We woke up early. We got on the plane at Heathrow, our last long walk of the trip, which was punctuated by two long walks through the Milano airport after gate changes. And, sure, you have to get off the plane and through the U.S. Customs checkpoints, but the airport walk on the way back home never feels that long.
The march to the plane, however, that can take a while.
The airport security staff confiscated my toothpaste, apologetically. Too big, by volume, despite having made it to and through Heathrow on the way over. Ah well, if that’s the worst part of the day …
We were in Club World on British Airways, which means you get your own little pod, which means the seats lay all the way back, and also that you get more attention on a six or eight hour flight than anyone needs. I just wanted to watch the movies.
First up, Mickey 17, which was highly anticipated by fans of the book, of which I’d never heard. I think they missed. It was Douglas Adams without the funny. But Robert Pattinson wasn’t bad.
I got through about four minutes of the Tom Hanks movie, “Here,” and decided I wasn’t willing to watch that on a plane.
So I watched The Amateur, which is exactly what you imagined after seeing the trailer.
Now I suppose I’ll have to watch the 1981 version, for comparison’s sake.
For the last leg of the trip, and I couldn’t time this much better, I managed to just sneak in all of Oppenheimer. First time I’ve watched it; not sure why it took so long. Pretty sure I need to see it again, if nothing else to improve the audio. Probably there are some interesting historical tidbits I missed as well.
If I may trade heavily, and unfairly, on both stereotypes, I’m not really sure how the Barbieheimer summer worked. The crossover just seems so farfetched. (Then again, Barbie was fine, and this is a Christopher Nolan masterpiece. Or Barbie was a feminist signpost and this was a Christopher Nolan masterpiece. So what do I know?)
Anyway, the plane landed on time. We made it through customs with no problem. The luggage collected, the last walk of the trip was through the airport. My in-laws went this way to meet their driver. We went that way to get to an Uber which took us to our car, and then back home.
And now I’m going to sleep for two, maybe three days.
So this is it for the week. More here Monday. Until then!
Yep, that’s me. I’m sitting over a wing. The better to ensure there are no monsters out there. You might be asking yourself how I got here — by car. You might be asking yourself why I am referring to “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which turns 62 years old this fall — it is still terrifying, but for different reasons. But the questions you should be asking: Where are you going? And: “What did you watch along the way?”
I’ll give you a day or two to figure out the answer to the first question. And I’ll give you a very small and indirect hint with the answers to the second question.
First, I watched “Captain America: Brave New World.”
It could have been better, but they were working from a thin comic book concept here. Anthony Mackie deserves better. And how Harrison Ford got involved will remain a mystery. Indeed, it is the copy book of MCU movies.
So, in other words, a good airplane movie. Passed the time. Filed it away. Pleased I didn’t spend time that could have been better spent doing or watching anything else.
Which brings us to our second film of the flight. And, again, Honest Trailer nails it.
There are pumpkins in North Africa, expressions some 1700 years before the technology that prompted them was invented and a newspaper in ancient Rome, where no history is observed.
Look, there are several reasons one makes a movie. Fan service, the box office, high art, or marketing overreach. Others are misguided movie execs, to right a wrong or wrong a right. One of those reasons is “to give Ridley Scott something to do,” and this film is that.
Anyway, the plane has safely landed. And if you’re plotting runtime to try to determine where I am, or otherwise trying to glean some information from the photo above, let me tell you I also watched the first episode of 1923 to complete the flight. We have arrived at our lodgings. Now we fight off the temptation to sleep — didn’t do that on the plane, as usual — so that we may laughingly ward off jet lag.
Because everything is lining up, and because it was cold and all of the little people are back in school we went to the movies and caught a matinee. I’ll give you one guess what we saw.
We saw the play, in London in 2015. It was one of those things where we had an afternoon, and were probably ready for an evening that moved at a regular pace, and so we walked over to the ticket booth where you can get late tickets inexpensively. One of the options was Wicked, and so we enjoyed that on the West End. This was the curtain.
The movie, part one, is what movies should be: a lot of fun. Most of what you saw were practical effects. The tulips were plentiful. The costumes were fantastic. They were, perhaps, the element most to the original, with just enough modern post-dystopian steampunk flare to pop in high definition.
Apparently the singing was done live. Sometimes that seemed obvious, not in a bad way. And other times it seemed incredibly impractical. Ga-linda is terrible. Ariana Grande is great in the role, but the character is terrible. Cynthia Erivo is so wonderful it’s difficult, even knowing the play, to imagine how they turn her from protagonist to antagonist in the second movie.
Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, who originated the protagonist and deuteragonist on stage, have small parts. I said it’s a shame that no one is still left from the Wizard of Oz that they could drop in somewhere. But I said that in the car, without looking this up. According to People, there were three surviving cast members still with us late last year, 84 years later!
