Stuff and Moonshine

Yesterday I disassembled the too-wide bed frame and assembled a new one that’s the same length but a foot narrower, so Andrew has room to get into it from the side. I then packed the big frame into the new frame’s box, with the instructions, screws, and alan key, and took it down to the recycling room in the basement of our building. There’s a section there for people to leave stuff that other residents might want, so I set it there. Someone else had left a “Phantom-Line 100,” a vintage device for superimposing ruled lines on paper when doing calligraphy. I took it home, on the suspicion that it was a type of camera lucida. It sort of is—I would have to invert it and mount it at eye-level to use it as such, but in the meantime I’ve had some luck with balancing this tablet on it and using it to trace images from the screen onto a surface.

The device flips the image from the original.

Monday Andrew had been watching Blackadder, and I’d remembered that Rowan Atkinson had played Inspecteur Maigret a few years ago—ten years ago as it turns out. I’ve only been able to find two of the four tv movies they did before they pulled the plug. We watched Maigret Sets A Trap, and we’re saving the other for later. Nice work by Atkinson in a serious role. Budapest stands in for 1950s Paris. Very different plot structure from the police procedurals of the last twenty-odd years, in which the murderer is nearly always someone who shows up in the first fifteen minutes—Maigret and his detectives don’t find their suspect till the third act, and then it becomes a matter of how to confirm it.

Mackenzie Crook has ventured further into magic realism with Small Prophets, and I just watched the first episode of…six, I think? The best part so far is Michael Palin as the protagonist’s father, building Rube Goldberg machines in the common living-room of his care home. This is, so far, the kind of show where much of the storytelling is done through the set dressing—there’s a wordless scene that made me say ohh, out loud, because it’s so sad and it also makes it more believeable that the protagonist will (spoiler, but nothing that doesn’t come up in the trailer and most reviews) ( Read more... )

After green_trilobite's check-up on the Danforth, we went back downtown, did some shopping, had lunch on a patio, got passport photos (we're not going anywhere, I just decided a few weeks back that since neither of us drives, we need some indisputable pieces of ID to save time and argument); then we went to hang out at the Comics Lounge, which yesterday was surrounded by the Taste of Little Italy street festival; for several blocks, all transit except by foot was shut down - and with the crowds, walking was pretty slow. Apparently Joe had had to fight the restaurant downstairs to even keep an access route open to his door. Once there, green_trilobite crashed on the sofa for most of the rest of the day, while I made it my base of operations for a trip to Dome Fabrics and later, to Starbucks for drinks and wi-fi. There were several dogs at the Lounge with there owners. There were a couple of women in costume, and I sketched them on my new-to-me iPad. I noted that if someone is wearing a tight dress and eating, every pose and gesture she does automatically looks like a pin-up (I had to clean up my sketch in photoshop when I got home, though - my drawing app couldn't do fine lines).