Legends of the Sun Pig

Our second trip to the South Bay during August was to see Lindsey Stirling, again at the Mountain Winery. This is the third time we’ve been to see Lindsey Stirling as a family. Both previous times were at 013 in Tilburg, so there’s a family tradition of driving an hour and a half to see her. Or maybe it was just a trilogy than a tradition.

Fiona was excited because we were returning to where we had taken her to see the Barenaked Ladies six years ago — her very first concert. Alex seemed lukewarm. We were running a little late, but we still saw most of Carah Faye’s opening act, which was fine.

The first time we saw Lindsey Stirling perform, it was just her, her drummer, and her keyboard player. The second time she had two dancers on stage with her as well. This time, she had a troupe of six dancers. I don’t know if this is the continuing progression of her stage act, or because she didn’t have to fly so many people half-way across ther world; either way, it was the biggest and richest visual performance we’d seen of her. Although perhaps the dancers are starting to become a distraction from her own violin playing?

A definite distract were the short skits that played on the video screen behind the stage while she nipped off for a quick costume change. The first one was a jokey short about her biggest fan living backstage, and doing a short piece to camera. Meh. The second one was a new-agey video of water crystals forming and dissolving, with soothing background music, and a voiceover explaining the (pseudo-scientific) work of (discredited) scientist Masaru Emoto on how water crystals respond to our emotional state as an obvious truth that we were all missing. Alex literally facepalmed, and spent the whole video with his head in his hands and groaning. We could see his prior respect for Lindsey Stirling drain away from him. Around us, the open-air auditorium felt hushed, not so much out of respect, but out of a uncomfortable feeling of “is she really…?”

California is a bit of a weird mix, sometimes. One the one hand, it is a centre of scientific and technical innovation. On the other, it is the worldwide home of woo. I’m sure that some people in the audience were sitting there, nodding, and going “yeah, she’s really onto something”, just as many of the parents there were going to have some resoundingly skeptical conversations with their kids on the way back home. Alex certainly had a good rant on the way out of the gig afterwards. Abi pointed out that we go to Lindsey Stirling concerts for her music, not her beliefs, but I’m not sure if Alex was convinced. It’s a hard and perennial question: how do you deal with it when a person has qualities you both admire and abhor?

Alex didn’t buy any merch after the gig. Fiona did. The geometric T-shirt designs accompanying Lindsey Stirling’s new album Brave Enough are pretty cool.

Because we were late to arrive, we were right at the back of the Mountain Winery’s car park, and it took us almost a full hour to exit. A few days earlier, Abi and I had arrived much earlier, because we were having dinner before the concert. Even so, getting our of the car park was a slow affair, because the venue is half-way up a mountain, with just a single-track approach road. So, note to self: when visiting the Mountain Winery, get there early.

While we were in California in August, we took several trips to the South Bay. On the first occasion, Abi and I went to the Mountain Winery in Saratoga to see the Indigo Girls. We had been to the Mountain Winery six years ago to see the Barenaked Ladies when Fiona was still six years old (her first concert). This time it was just Abi and me, though. We had booked one of their dinner + concert packages, and we had a lovely meal out on the Chateau Deck overlooking the valley. I had a tuna and shrimp salad to start, braised beef short rib for my main course, and a lemon meringue tart for dessert. The food was okay (the wasabi overpowered everything in the salad, and there was far too much beef), and I felt a little bit hurried throughout the meal (to be fair, they were trying to get everybody done by the time the concert started), but the accompanying wine from the winery itself was excellent, and the setting was amazing.

Lucy Wainwright Roche played a pleasant opening set, and then she came back during the course of the Indigo Girls to provide backing vocals on a few numbers. I’m not actually the Indigo Girls fan here. Abi likes them, and I spotted the gig when I was scouting for live music to see while we were in the Bay Area. I didn’t know any of their songs apart from “Closer To Fine”, but I enjoyed the music throughout. “Chicken Man” stuck with me because I couldn’t quite believe I was hearing the lyrics right. (“They can’t really be singing chicken man, can they?”) I listened to the song on Spotify when we got back home after the gig, but I didn’t like the recording as much as the live version — it lacked the energy they brought to the concert.

