I wrapped up last night’s work around 12:30 AM with about 5 slightly tipsy patrons, and we all exited the piano bar and went to a big window looking out on the ocean. It was still totally light out because the sun had set only a few minutes before, at 12:11AM. Tonight it’ll set at 12:13AM, moving at an angle only slightly out of parallel with the horizon.
Then it’ll come right back up again at 3:00AM, as if it really didn’t go away. And it actually didn’t go away, with the evening twilight simply becoming the morning twilight.
So the sun is always there.
However, it is also never there.
It is foggy and overcast in this place (Isafjordur, Iceland) today, and the skies have been totally overcast for a full week now. But people are enjoying the weirdness of it all. They paid for something otherworldly, and they got it. Kansas it ain’t.
Two nights ago, with a minimal size audience around the piano, I decided I had enough of a critical mass to do Bohemian Rhapsody. I had tried it before, it has worked before. Three key people were leading the charge, singing “I see a little silhouetto of a man etc” when THEIR FRIEND came in, started showing them her PUFFIN photos.
The song fell apart, with me singing Galileo Galileo Galileo etc pretty much by myself like an idiot, while these four people are passing around a digital camera looking at PUFFIN PICTURES!! You DARE ruin my Bohemian Rhapsody schtick with PUFFIN PICTURES??!
….AND YOU, TIN MAN --YOU DARE COME HERE AND ASK ME FOR A HEART??! YOU CLINKING CLANKING CLATTERING COLLECTION OF COLLIGENOUS JUNK!!
Ok I feel better now. Speaking of clanking - or is it clunking- that’s the sound you hear when a small iceberg hits the hull of ship, and you happen to be right on the other side, down on B deck. This didn’t happen to me (I have an inside cabin), but it happened to one of my cohorts at 6AM the other day. He woke up, went upstairs with a camera, and found himself with a large group of people out on a cold and windy open deck trying to take the Ultimate Iceberg Photo. The ship has deliberately sailed into an iceberg field going into and coming out of Qaqortoq, and the next day did more of the same. Oh well, they’re big, pretty, majestic, otherworldly, and still capable of sinking a ship.
On the same night the Puffin Lady disrupted my Bohemian Rhapsody, I also had competition from whales. Word got out that there were whales around, so many folks went outside and turned their cameras toward that. I saw some of their photos, but they never got more than the tail of the whale. I act impressed, but it’s hard to top that scene from Moby Dick when that big ol’ white whale leaps out of the sea, head and all, like a dolphin. Show me that kind of photo. But not during piano bar hours.
Yes -- I did see “Wizard of Oz“ recently -- and the Wizard did say “colligenous“ -- I tried to look the word up, with every possible spelling, to no avail. Can anyone enlighten me on this word?
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6 comments:
Hi Steve: The closest word to colligenous that I was able to find is colligate which means to To tie or group together. So could colligenous junk mean junk that was tied or put together or junk that was lumped together such that it resembles a Tinman? Oh well, sounds good to me.... :)
Hi Rosemary --
sounds good to me, thanks for the research
"So the sun is always there.
However, it is also never there."
???
I think I get it...
And yes, you never mess with Bohemian Rhapsody.
Maybe colligenous is in the scrabble dictionary, where anything goes...
Hey Joe-
??? Indeed. I’ll agree I was being a little too artsy-fartsy with “the sun being there and also not being there” ... what I meant was, the sun hardly set at all, we had an almost-24-hours-a-day-of-daylight-situation BUT there was constant cloud cover. So we were always seeing the light of the sun without ever seeing the sun itself. That might be a metaphor for something else, maybe you philosophers out there can throw out some deep ideas.
Also - the Scrabble dictionary would not have “colligenous” because it’s more than 8 letters long. However -- to properly pursue this, I could consult Joel Sherman, president of the NYC West 57th St Scrabble Club, former and maybe presently World Scrabble champ, and probably highly qualified to settle this colligenous thing
The Wizard says caliginous - which means dark, gloomy.
I think Mr Anonymous has hit upon the right word, I never figured on "ca" instead of "co" in trying spell the word.
However the I thought the tin wasn't so much "dark and gloomy" , but rather overly genteel and effeminate. He should have been the paper mache man.
But "caligenous" is a pretty cool-sounding word, I hope to find an opportunity to use it. Just for the fun of it I'm going to use the word inappropriately, maybe characterize a soup or a football team or a snowball as caliginous, see if anybody challenges me.
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