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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Wednesday, September 29, 2010 Lucky 13 Trash and I just looked this weekend at the credit card statement from the period when we were on our road trip, and it tells the story of our journey a lot more efficiently than I’ve been doing. It starts with a fill-up at home, then goes on to list hotels, campgrounds, Sonics, Waffle Houses, and tourist attractions, regularly punctuated by gas stations whose cities look like the tour t-shirt of a rock band that had to hit twenty cities in a week and a half but was afraid to fly. The billing period ends on the day after we got back, and that day shows only two entries. One is for the car wash where I took the truck before driving it back to my parents' house, with 2,500 more miles on it than when we started. The other is for PetSmart. When M. Edium and I were having lunch with my folks, he informed them that from there, we were going straight to the pet store and he was going to get a turtle. His mom and dad had said he could. Which, in his defense, we had. Let me emphasize that we do not simply bend to his every whim. Only when he shows us that he's serious about wanting something and it isn't a short-term thing, when he proves that he wants to be responsible for it, do we give in. In this case, he had to prove his seriousness by requesting multiple trips to the pet store to visit some animals before buying any of them. He also had to give plenty of love to his existing pets, to show he wouldn't forget about them. He'd been agitating for a new pet for months, in the most mature and reasonable ways available to a five-year-old. Which is not to say he doesn't have whims. Sure he whims. This wasn't a whim. Which is why he now has a new pet but not a surfboard. Plus we left his favorite snugglies in a hotel in Indiana, so that gives him a lot of leverage. Even the fact that they arrived at our house in a FedEx box that morning before he woke up only cuts so much ice.  At the pet store, buying a turtle turns out to be a little intimidating. You need a tank, and you need this funky light, and you need this weird food, and of course you need this little slow-moving green dude who looks like a petrified Panini sandwich. All of it costs about half again what M. Edium has saved (you're damn right he's using his own money), and the whole thing is more than what he wants to take on, so he decides to look at hamsters instead. I fully support this decision, because hamsters -- especially the dwarf hamsters that have caught his eye -- are cheaper, lower maintenance, and have more affordable homes that will actually fit on his dresser. Better yet, unlike a turtle, they're not going to outlive his interest in them. Or indeed M. Edium himself. The sales person advises against M. Edium's first choice on the grounds that they're speedy little critters, and when she explains that the Winter White is not only less likely to escape but also turns white in the winter, M. Edium is sold. I have to admit, I kind of want to see that myself. So maybe it wasn't the best idea to bring home a pet that's several links on the food chain below the pets we already had. But we immediately implemented ironclad safety procedures. The hamster is almost always in his cage, where the cats can't get at him. We open the cage door only when M. Edium's bedroom door is closed and the cats are on the other side. When the hamster has to come out of his cage for its weekly cleaning, it's in the bathroom, again with the door closed and a towel stuffed in the gap, and he stays in the cardboard box we drove him home in. I don't even let the cats chase the hamster when he's in his exercise ball, which was 93.6% of the reason I agreed to getting a hamster in the first place. But I'm happy to report two things. One is that M. Edium's hamster wish wasn't a passing whim. The other is that almost three months after coming home, the hamster is still alive. Meet Bucky. 
posted by M. Giant
7:04 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
although getting them a ball and watching them tease the cats is always a good past time. If you dont have a timid hamster.
By Let me second that. My brother and sister-in-law got a little black dwarf hamster that used to love to run the edges of the rooms in his exercise ball, tormenting both the cat and the dog! He seemed to realize that they couldn't get to him, and he would approach them if they didn't give chase!
