📺 Ms. Marvel (2022) ★★½
A Marvel series that checks all the storytelling boxes. Colourful and vivid, but also completely couloured inside the lines.
🌱 Unfortunately our hedgehog house isn’t in use this season, despite plenty of hedgehog activity in our garden. (Probably it’s just too hot during the summer?) But today I discovered that a brave bumblebee queen decided to use it instead and start a new colony in there! 🐝
Jopen blurred lines juicy IPA ★★★
🥾Short afternoon walk. Spotted a lot of lazing hares.
🎥 You Only Live Twice (1967) ★★½
Except maybe for the gigantic stage designs, I didn’t like anything particular in this fifth James Bond film.
📚 Excited to begin reading Synesthesia by Richard E. Cytowic. Very curious to find out how the field has evolved since my student days. I also like the look and feel of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge book series.
Went to the exhibition Come Alive, on eroticism as a creative energy, in beautiful Muntgebouw in Utrecht. Loved seeing the work of our good friend Wafae Ahalouch el Keriasti on display as well.
Short visit with the family to beautiful Landhuis Oud-Amelisweerd, just an half hour bike ride from home. Solo exhibition by Amie Dicke, and also ‘Gardening’, a group exhibition on nature and technology, curated by Creative Coding Utrecht.
🌱 Upon arriving home after a short holiday, I found this ‘fledgeling’ in our garden. Probably left there as a kind of trophy by one of our cats. It certainly wasn’t there a week ago. The hot temperatures and the abundance of insects must have contributed to its current state…
Finished re-reading: Ja-maar wat als alles lukt? / druk 1 (2005) by Berthold Gunster. A ‘positive psychology’ book I already read when I was a lot younger. Most of the concepts mentioned resonate a lot better with me now I’m older. 📚
🌧 Rather enjoying a drizzly, rainy day today, a welcoming contrast with the heatwave of the past couple of days. This is how we said goodbye to the heath. 🌅
🎵Enjoying a much needed short holiday at the coast (and arrived just in time for the incoming heat wave). Woke up with this great album by Mexican cellist Mabe Fratti. Apple Music incorrectly labels it as New Age, I would rather label it experimental dreampop.
🎥 Thunderball (1965) ★★★
I was pretty skeptical beforehand, but I actually did enjoy this one. Maybe it was the Exotica / Martin Denny style of the soundtrack, or the sometimes ‘experimental’ montage style of editing that made it a worthwhile watch.
🌱 Synchronised Nuptial flight of three (?!) ant colonies in our garden.
Different colonies of the same species often use environmental cues to synchronize the release of males and queens. […] The actual “take off” […] is also often synchronized to overwhelm their predators.
🌱 The newly planted grape in our garden is coming along nicely.
🎥 Goldfinger (1964) ★★★½
You can’t deny the blatant misogyny in this third James Bond instalment (naming a character Pussy Galore is just… well…). Still, this is perhaps the most iconic one of them all, with Goldfinger as the perfect villain.
Enjoying the final projects of my hard working students, during the graduation show of the HKU School of Media. Great to be able to just walk around again, really experience all the projects and have a little chat with everyone!
Today’s pale colour palette pretty accurately matches my current mood…
🎥 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) ★★½
Stephen Strange, somewhere, in an alternate, parallel, multiversal reality:
“There might be another, other, other me.”
Superhero fatigue really is a thing…
🎥 From Russia With Love (1963) ★★★
To me, Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb was the real Bond Girl here.
🌱 There’s nothing like the fresh smell of boiling jam from homegrown raspberries and redcurrants…
🎵 Andrew Bird - Inside Problems ★★★★
Great new album by Andrew Bird, harking me back to the great days of his debut Armchair Apocryphia!
🌱 Blooming sage in the morning sun. For the first time since we planted it years ago (but used its leaves for culinary purposes). Didn’t know it had such beautiful flowers.
🌱 There are literally hundreds of ladybird beetles living in our garden right now. I already spotted several larvae and pupae in the last couple of weeks, but I never saw so many of them before. They’re right on time though: our fruit trees have a lot of aphids on their leaves.
🎵 I finally found some time to edit the field recordings I made during our recent trip to Chalcidice, Macedonia, Greece 🇬🇷. I especially liked the intriguing, otherworldly sounds of the Eurasian scops owl at night!