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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   learn of another song by Queen
Saturday, November 24 2018
It being Saturday, we had Saturday morning coffee in front of the fire. I had a better experience with the ritual than usual, since I hadn't had any caffeine yesterday (unless I'm forgetting something). At some point the coffee drinking gave way to the leftover eating, which continued throughout the day. For most of the afternoon, though, I salvaged firewood, again from that massive supply of fallen oak below where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. Though internally the wood was dry, there was enough surface moisture to make me want to stack it around the woodstove to dry.
I found my Dazzle Hackintosh was more reliable after downloading an updated motherboard BIOS from Hewlett Packard for the particular motherboard it uses (one I'd bought on eBay back when I was really into Hackintosh). I still think the videocard is slightly Hackintosh-incompatible, but the new BIOS keeps it from getting stuck in a state where it never even begins to boot, something that often makes it impossible to casually use as-needed for Macintosh needs.

This evening (after grazing all day on leftovers), Gretchen and I set off for Saugerties to watch Bohemian Rhapsody, the new Queen biopic, at the Orpheum Theatre. On the way there, we encountered a pair of black bears on the shoulder of Hurley Mountain Road. One was bigger than the other, suggesting a mother and a not-fully mature child. Gretchen saw them first and I slammed on the brakes. (Black bears aren't all that visible at night!) I then blinked my high beams in a frenzy at oncoming traffic. What were the bears doing? And why weren't they hibernating? It's definitely been hibernation-cold for the past few days, but tonight was warmer (though still a little colder than seasonal). Perhaps the bears hadn't yet eaten all the acorns they needed for fat reserves.
The Orpheum is a triplex, and Bohemian Rhapsody was shown upstairs in a shallow theatre with a big screen set behind a stage. This arrangement makes all the seats kind of good ones, but the best ones of all were against the stage. There one could put ones feet comfortably up on the stage and relax for the whole movie in a way that is decidedly more comfortable than putting ones feet up on the back of the seat in front of us (which, if nobody is in that seat, we usually do).
Gretchen is the big Queen fan in our household. Since my exposure to the group was mostly through radio, my core impression it to regard them as some combination of overwrought and whatever "Another One Bites The Dust" is (all the rock bands were doing disco then, including the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd). That said, over the years I've been exposed to more of the Queen back catalog, so I've come to respect them as an important and talented part of rock history. Another important under-celebrated feature of Queen is that they were one of the first hard rock bands to come into being with almost no blues influences, which for me is a definite a plus. As for the biopic itself, I wasn't sure at first if I was going to be able to sufficiently suspend my disbelief with Rami Malek (whom I know as the always-slightly-bewildered protagonist of the golden age television show Mr. Robot) playing Freddie Mercury. But he did alright and, once my mind learned to discount the distinctive creases around Malek's eyes, I was mostly spellbound. With movies of this nature, it's all about recreating familiar images and YouTube clips, and in this regard Bohemian Rhapsody was amazing. That said, I feel there wasn't quite a big enough story here to justify a full-on biopic. Freddy Mercury's was, after all, a familiar story: a rock star rides the rocket of popularity into the sky but (to mix metaphor with Greek myth) flies too close to the sun and bad things happen. What made Freddie Mercury's story a bit different from the usual telling of this story was his unusual ethnicity and complicated sexuality, both of which made put him astride several of society's borders. Because Bohemian Rhapsody needed a PG-13 rating, his sexuality couldn't really receive a satisfactory treatment, and that might've contributed to what I perceived as a lack of story-telling substance. There were, however, a number of clever moments in the telling of the story. For example, Mike Meyer, who plays one of the characters in Wayne's World seen rocking out with friends in that movie to the song Bohemian Rhapsody, is seen in Bohemian Rhapsody playing a stuffy record executive who wants Queen to stick with formulæ to come up with their next hit. The character says he can't imagine boys ever rocking out in their car to song "Bohemian Rhapsody," and suggests releasing "I'm In Love With My Car" as a single instead.
On the drive back home, Gretchen relived a few moments from her tween years growing up on Queen. She'd been exposed to their music mostly through friends, so she knows a number of deep cuts that are only vaguely familiar to me (if at all). She did not, however, remember there ever being a song "I'm In Love With My Car."
Back at our house, I quickly found that "I'm In Love With My Car" is indeed a Queen song (and was on the B-side of Bohemian Rhapsody. I went on to watch a YouTube clip of Queen's actual performance at Live Aid and was astounded by how faithfully it had been reproduced in the biopic I'd just watched.
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