Killing in my home town

Great, now the Sheriff's deputies are killing people in my home town of San Juan Capistrano - in fact, just after the person ran out my favorite breakfast nook, Mollie's Cafe. I saw a lot of police lights there on Monday evening but had no idea someone had died.

NBC4's official write up here, with their video.

Bystander video (not graphic):

Verizon Throttled Fire Department's "unlimited" Data During California Wildfire

So many news items these days read like sarcastic dystopian stage plays. To me at my age, Spike Milligan (e.g. the Bedsitting Room) always comes to mind but I'm sure people still write them.

This item isn't about "net neutrality" per se, it's about throttling data when you go over an arbitrary limit on your "unlimited" plan, i.e. for we the people, the amount of data you can download is unlimited, but after a while it downloads so slowly that there is a de facto limit on how much data you can download...Catch 22. 

For the fire department, who were not simply trying to stream a bootleg of Crazy Rich Asians, but trying to coordinate ops to stop the whole state burning, it became an emergency during an emergency. 

But Verizon doesn't have an emergency department, just their offshored procrastination service. Can you imagine being a firefighter in full gear next to an all-consuming blaze, hanging around on hold with the 'supervisor' (the guy in the next cubicle who is brought over when you ask for the first guy's supervisor) going through these hoops:

"Verizon representatives confirmed the throttling, but rather than restoring us to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost, and they would only remove throttling after we contacted the Department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan."

(On the one hand maybe you shouldn't buy your mega-ops-truck just one phone line, but on the other hand maybe ten people from Verizon should be selected as enemies of the state and executed, pour encourager les autres.)

Jack White, August 18th 2018, Rabobank Theater Bakersfield

I am, shock horror, not an OG White Stripes fan. I gave up on rock music by the late eighties, and although I moved to the US at around the same time, where I could be expected to ride the grunge wave, I didn't. Ending up close to LA, where the scene was pay-to-play Sunset Strip hair metal, I wasn't persuaded that things were any better. (I didn't have a lot of exposure to Orange County punk, otherwise things might have been different.) So, from 1990 to 2008 I was just listening to hip-hop and EDM and that's it. About then, late oughties, I asked a friend from a legacy Led Zeppelin group, newly energized by the 02 reunion, if there was anything equally exciting in the world today, and that's how I heard about the Raconteurs.

I really dug the Racs. They had the power-pop sensibilities to write the hooks and melodies and yet had the attack of a hard rock band. By the time I was turned on to them, it was already too late for new music from them, but when the Dead Weather formed in 2009 I was all over it. I forget how many times I saw them - 6 or 8 - and I unambiguously loved them. In some ways, I thought of them as LARPing heavy rock music, but in an affectionate and very accurate way. The Raconteurs were vastly different with their Tin Pan Alley hooks, but equally effective. The common denominator was Jack...so I bought all the White Stripes albums. I liked them but they've never been on my heavy rotation playlist.

Although I bought the subsequent Jack White solo albums they haven't, to me, alway had that savage attack and hard edge I prefer in music. For every High Ball Stepper there's a plaintive ballad. For that reason, I hadn't gone to any solo shows, until yesterday.

But, it was a sojourn. Bakersfield is a long drive for us. It was enlivened by a truck full of tyrannosaurs racing us from Irvine to LA in heavy traffic.

Once through LA and the byzantine single-lane mazes the I5 takes, it was straight sailing up the Tejon Pass and through the Meth Desert to Oildrillerville, stopping only to briefly get lost in Valencia, home of Six Flags Magic Mountain.

(That picture of Six Flags wasn't taken yesterday - it's from December, taken by a colleague at one of my previous work places in Valencia. The hills were on fire at the time.)

The hotel we'd chosen actually attaches to the Rabobank Theater. So, although it was 106F out, the rest of the evening was the most civilized experience I've ever had at a gig. There were Yondr people there to intercept and redirect the foolhardy who did not have a paper ticket and could have locked their phones in their Yondr bag prior to getting in. The will-call people were polite and organized. We had seats. There were ushers with flashlights to get us to our seats. The beer queue was manageable. You could drink beer in the seats. (You were specifically enjoined not to bring in "cans or other projectiles" but apparently cans bought inside the venue are not potential projectiles.) The lights went down at almost at the advertised time.

The pre-show music was all hip-hop, which was fine by me. Toes were tapped. The lights went down and the man in front of me, who I swear was Jerry Garcia, lit up a joint. How he did it without an open flame I'll never know, but there it was. (Folks, he bogarted his joint. Maybe it wasn't really Jerry.) The support act was William Tyler and I'm sorry but no. The music - unaccompanied guitar - was pretty good and would be stellar on the player if you're painting a room or having a nice garden party or something, but as a warm up act for Jack, it just cooled me down. I'm convinced he played Led Zeppelin's Going To California eleven times, sometimes on acoustic, sometimes on electric and once in a slightly ragtime way. He was a very polite, humble southern gentleman and did not overstay his welcome.

He cleared off and a large number of what I've called Homepride Flour Men

arrived, prompting STB to wonder out loud what Jack's trilby budget is for the tour. A few minutes later, the screen behind the stage started showing the countdown clock. Every now and again the silhouette of Jack would turn up and wind the clock back or move it forward. This clock is great - nothing is as engaging as a counter, as anyone who has written or seen one of those movie scenes where "it's a race against time!" can attest. As soon as anything is "on the clock", whether it's disarming a bomb or getting to the hospital while in labor, a timer automatically generates interest and excitement. I nominate Countdown Clock for support act of the year.

Then the band arrived and started jamming, leaving us in suspense for a minute or two before Jack White appeared. I was prepared for the band to know the new, solo music inside out. To be perfectly rehearsed and yet able to jam. To follow the bandleader's cues and yet be loose enough to shine. And they did all that perfectly. I wasn't prepared for them to accompany Jack as he did some of the hardest, quietest, rawest and most emotional of his tracks, old and new. He sung his heart out with You've Got Her in Your Pocket and I'm a Martyr for my Love for You. The band stayed out of the way while still supporting Black Math and I Think I Smell a Rat. The gentle Humoresque was a jaw-dropping experience. Jack seems so vulnerable singing some of these songs that it often seems he's lonely even with all these people behind him and all the audience in front of him. The White Stripes songs that seemed abstract to me on the old albums came alive - I could finally see what the long time fans see in them.  I don't ever recall going to another show where the artist seemed so open and truthful. And rocking and banging and heavy, and light and ethereal.

Because I'm me, I'm going to catalog some irritants. The LED blue lights are too blue. It's overwhelming. If you pay good money, you expect to have the whole spectrum or at least cyan, magenta and yellow.

Second, the stage set up. The semi-circular enclosure that lifts the other musicians above him bothered me. It looks much steeper and deeper than in the official photograph (above) from my Section E Row OO. At first, I spent several songs thinking it privileged him over the other musicians, which might not be surprising given he's the headliner, but separating the band members is not rock'n'roll. It's odd to see the guitarist literally on another level from his band and I kept thinking it made him look like a diva, a Shirley Bassey or Beyonce, divorced from his backing band.

After a while, I thought it disprivileged him. It made him look like he was the slave in the arena in the coliseum, left to battle lions alone while the freemen and nobility sat in the tiers above, absolved from responsibility to fight.

Thirdly, the picture of the coliseum floor looks universally blue in the photo. It doesn't look like that in real life. In the moment, you can see that the fretcloth of the antique amplifiers is not blue, but a greyish beige, a faded 60's color. The LED blue surrounding it emphasizes the workmanlike mid-century look of the little pile of amplification inside the curve of the band's risers. It looks like a museum piece, a diorama featuring a critically endangered Homo rockus in his natural habitat. That bothered the hell out of me. I'd prefer the amps to be behind, where they're supposed to be, rather than showcased with Jack. They're superannuated, and even if they're essential for the sound there's no reason to foreground them in 2018. The White Stripes are, genuinely, over.

It did occur to me that the steps up to the band only exist because Jack has so much energy that he'd boil and blow up like a steam locomotive if he didn't have flywheel steps to run up and down at critical moments.

Up there with the greats. 12/10 would go again.

Disease cheese

The tomb of Ptahmes, a 13th century BC mayor of Memphis, Egypt, contains the world's oldest cheese.

University of Catania and Cairo University

It's lucky the archaeologists didn't eat it, as scientists found it was made with sheep or goat mixed with cow's milk that contained traces of Brucellosis.  They found this by chemical analysis, so scientists are all agog to see what DNA sequencing might tell them about the evolution of the bacterium over the years. (It's still a concern in cowherds.)

The rest of us are just happy to make jokes about Sarcophagus Juice pairing well with Egyptian Tomb Disease Cheese.

Edit: More on the cheese (which apparently isn't the world's oldest) here at Buzzfeed, including a very informative answer in the comments.

A website that will draw your dreams

This website houses an AI which will draw pictures based on your description. You just write a caption and it draws as you go.

It's not as accurate as, say, Jim'll Paint It, but it does some lovely images. Here are my suggestions to it.

That link again: http://t2i.cvalenzuelab.com/

The elephant of Celebes

Europe After the Rain

Nude Descending a Staircase

The Persistence of Memory with a soft clock

More information on how it works at AI Weirdness.

Old People Read New SF - Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar (review)

I'm one of the old people, and this is a new sf.  My review, among all the other old people's is here, at James Nicoll's site.

I had to cut down as my  initial review was way outside the guidelines.

What do you think about modernizing fairy stories? Does it work?

More Koningrooibekkie in SJC

Here are a couple of better pictures of a San Juan Capistrano Koningrooibekkie taken last week in my yard. 

 

Astonishing little thing, it appears at sunrise and then makes itself scarce.
(previously)

Video tour of Tower House, with Jimmy Page

Channel 4 has screened a wonderful tour of the epic Tower House, Jimmy Page's home since 1972, designed by William Burges as a showcase of his architectural and decorative talents.

Jimmy points out a crack in the plaster

London is currently undergoing an epidemic of basement-building, or "undergrounding", as rich people with limited property sizes and listed facades dig deep under their houses in order to expand. Page's neighbor Robbie Williams is digging such a basement and the vibration and possible soil movement is threatening to damage Tower House. The neighbor on the other side is also having soil work done. Page is a very private man and I'm positive he wouldn't invite cameras in otherwise, but this is the third or fourth piece I've seen on his attempt to stop the possibly damaging "improvements" going on around him.

For us it's a rare opportunity to see this intricate and ornate castle-sized artwork. It's disheartening that we might be seeing it for the first and last time if the threats materialize. I can't imagine what it's like to live here. Page must not be able to smoke, or cook or do anything that will damage the more than a century old paint. I know he can't play music there, as the vibrations can crack the mouldings and carvings.

I can't embed the video, but it can be played on Channel 4's website, here and is definitely worth the click.

RIP Laurie Collins (The Collins Kids)

Nikki Kreuzer via Third Man Records reports that Laurie Collins, sister of Larry Collins and member of rockabilly group the Collins Kids has passed away at 76.

Grandis Day Gecko shedding

For those who have not seen this miracle of nature, Mr Fatty the Day Gecko is shedding. Geckos shed their skin in more-or-less one piece. They can't just shrug it off like a snake, because they've got legs (and they know how to use them), but they let the old, dry skin split and get as much off in one piece as they can. Fatty's a bit old and sluggish nowadays and sometimes gets a bit of stuck shed we have to work on together the next day. Generally speaking though, he goes from dull green to white to bright green in a few hours like a proper lizard.

The head skin peels back first, presumably because that ensures they can breathe and see for the duration.  The rest of the skin is loose from the body but doesn't spring away like the head. It peels away more slowly, and in the case of the tail end (and sometimes the femoral pores and toes) the lizard needs to chew the last bits away.

ThThe



TheThe 

Yes, his substrate's brown. It's just compost tea from the organic soil in his planties. Ignore it.

Current list of great band names for future use

The Sheep Looked at Johnny
G-Clef Wine
Is This Love or Just Confucian?
Llanfair of the Vanities
Pledge of A Legion
Steakhouse of the August Moon
St.Ereos
Mucosa Es Su Casa
Mike O'Riza and the Fun Guys
Torc Understeer
St. John the Kangaroo Blues Band
Ike and Turner Corner
Dank Whale
Xie Xie La Femme
Venus in Furze
Duke Newcome
Richard Gere de Lyon
Thelementary Skool
To Your Battered Squaddies Go
Back Florist Ghetto


And a phrase from Mick Farren's Give The Anarchist a Cigarette, where he is disparaging the tent-dwelling boggies (as he calls them) of Phun City:

Ewok Bivouac

On the other hand, if you would like to automatically generate a name, an album title, and an album cover, my blog has a handy meme for generating all three for your first CD here.

