We live in a miraculous age, really. Every time someone goes to the hospital you hear about some new procedure doing some amazing thing in an incredibly un-invasive way. And then the patient is back on their feet again in no time.
Scientists make great strides with impressive frequency on many of the big issues of our day.
I can beam a movie into my computer, just because I want to sit in my library and read, rather than walking into the next room to watch the same movie, beamed into the television.
These are amazing things.
I can’t keep an Internet connection when it rains.
Just before we moved here the good people voted to invite in some cable and ISP competition. Just before Christmas they dug through our neighborhood to install their new equipment.
Tiny flags sprouted up throughout the area marking underground this and buried that. Asphalt and sidewalk are painted in cryptic codes. There were two big holes in our yard. The came back along and fixed that part, at least.
But without fail the Internet turns demure at least once a day.
I stopped counting at six times today. Sure, I grouse and complain. A nice guy on Twitter who works for Charter in Missouri tried to help. But he’s in Missouri. The local folks are nice enough, too, when you can get them out here. They haven’t fixed it, yet, but at least they’re kind.
Science can do this: “We have built a wireless implantable microelectronic device for transmitting cortical signals transcutaneously.”
Get a guy out front with a shovel? You are sure to get rainwater into your conduit.
So I listened, when the Internet connection worked, to The Damned United while I read today. It was based on a friend’s recommendation, and is the fictionalized biopic about an English club manager in the 1970s. If you can’t study over that you’re just not trying.
It didn’t work out very well for the guy. He held the job just 42 days.
Later there was Death at a Funeral, last year’s American version. I’m betting the English version was better. IMDb agrees. It was probably more nuanced than the remake. Nothing is subtle about Martin Lawrence or Tracy Morgan, though.
After the rain stopped this evenin, and the Internet connection returned — Is there a list, somewhere of things that are disproportionately, irrationally disappointing? Does this top that list? — I watched Brothers, without reading.
This was the one to see undistracted. It has a reasonable flow and it possesses a sound story (it is based on a Danish story). I’d buy Tobey Maguire with a lower rank, but Jake Gyllenhaal as an ex-con works. The trailers, if you’ll recall them, did not do the film justice. The build is much slower and the end is almost uncertain.
Elsewhere, I read and studied. I tinkered with the site. You’re reading a new font. Thrilling, I know.
Tomorrow’s adventure will make today’s adventure look like … movies and reading and fonts. I hope your Wednesday is equally impressive.
movies / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Is that you John Wayne? Is this me? 23 Dec 10
That’s holiday of the future, ya know … Hallmark is just waiting for the right time to spring this on you. Possibly the next time the economy ticks. There will be cards, new presents you must get — if you love your children — and an all new backstory. What did those wise men do before they made it to the stable? Why isn’t a tacky restaurant riffing on that idea for their commercials already?
Every so often I get on a John Wayne kick. I prefer Clint Eastwood, I think because that’s what my grandfather preferred. And there was something creepy about Wayne as an oil fire fighter. There was something creaky about him as an old fighter pilot. But, then, to me John Wayne had always been old.
Rio Bravo is probably my favorite, just because Dean Martin was trying so hard not to be Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson was trying so hard to not be cool while simultaneously being the unhip kid, generationally speaking. It is a bizarre dynamic, but I like that story for the most part.
I’d never cared for Wayne in The Longest Day, he just seemed to … sit there. Those regrettable Turner color crossovers put a bad taste in the mouth of anyone watching basic cable at that point in the 1980s. But that wasn’t the Duke’s fault. In the last few years I got around, in one of these kicks, to seeing his last film, The Shootist, which was really stirring. For the most part though, I can take him or leave him. If nothing else he’s good to have in the background.
I had AMC’s John Wayne marathon on last night and part of today, just playing quietly as I read and did other things. He’s good for this. You can tune him out as I did in The Horse Soldiers — apparently John Ford’s only Civil War film — and just pay attention when he’s speechifying.
And, also, when he punches someone. The man could throw a film punch like no one else. Here’s a good one from McLintock!, which was also on today.
He’s punching out Leo Gordon, who was one of the big screen’s perennial baddies. He worked until 1994 and died a decade ago. Only because G.W. McLintock let him live that long. He was married to a woman named Cartwright, which just seems appropriate, given the times and prevelance of westerns. She was also in showbiz. Her last role was in A League of Their Own.
If you want to amaze your friends, put in A League of Their Own, turn on the subtitles and learn how to say “There’s no crying in baseball!” in French. Call your friends out of the blue with this expression. Repeat it two or three times and then just hang up.
Someone did that to me a few years ago, because they felt the need to learn, and to share, the phrase. And I was amazed. So give that a try.
Anyway.
