joe_haldeman @ 2015-01-23T11:06:00

Feeling unaccountably down.  Maybe the weather, still and close. Probably the unfinished projects littering my desk.  Updating a speech I gave years ago, never my favorite use of time.

Or perhaps it's mainly a nagging sense of mortality left over from last night's music.   We went to an Arlo Guthrie concert, and although it was most entertaining, it was definitely an Old Person's Event.  Full of sixties stuff.  Lots of long hair losing its pigmentation and framing bald spots.

They showed part of the film Alice's Restaurant, where Arlo is a young kid tweaking the establishment.  All very clever and nostalgic, but it's hard not to feel irrelevant, now,  in the backwash of zany zeitgeist.  We were all so relevant then, in our sacred antiestablishmentarianism.  While the unborn ghost of the 21st century looked down on our antics and shook its head slowly:  we act out the script while we think we're inventing it.

Partly that it's Friday and I wish it were Saturday.  Off to lose myself in drawing, rather than shoulder the labor of thinking.  This week, the weekend is also the Hogtown Medieval Fair; Bill Hutchinson came by yesterday with guest tickets.  We spent a pleasant hour reminiscing.

Also talking about the television special we'd both seen on Nova.  (Gay was down visiting friends in Orlando, so I was watching teevee by myself, a rarity.)  It was about the salvaging of the Costa Concordia, the large tourist liner that sank in the shallows off the coast of Italy in 2012.  Huge property loss; only one dead.

The salvage was a hugely complicated industrial process, given a large element of suspense by the clock and calendar:  the ship had to be moved before the autumn storms came in.  The wreck was only meters from a sheer underwater cliff, and the storms would likely move it over the edge, into the abyss.

An entertaining suspense story that ultimately was about engineering and science.   See it if you can.

Joe