By Monday, September 27, 2010 Road Trip Day 12: Coming Home M. Edium can't decide what he wants to do. On the one hand, he wants to go home today and doesn't want to spend another day traveling. On the other hand, he wants us to drive back to Indiana and get his plush family. And we alleged grownups can't decide either, at least not until I get the hotel's head of housekeeping on the phone. Which is turning out to be a major project in itself. And until I do, we can't even be sure that Cattie is with Comfortable Blanket, or if we lost it somewhere else along the way. Because we needed another thing we need to worry about right now. Finally I get her on the line, and she confirms that they have Comfortable Blanket, Cattie, Unusual Lizard, and Other Blue Guy. With them are Dinosaur and Owlie, a couple of friends he's picked up along the way. They are, respectively, a stuffed jellyfish and an inflatable wolverine (not really). And how do we know it's Other Blue Guy and not Blue Guy that we left behind? Because Blue Guy is here. Other Blue Guy is there. That's how it always works with those two. They have kind of a fucked-up dynamic. She also confirms that she's boxing them up and affixing the FedEx label with my credit card number on it, and the driver should be there to pick it up later today. There's nothing left for Trash and M. Edium and I to do but get the hell home. Even our longest drives on this trip have been fairly laid-back, with plenty of stops for gas and bathrooms and food and views and what have you, but today we're all exhausted and eager to get home. We leave Starved Rock at around 9:30. Soon we're on the once familiar corridor from Illinois to Madison, which is now lined with water parks and mini-golf where once there was nothing but Jim Anchower. We stop to pee near the Wisconsin Dells and get to the Twin Cities as fast as we can. A high, nasal voice will issue from the back seat: "Where's Cattie?" At first we think it's M. Edium talking, but that's the voice he uses when acting as a surrogate speaker for one of his plush friends. It seems Blue Guy is wondering where the boss is. After all, Cattie is at the top of the stuffed pecking order, and his absence leaves a big hole. M. Edium and Trash explain to Blue Guy that Cattie stayed behind in the hotel, but he'll be home and back with them all tomorrow. Five minutes later, a high, nasal voice asks, "Where's Cattie?" This time it's Butterscotch (who is, believe it or not, an exuberant-looking NeoPet in hot pink) asking. Butterscotch is brought up to speed. We realize that this is M. Edium's way of working through the stress of the temporary loss, but an outsider might reasonably assume that it's just the same conversation happening over and over, with different stuffed animals, from Rockford to Eau Claire. One last fuel stop a few miles from home -- and we don't know how seven-eights of a tank got us five hundred miles when the last eighth doesn't get us the thirty-some miles from the Minnesota state line -- and we finally pull up in front of our house. Unpacking is going to be a long process, but emptying the truck will have to be a short one, because we have to get it back to my parents tomorrow. On the other hand, that bin of food we just carted through eleven states? That'll be emptied in about two and a half months That evening, as much as we all just want to hunker down at home, we also want to catch our niece Deniece's last home soccer game of the season. M. Edium hasn't seen her for a few weeks anyway. When he sees her, he asks, "How come she's shorter?" Never let it be said that travel doesn't help you grow. We've got stuff to do tomorrow, and returning the truck is only part of it. Until that's done, this vacation isn't over. More on that later in the week, when I finally wrap up this epic odyssey. posted by M. Giant 7:19 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:I just wanted to say I've really been enjoying your travel descriptions, and am now very curious as to how much mileage you put on the truck.
By Wednesday, September 22, 2010 M. Ovie Reviews – The American When movie stars act with those they love, the results are rarely as interesting as they – or we – might hope. I could run down a list of examples, but we all know I can just say Gigli and move on. Unfortunately, The American, in which George Clooney costars with his beloved Italy, is no exception. The Cloon is either Jack or Edward, depending on who he's talking to, and he's a pathologically taciturn hitman, freelance armorer, and amateur lepidopterist complete with a butterfly tramp-stamp. It's clear from the sixth thing his character does (the first being "stare into the fire" and the second being "take a drink" and the third being "stare into the fire some more") that he's not going to get a happy ending, but he does get to live out a certain kind of male fantasy for most of the rest of the film. Namely, he hides out in the picturesque Italian countryside (speaking just enough of the language to get by but not enough to look like a sissy), has no job other than to work on his upper body and a manly craft project in his rustic flat, deploys some Clooneylingus to graduate to off-the-clock status with a prostitute who looks like an Italian Katie Holmes, and – let's face it – is George Clooney. Plus he gets to fully enjoy his highly attractive existential crisis, because the 3D maze of a town he's staying in fortunately comes fully equipped with a bored priest who has nothing to do but try to save a creepy American's soul. Which, even if such attempts are mainly rebuffed, it's nice to see the effort. The poster would have you believe there is action in this film, what with its depiction of George Clooney running in a suit. In fact, he spends most of the film sitting and looking pensive in Land’s End. This is not to say that The American is the frequent opposite of action-packed, which is to say talky, because it's also the opposite of talky. The dialogue is written so economically that I suspect screenwriter Rowan Joffe was told that he'd have to pay the actors by the word, out of his own pocket. In fact, even when characters get killed, almost all of them do so with such polite discretion they might as well be in a