Feeling Groovy

 
Photo: Wikimedia Commons via user Nancy http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nancy
FAR OUT: We're still tripping in the '60s in our history of rock class. Today's lectures focused on major players in the psychedelic scene in San Fransisco and London.

First up was the city by the Bay. The Grateful Dead were seemingly everywhere and anywhere that had to do with a psychedelic happenings. It was interesting to ponder that their albums don't necessarily encapsulate their music very well, as they're known for their improvisational, experimental live performances. 

Jefferson Airplane was big on the scene, too. LOVE this video of them from the Smothers Brothers' variety show!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0

We also watched watched Country Joe and the Fish recorded live at Woodstock . There were some bad words, but hey, it's rock n' roll. CJ really liked their anti-war anthem, "I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag." 

Before I hit the showers this morning, I put on a Janis Joplin/Big Brother & Holding Co. playlist for the kids. By the time I came downstairs 20 minutes later, Annabelle was singing "Mercedes Benz" repeatedly. :)

Another lecture we watched covered London's psychedelic scene, which was emerging parallel to San Fran's. We compared and contrasted Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive with the song that inspired it, "My Little Red Book," by Love, a SF band. Interesting. 

SUPER PSYCHEDELIC: In keeping with this week's theme, I couldn't help but smile when I saw a photo NASA has just released. It's a colorized image of the combination of three wavelengths of light from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. They show multiple gets that led to a series of slow coronal puffs from the sun on January 17 of last year. 

It's gorgeous, really. . 

Image Credit: 

Alzate/SDO

MATH MINDED: Last week, CJ and Annabelle started a great math class through Stanford online. Called "How to Learn Math: For Students," it's led by professor Jo Boaler, an advocate for (good, meaningful!) math education reform. (I took a similar class with her several months ago, "How to Learn Math).

Here's the trailer for the kids' class...
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qD5QR5R6b8E?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 I really love what the kids are learning. It's not times tables or factoring or geometry, it's learning ABOUT math - how to view success, recognizing that everyone can do math, stressing how math is creative and cool (as opposed to the stereotype of rigid and boring) - all good stuff!

The class is a series of videos with Boaler, other math educators, and students. Between videos, there are chances for students to reflect. Here are a couple of the kids' observations.

CJ:  "n lesson 3 of this course, I learned that speed is not something that you need in math. Often times, the better idea is to go slow or process the idea in your mind, so you can think about it. Then again, if you can think quickly and can do well doing that, then don't be afraid to do so. Just remember that speed isn't everything in math."

Annabelle: "Being fast doesn't mean being smart. You should always take your time and think about why your method works or how it's related to other methods. Never let anyone  say that "You're not fit for this." You can do it, just keep working hard. Mistakes help you learn!"

LOVE IT!

Picture This

 
LEFTOVERS: After yesterday's Big Cookie Project, we had a few leftovers. The kids were happy to do a little decorating this morning. Can you guess who made which cookie? I'll bet you can. :)

STATE OF CONFUSION:  A few days back, I had the kids take a stab at filling in state names on a blank map of America.  They probably got 65-70 percent correct on their first go round.

Today, I handed them another blank map and told them to have at it. They did better, but there are still some rather enormous gaps in the knowledge we need to fill. Yowza. ...

PHOTOGRAPHY 101: For a change of pace, we drove a little today before commencing our walk. We pointed the Honda toward Queen Anne, destination David Rodgers Park.

But before we hit the playground there, we took the pups on a several blocks stroll around the neighborhood.  I was walking both dogs, so I had the kids take turns holding my camera. Annabelle went first, and asked if she could take some photos. I said, "Sure!" of course.

She started snapping shots of pretty flowers, which were plentiful.

CJ took his turn and by the second photo captured he declared, "I have found a new passion!"  :)  He suggested he start saving money for his own camera.

As we reviewed their photos tonight, talking about composition, point of view, depth of field and other aspects, each of them could quickly see that some photos were better than others, and name specifics as to why they were good - or bad.

CJ was underwhelmed by most of the tree shots he took, like the one above. We talked about how and why it can be hard to take a good photo of a tree.

When I saw him trying to capture an enormous evergreen in the park ...

I had a feeling he would be disappointed with the photo because it wouldn't really convey how big the tree was, since there was nothing in the frame to compare it to scale wise.

