A list of all posts since April (when we switched from Movable Type to Textpattern) is now up and running. Now if I can salvage all the MT entries from April back through last August, we’ll be in bidness.

RSS and Atom feeds are working again; you can find links to them in the ‘Remember’ section of the navigation list on the left. Let me know if there’s a problem with them.

I’m still working on the ‘Ask’ and ‘Contact’ sections of all the journals, as well as an archives page listing all entries. Hope to have those up soon. Thanks for reading us and leaving your comments … we love to hear from you.

Southeast Michigan seems to have missed most of the Brood X periodical cicada event, but the regular “dog day” Tibicen cicadas, which are apparently more of a loner species than the Magicicada, are now gracing us with their shrill hissing mating song. I’m sorry that we didn’t get to see much of the Magicicada, but Tibicen is the next-best thing.

On the afternoon of the so-called “Marriage Protection Sunday,” Steve and I went out to the Michigan Theater and saw Vincente Minnelli’s “An American in Paris“ (1951), which I’d never seen all the way through before and has got to be one of the all-time great musicals. Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Ira and George Gershwin, Vincente Minnelli, “I Got Rhythm,” and the Montmartre: all good antidotes to the hatemongers and the naysayers. Minnelli’s masterful use of color is almost hallucinatory; it’s absolutely unbelievable on the big screen, and it makes stuff like Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” look like child’s play, no matter how much “better” the technology that modern filmmakers have access to.

It was also gratifying to see that while the screening room where the film was being shown wasn’t packed, it wasn’t empty either. There were plenty of people there, and they were of many different ages and backgrounds; it wasn’t just a bunch of stereotypical musical aficionados (i.e., gay men). A grandmother behind us in line had two girls with her about 11 or 12 years old; good for her for taking them on a Sunday afternoon to see a classic American movie instead of some teen-tween major-studio crowd-pleaser like “Sleepover” or “Garfield.”