library. This is mostly tedious, although one unexpected benefit is that when one of the many heavily-accented characters says something you didn't catch, you have several minutes to sit there puzzling it out before someone else gets a line. So what actually happens? Very little. As is customary, it's all about One Last Job, but in a departure from custom, there is no context for it. There's no big picture, no sense of how Jack/Edward's project fits into any kind of geopolitical context or even his own nonexistent backstory. Which is actually fine with me, because that crap is generally just window dressing and McGuffins anyway, but the downside is that the movie becomes all about Jack/Edward's inner life, which our leading man is forced to convey through varying levels of eyebrow-height and jaw-set. Any Clooney fans who have said they'd see him in a movie where he doesn't even do anything, this is their chance to prove it. And yes, there's something to be said for quiet suspense and underplayed tension, but I'll let other people say it. Maybe the goal was to reflect the slower pace of life in pastoral Italy, in which case I'm not going to pastoral Italy. One thing I enjoyed: when I bought my ticket, the cashier picked up a phone and said into it, "Go ahead and start The American." Then he hung it up and told me I was going to get a private show. Indeed, I was all alone in the auditorium. That was kind of cool, but it's the second time that's happened to me at this theater, which makes me think it might not be open that much longer. And I think I need a few more experiences like this to overcome my conditioning against using my cell phone at the movie theater, even when I'm the only one in it. posted by M. Giant 4:46 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:A private show from George Clooney? Oh, bee-HAAAAYVE.
By The American moved way too slow. The premise was interesting, but just never really came together at any point.
By Monday, September 20, 2010 Road Trip Day 11 Part 2 Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10 Day 11 Part 1 M. Edium is not great at naming things, but that doesn't stop him from doing it. The names he gives things generally are -- while quite descriptive -- hopelessly prosaic. The more valuable the item, the less creative its name. His favorite stuffed animal for the past two years has been a multicolored stuffed caterpillar named Cattie, which he's had his entire life. Almost as important as Cattie is a tie-dye-colored iguana whose name is Unusual Lizard ("Unusual" for short). M. Edium also has two identical semi-humanoid blue plush rectangles with legs and eyes who are known, respectively, as Blue Guy and Other Blue Guy. And his precious, treasured blanket, the one without which he not only can't go to sleep at night, he can't get up in the morning, has been blessed with the emotionally charged moniker of "Comfortable Blanket." The fact that Comfortable Blanket doesn't have a very imaginative name, however, does not alleviate M. Edium's heartbreak or anger at the fact that we inadvertently abandoned it in a different state this morning. As I mentioned previously, I had called the hotel to arrange for them to overnight the blanket (and the stuffed animals that had apparently been found with it, whoever they were) to our house that day. Two hours later, I called them back. That's when I found out about the problems. First of all, it seems that when July Fourth falls on a Sunday and thus Monday, July 5 becomes a de facto holiday, things don't work as efficiently as they might. Things like FedEx pickups. Things like where hotels keep the forms to ship overnight packages. Things like the head of housekeeping, who has the day off. Things like the head of housekeeping's office, in which the items have been locked since the last conversation and which cannot be gotten into until the following morning, meaning that even if I wanted to turn around and drive four hours back and then the same distance plus two hours back to Starved Rock -- which, let's face it, at this point I'm starting to -- it wouldn't do any good. All we can do is go on to Starved Rock, plying M. Edium with apologies and a promise that he can have whatever blanket he wants off our bed tonight. Not having stopped for lunch, the name of the place seems pretty apt by the time we drop off some stuff in our cabin (two beds, full bath, no kitchen or fridge) and make our way to the dining room. This was the place Trash had been most looking forward to staying. It's the most expensive stop on our trip, and when I saw the photos on the website, I was like, "This is much nicer than we deserve." This feeling is alleviated during our meal when every road-worn vagrant in the northern half of Illinois brushes past our table in the course of a half hour. After our late lunch, we decided to explore the rest of the expansive lodge. Just our luck: in the great hall, the Humane Society just happened to be having a pet adoption drive, complete with adorable, fuzzy, heartbreaking kitties just begging to be brought home and have their pictures posted on Cute Overload. M. Edium saw a way to fill the gaping hole in his heart left by Comfortable Blanket, and Trash, who has not been allowed in pet stores for almost two decades, is a negative amount of help. It is at about this time that she and I realize what we are going to have to do. And no, it does not involve jamming a kitty cage into the already overstuffed backseat of an extended-cab pickup for a long drive home tomorrow, but it's close. Back in the cabin, M. Edium wants his friends. The one he wants most of all is Cattie, so the two of them can take comfort in each other in the face of Comfortable Blanket's absence. But remember how the hotel clerk said the housekeepers had found not only a blanket but some stuffed animals? Eeee…yeah. Right about then is when I become this hotel staff's stalker. posted by M. Giant 7:19 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:
There is no cute acronym already popular in the internet vernacular for my reaction while I read this post, but I shall use one nonetheless:
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By the by, "by the by" seems to be my go-to phrase of the moment. Yeesh.
