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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Thursday, December 30, 2010 M. Ovie Reviews: True Grit My hook for these reviews, such as it is, is an almost complete ignorance of the source material when it comes to remakes and adaptations. When it comes to True Grit, however, I have let you down in that regard. No, I never saw the original version starring John Wayne, and I never read the novel by Charles Portis. I did, however, start to read my dad's hardcover copy once when I was younger than Mattie Ross, but the writing style annoyed me so much that I quit before the first chapter. So, you, know, I come to this totally spoiled. Then there's the whole Coen brothers thing. As a Minnesotan, you might expect me to have a fraught relationship with Joel and Ethan going all the way back to Blood Simple, living my daily life surrounded by Fargo locations and running into the directors at the store all the time. Which isn't really the case, although it's fair to say I've developed a certain…mistrust of those two. It isn't that they aren't brilliant filmmakers, but I've walked away from too many of their movies thinking, Jeez, what was the point of that? They usually get away with it, but after rubbing our faces in it at the end of Burn After Reading, I can't believe I'm the only one who stayed away from A Serious Man for similar reasons. But with True Grit being based on a classic novel, I figured it was safe. And so have a lot of other people, clearly. There's one recommendation I'd make: if you're going to see it, make sure you're seeing it in a theater with really good audio. Because one spends a lot of time wondering what people just said. As Rooster Cogburn, Jeff Bridges apparently decided to lay the foundation for his performance as a man with true grit by gargling a bunch of it. The smooth, avuncular voice from the Hyundai and Duracell commercials is nowhere to be heard here. In the first half of the movie, I spent a lot of time wondering what he just said. Then, about halfway through, Matt Damon suffers a tongue injury, and then you can't understand half of what he just said. By the time Josh Brolin shows up, his "dumb-guy" voice practically sounds like that of a newsreader, not to mention Barry Pepper shouting his lines through a firehose of bad teeth and spittle. Fortunately, there's the crystal-clear elocution of Hailee Steinfeld as the aforementioned Mattie Ross, who is allegedly 14 years old but looks that way primarily because she wears Laura Ingalls' hairstyle under Shaquille O'Neal's cowboy hat. It is she who drives the action of the film, not only because it is her quest that puts events in motion but because with everyone else's diction issues, sometimes it feels like you're only listening to her end of a telephone conversation. It's a shame, because the dialogue is fantastic. It sounds just formal and florid enough to seem dated, almost like the first draft of a Deadwood script written by a Mormon. Overall, I liked it. It's a solid adaptation, featuring plenty of Coen-style randomness without as much of their nihilism. As for the speech problems, they were nothing compared to those of the lead character of the movie I saw the following night. posted by M. Giant 8:39 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:I knew the damn horse was doomed the minute she gave it a name. Ruined the whole movie for me, waiting for it to die a ghastly tormented death. As it did.
