Dave's Journal, July2018
I've been struggling to learn American Sign Language. So far all I found was this one animation in Italian Sign Language.
This improvised / customized house jack fascinates me. It was a jack for lifting 18-wheeler trucks, that this contractor modified to lift parts of a house. It operates simply by cranking that lever arm you see there (no hydraulics - just gears).
Note the long bolts (with handgrip "heads") through the vertical column. Needed to hold that corner up while they replaced the bottom sill.
Not a job for the faint hearted !
We were amazed to watch this at home on our 12" B&W television.
Kukla, Fran and Ollie is an early American television show using puppets. It was created for children, but soon watched by more adults than children. It did not have a script and was entirely ad-libbed. [AND - it was live !! ]. Burr Tillstrom was the creator and only puppeteer on the show, which premiered as the hour-long Junior Jamboree locally on WBKB in Chicago, Illinois, on October 13, 1947. . . . . KFO was a hugely successful show that counted Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Tallulah Bankhead, Ben Grauer, Milton Caniff, and Adlai Stevenson among its many adult fans. The show had sponsors like Life magazine, RCA, Nabisco and Ford Motor Co., who surely weren't trying to reach children. James Thurber once wrote that Tillstrom was "helping to save the sanity of the nation and to improve, if not even to invent, the quality of television."
It was broadcast from 1947 to 1957.
... was okay. A bit modest compared to last few years. A few great works, no bad pieces, but not as many pieces and definitely not as many sculptural works. Still, I enjoy see the talent that lives nearby; it's kind of humbling.
I should have made an effort this year to produce something worth showing the world.
Next year I'll try harder.
After some studying and stealing (scripts from the internet) I got MP4 videoclips to display as I want (like GIFs). No link to Youtube, autoplay, loop endlessly. (MP4s are much smaller files and cleaner than GIFs, but GIFs are easier to display - until now).
Way up above in this month is a shorter GIF version of this videoclip, but the MP4 file size is still only 60% of the GIF file size (and it's cleaner).
Note: this does not work on current cell phone web browsers.
What clued me to this possibility is that IMGUR, GIFY , etc are sometimes displaying MP4s but calling them GIFs; the quality shows, but not knowing they are MP4s is confusing until you understand their misnaming practice. Anyway, I got it now, and I'm all giggly about this.
Footnote: The girl in the video is using ASL to interpret a Rap song that is playing in her classroom. It says "I saw you driving around town with the girl that I love. F### You !! (the video repeats over and over.)
The garage has never been, and will never again be as neat as it is today. I got about 1.5 chords of wood stacked in there, and got rid of stuff I haven't used in years.
Those new bike brackets are questionable however. I don't like the way the screws went in. Time will tell.
I think of Brother Bob on many ocassions. This scene (from Young Frankenstein) is one of those times. I laugh and get sad at the same time.
This is the new, very limited production (eleven !) of the Jaguar 3.8 Mk11 sedan. IMO, one of the handsomest sedans ever made. Sadly, it will set you back about 500k$US that I don't have just now. But I can dream.....
Construction pictures for the North Wing renovation (finished).
Construction pictures for the front of the house (going on now.
Tore the old carpet off the stairs, expecting to replace it.
"Gee, let's just refinish the wood stairs."
But the stairs creak like a haunted house.
"Let's pull up the stairs. Refinish them. Glue and screw them back down."
But that would make upstairs off limits for 3 days - bedrooms, all our clothes and main bathroom.
"Okay .... let's buy new stair treads, refinish them in the garage, then install them."
So... the plot thickens every day. Today we are painting the walls and ceiling. Deal with the stairs tomorrow.
Meanwhile, in Lexie's world ......
I know almost nothing about painting with pastels (chalk-like crayons, kind of), but I know more than I did yesterday, because we visited the Boston Fine Arts Museum today.
First off, I like the look and feel of the paintings a lot, in some cases more than I like oil paintings. The "look" they have makes you very aware that you are looking at a picture of something that you would never actually see except in a pastel painting of the scene. It's very definitely an interpretation of reality and not supposed to look "real". When it's done to perfection, it does a supreme job of showing you how the painter felt about what he / she was seeing.
Pastels are not as durable as oil paintings and they are not shown very much. Spend most of their lifes in controlled atmosphere vaults, and are always shown "under glass".
Anyway, I have a new artististic interest (as a viewer - no chance of me ever paintng anything but walls).
Below are a few photos of our trip today.
Seriously, Cassanova was a rascal who lived a very adventurous and scandalous life. He spent many adventures doing stuff with nuns and convent girls (!!) that earned him his reputation. The 3 paintings below are from an exhibit of that time in Europe. "Naughty" behaviour but widely accepted and beautifully painted.
I forgot what this painting is called, but when I looked closely I said to Deb "It looks like her boyfriend jump out of bed and headed for the window". Well ..... yeh ..... reading the little card, that's exactly what's going on here. Hubby came home unexpectedly !!!
