Adventures of a Discoverer

This one is right on time for Halloween: a forgotten cemetery in the south of Seattle. In addition, it is supposedly haunted by baby ghosts. And, believe me, visiting it as I did last Monday is truly creepy. A little bit of History: Seattle, even by New World standards, is a pretty new city. At the beginning of its History in the 1800's it was a very isolated and undeveloped part of the world. In those days, the few people who lived here often joined the so called Fraternal Associations: groups of people who would get together for social activities and also to support each other in a land with not much available. One such society in Seattle was the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows, that had a chapter in south Seattle at the then new Comet Lodge. Among other services, the Comet Lodge offered burial insurance. Simply put, at the end of the 1800's the members of the Comet Lodge got a piece of land on top of a hill with a wonderful view of the Duwamish river and of Elliott Bay,...

This last Saturday I watched a new kind of theater play: "Stereophonic" , a play with actors singing but that is not a musical. It's an interesting idea! The play is about a rock band in the 1970's that's recording a new album and its members are trying to deal with their newfound success. As part of that, there is the stress between being artists and releasing commercial records. The play is set in a recording studio, and as part of the story the actors actually sing and play some of the songs from the fictitious band. So, even though the cast does sing, it is not considered a musical because the songs are not telling a story: they are just the songs that the band is supposedly recording. That makes for a very interesting spectacle. For example, since it's a recording session, one of the songs is started multiple times: the band is trying to find the right tempo for the music, and that shows how the diverging views of the band members can clash in moments lik...

Last week I had the opportunity to see two things that I was very curious about. Let's start with the first one: the Grand Illusion Pop Ups. For many years now, a group of movie enthusiasts has kept a small movie theater that they named  the Grand Illusion Cinema . It was located in a former dentist office in the University District and it was really well put together and manned by volunteers. It had good image and good sound, and it was truly a work of love by people who always wanted to watch all kinds of movies on a bigger screen. As such, it used to show a number of interesting movies from the past, the more obscure the better, and you could watch on a theater screen some particular movie that you had always been curious about. Even better, it partnered with the legendary Scarecrow video rental store to show movies that are actually not available in any media anymore: on occasion you could see a movie being played from an old videocassette that was once distributed in that form...

The trail to the summit of Mt. Defiance, in the Central Cascades, is a particularly hard one: so much so that I had tried to reach the peak twice before... and did not succeed (like  this time ). Yesterday though, finally, I made it to the very top and it was amazing. A little bit of background: Mt. Defiance is 5,456 feet (1,663 meters) high, which means that snow stays on its slopes for a long time. In the previous occasions, as I got higher I got through some snow fields that were in the process of melting, which means that they were both slippery and hollow: in some places there was just a layer of snow covering an empty space where the ice had already melted. It was too dangerous to continue at that point, so I had to give up twice before. This time around I did my attempt on September 1st, which means that all snow was gone for sure. Nevertheless, it is still a very tough hike: you have to walk 3,687 feet (1,124 meters) up on some very steep stretches of trail for what seems ...