This part is true. The part where Dave picks up the young woman’s book and chases her down has that nice little chase sequence through the campus (which isn’t shown in a logical linear order, of course). When he turns right, by the greenhouse, he’s going on to 3rd Ave. We drive that road regularly and it also seems a miracle no one gets hurt there on a regular basis.
I was going to write more, but the day got away from me. The days all get away from us from time to time, even as we know the days are always going some way or another. That’s the thing about us, we can seize the day, occasionally, if we are so inclined. But we can never grab the day and hold onto it. Not for very long anyway. I assume this has something to do with how our brains perceive time. We’re flowing through it, or it is flowing around us or some thing or another and the net you are holding isn’t woven with small enough mesh. Or some such.
But, hey! I did entirely rework a page on the site you’ll never see! And I found two or three things there that I need to fix. It is an administrative thing and you don’t care at all. I might not, either, but I started it long ago for reasons that probably didn’t make much sense then and probably mean less now. But I have it under control. For a time.
Also, I have added new images to the top and bottoms of the blog, here. As you might have noticed those are rotating images, built with a bit of code that offers the viewer a random image based on numerical sequence. Presently there are 81 headers and 81 footers. They all have varying heights and they are all 900 pixels wide. So I’m staying with this format for a long time, I suppose. I’ve been with this format for a good long while, as well.
I’ve been watching HBO-produced biopics. There was an Lyndon Johnson movie based on a play and then a two-parter on Winston Churchill that I’ve started. They are both interesting and probably have some accurate anecdotes, and they compress years of civics lessons into two-hour capsules. But try as I might, I see Anthony Mackie and Frank Langella rather than Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Richard Russell. Bryan Cranston fills out LBJ pretty well.
But I don’t know that you can really portray LBJ’s in a PG environment. The trailer was really good, I felt, so I watched it. The movie was worth seeing if you like political pieces or period pieces. There were a few really quite powerful moments. I think it captured the best parts of the worst parts of a hard, challenging time.
Stephen Root was J. Edgar Hoover. He is great in everything and there’s one little moment he has that nods at all of the things the cinematic audience we’ve learned about Hoover in recent years. Which makes me think of this in much the same way as we do comic book universes. Except, of course, this was real life. The most fake thing was the makeup they put on poor Josh Lyman to try to turn him into Hubert Humphrey. Should have spent more time on that.
I was half-listening to the Churchill story (turns out this is a BBC-HBO co-produced project) when I heard Lena Headey. Nothing takes you out of the 1940s like an accidental Game of Thrones reference. The problem is that these sorts of films always come off as cartoonish, either in a harsh way or in a soft focus, after school special sort of way:
I’ve been running indoors. Someone left the door open and Canada is cooling all of outdoors so we’ve been at the track. The track is a fine three-lane affair. Eight laps to a mile, only slightly better paces. It is made from special grade painful cement designed to hurt old joints, I think. But it looks like this outside:
So it is a trade off. Eighteen miles in the last couple of days. And now it’ll be a few more days before I set off again. Hopefully outside, where my stride is sometimes better.
The nicest part about being inside, after avoiding hypothermia, I mean, is that my running app can’t cope. For the first three miles or so it things I’m running at a world class pace. I am not running at a world class pace. Also, it thinks this is my course:
That is not my course. My app is just going through a modern art phase. It takes no time at all to imagine that is an aggressive effort.
So we’re back at it again. Another late, late night in the newsroom. This was the view when it was still daylight outside. I did make it outside at some point. Some days it is difficult to know for sure, but here is documented evidence:
Sometime I think I should walk around to trees and just start yelling “Quitter!” at them. That wouldn’t be strange. Would that’d be strange? That’d be strange. Right?
A few more photos from the weekend. We ride bikes through here. It looks different at dusk and at different speeds. And it is dark enough and we’re fast enough here and I was maybe just hasty enough that it makes everything look soft and blurry and distant. But look at those colors:
We went to the movies this weekend. We saw Creed, which was emotionally impactful in ways that I wasn’t expecting. And no one saw that happen, either, since The Yankee didn’t glance over at entirely the wrong time or anything. It had nothing to do with an aging Rocky or mortality, but probably had something to do with thinking of Mickey Goldmill. (Did you know there’s a story about Mickey being written? You want this one to make it.)
Walking out of the theater this little girl saw this poster and walked up to it.
“What’s this movie about, Mommy?”
Mom walks over, reaches down for her hand and says “You wouldn’t like it.”
Don’t worry, kid, no one is going to like this one.
This weekend we also learned that Allie likes cupcakes, or at least the paper.
We went to see the new James Bond movie late last night. Here’s my proof:
We went because some of the kids in the family just had to go see the movie. And if they didn’t they might die. As in, tomorrow. Or perhaps today. It is hard to say with Sudden Onset Bond Deprivation. So we went to the film. The kids were out before the first action sequence was over. Now, to be fair, we were at basically a midnight showing. On the other hand, these are teenagers. And we old folks managed to tough it out.
I probably couldn’t recount a lot of the plot points to you. I was awake, it just seemed an eminently forgettable film.
We got Chinese food for reasons that were almost immediately regrettable, post-Thanksgiving feast. Our fortunes:
Because philosophy cookies never sell at the same pace as fortune cookies.
We left town to this sign. And this is how you know the meme has reached pretty much all four corners of the globe. If it makes it up there … where, N.W.A was probably very late in arriving … it has made it everywhere.
And so we were back on the road today. We were doing the four hour drive at a slower rate because two teenaged boys were in the car behind us. They’re coming to spend the weekend and going to the Iron Bowl. Did I mention the cat went on our Thanksgiving tour with us?
