“Airigami: the art of folding air in specially prepared latex containers.” I love anyone that can raise whimsy to the level of art. I love Larry Moss. He has made the world safe for balloon sculpture. At www.airigami.com, you can see the fantastic flying octopus (almost 20,000 balloons, 10,000 cubic feet of helium) and the giant soccer players (40,781 balloons, 40 feet high). Moss has written books (Twisting History- Lessons in Balloon Sculpting) and performed at the White House.

This year, he will bring the infamous, spooky Balloon Manor back to Rochester after a one year absence: Return to Balloon Manor will be in Irondequoit’s Medley Centre October 20-29. If you were not at the first Balloon Manor, you missed an amazing experience like no other haunted house.

And among all those large scale projects, I love the way Larry Moss personalizes each event. His magic act reaches everyone in the audience. I have watched children swamp him as he makes animals and things, granting each one their own shaped bag of helium.

This year, Moss has brought that personal touch to the Balloon Manor as local kids can enter the Design a Monster drawing contest. Details are at [link expired], but hurry since entries are due by August 8.
A Grand Prize Winner for ages 9 and under; and ages 10 to 18 will be chosen. Their drawings will be made into balloon monsters to appear in Balloon Manor. Runners-up will receive tickets to Balloon Manor and Seabreeze Amusement Park.

July, 2006

Celine Dion, Volare, Nana Mouskori, Katrina & the Waves, and, most of all, ABBA. And this year: the hard rock band Lordi, whose lead singer, Mr. Lordi, creates his own costumes with plastic skulls, reindeer fur, etc., etc.

For those of you who haven’t guessed, today’s topic is the Eurovision Grand Prix (or Eurovision Song Contest). For fifty years now, the other side of the world gets together and tries to find a really good song that they can play on their radios until blood comes out of their ears. As of May 20, dateline Athens, that song will be Hard Rock Hallelujah by the Finnish band, Lordi. Yes, they had European Idol a long, long time ago. And it’s a broadcast hit from Egypt to Ireland. For crying out loud, the Ukrainians hosted it last year and opened their borders so that fans from participating countries could come and go as they pleased. Try that with Simon Cowell’s dressing room some time.

This is not an amateur contest. Participating countries are allowed to submit one song (selected by any means available; Serbia & Montenegro were banished for an inability to select a song), which is then performed by a musician or group who do not have to be from the originating country (i.e., Canadian Celine Dion). Each country ranks everybody else’s songs through two or so rounds and a winner is selected. Fame and fortune follow. Nowadays, you can visit www.eurovision.tv and follow the results from anywhere on the planet. You can also hear snippets of the songs or buy the complete set of entries, should you need to know what happens when good songs get writ large.

May, 2006

If you want to master the art of solving the television crime dramas before the second commercial break, then you could do worse than read the works of Agatha Christie (1890-1976). The creator of Hercule Poirot and author of Murder on the Orient Express presented a doctoral education in mystery solving across her one hundred plus books. At the time of her death, she was the best selling author in the English language, as many, many cover blurbs proclaimed at the time. But, you ask, what about the great mysterious event in her life three-quarters of a century ago? What, ho? Let me explain.

Londoners woke on the morning of December 7, 1926, to find the front page of the Daily Mirror covered with photos of Christie and the search parties seeking her. The headline trumpeted: “Mystery of Woman Novelist’s Disappearance.” Christie was missing, having left behind an abandoned car containing a bag of clothes and her fur coat. Luminaries such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers were drafted into the search effort.

Suspicion fell on Christie’s husband, Archie, who had been having an affair. The ensuing week and a half brought a great deal of publicity and very little in the way of results. As opposed to C.S.I. or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, grim patience solves more crimes in the real world. Like other unhappy spouses and spouses-to-be over the years, Christie had run away. She was recognized as a guest at a hotel in Harrogate. The police did not endorse her claims of amnesia, though they were forgiving based on the current stress of her life. (In addition, to her husband’s straying, Christie had recently nursed her mother through a fatal illness.) However, it took Christie two more years to dispose of Archie in divorce.