Savannah!

Word of the day : thole : endure   (This is one of the English language's oldest words.) 

Not a long post today, since we're getting ready to go to Savannah and I wanna try and finish a book before we go (and possibly start Downton Abbey). 

It's Girl Scouts cookie season, so here's a post for you: ttp://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2012/01/when-did-the-girl-scouts-start-selling-cookies/ 
(Be sure to hit on that link of 'expired' cookies.)
Julia and I will pass the Juliette Gordon Low home/museum in Savannah again today; one of these days, Julia will go in and look around.  

Smithsonian.com also had an article on the 2012 movie landscape.  Here are three movies I'm looking forward to seeing:

1) Darling Companion 
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist); starring Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins
Here's the premise, according to IMDB: The story of a woman who loves her dog more than her husband.  And then her husband loses the dog. 

2) This is 40  
Directed by Judd Apatow; starring Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Megan Fox, Jason Segel, Melissa McCarthy, Albert Brooks, John Lithgow
A follow-up to Knocked Up, checking back in on the lives of the Rudd and Mann characters.

3) Life of Pi 
Directed by Ang Lee; starring Tobey Maguire, Irrfan Khan and Tabu (the parents from The Namesake) 
An adaptation of Yann Martel's best-selling novel. 

 

The above painting, Horseneck Falls (ca. 1889-1900) by John Henry Twachtman, is on permanent display at the Met.  Twachtman was a Cincinnati-born member of the The Ten, the group of American painters inspired by Impressionism, whom I mentioned the other day,  (As an amendment, I want to add that the group came about in the late 1890s - I think I suggested that it was the 1920s the other day.)  Twachtman was a landscape painter who studied in Venice with William Merritt Chase for nine months and then in Paris too, with, among other lifelong friends, Childe Hassam and Robert Reid.  Back in America, Twachtman taught at the Art Students League and was eventually able to purchase a home in Greenwich, Connecticut on seventeen acres, through which ran the Horseneck Brook.  Twachtman, aided at times by the architect Stanford White, was able to modify his home from its origins as a common farmhouse to a rambling, low-lying structure that appeared unified with the land around it.  Throughout the rest of his life, until his death in 1902, Twachtman used the area around Greenwich as the subject of much of his work.  Twachtman liked soft tonal qualities, but he grew fond of broken brushwork and colors blended directly on the canvas, reminiscent of Monet.