Dead pool

dead pool

Deadpool.

I guess it was a raccoon attack. The pond was devastated on Sunday night.

John Galt, the Great White Goldfish has gone, along with his six red goldfish companions. The tiny mosquito fish are still alive. The water lilly was shredded into tiny pieces, presumably by the raccoon standing on its horizontal trunk as it dug in the water. There may be a growing point left alive - I'll leave it there to see if it resprouts.

The pump and filters were taken to pieces and strewn around in the silt. There must be a hole in the liner as several inches of water leaked out.

Goodbye little goldfishes. I guess you had a good run (or swim). 

Comic-Con report, 2018

The ticket rationing system of San Diego Comic Con is well-known; it's why we only got two days there this year, and considered ourselves lucky to get that much.  It worked out well in many ways. Four solid days of walking from one end of the convention center to the other every waking hour is too much. I'm not sure quite how big the convention center is, but on Thursday this year, it worked out to six and a half miles of walking. The other vicissitudes of a four-day run include staying in a backwater Hotel Du Seed (usual daily rate $40, Comic Con daily rate $150) for three nights, the morning run for the trolley and the evening London-tube-style crush on the trolley back, and of course the abominable drive from Orange County to San Diego and back.

Carlsbad Lagoon from the train

This year we took Amtrak.  It takes about half an hour longer than driving but you don't have to pay $25 to park at the end, and there's no stress. Just sit down and watch the Pacific drift by in air-conditioned, wi-fi supplied, 120v power-available comfort. And if you go business class, for an extra $11, you get a snack kit with about ten small items to unwrap and sample, almost as much fun in itself as a Comic Con exclusive Funko Pop or something, along with a free glass of wine. On Thursday we took the coach down and business class back in the evening. We Jack-Spratted the goodies. STB had twenty-five piece of carbohydrate to unpack and gobble on the train back, and I had eight ounces (two packs) of olives and four ounces (two packs) of cheese spread and two glasses of basic Chardonnay. (STB called it my Rubbish Mediterranean Diet and indeed I paid gastro-intestinally for it the next day.)

For the Sunday travel, we booked too late to get business class, but due to a little bird telling us what's what, we got on the train back at the right stop to get a seat. Literally hundreds of people who did not know the (not very) secret had to stand. It didn't help that Del Mar fair started the same day, so all the people who got on there, and all the people who got on at Legoland, also had to stand.

That's the logistics. So what the what happened at Comic Con itself?

We don't usually go to the big panels. Jodie Whittaker was there for Doctor Who. Bryan Cranston was there for Breaking Bad. Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul. All kinds of big names were on panels in the giant room known as Hall H. But the line for Hall H is literally more than 12 hours long, so the only way in is to start lining up the day before and miss literally everything in the whole con until you're inside, when, presumably, you do not give up your seat except under threat of death.  And once inside, you find, you may be seventy or 100 rows back from the stage and watching the action on video screens, just like being at home. Yes, you 'see' Jodie Whittaker in person, about the size of a pinhead. If you want to see her speak, you're just watching the screen.

We just go to the smaller panels in rooms ranging from 100 to 1,000 people. Oh, and the dealers' floor. Comic-Con has a huge exhibition. There are about 5,500 lots, though some dealers are on huge lots with multiple numbers so there may not be that many exhibitors. These range from premieres of new sci-fi shows with giant robots, explosions and earsplitting audio to tiny pitches from first-time authors of self-published books sitting behind a table with a vinyl banner showcasing their name and the cover, and a few dozen of their books in piles.  Comic books range from dollar an issue to the serious auctioneers who have bullet-proof glass booths showcasing issues valued at $10,000 or more. There are figurines from bobbleheads to mass-produced figurines to exclusive handmade sculptures to props used in movies with little price tags attached. (The tags are little. The prices are large.) The whole floor heaves with literally 100,000 people attempting to thread through the whole exhibition without any traffic lights or lane markings to aid them. Occasionally whole rows or columns come to a halt because a line for an exclusive item is being marched somewhere or compacted to save space.  It's like driving a mule cart in Cairo traffic, except you don't have a mule or a cart, and every fifth or sixth person you are trying to pass, undertake or get around is an 8-foot robot or smol dinosaur costume operated by a rapidly-deteriorating six year old human.

