Weird, but totally awesome. It's the scene from the Ring cycle where Wotan is summoning Loge to surround Brunhilde with a ring of fire. Check it out:
I was familiar with the scene, but I didn't expect the stage to start transforming like that. For several seconds, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. I didn't think it was actually slanting upwards like it was, because that would put Brunhilde in danger of sliding down the thing. Lol... Obviously, she was anchored to the stage somehow.
For a nice summation of the whole operatic cycle, here's a documentary:
It's a wonderful thing. Necessary, too. I can't tell you how many Wikipedia articles I've read and come away clueless. There have even been times where I was already quite familiar with the subject in question, but found the article on that subject to be incomprehensible. It's as if the authors were purposely trying to obfuscate everything. Maybe they were, for reasons of ego or something; who knows...
I've got a pretty decent vocabulary, and I can formulate complex sentences. But I rarely flex those muscles to their fullest extent. The primary goal of writing--whether it's fiction or non-fiction--is to effectively communicate some idea. The key word there is "communicate," not "lecture." And the best way to do that is by using plain English, not SAT words and Lovecraftian sentence structure. It's a two-way street. You must take your reader's sensibilities into account. Otherwise, you're just trying to show off. And no one likes a show-off.
Freeze warning in effect for this area. Lol... I knew it. These early springs never pan out. There's always some arctic blast ready to swoop down from Canada. The flowers and new shoots of spring are never safe until April. And now they'll pay the price for their premature sprouting. But it could be worse. Much worse.
On the other side of the continent, for example, things are far more dire...
The Oroville Dam is in pretty desperate condition, and warm weather will send an ocean of melted snow running down the mountains and into Lake Oroville. Here's the footage from a few days ago:
And here's California DWR's latest video:
The flow down the spillway has stopped, but it hardly seems to matter. When you've got a backhoe moving a single vehicle-sized boulder at a time, and you have anything less than several hundred backhoes working simultaneously, then you've got a real problem. They'll never get this thing anywhere close to fixed in time for the spring thaw. The only real questions are how much of the mountainside is going to erode away and how bad will the flooding be downstream. If I was a resident there, I'd be packing my stuff and getting out while the getting-out was still good.
Bill Paxton has passed away due to complications from surgery. He was 61. :(
I wasn't just a fan of his because I liked his movies, though I did. I mean, what's not to like? Aliens, Tombstone, Terminator, Apollo 13... he was in all kinds of cool stuff. But he also seemed like a genuinely good guy. He was humble and self-effacing in interviews, and always seemed to enjoy being around whoever was in his presence at the time.
He brightened our lives, even if just for a couple of hours at a time. And now he's gone, and the world is a duller place.
