Slide Show of Past World Cup Celebrations -- and Fine Galleries, Too!

Dierk Haasis has an excellent slide show on his Front Page, in honor of the World Cup tournament now taking place in South Africa.

He's also made improvements in the galleries at his website, and they're now more user-friendly and therefore even more enjoyable than before. I like to look at these images full-screen. Beautiful and satisfying, as they succeed one another on my monitor.

Some of them -- chiefly selections from his landscapes -- I have as prints, framed and displayed in my hall and in other places around my house. Truly they are works of art, and living with them enriches my life every day. These can also be seen in his Imagekind galleries, where they're available for purchase.

Nashville Public Television Documents Chihuly Glass Sculptures at Cheekwood

Scroll down and click on the video for a short preview. These are the sculptures I wrote about in my blog for June 13, 2010. Truly magnificent.

Chihuly Art at Cheekwood

The Chihuly exhibition at the Cheekwood botanical garden and art museum is spectacular. No photographs are allowed to be taken inside the museum, but there is an installation of several of the stunning glass sculptures behind the reception desk in the Visitors Center lobby, and I had permission to photograph those, as well as any of the outdoor sculptures.
Here's the one titled "Sun," which is on the museum's front lawn:





And here are three views of the exhibit in the Visitors Center lobby, behind the reception desk:

Daisies and Magnolias at Sunrise

This sign identifies the little garden behind Avalon Hall, on the Lipscomb University campus, where presently only the daisies are flourishing. "Aunt Mag" was the wife of David Lipscomb (whose name the school still bears), and Avalon Hall was the couple's last home.



And here are the daisies:





Walk west from Avalon Hall and past the student center and see several young magnolias, in bloom ever since late May. I snapped these photos just after sunrise:

Who Goes Walking at 7:00 in the Morning?

Today, I got a late start and was still dawdling around snapping pictures of roses at 7:00 a.m., when who should come lunging over to greet me but Pebbles! She didn't really have her ears laid back, as appears in this photo -- the wind of her swift passage blew them back. She was really quite friendly, even though not so well-behaved as her owner would have liked.



I'd seen her from a distance on other mornings, but this time I had the opportunity to ask permission to take her picture, which the owner readily granted me. Here she's just checking out a trail invisible to us humans:



And now she's telling us all that she's ready to move on:



On the other side of the campus, over half an hour later, I met Sammy and his owner -- my first ever encounter with those two. Both of them were also very friendly and so I got permission to photograph Sammy.

His owner and I exchanged names, and she said that Sammy, like the Buddha, is friends with everyone. When I asked, in bantering mode, if perhaps Sammy were an incarnation of the Buddha, I got an appreciative laugh. "Yes," she said, "he's Neo-Buddha." I'm invited to visit them next Saturday, since they live only a few blocks from me.

So, heeere's Sammy!



And Sammy moving on:

Daylilies? Double Daffodils? Who knows?

This morning I made some more photos of the planting of yellow flowers, hoping that seeing them en masse might help one of my viewers identify them for me.







And the flower's heart itself, as seen on May 30, 2010:

Who Can Tell Me Its Name?

I wish I knew the name of this plant. It's part of an ornamental flower bed -- the long, slender leaves are very profuse, making a striking green appearance with the showy flowers crowding among them. It's a banked bed that extends back several feet to the decorative wall, curving around it in a gentle arc of five or six feet. The plant is obviously a cultivar, but I haven't been able to identify it yet.





I put a cropped closeup of it on my other blog, reckon i should tell this? a few days ago, just because I think it's such a beautiful color and form, but, now, not knowing its name is beginning to nag at me.

Hope someone will see it here and be able to identify it for me.