We have two photos from reader Merilee. The captions are a bit terse, but she says that there’s no more to say. Her words are indented:
Heading into Toronto to the opera:
Hiking at Delicate Arch, Utah:
Photos of readers
May 2, 2020 • 2:45 pm
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Love the shoe laces!
Thanks, Rick, but they’re not laces, just clogs with leather flowers on them🤓
Haute couture, if ever I saw it.
Keep on stylin’, sister. 🙂
Whatever you’re sporting on your feet, they s sure look spiffy, and the colors work really well with the rest of your outfit. Bangs cut, too.
Do you recall what opera you were on your way to see?
Jenny, I think is was last Fall and the opera was Rusulka or Turandot. Hairdresser was still open so my bangs were more professionally cut than at present, although don’t think you can tell because of the wind. The shoes are super-fun super-cheap super-comfy impulse-buy online from China. I lucked out.
Opera. The original cultural appropriator.😀
Well, any way you cut it, as the Stranger said to the Dude, and the Dude to the Stranger: “I dig your style.”
I’ve seen both, love them. Rusalka is particularly nice, but Turandot is a classic.
I generally love Turandot, but the COC got too artsy-fartsy and woke and while purportedly trying to make Ping, Pang, and Pong less”Chinesey”, they managed to make them look more stereotyped, despite the white-face (I kid you not), and they hopped around so much that I wanted to hit them with a whack-a-mole mallet. Meanwhile, the others moved stiffly like robots, even during Nessun Dorma. I am generally open to modern versions, but this sucked. Rusulka, on the other hand, was so magnificent with Sandra Radvanovsky, that I paid $150 twice in the same week to see it again.🎶🎶
Russalka, familiar with it I’m not. Dvořák, eh. I must investigate. It wasn’t until I’d posted my comment that I realized I shouldn’t have asked the question because I can no longer listen to most Italian operas, such as Turandot (or Schubert lieder); I become too lugubriously affected by the music. Just tried to listen to the final scene of Lucretia Borgia and dissolved into a sobbing mess. I hope that’ll dissipate someday but I’ve been this way for too many years.
Then I started thinking about the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor and found this interesting article about it in the Guardian: “Lucia di Lammermoor’s mad tragedy in Donizetti’s mad life” https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jan/28/lucia-di-lammermoor-donizetti.
Thanks for the great Lucia article, Jenny. It’s one of my all-time faves. Saw it live at the Met a couple of years ago complete with the very cool glass harmonica. I try not to get too emotionally involved in the psychology of the stories, as it can be too sad. Saw a great production maybe 8 years ago in which a photographer with an old-fashioned camera with the black cloth shoots a picture at the end of the famous sextet with everyone kinda miming “cheese”. I think that this was also from the Met but I saw it at the cinema in HD.
You must know the gorgeous Song to the Moon, Jenny. I first heard it in Driving Miss Daisy and somehow tracked it down in the pre-internet days.
I found Renée Fleming singing it on Youtube.
“Gorgeous” is the word. And no, I wasn’t familiar with it. Thanks for that, Merilee!
Renée’s version is wonderful. It’s a great earworm to have.
Schubert’s Four Last Songs are simply gorgeous.
Do you mean the Four Last Songs of Strauss. I think you must because I’m listening to them right now (Schwarzkopf) and “Gorgeous” is the word for those, too! There’s a similar je ne sais quoi in timbre, I think but maybe I’m using the word “timbre” incorrectly.
Yes, of course I meant Strauss😬 Schubert’s songs don’t usually move me as much, though I so like his chamber music.
I forgot to say how I love your outfit, Merilee. The colour is gorgeous!
You too can be colourful like Merilee. Merilee introduced me to these Swedish clothes a couple years ago: https://www.gudrunsjoden.com/global
Thanks, Smoked and Diana, but I am colorful, without the “u”🤓
I’m reporting you to the authorities so they revoke your Canadian citizenship. 😀
Once I get my final papers I’ll start spelling both ways intermittently.
Just don’t do some “u” and some no “u” in the same piece.
That’d keep people alert.
Then you also have to speak with different accents in the same converstion.
Ooot and abowt?
I’ve yet to meet a Canadian that says that.
I know; just pulling your leg. But some people do say ashfault.
Some people also say valentimes day.
Valentimes might be universal.
Ooot and abowt?
I won’t ever say ashfault.
Asphalt. You know it comes from the Ancient Greek? ἄσφαλτος Because it was meant to protect children on playgrounds. Those assholes actually thought this was a good thing to fall on. I had so many goose eggs as a kid scraping my forehead along asphalt playgrounds at recess.
Love those threads! They sure beat the Costco PJs I’ve been wearing as scrubs.
Thank you Merilee. I do enjoy seeing your photos and those of the many others who show up here in WEIT Comments. Nice to learn more about interests and see what they look like.
Absolutely!
You’re either very small or far away in the second picture.
Or both!
It’s a well-known fact that you lose a lot of weight hiking in the hot sun to Delicate Arch.
