Tild~

~

Snowman Gone Wild

~~~~

A New Year’s Meditation

~~~~

Uh Oh

~~~~

B-Movie Title Screenshots

~~~~

Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus as performed by monks who have taken a vow of silence,  from the  monastic order of  St Francis de la Sissies. (PGMC 2007)

The monks’ 2008 holiday performance with the BGMC.

~~~~

Oy.  As a participant in many, many performances of  Messiah over the years,  your kindly old Auntie Tild would just like to say that nothing has made her laugh this hard in, like, decades.     Happy New Year everybody!

~

*Sigh*…  It’s so sad.   In a few minutes I have to fire up the Exploder and trundle off to work for the first time since December 23rd.

So, what have I been up to during the past week?  Yeah yeah there was Xmas etc, but other than that how did I spend my days?  Well I’ll tell you.

• Stayed up as late as I wanted to.

• Didn’t set the alarm clock.

• Never woke up before I felt like it.   See:  Alarm clock, not set.

• Didn’t shower for 5 days.    Not quite as bad as it sounds.  It takes a long time for old women — even fat ones — to get smelly when they’re doing  nothing but lolling around  reading,  snoozing,  and watching movies on their laptops.

• Played this game.

• And this one.

• And especially this one.  Hey, in the immortal words of Senator Blutarsky (D- Delta House) It don’t cost nothin.

• Read this book, which the publishers were nice enough to to send me in hopes I’d review it here.   Yep.  A review is forthcoming.  Sometime.  Soon.

But for now vacation time is over, so with a toss of my beautiful just-washed hair I’m taking my lovely-smelling freshly cleansed self off to work.     Happy happy joy joy, etc.

~

What:  Drinking Liberally Holiday Party

When:  Thursday,  December 18th,  starting at 6 PM

Where:   the 331 Club in beautiful Nordeast Mpls

Give It To the Marines:  We’re collecting for Toys For Tots once again, so if you choose to contribute please remember to bring a new, unwrapped toy. ($$ — check preferred  — works too)

Spot has all the details.     

See you Thursday night!

~

Whoah!  Time flies!!  Welcome back from one year ago, PYATTers.  The 2nd annual international Pretend You’re a Time Traveler Day has arrived!

As you celebrate ,  be sure to remember the intricate rules for observing PYATT Day:

You must spend the entire day in costume and character. The only rule is that you cannot actually tell anyone that you are a time traveler. Other than that, anything’s game.

There are three possible options:

Hello Computer!

1) Utopian/cliche Future - “If the Future did a documentary of the last fifty years, this is how badly the reenactors would dress.” Think Star Trek: TNG or the Time Travelers from Hob. Ever see how the society in Futurama sees the 20th century? Run with it. Your job is to dress with moderately anachronistic clothing and speak in slang from varying decades. Here are some good starters:

- Greet people by referring to things that don’t yet exist or haven’t existed for a long time. Example: “Have you penetrated the atmosphere lately?” “What spectrum will today’s broadcast be in?” and “Your king must be a kindly soul!”

- Show extreme ignorance in operating regular technology. Pay phones should be a complete mystery (try placing the receiver in odd places). Chuckle knowingly at cell phones.

~~~

Welcome to Costco.  I love you.

2) Dystopian Future - This one offers a little more flexibility. It can be any kind of future from Terminator to Freejack. The important thing to remember is dress like a crazy person with armor. Black spray painted football pads, high tech visors, torn up trenchcoats and maybe even some dirt here or there. Remember, dystopian future travelers are very startled that they’ve gone back in time. Some starters:

- If you go the “prisoner who’s escaped the future” try shaving your head and putting a barcode on the back of your neck. Then stagger around and stare at the sky, as if you’ve never seen it before.

- Walk up to random people and say “WHAT YEAR IS THIS?” and when they tell you, get quiet and then say “Then there’s still time!” and run off.

- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell “NOOOOOOOOO”

- Stare at newspaper headlines and look astonished.

- Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say “In thirty years dial this number. You’ll know what to do after that.” Then slip away.

~~~

Go to McDonald’s, order fries, and after eating one say to everyone around you:  “Pommes frites!  Fries are pommes frites!”

3) The Past - This one is more for beginners. Basically dress in period clothing (preferably Victorian era) and stagger around amazed at everything. Since the culture’s set in place already, you have more of a template to work off of. Some pointers:

- Airplanes are terrifying. Also, carry on conversations with televisions for a while.

- Discover and become obsessed with one trivial aspect of technology, like automatic grocery doors. Stay there for hours playing with it.

- Be generally terrified of people who are dressed immodestly compared to your era. Tattoos and shorts on women are especially scary.

Once again, all praise to PYATT Day founder Dresden Codak.