I told him sometimes the best thing to do when shooting something really big is to go really small - shoot just a small section of it.

And so he zeroed in on the really nubby bark, and took this cool shot.

Annabelle also zeroed in on some interesting bark.

Sometimes a sign is a sign of a good or bad photo. CJ liked the raised beds in this home's front yard ...

But when the picture was on my screen, I asked the kids, "What's the first thing your eye is drawn to?" They both said, "The no parking sign!" immediately.

Conversely, in one of Annabelle's flower photos, I pointed out how in the background you can see the street sign in the background, and how something like that can be a nice touch. We talked about how she could have frame it better.

CJ liked the looks of a purple UW flag flying over one home and tried to photograph it. While he was doing so, I told him that photographing flags can be tricky - ideally, you snap it right when the flag is unfurled. He only took to photos. It wasn't enough.

During our walk we encountered some TRUE art. ;) We dubbed it "Feline Island."

Zombie Apocalypse

UNDEAD: Apologies to regular readers for no post yesterday. I was temporarily overcome by and overrun with zombies.

More specifically, making zombie and other cookies based on a zombie hunting game, State of Decay. We made them for Kennedy's fiance's birthday. She worked on the popular game, produced by Undead Labs.

Tho the zombies are a little frightening, the game has lots of fun graphics on (fake) businesses within the game, so a number of my cookies had to do with that. ... 

I also made a couple of shark hoodie character cookies. That was fun ... and it kept me up until 12:45! 

My favorite cookie was the mascot for the T-Rexpresso stand found in the game.

Christian packed the cookies to work with him at 5:30 this morning, Kennedy picked them up a bit after 7 and I had a nice text from Abby by 8 a.m. :)

MONDAY, MONDAY: Yesterday was mostly devoted to cookies, but on Monday, we had big fun.  We worked around the campus in the morning, but in the afternoon we drove north to Everett, first stop Thornton A. Sullivan Park at Silver Lake. 

The 35.3 acre park has a sandy beach along the lake with a swimming area.  The afternoon was 75 ish and muggy, warm enough for CJ and Annabelle to be all in the water, but CJ chose to mostly wade. And splash his sister. ;)

  Annabelle spent nearly an hour in the water, and at one point, enjoyed a family of ducks parading by.

Afterward, we met G&G from Vancouver at Mill Creek McMenamins for a very happy hour!

FURTHER BACK: I've been meaning to post this for a couple weeks now. There's a really great mural on the backside of the school the kids attend weekly in Shoreline. Starry Night has always been a favorite.

TRIPPY: We are in the final week of our History of Rock n Roll (Part 1) Coursera class and we've approached the intro to psychedelia. What started off as a sub-sub culture quickly became a prominent part of the music scene. There was music crafted to be part of an (LSD) trip, but there was also music intended to be the trip itself.

One of the things we learned today was that The Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever" was the first song featuring a sample-playback keyboard (the Mellotron, predating the synthesizer). 

Freeloaders

SUMMER FREEBIE FUN:  We started summer off with a bang, for no bucks!

Saturday morning, we hopped a bus to Pacific Science Center.  Before entering, we stopped to admire the sculpture to the east of the science center, "Sonic Bloom." Powered by the sun, these over sized flowers sing!

What prompted our visit to PacSci on Saturday was a free screening of a movie they're considering for a run on one of their IMAX screens. I received a members-only invite a few days back, and jumped at the chance right away.

The movie was called "Watermelon Magic" and the trailer (below) I watched on its Web site looked really cool. The whole film was made by stitching over 200,000 high resolution stop motion images together. It's visually stunning, without a doubt.
"Watermelon Magic" Trailer from Spring Garden Pictures on Vimeo.
However, our party was split on our overall impressions of the film, with Annabelle and Christian liking it more than CJ and I did (we didn't care for the magic wand element to the story).
After the film, we tore outside and toward the open lawn at the Center near the International Fountain. That's where there were a couple of (free!) concerts being staged. The concerts were for Seattle Marathon finishers, but staged in the open air on public ground, there were plenty of interlopers, like us. ;)

First up were The Presidents of the United States of America. I've been a fan of theirs for 20 years now, and the kids know and love their music, too.

 Lead singer Chris Ballew always looks like he's having big fun when performing, and it's infectious.

 We loved drummer Jason Finn's old school Mariners drum kit!

