The Foundling Goes Home

The Foundling Goes Home is a romance for guitar and orchestra. I've not yet written the orchestrations for it, but I think it stands on its own as a solo piece quite well.

The title was inspired by the character, Shasta, in—The Horse And His Boy—a children's novel by CS Lewis and part of the Narnia collection.

More Movies

Some pretty good movies I've seen during the past year or two:

Breaker Morant (Australian/British film)
Witness For The Prosecution (British, and one of the best movies ever made)
The Letter Never Sent (Russian; I mostly just liked the cinematography, but it’s worth watching just for that)
The Snow Walker
Time Limit (A very good Richard Widmark post -war film)
Stagecoach (The original with John Wayne)
The Final Cut (Robin Williams in a serious role)
The Train (Fantastic film with Burt Lancaster)
The Long Voyage Home (Another great John Wayne/John Ford film)
Seance on a Wet Afternoon (British)
The Threepenny Opera (British, not great, but not bad)
La Jetée (French)
Biography: Tom Selleck
They Shall Have Music
Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?)
The Whales Of August
Star Trek VIII: First Contact
Dangerous Crossing
Seven Years in Tibet
The Comedian
Blackmail (Hitchcock’s first talky)
The Offence (British with Sean Connery)
Moby Dick (With Gregory Peck, and much better than the book)
Sting of Death (With Boris Karloff)
Lloyd's Of London (British)
Somewhere In The Night
Ink
Foreign Correspondent
The Woman In the Dunes (Japanese)

Movies I didn’t like:

Cypher
Orpheus (French)
Pitfall (Japanese)
Ride In The Whirlwind
Map of The Human Heart
Notorious
The Rules of the Game (French)
All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman)
The League of Gentlemen (British)
Nosferatu
Jigoku (Japanese)
When The Clock Strikes
Bagdad Café
Lord of War
Taxi Driver

Good Time To Invest In Amazon Stock

Amazon stock went up 3-ticks today at the announcement of two new products and a cheaper price for the Kindle 3, all just in time for Christmas:

1) Kindle Fire - Basically an iPad with a smaller 7" screen for only $199.00. Supposedly a 10" screen model is in the works (price unknown). This can sort of be thought of as Kindle's version of the Color Nook. It has a backlight and a color screen; however, it's more of a tablet computer with a dual core processor, 8GB of storage (that's enough to store a movie on), and the ability to browse the web.

2) Kindle Touch - A new e-reader with a touch screen, very much like the Nook. It will sell for $99 with on-screen ads or $139 without ads. Why anyone would want a touch screen though is unfathomable to me.

3) Kindle 3 at a cheaper price as low as $79 with advertisements on-screen or $110 sans the ads.

Bigger news than all this might be India's announcement of a, get this—$35 tablet computer—aimed at the rural poor. It's called the Aakash (which means "sky"). It has a 7-inch touchscreen, 32GB of internal memory, 256MB of RAM, and two USB ports. The 2100mAh battery should last for two to three hours. Now India's children from the poorest segment of society can learn to be slackers too!

"The Perfect High" by Shel Silverstein

I mostly remember Shel from his having written "A Boy Named Sue" that Johhny Cash had a hit with. But he wrote a ton of silly songs, poetry, and children's books, along with some very tawdry drug culture poems too like this one. There's a lot of dirty words in it, but boy is it funny. Shel's the only I guy I know who could give you a poem full of dirty words about a hippy cat looking for the perfect drug and still manage to give you a nice moral at the end. I also find him an enigma in that he was friends with Hugh Hefner and yet wrote nice clean children's books too. He was one strange hippy dude.

This poem is read by Shel's old friend Larry Moyer at the Sausalito Woman's Club.

Nicolas Cage is a Vampire!

That's the latest rumor, albeit a tongue-n-cheek one, that the owner of this photograph has started with this Ebay auction.

He says the following:

Original c.1870 carte de visite showing a man who looks exactly like Nick Cage. Personally, I believe it's him and that he is some sort of walking undead / vampire, et cetera, who quickens / reinvents himself once every 75 years or so. 150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host.


This is not a trick photo of any kind and has not been manipulated in Photoshop or any other graphics program. It's an original photo of a man who lived in Bristol, TN sometime around the Civil War.


I've had a lot of questions asking where I purchased this. As followers of my website know, I collect antique memorial photography - images of dead people - from the 1800s. This photo was found in the very back of album that contained an unusual number of Civil War era death portraits (which is why I purchased it). All of the other people in the album, living and dead, were identified by name - this man was not.


Photographer is Professor G.B. Smith. A contact of mine forwarded this interesting article (link) about the photographer, Smith. Turns out he was a confederate Civil War prisoner of war photographer.


Guaranteed to be an original 1860s-70s photograph and not a modern reproduction, copy or photo manipulation.


4" x 2.5".

He's asking one million dollars for the photograph, but you'll be happy to know that he'll accept the best offer he can get. He so far has declined 106 offers!

No, he probably won't even get a thousand for it, but you'd be surprised what some of his old photos sell for. He specializes in, get this, post mortem photographs before 1950. It seems that people used to dress up the dead in strange ways before first photographing them and then burrying them. Here's one that sold for $1,275.00 on Ebay:

Many of the 1,500 or so photos in his collection are from the 19th century and feature young children. People think we're living in strange days now, but believe me, humans have always been strange. Here are a few examples:

Sometimes You Just Gotsta Hear Some Doc Watson

This is one of the better renditions of "Summertime" you'll ever hear. I have what I think is a real nice arrangement of “Wayfaring Stranger” that has parts of Summertime incorporated into it (the two have very nearly the same melody). Unfortunately I can’t sing it. I should have married a girl that could sing.

Jeff Beck's Hot Rods

I saw this video a couple of years ago and neglected to favorite it. Darn if I could find it again. Then today I found it right off after typing "Jeff Beck" and Hot Rods into Google. Anyhow, this is about a 45 minute interview done at Beck's own home and garage, and you get to see every car he has in his collection and hear him talk about building them. You also get to see the elusive Mrs. Jeff Beck and her artwork, and she's quite good.