Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
|
|
|
M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
|
|
Friday, July 30, 2010 Road Trip Day 3: Boo-Boo in Memphis Day 1 Day 2 In other news of unprepared-for largesse, the ice we bought back in Minnesota was largely still ice. Back in Nevada, I told Trash to get two new bags before I looked in the cooler; we only had room for one. The week after Christmas has nothing on how weird you feel when returning a bag of ice. And even driving through a day where the digital thermometer in the mirror keeps threatening to top 95 degrees, the ice still holds up. Which is good, because for some reason it's in the cooler that doesn't have a drain. The drive to our next destination begins with a winding, scenic path through the Ozarks, where you have to slow down to 45 every ten miles or so because you're going through a "town." Which is fine, because we get time to look at a lot of natural beauty amid the hairpins and switchbacks. This all ends rather abruptly as we come around a corner and find ourselves suddenly hundreds of feet above a vast river flowing below. Yes, there's a bridge under us as well, but we're from Minneapolis, so the question of whether this bridge is going to hold is not entirely academic. After that it's just straight lines and Wal-Marts as we cut down across the northeast corner of Arkansas (the first time in this state for both M. Edium and myself), one of which becomes our lunch vendor in the form of a ten-dollar bucket of chicken and fries. That healthy food in the 30-gallon bin in the truck bed can wait. * * * Although we're not traveling in an RV, we are going to be spending a majority of nights in RV parks. As it turns out, that's where you find a lot of your camping cabins. This came as something of a surprise. For instance, our first view of the Jellystone™ Park where we were staying outside of Memphis (actually Horn Lake, Mississippi, a new state for all three of us, as we discovered that Memphis's suburbs extend into the next state down) was that of a sea of RVs, stretching out as far as the eye could see, like a giant pod of beached white whales. It was a somewhat alarming sight. But this cabin turned out to be the best one of the trip. Parked on jacks like a mobile home, the inside turned out to have a full kitchen, a master bedroom, central air (a godsend, given that dropping down into this bottom tier of states was apparently all it took to push the outside temp to 98) and a loft over the front door where M. Edium was thrilled that he'd get to sleep. It made up for the fact that he didn't get to travel in an RV where he could sleep above the driver's seat. As if he would have slept up there on the road anyway. Kid never even nodded off during any proper traveling, the whole damn trip. This was the site of my first big parental fail of the trip. M. Edium and I were at the pool while Trash was grading papers in the cabin. Suddenly a tractor pulled up nearby, and kids started gravitating to it. Apparently it was some kind of hayride. M. Edium and I also boarded, but a moment later I realized I'd lost my phone somewhere. We had to get off. We missed the ride. And his one chance to meet Yogi Bear. Recriminations ensued, even though five-year-olds today don't know who the fuck Yogi Bear is anyway. Damn, Jellystone, update your shit already! * * * The evening was spent in a whirlwind tour of Memphis, with brief photo-ops outside the gates of Graceland, the windows of Sun Studios, and the Civil Rights Museum (actually the motel where Dr. King was shot, although we didn't realize that until we looked at it and recognized it from the photos). We ate dinner from a deli counter in the back of a convenience store and headed back to the cabin for the night. Which passed slowly, because I had trouble sleeping. I was more upset about making him miss Yogi Bear than I realized. The fact that the "ride" turned out to be about three minutes long helped not at all. posted by M. Giant 9:12 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, July 26, 2010 M. Ovie Reviews: Salt When Trash is interested in a new movie, she often sends me instead of going herself. She's been wanting me to see Salt ever since she saw the trailer online months ago. And after spending Sunday replacing another window in our house and getting overheated and dehydrated, I really wanted an ICEE. I will say that the ICEE was very good. Alas, Salt is crap. It's somewhat indicative of what a collection of missed opportunities it is that the Vice President is named Oates and yet the POTUS is not named Hall, but that's only part of what goes wrong. It's certainly not the fault of the three leads, who labor heroically but vainly. Angelina Jolie certainly commits to the action-star bit, and Chiwetel Ejiofor's fake American accent is quite convincing (although he looks so dorky when running that I think the people lobbying for him to be Bond are going to have to regroup big time), and Liev Schreiber is his usual understated self. And I can't argue with most of the fight scenes, because it's not a good idea to argue with fight scenes in general. Unfortunately it's all in the service of a story that exists simply to support twists and reversals and surprises, and that not very well. At various points, characters are always either doing stuff they wouldn't do if they really knew stuff they're supposed to know early on, or doing stuff they would only do if they knew stuff they don't know until later. I heard someone on the radio say that this movie is like watching every episode of 24 at once, and he wasn't far off. But 24 at least has a center, and while we may not always agree with Jack Bauer's motivations or methods, we can at least understand them. Whereas with Evelyn Salt, how are we to root for or even against a protagonist when we don't get what she's doing or why she's doing it? I mean, yes, we get that she wants to save her husband, but why? He's ugly and creepy and he plays with spiders. Sure, he saves her from a North Korean prison in the first scene, but marrying him doesn't seem like that much of a step up. Seems like a year of being his wife should more than discharge her obligation to him. I'm disappointed in director Philip Noyce, who seems to have descended into self-parody with all the scenes of Very Serious People typing on keyboards and talking on telephones and swiping key cards and shit while Triple-Agent Barbie runs around doing her thing. There is a pretty good chase scene at the beginning, which is an effective demonstration of how hard it can be to get away from trained, motivated law enforcement people who really want to catch you. But since it later develops that it's much easier to do other things, like, say, get into one of the most secure spots in the world, it's kind of a wash. After I got home, I told Trash about the movie. She's the opposite of me where spoilers are concerned. In fact, she not only wants to know what happens in a movie before she sees it, she often wants to know what happens so she doesn't have to see it. As I was recounting all of the increasingly ridiculous events in Salt, she became increasingly skeptical. "That didn't happen," she kept saying. That, and she kept asking about the stuff that really interests her about Angelina Jolie, namely all of her kids. So in the middle of telling Trash about one scene or another where Salt lays waste to her pursuers while modeling a different chic look, I had to keep remembering to add in stuff like, "and then she goes and picks up all of her kids and they go have pizza and ice cream." I hope the DVD includes those deleted scenes or she's going to be disappointed. Not as disappointed as I was, though. My eyes rolled at the same time as the credits. And my ICEE cup was empty. posted by M. Giant 7:30 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:nice post...
By I’m hoping that we’ll end up with a slew of prototyped ideas and a bunch of happy people. I’m sure there’ll be a lot more hard work until we can turn those embryonic proofs of concept into living
By Friday, July 23, 2010 Road Trip Day 2: Missouri Loves Company Day 1 Sarah has already made Nevada, Missouri famous to DHAK readers as The Town That Smelled Like Poo. Which I guess makes it a little ironic that it's kind of my ancestral home. My dad was born and raised in that area of southwestern Missouri, and my grandma still lives there. The last time the three of us went to her house was eight days short of five years ago, when M. Edium couldn't speak at all, and motivated across her carpet only by holding over my hands, which I had to walk in a stoop to keep within his reach. This time he uses her carpet to put together a new Star Wars Lego set in about thirty seconds flat. We've now got pictures of him in her lap representing a half-decade of before-and-after. He's changed a lot more than she has. My grandma's refrigerator is covered in postcards from all over the world, from her whole extended family. Some of them are from us, though not as many as I thought. It's a little unnerving to peel back one corner of a postcard you could have swore you sent ten years ago and see someone else's handwriting back there. I just have to assume that she has to winnow out multiple postcards that come from the same destination. Why put up everything from New Orleans in favor of St. Petersburg and Sydney? You don't, is why. * * * Tonight's our first night in a camp-cabin on this trip. We stayed in one for our last night in the Black Hills last fall, so we know what to expect. Or so we think. We are stunned at what we find. A state park camp cabin is a Spartan structure, essentially a tent made of logs with a bunk bed, an overhead light, a door, and a couple of windows, one of which may or may not have a toaster-sized air conditioner wedged into it. An RV park cabin, as it turns out, is not that way at all. We basically packed our entire camp kitchen in the back of the pickup -- everything from dishes and utensils to the stove and oven (yes, we have a camp oven). This was based on the assumption that everything we'd need to prepare meals would be found not in our cabins. So one feels a bit foolish when one walks into a cabin and discovers cabinets stocked with dishes and utensils, a double sink, a mini-refrigerator, a microwave, and freaking DirecTV. We're overpackers as it is, but this was a bit ridiculous. We could only hope that places further down the road were a lot more primitive, or else after getting home and unpacking the truck, we'd have to rinse out cobwebs as well. Architecturally, the cabins were in the style of old "railroad" apartments, with the kitchen/living room just inside the front door, followed by the kid's room with the bunk bed (double-sized on the bottom, which was both a nice touch and made me think of Sir Mix-A-Lot), through which you walked (past the cruise-ship-bathroom-sized bathroom) to get to the "master suite," all furnished with stuff from thrift stores and auctions. Imagine my surprise upon learning they'd just been built the year before. This was the first time on this trip we cooked for ourselves, and we did it up right: hot dogs boiled in a pan on the hotplate. I maybe could have gotten something out of the food bin in the back of the pickup, but at this point it was still too heavy to move. posted by M. Giant 8:17 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Do you mind my asking where these cabins were? We live in KC and are always looking for weekend places to stay that are only a few hours drive.
