Revels Harbor Island cruise, 2013-08-14 (selected photos), a set on Flickr.
Via Flickr:In August 2013, my darling ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
plumtreeblossom took me on a harbor cruise and sea-chantey singalong put on by the Revels (http://www.revels.org/). We had a blast! These are some of the pictures I took from the harbor.
plumtreeblossom, who’s also safe and sound) about the explosions at the Boston Marathon. I wanted to let everybody know I’ve been spending this holiday resting and catching up at home and I’m safe; I haven’t been anywhere near the Marathon.plumtreeblossom and I are both involved in PMRP’s Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular² live-radio-drama event. plumtreeblossom is reprising her rôle as Billy in “Red Shift: Crisis of the Cuddlykins”, a spoof of Flash Gordon- or Buck Rogers-style serials, and I’ve been directing (in my directorial début!) audioboy’s radio adaptation of the classic 1954 movie Them!. Shows are April 5, 6 (matinée and evening show), 11, 12, and 13th in Davis Square, and a special matinée April 21st at the MIT museum. More details are on the PMRP site. My cast is awesome (and so is plumtreeblossom’s, of course; it has her in it!) and it should be a tremendously fun time.plumtreeblossom and I saw Theatre@First’s performance of Lysistrata last night and it was hilarious. John Deschene is a genius. The dance and shadowplay worked incredibly well. The actors are also genii, especially ladrescher. And the music had me bouncing in my seat and worked perfectly with the show. I didn’t realize this until just now, but there was a lot of stuff that just had to be perfectly timed in order to work, and it all was. Go see it if you haven’t yet. (No complaining that you live in Australia! You have almost a week in order to scrounge up plane tickets and get here.)usernamenumber and preraphaelite). But I'm here safe and warm in Somervile with plumtreeblossom. And so is Chickenfinger, although she's been hiding for hours and we don't know where she is. And I just got out of an ecstatically wonderful hot shower. Life is good.plumtreeblossom and I are stuck in Quincy. Power went out around 9 last night. Heat and hot water stayed on a while but went out (maybe the pilot light blew out?) sometime overnight. I've been shovelling for when the travel ban is lifted (or when I decide we'll freeze if we stay here or I can't manage without my CPAP machine for another night). I've got maybe another hour's shovelling before I'd be able to get the car out; I'm taking a break.plumtreeblossom is here with me in Quincy, and we’re hunkered down for the storm. Hasn’t been bad yet. The snow is sure coming down, though! I brushed it off the car to go pick her up at the T station, and by the time I’d finished, the windshield (where I’d started) was already covered again.
plumtreeblossom’s building on campus lost power too, but since she didn’t have to babysit a whole bunch of servers as they eventually came up, I think that meant she ended up going home earlier than expected, rather than later than expected. (The T was running during most of the power outage, I gather.)silverlibre has been in town visiting for a bit over a week, and it’s been wonderful! Lots of wonderful home-cooked meals (mostly due to her, although we all collaborated on the Thanksgiving dinner, and plumtreeblossom’s Thanksgiving turkey was wonderful, and lots of wonderful things to do and see and talk about. I don’t have time to do it justice, but here are a few of the highlights:zendzian in Mister Roberts at the Concord Players. (We didn’t much like the play itself — meaning the script —, but the acting was great, and the sets were truly impressive, and I’d love to see some more of their productions.)plumtreeblossom and silverlibre and I had a fabulous time preparing food, and then we had a couple guests over and ate it. Thanks to our guests (who brought some yummy pickle and roasted sweet potatoes and pie for the feast).tamoroso; much to my surprise, it turned out that he and my mother had never met, and he’s really good people.plumtreeblossom had been to before but I (and silverlibre) hadn’t. The food was very good; definitely worth the price. Made me want to eat more fish.surrealestate and DD and Tadpole to look forward to, and dinner with cathijosephine (who’s been on a road trip to New Orleans for the last couple weeks, but fortunately will be overlapping with silverlibre for a couple days). plumtreeblossom and I are in a live staged Hallowe’en radio show that is playing in Davis Square the next two weekends. (This is voice and Foley actors performing in front of microphones, essentially as if performing a live radio drama, but for a live audience instead of for radio broadcast.plumtreeblossom and I are in ”The Crasher” about a troubled writer who moves into a sleepy Maryland town to get away from her troubles. But she finds it’s not as quiet as she’d hoped.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.plumtreeblossom this evening. I was kept late at work, and she had her class schedule change unexpectedly, which meant we were both in Cambridge and free at around 7:30. So we met in Central Square for dinner. We first tried Mary Chung’s, but they’re closed on Tuesdays, so we ended up having a delicious Indian meal at Shalimar. Yay!surrealestate and DD for inviting us to join them and Julian on the Cape! 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 Radio Theater. That was a truly spectacular performance. Kudos to Michael McAffee, who starred as Red Shift (the lead Interplanetary Do-Gooder in the Red Shift episodes) and directed “The Day the Earth Stood Still”¹.The other thing I didn’t like about it, was that it mixed very plausible, believable characters with some really implausible behaviours and reactions. I mean, the whole premise is time travel and altering history, and I’m willing to suspend disbelief that far, but a lot of the things about how the time travellers behaved and how the 19th-century Southerners reacted to them and their technology seemed completely implausible.
