Friday Carousel

It's Friday, the last day of the week! How wonderful! This is the day that I get to wear casual clothes to work, and pretty much enjoy the day as much as I can. I'm right now in my office hanging up pictures. Mostly they are pictures of impressionist artists, but they are all pictures that were in the famous Ambroise Vollard collection. So far my favourites are "The cook", and "Dr. Felix Rey".

Anyway, onward with Carousel!

Florence Foster Jenkins: You have to give the woman some credit, she was just so determined. Florence was born in Pennsylvania in Wilkes-Barree to two rich parents in 1868. She had a couple of music lessons as a child and developed the desire to go abroad and study music. Of course daddy refused to pay the bill, so she eloped to Philadelphia with Frank Jenkins, a doctor (She later divorced him). Here she earned a living as a teacher and a pianist. However when her father died, Jenkins inherited a substantial sum of money and embarked on the singing career that she had always wanted. She was a hit immediately for her songs, but for quite the opposite reason than most singers can boast. Florence had little sense of pitch and rhythm and was barely incapable of sustaining a note. Her accompanist can be heard making adjustments to her variations and rhythmic mistakes. Despite her lack of ability, she was convinced of her own greatness; dismissing the laughter which came from the audience as “professional jealousy”. She was also aware of what her critics said stating that “people may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing”. The great Florence died after her last (and sold out appearance) in 1944 in the same happy, confident sense of fulfillment that had always been a leading factor in her entire life.

A lawsuit between hairdressers and culture?

Underwater Sculpture. These are a little creepy but still beautiful in my opinion, I suppose that they'll in some way revert back to the ocean and in a thousand years they will become coral reefs. This is of course if we don't mess everything up first.

RAVE CATS! I Have always had a thing for glow in the dark stuff...yes it's a secret passion of mine...that I think stemmed from my obsession with the strange and unusual well scinece has created my newest fad...Rave cats!

Fireworks in Oslo. Because it generally gets really cold up in Norway, the government doesn't have a huge location where people go to watch fireworks. Instead everyone just uses their own backyard as the point of celebration. Someone decided to take a picture. How cool is that?

Most romantic getaways are sappy, but these actually look pretty cool. I love beaches, so I would probably go for these.

Japan should know better: Globalization and politics merging together to create this big ooops. Come on...Japan should have known better.

And now a weird video for all you wonderfully weird people out there: