Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Sunday, January 31, 2010 Winter Wonderland I told you a few weeks ago about our feeble attempt at a snow fort, and my even more feeble attempts not to feel inferior about it when I saw other peoples' in the neighborhood after we received a generous shipment of highly moldable snow. However, in the intervening weeks, I have not told you about some of the other structures I've seen, just within a mile radius of our house. These have included a snowman twelve feet tall, a snow Sphinx, and a snow Eiffel Tower (although several sever thaws have rendered it more of a hollow snow Great Pyramid). And those are just the ones I know about. For all I know, there could also be snow Taj Mahals, snow Sydney Opera Houses, and a snow Space Needle within five minutes' drive of here. If the latter exists, I can at least take comfort in the fact that it's not tall enough to be visible from our driveway. But all of this is nothing compared to what exists on our very own block. It's not noticeable right away as you drive past unless the kids are out on it, but we've brought ours over there a few times, and every time it's more impressive. Across the street and up the hill from us, our neighbors live in a house that's situated atop a small but steep hill. You might expect them to have a sledding run in their front yard. You might not expect them, in a small, urban lot within the city limits of Minneapolis, to have five. 1. The straight run begins in the middle of the level part of the north half of their yard. The steep part is long and steep enough that you can really get going, almost to the point where it almost seemed possible to clear the snowbank bordering the street and end up in traffic. Which is impressive considering this snowbank is four feet high. I stationed myself on the outside of the bank just in case, and you wouldn't believe how much sled-bottom I saw a few times before my neighbor remedied this by digging the channel a little deeper near the top of the snowbank so it would bounce sharply against the ice-ridge at the top instead of coasting to a uncertain zenith. Kids are resilient, but I don't think I would have taken that run in a sled without an airbag. 2. The short bareback run starts with a small plastic kids' slide that actually used to be M. Edium's. It's perched so close to the very edge of the hill at the south half of their yard, I suspect it'll tumble over when the snow melts. The near-vertical plastic drops you into a slightly more vertical ice trough that drops you onto the sidewalk. 3. Identical to 2, except it's more vertical, has a smaller plastic slide, and drops you into the driveway instead of the sidewalk. 4. Actually not a sled run at all, but a more fascinating attraction to M. Edium, is the snow fort. Carved clear through the snowbank dividing the sidewalk from the street, M. Edium spent more time in there making improvements than he did sledding. It's the engineer in him, I guess. 5. The "270" begins at the top of their yard, only a couple of yards from their front window. A neighbor-made snow-platform at the top provides a staging area for this saucer-only run, and a parent must assist with the launch. The subject, who must ride in a saucer rather than a sled, takes a steep drop out of the yard and across the icy driveway. While turning 180 degrees so that the child is suddenly sliding backward, the saucer goes a slight distance up the far snowbank before gravity starts pulling it down the slope of the driveway. Just short of where the driveway meets the sidewalk, a temporary berm made of snow sends the saucer sliding back across the driveway and then up the sidewalk. By the end of the run, the child has described a giddy but graceful three-quarter circle, and invariably finds him- or herself positioned, for maximum convenience, at the very foot of the shoveled concrete steps that lead up the middle of the yard and right back to where he or she started. They can't leave the house, but who would want to? M. Edium has repeatedly asked me, "Why don't we make our yard like [neighbors']?" I always tell him that our lot is flat, and there are no slopes to work with. Sure. That's the reason. posted by M. Giant 9:12 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, January 29, 2010 Gym Dandy I told you about M. Edium's gymnastics tryout, but I didn't really give much detail on how it went. To be honest, it didn't start off that great. The way it works is that the kids are in the main gym, which is fully equipped. Music is supplied by a stereo mounted on the wall, 95% of the carpeted floor is also covered by thick padding, and there are rings, a balance beam, padded ramps, and a padded vault horse, all arranged at heights designed for people who are even smaller than gymnasts. We got there early, while the previous class was still going on. You have to cross the gym to get to the bathroom, which M. Edium claimed to have to do right away. And then again two minutes later. I think he just wanted to be in the gym. But oddly, once he was in there with the class he was auditing, I didn't go quite the way we expected. Keep in mind that although most of the other kids in there were his age or younger, they were in their seventeenth or eighteenth week of a twenty-week semester. M. Edium felt a little out of his league. While the two instructors started running through the warm-up moves, M. Edium preferred to sit off to the side. Trash told me, "Go tell him to take part." I went in an told him to take part. He did for a while, but then he went and sat down again. Trash told me, "Go tell him again." "I think it's your turn," I said. "I'm reading this paperwork," she said. So I went in and told M. Edium again to participate. After the third time, he started getting into it more. It looked like it might actually be worth it to sign him up for a class. So Trash went ahead and did that. And then she went back