By These were in the Ozarks Mountains RV Park in Willow Springs, MO.
By Monday, July 19, 2010 M. Ovie Reiew: Inception Christopher Nolan was exhausted when I saw him in person years ago. It was late morning, Pacific Time, but he'd just flown in from London and was so jetlagged he looked hung over. During the symposium, he kept rubbing his face while one of his fellow screenwriters whined about all the problems that went along with writing the biographical script that he'd be winning the Oscar for a few weeks later. Nolan looked like he needed some sleep. This, of course, was just a cheap way to start the review by saying I once saw Christopher Nolan in person, and since I don't really have a transition from here, I'll just start over. It's often said -- including in Inception itself -- that we humans only use a small percentage of our brains. When seeing most summer blockbusters, that percentage gets even smaller. Not the case with Inception. You need to pay attention, or you're screwed. Fortunately it meets you more than halfway by holding your attention, so that makes your job easier. This almost seems like a premature return for Leo given how recently he was in Shutter Island, especially given the number of similarities between his characters in these two films. Both Teddy Daniels and Dom Cobb have tragic marriages, experiences that call their personal realities into question, distracting facial hair, and dumb names. Plus Leo persists in his stubborn inability to stay dry in a movie. But at least he drops the accent here, so it's all good. But as for the movie itself, I don't think I'm spoiling anything in referring to the fact that a lot of it takes place in various dream landscapes. Now, obviously the characters experience their dreams differently from the ways I generally experience mine. For instance, they experience them together, which I have not as yet done. The dreams in the movie also have unusually stable architecture and object (not to mention character) permanence, and unlike me, the characters can run, yell, and fight when threatened in them (most of them very well). Also, nobody ever finds themselves in a class they've been forgetting to go to all semester or appears in public in any stage of undress. In fact, this movie's interpretation of one of the most frequent recurring motifs in my dreams -- what I call the "Oh, now I have to squeeze myself through this ridiculously tiny opening in a public space for no reason, what the fuck is this doing here it's a fire hazard" situation -- appears when the character experiencing it is awake. But it makes up for all this with a lot of other clever observations about dreams. Like how you never remember the beginning of a dream, or how the sensation of falling is the quickest way to wake up, or the way it's raining in one character's dream because he has to pee. And I love the concept of the dream-within-a-dream. Anyone who's ever gotten up in the morning, gotten dressed, eaten breakfast, and then gotten yelled at because they're still asleep knows what that's about. This movie takes that idea and runs with it, brilliantly. And of course the idea that you dream so much faster than you live -- and that this extends exponentially to deeper layers of the dream, so a whole dream about a dream about a dream can take place in a matter of seconds. And then when they have to synchronize the endings on the fly because everything's going wrong, it's like doing astrophysics in your sleep, almost like Apollo 13, and not just because there's a fair chunk that takes place in zero gravity. Don't get me wrong: I don't buy 90 percent of what happens in this movie for an instant. But it establishes its internal logic and sticks to it, while playing with it in clever ways that keep you not only guessing, but totally engaged and invested. And the ending? It's controversial, I know, but then I think that to a certain extent, that's just Nolan being Nolan. Think back to Memento, after all. And if that last shot upsets you that much, just try to remember it going the other way. Maybe eventually you can convince yourself that you dreamed the real ending. As for my own dream situation, I had to catch this at an 11:00 p.m. showing, and its 2½-hour runtime meant I was up until 2:30, mulling it all over. And then Trash and I were taking it in turns to travel to Duluth in Luke Skywalker's landspeeder so we could both attend an overnight farewell party in honor of our longtime personal friend Angelina Jolie, but that's neither here nor there. posted by M. Giant 8:25 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:
Holy crap, I had the bad dream you describe at the end of paragraph five for the first time, just three nights ago.
By
Wow, I thought I was the only one who had the "skipped class all semester" dream. Although, in my defense, it's usually because the campus keeps changing and I can't FIND it. And the squeezing through a tight space ... this recurring thing with a house that's never the same but the ridiculous path I have to take to get through it is.
By The only problem I had with the movie was that they made such a big deal about how the feeling of falling woke people up from dreams. However, then it was always the impact that woke them up.
By Friday, July 16, 2010 Road Trip Day 1: Bethany (Getting Missouri?) The last hour or two before we leave on a long trip is always crazy and hectic. So two weeks in advance, I sat down and started making to-do lists, to-pack lists, and lists of which lists to pack (which is normally what Trash does, and I'm happy to leave it to her, because it turns out that job sucks). I thought if I could simply prepare compulsively enough, we'd leave the house without that rushed, panicked sense of come-on-let's-go-what-are-we-forgetting-oh-screw-it-let's-just-get-out-of-here. It turns out that no matter how complete this list is, and how efficiently divided between tasks to do ASAP, and then to do the last week, the day before departure, the night before departure, and then the last day, the last hour, and the last second, the hecticness simply cannot be processed out. In hindsight, I think the main factor behind that is fitting everything in. Like, the list of stuff that went in the back seat of the pickup was more than I could fit in there, at least with any degree of organization, unless one of the things we left out was M. Edium. And he would have protested strenuously. And there's the question of fitting everything in time-wise. There are a lot of tasks you can't really do until one minute before you leave. The problem is that it takes an hour to do them all. This results in, you guessed it, crazy hecticness. But even though I didn't engineer a smooth departure, I did accomplish one thing: a greater appreciation for one of the parts of the process I normally leave to Trash. I think we'll go back to that for next time. As for Trash's rush to get on the road ASAP, though -- as in, an hour earlier than originally planned -- it turned out she was right. We were about 40 miles north of the Iowa state line when traffic on the freeway just…stopped. And if you know that part of Minnesota, you know that exits aren't all that close together down there. You can go 20 minutes at the speed limit without ever having a chance to get off the interstate. It gets significantly longer if you're going slower, like zero miles per hour. Eventually things got moving again to the speed of a slow walk, and after about ten minutes of that we got to a place where I could jump the median and backtrack to the previous exit. The great thing about a GPS is not just how you can find your way to a place; it's how you can find another way to a place when the main way is backed up like an airplane toilet on a transatlantic flight full of competitive eaters. So I guess once we factored in the traffic jam and the detour, it was more like we'd left on time anyway. It's like she knew. Anyway, the worst part of any road trip is the first part, where you're on roads you've been on millions of times before and you're not seeing anything new. The second worst part is when you're on roads you've never been on before and not sure where you're going. That's when you figure out how to get the big picture from a GPS screen that's the size of a credit card. * * * That wasn't the longest delay on our drive into Iowa, though. The longest delay was actually self-inflicted. Near Story City, IA, which is about 45 minutes north of Des Moines, M. Edium announced that he was hungry. I didn't see how this could be possible, since we'd all picnicked on giant sandwiches in the truck about an hour before. Obviously Trash and I were trying to avoid McDonald's as much as possible on this trip, but a) we were trying to get to Trash's grandma's house some kind of meaningful interval before some version of M. Edium's bedtime and b) okay, you just try and get him to not notice the Golden Arches. I suggested the adjacent Happy Chef. Trash objected, "We don't have time." I don't know why I didn't point out the obvious, which is that the Story City McDonald's is the slowest McDonald's in the world. We've been through the drive-thru a few times on previous trips to Des Moines, and it never fails to add a half hour to the travel time. This time we saw the line of cars stretching back from the menu board, and decided to go in, because we thought it would be "quicker." And then M. Edium and I waited about a half hour for Trash to come back from the counter with our food. I guess the people at the Story City McDonald's like to make sure nobody leaves without a story. * * * On the way to Trash's grandma's house, we marveled over one of the oddities of Iowa geography: everything is at least an hour away from everything else. The plan had been to spend the night in Osceola, which looks close to Grandma's house on the map, but as the last hour of watery daylight is fading away in the rearview mirror, and you're realizing you're going to have to come back here after the visit, you discover something about this plan: it is stupid. So while Trash visited with her relatives, I scrolled through hotels on the GPS looking for one that was on the way to where we were headed the following day. I've driven through Bethany, Missouri more times than I can count, and the only sight I can recall dates back before the freeway went through there: a blinking yellow light over an intersection. It's a little more built up now, so we were able to locate a hotel with an available room. And we only got there two hours after M. Edium's normal bedtime. It was while I was retrieving the night's necessities from the truck (always a multi-trip process, no matter what) that I had my first moment of panic: the suitcase holding all of M. Edium's clothes wasn't in the truck. While my wife and child waited upstairs with increasing puzzlement, not to say impatience, I ransacked the passenger space Trash had so ingeniously organized. No mini-suitcase. What now? Sure, I could see a Wal-Mart from the hotel parking lot, but I didn't want to have to go in and tell them M. Edium was going to have to sleep in his clothes the first night and we'd have to spend the next morning shopping for his all-new travel wardrobe. But then, see above regarding everything not fitting in the backseat. Turns out I'd put his suitcase in the truck bed. So disaster averted, and Trash never knew how close I'd come to making a rookie foul-up on the very first day. Until now, that is. posted by M. Giant 7:58 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, July 14, 2010 M. Ovie Review: Predators OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WHAT'S HAPPENING I'M ABOUT TO DIE OH MY GOD. So that's pretty much the opening scene of Predators, so let's get on with the review. Here's something you need to know about me. I've visited the location where much of Predator was filmed, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. When my state elected a new governor in 1998, I voted for the guy who was famous for saying, "I ain't got time to bleed." But -- and here's where it gets weird -- I have never seen Predator. Never saw Predator II, never saw Alien vs. Predator, never saw Alien Predator. I did see Pretty in Pink, which came out at about the same time and whose title begins with the same few letters, but even that wasn't until years later. (Maybe that should be my hook for these reviews: what I lack in insight I make up for with utter ignorance of the source material.) So I went into this movie knowing nothing about it, other than the hero was the very unlikely Adrien Brody and that sometime in the shadows of the past there had been a movie called Predator which everyone but me had seen. That's how I would advise seeing this, because our motley crew of mostly heavily armed randoms has no idea what's going on either, and this way I didn't have to sit around waiting for them to figure out what I already knew. Although if you've already seen Predator, it's probably too late for you to do anything about that. As usual, I'm not going to spoil anything about the plot, but that still leaves plenty to talk about. Like, whose idea was it to cast Adrien Brody of all people as the lead bad-ass? I do have to give him credit for bulking up, but he still doesn't have the face of an action hero. Until exercise physiologists figure out how to turn that sad poet's face of his into a trapezoid of blank muscle, he's just going to look like someone stuck Pete Townshend's head on Wolverine's body and gave him a big plastic camouflaged gun. (Speaking of which, the weapons in this movie were totally distracting. Like, why does that gun seem to have a camcorder attached to the top of it? Wouldn't you get tired schlepping a ginormous Gatling gun around the jungle? How much would it suck to be the one guy dressed and armed for collecting protection money from local business owners?) The fight scenes, honestly, weren't all that special. Even if I could tell the different kinds of predators apart, which I couldn't. Lots of shooting and hacking and green fluorescent blood everywhere. Just as well I don't care that much about fight scenes anyway. What I found more interesting -- and a bit surprising -- was what this movie has to say regarding questions of survival vs. morality, and whether one's any good without the other. Although the dialogue is admirably spare (save for one character who's hypocritically chatty), Brody and the chick from I Am Legend manage to find time for some pretty heavy conversations. Maybe that's why they cast The Pianist -- he looks like a guy who actually could quote Hemingway. But as we learn over the course of the film, not all predators are monsters, and not all monsters are predators, whereas some humans are and some aren't and some oh fuck it let's just get to the killing and explosions already. But as for whether you should see it, that's up to you. Chao said that aside from the setting, this was pretty much exactly like the first one, so you might not be missing much if you skip it. As I speculated afterwards, maybe this was just an excuse for Robert Rodriguez to be involved in remaking one of his favorite old movies. And maybe to get back at Danny Trejo for something, because damn. posted by M. Giant 8:09 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:I tell you this men, maybe that movie is gonna be one of the worst film in cinematographic history, but with a little help from magic in Hollywood maybe can rescue a little of the money.