By Tuesday, December 28, 2010 M. Ovie Reviews: Megamind M. Edium and I didn't wait all that long to see Megamind, but it was still in the cheap theaters by the time we made it on the day before Christmas Eve. Which kind of fits in with the theme of this review. Indeed, it's difficult to sit through this movie and not see it as a ninety-minute manifestation of Dreamworks Animation's inferiority complex. I mean, yes, Dreamworks has been all about the underdogs ever since Shrek, but this is taking it to a whole new level. As you probably know from the trailers, the titular Megamind is a large-headed, blue-skinned supervillain who came Superman-like from a dying planet,. His only problem is that there's also another newcomer to the planet who, he believes, has totally stolen his destiny as a hero. Plus he's handsome in a more human sense. So, obviously, this hero, named Metro Man and voiced by Brad Pitt, carries some obvious symbolic meaning. I mean, here's this smirking, winking, preening, dick whom everyone loves. We're supposed to hate him, of course, because, see above regarding the protagonist. And are we really to believe that this infallible, endlessly popular character who can do no wrong is anything but an allegory for Pixar? The sad thing is that as the movie demonstrates, that inferiority complex is not unjustified. Yes, Pixar movies have jokes that are clunkers, and some Pixar movies have hardly any jokes at all (see: Ratatouille), but nobody remembers those. On the other hand, everyone remembers all the lame jokes in Dreamworks Animation movies. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that most of those lame jokes end up in the trailers. This is not to say that Megamind is devoid of laughs, because it's not. It's just that most of the best jokes are throwaways. Which I'm not going to give examples of here, because that would wreck them for you and you're going to need all the enjoyment you can get. It's also fair to say that if Dreamworks ever does succeed in unseating Pixar, the animation world is going to be as bleak as the one portrayed in the movie after Megamind takes over the Metro City. Is that harsh? Maybe. Megamind is fine. In a world without Pixar (and a world without Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs), it might even pass for genius. But we've seen genius, usually after a desk lamp hops across the screen, and it doesn't feature the voice of Jonah Hill as an animated character who looks exactly like Jonah Hill. I won't give away the ending, other than to say it's not particularly earned, but I'm not trying to come off too harsh here. It's not inspired, but it's solid. If you're interested in some symbolic wish fulfillment from an also-ran animation studio, you could do a lot worse than Megamind. posted by M. Giant 2:35 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, December 23, 2010 Merry Christmas!    
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1 Comments:What great shots! I am a long-time reader, first time commenter. I hope you and your family have a very wonderful Christmas and even better New Year! I love what you do both here and over at TWOP. Many thanks to you for all the laughing to tears you have provided!
By Tuesday, December 21, 2010 Santa's Medium Elf I like to think that we've succeeded in teaching M. Edium that the more generous he is to other people, the more generous Santa will be to him. Before we did that, we should have stopped to think that we kind of have to pay for it on both ends. For instance, once again this year we did one of those "Adopt a Family" things for Christmas. You know, where you're matched with a less fortunate family, and you do what you can (mostly anonymously) to make their holidays a little more bearable. The first one Trash tried to sign us up for was all out of available families (which is mostly good, I guess), so she found another program. When she and M. Edium went to Target with the wish list of the 7-year-old boy and single dad we were helping, she asked him, "So what should we get for him off the list?" "Everything!" M. Edium insisted. The good news was that it was a modest enough list that everything fit in the car. Though just barely. M. Edium was almost as excited as if the stuff was for him. Before that, even before Thanksgiving, Trash sat him down next to her and her laptop to pick out what he wanted to give through the Heifer Project this year. He gave it some serious thought and made a choice. And then yesterday he got a thank-you letter, along with a photo of a young man and the bushel of eggs that came out of the chickens M. Edium had sent. Yes, this kid had plenty of eggs to eat where before he would have had to dine on gravel, but even better, he has enough eggs left over to sell and earn money to go to school. We explained to M. Edium how he had tangibly made someone's life better with his gift. I know that made him feel good. Dragging a 6-year-old to the store to shop for his nine hundred friends and cousins under ten should be a trial, as a result of his whining, "Can I get this?" or "Can I get this?" Instead, it's always "Deniece would like this" or "We should get this for Denephew." Then he asks if he can get something for himself. Maybe. As the season-end Amazon offers have poured into everyone's inboxes, Trash has been jumping on them, in anticipation of flooding the Toys for Tots donation barrels when they reopen next year (and flooding our basement storage space in the meantime, I might add if I were feeling ungenerous). M. Edium has shown no interest in commandeering these for himself. The karmic payoff has already begun. Some readers have kindly sent gifts to "M. Tiny" through Amazon (I know; if I can't change the name on the account, neither can you). We've been rewarding his behavior where we can as the season wears on. And when he comes downstairs on Christmas morning, whoa Nelly. So yes, we have taught him the importance of generosity. Next year I think we'll start teaching him the importance of generosity as it relates to his own money. Another year of this lesson might break us otherwise. posted by M. Giant 5:09 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Good for him, and good for you guys. You are raising him right.
