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115th Birthday Amelia Earhart

How I managed to ignore the success of the Hunger Games series, I’m not sure, but I did. Until the movie came out and I saw book #1 on a prominent spot in the bookstore (and at a discount, so that’s always a good thing :D). I could hit myself for not reading the book sooner, but better late than never!

I’ll just copy my reviews from goodreads.com – no big spoilers!

April 7th-June 14th 2012 The Hunger Games
When I started reading, I was grabbed by the story and felt a connection with the people. I stopped reading when I reached chapter 6, not sure if I wanted to read on about kids slaughtering each other.
After talking to people who already read the book, who urged me to go on, I finally decided today that it couldn’t be too bad when so many people kept recommending it.
So.. this morning I picked the book up again and finished it several hours later.
It is well written, kept me turning page after page because you just want to know what’s going to happen next.
The only thing I regret is not buying books #2 and #3 in advance, now I have to wait till they get here to read on.

I orderded the books online that same day and lucky for me they arrived 2 days later!
Book #2 was as good as book #1 (to me anyway). Wasn’t ready to write a review after reading it. The only thing I thought when I read “This is the end of Book 2” was: WHAT THE HECK?? This is the worst -or best- cliffhanger ever!
The strange thing is that I hate violence, murder, torture, etc. I prefer reading books where the suspense keeps me on the edge of my chair, the unknown events that make my heart pound by just thinking about what COULD happen on the next pages, or the image in my head of what IS happening, but what’s not mentioned in words, no gory details, you know what I mean? Still, I couldn’t stop reading. Started Catching Fire at June 16th, finished it June 17th – thank goodness for my days off!

June 18th-June 23rd The Mockingjay.
Before I started reading, some people told me not to expect too much of it, as they didn’t like the book and the ‘climax’ was a disappointment. How wrong they were.
Even though I was reluctant to start reading – what’s the use of reading a bad book? – I ignored the negative comments and I’m glad I did.
I was immediately grabbed by the story again. Susan Collins’s style of writing does something to me, it works like a magnet, pulling my eyes from word to word, eager to skip a few lines to see if something bad is going to happen, but then going back to the beginning of the paragraph and read word for word.
I didn’t need yet another Hunger Games in book #3, so I was glad it started relatively peaceful in District 13. I prefer the suspense over the actual fights and killing, but knew that eventually the story had to end with violence again.
No big spoilers from me, so I just conclude with saying that I love the end, the solution to all problems, the peace and the revelation when Katniss realizes who she really needs in her life and why.
Thank you, Suzanne Collins, for the ‘food for my soul’. Your awesome writing style made me read a genre that I’d never thought I would read. Although I still think that the pods and the games are too cruel, I can see it being some sort of metaphor for the bad things happening in this world right now. The wars, suppression, famine, the gap between poor and rich, the exploiting of the earth’s sources …
We have to be careful or we will destroy ourselves and everything on this planet.

Let me apologize for not knowing this composer before. I found out today that I sure did know some of his work, though never knew his name. I will never forget it now 🙂

For years and years one of the programs on a Dutch Radio Station started the show by playing a piece of music accompanied by the sound of an old fashioned typewriter. I loved it and anyone of my generation (in Holland) probably knows the music as it was a very popular radio show.

Today, while browsing youtube videos, I suddenly noticed – in the list of videos which appear on the right of the youtube pages – a video called: ‘The Typewriter’ and I thought: ‘No…. that can’t be it, now can it?’ So I clicked and lo and behold, there it was. I was so happy (and used ‘replay’ a lot :p). That’s when I learned the composer was called Leroy Anderson (1908-1975. Official Website). Many performances of The Typewriter on youtube, but this is my favourite:

There are more videos featuring Anderson’s work. All masterpieces IMHO. The interesting part is that they are all light concert pieces and you’d think they’re easy to play, but there are many comments at the different videos where people stated that the music is intricate and quite difficult to perform – check youtube and you’ll find some terrible performances as well, just shows the level of skill needed to play Anderson’s work. According to Wikipedia John Williams described him as “one of the great American masters of light orchestral music.”