to reading the paperwork while I watched the kids. After a while, she showed me something in the orientation packet, specifically the section on information for parents. It said, "Do not enter the gym to correct your child. That is what the instructors are for." "Huh," I said. A bit later, she pointed out another interesting passage. "Do not be concerned if your child does not participate at first. This is completely normal." "How about that?" I said. She went on reading, but didn't really come across anything relevant. Other than the part about children needing to be barefoot in the gym. I looked out at M. Edium, running around in his stocking feet. He was off to one side again. "I think you'd better go in there and take his socks off and also tell him to participate more," I suggested. "In fact, why don't you kind of follow him around for the rest of the class?" She did not take my suggestion. posted by M. Giant 8:17 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, January 27, 2010 House Rules At different times, we've had a lot of our friends living in our house with us. It happens when you have a spare bedroom and friends with living situations in flux who you love having around. As we tell all of our long-term houseguests, we only have three rules: 1. If you have a party, invite us. 2. If you let one or more of the cats escape, you're not coming home until you find them. 3. No crashing your car into the garage. Rule three was the only one of those rules that was ever broken at all, which is why we ended up making it. And it was only broken one other time after that. As we eventually learned, those are the only stated rules. There are of course lots of unstated rules, but we always left them unstated because we knew we could rely on our friends' common courtesy and common sense to know how to behave. Of course, this only works with adults. We quickly learned that it doesn't apply when a new roommate moves in at the age of 18 days. One finds oneself stating a lot of new rules in this situation. Some of these rules include: 1. No storing bacon under the coffee table. It goes in the refrigerator. 2. No eating crackers in our bed. Eat whatever you want in your bed. 3. No climbing on the back of the sofa. This is a fairly recent rule, now that we have a new sofa. M. Edium misses our old sofa. 4. No rubbing your bits on the bathroom wall after you pee. Our friend Chao claims to have been heartbroken when we implemented this rule. 5. You've had enough screen time today. HA HA HA HA HA!!! 6. Do not abuse the phrases "shut up," "stupid," or "God." Along with the previous one, this would have gotten me fired from TWoP long ago if I held myself to it. 7. No being naked outside. Especially this time of year. 8. I can't understand you when you whine like that. Previously, this rule applied only to the cats. When they spoke normally we could understand them perfectly. 9. Hold my hand when we cross the street or the parking lot. Some of our roommates might have gotten the wrong idea if I'd insisted on that one. 10. I am in charge. Sometimes M. Edium has a tragic misapprehension of the chain of command around here. He actually tries to claim he's the boss of us. I mean, he is, but we can't let him know that. And on and on it goes. Sometimes we lament the fact that our three simple rules have been supplanted by what would be a massive tome if we ever printed them all out. But then, I guess it's worth it so we can have a civilized, generally well-behaved boy rather than a filthy, naked, screaming ape-child out of a T. Coraghessan Boyle story. Every once in a while, he needs to be reminded, and more rarely, we'll implement a new rule as needed, like "No more diving off the top bunk." When he crashes into the garage, though, there's going to be hell to pay. posted by M. Giant 5:56 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:
We always liked our rules, which apply to visitors as well as anyone who lives with us for any period of time:
By Monday, January 25, 2010 Grouse of the Rising Sun M. Edium's been showing rather an existential bent lately. A few weeks ago, when we were driving through an unfamiliar neighborhood, he suddenly asked me, "Is this a dream?" I told him no, this was really happening. He asked me the same question last weekend when we were driving to a birthday party in Wisconsin. I gave him the same answer. And then he was asleep in his car seat within five minutes, so I realized that maybe the question had a more immediate significance than I thought. He and I went to Florida for a few days this last week. Looking forward to it has helped him avoid post-holiday letdown. Unfortunately our flight was at 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning. Despite his excitement, I thought it would take some doing to get him up at four in the morning, but when I went in there and whispered into his sleeping ear, "Are you ready to go to Florida?" he was out of that bed like he was spring-loaded. Still, I think the early hour was telling on him a little bit. As we were pulling onto the freeway to the airport, he asked, "Is this a movie?" Which is a slight variation from the previous two iterations, but we assured him this was really happening. He was really going to Florida. He was my dream all through the airport, even security, staying close and obedient. More so than my wheeled suitcase, in fact. We got on the plane and took off into a black sky. The layer of clouds we ascended through was low and opaque, but so thin that from above, patches of it glowed, lit by the clusters of light below. I've never seen anything like it. M. Edium, grizzled air travel veteran that he is, didn't seem impressed, this being his fourth plane trip. We were changing planes in Milwaukee, so I didn't want to unpack his DVD player for what would probably be about forty minutes at cruising altitude. Instead I distracted him with his books and stuffed animals, and with the