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We began to involve the kids in the family in Heifer International when they were bitty little things. They, too, received pictures and letters that helped them understand exactly how much one little - usually powerless - kid could make a difference. I'd like to believe it's the reason that as teenagers now, they are all very involved in activities that help others.
By I really admire the way you are raising him to be so selfless. Also, this: http://www.xylocopa.com/product/mad-science-alphabet-blocks reminded me of you guys for some reason.
By Sunday, December 19, 2010 M. Ovie Reviews: Tron: Legacy I've already riffed on Twitter about how long it takes Jeff Bridges to get a sequel made. Texasville, the sequel to the obviously mistitled The Last Picture Show took nearly two decades to come out. Now he's in Tron: Legacy, a sequel to a movie that was released 28(!) years ago. To put that into perspective, imagine having seen Star Wars for the first time in a double feature with a sequel to a movie made in 1949. I saw Tron: Legacy with my oldest friend, whom I had not yet met when the original came out. Now the upcoming decades will hopefully be littered with more overdue Jeff Bridges sequels like The Fabulous Baker Men, Neutronstarman, D-Biscuit, L-PAX, Tucker: The Man Wakes Up, and Bigger Lebowski: The Abiding. So anyway, there may be other movies where a 61-year-old actor plays scenes with his 33-year-old self, but none immediately come to mind, and certainly none I saw this weekend. I have to say, I think it's a little ballsy to make a sequel to Tron at all. Back in 1982, hardly anybody knew anything about computers in the first place, so setting an adventure story in a virtual computer world populated by "programs" who look like people with strips of neon on their clothes was something screenwriters could get away with. Dude gets zapped into a computer and meets the program alter-egos of the friends who wrote them? Why not, we didn't know any better. And it's not like anyone ever writes more than one program anyway. Now, in 2010, a lot of people are a lot more computer-savvy. It must have been tempting to update the Tron-iverse to something that makes sense to modern viewers, but no, it stuck with the 1982 concept. I thought that the Internet alone would have changed the landscape of The Grid beyond recognition (no pun intended, and possibly no pun achieved), but if anything, it's more nonsensical than ever, with programs that still wear discs on their backs and have lots of spare time to witness gladiatorial arena games and go to clubs hosted by another program who goes to a ridiculous amount of trouble to be David Bowie. I'll be the first to admit I have no idea what goes on inside my computer, but I'm pretty sure it's not that. If anything, I imagine a Grid populated by a rogue's gallery of .exe and .dll files, with old recaps and blog entries wandering the alleys leaving a trail of snark, and wide thoroughfares where the sky is blotted out by corpulent Microsoft applications that keep offering unwanted advice and falling down all the time. I do have to give credit for the movie featuring one computer-generated character that actually looks like one. That would be the ageless, evil doppelganger of Jeff Bridges' Kevin Flynn, a program named Clu (because, sure, that's what people named programs in 1982). I'm pretty sure his face is just supposed to look human, like those of all the other programs in the movie, but it's obvious he comes from the part of The Grid that we now know as the Uncanny Valley. He's a notch above the creepy-ass animated creations in recent Robert Zemeckis movies in both execution and subtlety, but you can't not notice that his face is just wrong somehow. The meat on his face has no weight; there's no air pushing his free-floating lips out when he talks. And he talks a lot. Ultimately, what's wrong with Clu is what's wrong with the movie: the more talking, the weaker it gets. Things are fine during the action sequences, when laser-Frisbees are flying at people and light-vehicles are zooming around after each other, and it's FUCKING LOUD, but every time someone explains something about how this world works it's all a bunch of Matrix: Revolutions gobbledygook that makes it impossible to get invested. If anything, the Dueling Daddy Issues were a more interesting subplot. But I guess it succeeds in bringing back what worked from the original (video games come to life, flights across the wastelands, an autocratic ruler brought low, and "That is a big door") while tossing in enough modern action-movie crap to interest the kids whose dads drag them to it. Plus now those dads can say, "Next time you want to complain about me missing one of your soccer games, just be glad I'm not permanently trapped in a virtual computer world doing a reprise of that guru-in-exile thing I perfected in Surf's Up." Which is more than a lot of movies can do. posted by M. Giant 9:19 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, December 17, 2010 Poked Trash and I try to support M. Edium's interests, often going so far as to share them. This isn't always hard. For instance, it isn't actually that much of a challenge for me to pretend I like putting Star Wars spaceships together out of Legos, and Trash has given him so much backup in his karate career that she has literally earned her own gold belt. This goes back to his infancy, as we supported and heavily subsidized his habits with regard to Transformers, Bakugan, NASA, Spongebob, all things Pixar, Captain Underpants, and everything else that came down the pike. Then at some point Trash and I, without any prior discussion, suddenly hit the wall on the next thing he wanted to get into. We explained to him that he couldn't be a huge fan of everything; life was short, and if he tried to become an expert on everything he risked becoming a dilettante -- an expert on nothing, one whose knowledge went broad but not deep. And anyway, he didn't have to get into stuff just because his friends were into it. We felt this was an important lesson for him. And I'm sure our shared, blind, longstanding, unreasoning hatred of Pokemon had nothing to do with it. This was months ago, of course, and he pretty much let it drop. To the point where we had forgotten all about it. And, for this story to have the proper effect, you probably should too. So now he's in kindergarten, which means he's more or less steeped in Pokemon culture. Which is a problem, because over the summer we discovered that he's a worse negotiator than Barack Obama. For instance, he owns a four-foot-long toy robot arm that he can use to pick up things that are as far away from him as four feet! And he traded it with a neighbor girl for a single Silly Band. Similarly, we just recently found out that he's agreed to swap some of his Lego mini-figures with a kindergarten classmate for Pokemon cards. Lego mini-figures, in case you're not familiar, are the little Lego guys that come with certain kits. You can also buy some of them separately for about five bucks each, but not the ones that only come in the kits. M. Edium is the proud owner of a big chunk of the Star Wars cast in one-inch-high Lego form, including a small army of stormtroopers and clone troopers (you can tell them apart because the former don't have faces under their helmets). And he's been talking about swapping them one-to-one. A five-dollar mini-figure for a single card that comes in a 50-cent package of them. We tried to tell M. Edium what a bad deal this is for him. He didn't seem to care. "It's the only way I can get Pokemon cards," he said sadly. Trash and I said, "Don't trade your Lego guys for them. We can buy you Pokemon cards." M. Edium said, "Yes! It worked!" So maybe he's a better negotiator than we thought. posted by M. Giant 6:38 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:Damn, that kid is good.
By Thank you for reminding me of how to spell dilettante. I have tried several times in vain to spell it in scrabble games and have failed miserably.