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When I was M.Edium's age, I left my beloved Raggedy Ann in a hotel in Baton Rouge--which we didn't realize until we were back home in Dallas.
By Wednesday, September 15, 2010 Road Trip Day 11: Illinoise Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10 Trash and I have both noticed a sharp increase in the quality, vividness, and detail of our dreams on this trip. Maybe it's all the new sensory input, maybe it's just sleeping in strange beds, maybe the water south of the Mason-Dixon line is just drugged, but whatever the case I've got some great story ideas if I ever get back into writing fiction. Like the dream I had about going to visit a brilliant psychiatrist at a mental institution, only to discover he's not on the staff, but one of the patients! Wooo, booga booga! We've been on the road eleven days, which is still no excuse for what happens next. We're in a hurry to get going; one of the nicest places we're staying at this whole trip is our destination for the night, and it's about six hours away so we're eager to get going. I pack the truck in a hurry, and am still carrying stuff down from the room when Trash and M. Edium pass me on their way out to the parking lot. I realize, oh, I'd better hurry, and make one last run up to the room to grab the last few things. We're on the road a few minutes later. The route we'd normally take through Indianapolis is under construction, according to the DOT's website (this is the kind of thing we research the night before), so we take a more circuitous route. We stop at a gas station for a crap breakfast and head west, toward the Illinois state line. We plan to make a stop in Champagne-Urbana to visit Trash's grad school and then turn north to Starved Rock. After about two hours, M. Edium complains about the air conditioning being too high. He gets cooler back there, shaded by the roof and the tinted back windows, than we do. Trash turns around to deal with the situation. A moment later she turns back to me and says, under her breath, "Fuck!" Trash had intended to spread M. Edium's blanket over his legs. Although this blanket looks like a full-sized comforter that Trash and I quit using on our beds, it is in fact one of M. Edium's most treasured possessions. It is a friend, and it has a name. And it is not in the back seat. At the next exit, I pull off the freeway to check the truck bed. It's not there either. It can only be in Room 205 of the Holiday Inn in southern Indiana, two hours behind us. "Fuck!" I agree. We have two choices. We can turn around right now and head back to the hotel and retrieve the blanket. Or we can call the hotel and offer to pay to have them FedEx it to our house. You might think we have a third option, but you would be wrong, as you are about to see. I park the truck in an empty parking lot, get out, and get the hotel desk clerk on the phone. She says yes, a housekeeper found it and some stuffed animals, we can ship it to you, we have your credit card number, no problem. It'll get home before you do. Thank you, happy to help. Meanwhile, Trash is informing M. Edium of the situation, and before the sentence is even out of her mouth, he's wailing in grief -- no delay, no artifice, just a plea -- a demand -- that we turn around and go get it right now. By the time I wrap up the phone call, Trash has calmed M. Edium down a bit, and even convinced him that it'll be better if his blanket is waiting for him at home, rather than adding four hours onto today's drive time. M. Edium, after all, has a limited tolerance for how long he can deal with being in the car for one day. Adding four hours would cause us to exceed that tolerance by about four hours. He's still pretty pissed at both of us, but he manages to see that we've done what we can to remedy the situation. He even enjoys the little driving tour we take of Trash's alma mater. Certainly more so than Trash, who can't help noticing that almost every business in town she remembers is gone or closed down. The one familiar commercial landmark is the running robot in the window of the campus bookstore, but that's the campus bookstore and thus can't close down. Only…it has. Looks like both of them lost something today. After we go through town and head north, Trash suggests that at the next rest stop, I should call the hotel and make sure everything is cool. It is at this point that things go from as-good-as-can-be-expected to worse-than-before. posted by M. Giant 9:50 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, September 14, 2010 Hey Nineteen The year I was nineteen was one of the worst and best of my life. It was my first year of college, and it wasn't going the way it's supposed to on TV and in the movies. I had lost touch with most of my high school friends and didn't seem to be making new ones. I was bored, lonely, I looked like hell, and that winter was so cold and so long and penetrated so deep into my soul that for a few weeks I was virtually dreaming in Russian. The symbolism of what happened to me during one day of spring quarter couldn't have been more obnoxiously on the nose. Walking from one bank of campus to the other, I spotted a girl sitting on a low wall, trying to read the Minnesota Daily and having a bit of a time with it due to the wind and the sun's glare. I decided to rescue her from