By Monday, July 12, 2010 M. Ovie Reviews: Knight and Day I was surprised by Knight and Day. I went in expecting a big, dumb movie, and it certainly is that. But overall, I liked it more than I expected to. There's a great deal that doesn't make any sense, but the action sequences move fast enough that you don't have time to think about them. Which is good because a lot of the action sequences don't make sense either. What I didn't expect was that the chick would be the lead. It's really her story and her arc, even if most of it is initiated and catalyzed by the dude. Who in turn isn't so much a character as an over-the-top action hero with unlimited skills. "Who are you?" she keeps asking him. Exactly. Tom Cruise is game, and good for him, but he's miscast. Yes, it's kind of witty to put him in a role where he's essentially a self-parodic version of fantasy masculinity, but I think they could have taken it even farther with a different actor. I don't know that actor's name, but you probably know who his face, and his voice, and even his smell. With that actor, I think Knight and Day might have gone something like this: [And yes, I normally try to keep these spoiler-free, but that wouldn't really work here with what I'm about to do. You've been warned.] "Hello, June (Cameron Diaz). Fantastic to meet you. Do you want a man who wears sunglasses in an airport and keeps bumping into you? Of course not, that's the obnoxious behavior of a man who smells like a lady. You want a man who can banter winningly with you on a nearly-empty plane without having to shout over the engine noise, and then kill all your pesky fellow flyers with his bare hands. The kind of man who can then land the plane singlehandedly in a cornfield, and give you invaluable advice which you will later ignore at your peril, but who for now will send you into a literal swoon as he sweeps you into his arms -- arms that smell like a man. A man and spilled jet fuel. "A man who will arrange for you to wake up securely in your own bed the next morning, a man who'll leave a perfectly turned omelet for you in your kitchen, a man who will save you from yourself even when you ignore his manly advice and get into that car with that man from Garden State who smells like a lady. Question not, June, why the man you met last night left you at his mercy in the first place, because if he had not done so, there would be no reason for him to ride to your rescue on a motorcycle from which he will SWAN DIVE in midair to the roof of your car and engage in an heroic gunfight with your captors, while still smelling like your perfect omelet. "Perhaps, June, this is all too much for you. What you don't yet know is that you have embarked on a Joseph Campbell-style 'hero's journey,' which is what happens when some anonymous nobody who smells like a lady is reluctantly plucked from his humdrum life and becomes a man. A man who survives adventures, faces challenges, who is tested, who discovers his own unique skills, becomes powerful, and able to bestow boons on his friends with his bare hands. In short, the man you could smell like, although in this case, the man is a lady, namely you, so continuing to smell like a lady is perfectly acceptable. It may also be why your sister ends up getting so thoroughly screwed. "Yes, it's true that the hero's journey also usually includes meeting a diverse cast of friends, but you've already met a man who can shepherd you safely through a gunfight, rescue both of you from your ensuing captivity, then take you skydiving to his own private island where he will bring you fish directly from the ocean with his bare hands. And that, June, smells to me like all the friends you need. Time for you to be unconscious again. "Perhaps later you will find yourself doubting this new man, but that is all part of his plan to keep you safe. That's not a rat you smell, but the smell of a man. "Look at yourself, June. Now look at me. Now back at yourself. Now back at me. We're now more alike than you realize. By now you are able to take out an entire motorcade of pursuing hit men while sitting backwards on the handlebars of a speeding motorcycle driven by me, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. Also, it's during the running of the bulls. "Now watch in amazement as your new man, who has been spending the entire movie holding onto that thing everyone wants, uses that same thing to destroy his nemesis. Anything is possible, especially in the third act, when your man pulls the ultimate reversal and you rescue him. By which I mean me. Congratulations, June. Your journey is complete, and now that we're on the lam you'll probably want to change your last name to Day so the title of this movie will make some kind of sense. I'm wearing shorts." (Credits roll over the whistling of a jaunty tune) posted by M. Giant 8:07 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:I won't see anything with Tom in it, but I would see that movie.