By Tuesday, December 14, 2010 In Deep M. Edium sometimes seems to be in danger of becoming one of those "overscheduled" kids. In the past year, he's had piano lessons, karate, gymnastics, Lego League, and maybe even a playdate or two. We try to keep it from getting out of hand. For instance, karate has handily replaced gymnastics as his primary form of organized exercise and favorite activity, so he'll be dropping that when the term is up at the end of the year. Piano might not even count, because he only did that for eight weeks and didn't learn jack anyway. Lego League is also a short-term thing, but if he weren't playing Legos at school during that time he'd be doing it at home…well okay, actually he'd be at karate. Huh, maybe he does have kind of a full plate. One thing we don't want to pull him out of, however, is swimming lessons. I mean, that's a safety thing, after all. We want to feel safe leaving him alone in the bath, right? He's been going to swimming since he was three, when we started the weekly lessons in the pool at the high school across the street. Couldn't beat the convenience; distance-wise, the pool is closer to our front curb than the back of our garage is. Plus, during the parent/child classes where I got into the pool with him, it meant that I only had to shower half as often as I do now. The problem is that it's community education, and all the bush-league red tape that entails. Well, that and the fact that the pool is in the middle of "renovations" that will keep it closed for a year and a half. Last summer, we put him through a term of the lessons provided by the community center in the neighboring rich suburb. The only problem with that was that the lessons were priced for people who live in a rich suburb. After a single-term return engagement to the pool across the street, we decided to go old-school by enrolling him in classes at the Y. (I was going to make that name Google-proof just in case, but I think it already is). He was in the "Eels" class for his first term. And his second. And third. And fourth. At some point, Trash and I started to wonder if he was learning anything at all. Every evaluation sheet at the end of the term had check marks next to most of the skills -- all except the one about swimming alone for 20 feet without a flotation device. Which, you know, was the one we cared about. Scheduling challenges with regard to his fifth(!) term as an Eel led us to try out a commercial "swimming school" that had been sending us big, glossy catalogs for some time. Yes, the lessons there are a hell of a lot more expensive, but the term is also longer, and how much economic sense did it make to keep paying for lessons where he wasn't learning anyway? I have to admit, the first time I brought him there, I was horrified. To begin with, it's in a mall. The changing room (not a locker room, because there are no lockers) is crowded and chaotic, with stressed-out parents hovering over flocks of damp, directionless munchkins swarming underfoot. The pool itself is startlingly small -- especially after the Olympic-sized pool at the Y, only an eighth of which is being used for lessons at any given time. Here, every square inch of the pool is part of a "station" where some level of class is taking place all the time, with teachers apparently getting breaks that are no longer than the amount of time it takes for the current batch of kids to swap places with the next. Through the cacophony of a dozen teachers hollering over the ambient pool-echo at four dozen kids, you can often pick out key phrases that are obviously tattooed onto the brain matter of every staff member. Clearly it's all about maximizing efficiency. It looks less like a school than a factory where they make young swimmers, complete with floating veal pens. But damn if it isn't working. M. Edium started at the end of summer, unable to schlep himself through four cubic feet of water. Now he's torpedoing from one end of that floating veal pen to the other, if the torpedo in this metaphor has no guidance system and a bent propeller. So obviously we're going to spring for the more expensive lessons again in the next term. I just wish that when we brought him to the Y, it had been the one on 92nd Street. I hear they're good about giving people their money back. posted by M. Giant 8:54 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, December 13, 2010 Winter White As I mentioned before, Bucky is a breed of dwarf hamster called a Winter White. This deceptively prosaic name simply means that his fur turns white in the winter. M. Edium has been looking forward to this startling transformation since we got him in July, and I think it's time to share it with you. I wanted to shoot him on a black backdrop so the contrast would be more startling, but I also wanted to get him looking at the camera (okay, the cell phone) so that his black eyes would stand out as well. Perhaps we'll have a whole shoot someday. I could show him on a white background, so nothing would be visible but his floating eyeballs, or just tape him to the ceiling with invisible tape. The possibilities are endless. For now, however, I just want you to take a look at the amazing transmogrifying creature with whom we are privileged to share our home. So here he is. Get ready. This is going to blow your mind. TA-DAAH!  