Because I didn’t know the songs, I wasn’t memorizing the set list, but here’s what other people recorded: Indigo Girls set list as setlist.fm

Alex, Fiona, and I took a trip to Edinburgh in July. We flew over in the afternoon of Monday 18th. We picked up a rental car at the airport (upgraded from the Ford Focus I’d booked to a ludicrously huge Mercedes C200), and took a drive around South Queensferry to have a look at the new bridge under construction. Afterwards we drove to Haddington, and went out to dinner at the Waterside Bistro with Scott, Ange, Kyle, and Rachel. Alex and Fiona both had cajun chicken for the first time, not realizing quite how spicy cajun food can sometimes be. Alex was comically taken aback by his plate, but he did claim to like it (even though the heat eventually became too much for him). His palate is definitely evolving. It was a warm and sunny evening, and we took a leisurerly walk back along the river. Well, leisurely for the adults. The cousins spent most of the walk running and chasing each other.

Tuesday was one of the hottest days of the year in Edinburgh. I went in to work for the day, while Scott and the kids went to Foxlake for watery adventure fun, and hit Haddington again for ice cream in the afternoon. In the evening Alex, Fiona, and I drove back to the airport to drop off the car, and took the bus back into Edinburgh. We took a taxi to our Airbnb rental.

Wednesday I had to work again. I was supposed to be at an all-day workshop, but I had to abandon it part-way through the morning because of an allergic reaction to a personality profiling exercise. (That did allow me to be around the office during for an important software release in the afternoon, but my team had that all under control anyway.) Alex and Fiona were on their own. (Deliberately so: this was an Independence Quest.) They had phones, they know the language, and they had been around Edinburgh before. This was the day for them to explore the city on their own. They left the apartment around lunchtime (after the massive thunderstorms had passed), and visted the National Museum. They wanted to go to Maison de Moggy, the cat café in the Grassmarket for lunch, but they found that it only serves cake, not hot food. So they found a fish and chip shop and had that instead. At some point during the afternoon they hit up the Black Lion games store, and made their way back across the Meadows to the apartment. In the evening we went out to see Area 11 at the Mash House, and had fish and chips (again) at Uncle’s on George IV Bridge on the way back.

I had the day off on Thursday. Ange dropped Kyle off at our apartment just before we left. We walked across the Meadows to drop off our bags at the FanDuel office for the day, and raid the snack table. A long time ago (2002), Abi made a geocache called Up The Close And Down The Stair, which is a scavenger hunt around Edinburgh’s old town, following in the footsteps of 19th century serial killers Burke and Hare. We had a great time doing the cache, stopping off for ice cream, lunch at Mamma’s, and the occasional pokémon. At the end of the day we picked up our bags, saw Kyle off on a train back to East Lothian, and had just enough time to get Alex a haircut at Alfies barbershop on Fleshmarket Close before we caught the bus out to the airport and back home.

So it turns out that if you stick googly eyes on stone statues of children, the result is absolutely terrifying:

We saw these near the site of the first stop of the cache, in the graveyard of St Cuthbert’s on Princes Street. In case you missed it the first time:

Of course this meant that we had to find a shop that sold googly eyes, and targets to apply them to:

Not quite so terrifying, that last one.

At festival time, Edinburgh has such a shortage of flat surfaces for affixing posters that they put up temporary structures just for plastering with festival advertising. In Dutch, these would be called “plakzuilen”.

Around the household we’ve been listening to Area 11 since the Yogscast featured the instrumental section between “Vectors” and “Euphemia” as part of the theme music for their Minecraft videos. (Curiously, in the original version of their album All The Lights In The Sky that I bought on iTunes in 2013, that section is at the end of “Vectors”; if I play the album on Spotify now, it comes at the start of “Euphemia”. The two tracks flow into each other seamlessly, but I wonder why the track division has changed.)

Their first album was amazing, easily one of my favourites of 2013. They put out an EP and toured the UK towards the end of 2014, but the timing didn’t work out for me to catch them live. Earlier this year we caught wind that they were going to be bringing out a new album, and touring again. This time, the timing worked out perfectly: they played The Mash House in Edinburgh on Wednesday 20 July, right in the middle of Alex and Fiona’s school summer holidays. With me still flying to Edinburgh for work every other week, it was easy for me to line up a business trip and bring the two of them with me as well!

Fiona and I have been to a variety of concerts over the last year, but The Mash House is by far the smallest venue we’ve been to. Alex was with us for Imagine Dragons back in February as well, and this was smaller than anything he has experienced too. The Mash House is accessed from a small door down a tiny alleyway just off Chambers Street. There’s a bar at the front of the house, and a 250 person capacity suite further in. It wasn’t full, and we were able to get a good position just four or five heads from the stage. Alex is 180cm tall now, so he had a good view. Fiona is still a fair bit shorter, and she had to weave around to see everything. I’m not sure if I was the oldest person in the crowd (again), but I certainly wasn’t far off.

