Future Poltergeist

 On the face of it, this movie is pure gimmick. It's a black and white movie, made entirely in the style of a silent movie. With few exceptions, the only sounds we hear are in the movie score. There are cards with quoted dialogue on them, just like in old times, but most of the movie is conveyed through the acting.  At first I was irked by this, because it felt very gimmicky, but it really grew on me. The acting that is needed in such a genre is different than in the "talkies" and it was interesting to experience it. It required close attention, and it drew me in to the story. The movie has a ton of heart and it's easy to see why it got so much praise. The story is somewhat similar to 'Singing in the Rain'. A silent movie star (Jean Dujardin) has the rug pulled out from under him but the inclusion of sound in movies. He rejects it and feels that it will have no place for him. (Very late in the movie, we find out why.) The change in movie style happens just as ...

 Long time readers of the blog will remember that I've had a thing for watching movies that were nominated for Best Picture. In fact, the very first function for this whole thing was to record my watching of the 50 movies that had that distinction in the 90s. I still enjoy doing so, but marriage and kids have sometimes been an obstacle in watching arthouse style movies.  Sometime in the 00s I stopped being a completest when it comes to watching the noms. That was true by the middle of the decade and became even more of a thing when the Oscars expanded past five noms per year in 2009. I don't know that the quality of the movies declined, but carving out time to watch nine movies is simply a more daunting task. Harder to start and (much) easier to slough off.  A few weeks back, it occurred to me that I could fix that. I could watch the ones I haven't seen and rewatch some that I don't remember well. I like to have some kind of project going and if I approach this in a cas...

 In the spirit of my post from last week, I'm thinking about this article , suggesting that we print our blogs before they disappear into the technical ether.  Thinking really hard about making this happen...

 I want to share some of my favorite pictures of this past year. Right before we went up to Camp Van Vac this year, news broke about a comet that would be visible to the northwest, after sunset. I knew that this would line up perfectly with our nightly sunset watch and it did. We dutifully went out several nights and saw it. I got to play with the nighttime settings on my camera and I got this dandy. 

 I don't know if I've done a "things I'm thankful for" in a long time - or ever. Today seems like a good day to change that. I'm thankful for: My family, of course. I'm thankful for my children who are (often) wonderful. And my lovely wife. This past year has been a taxing one, with all of us stuck at home together. But I've come to appreciate them more than I think I would have if this was a typical year. (I'm also thankful for headphones, both theirs and mine.) The family I don't live with. I'm thankful for my brother and sister, who are both wonderful people. I'm thankful for my mom, who is also wonderful. I don't get to see them nearly as often as I'd like to and this year drove that home. The same is true of my aunts and uncles and cousins and so on. My friends, who I'm still attached to thanks to social media. Places like Facebook have their downsides but being able to quickly talk to so many people I hadn't seen i...

 One of the strangest things about being stuck in the pandemic is how completely unhooked from the normal passing of time I've become. Before the plague struck, the routine was largely: M-F, everyone leaves in the morning and comes home in the afternoon. We spend the evening together (over a shared meal or otherwise) and then go to bed with some thought to the next day. Sat/Sun, usually an outing. Possibly out for breakfast or brunch. Watch a sporting event one of the afternoons, possibly both. Sunday night has a feel of getting ready for the next week of work or school. This is no longer true. The FP Gal and the kids still have school and work but it's different. No one leaves home so it doesn't feel like they've broken away to a different thing. They simply go down to their various rooms and do their thing. The kids filter up at various times every morning and I try to keep the boys quiet. I see the ladies at lunch and again later in the afternoon when they're don...

 It's been so long since I've written anything that I should probably say something about how we're all doing.  Relia is now a teenager. She has a good, tight group of friends with which she is in constant contact. They're all good people and I'm very happy for her. She is artistic and capable and frustrated whenever she's told she can't do something Right Now. I'm impressed by how she will decide on a project and then jump right into it. At the moment she is leaning towards being a psychologist (psychiatrist? therapist?) and I'm sure she'd make a great one. DF is ten and loves gaming. He plays video games whenever he has a chance and is thinking of going into the field someday. In many ways he is a copy of me. Physically he looks like my younger twin, except he started growing his hair long at a much earlier age than I did. I'm sometimes frustrated that he isn't reading the same books that I did at his age, but he is a reader. In third g...

 Yesterday featured something unusual for this blog: a new post. Over the weekend I realized that I wished that I'd been blogging through this whole pandemic. It would have made for a nice record of this time period. I'm not sure why I didn't. Several people suggested keeping a diary. The fact that I didn't is purely my own fault. When I told this to the FP Gal she simply told me that the best thing I could do would be to start writing now . Which is what I'm doing.  I don't want to make the classic mistake where I promise that I'll do this every day and then fail to write a single new blog post ever again. What I'm doing is quietly deciding to bring the blog back from the dead and . . . write some stuff.  This used to be a habit of mine and I know that people used to check the blog daily to see if anything new was there. Maybe that will happen again, though no promises! In any case, it feels good to do this.  See you tomorrow!

 This past summer, I read some articles on the importance of buying physical media. Music on CDs, movies on DVDs and books in hard copies. There are several reasons for this, the most pointed one being that we live in an age where various people of influence have started to decree that some of things of the past should be kept away from people of the present. If you don't agree with them and still want to watch 'Gone With the Wind', you cannot depend on it being made available to you. Buy your own copy and the decision is completely in your own hands. Another good reason to actually own the goods, especially with movies and TV is that we don't know when things will drop off the face of the earth and become completely unavailable. Check out this article about one person's attempt to watch the movie 'Cocoon' earlier this year. It's unavailable to stream and long out of print. (The writer eventually buys a used DVD copy for $25.) 'Cocoon' was a pop...

Last week, during the Falcons game, they showed an overhead view of the nearby Olympic plaza. I realized that I'd never visited an Olympic site before and that I'd really like to. It would be cool to see the infrastructure and to see what's being commemorated. What would be the easiest place to do that? I told the FP Gal and we tried to figure out which site would be closest to us. I thought it might be Calgary. She mentioned Lake Placid. I said that Salt Lake City would probably be in the mix. I tried to Google it but Google was having problems so I put it on a mental shelf and moved on. The next day I looked up the results. Per Google, from my home location: Lake Placid, NY is 1250 miles away. Salt Lake City, UT is 1238 miles away. Calgary, up in Canada, is 1201 miles away. That's pretty amazing. Three sites, chosen for their Olympic pasts, are almost equidistant from us. Less than a 5% difference between the extremes. Pretty crazy. Only after figuring this ...

I love my reading lists and this one came from an unexpected place. The whole article is worth reading but I think I most want to focus on the books that the author wants kicked out of high schools.

Back in 2014, right before the Sochi Olympics, I did a list of suggested winter Olympic sports. I put those suggestions out, one by one, on Facebook but I didn't have them all collected anywhere. I have since found the word document that I used while brainstorming the list and I thought I'd put the suggestions here for posterity. 1. Paint ball on ice 2. Competitive polar bearing 3. Capture the flag 4. Ice sculpture racing 5. Snow fort construction 6. Winter bike commuting 7. Dog sledding (actual suggestion) 8. Getting a toddler dressed and into a car seat 9. Ice yachting 10. Snowshoe long jump 11. 4 X 100 Driveway shovel relay 12. Snow ball fight Some of these are obviously jokes but there are some that I like quite a bit.

As a snapshot of where he is, here are some of the things LL wants for his birthday: mirrored sunglasses a nerf dart gun/suction cup darts a builder playset (I'm not sure what this is) colored foam, like the kind with colored paper that makes it stick together (?) NOT a younger brother (maybe a younger sister) after explaining the long odds against a younger sister, he said that he simply wanted help making one out of a paper bag a fun day

The other night the FP Gal and I were talking about classic literature that we read in high school. This conversation was started because I was talking about my interactions with my classmates in my college literature course. My class has been sub-divided into smaller groups of five or six and my group consists of several young high schoolers, mostly women. Their approach to the poems and stories that we've been reading is very different than mine. This is understandable and not at all meant as a criticism. An 18 year old must have a very different perspective on fundamental issues like death and marriage. Anyway, this lead me to talk with the FP Gal about what 'classic' stuff we had read while in high school. I mentioned that I'd happened to read 'Death of a Salesmen' twice and didn't feel the need to read it ever again. She calmly told me that it's probably a piece that isn't meant for high school. We both agreed that it might be valuable for me ...