that by sitting down in front of her and making her talk to me instead. I wasn't just being creepy, because this wasn't the first time I'd met this girl. In fact, I knew her pretty well. We'd gone out together a few times in high school. I'd even kissed her. Which, considering how beautiful and cool this girl was, was probably more than I ever should have hoped for. Even though things never really got off the ground with her, I still missed her every day, and was always hoping to run into her on campus. On this sunny spring day, I was just being greedy. But I still felt special just being around her. We parted ways that day, and I was happy that I'd gotten to hang out with her for a bit, and even happier that maybe I'd know where and when to "run into" her on campus in the future. That evening she called me at home and said that because she had enlisted in the Navy and was leaving in six weeks, she just had too many people making demands on her time. Too many friends who wanted to hang out. And she didn't want her last weeks to be overscheduled. She wanted to spend what time she had left with people who really mattered to her. "I get it," I started to say. "That means you," she said. I hadn't gotten it at all. I got to feel special all that summer, as we spent more and more time together, and when her Navy placement fell through and she got to stay home. By the end of that summer, we were dating. Nineteen turns out to have been a lucky number for me. Two and a half years after that spring day, I got to kiss her again. While wearing a tuxedo, in front of a church. Today is the nineteenth anniversary of that day. Thank you, Trash, for an amazing nineteen years. The last nineteen, I mean. posted by M. Giant 5:33 AM 3 comments 3 Comments:That is so sweet.. Congrats to both of you
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You guys are the best, you know that? Sometimes I think about those days, and we (well, mostly I) were a gang of (or, one huge) freakin' idiot(s). But it kind of *IS* the way it's supposed to happen, according to TV and movies. Your part seems that way, anyhow.
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Awww - what a great story! Happy 19th.
By Sunday, September 12, 2010 First Day We've been working pretty hard to prepare M. Edium emotionally for kindergarten. We brought it up frequently. We were always willing to talk to him about it as much as he wanted. We've been reading him stories about starting kindergarten, from 16-page picture books to Ramona the Pest. We even told him that unlike when he started day care or Montessori, his first day of kindergarten would be everyone else's first day too, a fact which seemed to relieve him greatly. We just forgot to prepare ourselves. Okay, that's not actually true, at least not where Trash is concerned. She put together a whole plan for Thursday, when he began afternoon kindergarten. He would get to stay home from Montessori that morning (although he'll still be going there three mornings a week, for its science curriculum); get to pick his breakfast (pancakes and sausage); have a little outing with his mom (who had taken the day off for the occasion); have lunch at his favorite bistro, McDonald's; and let us drive him to his first day at school. Then Trash would go home, sit with our friend Bitter, and drink some wine. At the appointed time, I would drive us back, pick him up, take him to karate class, and then bring him ukulele shopping. You know, just like any other kid's first day of school. I can't believe I'm even outlining such a standard ritual. I didn't see it coming, though. A lot of parents are ambivalent about their kids growing up, but I'm generally pretty strongly in favor of it (especially given the alternative). But I'd been thinking about this day in the future tense for so long that it seemed stuck that way. And then suddenly we were out on the sidewalk leading into the school, waiting for his teacher to come out and line everyone up before leading them in, and it hit me that this was it. This short interval is going to be his last first day of kindergarten. I quit thinking about the two big proposals I had due at work the next day, both sitting in a worrisome state of incompletion, and realized there's no going back with this kid. In Ramona the Pest, there's a chapter where Ramona finds herself, for the first time in her life, in a situation where nobody knows who she is (it's because she's wearing a Halloween mask, but it still triggers an alarming existential crisis for her). That's where M. Edium was headed now. I mean, not that day, not literally, because he'd met his kindergarten teacher twice before, as well as several of his (13!) classmates, but it's coming, right? Sometime? Not that he was remotely worried about anything. He was too excited to meet his new best friend, who has a Clone Wars backpack just like his. Afternoon kindergarten lasts two and a half hours. When I first learned that, all I could think of was what a paltry amount of time that seemed like, after his being accustomed to six-, seven-, and eight-hour days at the Montessori school. And especially considering that afternoons tend to be the part of my work day that fly by. That hasn't been the case so far. His first two days of kindergarten, those 150 minutes have crawled more slowly than he did five years ago. 
