Day #6 ..of Year #2 of Pandemic

After three-four days of crystal blue sky, clouds are finally beginning to roll in again. I did take a walk - when it was very sunny and had blue sky - at noon to pick up high blood pressure meds. They'd automatically refilled them for me on Wed, of last week, but I convinced them to hold the pills until Monday of this week. Only to realize at around 11 pm last night - that I'd forgotten all about it. So I raced off at 12 noon today to get them.

Wallgreens - the local pharmacy - is as you already know doing COVID Vaccines. There wasn't that many people there today. But, I'd heard they'd had issues. (All the pharmacies have had issues.) They at least have a small waiting area - with evenly space seats for about twelve people. Someone goes up to one window and registers, then they go sit and wait or stand and wait to be called. They get the vaccine and sit somewhere for a bit, and take off. It's not very well organized. I prefer the Mobile Health Units that have been set up by the Feds and the State - at those vaccination sites. Which are admittedly harder to get to or get an appointment at.

People are posting on the neighborhood page information on which site has appointments available. It kind of reminds me of the early days of testing - where people were hunting for places to get tested, that didn't have a long wait.

My sister in law is scheduled for Thursday, niece is slated to get it through her school, and my brother went through hell trying to get it through the State sites, and pharmacy ones. He got one for May, but decided to jump around the system to see if he could get one earlier - he's 50 turning 51 in April, with slight ashma. Mother thinks he managed to get one for this week or early next week.

My family is at the moment 65% of the way vaccinated. I have a lot of folks over 60 in my family. Moderna and Pfizer. Yay team Vaccine!

The Governor keeps coming on telling everyone how United New Yorkers have been. That we're more united than anywhere else. How we all came together and fought off the vaccine - and we'd been blind-sided by the various.

ME: I don't know if I agree with him on this. Feels like a lot of showmanship..
Mother: No, you're right not to. You weren't that United.
Me: No more than anywhere else.
Mother: You had the Hassidic Community which was insistent on doing its own thing, along with others.
ME: Quite true.

Our Governor reminds me a little bit of a liberal version of Trump at times.

***


Mother has been able to arrange more visits with Father, and the home health aid coordinator has also arranged for her to visit him in her transport wheelchair, and not in the walker - so she's not throwing her shoulders out and hurting herself, also not putting unnecessary weight on the healing hip.

They've also worked out grocery deliveries for her, and getting her to and from places. So good news. And her cousin was pleased that both my brother and I told her that she needed a second opinion. (She doesn't listen to me, everyone else has to say it as well.)

I told mother that I was a bit depressed today. ( Read more... )

Work has admittedly been making me crazy. It either comes at me all at once, and usually at the end of the week, or not at all. ( Read more... )

Also, tried to distract myself with a conversation on Scalzi's Whatever post about JL but got nowhere. No one is a film geek on that board, including Scalzi. If he was a film geek - he'd have written a different review. No, he's just a proflific sci-fi writer.

Also, distracted self with a meme on FB - which you could play at too if you want..."teach kids the alphabet with rock bands...A is for ABBA...keep it going". So far they've not made it past R. It took a while for them to get past M. And people are struggling with X. My cousin - realized he should do the entire alphabet - after getting to N - so messenged me instead.

(Via FB, I've managed to connect with approximately 80% of my cousins - I have about 30. My father had 7 brothers and 3 sisters, four of the seven brothers had kids (one's a 70 something gay man, who never told anyone in the family but my mother and father, that he was gay, and one's a Catholic Priest). All 3 of the sisters had kids. 3 of the siblings had more than one child. 3 of the siblings had more than 2. One of the siblings had more than 3. My mother had two sisters, one had no kids, one had three. Plus mother has two living cousins who are close to her age, that had no children. Add to that, of the grandchildren, about 10 had kids themselves. Needless to say, I've no concerns about my family line surviving me.

Did I give everyone a headache? I know I gave me a headache.



New York vs. The Corona Virus

Well California to date is still the only state to have more people dead from this thing than NY, that is if you accept the COVID MAP OF DOOM's tallying of the numbers. I keep waiting for Texas and Florida to pass us by, and I'm not completely certain that I believe they haven't. Any more than I believe Russia, India, China and Africa haven't. But who knows?
( From the Governor's Daily Email on COVID )

Apparently folks in upstate NY figured out they could make quilts out of face masks. (I don't know why not - face masks are mostly patterned cloth, with few exceptions. Only certain folks can afford the ones not made from patterned cloth - which wouldn't work well on a quilt.)

