Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Read the rest of this entry »

Due to scheduling issues of one sort and another, I did not get to Brookgreen Gardens Nights of 1000 Candles in 2019, so I was looking forward to seeing the Bruce Munro Southern Light installation this Spring. Well, then there was, of course, COVID-19, and that was put on hold for a while.

Now however, the display is up and running, and I found a chance to take it in on 6 June 2020. It was one of those unseasonably cool nights we have had this Spring, so the bugs were down, but it was still very comfortable, and there was also a beautiful full moon to go with the lights. My favorite part was towards the last of this set of pictures, a profusion of small color-changing bulbs on stalks planted across one of the more open and less sculpture-studded sections of the gardens. I felt as though I could probably have sat out there for some hours, but as the display closes at 11pm, I had to move on out before I was quite ready.

The exhibition runs from 8pm-11pm through September, so if you are in the area, it's well worth checking out.

Read the rest of this entry »

I'm afraid I didn't get all the pictures I wanted at this year's State Fair. I usually get a bunch of neon shots at night back in the midway area, and a night video shot from the skyway. This year, it started to rain just as it was getting dark, and that put an end to the outdoor part of my visit.

I didn't notice any particular changes this year, other than that the dinosaur exhibit in the old Steel Building site was not back this year, and that the Rocket was done up in candy stripes for its 50th anniversary. This year was also the 150th anniversary of the fair as a whole, an occasion noted in the annual sand sculpture.

Anyway, it was fun, as usual, and I had my "fair food". Hopefully next year, I will get my normal assortment of pictures and video.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, this was my week for seeing old guys.

I have to say the drive up to Greenville was fairly awful. I forgot that leaving Columbia on I-20/I-26 at 4:45 was not a good strategy and then it was rainy and misty the whole way and when I hit the road work near I-85, it was like they forgot to put lane markers on that stretch, or put them in with slate grey paint. Then I-385 ran out and the Greenville traffic jam started.

Anyway, it was a good thing that my ticket said 7:30 but the show didn't actually start until 8:30, or I would have missed the first hour..

Seger was in excellent voice, with no signs of the medical issues that postponed this concert from the start of the year. He has one of the best catalogs in rock, and he had the audience rapt from the first song ("Old Time Rock & Roll") through the last brauva performanc of "Rock & Roll Never Forgets" (which I missed capturing due to battery issues). This is his last tour, and if you can catch a show somewhere, you definitely should!

After not being able to go last year due to scheduling issues, I was afraid that this year would be a bust as well, since it had rained all day Friday, and was just starting to drizzle again as we pulled into the Gardens. Fortunately, that quickly petered out, and the rest of the night was rain free (though the ground was saturated as I found to my squishy discomfort a few times I steppted off the paths).

The basics of the festival stay the same year after year: Lights in a garden full of beautiful trees and sculpture, but they change it up a bit for each new edition. In particular, this year the boat full of glass balls was new as was the Hogwarts train setting.

I learned something interesting about taking pictures of LED Christmas lights: Even though these are not "blinking" lights, if you push your shutter speed high enough, you may well catch the instant when they are off. This did not happen with the old incandescent bulbs. I'm not sure exactly what the mechanism is. I would have said they go on and off 60 times a second with the AC frequency, but clearly in some pictures one strand is off and another is not.

One thing the preceding days of rain did do was keep the temperature at a comfortable level. There have been years where I could barely work the camera because my fingers were numb, but not this year!

There are two days of the lights left: Saturday 22 December & Sunday 23 December. If you are in the area, you definitely should go. Tickets are at https://www.brookgreen.org/.

(If I get the time, I may go back and add some videos of the train setups).

Read the rest of this entry »

I made my annual trek to the Charlotte Heroes Convention last Saturday, and spent the whole four hours I was there on the convention floor, trying to see every booth. Certainly a far cry from a couple of rooms in the Woodlawn Holiday Inn as it was in the beginning!

Of course, Charlotte being Charlotte, I found that the parking lot I had used for the last 10+ years was just a (deep) hole in the ground now, so I had to find another, which was luckily close enough to not risk getting lost.

I know Chris Claremont was there, but I did not make it to his (or any) presentations though I did see SC's Roy Thomas at a booth on the floor. Stan Lee was not there this year, and news stories suggest he's not doing very well unfortunately.

I think Harley Quinn continues to be the most popular costume, and of course where there's Harley, there will be Ivy as well. I saw one Mera whom I don't recall seing before (and with a fork for a trident). I didn't see any Groots or Gamoras this year...

Swag:

For the first time this year, I didn't see any booth with old pulp magazines (though I could have missed some), and very few with old paperbacks.

Anway..

Hartness was at a Columbia con a few years ago pushing his Black Knight Chronicles books, vampire action tales set in Charlotte. I found them entertaining, so I bit when he was there at Heroes Con with a new series about Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter, which is apparently also set in Charlotte and ties back into the original Dracula. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it's on the list.

Crockett Johnson is remembered mostly today (if at all) for his series of children's books about Harold and his magical purple crayon. But before that, he wrote this WWII era comic strip about the put-upon young boy Barnaby who is dragged into all types of unlikely situations by his well meaning but incompent fairy godfather Mr. O'Malley.