The musical education continues apace. This morning I played this gem for Relia and tried to explain to her what I loved about it: I spoke about how smooth the music is. And indeed, when people speak of music being 'silky', this is what they mean. The strings and the back up singers all help, but George Michael's voice is simply gorgeous here. I then played her the original, which I also love, but maybe not as much as this recreation. As I was finding that, I found a version from Adele: I like this too, but not as much as the others. It's faster, which can be ok, but doesn't do the song any favors here. Adele also uses that modern thing where singers must 'shake' their voices. (If I was smarter about this, I'd know the term I mean. Tremelo? Or am I making that up?) My personal feeling is that a little bit of that goes a long way. The industry feeling seems to be 'if a little bit is great, then a lot of bit would be even greater'. Anyway, ...

Me to Leo: No, no, no. Your daily schedule is not so busy that you don't have time to put on underwear.

Lately Relia has been working me to listen to more of her music. Her purpose for this is so that I'll let her play the radio while we drive, but I'm trying to give it deeper meaning. I remember various times that I tried to bridge a gap with my parents by impressing them with the music that I'd fallen in love with and I want to give her that same opportunity. So far...it's not really moving that fast. She is big into Taylor Swift and a handful of other people that seem a little 'flavor of the day' to me. She's convinced that Taylor Swift is 'country' music and that may have once been true. But when I hear Tay-Tay, I hear pure pop music. Which is fine. I like pop music. But it ain't country music. The other day while I was driving (and controlling the music!) this song by Morrisey came on:  She called it country music. Well...maybe not. I asked her what made it 'country' and she said that she could hear the guitars. Ok, fair enough...

We're working our way past Daylight Saving Time and it's not been easy. Lately, LL has been getting up sometime in the middle of the night and going downstairs. We don't know exactly when he gets up but sometimes he has made changes to his environment, like bring his clock downstairs. Last night I woke up about 4a (3a for my personal body clock) and I found him downstairs watching TV. I shooed him upstairs and back to bed. From what I can tell, he went back to sleep pretty quickly, which makes me think he'd been up for some time. Unfortunately, I couldn't get back to sleep for at least an hour or so. Eventually, I made it back to bed. The FP Gal left around 7a and told me what time it was. I got out of bed around 7:20 and (incredibly) no one else was up. I had the whole place to myself! Relia got up about ten minutes later and then LL. This made him late for school but that's no biggie. DF was still in bed at 8:30! All of our schedules are messed up. Which.....

One thing that I was very curious about with having children, is what kind of things that my children would just 'get' that I didn't at their age. This happened with me and my parents, most obviously with space travel. I grew up with rockets being a common thing. I literally never lived in a world where man had not walked on the moon. When it came to aspects like gravity in outer space, I feel like I just 'got' it in a way they didn't. (This isn't to suggest that my parents are stupid, by any means. We simply grew up in different times and with different things happening.) Anyway, the FP Gal just showed Relia this video: Relia saw it and simply said, "Yeah, I knew it would do that." Either she just wants to look cool in front of her old parents, or she has grown up with people in zero gravity and just 'gets' how things operate there. In any case, I think that the video is cool.

It's been some time since I've written about the kids. There is a simple reason for this: I'm not sure how to do it anymore. The older they get, the more worried I am that I'll over-share and embarrass them. They probably don't want people to be able to search their childhoods when they're older. That...seems fair to me. The worry that I'll do that has made it hard to write. That's one of the big reasons that this blog has become semi-abandoned. But I'm trying to work past that. If Relia wants to, she can look back at her first couple of years and read about what was happening and how her parents dealt with that. DF can to some extent. LL can't at all. In many ways this is the classic third child syndrome, just moved from baby albums to blogs. It's too late for me to go back and write more about the previous four years, of course, but I'll try to throw a snapshot in here. LL is now almost five. He's smart as a whip and constantly...