Rambo came back today. We have a Rambo in our lives. He is an appliance repairman and, as such, we are none too thrilled about having a Rambo in our lives, because his existence is predetermined by a failure of some mechanical apparatus, the absence of which we have deemed less than optimal and, thus, begun the process of bringing Rambo into our home.
It would be perfect if the guy talked like Stallone, or even a shade tree mechanic, but he knows his business and seems to be a thoroughly decent, happy and well-spoken fellow. How he got the name Rambo will forever be a mystery. It isn’t a written rule, but you just don’t ask people named Rambo about their origins. You can pretty much guess anyway, and you can also be sure he’s not pleased with the whole situation. It only gets worse if you think about what his name could have been if he’d been born a few years earlier, or a few years later. Hollywood does no favors to men who want to name their kids after action stars. And the kids know it.
Right now some guy in his mid-late-30s named John Shaft Kurzweil is in complete agreement with me.
Rambo is here today to replace the pumperator on the dishwasher. He has brought a colleague. When you are in a different room and listen to them speak intelligently about the issue in a soft, un-intrusive tone they sound like Boomhauer.
I asked about the proximate cause of the problem, which, I’m told, could be hoses, seals, pumps, motors, engines or the motors on the seals that pump the hoses into the engine. Either way, the water wasn’t escaping into the drainage system in a pleasing manner, but was taking the gravity assist and going everywhere. Ultimately, Rambo’s colleague said “If it is man-made it will eventually break.”
Not to get geological here, buddy, but other stuff breaks too. Mountains, for instance, are susceptible to change and diamonds aren’t exactly forever, never mind the marketing. Now back to the problem at hand.
I was doing laundry while they worked. When the spin cycle turned on Rambo must have seen dollar signs. My washer sounds like a bronco with ADD and self-control problems. But the clothes come out smelling nice, so there’s that.
I asked Rambo what else was going to break — this was his fourth visit to our house, which still sits firmly on an ancient and sacred burial ground, I’m sure of it — and he was afraid to commit to anything. He bade me Merry Christmas and then said the best thing possible.
“Don’t take this personally, but I don’t want to see you again for a while.”
That’s my joke. And unless you’re rigging something else to go out on a time delay basis, or if you have trained the cat where we have failed, I’m hoping to not have to call your fine establishment anytime soon. On their invoices they do the company initials on a clothesline graphic. It is cute, but nothing I need to see again for a while.
More working and getting ready for the holidays. Amazon failed me. Not that it matters, but they promised delivery on Christmas Eve in the spam and on the website. The followup Email says December 27. I wrote a note, accusing them of treachery of the most grievous kind. Someone sent back a nice copy and paste Email which suggested they did not read my note. Where’s that John Wayne punch now? I canceled the order, which is a delightfully efficient process. I think they’ve done this before.
Meanwhile, on Overstock they were also promising Christmas Eve delivery. I bought the last of something there. How thrilling! The very last thing and I didn’t have to pinch other fingers or box out or throw elbows like a rebounding forward. Their followup Email assured me the Christmas Eve delivery date would be met. As of this writing the item has gone from Maine to New Hampshire and Louisville and is projected to be on time.
What a world we live in. Let’s compare and contrast.
On Monday I watched total strangers clap and cheer for soldiers returning home to their families at the airport. Oh that was just a special joy to see. It was even an honor to say welcome home to a bright eyed young lady from the Army who already had tears in her eyes as big as the pack on her back.
Later that night I couldn’t get a stranger to help give my car a boost.
Today I ordered something, shipped from Maine, and be placed in my hands tomorrow. That thing is coming in with Santa.
It took more than two weeks to get the dishwasher’s new pumperator for today’s install.
For symmetry’s sake I’m looking for a fitting John Wayne quote, but the man never talked about dishwashers or the vagaries of our national supply and distribution lines. We are the lesser for it.
This doesn’t seem right at all, to be in December. But the mind makes perception funny that way. If it isn’t December, smart guy, what is it? July?
Well, no. But I wouldn’t mind a few weeks worth of May. It has just recently turned to a bitter chill (for here) which at least makes it feel like winter is creeping in. Doesn’t mean we have to like it. If I can’t have May I’ll take mid-March, please.
So the monthly video, designed to encapsulate the theme of the next four weeks in 35 seconds, is up. This one was both obvious and hasty. Busy day today. Work, meetings, study. Had a great teaching moment with the newspaper today. We will have to run a correction next week.
Lunch with Brian, he suggested Moe’s, a local barbecue chain that now stretches from North Carolina to Colorado. This particular one is close to Brian’s office, in an old oyster house. The place feels run down, maybe even transient for a restaurant. Yuppies can go there to feel authentic about their barbecue.
And it is good, if a little pricey. This is my compliment: It is like Bob Sykes‘ barbecue, but without having to go to Bessemer.
I love barbecue.
