I have not yet seen “Moonlight,” but will now; not for the Oscar, but because I used to swap between Fuji and Kodak for artistic effect:
…the three chapters of the film were designed to imitate different film stocks. The first chapter emulated the Fuji film stock to intensify the cast’s skin tones. The second chapter imitated the Agfa film stock, which added cyan to the images, while the third chapter used a modified Kodak film stock.
Spivonomist comments on Huxley’s masterpiece with a line guaranteed to intrigue (emphasis mine):
If you’re anything like me, you haven’t read Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic A Brave New World since you were awaiting a slightly overdue deployment in a piss-yellow barracks during the rainy spring of 1995. Twenty years and change hence, most of what I recall from the novel are impressions of its themes. One thing I remember clearly is a certain irritation at being betrayed. I was promised a dystopia, and received instead a glorious paean to a frankly enticing possible future.
Twenty-sixteen was (to put it mildly) a rather rough year for me and those I love, capping a five-year-long midlife crisis extended epiphany.
Happily, most everything’s right with my world now, but for the gaping hole left by Alaska’s passing.
Greatest book-cover illustration ever.
There’s only one name for my next white wolfdog companion: Cafall, from Susan Cooper’s The Grey King.
But I could definitely see a Kangal dog joining our household as well. What better hunting companion for an ultra-long-range specialty-pistol shooter than a breed whose gaze is always focused on the horizon?
h/t: Isegoria.
As a child I wondered why you could not find a acoustic bass guitar. Enter the mandocello:
Hat tip: Allison Hayward, whose sighting of Mike Marshall at Wintergrass 2017 spurred me down the rabbit hole.
Check this out!
via Traction Control: Connie du Toit, beloved wife of Kim du Toit, passed away this afternoon.
Readers may recall Kim’s blog introduced me to the concept and importance of the American Rifleman, and inspired me to travel more than a thousand miles to Boomershoot when I’d never shot a rifle before. He changed the course of my life. Precision shooting, the Nation of Riflemen, RKBA blogging — the whole thing goes back to those days in 2005. Phil and I met shooting next to Kim and his son, which led to Phil inviting me to join the RNS blogging crew. Without Kim I’d never have met Phil, Dave from Michigan, Scott, Rolf, Bob and Kenda, Joe Huffman, Barron and Janelle, and so many other friends in this wonderful hobby — and also Kim’s wife Connie.
I never met Connie in person, but even the few conversations we had showcased her wit, warmth, and deeply-held concern for the Republic, our society, and its values; clear above all from the first moment to the last was the world-class mind on the other end of the phone. Truly a diamond of the first water, and now she is gone. The thoughts and prayers of all of us at RNS go out to Kim and family.
(He had done, he liked to say, all the vices.)
—Larissa MacFarquhar, describing philosopher Bernard Williams in her endlessly-delightful New Yorker article on the late Derek Parfit, “How to Be Good.”
I find her prose, BTW, to be both astonishing and intimidating in its near-perfection. Full quote below the jump.
h/t Marginal Revolution, whose post on Parfit’s passing includes lotsa great links you should read.
I found this video, film of 1900 Berlin colorized and slowed to normal speed, tremendously affecting. The facial expressions did it. Those ghosts are all too real.
To some of us, this photo has the same emotional resonance as the one of Bill Clinton shaking JFK’s hand had to a very different tribe:
I still try to reread Feynman’s QED every year. You should too.
Always nice to see more specialty pistols exposure, and 6mmbr sure does have pretty pictures:
XP-100 on custom aluminum frame. And on the C&J Convertible Rest — Hot Dog!
A delightful book worth seeking out is The Fantastic City by Amelia Ransome Neville, (link to free ebook, good luck on finding a hard copy) primarily for its humanizing nuggets of golden-state history (“Beckwourth, the explorer, lately returned from the Pacific Coast, sat near us and always ordered ‘apple pie’ for dessert”). But they’d be dull lumps indeed without her droll wit and often startlingly modern prose, viz:
“There were female freaks called ‘blue-stockings’….”
In a 19th-century memoir?
Love.
It.
Ever pick up a book, thumb it open, and become captured by a single phrase? That one did it for me.
That, kids, is what you get when the writer’s in the later stage of life, a time of no fucks given, but perhaps many regrets.
Oh yes, regrets: “I am aware in this year of grace…”:
Which then segues into the passage quoted in this post’s title, and initially excerpted above. Gives the whole excerpt another level of meaning, don’t it? And this memoir of San Francisco was indeed completed in the certainly quite literate Ms. Neville’s later stage of life. Writing in the 1920s, her voice is far from that of an 1850s jeune fille, but captures the requisite innocence nonetheless.
I came to this book via a reference to the enigmatic Blind Boss of San Francisco, whose Ravenswood estate lies but a few miles away from mine, and was the source of not a few of the hall trees that furnish our home. Fun stuff.
This is Ms. Neville (Heya Phil, y’all know the Rickards?):
I’m convinced tables of contents were once intended as marketing tools. If you’re not yet convinced this book’s worth perusing, well, check out the contents:
A belated Merry Christmas, everybody, and do let us know what lit’r’y treasures, or other things worth sharing, that you might have come across during our sort-of-hiatus.