For New Yorkers, for Americans, and for the world, the 1920s would prove to be the decade with the most rapid technological change in history. In one generation, travel by horse and carriage would make way for autos; people would travel underground, and soon, in the sky; wireless radio would change ship travel; kitchen appliances and indoor plumbing would become mainstream; light would come from a switch and heat through pipes; telephones would appear in the majority of homes; and the canned music and crackling voice of radio would provide home entertainment and news.One minor quibble I have with it is that it’s a bit fictionalized and novelistic, including details that I can’t imagine are all actually attested in contemporary sources. But that certainly adds to the vividness, and it’s a very vivid book. Definitely recommended.
One thing that struck me as a 21st-century reader, reading Greenblatt’s exposition of Lucretius’ view of the universe, is just how far you can get by pure speculation, without formally using anything like the scientific method. Lucretius, and Epicurus before him, made up what they thought they knew about the world with nothing like formal experimentation, with no theory-testing, just coming to conclusions based on whatever they happened to observe, plus whatever biases were already in their heads. And to be sure, they got an awful lot laughably wrong from a modern vantage point. Quoting Greenblatt:
Lucretius believed that the sun circled around the earth, and he argued that the sun’s heat and size could hardly be much greater than are perceived by our senses. He thought that works were spontaneously generated from the wet soil, explained lightning as seeds of fire expelled from hollow clouds, and pictured the earth as a menopausal mother exhausted by the effort of so much breeding.But he also believed that everything in the universe, whether matter we interact with on earth or lights we see in the sky, was made up of tiny indivisible particles; that while physical objects seem solid, those tiny particles probably have space between them,; that they interact, and that while a rock face may be eroded to sand and a human being may decompose to dirt, the tiny indivisible particles (though they may scatter) never change or disappear; and that all these particles were in constant motion, and that their behaviour in aggregate was controlled by random fluctuations, by what we would now call laws of statistics. He believed that living matter was made of the same particles as inanimate matter. He believed that human beings were animals, and that the differences between different kinds of animals were generally matters of degree, rather than kind. He believed that animals develop from other animals, as the random changes (or “swerves”, hence the title of Greenblatt’s book) of the atoms the animal was made up of accumulated into larger changes, and the animals with beneficial changes did better than the animals with detrimental changes, so that the beneficial changes were passed on. He believed that consciousness was a phenomenon produced by physical bodies that could be explained (like everything else in the world) by the incredibly complex interactions of uncountably many tiny particles.
plumtreeblossom and I went back to see Theatre@First’s production of Pride and Prejudice again. And again it rocked (often with laughter). It obviously wasn’t exactly the same this time, but you can basically re-read my opening-night review and not go wrong. Of course, we noticed lots of stuff this time that we’d missed last time. And this time I took a lot of pictures, which hopefully I will eventually get around to posting on Flickr.plumtreeblossom and I saw Theatre@First’s Pride and Prejudice last night at the Somerville Theatre, and it was spectacular. Go see it if you possibly can. The sheer number of jaw-droppingly outstanding performances was unbelievable. J. Deschene’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh got spontaneous, sustained applause as she flounced off the set after one scene, which she richly deserved. Doug Miller’s Mr. Bennet had a little mime show at one point where he had the audience in stitches without speaking an audible word. Brian Edgar’s conniving vicar Mr. Collins was quite spectacular — you wanted to take a shower after he left the stage. And those were just a few of the highlights; this large show was just chock full of spectacular performances.
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branchandroot