By Wednesday, July 07, 2010 Overpacked Trash and I have done enough road trips of sufficiently diverse duration and purpose that we've gotten pretty good at packing for all of them. The food part, however, remains the most elusive challenge. Before M. Edium, for instance, preparations for the three-hour drive to Iowa evolved from making a special trip to the grocery store to make sure we had food in the car, to simply making sure we had food in the cats' bowls. Once, in the early nineties, we filled a cooler with lunches and snacks for a two-week, multistate journey. Unfortunately, we failed to take into account the fact that the first week and a half of that would be spent with family members who would insist on feeding us. So by the time we were finally on our own in Wyoming, we couldn't really look forward to eating the baloney sandwiches we had packed seven states ago. But back then, what choice did we have? This was before the days of GPS, which meant the only grocery stores in the United States were the ones in our area. Which must have been inconvenient for the rest of the country, but we never gave it much thought until we left town. We were a little smarter this time; in addition to our plan to use the GPS to the locate the nearest supermarket at a moment's notice, allowing us to fry our eggs within three miles of where we bought them, most of the food we brought along on this trip was non-perishable. Now, in retrospect, maybe we didn't need to fill a 30-gallon bin. In our defense, we thought that would save us having to do much shopping or eating out on the road, but it pretty much ended up meaning we came home with 28 gallons of food to put back away. Sure, you feel pretty virtuous and forward-thinking when you're raiding your own pantry shelves for the makings of twelve days' worth of fully balanced meals that can be prepared on the tailgate of a borrowed extended-cab pickup, but then you find yourself at the gas station in a different time zone and the mini-donuts are right there. So maybe we were guilty of overpacking in that department. But I'm generally of the mind that when deciding whether or not to pack something, it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. We had plenty in the first category and nothing in the second (although the giant three-burner camp stove with its accompanying jug of jet fuel didn't get used for anything but to make a single pot of Kraft mac & cheese in Nashville), but the list of other stuff we didn't use at all might be informative: • M. Edium's Razor scooter • Our camping oven (no, that's not a typo) • A lot of our other camp-cooking gear • My folding barbecue grill • Any of our music CDs • Most of our sweatshirts • Most of our long pants • A dozen homemade chocolate-chip cookies (out of six dozen) • Either of the two migraine pills • Caladryl • Almost anything from the first aid kit • Trash's emergency bee-sting kit • The spare tire • The axe You know, as you go down that list, the stuff we didn't use starts to tell the story of a pretty successful trip. Notice I said "starts." I plan to wring entries out of this vacation to last me until the end of the year. posted by M. Giant 8:33 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, July 05, 2010 XM-I Getting on Your Nerves Yet? Trash and I have recently discovered the fun of satellite radio. It's not that we were just now exposed to it; we just didn't get how to properly use it until now. My parents had it in their pickup when they lent it to us a few years ago around Christmastime (we have since gotten better at cutting back on present-buying), and Trash locked it on the holiday songs channel. Which turned out to be less than satisfactory for both of us, because she didn't want to hear so many obscure Christmas songs and I wanted to hear no Christmas songs. When I went to L.A. a couple of years ago, it was in my rental car. I liked it at first, because I had plenty of time to drive around before my meeting. But then it wasn't long before I realized that at any given moment, I was probably missing several hundred of my favorite songs on other channels. But on this road trip, it's been a godsend. For instance, we didn't know you could get NPR on it. See, what normally happens on long drives during the weekend is that we're in the car during Car Talk, and then somehow, right when Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me is supposed to come on, we leave that station's broadcast area and enter a different station's broadcast area. And of course that station is playing "Car Talk" all over again, and by the time it's over, we're there. Instead, this time we got to hear "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" in its entirety -- twice! Incidentally, this is also the first time I've ever heard all of the song "American Pie" on the radio without driving out of range before the end. We also discovered that there's a comedy channel that's fit to listen to when M. Edium is in the car, described as "clean comedy." This is, unsurprisingly, hit and miss. You hear some good Mitch Hedberg or Stephen Wright, but a lot of what passes for clean is, by necessity, old, short, or just not that funny. Although we did hear a pretty good half-minute of David Cross the other day. But Trash's favorite use for satellite radio is as a torture device. And the person she's torturing is me. I have to hand it to her, she knows what I don't like. The 70s on 7, for example, is what you might call a "target-rich environment." I think that station does it on purpose. They've even got a feature called the "Jukebox of Cheese," so they have to be aware of it. I can't even tell you all the awful tunes Trash has deliberately subjected me to in the last week and a half. But she can. In fact, she has been telling her Twitter feed. Which is protected, but I think the people being protected are y'all. I mean, it's bad enough that she's been inflicting earworms like "Baby I'm-a Want You" on her online friends without making them available for general consumption. I could give more examples, but I've learned to cultivate a zen-like calm. For the really bad songs, I can often outlast her. We've actually talked about getting it ourselves. There's not really a casual alternative station in the Twin Cities right now, unless you count the Current, and since they'll never again play that song you like that you heard them play once (or indeed play any other songs more than once), I don't. So maybe satellite radio is for us. And to be honest, it's better than what she used to do, which was to play me "Midnight at the Oasis" on her cell phone. Brrr. posted by M. Giant 8:35 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Now you're just reminding me of the horrible morning I got in my car expecting to hear Drive 105 and was subjected to the horror of Love 105 instead. I just get most of my NPR in podcast form these days and plug in the iPod.
