Just A Peck 0034 // Méliès, Slide Rules, Bald Eagles
- Journal
- What I Watched This Week
- What I Read This Week
- Memories
- Quick Links
- What I'm Excited About
- My Favorite Quote of the Week
JOURNAL
This week I was back down at BigBadToyStore HQ for a strategic planning meeting with company leadership. It's going to be an exciting year for BBTS in more ways than one, and it's still hard for me to believe this is actually the place where I work.
Two bald eagles have been my home office companions this week. (Well, two bald eagles and one grumpy, standoffish cat.) They hang out in this tree outside my window and have never once given me usable feedback on any work issues.
I think I've mentioned before that Jody and I are in a competitive Wingspan League. (As competitive as a board game like Wingspan allows you to be, anyway.) After our penultimate league game this week, one of our hosts showed me his incredible Slide Rule collection. This is just one of the photos I took. And I was so astonished by his Fuller Spiral Cylindrical Slide Rule that I forgot to take a photo.
I had coffee with my awesome friend Phil who was in town helping his sister tune her piano. It has been almost fifteen years since Phil and I worked on a show together, but the permanence of theater family is something special.
Jody had a work party this weekend, and one of her coworkers hosted in a commercial building downtown. We were able to get a tour. Poking around in the hidden nooks and crannies of old commercial buildings is one of my favorite things.
Once per month, we try to get together as a family. We had been planning to drive to the Twin Cities to meet at Corey's house this weekend for our monthly gathering, but his pup contracted kennel cough, so we pivoted and just hung out for a couple of hours on Zoom. Since it's the first Sunday of the month, we also had our Family Movie Club discussion. (We discussed Phantom Thread.)
WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK
WHAT I READ THIS WEEK
In Progress:
- Playground, Powers
- Middlemarch, Eliot
- Hollywood: The Oral History, Bassinger, Wasson
MEMORIES
Five Years Ago:Five years ago, still masked and socially distanced, the Playhouse staged its first in-person show since the start of the pandemic: Charlotte's Web, and Kaylee returned to the stage one last time to play Charlotte under the direction of her long time mentor and director-collaborator, Emily Parr. The actors wore masks, and all the seats in the Depot that you see below with paper on them were where no one was allowed to sit in order to keep patrons spaced out at least six feet from each other.
QUICK LINKS
- WalkmanLand: paying tribute to portable music players from the 80s and 90s
- Javier Riera's geometric projection mappings
- The joy of other people's marginalia
- Japanese Death Poems
- The Art and Design of Expression in Historic Maps
- An archive of commercial illustration from the mid-20th
- Dreaming big is a muscle
- Gary Gulman on how the states got their abbreviations
- Ismail al-Jazari's thirteenth-century treatise on the construction of machines
WHAT I'M EXCITED ABOUT
MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it"-- Pirkei Avot, 2:16
That's it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!