Do you have a MicroCenter anywhere near you? Their prices on Mac desktops and laptops is normally lower than  Apple's, and currently they have a sale on those desktops and laptops. Customer service is great, although customer service is also excellent at the Apple Store, and in general for Apple products.

Be sure to get enough memory and storage space for your needs, particularly if you're going to be keeping it for the next ten years.   

My PC needs to upgrade to the newest, latest Windows but it apparently doesn't meet the hardware requirements.  It has been running very slowly the past few years so it may be time to get a new machine.  Looking back, I think I have had this one for over ten years.  (or maybe almost ten years; I can't remember exactly when I bought it)  So I am thinking of switching to a Mac mini.  I like the idea of less space needed for it on my desk and it seems to be less expensive than PCs.  I will do more research.  I have a few months before MS stops supporting whatever version of Windows I have.  After stopping at COSTCO today I will swing by the Apple store.  I should have done this yesterday when the temperatures were in the high 60/low 70s.  We have a high of 45 today.  

I am aware that it is some made-up holiday designed to get everybody to buy flowers and candy, but what today really means is that February is half over. Today has been a frustrating day. Some good things happened (The Lumineers' new album came out¹, I got to Genius on today's Spelling Bee², I had some really good mandarin orange chicken from Trader Joe's for dinner, and I am getting free delivery on my King Soopers grocery order³). But they're kind of offset by the frustrations, which I don't want to go into.

Maybe I should go to Target tomorrow and treat myself to whatever sale-priced candy I can find. Although it's been my experience that they have had a better haul (variety-wise) after Easter.

On first listen, I like the Lumineers' new album, but it's not as good as their first two.

---

¹Support Colorado bands!
² I've gotten to Genius maybe seven times ever, and consider it a success if I get to Amazing.
³ King Soopers has a no tipping policy on delivery, so it really is free!

That's the one I had in mind, or rather, had in mind as a backup in case another one couldn't be found. I thought there might be something in Saturday Night or Forum or Gypsy. I was sick of using "guarantee" as a target word.

tenderness (Need to get Otis Redding out of my mind)

Apparently Manual Cinema's Future Feeling (and not just its trailer) has been up on Vimeo since last April:



It's possible that it was originally posted as "private" or hidden (perhaps still undergoing a final round of editing or polishing) and only later made publicly viewable.  As it is, I had to look up their Vimeo page to find it, since the complete short doesn't seem to be directly embedded anywhere on their own website — only the trailer (which does now list the full piece as a related-content nudge afterward).  Both on the Vimeo page and especially in the related-content prompt, the 40-second "official trailer" and the full 8-minute film are less easily distinguishable-at-a-glance than they might be, since both use the exact same image as their thumbnail/"poster frame".

But it's a beautiful watch, as visually inventive and poetically concise as anything they've done, with a level of cinematic subtlety and polish that place it immediately among MC's best work.  If part of me wants to linger in director Ben Kaufman's gorgeously haunted Nantucket time-loop for longer than eight minutes, it should be said that not a frame here is wasted, and that Future Feeling's particular mix of eerie ambiguity and lean to-the-bone precision likely wouldn't be served by a longer runtime.  It's exactly what it needs to be, like a haiku, and if it leaves us wanting more — all the more reason to hit "replay" and give what's there an even closer look.

Coming up for them, on the live-performance front: The 4th Witch, a "bold and imaginative inversion of Macbeth" premiering this June at the Spoleto Festival.

NYT:  David Edward Byrd, Whose Posters Captured Rock's Energy, Dies at 83
                              His designs for Jimi Hendrix, the Who and others embodied the spirit of the psychedelic era.
                                                       He also created images for stage shows like Godspell.

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I actually had to google that one — "gross" immediately struck me as challenging because by far the most common modern conversational sense of the word (repulsive, disgusting) seemed to me just a skosh ahead of SJS's time.  Jenny's use of it in Company, below, may represent relatively early adoption by someone her age: originating in the 1960s as teen slang usage, she would have had a decade at most (not in her own teens, but rather her mid-twenties to mid-thirties) to pick it up by 1970, perhaps from her kids.  Or she could be using it here with a slightly more old-fashioned shading, less "icky, nauseating" and more "coarse, lacking refinement".  (Obviously, legal, medical or financial terminology is its own thing, but apart from "gross percent of the billing clause" I couldn't think of any other such usages in SJS's oeuvre; ditto phrases like "grossly mistaken" or "gross injustice").  In any case, I suspect Sondheim himself would have been solidly into middle age (and much further into, if not entirely past, the 1970s) by the time "gross-disgusting" had spread across demographics to become anywhere near as ubiquitous, covering all kinds and degrees of distaste, as it is today — which is why it's hard to imagine almost any of his characters using the word casually.   Little Red, in Into The Woods, perhaps.  Or, I suppose, most of the characters in Here We Are, his first contemporary-set show since Merrily in 1981, although I couldn't find any instances of it on the ITW or HWA OCRs.  Let me know if you had a different one in mind than this:


—She's tall enough to be your mother!
—She seems so dead.
—And cheap and gross and...
—She's very weird.
—Depressing and...
—And immature?
—Goliath!

Poor baby, all alone!
Throw a lonely dog a bone, it's still a bone.
We're the only tenderness he's ever known,
Poor baby.

New cast addition:  Hannah Cruz (Suffs) as Gussie.

Also Mallory Bechtel in "an undisclosed role" — I'd guess Beth, but I don't know why they'd be keeping that undisclosed for (thus far) almost a year after originally announcing that Bechtel had joined the cast.  [Ed. 3/8/25:  Sometime over the 3½ weeks since I first posted this, the IMDb and Wikipedia pages for both Bechtel and the film were updated to confirm that she is indeed playing "Beth Spencer"].

So I think "Okay"
And I start a play,
And he somehow knows,
Cause right away,
It's Drrrring!

"Hiya, buddy,
Wanna write a show?
Got a great idea,
We'll own all the rights
With a two-week out
And a turnaround
On the guarantee
Plus a gross percent
Of the billing clause—"