It was a great set, and we had no trouble getting right up to the stage (we were fresher than those poor marathon runners, ha ha).

After the Presidents, we went and splashed around in the International Fountain for about a half hour. While there, we noticed a solar halo. Maybe the sun's way of saying, 'Hello, summer!' (at least for those of us above the equator!).

Before too long, it was time to head back to the stage, because Seattle rap icon Sir Mix-A-Lot was up.

 He was wonderfully entertaining, a storyteller with great rhythm and rhyme.

What a fun start to summer - and today, the freebies just kept coming! For the second time in about a month, we scored a free pizza thanks to Domino's "DomiNoNo" promotion, which involved them giving away 20,000 free pizzas each time a Major League pitcher threw a no hitter for up to two no hitters this season. To win one, you had to log into their (very busy) Web site at the appointed time and hope for the best.

I was lucky and scored a free one when Dodgers pitcher Josh Beckett pitched a no-hitter back at the end of May, and last week another Dodgers' pitcher, Clayton Kershaw, pitched a no-no, and this time Christian scored a free pizza.

Too bad they're only doing the promotion twice this year!

SOME SCHOOLIN': We're not only about fun and games and food, of course.  This weekend we did manage to finish watching the lectures for weeks 5 and 6 our our history of rock class, and took the Week 5/6 exam. We've just got one week left in this session, and will have to take the final by this weekend.

On the Eve of Summer

MORE TO THE STORY: "Earthrise" (above) is one of the most iconic photos in the history of humankind. It's our first look at us, from space, taken by the crew of Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve,  December of 1968. 


Frank Borman was the one holding teh camera, while Bill Anders turned the capsule and Jim Lovell fished around for film (not as quickly as Borman would have liked, as it turns out. You get to hear this for yourself thanks to an animation that has taken photos from Apollo 8, and seamlessly stitched them in with images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the original audio from the time when the photos were being taken. It's almost like you're in the capsule with the astronauts while they're scrambling to capture the historic image.

It's worth the watch! 


NOT TODAY: This afternoon, around 3 p.m., we tuned into a SpaceX Web cast, ready to watch a Falcon 9 rocket make its 10th flight into space. On board the 23-story-tall rocket are six ORBCOMM communication satellites.

photo: http://www.spacex.com/press
Launch was initially supposed to be at 3:08 p.m. our time, but that came and went, as there was a leak in a line. SpaceXers tried to track down the source of the problem and were gearing up for another go an hour later, but instead, today's attempt to have 1.3 million pounds of thrust get those satellites up into space was put on hold. 

They may give it a go tomorrow. Updates here: http://www.spacex.com/webcast/ and http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/010/status.html

A LITTLE RESPECT:  Our musical adventure and education continues, with today's topic being Stax and Atlantic artists of the mid and late 1960s. Both Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin had a hit with "Respect," a tune Redding wrote and recorded. Redding had a hit with the song in 1965. We watched a performance of his, and the heavy horns, a hallmark of Stax artists' recordings, were much in evidence. http://youtu.be/Qo3aeXZFZkg

Up next was Aretha, the Queen of Soul. We watched a very sassy Franklin pantomiming along to the original recording. Good stuff!
http://youtu.be/cYbs_O_iMfU

Sweet Stuff

THE TASTE OF SUMMER:  Today was field day up at the place the kids attend classes on Wednesdays. We couldn't stick around for the hours and hours of fun, but we did manage to go, help set up a little bit, and drop off some summery cupcakes baked fresh this morning.

I used my standard dee-licious strawberry recipe for the cake, but invented a 'lemonade' frosting to top them, making it a strawberry lemonade treat. They smelled glorious. 

After dropping the tray off, I was really regretting not having actually eaten one of them! The kids report they were wonderful, however. 

MORE MOTOWN:  We're still stuck in the '60s, musically speaking. Today we learned more about some Motown artists, including Smokey Robinson, who was both a songwriter for other groups and a renowned performer in his own right. I should have shown the kids a Motown-era video of Smokey, but I couldn't help but dredge up this gem. I used to love it on Sesame Street.  http://youtu.be/ws_vnXup7so


I found old footage of a "Motown Revue" that featured Little Stevie Wonder performing his first Motown hit, "Fingertips Pt. 2" from 1963. Stevie was only 12. Wow! We also enjoyed the Four Tops singing "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" from a 1965 television appearance (1965).