impending sunrise in the east when the first signs of it became visible. Big mistake, that last one. "I want Mom here," he declared, and launched into a full-on crying jag. It didn't take me long to figure out what had happened. He'd woken up in his clothes, been bundled into the car, ridden to the airport, left his coat behind in his mom's car, and walked onto a plane, all in conditions indistinguishable from the dead of night. No wonder he thought he was dreaming. But then he saw that sunrise coming, and suddenly it was real. He was awake, and time was passing, and miles were racking up between him and his mom every second. And as far as he knew, he'd only dreamed kissing her goodbye, and we know how he handles thinking he missed that. I tried to settle him down as best I could, thinking of my fellow passengers. My only comfort was that from more than a couple of rows away, a crying five-year-old sounds just like a crying two-year-old. Although nobody expects a two-year-old to order his dad to call his mom on his cell phone and tell her to be in Milwaukee by the time we land. He got over it after a few minutes, but it wouldn't be accurate to say he forgot it. A bit later, as the whole sky was getting light, a passing flight attendant saw him looking out the window and asked, "Is that sky pink or peach?" With his typical heartbreaking honesty, M. Edium said, "Pink, but it made me cry because it made me miss my mom." "Aw," the flight attendant said, and continued up the aisle. I think that was when she figured out the crying toddler she'd heard earlier in the flight was actually a crying five-year-old. Those don't get nearly as much sympathy. When we landed in Fort Myers a few hours later and were still taxiing to the gate, the passengers around us chuckled adoringly as they heard him yelling at her through my cell phone such cute-icisms as "LOVE YOU MOM" and "I MISSED YOU WHEN THE SUN CAME UP" and "I'M KISSING THE PHONE." Then they all told him how cute and what a good traveler he was. Obviously those weren't the same passengers who had been sitting near us when he melted down over Eau Claire. posted by M. Giant 8:31 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:Awwwwwwwww. I hope my daughter misses me as much when she is M.Edium's age! And that my husband is the one who has to deal with it. He he he.
By Wednesday, January 20, 2010 Up in the Office I came to kind of a startling realization last week. It's one of those epiphanies that hits you out of the blue, when you're thinking of two unrelated things at the same time and you realize that they're actually related, and suddenly nothing in your life is the same again. And it's this: Ryan Bingham, the suave, handsome protagonist played by George Clooney in Up in the Air, is actually Michael Scott from The Office. Now, obviously this analogy stands up best if you are completely blind, but even if you're not, stay with me. Both of them love their perks. Michael's in heaven every time Dunder Mifflin sends him on a business trip, whether it's to Philly or Winnipeg. Part of that may be the novelty of it, but then Ryan never seems to get tired of hanging out in the Admiral's Club or playing with his decks of hotel-room card keys, either. That scene where Ryan complains to his assistant about not having a Sebring waiting for him could have easily been Michael whining to Erin. Both men are deficient in personal relationships, valuing the most superficial connections in their lives. The only difference is that Ryan wants it that way (or thinks he does), while Michael is too clueless to see that that's the only way he's ever going to get it. In a speech from the trailer, Ryan says, "Fast friends aren't my only friends, but their my best friends." Michael's best friends, meanwhile, are Jim and Pam, who can generally only stand him when he's just been kicked in the metaphorical nuts. But that's not to say that they're completely inept, especially when it comes to getting girls. Ryan's able to land Vera Farmiga rather speedily, while it does take Michael rather longer to rack up the likes of Melora Hardin, Amy Ryan, Nancy Walls, Linda Purl, and that Benihana waitress. But I'll put that moment when Ryan's relationship with Alex...uh, resolves (spoiler) up against anything Michael Scott's been through on the romantic front. Both are, to put it kindly, geeks. This is not apparent at first glance, because Ryan looks like George Clooney. But when you see him dorking out about the St. Louis airport or his frequent flyer status, just close your eyes and try not to think, What a loser! For examples of Michael's geekiness, please see The Office seasons one through six. And although Ryan doesn't share Michael's pathological fear of delivering bad news, both are, when it comes down to it, very good at the core function of their jobs. Michael sold his own worthless company back to Dunder Mifflin for a sweetheart deal, while Ryan was able to sell unemployment to a despondent J.K. Simmons, among untold others. And both of them are in a struggle against money-driven changes in their industry, each claiming that cost-saving measures are no match for the personal service they provide. The difference is that Ryan sits there and takes it; it never occurs to him to quit, even when the job takes away his entire raison d'être. Michael Scott was way too cool to put up with that shit. You still think I'm crazy. I can tell. Even when you admit that they both dress identically and fancy themselves talented public speakers. That's fine. Next time you watch The Office, imagine Michael's final talking-head speech as a mellifluous voice-over heard during breathtaking aerial footage. And if you haven't already seen Up in the Air, just imagine Ryan's mellifluous voice-overs as Michael Scott babbling in front of his office window. It's easier than you think. posted by M. Giant 7:16 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
I totally see it!
