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Showing posts from March, 2012

A Richter Surprise at the High

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A pic of me enjoying Jackson Pollock's 1A 1948 up close for the first time in my life. I have previously only seen it in art books. Taken with Jennifer's iPhone today at the High Museum in Atlanta. This was part of the Picasso to Warhol exhibit. Seeing Pollock's work was one of the highlights of the trip for me. All the Campbell's Soup Cans of Andy Warhol were at the High today as well. I only recently learned how many of these Warhol painted. Warhol is very popular among the artsy crowd, of course. I am non-plussed by most of his work. I took a day of vacation today so Jennifer and I could take her parents to Atlanta as a double-birthday present. We treated them to an exhibit at the High Museum and lunch afterwards. It was fun to get out of what has been a dreadful routine of work lately and shift mind-gears into something more meaningful. For me, that something often means Art. Jennifer, of course, was particularly taken with the featured works of Henr

Sort of Catching Up With Woody Allen

Wood y Allen is an American filmmaker icon and one of our country’s most prolific writers and directors. He is a comic genius with a solid dramatic competence. Jennifer and I are both Woody Allen fans. It was something we had in common when we first married. We both had seen Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977), and Manhattan (1978), among others. But early on in our marriage we had a falling-out with Allen and his work. And for the next 20 years he hardly registered in our conversations and interests. This was due to a couple of different reasons. First of all, I had become rather blasé about Allen. For me, Stardust Memories (1980) had encapsulated and brought closer to the first part of his career. Even though it was not as well received by either audiences or the critics, I considered it a brilliant film, certainly one of my favorites. Skipping over a few movies, Allen’s next excellent effort was a different kind of film, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), which I also enj

Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Severe Thunderstorms

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A beautiful, mostly sunny day here today. We did routine chores, went to a double-birthday party in my family, and we spent a lot of time outside. My dad's farm is now to the point where he doesn't really need my help to clean up from the storm that hit there before Christmas . He has grown a bit weary of the clean-up's immensity. So, he takes weekends off. There is more fence work to do and lots of trees to pile up and burn. There is still a pole barn to put up. But, he is hiring most of that out now that he is getting money from insurance and farm assistance programs. It is too warm for March with record highs being set locally all around; s o warm that ticks are already plentiful in our woods. I got two bites and Jennifer had one. My body overreacts or is allergic or something to tick bites. I won't go into the details but those two bites will bother me now for several weeks before they finally heal - which is why I tend to watch out for ticks. But normal

Watching Kelly Evans

Sometime last August I was fiddling around with my iPad, reading news from the various apps that I have downloaded, when I stumbled into the video section of the CNBC app . Please recall that I do not have cable or satellite. Much to my daughter’s dismay, we are cave-dwelling TV antennae people. I won’t pay for TV because, frankly, it seems stupid to pay for all that crap. Cultural norms being what they are, I understand that monthly TV fees are acceptable in this country. I just think anyone paying for TV is wasting their time and their money. But, I digress. Obviously, I don’t watch CNBC. I don’t even follow CNBC much. I use the app on my iPad to check how the world markets are doing in real-time. They have particularly detailed and complete commodity market information that I haven’t found anywhere else. But, one day last fall I decided to wander over to the video section of the app. I immediately saw silly financial shows like Jim Cramer’s Mad Money . Why would anyone li