Anderson wrote many, many great pieces of music, but to name just a few (great titles!): The Waltzing Cat, Sandpaper Ballet, Clarinet Candy, A Trumpeter’s Lullaby, Bugler’s Holiday, The Syncopated Clock, Plink Plank Plunk, Fiddle Faddle, Jazz Pizzicato,  and last but by no means least … *drumroll* … Sleigh Ride!

Well waddayaknow, one of my favourite Christmas tunes! Listening to it year after year and I never knew Leroy Anderson wrote it!

As I said in the beginning, I will never forget his name now!
(Useless fact: it’s 7 months until Christmas :D)

Although it’s hard to imagine I suppose there are people who don’t know Pinterest yet *gasp*
Basically, it’s nothing more than an online pinboard (but very addictive!).
My ‘bookmark’ list is long, very long, too long to keep track of all the great sites I found, eventhough I created folders and tried to put some order in them.
With Pinterest you cut down on your bookmarks. When you bump into a site or post you find interesting, just click ‘pin it’ and you can add it to one of your boards. You can shuffle your boards around, rename them and add as many as you want.
The great thing is that you can also see what other people have pinned. As people from different countries get totally different results when using search engines like Google or Bing, the people you ‘follow’ on Pinterest can find things you’ve never seen before. Bonus: you can ‘repin’ those images to one of your own boards.
So far, so good.

Let me continue by saying that I love tumblr. You can find gems: images created by other people on tumblr, with quotes or beautiful photoshopped images from their favourite band, movie, TV show, you name it. I sometimes pin those images to one of my pinboards, with a link back to the particular tumblr account.
Many tumblr accounts (dare I say: the majority..?) take images from the www without a link back and this is driving me crazy. Pictures of nature, scenery, ballet, fashion, etc., downloaded from the original site, uploaded to tumblr (or iheartit or any other ‘collection’ site) without giving credit.
I’ve also noticed that people on Pinterest download an image and upload it to their pinboards. Nothing more frustrating than seeing an image of – for instance – a chocolate cake, without a link to the original recipe. I hate sitting there drooling over a cake I want badly and not being able to make it!!

Not too long ago I found a tip on The Graphics Fairy about dragging and dropping an image to google and do a search, but the ‘dragging and dropping’ didn’t work for me. Glad to say I found another way to do a search. It still takes a bit of work, but it’s possible to find the original source of an image.

* Go to Google

* Click ‘images’

You’ll see a little camera icon in the Google searchbar

* Click the camera icon
It will ask you for a url (or you can upload an image you found somewhere)

* Open a new window and go to the image you want to investigate
* Right click and pick ‘copy image url’ (or something similar. My Google is in Dutch, so I’m not exactly sure what the English translation is)
To make things visible, I used an image of mine I pinned to my Digital Scrapbooking board.

* Go to the other window and paste the url in the Google searchbar

* Click ‘Search’
You will now see the image and a list of links which use the image.
Sometimes it’s clear where the image is from, usually one of the first sites on the list. Not always though. In that case:
* click ‘all sizes’ and you’ll see all the sizes of the image used on the www

You can bet that the original source has the largest image – as it’s the original – et voila, you have the source, and you can pin THAT image, which will link back to the original owner.

Unfortunately it’s not always that easy, and I stumbled upon images which I couldn’t trace back to the original source. In that case – as much as it hurts, as the images sometimes are so beautiful – I don’t pin the image. I’d rather not use it than to pin it and not link back, or – even worse – link back to tumblr or a blog which obviously didn’t create the image but found it somewhere on line.

Call me picky, call me strict, call me whatever, I just feel better when I know I’m linking back to the original.

And that’s my lecture for today 🙂

If you’re curious about which things I’ve pinned: FOLLOW ME

And if you want to add this post to one of your pinboards, just click the ‘pin it’ button below!

Happy Pinning!

Today is May 4th, Remembrance Day in The Netherlands.

Every year I post a link to a page on my website, dedicated to my late Grandfather.

Please read… think about it… and remember!

Clicking this link will take you to The story of my grandfather

“Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”

~Anne Frank