By Monday, January 18, 2010 Happy, happy 40th birthday, M. Giant. We love you enough for 40 - 40 year olds. Besides, you don't look a day over 18. Love, Trash, M. Edium, Phantom, and Exie. ****** and a message from M. Edium ******* mom max dad love you star wars posted by M. Giant 9:36 AM 3 comments 3 Comments:Happy Birthday. May the force be with you.
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By Happy Birthday to my favorite recapper!
By Thursday, January 14, 2010 Big Ticket Timing Like a lot of people, Trash and I really made an effort to save money last year, and plan to continue this year. We tracked our expenses, we cut down on eating out, we found ways to save on our utilities, we even clipped coupons. And of course, we held off on major purchases whenever possible. Well, sort of. After I posted the entry about having broken my snowblower, Trash suggested I call the used snowblower place to see if they had another used one cheap. They did, so I went and picked it up, with the understanding that when I (okay, my dad) got the current one running again, I’d try selling it back. Probably not at a profit, but hopefully not at too much of a loss. Plus I got an upgrade, buying a nice two-stage for the cost of my old one-stage. Better yet, I don’t have to mix the gas and the oil, so I'm not going to break it by failing to do so. So that doesn't really count. And we needed a new couch and love seat. We've never actually bought a living room set for ourselves, believe it or not. Our first sofa was a wedding gift from my parents, and the sofa and love seat we had after that were hand-me-downs from Trash's dad and stepmom, who deemed them too old for their further use. We got several more years of use out of them ourselves, but when we realized that only one side of the cushions could be used any more and we couldn't lean against the end of it without risking a poke from a loose nail. We were going to go to IKEA when we got around to it, but Trash spotted a sweet buy-couch-get-love-seat-free deal at a furniture chain, so we couldn't pass that up. Now the old furniture set is out on the curb, where it's been for three days. I know that Jawa is a seasonal occupation, but you'd think someone would have snagged a matching set by now. Before we bought them, Trash expressed surprise that we didn't know anyone who had an old couch and love seat to get rid of. "Well, maybe we do," I said, "but they aren't going to give them to 39-year-olds." Obviously we needed them either way, and they were a great deal, so that doesn't really count either. And then, before Christmas, M. Edium heard all about his cousin's gymnastics classes, and he wanted a piece of that. Trash set him up for a trial session at a place where kids from teens all the way down to foetuses get to go and, as M. Edium put it, "Learn new moves." For weeks afterward he was looking forward to gymnastics more than anything, even more than swimming lessons, which was what he used to look forward to more than anything. The trial session was a huge success, so we signed him up for a full-term class that ended up costing more than my new snowblower. But it's for his long-term physical development, confidence, and self-actualization, and maybe he'll fall off chairs less often, so that doesn't really count either. Oh, and there's the air fare. See, we're going to fly down soon to visit my parents while they're in Florida. But it's going to be just me and M. Edium going, since Trash is going to be teaching a class then, so that's cheaper than flying all three of us down. Plus my parents are putting us up, so that's free room and board. Also, it's important for a boy to spend quality time with his grandparents, and I'm not about to put him on a plane by himself. So that doesn't really count either. Maybe I'm just looking at this wrong. We tracked last year's expenses, and we're tracking this year's. So maybe we should just decide that expenses that fall between Christmas and January 7 don't count. That's a good system. I think I'll start putting together my shopping list for a year from now. posted by M. Giant 7:45 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Hey, cool! What is Trash teaching? (I don't know her, but I just get the sense she'd be a great teacher.)
