(Favorite) Friday Favorite

I know I am getting old when my nostalgic Thursday morning consists of reading the nostalgic posts I wrote between 2010 and 2014 on this blog under the title Friday Favorites. Yes, I am nostalgic over my nostalgia. (That would be nostalgia^2) (engineering humor) (not funny). There are over 200 Friday Favorites posts, most of them looking back over seven decades of life to find favorite songs, favorite vacations, favorite events … favorite you name it. I also (re)discovered that I was getting old back then. When I accidentally searched for Friday Favorties (one of my Favorite typos, apparently) there were half a dozen posts so titled. Really. Yes, I are a writer.

Forty-Seven

basheert

I met Muriel in my Junior year of college at the University of Connecticut.  She was dating my best friend.  That would have been 1965.  A while later, after she’d stopped dating him because he wasn’t Jewish (I’m fairly certain he didn’t know why), I asked her to a party at my fraternity and she accepted.  She thought my last name was Green, which could be Jewish.  It wasn’t … I was raised Catholic.  Our parents were not overjoyed … in varying degrees … with the prospect of an interfaith marriage.  Three years later, after several breakups to please the folks, we were married in a Connecticut synagogue.   It took some effort to find a Rabbi that would marry us.  That was forty-seven years ago today.

Walking Music

As micro-SD cards have grown in capacity and come down in price, I have gradually moved almost my entire digital music collection to my smartphone.  That includes music purchased in the mp3 format, mostly from Amazon music, about 75% of my CD collection that I ripped to mp3 files on my computer, and even some mp3s recorded from vinyl.  That means that there are something north of 6000 music files traveling with me every day.  I have very eclectic musical tastes ranging from what we used to call hard rock to jazz to the most delicate of chamber pieces and sting quartets.  I also like my music loud.  My wife, Muri, does not, not like her music loud or share my broad tastes.  As a result, I listen to music my way mostly when I am alone in the car or on headphones.   My Bose Quiet Comfort headphones are my favorite when I’m working or napping in my recliner.  Yes, I like my music loud when I nap  But in the park, particularly when I’m walking I prefer earbuds.  Therefore, walking is when I explore old … mostly forgotten … favorites in my collection.  One way to do this is to put my music player app, PowerAmp, into its Shuffle All mode, giving a random assortment of 6,000 plus songs.  Yes, that sometimes means listening to Diana Krall singing Jingle Bells in June or putting up with with that one clunker on the Electric Light Orchestra’s Greatest Hits.  But I also get to hear forgotten favorites like Sting’s When We Dance.

Eye’s a Romantic

A week ago, I posted about the issues I was having with my vision, a large number of very small gray spots drifting around in my field of view like Gray Snow.  Fortunately, my optometrist was available to do a retinal exam and reassure me that they were either floaters or products of an ocular migraine.  When I saw my regular doctor for a checkup on Thursday, he recommended I see an opthamologist and sent in a referral (since my Medicare supplement is an HMO).  On Tuesday afternoon, saw my new ophthalmologist who is about my daughter’s age and just as cute (don’t tell my daughter I said that).   During the very thorough exam, she suddenly asked, Are you a romantic?   It seemed like an odd question from an eye doctor.  I guess I am, I said.  Why?   The blood vessels form perfect heart in the center of your right retina just like a Valentine, she answered, sounding just a little excited.  I’ve heard of this but I’ve never seen it before.

So when the examination was over, she put the retinal photos on the computer screen and there it was:

And even better, my retina has no problems.  Which makes me one happy old romantic.

Moondance

courtesy wikipedia

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed on Facebook that Saturday night’s moon would be a so-called supermoon.   Properly called a perigee moon, these occurs when the phase of the moon is full while the moon is near it’s closest position to the earth, or perigee.  According to NASA Science, the perigee moon is 14% larger and 30% brighter than your average full moon but without a side-by-side comparison, it is hard to tell the difference.  Yes, that’s a scientific, clinical description and it doesn’t prevent people from saying things like, Oh my God, that is the biggest moon I’ve ever seen! particularly if they are observing the moonrise.  For reasons not completely understood, the moon looks particularly large as it’s rising from the horizon.  This ends the scientific portion of this post.  When I read about a supermoon, I am once again that excited kid with his Edmund Scientific reflector telescope rushing out to the hayfield.   When the moon rises full, I am the wolf baying, Owooo, owooo at the sky, the young romantic recalling favorite moon songs and favorite moon scenes from the movies.

