Skip to main content

A Few of My Favorite Things

Finally got my little camera hooked up to the connection as well as my phone. The phone is easy... but sometimes I just snap random things with the little camera that comes out so much cooler than I thought.

Some of my utterly favorite things from the Paramount Studio Tour were things I hadn't expected.

The first was finding that Lucille Ball had been the first true believer in the Star Trek franchise, and the photo in the front forum of the tour area. It was also the first time I realized just how much of a power Lucille Ball had been not only in her own studio, the Desilu production company, but later on also in the whole of the Paramount powerhouse of TV and movie making.






 



The sign shop was amazing, mostly because the guy that was in charge of it all had started with pinstriping cars, and had done such a good job on one of the cars that someone had offered him a one-time job at Disney to do that kind of detailing for the rides there.  From there he'd gone on to an 18 year long career there, and then had gone on into more general movie making art work.

He's now been in the industry for 30+ years and his son is working in the shop with him, and it's as much about his ability with handpainting signs on glass (and showing the brushmarks on the back of the glass as well as the front) as it is about coordinating dozens and dozens of signs to reface a little town for a movie set. It was amazing the amount of reject work they could show in the shop.  These are pictures that didn't include the super secret items from an on-going project they were working on.

In the archives, I was utterly thrilled to realize that I was standing next to a cart that was completely filled with Star Trek films.  All of them.

I was amazed. I'm so used to thinking of all media as just being ephermial, as something I'd get from connections, and that the substance of real film wouldn't be that big a deal.  But it really was a big deal to stand right next to the physical existence of these stories that I'd loved while I grew up. These were the archival copies of these movies, the source and One True physical embodiment that had sourced all the copies that had gone all over the world to entertain and teach everyone.

The other thing I was surprised brought tears to my eyes was finding the full-sized model of Bumblebee and being able to stand next to him in a photograph.

He was always my favorite of all the Autobots. He always seemed to be the sweetest and most determined of them all, but that may well have been because he couldn't speak. It's an interesting thing.  But he had always been my favorite and in the newest incarnations, seems to be the one that I'll still love the most. *laughs*

Speaking of giants... this is a picture John got of me next to one of the redwoods.  It was fun to just be able to look up and not have my neck hurt at all in doing it.  And still not quite see the top of the tree because it was so far up. 

So just a few more pictures from various parts of the trip that I hadn't been able to get up yesterday.  There will be more from Seattle today, as there are a few Mecca points that John and I will visit. I'm looking forward to it.


Comments

  1. Oh, yeah... and the Mona Lisa just casually sitting there on the ground, leaning against the table is definitely a reprint.... it was just funny.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Potsticker and Boiled Dumpling Recipe

There are two different everyday dumplings that we always used to make at home. One is the potsticker (gwo tiea) and the other is the boiled dumpling (jow tzs) (literally foot). They have a variety of innards and different wrapper dough to deal with their cooking environments. Dough Ingrediants Potsticker Dough 400 grams all purpose flour 210 grams boiling water 2 grams salt Boiled Dumpling Dough  400 grams all purpose flour 210 grams cold water 2 grams salt Dough Preparation - Is the same for both Put the flour and salt in a medium bowl, and, using a fork or chopsticks, gradually add the water. Pour out the pieces of dough and extra flour onto a clean counter and knead together. Place in a covered bowl and let rest for 20 minutes. Then take it out and knead it again until it's smooth and pliable, about 3-5 minutes, and then put in the covered bowl again to rest at least 20 minutes, but it can hold for a few hours. Filling 1 pound meat/protein. Usually ground pork, but ground turke

Gumbo Z'Herbes

I'm writing this because my son needs this particular version of Gumbo Z'Herbes as I actually do it. It was based off a recipe in Epicurious that then went to Chow that then went to Chowhound, that then... anyway... I don't know the exact origins anymore, and I've changed it substantially from them.  Ingredients 3  lb  greens (two bags of Costco Super Greens is great for this) 2/3  c  vegetable oil 2/3  c  all-purpose flour 1   yellow onion chopped 1  bunch  scallion chopped 1   green pepper chopped 4   celery ribs chopped 2  cloves  garlic minced 2  t  kosher salt 2  T  Cajun seasoning (preferably Lucille's) 2 cups vegetable broth or chicken broth if you're not going vegan or water 2  whole  cloves 2  whole  bay leaves 3 whole allspice 1  T fresh herb (I never have marjoram, so it's been cilantro usually or parsley)  Gumbo Z'herbes Directions Have a big bowl of ice water to the side. Bring 3 cups of water to a boil, add 1/2 tsp salt to the water, then d

Povitica, Traditional and My Take

Strawberry Hill makes povitica for the Kansas City Ukranian and Croatian and Eastern European people in the Midwest. They do an amazing job of it and were highly recommended by John's father's cousins. So we bought an apple cinnamon one and an English walnut one to see what they were really like. We ate the apple cinnamon one, first, and that's what I started my experiments to reproduce. I started with Joy Food Sunshine's Homemade Povitica Bread Recipe , but it was far too light and airy and bread-like for me. It's a very nice loaf of sweet bread with a very light swirl of nuts for flavor and scent. It's a nice thing, but entirely unlike the Strawberry Hill loaf, which was super dense and the swirl of flavors dominated the almost chewy wrapper around the filling. It also had very little cinnamon, something I really missed as the Strawberry Hill apple povitica had a wealth of cinnamon richness. Also in talking to the Arkansas cousins, living in the American Sout