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"M. Edium heard all about his cousin's gymnastics classes, and he wanted a piece of that." LOL!! I'm a little behind on my reading!!!
By Wednesday, January 13, 2010 Christmas Wipe Out On Christmas Day, after we'd spent a few hours battling the snow in our driveway and sidewalk instead of battling the snow on the freeway between here and my parents' house, we came inside. Trash was busy straightening the kitchen while I was in the basement throwing some snowy wet clothes in the washing machine. Suddenly I heard a loud crash and a startled shout of pain from upstairs. I dropped what I was doing and ran upstairs, as my training dictated, and beheld a frightening scene. Our new dishwasher, the one we bought less than a year ago and had professionally installed, had its door open almost all the way to the floor. It looked the way our old, horrible dishwasher used to look when the hinge springs broke, as they did periodically, and reminded us just how a heavy the door of an automatic dishwasher really is. It also looked the way my jaw did. Oh, also, Trash was splayed out on the linoleum. Apparently her wet socks had slipped on the linoleum floor and she'd gone pitching forward toward the dishwasher, which she had open for some reason with the bottom rack out. Now, she's not a big girl, but if you drop a sack of groceries on an open dishwasher door hard enough, it's going to knock it out of true. And I don't think she would object to my revealing that she's heavier than your average sack of groceries. She might even be heavier than Under the Dome. Hence the condition of our dishwasher. And her leg, or something. She gave me kind of a hard time about my priorities during that first moment of horror, while she sat there with sunbursts of pain radiating from her newly-bashed knee and the fresh memory of the steak knife points seeming to rush up to meet her face. But as I told her later, humans heal. Whereas dishwashers don't, which meant I was going to be stuck with another busted-ass leaky piece-of-shit Joad dishwasher in my kitchen for another twelve years. So while M. Edium helped her into the living room and onto the love seat, iced her knee, and got her a few old leftover narcotic pain pills, I examined the more permanent damage. And I realized that as much as I hated our old dishwasher, it had done one thing for me: it had taught me how to fix broken dishwashers. After rolling the lower rack away from where it had crashed into the center island and closing the door, I saw that it was even worse than I feared: the door didn't close properly. It was hitting the edge of the dishwasher socket, like our old one had. It was like our hateful old appliance had risen from the dead to possess the body of our new one. But from what I could tell, Trash had only bent the two l-shaped hinge brackets that hold the door. Could I bend them straight again? I could not, because they had started out with a crimp in them and I didn't know exactly what they'd looked like to begin with. So I got online, ordered the replacement parts (less than $40 with shipping, which is significantly less than an entire dishwasher, even if you install it yourself), and waited for them to arrive. And when they did, I fixed it. Yes, I had to take a couple of pieces off our kitchen cabinets, and mess up the floor in front of the dishwasher a little more than it's already been messed over the years, and I had to make a special trip to the hardware store to get a screwdriver with a point shaped like a Star of David for some reason, but I got it fixed. The door opens exactly to where it's supposed to and no further, it doesn't leak, and the dishes come out clean every time, provided we do what we're supposed to do. Namely, don't overload it and scrape off the gack beforehand and remember to actually press the start button. The door even closes properly again without hitting the edge of the socket. Literally, it's good as new. Plus Trash can walk again, so that's good news too. Told her she'd heal. posted by M. Giant 7:23 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, January 10, 2010 I Aught to Thank You To say this new decade snuck up on me is something of an understatement. But it wasn't until just this week that it actually hit me. Hard. Upside the ear. Specifically, I suddenly realized how many things I have now that I didn't have on December 31, 1999, and it's actually kind of stunning. These are all things that have changed my quality of life for the better, and even though it's not November, I can't help being embarrassingly grateful. Some of them are things I wanted, some of them are things I didn’t know to want, and some of them are things I never knew would exist. A partial list, in no particular order: A Fender Stratocaster An IKEA within 15 miles A blog A four-bedroom, two-bath house with a back door that opens onto the deck A dishwasher whose door closes properly A Diarist Award An office wardrobe that consists of t-shirts and hoodies A year of writing for a national radio show Stephen King's complete Dark Tower series A democratic Congress Air America A PlayStation An editor and an agent American Idiot A full-time job I like and can do from home A part-time job making fun of TV shows for money Two published books A better financial situation (not counting 401(k), or course) The Lord of the Rings on DVD Wireless Internet at home A laptop (work-supplied, but they don't seem to mind me writing other stuff on it) Friends I could meet for a drink or a meal in almost every major city in the U.S. An awesome and hilarious son, and the family who came with him A hot wife who looks 25 and has a Master's degree (on 12/31/99 she looked 23) My thirties to look back on Y'all My thirties have a 99.5% overlap with this past decade, and I have a week left of them. And I have to say, my forties are going to have a lot to live up to. posted by M. Giant 6:04 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Happy almost birthday! Just think of all the new milestones you'll have with M.Edium...braces, first gilfriend, the sex talk. Am I making you miss the aughts even more?