We also started to learn about Soulsville USA/Memphis Stax. They had a very different approach than Motown's hit makers. Booker T & the M.G.s was the house band, backing the Stax artists. They did chart one hit on their own through, "Green Onions" - what a great groove that song is!  

STATE OF CONFUSION:  For awhile now, I've had a couple of blank maps of the United States with the states outlined sitting around. Today, I finally asked the kids to fill in the blanks - put state names on all the ones they were certain they knew. 

They were both Very Not Pleased with how many they didn't know. Basically the entire Midwest for both of them was blank. Oops. Guess what we'll be working on for the days to come?!

I played The Animaniacs' great song naming all 50 states and their capitals after they got stuck: http://youtu.be/MSvJ9SN8THE

We listened to/watched a few other state song videos. Most were forgettable at best. However, this one (Tour the States, from Marbles the Brain Store) was a standout. Catchy tune and neat-o animation.


GET A CLUE: This evening, we played a new twist on a classic board game, "Clue."  The setting was a waterfront park, but the characters and murder weapons were the same. 

I am proud to report that for once, I won! I could sense that at least one other player (Christian) was about to make a guess as to perpetrator, weapon and locale on their next guess, so I had to take a leap of faith and I guessed/deduced correctly.

Bridging Time

UNABRIDGED:  Yesterday after dinner, we decided to go for a stroll, destination: The Fremont neighborhood of Seattle (which will be full of naked bicyclists come Saturday, BTW).

We parked at the south end of the bridge and walked across to the north.

A few sculls slipped silently through the water under the bridge.

Once on the north side, we stopped at a place called Old School Custard. Their calendar is more delicious looking than most calendars, wouldn't you say?  :)

From there, we walked further east to Fremont Brewing. We haven't been there in a long time, but just from driving by, you can see the place has expanded and expanded, but it's still packed all the time.  We sat on the bleachers near the front door, and Annabelle added some artwork on their risers.

The sun was setting as we walked back across the bridge.

The bridge tender was all aglow.

If she were counting, she would have seen over 4,000 bikes cross the bridge on Wednesday. That's a lot.

ASSEMBLY LINE:  We're still working on learning about the history of rock. There's a lot to learn! Part of today's lectures touched on how television was so important to the music scene in the late '50s and early to mid-1960s, with shows like "American Bandstand," "Shindig," and "Hullabaloo."

And we learned Paul Revere and the Raiders, a Portland band, were the 'house band' on a dance and music show called "Where the Action Is." Their American Revolution outfits were a not subtle push back vs. the British invasion.

Music on television was so influential, it resulted in cartoon characters having a number one hit (The Archies with "Sugar, Sugar") The kids and I watched the original video from 1969, featuring the animated Archies of comic book fame characters performing the tune. "This is MESSED UP!" CJ declared. I told him think about how messed up it is watching it as a four-year-old, like I did!

And television can be credited for a band of chimpanzees (Lancelot Link & the Evolution Revolution) having a #1 hit, as well (Sha-La Love You). I shuddered watching those videos today. (I think I've repressed the memories of them due to trauma, LOL.) Christian remembers them and said to me, "It was not well done." I'd call that an understatement.

And not to be outdone by apes, the made-for-tv band The Monkees had a number of hits with 'bubblegum' pop songs. The Monkees were much easier on the eyes and ears, IMHO.

Wacky times, those were.

We also learned about the birth of Motown, which meant we listened to some great music today. :)
I showed the kids The Marvellettes performing "Mr. Postman"  http://youtu.be/rGJcbHni4rc

And we watched The Contours singing "Do You Love Me?" That video is ALL KINDS of win! A dance party ensued. http://youtu.be/FgtpreUfcS0

Motown founder Barry Gordy Jr. had a masterful, 'assembly line' approach toward creating artists who would be successful "crossover" acts.

BUDDING BOEING ENGINEERS: We stopped at Value Village on our way back from Shoreline (helping clean up the campus where the kids take school once a week). You never know what you're going to find there, and today, one of our finds was a Boeing 747 model - imported from Japan.

As you can see, the instructions were entirely in Japanese. However, there were a couple of drawings, which the kids made the most of.

There were moments when it was a struggle, as evidenced by CJ's face ...

However, in the end, they made it work.