Sounds like you are well on the way to being fully digital soon. Your fat pens treatise was most interesting. There is something more reassuring about a stout and " girthy" ( love that word, btw ) writing implement. I still like to use the big red primary pencils for marking stuff when I'm cutting wood and such. A flat-edged carpenters pencil may be more suited to the task, but I just like the feel of these simple scribblers. My dad called them " horse-leg pencils".
What I'm curious about is, in the mile-high city are those chunky pens a teensy bit lighter, or would they perhaps be heavier? I too, am a mere mental mortal who cannot really get my head around the whole gravity thing.
This week had to be one of the best I can remember for a real-life trumps fiction scenario. The whole story behind the discovery, investigation and final burial of King Richard the Third's remains in England just kinda blows my mind. Finding his bones under a London parking lot, verifying the remains by taking a DNA sample from a 14th generation descendant ( here in Canada, no less! ) and then having a royal burial with full-tilt gold-plated pomp and circumstance ( and Benedict Cumberbatch speaking poetically at the service and being an actual distant relative - this stuff simply cannot be invented! )
Sometimes, we over here in the colonies really have to give credit where it is due when it comes to the British - they are simply the uncontested epitome of Anglo-Saxon class and gravitas.
Plus, they can and do delight regularly in bursting that same balloon.
Rule Britannia !
I always liked Richard III probably because my image of him came mostly through the Shakespearean drama filter. But c'mon how could Will not have penned a popular play - and let's remember that he, like Dickens later on, were populist writers who wrote to fill the seats or sell the pages above all else - about this royal.? Check out the historical facts and you can see that Ricky Three's tale was a platinum potboiler fairly begging to be dramatized and staged.
While it didn't generate a whole bunch of quotable quotes, Shakespeare's Richard the Third did give us some goodies including " A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse.! " and " Now is the winter of our discontent... " ( especially applicable to this last winter, n'est-ce-pas? )
While we have this three act play vibe going here I'm reminded of three consecutive evenings in Merida that rang a nice bell this time around. We had a cold spell down there too. It was the very southern extension of the cold snap that hit the better part of the continent in Feb. My lsbh and I found ourselves forced inside and looking for some edification other than reading on a number of consecutive evenings.
We'd briefly discussed what dvd's we'd bring along for this year's jaunt but other things intervened. I stuck a bunch of Star Trek episodes and a few movies that we always can fall back on in the carry-on. I also stuffed in the original Star Wars trilogy. It's pretty well like " It's a Wonderful Life " and the Alistair Sim version of " A Christmas Carol" for us - a mom and apple pie choice.
The upshot of this was that we found ourselves with the opportunity to watch the whole trilogy over three consecutive evenings once again, and enjoyed as much as the last time. Even now I still find it drop-dead easy to simply lose myself in the story. I remember reading that Lucas had set out to write a one movie story with Star Wars but that it just blossomed into a play that could not be told in any less than three acts.
As I watched this time I was struck by how even secondary features and aspects of this cinematic tale have become cultural touchstones. It can be a dialogue item or a cinematic one. Ask someone you know to say the first word that they think of after hearing " I, am your father " and chances are pretty good it will be " Luke " or to fill in the blank in " Let the ...... win " and I'd bet " Wookie" will be the answer more often than not.
I still chuckle my you-know-what off when I see this visual spawned by the storm-trooper road-block. If it came from the mind of a Google underling I hope that he or she was given a corner office over this one!
In fact, I am starting to appreciate just how thoroughly the whole storm-trooper shtick has permeated popular culture.
Can you think of a set of movies that have penetrated international consciousness to any greater extent than this ? I can't.
Okay, time to redress an oversight before leaving. I forgot to include the Twain-ism last time so once again here's two. The first has a direct connection to the raison-'etre for Wormhole Digital Publishing while the second has a weather hook.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
Until next time Carolyn, be careful on those mile high steps. It's a long way down if you trip.
Don
All images sourced from Google Images
Fig. 1 - www.supreme-store.basics.com
Fig. 2 - www.newscom.au
Fig. 3 - dclibrary.org
Fig. 4 - www.imaginarycinema.com
Fig. 5 - www.dailymail.co.uk
Fig. 6 - www.backtobionic.com
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