By I think everyone should make a list like this. I don't think it would turn out too well for me, but I'm hoping this decade will be better. :D:D Happy New Year, and Happy Birthday!
By The forties (at least for me) were better than my 30s. I wish the same for you.
By Wednesday, January 06, 2010 Snow Ruin Perhaps unsurprisingly, the thing that resonated with me the most in Where the Wild Things Are was the whole snow fort bit. Despite living in Minnesota, I don’t have a lot of history with building successful snow forts. You get maybe one or two good, sticky snows here all season that are good for building anything, and all the rest has the cohesion of a line of coke. When I was a kid, I could count on one frostbitten finger the number of snow forts I built that actually had a roof. On the plus side, it would have taken more than a teenager jumping on it to cave it in, but since that’s because the roof was made of our picnic table, I’m not sure it counts. But on Christmas Day, we got one of those snows. With the snowblower broken and our plans postponed, I figured I could get the mess cleared out of the driveway, have fun with M. Edium, and fulfill a pathetic old winter ambition of my own at the same time. The only thing was, I knew that with M. Edium’s attention span and tolerance for the cold (not to mention my own), I had a limited window to get this done. So making hundreds of ice bricks the size of ice cream buckets clearly wasn’t going to cut it. That’s why I went to the garage and found a different mold: a 35-gallon chest cooler. I thought this was genius. I could scoop shovelfuls of sticky snow into it with the shovel, stamp it down until it had the density of a dwarf star, and then dump it into place, leaving a neat, oblong, and substantial hunk of building material. Plus it gave me an excuse to explain to M. Edium that the reason they’re called igloos is because you make them with an Igloo cooler. There were a couple of things I underestimated, though. I underestimated the weight of 35 gallons of snow packed to the density of a dwarf star. Yes, I could lift half a ton of molded plastic and frozen water, but it was difficult to place it precisely at the same time. Plus when I was working on the second layer, the first layer was not always up to the task of supporting the weight. I underestimated how much snow it would take to fill the cooler that many times. I’d place it at the edge of untouched snow each time, but then still be walking several steps to fill it at the end. By which point I was already dreading schlepping it to the building site so I wasn’t in any hurry to move it. On the other hand, I overestimated M. Edium’s zeal for the project. I assigned him the task of filling in the chinks between the blocks, which coincidentally were about the width of a cooler wall. However, he was more interested in pursuing his own vision for the space, which seemed to include four to five hinged doors and a full living-room set, which he assembled from half-ton ice blocks that he pulled in off the walls. After a while, we had a loose, semi-rectangular assembly of large white blocks that looked as though it had been constructed by Jewel’s orthodontist. I thought we might take another crack at it the next day, but of course it was a lot colder and the snow that fell stuck together about as well as the coating on a powdered donut. How it looked was how it would stay. But even though it doesn’t have a roof or straight walls or much of a floor plan, I like to think of it as having turned out kind of special. It almost looks like an old ruin, so that we can imagine snow-druids capering about in millennia past on this very spot. And when we drive past all the other snow forts in the neighborhood, finished neat and foursquare with their flags, turrets, and hundreds of ice bricks the size of ice cream buckets, I just dismiss them. They don’t have the history that ours does. posted by M. Giant 8:50 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
I made the mistake a few months ago of telling my six year old about the time my mom helped my sister and me build an igloo in our front yard, way back in the Dark Ages of the early 70s when I was young. It was absolutely the coolest thing my mother ever did in my entire childhood. It was a fantastic igloo, roof, entranceway and all, and then my mom would bring us picnic lunches to eat in it, ala the Eastman children's book Snow, which was one of our favorite books as kids (and which my kid now loves to read).