Oh, I forgot to tell you, that's a picture taken in September. I thought I should show you what he looked like originally, so you can have kind of a before-and-after. Now here's what he looks like as of today. Here goes. TA-DAAAH!  That second photo was taken only two weeks before the winter solstice, with snow coating the ground and outside temps in the single digits. Just look at that adaptability! This is not my fault, by the way. I did a little research on Winter Whites some time ago, and it turns out that what triggers their change in color is a reduction in exposure to sunlight. The days get shorter, the hamster goes white. But experimentation has shown that it's possible to forestall the change in fur color by simply exposing the hamster to fluorescent light. Now, with that in mind, let me zoom out a bit so you can see how Bucky's cage is situated on M. Edium's dresser:  And yes, that's a CFL in that lamp, the F standing for "freaking fluorescent." So why haven't I simply turned it off? Well, M. Edium and Trash won't let me. M. Edium sleeps with a lamp on, so that takes care of the nights .But what about the shorter days, and all the darkness between early Minnesota sunset and bedtime? Couldn't Bucky get his much-needed darkness then? Nope. M. Edium and Trash are convinced he doesn't like the dark. Which must be why he spends so much of his time basking in the bright rays of his blue plastic igloo. It's only a shame that he doesn't have other Winter Whites to hang out with. They'd all think he'd been on a cruise or something. In fact, now that I think about it, it's even more unusual that he hasn't gone pale during the winter. You know, like most Minnesotans do. posted by M. Giant 9:31 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, December 08, 2010 Shoulder Surfing Sometimes M. Edium likes to come into our bedroom to fall asleep in our bed at night. There are very strict protocols in place for this. He is not allowed to speak, except to say "I love you." He must lie still. He must make a good faith effort to fall asleep. If any of these rules are broken, he is sent (okay, carried) back to his own bed. Recently, it's becoming apparent that a new rule must be put into effect: no reading Daddy's laptop screen. He likes at least one of us to be upstairs with him while he's falling asleep, and some nights I like to sprawl on our bed and type with my computer in my lap, whether it's that week's recap, a blog entry, or what Trash and I call "work-work." Until recently, I didn't have to think about it. But now, writing is becoming like performance art, with every one of my words read and scrutinized in real time, as they appear on the screen. No sooner have I finished typing a word than I'm hearing it whispered by a soft, high voice in my left ear, like a text-to-speech translation app that has some helium in its code. I try not to let it cramp my style, but I don't let anyone read over my shoulder while I'm typing. Not even Trash. For one thing, I'm not the best typer; I can type quickly, or well, but not both at the same time. It makes me self-conscious. And yes, as I'm typing this very entry, that is exactly what is happening. "Lie down," I say. "It just keeps getting funnier and funnier," he laughs. "You need to go to sleep," I say. "I'm not. I'm reading," he says. Then he reads everything I just wrote, so it's like having the whole conversation over again. Are you going to stop or are you going back to your own bed? I type, without bothering to say it out loud. I look at him. He laughs. "Well, how does this end?" I ask him. "Well, how does this end, I ask him?" he repeats. I should know better than to encourage him at almost 9:00 PM, but this is the cheapest, easiest idea for a blog entry ever. "So? What?" he asks me, after reading that last paragraph. Wzfcthnjmuklm, he types. Then he adds, My daddy should go to bed but he should be quiet too After typing that last line himself, he has a deal. posted by M. Giant 5:23 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, December 05, 2010 Start Me Up I've been having some minor car trouble the past few weeks. I don't know what it is, but I know how to fix it -- at least in the short term. What happens is this: I go out to my car, get in, turn the key, and nothing happens. Except that if the dome light is on it goes out, and if the clock is showing a time it goes blank. Like the whole car was just unplugged, or hit with an EMP. Like I said, I know how to fix it. I pop the hood, wiggle one of the battery cables until the dome light comes back on, then get back and start it right up. It takes me an extra minute and it can't help my car's resale value, but I'm kind of starting to get used to it. At first it was incredibly annoying. My clock would always go back to 1:00 and my radio stations would get wiped so I'd have to reset them again. And that still happens. But I'm learning that this isn't necessarily bad. For one thing, a lot of Twin Cities radio is kind of boring, so I don't generally want to leave it on one station anyway. Finding and reprogramming all the stations I used to have takes me long enough that it keeps me occupied more effectively