By
I, for one, was enjoying Trash's Twitter feed on the various songs she'd found. Except for that one day when she denigrated the ever-awesome A-ha. (Guess that was during the 80s on 8 phase...)
By We're big fans of XM particularly since terrestrial radio in Baltimore sucks some pretty awful monkey butt, but it does seem that the playlists are not as "deep" as they used to be.
By Thursday, July 01, 2010 Performance Anxiety For some time now, M. Edium has displayed one of the classic traits of a perfectionist: a reluctance to do anything at all. This manifested at about the time he changed schools. Montessori is all about learning by doing, or so I understand. So for a while we were worried that he wasn't learning anything. The only way a teacher could get him to do an activity was if he was sure he could do it perfectly. He didn't want anybody to see him messing up. So for a while there, we'd practice at home. Which is of course an ideal use of our tuition money -- that is, to have a place to go where he can show off all the stuff he's learning at home. But we knew he'd get over it, and we were right. Or I'm sure we will be at some point in the near future now that he's been at that school for a little over two years. This is not to say that he completely sits everything out. As one of his teachers informed us at the last parents' night, he can do everything, which is not the same as saying that he will do everything. In fact, another of his teachers tells us it's one of the worst cases of stage fright he's ever seen from one of the most capable kids. Even during show and tell, when he never fails to bring something to share, he doesn't so much "tell" as "whisper to Mr. N. so he can tell the class about it in his own voice." Even at his graduation, when it came time for him to come up and receive his diploma, he just wouldn't move when his name was called. The only person in history to boycott his own commencement. Trash and I are wondering how to help M. Edium get over it. The only thing he still won't do is read to the class. A few weeks ago, I went in one morning and sat with him while he read to the class for the first time. He had them at first, but it took so long to coax his voice above a shy whisper that by the time he was speaking more audibly -- and even that was a library voice at best -- it was hard for those still listening to hear. And then he conned me into reading a book. I do have to admit, it's kind of a tough room. But I think maybe I'm close to a solution: force him to perform in front of a large audience. I'll set up a laptop on the table and inform him that the webcam is livecasting to thousands of people. Then I'll make him read a story, do some gymnastics, sew a button on a shirt, and perform some extemporaneous standup comedy no matter how much he cries. Of course I don't actually know how to do a livecast, or if such a thing even exists. Plus none of our laptops have webcams. But he doesn't know that. All I need from you is to watch this space for when I'm going to make him do it. Then post your feedback in the comments as though you really saw it happen. Please be supportive, but honest. It's the only way he's going to learn. posted by M. Giant 9:37 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Hey, just a quick thought: you might look around to see if there are any of those kids-reading-to-dogs programs in your area, many of which are sponsored by local libraries (you can also check the Delta Society's website, which I think has links to regional programs.) My dog is in training right now to be able to do that someday, and the program itself is awesome: for whatever reason, kids often find dogs to be a good, nonjudgmental audience for reading out loud, and the programs begin with just kid and dog and gradually work up to kid/dog/group of kids, kid/dog/mixed group of kids and adults. The programs are phenomenally successful at building the confidence of timid readers.
By I'm a former child perfectionist, now adult perfectionist, with many perfectionist nieces and nephews. You may already be doing this, but I've found that praising the kids for TRYING rather than ACHIEVING has gone a long way to getting them over their inertia. One of my cousins switched to recognizing honest, hard-fought attempts as well as successes, and we're finding that her son is much more willing to try in situations where it's not 150% certain that he'll succeed. I LOVE what Kelsey's suggested -- what a brilliant idea!
By Another effective drug treatment is Buspirone which is prescribed in chronic cases. All these drugs are mainly short-term treatment to relieve the symptoms of generalized anxiety disorders.
By 
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
