For this week’s Rhapsody we return to Liszt with his Eighth Hungarian Rhapsody performed by Claudio Arrau. It’s a lot “quieter” and whimsical than a lot of Liszt’s music but he cranks out the power in the end.
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I’ve been a fan of Wu Cheng’en‘s Journey to the West since I had a picture book about Monkey’s early adventures as a kid. From there it was only a matter of time before I read the synopses to the whole story to reading the abridged version Monkey by Arthur Wale and then finally the whole thing. (These days I’m partial to the Anthony Yu translation.)
So I’m always interested in media versions of it from anime shows that are loosely based on it like Dragon Ball and Starzingers to the more straighter versions that go from good like the CCTV version, to insulting like the Lost Empire, to everything in between.
So all I can say is this new one with Donny Yen looks… promising.
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Well, it was an interesting week for all things involving technical maintenance.
The first thing came as a surprise on Saturday morning when on the way to the U-district I discovered my front wheel was literally bent out of shape. My best guess of how it happened was when I tripped picking it up the night before. It was one of those stumbles where you know you are going to fall no matter what going to fall down so the best thing to do is (again literally) roll with it. It seems weird that after being a bit of a klutz this December with a handful of tumbles I was genuinely surprised I was able to walk away from, the only one that actually damages my bike was a comic pratfall in my front yard.
The biggest pain about it was rescheduling my afternoon around going to the bike shop which involved going to the bank for petty cash, breaking the twenty at a Dick’s Drive-in, and of course waiting for the damn bus. When I got to the shop it turned out I had to get the wheel replaced, which only took another fifteen minutes.
Compared to that, the problems I’ve had with my laptop this week was merely tedious. Over the past year it had been having problems with the back light going out to the point I’d stopped using it for a couple of months. One of my Christmas presents to myself was taking it to the Apple Store Genius bar. It turned out to be an easy fix and I was very glad to have my portable office back. I quickly decided to take the next step and finally get a travel tablet so I could do more than just letter strips It turned out that none of the drivers that Wacom provides run on anything older than OS X 10.6 and my laptop still runs on the OS X 10.5 it came with. To a certain extent this is just as well. I’d been putting off upgrading the operating software on both my computers. The only real stumbling block was in order to upgrade to the current operating system on my laptop I first had to upgrade to 10.6 and guess what software Apple still keeps in disk form and still sends to you by snail mail? (In hindsight I should have checked to see if the Apple Store had a copy but so it goes)
I finally got my copy on Saturday but just to be on the safe side I’m backing up everything before I do anything and since I’m using an old portable hard drive I’ve had way too long and it’s taking forever. (By forever I mean about 1 gig every 15 minutes and that’s not counting the number of times the computer went to sleep and the time I accidentally unplugged the laptop when I moved it to the office!)
All fun but still the sooner I get this over with the better.
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Today’s Sketch is more from the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s China collection. Both are from the Tang Dynasty (between 618 and 907) the first is a Lokapala Guardian King the second is a tomb attendant. I’ve always liked the tomb attendants as a reference for faces and period costumes (of course since most of them are broad caricatures of ethnic minorities it is easy to imagine them as the era’s equivalent of a lawn jockey.)
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Well I had a very nice evening with my friends Steve and Barbara Schwartz. It was a nice small affair with a number of acquaintances talking while waiting for midnight.
It was very nice with the only stumbling point being the lobster they had gotten not thawing in time (important tip if you’re thinking of thawing something outdoors… it it’s 45 degrees outside… DON’T. It finally got cooked in the microwave.
The rest of the spread was excellent with a selection of cheeses, wantons, and finally chocolate cake. (As Barbara pointed out it was the chocoholic doing the shopping.) As for drinks lots of beer, a 2001 zinfandel that Barbara took out because she was worried it might have turned into vinegar but turned out to be excellent, a frozen vodka and of course champagne for the fireworks.
By the time it was time to go home I felt like I was going to explode and was more than a little worried about having to fight a hangover in the morning, (and getting home was a bit of a challenge since heavy fog meant the risk of drunken partiers was the least of our problems)
Still, fun was had by all and here’s hoping everybody else has a happy new year!
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