than listening to another ad for carpet cleaning. And it used to be that the clock thing was annoying, too. Looking at my watch or my cell phone becomes kind of a production at this time of year in Minnesota, so I would miss having a clock I can just glance down at while driving. But with the time getting wiped every time I leave the house, I can now look down and know exactly how many minutes I've been gone. It's like having a trip stopwatch. And of course the kludgy starting method provides triple redundancy to my anti-theft system, the first redundancy being the car alarm that came with it, and the second redundancy being the fact that it's an eleven-year-old station wagon. And it doesn't happen every time. It seems to take a few hours for whatever happens to happen, so if I go on an errand I know I'll be able to get home safely. The outer margin of the time that it can sit and then start right up again appears to be equal to the running length of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 plus trailers and the amount of time it takes to buy an ICEE. Don't ask me how I know this (because you probably already figured it out). But what about Trash, you ask? Well, she refuses to drive my car except in the most dire emergencies anyway, so it's immaterial. I could probably go on with the car acting like this indefinitely, but the other morning when I had to use the key to open the door (glad to see that the old-school key slot hadn't grown over in years of disuse like an earring-hole). For some reason, the car thought I was trying to steal it, because the alarm went off and it ignored all the buttons on my key fob like you ignore a drunk uncle at a wedding. So now I think I need to use the spare key fob from now on. But that problem now seems less urgent than the reek of gasoline that's now inside the car. Different story, that. posted by M. Giant 10:06 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
I have never considered myself a diehard Harry Potter fan but I have enjoyed watching the movies over the years. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" has always been my favorite, until now.
By Wednesday, December 01, 2010 Space Cage When M. Edium first got Bucky, we got the cheapest cage available, basically a plastic pan with a white-laminated wire top and a plastic exercise wheel clipped to the back "wall." The really fancy standard features were a little plastic food bowl and a little plastic tag you can write his name on so that if anyone breaks in and kidnaps him they'll at least know what to call him. The cage M. Edium really wanted for Bucky was the fancy, super-advanced model made mostly out of purple and green plastic, with wire bars laminated in neon green. It's festooned with expandable crawling tubes that loop in and out of it, there's a "visiting tank" on top that we can open the lid on and pet him if he feels like crawling up there at the same time, and the exercise wheel on top not only spins normally on the horizontal axis, but more slowly on a vertical axis, like a rotating restaurant. Super-cool, in short. I told him we were getting the starter cage, and if he took good care of Bucky and saved up his allowance he could get the "space cage" later. After a few months, he earned the space cage for Bucky when he got promoted to "gold stripe" in karate. We brought it home and set it up that very night and popped Bucky in, and then waited for him to start loving it. Turns out it's a little difficult to explain to a hamster why he should love his new cage. He was afraid of getting stuck in the crawling tubes, the exercise wheel made him claustrophobic, and the visiting tank made him feel exposed to every owl that passed overhead in M. Edium's bedroom (no matter how many times we told him there weren't any). Also, the dark plastic roof meant he was getting a lot less light in there than he was used to, and as much as we tried to remind him that he's crepuscular he didn't seem to buy it. We gave it a few days, but while we were used to Bucky chewing on his bars once in a while, we weren't used to him chewing on his bars all the time. By the middle of the week, the food bowl never got depleted, the exercise wheel gathered cobwebs, and the top of M. Edium's dresser was covered in green drifts of pulverized wire-coating. We decided the only thing to do was move him back "home." We swapped the cages back, and the difference was unmistakable. You might think it's hard to judge the mood of a tiny creature whose emotional displays consist of scampering and twitching -- which look exactly like his unemotional displays -- but we could all tell. For one thing, he ran that cheap-ass old wheel like he thought I really had hooked it up to a cell phone charger. You might also think that M. Edium felt screwed out of his reward, which he kind of ended up wasting on a pet who didn't want it. But he's happy; Bucky now has a "vacation home" that he can visit on weekends and special occasions. The fact that he's never bothered to do so doesn't take away from that. I'm sure a lot of people with second homes have a similar relationship with them. posted by M. Giant 9:35 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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