posted by M. Giant
7:39 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
That's so sweet. Our youngest has just started full-day kindergarten, and we’re glad to be rid of him. Maybe because he’s our third.
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Ah yes, the first day of kindergarten. I remember it all too clearly. The excitement of my kid, who was unable to stand still and instead danced about at the corner of our street where we waited for the bus. The bus pulling up and how she bounded up the stairs, grinning and thrilled, while we stood on the sidewalk and waved the "I love you" sign with increasing franticness as the bus pulled away. The inability to stop the flow of tears that started as we turned around and trudged back up the sidewalk to our eerily quiet house.
By Thursday, September 09, 2010 Dew It Again It's that time of year again, the time when I start shaking all of you down for donations in the name of the intellectual development of others. But it isn't Sarah's Donors Choose drive this time (she's taking a break from that, and given all the work she's done on it over the years I can't say I blame her). Instead, Pamie and Glark are once again hosting the Dewey Donation System drive. Being married to a librarian makes this a very big deal in our house, even though she's more of a Library of Congress type. In the past, DDS has often been used to save libraries that are threatened by budget cuts and dwindling collections. But this time, the beneficiary is a library in Baltimore that has already been closed down, ten years hence. Does that mean it's too late to help? Hell no -- it was brought back as the Village Learning Place, a nonprofit library and learning center. And what's the only thing cooler than a library? A zombie library, back from the grave. I mean, come on! Like all zombies, the place needs brains, but the analogy kind of falls down there because what this place does with brains is fill them, not eat them. But still, wouldn't you rather fill brains than eat them anyway? I understand they're very salty. And you get to make your donation either in the form of books -- which you get to pick -- or money, the amount of which you also get to pick. It's like a zombie you control! Where's the bad, I ask you? I’m a little late getting on this because it's been a busy week (day job, domestic projects. M. Edium starting kindergarten and taking the next step on the journey that will one day TAKE HIM AWAY FROM ME FOREVER), but Trash and M. Edium have been picking up the slack. He loves picking out books, even if he's not going to get to read them. He's even found some of his favorites on the requested list and sent them along. Are any of your favorites on the requested list? Better check. Better check quick, before they're gone. So, to conclude, once again, give through the Dewey Donation System It's totally worth it, especially to them. posted by M. Giant 9:30 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Thanks for sharing, and for making Dewey a project for the whole family. Writers, librarians, kindergartners, and Minnesota all rock!
By Let me, please, just say: Zombie library sounds infintely cooler than nonprofit neighborhood library. Calling it that may just be the push we need to get kids reading?! Things that make you go hmmm......