By Monday, January 04, 2010 Movies 4Q09 Part 2 Here's what I saw in the final sprint to the end of the year. Trash suggested I go see something on New Year's Eve, but her heart wasn't really in it. Plus I wanted to start a third new decade with my special person. And there wasn't anything I wanted to see anyway. The Road Hmm, a scraggly, bearded Viggo Mortenson shepherds a small person who represents the only faint hope for the future through a gray, blighted landscape populated with flesh-eating monsters. Tempting to dismiss this as Lord of the Rings: Just Kill Yourself Already. Yes, The Man does do some pretty fucked-up shit to and around and in front of The Boy, but one hopes that one would be as good a father in similar circumstances. There's a lot of stuff they have to go through that really puts that morning we were out of milk into perspective. Pirate Radio I saw this with Chao, a former metal radio DJ who enjoyed seeing all the equipment he used to use. Considering this movie is set in 1966 (and a day or two of 1967), that should tell you something about the radio station where he worked. Funny thing, while watching this I couldn't stop thinking about Love Actually, and I didn’t think it was just because Bill Nighy was in both. It wasn't until later that I learned that both movies were made by the same writer/director. Which would explain why I spent a lot of this movie asking myself, And the point of all this is…? Up in the Air Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is broken in some fundamental way. I’m not just talking about his fear of commitment, which is common enough, or his soul-scorching job, which we've all had at one point or another (I once worked for Ticketmaster, so I win). I’m talking about the fact that he enjoys business travel, to the point where it, in and of itself, is the reason for his existence. I didn't even like it all that much when I did it for a job I loved. That said, I do appreciate how quickly and efficiently the movie deals with the worst part of air travel. Right at the beginning, a series of rapid cuts demonstrates how Ryan has a system for getting through the metal detectors. Which is good, because otherwise you'd be sitting through the whole movie thinking,What is wrong with this guy when flying sucks so much? But getting this major roadblock out of the way lets us settle into the story without worrying about other minor obstacles he must have, like where he gets his laundry and dry cleaning done. And hopefully, a whole generation of filmgoers will learn from his example in dealing with airport security: pack light, wear slip-on shoes, and bring an editing crew. I did appreciate the number of clichés that were dodged, though. For instance, I absolutely knew, upon reading in the press that Ryan's shooting for ten million miles, that he would end up walking away from that goal (he actually ends up walking away from an entirely different goal). And he goes through a lot of changes yet seems to end up largely where he was before. So his character doesn't have an arc so much as a circle. But I liked it. Not as much as American Airlines and Hertz probably did, but I liked it. Sherlock Holmes It's kind of embarrassing how many Sherlock Holmes stories I know that aren't by Conan Doyle. Many more than the original mysteries, that's for certain. So I'm really not in a position to address this movie's fidelity to the source material. I will simply rank it highly, somewhere between Laurie R. King's Holmes & Russell series and Without a Clue. And of course I'm a sucker for RDJ. Apparently I'll see him in anything, as long as it's not The Soloist. And now, for no other reason than to offend you and start arguments (#18), here is my ranking of the 25 films I saw in the theaters in 2009, from best to worst. Keep in mind that this is all highly subjective, and takes into account everything from my own expectations going in (#19, #22) to the resources available to the filmmakers (#4, #10), to the use of 3D (#3, #15, #25), to whether I was able to physically withstand it (#24, and I wasn't). It does not, however, include my moviegoing companions, which in every instance were nothing less than exemplary. Aside from #1, #4, #8, #10, #11, and #13, which I saw alone. 1. Inglourious Basterds 2. Star Trek 3. Up 4. District 9 5. Up in the Air 6. The Wrestler 7. Coraline 8. The Road 9. Where the Wild Things Are 10. Paranormal Activity 11. Sherlock Holmes 12. Doubt 13. Zombieland 14. State of Play 15. Monsters vs. Aliens 16. Watchmen 17. Quantum of Solace 18. Drag Me to Hell 19. Year One 20. Pirate Radio 21. Yes Man 22. Public Enemies 23. Observe and Report 24. Audition 25. The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy Since I got a lot of movie passes for Christmas this year, expect a similar showing in 2010. But I'll try not to go so heavy on the Oscar-bait this time. posted by M. Giant 2:03 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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