe.
The show was a mixed bag. I don’t think it was all good. I commented to Tim that I found some of the paintings to not be convincing in the fullness of time, while others still held up fine through my eyes. I suppose a somewhat scattered experience can be expected in an exhibition that covers 7 decades. I haven’t really considered Picasso’s paintings in some years, so it was a great opportunity to reconsider these paintings.
Dean Martin
What’s your favourite song about drinking?
Today Lorraine our most fantastic groomer cleaned up Ellie Mae and Memphis. This involved stripping out loads of underfur, followed by a bath, conditioner and a blow-dry. Most of the hair that comes out when our girls shed is the underfur you see on the ground in these photos. We brush out what we can, but Lorraine gets most of the undercoat out.
27th Street 