In finding links for this entry I found this BBQ blog. Why didn’t we think of that? They wisely break their entries down by state. Not that they can be everywhere at once, they’re leaving out a lot of Alabama. (They’re looking for contributions, if you’d like to help them out.)
I got to have Thai for dinner with The Yankee. We visited Surin West, where we haven’t been since sometime before our move. We sat at the same table. Had the same disinterested waiter. I may have had the same meal, who knows. The coconut soup was delicious, as always. And actually warmed us up a bit. Have I mentioned it is cold?
Sent her home, shot the movie above, bought some things and ran other errands.
And then Up. It is a touching film about which much has been written. I’ll simply say that it seems to me to be about how the spirit of love changes. First the child, the dream, then the wife who becomes wrapped up in the home, which gives way to the boy and the bird and the dog.
The animation, of course, is brilliant. The montage was full of life and yearning and loss, even before it was about that. And it might be one of the best montages ever recorded. That’s art.
And now a little studying. More tomorrow, happy December!
Bitterly cold and falling just now. Winter has arrived. Or it has signaled it’s imminent arrival. Honestly I can’t tell anymore. It is easy to personify the whimsy of nature to a point. But when you get to the days of 40 degree temperature swings — as some parts of the state enjoyed today — you go beyond a singular personality. You have to accept the possibility that the weather personification you’ve been building might have a friend in there.
And that doesn’t even get to addressing those delightful outlier days where winter is officially here, but everything stays in the low 60s. Maybe your personification has an ADD consideration. The pharmaceutical companies are working wonders on this sort of thing these days, just ask them. Maybe they have a drug big enough for all outdoors.
I’m sure that day is coming. And that will be the day that Neo reveals Skynet was just a ruse to distract us from the Matrix. And you just thought you had identity issues before that.
So it was cold. Actually, it started warm. I put on a sweater this morning to walk into 72 degrees with a dewpoint of 68. Around here the meteorologists call that disconcerting. After driving through rain storms, one of them so angry that people were tempted to pull off the road, I made it to work in a chill drizzle. And things have been deteriorating, weather-wise, since then.
Photojournalism in class today. Our faculty member that teachers photojournalism offered to come in and give the lecture. It is always nice to see how others do it, especially those who’ve been doing this for quite some time. This particular professor now travels a lot professionally — some gig, eh? — and he brings back these majestic shots from all over the world. He shows a lot of his pictures, and then showed the great Eugene Smith.
It is enough to make you want to grab your camera, shake your fist at the rain and demand a low angled light so you can take tight closeups. People are the thing. I forget that a lot in my casual shutterbugging. You must always remember it if you’re working.
And also, reporting. Even Eugene Smith’s almost-groundbreaking work is lacking if you don’t have the information to go with. Pictures, words, light, pens, all of the above. Photographers are journalists too. I try to make this point a lot.
Two quick links, and then back to it: I cause trouble. The sports guy at al.com sends me these questions and I try to answer them in the most un-antagonistic way possible. Still I get almost 100 comments in 90 minutes.
Don’t read the comments. They’ll hurt your head.
So of course that’s about Auburn and Alabama football. For just a little more, read about this piece my friend Jeremy is putting together on Bo Jackson. Very interesting little letter, there. It might not be your time or your place or the pinnacle athlete of your generation, but put yourself in Jeremy’s shoes. You can interview the Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali or the Bo Jackson of your childhood. What a possibility.
Do read the comments on that one. They are very good.
Later: I don’t expect you to watch this, but I slogged through Under Heavy Fire tonight. Or, as IMDb calls it, Going Back. Sure, lots of films have working titles and international titles, this one just had two different names. I think it was trying to get into the witness protection program. Anyway, I half acknowledged it playing on Netflix and only link to it here because someone went to the trouble of getting the entire thing on YouTube.
I did not embed it, however, because it might be the worst Casper Van Dien movie that has ever starred Casper Van Dien. It is a shame, since it is Casper Van Dien, and his square jaw of truth here just demands respect. But nothing else does. Shame, because the primary story — OK, there is no secondary arc — could actually be an interesting tale. Every place, that might display conventional thought, or logic, or other key things like dialog, this movie is lacking. There is a lot of screaming, and a little acting.
Casper Van Dien is really hoping Starship Troopers 4 gets the green light about midway through this project. He pulls aside one of the other characters for a sidebar and you almost expect him to break the fourth wall and start talking about this movie.
This being a Vietnam-period piece it must be told in the tone of the self-loathing post-modern Americanism. So much so that this may have been geared for an international release. The guy that directed it was also behind three of the four Iron Eagle movies (Did you know there were four? I’ve seen the first two and was contemplating the final films as a joke, but now that I’ve put all of this together I just don’t have the stomach for it. This might be the worst military film to roll out in 25 years, and this guy didn’t direct Iron Eagle III. How bad must that film be?) and Superman IV. So there you go.
