The animated twinkling of the fireflies, the cool blue-green of the jar (just like an old Ball jar) — I loved this piece instantly when I drove past it the other day at dusk. The sign is five feet tall!  And dusk is the perfect time to see it, just like real fireflies.

And it turns out the piece has a pretty cool back-story, too: Sanders said he made this artwork and its twin for the wedding reception of country music stars Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton, who got hitched May 14 at a ranch near Boerne. You can see one of the “Fireflies” signs glowing on the back left wall in this photo of the extremely funky-cool reception area, created by Junk Gypsy, designers based in Round Top. (And Aggies, whoop!)

The Junk Gypsy blog (which has many more gorgeous photos of the wedding setup) says the designers settled on a theme of “moonshine and mason jars, fireflies and pink guitars” to represent the couple. Sanders said the inspiration came from a Lambert song about treating love like fireflies in a jar — I think it must be her 2004 hit “Me and Charlie Talking”:

So you treat your love like a firefly,
like it only gets to shine for a little while
Catch it in a mason jar with holes in the top,
and run like hell to show it off

Junk Gypsy commissioned the neon works from him, then returned the pieces to him after the wedding, Sanders said. And thank goodness he put one up in his window for us to enjoy.

“I love them too,” Sanders said. “When I was a kid, we called them ‘lightning bugs.’ “

Each of these two pieces is priced at $3,000, and even at that, I might try to buy one if I thought my husband would let me hang it in the living room where I could see it every day. Thank you, Mr. Sanders, for telling me about your artwork and letting me post the video, so others can see it twinkling too.

The Bastille Day connection is meaningful to me as I have for years used the date as an excuse to throw a party — a few years ago we had the “Eleventh or twelfth annual” such fest, having lost count somewhere in the late ’90s. Here’s a flyer from the fourth one; I think it must have been in 1993. The tradition probably grew out of all my buddies being in the various geeky language clubs at our high school (I was the Spanish Club secretary) and lasted because it falls at just such a great time to throw a party. Summer doldrums have set in, everybody’s thinking, “Gee, that was fun getting together with family/fireworks/barbecue on the Fourth… we should do that more often… and we still have all these plastic cups left over.”

In the spirit of freedom and celebration, I offer… er… some free wallpapers! How anticlimactic. These are, you’ll see, predominantly in the color my friends have come to call “Sue-green” over the years — which has been one of the only constants in the various (mostly really ugly) versions of Sues-news.com. Luckily the Wayback Machine didn’t store any earlier images of the site — I was going to post some here so y’all could cringe.

These images are all ones I shot (or painted — I made up some fleurs-de-lis for the French connection) — so take any you like! I think I’m going to put the one with the white column on my desktop at work, and keep my desktop icons on the left in the white area.

Thank you for celebrating with me in this very small and silly way!

But as far as my own Mamma is concerned, she had plenty of reason to stitch it in the 1940s or 1950s, too, because her husband — my Pappa — was among the millions of Americans who fought in World War II, and she was among the millions more who waited nervously at home for news. My Pappa came home, to a long life, love and family, so he is not numbered among those for whom today is specifically set aside.

So I post this in memory of his friends who did not come home, and their fellow service members, men and women, who did not come home in all our wars and actions, in peacetime, in training for combat, from jungles and beaches and motor pools and hospitals and dirt roads and blown-out towns, in ships and planes and helicopters and trucks, in the air, on land and sea.

thank you all.

Fightin’ Texas Aggie Class of 1994!

This image, a daguerreotype, was made in late 1850, right around his 15th birthday. The next year, he would start work at his brother Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Courier.

University of California Press; thisismarktwain.com

No mustache. No thought of a white suit. A smooth face with what might be freckles (his hair would have been red), the narrowed right eye adding an air of skepticism, as it would in his later portraits. (The photo is reversed – more on that in a minute.)

And if one is hesitant to seem fanciful by saying the boy’s eyes are windows into a clever and original mind, the literal proof is at the bottom of the image, where his hands clutch printer’s letters spelling out his own name: “SAM.”

He’s holding a compositor’s stick in which he has “set the letters in reverse so that they would read correctly when the daguerreotype produced a mirror image,” explains the Steamboat Times, which also says the hat is a printer’s cap.

Though his “splendid shock of red hair” is white in our collective consciousness, he was not only a redhead himself but surrounded all his life by red hair (his mother, his daughter), as well as cats, and so may be uniquely qualified to observe, as he did, that

“While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.”

The photo comes from Thisismarktwain.com, a web site built by the University of California Press in advance of its release of the unexpurgated version of his autobiography — he didn’t want it to be published until 100 years after his death, which came in 1910. So it’s time! The first volume will come out Nov. 15.

The Coupland Dance Hall, a wonderful old building chock full of history, which was where I asked to go for my birthday in 2011. This particular Saturday night the crowd was small because of predicted hailstorms in the area, and also I waited for a moment when the dancefloor was pretty empty to snap this, because I liked the star light pattern on the floor. One room over, the restaurant serves real good meals; one floor up, they’ve turned former bordello rooms into an inn where you can stay! Aggie-owned, and a really great night out.

The greatest word in the entire world. In New Orleans’ Central Business District, these brass insets mark the streetcorners. And if it’s a lovely soft overcast day in January, you can smell the scent of sweet olives drifting over from the Quarter.

Hickory burger no onions, please. With a fountain Dr Pepper and a side of beans. (Ate here so often in high school that I didn’t have to say it — I just walked in and the cook said, “Hey there, hickory burger no onions!”) On the south side of the courthouse square in Denton, Texas, the best damn town anywhere.

A bunch of grocery store roses; snapped actually in the parking lot of the grocery store as a cloud scudded across a bright sunny sky.

A holy well in the Irish countryside that we came upon unexpectedly during a ramble that resembled altogether too closely the story in “McCarthy’s Bar” that ends, “Have ya fallen and hurt yourself, or are ye just afraid of the cow?” Bovines notwithstanding, this was very much the coolest moment on our trip

A hilltop in Tuscany

A farm in County Galway. We had a picnic here.

]]> http://sues-news.com/2010/01/26/about-the-banner-photos/feed/ 0 sue94ag couplandarama.png cropped-cropitoulasweb1.jpg dcihj2 Roses Holy well Hilltop Irish farmland