A Rational Romantic

Rational: based on or in accordance with reason or logic.

Romantic: (1) inclined toward or suggestive of the feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love; (2) of, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality.

If you were to go back and examine my post-high-school education, you would see that my course work consisted of mostly science, engineering and math.  I consider myself a scientist, although my practical bent carried me into the applications side of science, usually called engineering.  I’ve had a career of (yikes) forty-seven years piecing together rational ideas and concepts into systems, then evaluating those systems according to scientific principles.  Engineers have earned their reputation for being uber-rational and I am one of them    I am a realist, too.   I know exactly what Jackson Browne meant when he wrote:

Friday Favorites 4/20/2012

It’s late Thursday night.   Muri’s already asleep and I’m curled on the sofa in our bedroom with my new laptop.  As I often do, I drank too much coffee at my Men’s Meeting, so I’m not ready to go to bed, even though I’m tired.  I’ve always been a night owl.   I’m in a melancholy mood.   Melancholy is a strange emotion.  Left to its own devices, it can turn to sadness.  But like sad songs and romantic movies, a melancholy mood, properly nurtured, can be savored.   One way do do that is to feed the mood with love songs.  Tonight, I put on my headphones and a playlist I call Slow Dancing, a compilation of my favorite love songs.  I have an almost phonographic memory for music, and once I listen to a playlist for a few times, I’m humming the next song before it starts, so I like to Shuffle the songs and let the music sneak up on me.

Friday Favorites 11/17/2011

Thursday afternoon, in search of a mid-week date, I found the Dreamworks Animation film, Puss in Boots, starring the voice of Antonio Banderas, at the local cinema.   I thought Shrek was very inventive, with the sequels gradually less so but still entertaining but when I heard there would a spin-off starring the diminutive supporting actor cat from Shrek II, I wondered what Dreamworks was thinking.  To my surprise, the reviews were good … 82% on the Tomatometer … with one reviewer describing it as An almost purr-fect little film that even a dog owner can enjoy.   Now, while I am a fan of animated films, Muri is not.   The last animated film I dragged her to was Rango, which probably should have cost me my movie-choosing privileges for the rest of my life.   She’s a good woman, though, and when I told her hat I’d heard it was a good film for cat-lovers, she acquiesced.  It was indeed very cute and enjoyable, especially for cat lovers.   Cat haters, on the other hand, should definitely skip it … and sign up for therapy as soon as possible.   It got me thinking … what is my favorite animated film of all time?   After all, I’ve been around since most animated films were short subjects … cartoons … that looked like this:

A Kiss is Still a Kiss?

You must remember this, A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.   The fundamental things apply as time goes by – As Time Goes By from Casablanca, words and music by Herman Hupfeld

Dammit.  I was really ticked at Muri last night.  The MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) were on and I missed them.  I missed Lady Gaga, dressed as her male alter ego, Jo Calderone kissing Britney Spears, trying to recreate, of course, Madonna’s famous French kiss of Britney at the 2003 VMAs.   Miss Spears was apparently uninterested in the reprise, allowing only a kiss on the cheek.   According to Hollyscoop.com, the 2003 Madonna-Britney kiss was the top kiss of the decade on a top ten list that included six same-sex kisses.  On TopTenz.net, which placed no historical time limits on its kisses, the Madonna-Britney smooch was only sixth … first place was captured by Judas Iscariot’s betrayal kiss of Jesus.  That would seem to be several degrees more important on any historical scale.  Madonna-Britney were also beat out by the first movie kiss (filmed by Thomas Edison in 1896), a sculpture kiss (Rodin’s The Kiss), a fairy tale kiss (Sleeping Beauty’s kiss of awakening) and the famous Life Magazine VJ Kiss in Times Square.

Friday Favorites 7/22/2011

Romantic: of or pertaining to the pleasurable feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.   Sexy: sexually attractive or exciting.  Song: a composition for voice or voices, performed by singing.

Grace Slick and Marty Balin

There are romantic songs like The Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody and Celine Dion’s The Colour of My Love.   There are are sexy songs like Rod Stewart’s Tonight’s the Night(Gonna Be Alright), a seduction song if I’ve ever heard one, ending with the pleasured whispers of Stewart’s then girlfriend, Britt Ekland,  yielding to the song’s seduction.   Kiss You All Over by one-hit-wonder** group, Exile, certainly qualifies.  On one hand we have love and on the other, sex … if we want the whole package, we want a romantic, sexy song.