Just as a means of comparison: how did these movies fare on IMDb’s notoriously generous star rating system?
Iron Eagle 4.9 stars
Iron Eagle II 3.3 stars
Iron Eagle III 3.2 stars
Iron Eagle IV 2.9 stars
Superman IV 3.4 stars
Going Back 5.1 stars
So I won’t be watching the last two Iron Eagle movies tomorrow.
I will be shooting you one, though, as we make our way into December it is time for the first-of-the-month thematic video. December, hmmm. I hope I can think of something.
My office window faces the north, so I have to go outside for views like this. There’s a nice green lot below my windows and I can see when the sun hits that perfect golden angle. It just so happened I had to make a trip today from my building to another part of campus and I just managed to catch the sun exploding through that tree through the lomo filter.
Students were throwing a frisbee on the quad, the hammocks were empty, young ladies were teaching one another an exciting new cheer that involved a lot of screaming. The sun was peeking between the chapel and the theater. I was carrying a handful of books and binders and things and it was just a marvelous scene. I took more pictures for later.
We had baked apples at lunch, which I only mention because I’ve never noticed them in the cafeteria before. Naturally I tried them. Baked apples are very subjective, of course. No two recipes are the same and no one’s are as good as those made by the person that you’re now thinking of.
My grandmother makes the best apples. She would cut up fruit from the Granny Smith tree in her yard — I never called her Granny, but given that her name was Smith it was a long time before I realized that the variety wasn’t named after her. I don’t know all of her secrets, but I know that my cousin and I would beg her to make them. She’d fill up one of those square casserole dishes, the apples, the sauce and a bunch of mini-marshmallows. We could eat them all in one sitting.
These apples weren’t my grandmother’s apples. They weren’t bad. They had a nice cinnamon taste with a mild bleach finish. My grandmother has never had to make apples for hundreds of people, so there’s that. And it got me into the
spirit of fall, so I’ve no complaints.
Journalism links: It still boggles the mind that publishers, who were slow to accept the changes brought about by the world wide web because they were fundamentally losing control of their ability to be one of a few unique voices, have made their bed with Apple where they have willingly handed over control. Poynter reports:
(T)he November issue of Esquire, its second to be made available as an iPad app, has been held up by Apple’s app review process since mid-October.
The November cover story features actress Minka Kelly, who the magazine named the “sexiest woman alive,” and that apparently is the sticking point in the app being approved.
The Gazette Extra, like everyone else, is trying to find the proper way to deal with comment trolls. Because, as the editor says, “some people can’t behave” his paper won’t allow comments on stories about crimes, courts, accidents, race or sex. That particular paper, it seems, has exceeded that point of critical mass where comments are no longer constructive or dialogical. Even in that thread, on a note from the editor about curtailing vicious comments, the conversation veers wildly out of control. Most every big site has this problem.
Cooks Source — the New England cooking magazine that became suddenly infamous for infringing upon the works of online writers, and then snottily claiming that everything online was public domain — has another petulant letter from the editor on their website. Both Facebook pages they’ve set up have been overwhelmed by critics. And now, at their most popular, the little magazine that copies and pastes is closing shop.
And I wish I could give you a link, but the Samford Crimson is unfortunately not putting it online. The sports section has been running a football pick chart this fall. The university president, the starting quarterback, sports writers and other student leaders have been participating. A math professor has led all season.
Videos: Last Saturday when Georgia visited Auburn for their beat down in the South’s Oldest Rivalry freshman running back Mike Dyer broke the great Bo Jackson’s freshman rushing record. Jackson was there, celebrating the 25th anniversary of his Heisman, and had a nice moment on the sideline with Dyer.
This is the video that aired on AUHD, so imagine seeing this on the big screen at the game, and the audio is the crew’s behind-the-scenes chatter. It makes a nice moment even more entertaining:
I love that last line: Memories. That was just perfect, in so many respects. The guy who produces the the big screen programming, Bo Cordle, is leaving. In fact that was his last game. what a way to go out.
This wasn’t quite as entertaining, but I watched The Red Baron tonight. It is a modern adaptation on the career of Manfred Von Richthofen. Like all movies of legendary war heroes, it is told as a love story. Only this particular love story didn’t actually happen. Because the story of perhaps the greatest ace of World War I needed to be glossed over and fictionalized. I hate when that happens.
Meanwhile, here’s actual funeral footage:
Everyone in that footage is also in the ground now. World War I was a long time ago, said obvious guy, obviously. I just started reading this week R.A.C. Parker‘s history of Europe between the wars. The first handful of chapters are about the treaties that ended World War I. This book was published in the 1960s, so everyone knew where this story was headed. Even still, in the first few pages, it is already heartbreaking because of what even then, just months after that funeral, was something of an inevitability.
As is this stack of things I must grade. So, to my red pen I must now go.
