As I listen to new music, I make notes of what I’d like to share. When I have time, I work my way through my lists of discoveries and try to slot bands into the themed drafts saved on my computer. When a draft has enough bands in it (usually 4-6), I schedule it for publication. It’s a system that’s worked pretty well for me, but sometimes when I’m working through my lists I come upon a band that really belonged in a post that already published. So I started this post of missed opportunities. The theme is regret, but the music is good.
When my oldest daughter was ten, she and I visited her birth city, Qingdao. Every day, we woke up early and gorged ourselves on the breakfast buffet in the hotel before venturing out to explore the city.
Most days, we ran out of steam midafternoon and headed back to the hotel for a rest before venturing back out to find dinner. Once my daughter discovered Boonie Bears, a two-hour block of every day belonged to local TV.
Neither of us spoke Chinese, and there were no subtitles, but the story was easy to understand. An inept Elmer Fudd-type character was trying to log a forest, but the clever bears who lived there kept outsmarting him.
For all the Looney Tunes silliness and cartoonish violence, there were some intriguing subtleties that I don’t think an American cartoon would have offered. The “evil logger” often gets chewed out on the phone by a boss or his father. He also cries when his mother calls him. In one episode, the forest animals help him get home to the city – not, I think, because they want him out of the woods, but because he needs to see his mother.
Once we got home, internet research told me the name of the cartoon, and I found out they made a movie of it in 2014. But so far, none of the streaming services seem to offer the tv show or the movie. I’d love to see it again with subtitles. To this day, my daughter still talks about the forest cartoon she used to watch in China.
I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, but I do love documentation. As a perfectionist, I like to have thorough records. And as a perfectionist, I spend so much time feeling that I’m not performing to standard that sometimes it feels nice to look back and realize, “Hey, I actually did a lot.” So here is a quick summary of the work I did in 2019.
My heavy metal origin story is so embarrassingly cliche: I started dating a guitar player in high school. In my defense, I was studying violin myself at the time, so I also came by my preference for strings honestly. But there’s no denying that however much I broaden my musical horizons, I love a good guitar noodle. Here is some of the guitar-worshiping music I’ve liked lately (and a couple classics for good measure).
People behave badly at Chinese zoos. China just doesn’t have the same standards for animal welfare, and most people aren’t as familiar with wildlife as we are in the U.S. It’s out of ignorance not malice that people feed animals through the bars and toss rocks into enclosures to make animals “do something.” That’s part of what we need zoos for – to educate people about animals.
Despite the low standards that so distressed me at the zoo in Qingdao, I got in trouble for using flash near the pandas. I didn’t mean to – my camera was set to auto, and the building wasn’t at brightly lit as I thought. But when my flash went off, a security guard came over and told me I would have to leave if I did it again. We protect what we value.
I’m a freelance content and grant writer sharing my work and my thoughts about books, music, and travel on this blog. If you want to know how I can help you share the things you care about, read more about me.