~~~

Have fun, everybody.  Me? I don’t observe PYATT day.  It is December 8th, after all, and as you may know, for me that can only mean one thing.

~

Here’s the front page of the Minneapolis Journal for Saturday evening June 6, 1925:

There was a lot going on:  A heatwave across much of the nation had killed 238 people, but President Calvin Coolidge vowed nevertheless to travel to Minnesota to make an address at the Norse-American Centennial celebration at the State Fairgrounds.  The President’s special railroad car “has been filled with ice cakes and electric fans to keep it cool until he embarks.”

In a few days Minneapolis was also going to have elections for city offices including Mayor,  Treasurer, Comptroller, judges and aldermen. The Journal’s endorsements or “recommendations”, or lack thereof, were usually terse and to the point.  In the Mayoral race:  “No recommendation because the citizens know both candidates.”  In the 12th Ward:  “This beautiful Ward is not represented by a strong man.  Vote for Ekberg to replace Jenson.” Boy howdy, those were the days, huh?

What I really want to direct your attention to, tho, is the little item in the lower right corner of the page:

Way to make an entrance, Dad.

~

Next:

“That baby looks familiar”

Grandma Tild will not be denied

The woman at the bus stop

and

The Detroit Police Dept.  Vice Squad!

Stay tuned, kids.

~

After reading this story * yesterday about tracing birth families and the two Chicago men in their 80s who discovered just last year that they are brothers, I decided that it’s finally time for me to write down my father’s story.  In full.   I can’t let any more time go by or it might never be told.  Got to do it now, if for no other reason than I owe it to my sons, who never had the chance to know their grandpa Gunnar and have never realized how much and in how many ways I see him in them.  

See the shoulders?  My dad is 14 or 15 here and already well on his way to his full height of 6′ 2 1/2″.  Yeah, he’s doing that Ugh I’m Sitting Between Ma and Pa slouching thing, but even so you can see the breadth of those shoulders.  A few years later he made All-City as a defensive lineman for Mpls Roosevelt.   Now jump forward to 2008:  my oldest son is 6′2″,  my youngest is nearly 6′3″, and both of them have that same silhouette, the same broad shoulders as the kid in the picture.  

This story is going to be a while in the telling.  It’s too much for one post, so I’ll be asking for your indulgence and patience as I roll this out piece by piece.   It’s a really good story, tho, and well worth the telling, and for far too long now all of it has needed to be written down.  Or at least as much of it as we know.  

*h/t to the ‘Sippifarian for the link

~

I have this entire week off (a rare occurrence) and because it’s also Thanksgiving week I’ve been spending my days racing around from co-op to hardware store to ÜberTarget to liquor store to Costco and back.  But please don’t assume that means there’s an orgy of spending going on.  Nuh-uh.  Many stops but few purchases has been the actual order of the day all week.

In the evenings I’m relaxing with reading my Bloglines feeds and tinkering with pictures I find on teh intarwebs.  The tinkering is like coloring with crayons in coloring books for me: very very therapeutic.   Anyway, here are last night’s results, offered with a minimum of comment (minimum meaning like none at all).

Undisclosed income source?

I’ll post more of these as they materialize throughout the week.   Happy Turkey Day one and all!

~

Some of you have been noticing the new additions to our rotating header image gallery here at Tildology.   As you may remember, the theme is Women Holding Up Fruit (on produce crate labels).  You can see our two latest entries in their original settings on crate lebels for Fairy brand apples and Columbia Belle brand apples.    Nice work, ladies.  Way to hold up the product!

Oooh, and I also found yet another Droste effect crate label:

taste-test brand

I don’t even know anymore how many Droste effect crate labels I’ve found.  The total must be approaching 20; it’s somewhere up past a dozen at least.  Crate label art is loaded with them.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s the single most prolific source of recursive pictures on the intarwebs.

Gotta leave for work now.  Long day, testing new versions of a couple of my databases.   More posting later, I hope.

Somewhat to their dismay I fear, some of Auntie Tild’s favorite people, the proprietors of Dinged Corners have been discovering how ubiquitous that Safe Hit crate label art really is.    Yeah.  It’s everywhere.  Even in  places you’d never expect.  (Now that’s some powerful marketing fu.)

Anyway, I’m feeling kind of bad about how commonplace the image seems to be, so to make it up to them I thought I’d quick whip up an alternative.   Whattaya think,  Lucy?

~