Opening act Milestones were good. In the break before Area 11 came on, Sparkles* wandered from the back of the room to the stage a couple of times to check the setup, looking very serious and concentrated. (In promotional photos he often wears a stern frown; I think because otherwise he’d be mistaken for an adorable teddy bear.)

1. Override [C]
2. The Contract
3. Watchmaker
4. Versus
5. In the Blind
6. Homunculus
7. Processor
8. After the Flags
9. Angel Lust
10. Dream & Reality
11. All the Lights in the Sky
12. Heaven-Piercing Giga Drill

Encore:

13. Tokyo House Party

Now, Alex can be quite sensitive to loud noise, and he isn’t generally a big music fan. Live music is mostly take it or leave it for him. But by the end of this gig he was jumping along to the beat, and pumping his fists in the air with a great big grin. I loved it, too. I particularly appreciated the sound engineering that allowed Jonathan “Kogie” Kogan’s bass to shine through. At first listen, Area 11 are very heavy on vocals and guitars, but when you go listening for it, the bass is amazing.

The A’DAM Toren Lookout deck has been open for a few weeks now, but the swing had its first public rides today. We didn’t plan it that way, but my parents were in town, and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go up there, have a look around, and take a ride.

It’s amazing.

Fiona and I recently watched Ghostbusters and Finding Dory in the cinema. Ghostbusters was fun, but it spent too much time paying homage to the original. What I’m really excited for is where they go next, now that they’ve got a great set of characters teed up, and have got all the introductions out of the way. Surely there is going to be a sequel.

As for Finding Dory, it’s both a sequel and a homage to Finding Nemo. It’s the same plot, remixed with different themes for a different protagonist. Despite trusting Pixar and director Andrew Stanton to deliver a beautiful, fun, and emotionally rich film, I hadn’t been looking forward to it. If Fiona hadn’t been so eager, I wouldn’t have made a cinema trip to see it. And I did enjoy it! Just as Dory stole the show in Finding Nemo, Hank the octopus septopus steals the show here. The two seals struck a curiously wrong note, though. In a film whose core theme is about kindness and emotionally supporting people in need, it was unsettling to see their constant bullying of a smaller, weaker, weird-looking seal being played for laughs.

Once I got past the initial hump of Person of Interest’s first season, I’ve been storming through the episodes. I’m almost at the end of season 3 now. I’m finding it especially interesting in the light of recently having read Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence, because the accidental emergence of AI is what drives the entire arc of the show. (It might look like just another altruist vigilante action show, but it’s actually science fiction.) The book’s academic themes and scenarios are still fresh in my mind, and I’m finding more depth in the show than I think I otherwise would. The downside is that I get impatient when they do a number-of-the-week episode that doesn’t move the big plot forward.

That big comic books haul from a few weeks ago? Here goes:

• Wolverine (2013): Hunting Season and Killable. Lovely classic action superhero artwork from Alan Davis. Story: meh.
• Wolverines: Dancing with the Devil; Claw, Blade and Fang; The Living and the Dead, Destiny. Mostly filler. Albeit with lovely visuals from a variety of artists. The art style changing from issue to issue kept things fresh.
• Captain Marvel (2014): Higher, Further, Faster, More; Stay Fly; and Alis Volat Propriis. First two books are great, third one suffers from having to show just a single slice of a Marvel crossover storyline (The Black Vortex), and feels disconnected as a result.
• She-Hulk (2014): Law and Disorder and Disorderly Conduct. Brilliant. Witty and full of superheroic antics, but without a constant sense of violence being the only option. In fact, Jennifer Walters being a lawyer makes it her least preferred option. Her desire to be accepted as a professional for her law practice makes this the kind of low-powered, relatable superhero story I love. I also adore Javier Pulido’s take on her, which is much more cartoonish and athletic than classic hyper-muscular sexualized She-Hulk. Not as obviously comedic as Howard The Duck and Squirrel Girl, but quite in line with their quirky and irreverent attitude to the Marvel universe. Want more of this.
• Manhattan Projects vol 1. Intriguing supernatural alt-history, spinning off lots of ideas around what might have happened if the Manhattan Project was a nexus of paranormal investigation and engineering. Very dark. Not sure if I’ll continue with the series.
• Rocket Raccoon: A Chasing Tale. Skottie Young’s art style reminds me of the loose and flowing art style of 1980s-era European comics like Robbedoes (Spirou). The storyline is I found bit take-it-or-leave-it.
• Spider-Gwen: Most Wanted. It’s OK. I’m not really feeling it.
• Silk: The Life and Times of Cindy Moon. Liked this a lot, especially Stacey Lee’s artwork.