My one problem — aside from the standard musical issue that at least one song is weaker than the rest — is that someone brings into a classroom this new invention, they call it a “cage” and, in it, the animals will be kept, so they can be held in their natural condition. Which is to say, without a voice. (A lot of that element of the movie seems pointed and modern.) But here are people with bicycles, electricity, the most over-engineered train in the world and the coolest library ever, but they’ve only just invented cages?
I suppose the order of development means a lot in a fictional society, too.
Anyway, it’s a fine movie. Watch Wizard of Oz again before you see Wicked. You’ll find more of the Easter eggs that way.
It was snowing when we left the theater.
That’s just beginning of a week-and-a-half of actual winter. I bet they never have to deal with that in Emerald City. The wizard probably takes care of it.
I had a perfectly uninspiring 38-mile bike ride this evening. I averaged about 20 miles an hour, and near the end I thought, I should grab an image. Just then I was riding here.
And that fit. That’s how impressive the ride was. You might think my little Zwift avatar is riding through a cave there, but no. No, he is riding to his death. Death by asphyxiation, for he is riding through the heart of a volcano. And, surely, while holding a 24 mile per hour pace through the thing my avatar would be breathing hard, and pulling in more sulfur than anything.
Volcanoes vary, but the gases they produce are primarily water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide (SO2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), nitrogen, argon, helium, neon, methane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
No way my guy lives through that, right?
He’s probably got a better shot at being safely whisked away to Oz.
I have two classes tomorrow, so a substantial part of yesterday, and almost all of today, have been spent in making notes for myself, trying to think up ways to keep students’ attention and give them some useful information. This is always a learning process, both in terms of pedagogical techniques but, sometimes, in the actual material. I learned a few things yesterday. Now I get to share that information with others. That’s a lot of fun. Hopefully they’ll think so, too.
Just kidding. I’m working on a lecture a few weeks from now. But I did learn some things. One of the things I learned is that some of the reading materials have disappeared, and so I had to scramble for suitable replacements. Another thing I learned involved something arcane and technical. The journalist in me would have benefited from the existence of this technology, but not understood why or how it worked. Sorta like me and, say, an important converter in a hydroelectricity plant, or the part between solar panels and light switches.
What was really fun, and quite gratifying, is when I get to a new section of notes and text for this lecture that will take place in a few weeks and realize, “Hey, I know how to do this. I’ve been doing this for a long time, as it turns out.”
Can’t buy the sort of confidence that comes with steady realization, I’ve always said, since at least the beginning of this sentence.
The one big break from all of that today was a bike ride this morning. Here we’d just been chatting, when I looked down and we were soft pedaling through the low 20s.
On this particular route we follow that road for some miles until it ends. Then we turn left onto a road that parallels the river. The road is mostly flat, but there is the slightest little gradient. And my lovely bride will crush a false flat. I could still see her when she got to the next turn, but I didn’t see her turn. Despite having a clear view down that next road, I didn’t see her there. She wouldn’t have continued on straight ahead, owing to the logistics of the ride, but no can see.
So I spent the next four miles putting in some of the ride’s best splits, just to catch back up to her, which I finally did. We talked again for a moment, which was mostly me just trying to get out “You’re fast!” Then I went past her. I held her off for four miles, after which she dropped me with a “Why’d you do that?” look.
Because being chased is every bit as fun as chasing. Moreso when your legs are beginning to feel pretty decent again. (That only took two months.)
Also, I set three Strava PRs on that ride. All of which is why there’s only one shot in the video. I was too busy, and then too tired, to get more shots.
The seventh installment of my efforts in tracking down the local historical markers did not come from today’s ride, but rather a weekend expedition. Doing this by bike is one good way to go a little slower, see more things and learn some roads I wouldn’t otherwise try. Counting today’s installment, I’ll have visited 15 of the 115 markers found in the Historical Marker Database. What will we learn a bit about today? I’m so glad you asked!
Downtown is an old town here. Quaint houses. Signs on the walls displaying the original or locally famous previous residents. Hitching posts out by the modern curb. Lots of cars, but the whole vibe. It’s a charming little place, and houses like this are part of why.
Built in 1724 by a second generation immigrant, Samuel Shivers had one of the first houses in this town, and it is still today a fine example of several different generations of architecture. Historians would point out that there’s four centuries of work here, included the remnants of Samuel’s father’s 1692 cabin. The house we see today, then, shows us work that spans four centuries. The door, the hinges and the rest of the hardware there are period original, but I don’t know which … again, several centuries of work are in here.
The mantel is original. Some of the window glass is original. It wasn’t long before the Shivers family needed more space, so Samuel bought a nearby tavern and had it moved onto his property. Samuel’s daughter and her husband took over the house in 1758. That man, Joseph Shinn, helped write the state constitution in 1776. Their son, Isiah Shinn, took over the house. He was a state lawmaker and militia general. Isiah presided over more additions in 1813, adding a dining room and two more bedrooms, and this was the look on Main Street until 1946. The woman that owned it then made a lot of changes and whoever produced this sign did not like it. But for the past few years a preservationist has owned The Red House and is restoring it to its original style.