You were all dried up like those sea monster things you used to buy as a kid then add water to them to make them grow.
Exactly! Honey, I shrank the hikers!
To be fair, Delicate Arch is humongous and it’s not easy to get hoomans and it into a frame, especially with some random person filming us. We were lucky that there weren’t crowds of selfish others that day, doing fashion-like shoots right in the middle of the arch (which happened on a later occasion).
Two places I have not been. I have driven through Utah a few times going to other places but never stopped.
Randall, Moab is a wonderful place. I’ve stayed there 7 or 8 times, renting a house maybe 5 of them. Arches and Canyonlands NPs near by, and lots of other hiking along the Colorado. Bryce and Zion and Capitol Reef a few hours south. Dying to get back to hiking…
I know it has great things to see and do. I always seemed to be headed for California, both north and south from some where in the middle of the country.
You’re in Kansas, I believe? We drove through there last Spring on our way back from Moab, dodging floods and tornadoes.
Sorry to hear that. Not much to see driving through Kansas. I mean it’s okay to live here but not much for tourism.
Kept getting warnings of the Missouri and Mississippi flooding. Had had plans to go to Taos and Manitou Springs but there was snow in May and we’d had enough of that in Ontario. Made it home fine.
Moab is a bit touristy; but it’s in the heart of Abbey’s country: A wonderful place.
It certainly has gotten more touristy since I started going about 20 years ago. We’ve been renting a house just outside of town, in Pack Creek, partway up the La Sals, which has been perfect.
Probably not so touristy these days!
I’ve been in Utah once, with a stop in Salt Lake City. We were on a Greyhound special: round trip New York-San Francisco for $50 a person! We couldn’t resist, this was in the late 70s. We passed along the salt lakes, and it was the first time I saw people reading bibles on a bus. The drivers used to put up a sign with their names above the front window, and one of them was Charlie Brown. The ride took 3 days, with stops in Chicago, Reno (the driver had to drag some passengers away from betting machines), and somewhere during the trip we stopped along the largest steam locomotive ever built, with eight cylinders.
Thanks for sharing, Merilee. Nice to enjoy the memories of times we could go to operas and visit national parks!
No kidding, Janet!!
You know what they say: one man’s terse is another man’s pithy.
Brevity is the soul of wit, as the Bard put it.
Or as W. Somerset Maugham had it, “Impropriety is the soul of wit.”
Gotta remember that one, Jenny😄
Can’t speak for anyone else, Jenny, but impropriety’s probably the only shot I’ve got. 🙂
Me, too. No, not the movement, the phrase.
I like this: “Wit is educated insolence,” attributed to Aristotle
Gotta remember “educated insolence.”
Wait where’s the cupcakes.
Cupcakes??
I thought you were the one who posts the cute cupcake emojis all the time.
Not that I remember. Kitty pawprints, perhaps?🐾🐾
Ah yep right. I always thought they were cupcakes for some reason haha. 😀
😂 I AM planning on making red-velvet cupcakes tomorrow for my daughter’s 33rd on Monday. Will have to sit 6 feet away from her and her family on her lawn (as we did on Easter with her 4-yr-old bunny-hopping around.)
I wonder if a bunny could be a vector. Cats probably can.
😂She’s a human bunny-hopping.
Haha something about that really made me laugh.
Haha something about that really made me laugh.
Delicate arch looks strangely like a man bending over from behind from this angle.
Yeah, it does kinda. Like a bowlegged cowboy🤣 Never noticed that before.
It even has a crack where it should be. 😂
🤓
Now, I can’t not see it.
Maybe we should send this to the National Parks people to add to their brochure?
Even in jest best to think about that — they’d surely put you on a list of enemies of the state. Don’t forget that the National Parks Service is riddled with fundamentalist evangelicals who allow and abet prayer services in the parks, among other subversions of the separation of church and state on national land. PCC(E) has done a couple of posts on this.
🤓
The first thing that sprang to mind when I saw that photo was “Indelicate Crotch”!
Get your minds outta the guttah, people🤣😂
😀
It looks like it’s wearing cowboy boots, like PCC. 😎
https://lifeonthescenicroute.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/mt-rushmore-from-the-canadian-side.jpg
lol. Mount Tushmore.
😂🤣
Somehow the caption got cut off. It’s supposed to be Mt. Rushmore from the Canadian side, which doesn’t really make sense as it’s nowhere near the Canuck border, but still funny. Props to Rickflick for finding the non-FB link.
👍
Counterpunch? There are dozens of journalist for significan news outlets who cover Washington every day of the year. Maybe none of them have ever heard of Counterpunch. So, let Counterpunch testify.
Sorry, wrong thread. Please ignore.
I missed this somehow yesterday. Glad I caught up, this had some fun threads in it. I enjoy your brightly colored attire. Reminds me of the attire in India when Jerry posts his travel photos. That arch is really cool, no wonder it’s an American icon.
Thanks, Mark. There’s lots more where that (Delicate Arch)came from in Utah.