After being in this strangely post-apocalyptic crush for a few hours, you can go to the mezzanine, buy a burrito or some loaded nachos, and sit down to watch it happen to other people a couple of feet below you for a while. The existence of the mezzanine, with its quiet cafe, fandom panels and tables for groups like the SCA and Furries, is a bit secret (or maybe nobody likes the SCA or Furries) and I won't blow it except to say that the word 'mezzanine' is not particularly obscure, so you could look it up and then find the actual place if you really wanted. Outside the door of this quiet area, the SCA organizes swordfights.

Sword fight outside the mezzanine area

Many would-be exhibitors have realized that paying for a Comic-Con pitch and spending three and a half days behind a literal moat of living, shuffling humans is not the best way to obtain attention. Instead they book empty stores, bars, Petco Park, parking lots, tram stop rain shelters, the street, pedicabs, random homeless people, glamorous models, teams of actors on the street costumed as zombies, etc., and put on full shows with them, outside the convention center. Somewhere in this unadvertised mass it is quite possible to see the biggest names and extravaganzas of the con without actually paying for a con ticket. If you're short of cash, try this method.

In the past I would have recommended Tides, a tiny sit-down cafe hidden behind a billboard at the far north end of the convention center. Alas, they changed their format this year and instead of buying usual cafeteria fare from a till operative, they've changed to charging you $25 before you go in the room (clutching your one paper plate) where you're faced with three or so metal buckets filled with sugared meat and dried tofu along with "teriyaki sauce" (brown sugar-water), rice and some bitter salad greens. That was the "Asian buffet". Apparently the next day's was a "Mediterranean buffet" and the next day some other thing, but I'm sure they were all sugared meat and bitter greens. In mitigation, the carrot cake was splendid and STB said the chocolate cake was good too. If you like sugar, it might be the cafe for you.

The panels: this is what we did between this people watching.

Thursday Panels
Writing and Drawing the Past
As with many con panels, it's sometimes hard to reconstruct why people put the panel together they did. Jen Wang, for instance, was talking about/promoting The Prince and the Dressmaker, which looks enchanting. We learned it's about a prince in Paris in the past who likes wearing dresses, which didn't seem to require as much historical accuracy as fellow panel-member Jason Lutes' Berlin, which is about the Weimar Republic.  Is TPatD about Chevalier d'Eon? No, it's made up.  She did a lot of research, but technically it's not historical fiction. Jason Lutes said he'd spent over twenty years researching material and drawing Berlin. I was going to ask him during the Q&A if he preferred first-hand accounts or translations. No need. He said right out during the panel that he couldn't read German. Dude. In 20 years you can learn to read German. German kids do it in six. I did learn something new - that historical comic book artists use a lot of old postcards as references, and postcards are/were heavily airbrushed.

2001: A Space Odyssey 50th Anniversary Panel
The panel included Dave Bowman and Frank Poole (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood) and others. It's always great fun to listen to actors from classic movies tell their stories about how they came up with their characters and lines. This pair's banter is well-honed, but it's good to hear and the upcoming remastered 2001 looks amazing. It'll be available from October 30.

The Treasury of British Comics: Can a Forgotten Archive Teach Us About Comics in the 21st Century?
I assumed this would be about "a treasury of comics" in the same way that there is always a "bumper book of fairy tales" or a "monster book of spells" - i.e. a phrase meaning "a lot" in our golden childhood lexicon and in Harry Potter (same thing). It didn't. There is actually a whole bunch (technical term) of British comics from the non-IPC (non-Leo Baxendale) stable that was about to be dis-treasured, and these guys bought the whole lot. I believe they said 61,000 pages of things like Bunty, Jinty, Misty and Whizzer and Chips. I remember them very well. These are being reissued but being unassuming British people, they didn't quite make clear to me in what format or what name you can obtain them. I particularly enjoyed them talking about comic book character Faceache without realizing the American audience don't know the slang term "face ache" meaning a miserable person you don't want to be seen with. The audience probably just heard it as "argle-bargle" and assumed it meant, I don't know, cavey cavey or something.

