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| I Voted |
Here is what White House insiders are now leaking to the Daily Mail, the Daily Beast and anyone else who will listen, because the first rule of a Trump disaster is that everyone inside it immediately starts talking.Within an hour of the first results on Tuesday night, Trump retreated to the second-floor private residence with Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old aide who follows him around with a printer, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. He put Fox News on. And then, according to one source, he stopped speaking. Not quiet. Not sulking. Paralyzed. One insider described him as barely getting a word out. Another said the residence was “very, very dark” and called it a dark scene, which is the kind of thing you say when you want the reporter to understand you mean the lighting and the man.
Downstairs, Cabinet officials, advisers and MAGA hangers-on had gathered in the East Room expecting a party. Somebody had ordered platters of Cheesecake Factory appetizers. The word used by the Mail’s source for this plan was “delusional,” and I don’t think I can improve on it. By 10 o’clock, the trays were uneaten, and the senior people were gone, out the door and into the bars of Washington to drink and figure out who was going to get fired.
On a peronal note, my ex-wife won election to the Fairfield Township Board of Elections in Indiana. Go, Amy!
We just got back from seeing Wildwood. If you haven't heard about it, it's a fantasy epic, filmed in a mix of stop-motion and digital, produced by the same people who did Coraline. And it is amazing.
I haven't seen a film that drew me into its world in years the way Wildwood did. I'd compare it to the first Avatar or Lord of the Rings in that respect. The story is OK with a mix of many standard fantasy tropes with some sly humour thrown in for the adults. (It's rated PG-13; I wouldn't bring a six-year-old to it.) But visually, it's jaw dropping. Don't be put off by the stop motion; it's better than most of the CGI superhero epics polluting the screens these days.
Try to see it in a theatre instead of waiting for streaming. You need the big screen to appreciate the detail that went into building the world. Even having watched the "Making of" video, I still can't imagine the amount of effort it must have taken to bring Wildwood to the screen.
We went to an afternoon screening and there were maybe a dozen people in the theatre. I hope evening shows draw a bigger audience; I would really like to see this be a big hit. Even if it doesn't draw huge audiences, I think it will become a movie that people will still be watching twenty years from now.
Once more, it's time for 30 Days of Dead where for each day in November you can download a high-quality MP3 of a Grateful Dead song. Even better than that, it's free.
t's a Dead Head's most wonderful time of the year! Welcome to another 30 days of unreleased Grateful Dead tracks from the vault, one for every day of November, selected by archivist and producer David Lemieux. The tracks are yours, 100% free gua-ran-teed, but the real fun is taking part in the challenge for the chance to win some sweet swag from the Dead.
I've been downloading these since they started in 2010 and spent many hours listening and enjoying the Dead's music.
Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in October. We're back to watching more TV now that the Jays season is over.
It being autumn (and a rather pleasant one), it's appropriate that this week's photo of a tree, with some leaves still remaining. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro, slightly cropped and with the Dynamic filter applied in Google Photos.
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| An autumn tree |
I am continually amazed at the gems that keep popping up in my YouTube feed. This week's example is a concert by the Mahavishnu Orchestra playing at the Skytop Lounge at the Syracuse University on April 29, 1972.
I saw them about 10 months later at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto. From what I remember, the setlist was very similar to the one in this video. It was one of the best concerts I have ever seen. The band was telepathically connected and played over an hour of blazing, intense, and transcendent music. I saw them twice more in the 1970s, but neither of those concerts came close to the level of the Toronto concert.
The musicians in this early version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra were:
The performance in this video comes close. The video quality is not great (it could use some AI upscaling), the audio is OK, but the performance is spectacular.. Enjoy.
