Another in a continuing series of pics taken on location while shooting for Avista’s 125th anniversary film, this pic’s a good example of how patience pays off. We didn’t know when the Washington Water Power sign lights would turn on, so we set up our gear and waited for the right moment. As soon as they came on we were shooting so that the ambient light level wasn’t too dark. Avista’s Post Street substation, designed by Kirtland Cutter, was constructed in 1910.
As part of our shoot for Avista’s 125-year anniversary video, we traveled across the Palouse to shoot inside WSU’s Martin Stadium. The remodel of this facility is impressive. It’s always cool to have an entire stadium to yourself. The team from MOJO Lab and I had the best seats in the house.
Had a chance to spend part of Saturday filming at the Spokane International Airport. Our access was great and the film production boys from MOJO Lab were all over it. Above, MOJO principal Chris Clifford frames a Southwest Airlines 737.
Ever wanted to visualize the estimated average frequency with which a Sagittarius named Amelia drinks a soda? Or how often someone in Denver orders a pizza? Yeah, me too. Check it out.
The more observant of you will likely have noticed that Tony Kuchar, former intern, has officially joined the helveticka team.
There are two things you need to know about Tony. First, he graduated summa cum laude from EWU with a BFA in visual communication design. That means he’s smarter than the rest of us. Second, he told me that CK is a “great mentor.” So he’s politically savvy to boot. Prediction: He’ll be running this place inside of six months.
Gotta run. I need to curry favor with our new overlord.
Why are writers the worst procrastinators? Because we were the best in English class. Megan McArdle explains:
“Most writers were the kids who easily, almost automatically, got A’s in English class.… At an early age, when grammar school teachers were struggling to inculcate the lesson that effort was the main key to success in school, these future scribblers gave the obvious lie to this assertion.… It isn’t that they never failed, but at a very early age, they didn’t have to fail much; their natural talent kept them at the head of the class.”
Do read the whole thing.
We used a number of different cameras while on assignment for Avista last week. And perhaps none in MOJO Lab’s arsenal is more useful than the GoPro. It’s small, lightweight, and can be mounted to just about anything—in this case, the top of a beer can at Caldera Brewing Company in Ashland, Oregon.
I spent last week on the road with the film production boys from MOJO Lab. One of our last stops was Avista’s Kettle Falls Generating Station. I’m standing next to one of the Cats used to push wood waste around. Every day, more than 50 semis unload their biomass which, in turn, is used to produce electricity.
The massive shiny blade behind me is called—fittingly—”Woody.”
It’s a little late, but it appears that Skynet has finally arrived.
Henry Mayer’s white whale: an elusive Nazi diary.
Scientists have reconstructed 1,500-year-old plague bacteria. What could possibly go wrong?
Beer and wine pairings for Girl Scout cookies.
And finally, “U.S. household penetration of soda is roughly 90%–nearly rivaling toilet paper.” Um…
The missus pointed me to this review of John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. While it’s well worth reading in its entirety, I realize that’s asking a bit much. (I’m guessing that most of you look forward to a 3,500-word article about a long-dead German composer about as much as I do to the next season of Pregnant & Dating.)
At the very least, though, please take a moment to read the first four paragraphs, m’kay? I’ll wait.
Done? Great. Now a little insight from Arnold Schönberg, another German composer who died 200 years after Bach: “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
I know it’s early, but I’m gonna go ahead and declare The Gloaming’s self-titled debut as one of my top 10 albums of 2014. It’s a hauntingly beautiful—and soulful—collection of tunes that manages to somehow strike the perfect balance between traditional Celtic influences and contemporary songcraft. Listen to “The Necklace of Wrens” to see what I’m talking about. My copy of the CD came from the UK; looks like the album will be released in the United States February 25.
In a fight over prose versus poetry this week, poetry won when a 67-year-old man who had the temerity to call prose “the only real literature” was stabbed to death by a former teacher who prefers verse. According to the newspaper account, “both of the men were purportedly drunk at the time.”
Awesome footage. Be sure to give it a little time to load so you can watch it in full-screen HD glory.
“In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles wrecked its English major,” begins Heather Mac Donald’s devastating takedown of modern American higher education that appeared in the January 3 Wall Street Journal. (I’d link to it, but it’s behind a paywall.) “Until 2011,” she explains,
“…students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the ‘Empire,’ UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.”
Her best line comes a couple of paragraphs later: “Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.”
Robert McHenry, a former editor of Encyclopædia Britannica, has his own thoughts—and a theory—about the kerfuffle here.
“…there is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on”
E. B. White, from One Man’s Meat (1938)