Misty, girls' horror comic

A Celebration of Mary Shelley
The creator of Frankenstein (and his monster) was a 17 year old who lived with her married boyfriend and lived quite a life. The panel had quite a lot to say about her and about the different editions of Frankenstein. Spoiler: yes, she did write it by herself.

Sunday Panels
The Beatles: Yellow Submarine Surfaces in a New Graphic Novel
This looks like a fun book to pick up. Unfortunately, by the time we realized we'd been sent to the wrong part of the exhibition area, it was sold out. (It goes on unlimited sale next month.) The panel was interesting mainly because the Americans on the panel had studied the movie Yellow Submarine in much the same way that academics study Hittite potsherds. They'd carefully transcribed the words and thought hard about what colors were "psychedelic" and (although I ironically didn't ask to check) it certainly seemed they'd never thought to ask an English person, a Liverpudlian, or an old person who has taken acid, or even Alan Aldridge (who only passed away last year) about what any of it might mean/might have looked like.  At one point Bill Morrison said he'd spent ages trying to figure out what George Harrison said about the Blue Meanies' dogs (in the film) and eventually worked out it was "Cavey, cavey," which, Bill said, "was some kind of English expression." Well, nearly. It's from 'cave canem'- Latin for Beware of the Dog.  I guess it is "English" as we pronounce the "v" as "veh" rather than "weh", but it's hardly a long-lost Anglo-Saxon expostulation.

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?
curid=118606 Photo by Radomil 01.10.2004

Enter the Fun Zone: New Immersive Arcades and eSports Stadiums
An exciting panel on the future of augmented reality - for STB. For me, a chance to catch up on my Twitter. I was astonished to learn that most leisure activities (like going to the movies) cost around 15c a minute. Interactive media can charge up to $10 a minute. Quite a business opportunity.


Inside the Comic Con Museum
There's going to be a Comic-Con museum, folks! (And that's it.)

How I Got Here: Paths to Comics
An odd one this as I think of Cory Doctorow and Nalo Hopkinson as second if not first tier writers, and yet this was not fully attended. Hopkinson I could have listened to for hours and Doctorow told a funny story about his dad's fairy tales, which started out in Grimm world and always ended with the proletariat seizing control of the means of production.

Wally Wingert: I Was Cosplay Before Cosplay Was Cool!
He has been dressing up as TV characters since he was 4, and had entertaining tales to tell about it.

Home made blue cheese taste test

My first homemade cheese is now on the table. It's not my first homemade cheese, it's the first one to ripen. The Wensleydales and Cheddars are still in the wine fridge, doing their fermentation thing.

I used this recipe, more or less. It includes pictures and tips at every step.

I started on 06/07/18. I did not follow the recipe exactly.  I used half cup of yogurt instead of yogurt starter. I tried to follow the method exactly but being new at cheese, I made a few elementary errors. 

After draining curds insufficiently, tried to pack them in metal mold. Tipping them from one end to the other of this mold didn’t work – they were too sloppy and fell apart. As an emergency, I quickly boiled some muslin and rehung the curds.When they stopped dripping I put them in a probably insufficiently sterilized too-small smaller mold on not very sterilized mats. From there tipped every 15 minutes for an hour, every hour for three hours and then overnight at RT.  I smoothed it off  06/11/18, poked holes in it, and put into cheese fridge in a closed box for humidity. I calculated it would take 2.5 months to ripen, which would make it September first, and from then it could be refrigerated for up to 2 months. It was fully ripened by 7/20 – I could tell because a litttle tongue of soft cheese leaked out of the blue rind. 

It is extraordinarily good. Mild and soft. 

Koningrooibekkie in SJC

Found this bird scratching around the bird feeder last week. It showed up at dawn for two or three days. It's like a tiny magpie.  Sorry about the photo quality but it's also very shy.

Peromyscus friend Carroll managed to ID it. It's a pintailed whydah, an African bird known as a Koningrooibekkie in its native land. Apparently they've been seen in Orange County for at least the last five years and are probably breeding in the wild.  There is a concern that this species may be laying its eggs in finch nests, to parasitize the hapless parents as cuckoos and cowbirds do. This one didn't seem to be 'with' anyone, finch or female whydah, but I'll keep an eye out.

Here's a professional photograph she found. (I don't know who took it but will credit or take it down as requested, if the photographer lets me know.)

What spectacular tails they have!