Lots of rain here, big thunderstorm yesterday that knocked out the electricity for 3 hours. Thank goodness the rain had cooled things off or it would have been unbearable. The humidity is awful and it's really early in the year for that.
I'm almost through with a crochet project, will show it soon. And as always I've been reading.
Just for fun I read Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon. Quick, fun read, kept picturing Humphrey Bogart through the whole thing. It was originally published in 1930 and considering that it's a little gem. We've never seen the whole movie, just parts of it, now I want to see the whole thing.
A really great book I just finished is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and I almost gave it a miss because of all the hype about it. But it lives up to the hype and even surpasses it. Called a apocalyptic fantasy it's so much more. It opens with a presentation of King Lear in Toronto where the leading actor dies of a heart attack and it's witnessed by a little girl in the play who had been friends with him. Then the world is devastated by the Georgian flu. But this book isn't into the science of that it's into the people who survived and how they both look backwards to the world that was and to the future.
We meet the young girl 20 years later and she has become part of the Traveling Symphony that performs concerts and Shakespearean plays for the small surviving communities.
Why symphonies and Shakespeare? Because they had adopted as their motto "Survival is Insufficient", taken from an old Star Trek episode.
Really enjoyed this one, I'm sure it will show up on my best reads of the year.
And now for something completely different, have you seen the picture of the rare Black flamingo that was spotted in Cyprus? Another one was spotted in Israel a couple of years ago, but because flamingoes can migrate long distances they think it might have been the same bird. This coloration is a genetic mutation and is caused by excess pigmentation in the feathers. Really strange to see.
A really great book I just finished is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and I almost gave it a miss because of all the hype about it. But it lives up to the hype and even surpasses it. Called a apocalyptic fantasy it's so much more. It opens with a presentation of King Lear in Toronto where the leading actor dies of a heart attack and it's witnessed by a little girl in the play who had been friends with him. Then the world is devastated by the Georgian flu. But this book isn't into the science of that it's into the people who survived and how they both look backwards to the world that was and to the future.We meet the young girl 20 years later and she has become part of the Traveling Symphony that performs concerts and Shakespearean plays for the small surviving communities.
Why symphonies and Shakespeare? Because they had adopted as their motto "Survival is Insufficient", taken from an old Star Trek episode.
Really enjoyed this one, I'm sure it will show up on my best reads of the year.
And now for something completely different, have you seen the picture of the rare Black flamingo that was spotted in Cyprus? Another one was spotted in Israel a couple of years ago, but because flamingoes can migrate long distances they think it might have been the same bird. This coloration is a genetic mutation and is caused by excess pigmentation in the feathers. Really strange to see.
That black flamingo is really interesting. We have had several albino birds over the years - a blackbird a couple of years ago and a sparrow before that. We also had a leucistic starling (part coloured - a silvery colour). Of course these birds stand out so much that they are easy prey - but does anything prey on the flamingo?
ReplyDeleteYou quite piqued my curiosity. I've seen the Maltese falcon several times; now I must read the book.
ReplyDeleteI haven't heard about the black flamingo. Apparently, flamingos are pink because of their diet. I was wondering what that flamingo had eaten to cause it to turn black.
ReplyDeleteWow! I hadn't seen the black flamingo. Amazing.
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