Life, going on

[moon_custafer]

The past year's been such a bleak holding pattern it surprises me when I look back over a few days and have interesting stuff to record, even if I was mostly living in my own head or on the Internet. A dream the other night confirmed that "trying to find a place I can got coffee early in the morning downtown" is a recurring obsession in my nighttime brain. I think I must be looking for a specific place (possibly a small diner with Art Deco fixtures), because in the latest dream I passed up some bars that were open and likely serving coffee.

We rewatched Andrew's favourite Poirot episode, "The Dream," and (SPOILER) for the first time I wondered if Mr. Farley and Mr. Cornworthy were in fact being played by the same actor. IMDb confirmed that they were, and also informed me the actor was Alan Howard, nephew of Leslie Howard. He was an actor not unpleasant to the eye, but odd-enough-looking to be safe from leading-man parts: tall, with reddish hair, a very pale face and extremely dark eyes, as though all the eumelanin had gone to his irises.

Handful_ofdust's son is eleven today. For some reason, Iain Armitage, the six-year-old theatre critic, reminds me of him, although Iain is chatty where Cal would rather sing than speak. Their looks, charm and enthusiasm, I suppose.

Yesterday I read for the first time of the Wallace case, which apparently is the unsolved crime that mystery writers talk to each other about when they're procrastinating.

Today, I read for the first time about Jeanne Villepreux-Power, top Parisian dressmaker of the early 19th-c, who went on to become a pioneering marine biologist and confirm, by inventing the aquarium and following a nautilus through its life cycle, that the species grows its own shell and doesn't move into someone else's like a hermit crab. I need to know more about her, including what kind of dresses someone with a mind like that designs.

Comments

[sovay]

Alan Howard, nephew of Leslie Howard. He was an actor not unpleasant to the eye, but odd-enough-looking to be safe from leading-man parts: tall, with reddish hair, a very pale face and extremely dark eyes, as though all the eumelanin had gone to his irises.

Yes! He is most famous for being the last of the four eponymous nouns in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) and for voicing the One Ring in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, but I have only ever seen him in random television appearances. He did a tremendous amount of theater of which there is no filmed record. I agree with that assessment of his looks.

Jeanne Villepreux-Power, top Parisian dressmaker of the early 19th-c, who went on to become a pioneering marine biologist and confirm, by inventing the aquarium and following a nautilus through its life cycle, that the species grows its own shell and doesn't move into someone else's like a hermit crab.

. . . I also need to know more about this person. Thank you very much for informing me of her existence.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I looked him up and found that most articles focussed on his Shakespeare performances, and praised his vocal range -- expect the latter is why he was cast in the dual-and-a-half role.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

A quick search indicates that most stuff about her is in French or Italian, and some of it uses her married name at the time, Jeannette Power, or Giovanna Power, rather than the hyphenated modern version of her name. She seems to have actually been an embroiderer rather than a dressmaker. Her aquaria were of three types: glass indoor ones; ones that stayed on the sea bottom but which could be hoisted to the surface to inspect the creatures living in them; and ones that were sort of like caissons with wooden walls that allowed water to flow through but confined the creatures under study to one area. Sadly, most of her notes and specimens were lost in a shipwreck when she and her husband moved from Sicily to the mainland, and she didn't have the heart to begin again and retired from science (one hopes she took up something else, at least.)

[bleodswean.livejournal.com]

I always glean something from your posts. Thank you for that.

I sure hope things get better soon. Poor Andrew.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm hoping next month's appointment with the memory clinic will do something for him.