Relicui Mei

There are a great many barbershops. There are a great many fabric shops. Do NOT eat Chinese there. UNLESS, you are at Red Panda in the Plaza Santa Rosa, where it is delicious. You can buy gelato just about anywhere. Including Red Panda. Every store sells every thing.  Every story is a general store/department store, just varying in size. You can use your phone for purchases in virtually any establishment. Your colones will probably go to waste.  There is no tipping. Just don't. Their systems are not set up for it, it confuses everyone, it's neither expected nor necessary. Except for the major highways, there are no street signals, and drivers drive like it. There are also fewer street signs than you want and with few exception there are no street addresses. It's hard to believe, but it's true. No one will say "pura vida".  You need to go to the beaches for that pap.

 A man who has MAN-HANDS?! And you want a ring or ring for those man-hands?  But it can't be a weak, flimsy, REGULAR ring?  It's needs to be a MAN-RING? Well, SigmaRings has you (and you man-fingers) covered. Whiskey Barrel and Deer Antlers; it's the next best thing to a ring made from the bones of your enemies.

I watching " Fighting Caravans" , one of the films based on Zane Gray's novel of the same name, which I mentioned in an earlier post . It wasn't a silent film, but it did a pretty good impression of one. It is much older and therefore cruder film than Wagon Wheels , despite a higher budget.  And the ersatz Old Gay Couple are much funnier and gayer (well, not 'gay' so much as 'misogynistic', but in 1931 those distinctions were fuzzy). Its plot and the fates of its characters noted how the Oregon Trail signaled the end of an era where the Frontier was still unexplored and unsettled.  That interested me because previously I would have only thought about the Oregon Trail as the beginning of "The Wild West" rather than as the end of the "Frontier West". It also opened my eyes about Gary Cooper. And a welcome sight he was. Like most contemporary folks, my impression of is based mostly on his later work. Everybody knows is the "real...

The Circle of Fifths is central to composing, or even understanding, any music complicated enough to include a key change. Not that anyone understands car gearshifts anymore, but they are a useful metaphor.  Just as you can't slam from first gear to fourth gear without it being pretty jarring, you can't jump from one key to another in music randomly without it being jarring.  In a car, you have to transition via neutral or other gears in between.  That's kind of how music works and the circle of fifths is like a gearshift that let's you do so. With three times the number of gears, and different ones for leaded and unleaded. Metaphors aren't perfect. Most songs, even ones that have nothing but melody, have chords (a group of notes played simultaneously).  Those chords are based on the notes of the melody of the song (the melody is the "tune"; the part of a song you would whistle).  Sometimes the chords are performed, sometimes not; but even when they are no...

Today I watched my first Randolph Scott movie (contrary to the song Randolph Scott never actually Rode The Range Alone, since he always had sidekicks), Wagon Wheels.  It's a B-movie version of Zane Gray's book Fighting Caravans , which had already received one or two A-movie treatments at that time. Randy, indeed. I enjoyed it. Scott was an unexpected pleasure.  He was calm and poised and actually attractive (rather than just Cowboy Movie "attractive").  There was a little kid played by Billy Lee who was not only was non-annoying, he was actually adorable.  The female love interest had determination and dignity and the most beautiful alto voice.  The supporting characters were enjoyable even: the frontier lesbian and her bookish sister, the Old Gay Mountaineer Couple who raised Scott's character since finding him as a child, the Snidely Whiplash guy who's "half-injun" and there to sabotage the trip. There's a lot of sexual tension here. I'm ...