"Cushlamocree!"

Don't know anything about these two, but one was pitched to me as Star Trek with funny animals, and the other was free.

This was pitched by the author who was quite enthusiastic and loquacious. I came away a little unsure if it was a fantasy of some sort or a period murder mystery. I'll find out eventually.

The pitch here was for "70s late nite drive-in vampire feature..".

I'm a sucker for anything with "Doc" in the title.

You will believe water can flow uphill..

Pirate booty! (Yeah, I think I used that joke last year..)

I'm a sucker for surrealism too, though the contents seem to be not quite what I expected.

Well, this is the 9th South Carolina State Fair post here, so you probably know the drill by now. I like what I like, and I take pictures of it. I moved some pictures around to provide an entrance sequence, but as you can tell, I actually ended up up at the fair on two different days this year. I still miss the Steel Building, which was a bit more down-market than the new commercial exhibits in the new art building annex. In particular, no grey market videos, and no handwriting computer. This year, the flowers were moved in with the art, and the agricultural exhibits moved across the way where the flowers used to be. I didn't get into the animal area, so I don't know if the baby duck slide was still running.

I think I was running the camera at ISO-800 this year, higher than previously, and I'm not entirely happy with the results as the frequent bright lights interspersed with the booths tended to drown out everything else.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, unsurprisingly, most of my pictures didn't turn out at all, and these are pretty poor, but it was an impressive, if brief, moment here in the capital city. As totality approached, the street lights turned on, evening birds took wing, and the one car on the road had headlights lit.

There was a very light sprinkle ahead of totality, but during that brief interval itself, the clouds actually parted, and we all got to ooh and ahh at the firey crona around the occluded disk. Somewhere in the distance, fireworks started..

I took my annual jaunt up to the Charlotte Heroes Convention last Saturday, and couldn't resist a few clouds shots.

Parking is pretty easy considering what you might expect, and it's just a short walk to the convention center.

As you might expect there was a predictable, though certainly not unwelcome theme to this year's costumes.

A bit of a palate cleanser..

Love the "what the hey?" on the guy..

Some steampunk (note the vacuum tubes..)

Whosoever holds this hammer...

By the all-seeing Eye of Agamotto!

I thought I thaw a puddy tat

These are not the cosplayers you are looking for..

The Huntress, and I'm drawing a blank. (UPDATE: Black Canary, I think)

No idea, but I wouldn't cross him.

Cassie Kane, Batwoman (the "Bombshells" continuity version)

Storm...

...and Stormette

Harley Quinn

Never count the classics out

Swag

Walt Kelly's Fairy Tales

"Invisible Monster" remains the scariest Saturday morning cartoon ever..

Henry Kuttner, maybe best known for The Twonky

Girl Power

Planet Stories knew what covers would sell. (And published some decent "planetary adventure". Here's a Poul Anderson I haven't read)

Jack Williamson headed west on a covered wagon as a child, and was writing until 2006.

C. S. Forester better known for "Horatio Hornblower" and The African Queen (though, frankly, the movie is better).

Never heard of Wilcox, but again, a great cover..

Amy Chu, most recently writing Red Sonja.

Looked like an interesting coming-of-age story

No idea, but the guy was such a go-getter cold salesman that I said "Why not?"

Really noticed Randall's art on "The Bitter Earth" back in the day. His first visit to Heroes Con.

Pirate, um, booty.

The TV series is one of the funniest cartoons on today. I highly recommend "Girls Night Out" & "Pyramid Scheme". You just have to basically forget that the characters are drawn from Wolfman & Perez's classic 80s run of "Teen Titans" and go with the stupidity. Thought maybe a signed comic of her favorite show would actually get my niece to read something. We'll see..

Well, the shuttering of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus has already been well discussed in Have Your Say. I'm one of the majority who haven't been to a show in decades, and don't really have any strong memories of the few times I did go (which would have been in the Carolina Coliseum), but the news brought me, my sister, my nieces and apparently three quarters of Columbia (judging by traffic) out to the show last Sunday, and I have to say I certainly enjoyed myself.

Rather than the traditional three-ring hodge-podge, this years show was themed, and had a overall plot, so in a way I guess it was more like a Cirque du Soleil presentation than sawdust and tent poles. The loose plot framework was that two boyhood friends had both become stellar ringmasters, one working for a circus master whose magic telescope let him pick the brighest "circus stars" and the other to an evil Russian-esque Circus Queen, Tatiana, whose mission was to poach those brightest circus stars to build her show. The framework let the misguided ringmaster do physical comedy and lead his army of clowns against the "good" ringmaster while the good ringmaster travelled from planet to planet recovering his stolen stars, which of course gave them many chances to perform.

Another innovation was the fact that, when not covered by various panels, the arena floor was ice, so there was a lot of skating involved too. All of the usual feats of deering-do were there, tumblers, trapeze artists, bareback riders, lion (well mostly tiger) tamers, as well as dogs and clowns. Only the elephants were missing.

Of course in the end, the two friends were reconciled and even Tatiana joined the combined show which set off for Earth so it could make good the tagline of being the greatest there too. To me it seemed an appropriate send-off for the end of an American institution.