Every so often something worth paying attention to pops up on my computer screen. This does NOT include the stuff in the SPAM folder from the vast number of outfits who seem to think that I am some dude named “Ivan” who can’t spell his own name; those people keep sending me info about “male enhancement”, directions to “new girl in town” looking for a good time, solutions to prostate problems, and marital misinformations of various sorts…among other things not suitable for a family newspaper…or my email, for that matter.
Anyway, one of my regular correspondents, who shall remain nameless, but you know who you are (Names withheld to protect the guilty), sent a performance video posted by Classic Fm featuring South Kitsap High School (In Washington state, I think) doing Handel’s “Messiah” dressed as silent monks and flashing poster cards of the words/syllables of the famous choral piece to accompany an actual recording–or maybe it was the rest of the high school choir– doing the “Hallelujah Chorus”. What a hoot!! Fourteen brown-robed figures, hoods over faces, holding cards printed with the words/syllables, three figures to the left, seven to the right on the first row, with four figures behind them and up a level. The music starts and the cards flash up showing the words/syllables being sung in the recording “Hal le lu jah ! Hal le lu jah! For the Lord God Om ni po tent reign eth! Hal le lu jah! Hal le lu jah!” “ The king dom of this world And of his Christ” Just picture it. I think that there was some editing/arranging done to condense the presentation–a couple of Hallelujahs missing, perhaps?–but the over-all impression was creative and entertaining ( High-range sections with the placards held overhead, a pair of cards being foot-operated, one rather short monk jumping up to match the height of his/her card to the others on either side; it was all wonderfully choreographed and synchronized. Great stuff. Would like to see more such.) Don’t know if it was a project of the local music teacher/department or of the kids themselves–probably a co-operative effort. Really fun.
And for something totally off-the-wall, there was a brief piece (in the AB-J) on the Wisconsin
Department of Natural Resources assisting local crews to clean up after a fire in a dairy processing plant flooded the facility …with butter. It seems that in a butter storage room, a blaze broke out, heating the yellow stuff, causing it to melt and flow throughout the building, “impeding access” the article said. Well, wouldn’t it just! Several hours were required to extinguish the flames; butter escaped the confines of the plant itself and flowed into sewers, and, ultimately into the local wastewater treatment plant (Give you the fantods, does it, Jeff Sheehan?). They’ve been cleaning the stuff ever since but seem to be handling regular operations effectively. No back-up so far. Additional butter–about 20 gallons–went into the storm sewers and a nearby canal, where it was “boomed” (confined to a smaller area by adsorbent material), then removed. Just lucky that it wasn’t cheese, I guess.
And I guess that I finally will have to visit my brother out in Albuquerque, NM. The AB-J recently reported that this city is to be the site of the National UFO Historical Records Center, planning to establish “the largest historical archive dedicated to the preservation and centralization of UFO/UAP (What’s UAP? Unidentified Aerial Phenomena?…just a guess) information in the United States.” My guess is that this is not a government project but one with considerable support from researchers of various sorts who want to get all of their material in one place so that it can be digitized, cross referenced, correlated and all that–files & reports, patterns & insights, information & knowledge, audio & video–the works. Not everybody in Albuquerque wears a tinfoil hat (My brother, for instance, shaves his head and only wears something to keep off frostbite) but NM really is associated with a lot of that sort of stuff. Maybe he can take me on a tour of local sightings. I had him and my sister-in-law, his wife, tour Garrettsville during the Christmas Walk. Same thing. Unidentified Stuff.
And, finally, the squirrels seem to have opened a bowling alley or a pickleball court–yeah, that’s probably it; they couldn’t get in up at the classes at the Y, so they opened their own–up on my roof. I can hear them running around up there, under the solar panels, apparently. There was a raccoon last Fall, a whole family of them living between the roof and the attic ceiling, but they got evicted. Hope nobody else is in that space…no beer taps available.