Apparently, the first film produced by Samuel Goldwyn in his studio Goldwyn Pictures in 1917 was shot in this town, and all of the interior scenes take places in this house, or on sets modeled after it.
The whole movie is online.
The Red House, also, has this fancy plaque on the front wall.
I touched it. It’s some sort of vulcanized rubber. But the rest of the house, though, it’s something else. Some day I’m going to have to work my way into an invite.
What already seems like six or seven years ago, somehow, but was merely last Wednesday, I showed you the marker that stood by itself, with nothing to memorialize. It was a fire ring. There’s one other in town, and it is within just a few feet of The Red House.
And even though, last week, I shared a screen cap of the Google Street View car’s photo of that now-missing fire ring, it’s important to see it for yourself. So now here is a fire ring.
This all seems pretty obvious now. It sounds like this.
I’m just tapping the ring with the metal head of my bike pump but the sound really jumps. Imagine, years ago, hearing this in the middle of a quiet night, when someone full of adrenalin is striking this ring. “FIRE! COME QUICK!” I bet it was an effective system for it’s time. The Red House’s sign says it has survived, among other things, fires, so that ring must have been an effective call to the community.
Also, ‘Old Discipline’? What a great name. What a great name for anything.
If you’ve missed some of the early markers, look under the blog category We Learn Wednesdays. What will we learn next week? Something quite unique indeed. Come back and see!
Tomorrow I’ll put four more big plastic bins in the basement because this weekend I prepared two fo them for storage. Also this weekend, and today, I emptied six more bins of books. Tonight I finished placing them on their shelves. First, all of the Gloms are now back in order in their bookcase. (One of the bins of Gloms got dropped when we were moving things into the house. It, of course, was the bin with the 120-year-old books. They seemed to do OK, the ancient books, but that was a stressful moment.)
The Gloms are going to pop back up in a photo capacity in the not-too-distant future.
After that, there also two other bookcases, filled with dozens of books I’ve yet to read. Last night I organized them into two stacks. On my grandfather’s bookcase, right next to my desk, are the books I’ll read first. There are about fifth books placed there, and perhaps about the same amount on the other bookshelf in the far corner.
Tomorrow I’ll set up the audio equipment. After that, it’s just reducing clutter, and then making plans for how I’ll actually use the space.
Anyway, most of the house settling is coming together. I’ve got two other bookcases to fill downstairs, and there are some odds and ends to figure out, but soon we’ll be on the way to trying to figure out where to hang things.
Which is good, because talking about how you’re unpacking for days on end might be the most boring thing on the web, am I right? So, starting tomorrow, back to the other riveting things I usually talk about here.
Here’s the important part. The most delicate things have been removed from balled up newspaper.
First one, then the other.
Phoebe and Poseidon are ridiculous, and they’re doing well. Quite settled, I’d say.
We had a nice little bike ride this weekend, which allows me to use the new bike banner once again. It was a lovely pedal through farmland and close to the lower basin of the Delaware River estuary.
We rode by crops ready to be pulled from the vine, cornstalks ready to soar and over a bit of the marshy river itself.
On this particular route, I think we only passed one church, watching over the fields and the people and the carefully planted trees.
It wasn’t a hard ride, but it was not without its challenges. It wasn’t especially fast, and at one point everything hurt. I am, I reminded myself, recovering from a move, Also, despite my lovely bride’s best efforts, I still got us off to a later-than-desired start, so the sun was ready to bake us in the last few miles. But the scenery was nice, and the company was wonderful.
I’m ready for the next ride, and maybe after a few more I’ll be ready for them to be a bit faster.
We took some time out for gymnastics. Tthe former All-American still has the Focus Face and the fingers and toes do what a gymnast’s fingers and toes do. I doubt she’s even aware of them, but it always amuses me.
She stuck the landing, several times.
Today, there were laps.
I swam some laps as well. I’m easing back into this, having now my second lap swim in just under eight silly years. In a few more pool sessions I’ll be up to a respectable warmup distance.
Also, I really need my shoulder to stop spasming. This is a Memorial Day weekend thing, followed by the stress-of-a-move thing. But, hey, I can still carry things. First, heavy boxes, then books by the armload and finally, when that got old, moving entire bins of heavy books. I’m sure that has in no way contributed to this running issue.
Yes, I am going to get one more week of videos out of the concert we saw last month at The Ryman. I recorded it, you get to hear it. “Shame on You” was a 1997 single from the “Shaming of the Sun” record. Love that album, love this song, love the banjo.
There’s a reference to the year 1694 in the song, fit in as rhetorical rebuttal. Not a lot seemed to happen in colonial America in 1694, but it doesn’t make the point any less valid, but the migration was underway. These sorts of things happen slowly, until you one day look around and everything is different, and new challenges and realities are emerging. I suspect that’s what was happening in the 1970s and 1980s and early 1990s when David Zeiger released his documentary, “Displaced In The New South” which has a theme that inspired the song.
The opening line of the documentary is the title of the post. I suppose it has always been that way, as well.