By Tuesday, September 07, 2010 Road Trip Day 10: Going Fourth Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Although today is July 4, we had not one but two fireworks displays yesterday (including one at the RV park during which almost all of the explosives made it off the ground before blowing up), so we're feeling good about not knowing whether we'll see any tonight. We're invited to our host's annual 7/4 party, including the home-style fireworks in their yard after dark, but with the trip winding down, we've come to a realization: we're going to have to do more driving in the next three days than we've done all week. So not only have we checked out of our E-Town cabin a day early, we get on the road in the heat of the afternoon. Trash and M. Edium are going to be spending their first night ever in Indiana. The goal is to get as far as we can tonight, because tomorrow night we have reservations at Starved Rock in Illinois and we'd prefer to actually spend some time there than spend all day getting there. Still we're going to miss Kentucky. Trash is half-seriously talking about moving there someday. Even the freeway to the state line is scenic. And at the very end, we're quite pleasantly surprised by Louisville. Having driven through -- or, more accurately, past -- a number of major cities in our lives, we're not expecting to see much more of this one than a collection of skyscrapers off to one side. But Interstate 65 gives you the grand tour. You drive right past such famous landmarks as the venue of the Kentucky Derby and the place where they make (or at least used to make) Louisville Sluggers before you find yourself threading between skyscrapers through the very heart of downtown. All city freeways should be like this. This makes us want to come back to Louisville some time when we can actually spend a while there, but for now we're left wanting more, even as we cross a scenic river into Indiana. Again, our only goal for tonight, is to get far enough to make tomorrow's drive as undemanding as possible, but it seems like we've traveled a long way. We started in Prince's hometown, and have since passed through Lynyrd Skynyrd's and are now approaching John Cougar Mellencamp's. But more significantly, Trash could get authentic Southern sweet tea this morning and now she can't, except at McDonald's. We decide to call a halt about an hour short of Indianapolis, and check into what is only our second (and last) hotel room of the trip. Somebody is launching a few fireworks from the furniture store parking lot across the highway, so it's a good thing we got our pyro fix yesterday. The difference between our state of mind now and the first night is striking. Then, we were uptight about making sure we had everything and everybody. Tonight, we can't even bring ourselves to care that much about the fact that M. Edium has dumped all of his stuffed friends (the count now up to 19 or so, including the ones he's picked up along the way) out of the pillowcase they're supposed to travel in and they're all over the back seat. I bring some in with the rest of our stuff, but I sure don't count them. The daily stuffed-animal census has faded in importance like an old superstition. This is something we will live to regret. posted by M. Giant 4:58 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, September 03, 2010 M. Ovie Reviews: Centurion Chao sent me a text inviting me to come meet him at the other art house theater in town on a night so busy that I nearly forgot to show up. Which, given how much I love movies, is a pretty busy night. I wasn't as busy as the guy in Centurion, though. That dude had his hands full, when they weren't tied together. Remember the British officer from Inglourious Basterds who nearly lost World War II because he forgot which fingers Germans use to signal the number three? That's Michael Fassbender and he's the lead in this, the titular centurion, but he's often upstaged by Dominic West from The Wire as a charismatic general, Bond girl Olga Kuryenko as a deeply scarred mute who will fuck you up, and the character played by 28 Weeks Later's Imogen Poots, an actress whose name would be good for an extra letter grade if I gave letter grades. And that's not even counting the character that dominates the majority of scenes right from the first frame, that being the surprisingly spectacular scenery of the Scottish Highlands. The opening credits basically float Fringe-like over snowswept mountains that make Middle-Earth look like Kansas. I didn't even know Scotland had that shit. As you might guess from the title, Centurion is set during the time of the Roman empire, a period with which I am an eminent authority by virtue of the fact that I recapped both seasons of Rome. Except Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo never show up, even though this is set only a century or two after their time. It takes a while to figure out what kind of movie it is. At first it looks like a Vietnam or war-on-terror allegory, with a cadre of imperial soldiers far from home in a hostile landscape fighting a never-ending war against an enemy that doesn't follow their rules. Then there's a little light torture, and some politics, and an escape-slash-chase, and some more torture, and finally things settle into a groove with our small band of ragtag fugitives fleeing the second-century equivalent of an angry biker gang. Although I appreciate the fact that this is a sword-and-sandals epic that leaves out the "epic" part, coming in at barely over an hour and a half, I also would have appreciated a little more time to get to know some of the secondary characters and figure out how to tell them apart. Maybe if I watched more English TV I could have kept them straight by thinking of them as "that guy from EastEnders" or "that guy from Doctor Who," only there were a couple dozen of each. Fortunately they had an obliging tendency to get themselves killed a lot, so that narrowed things down. Which brings me to the fight scenes. Director Neil Marshall doesn't flinch from showing some pretty violent injuries and deaths. There are lots of edged weapons whickering through the air and skulls being cleaved fiercely in twain, and some stuff that's a lot more imaginative. If that's what you look for in a movie, I would recommend this. But I guess I'm getting to the age when I'd rather see a movie that's a reason for the fight scenes rather than the other way around (which is probably why Predators left me so cold. In the end, what strikes me about this movie is how much stress and effort goes into a lot of stuff that ends up being just for nothing. It's very anti-Hollywood. Although if they really wanted to drive the message home, they could have had the courage of their convictions and gone through this obviously arduous shoot, killed off most of the cast in the process, and finally wrap it, only to hand it over to a distributor who would then bury it in a dumpster. On balance, however, I'm glad they didn't. posted by M. Giant 5:24 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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