Memory quilts can be made of anything—even PPE. To honor the memory of the struggle New Yorkers endured throughout the pandemic, the Village of Mamaroneck Arts Council started a mask quilt project collecting decorated face masks from the community. The eight-foot by five-foot quilt showcases around 250 hand-painted masks designed by Mamaroneck residents as young as five and as old as 85 and is currently displayed at the Rye Neck High School Library in Westchester County.

The Governor is working his darndest to keep moral up in the State. Meanwhile We Work is trying to convince folks to go back to the office - they provide shared office space. And apparently the Mayor is pushing to bring City workers back to the office in May (meaning Crazy Agency may follow suite. My guess is May or June, I'll be back in the office. Assuming they get everyone vaccine.

There are mice living in my walls. ( Read more... )

Oh well, could be worse. Could be spiders. And I'm terrified of those.

Justice League Film Comparison - The Importance of Original Score..

If you want to know how music or the musical score (orchestration & songs) can drastically alter a film - go no further than the Whedon cut vs. the Snyder cut Justice League films. [Caveat - I'm not expert on this, a lot of things about musical scores go over my head.]

I always knew musical scoring was vitally important to film, after all silent films are mainly just music and visuals - but when I compared those two films, it smacked me upside the head. You can change the entire meaning and tone of a film with just your selection of the music.

The Music of Justice League - is its own epic tale of Death and Rebirth

Holkenborg, now 53, is far from the first film composer to lose his spot at the eleventh hour. But he might be the first to ever get his job back. Four years after he was canned, Holkenborg's name is back in the main credits of Zack Snyder's Justice League, the four-hour epic premiering today on HBO Max. And his equally long score — a colossal mashup of operatic orchestra, rock, synthesizers and wailing vocals — is, for some, as hotly anticipated as the expanded exploits of Ben Affleck's Batman and company.

...

The studio turned to the wisecracking Joss Whedon, known for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Marvel's own super-team franchise, The Avengers. Though credited with merely finishing Snyder's cut, Whedon actually rewrote and reshot as much as 75 percent of the film that was released in theaters on Nov. 17, 2017.

Holkenborg says he had just one meeting with the director. "We did not necessarily have a great click," he says. "I mean, I wasn't sitting there being thrilled to talk to him, because he was quite negative on the cut that was existing and what we worked on together. He was negative about the music that was in there at that point. He was negative about a lot of things in it. And I was like, 'Hey, you're talking about my friend here.' So I wasn't really inclined to take that further. I spoke to Zack that night and said, 'I'm leaning towards not doing it.' But then the next morning, I got a phone call that [Whedon] was going to work with Danny Elfman."

And this Interview may work better - it's more in depth.

Holkenborg had six months to write a brand new four-hour original score, involving previously conceived musical ideas by his mentor and partner, Hans Zimmer, from the first two movies in the Snyder-helmed DC trilogy, along with brand new ones. Holkenborg's process was a very free one due to the particular and somewhat unusual circumstances of the film's release. He went on to explain:

[Snyder said] 'Keep in mind when you start that the shackles are off.' Which basically meant that whatever my vision, together with Zack, was going to be the final vision and there was no interference of studio and producers on this particular film. Which, as some of you know, is extremely unique.

While the Whedon Cut and Snyder Cut both follow the same basic plot, the Snyder Cut makes changes and adds scenes, which provide the necessary context that Whedon was missing. And while Elfman's score was in no way a bad one, Holkenborg's return to the project allowed Snyder to release a film more faithful to his original vision involving Holkenborg's electrifying rock score in all its glory.

So..Tom Holkenberg who is closer in style to Hans Zimmer, is replaced by Danny Elfman.

The article by the way is really interesting - it points out that Holkenberg is by no means the first composer to be replaced on a film score, but he may well be the first to come back and re-score that film several years later.

I'm going to try to show the differences in a few clips. But, I know of a man who is blind - that enjoys the Looney Tunes Cartoons - based solely on the score of the films and the sound.

But first - a link to an Interview with Danny Elfman, the composer on Whedon's verison. Danny Elfman hates when Reboots Scrap Classic Themes - explaining why he dropped in other films scores into the Whedon Cut.

( Excerpt )

So two completely different styles and why we have two different styles. The reason for the different styles - ( Read more... )

Here's how they differ:
( Read more... )