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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Friday, April 29, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Troll Hunter As I mentioned in my review of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival is going on, and I couldn't honestly say I'd been to an international film festival without taking in at least one international film. Enter the first Norwegian feature I've ever seen: Troll Hunter. As you know, I love movies where the action is filmed entirely by the main characters. Blair Witch, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, I enjoyed them all so much I stayed away from Paranormal Activity 2 just so I wouldn't break the streak. I still haven't broken it. Troll Hunter starts with the usual framing device: here's this footage that was found, make of it what you will. Then we're watching some lame student film project made by some kids who are looking into a rash of bear-poachings. But as with any bear-poaching investigation in the Scandinavian wilderness, not everything is as it seems. As is required in stories like this, the kids ignore multiple warnings and pieces of well-intentioned advice, and track down the creepy, grizzled, secretive figure who is suspected of the bear poachings. After several abortive meetings with him, there is a very dramatic one in the middle of the night in which they discover that he is no bear-poacher, but…well, you know I hate to use spoilers, but the title of the movie is kind of a giveaway. I saw this with Chao and D. Rough, who referred to this as The Blair Troll Project, which is totally fair. But where Blair Witch is just a straight line of increasing mystery and fear, Hans the Troll Hunter and his young charges get to spend a lot of quality time together, meaning he serves as our guide through his shadowy, one-man world of Norwegian troll hunting. One of the main aspects of which is the government cover-up that keeps the public ignorant of the existence of trolls. By the time we're done, the only real unanswered questions are the ones regarding exactly what happened right at the end, but that's plenty. Unsurprisingly, the best scenes are the ones where Hans tangles with the trolls out in the field. One really gets a sense of the variety inherent in a troll hunter's job, with the different breeds and situation one runs into. Unfortunately, you also get some looks at the trolls that are just a little too clear, and although they're plenty ugly, they tend to have these big bulbous noses that severely cut into their scariness factor. The other problem is pacing. Between troll encounters, there are lots of long, talky, expository scenes where Hans explains the various ins and outs of his spectacularly crappy, stinky, unrewarding job, his dissatisfaction with which is his main impetus for bringing these kids along to begin with. And the less said about the movie's "scientific" explanation for how trolls get killed, the better. But the movie says a lot about it anyway. The other thing separating this from Blair Witch is the humor. There's some pretty decent black comedy in this thing, and I'm pretty sure almost all of it is intentional. Although it's hard to tell with these stoic Scandinavians sometimes. Trolls probably aren't going to be replacing vampires or zombies in pop culture any time soon, but this has some pretty indelible images, building to a climactic payoff. And if a movie can make trolls entertaining to someone who used to hunt them down on internet message boards like me, it'll probably work on anyone. posted by M. Giant 10:22 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, April 27, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Rio Going to kids' movies with M. Edium, I've become accustomed to animated features having bits aimed at entertaining me, too. Which has often made me wonder, what would a movie be like if it were aimed entirely at kids, with jokes too stale and flat and a story too predictable for an adult to appreciate? Well, after I took M. Edium to see Rio, I don't wonder any more. Rio is a fish-out-of-water tale, about a blue macaw (Jesse Eisenberg) poached from the Brazilian rainforest while still a hatchling who is then raised here in Minnesota. Having reached adulthood in an environment where the biggest danger he faces is the creepily codependent relationship he shares with his adoptive owner, Blu is predictably unprepared to deal with the outside world. Then one day a Brazilian ornithologist shows up wanting to mate Blu with the only other blue macaw in existence, and he wants Blu and his owner Linda to travel to Rio to make it happen. Which they do, and then stuff ensues. Not hilarity, or anything all that interesting, just stuff. Turns out Blu's putative mating partner Jewel is pretty much his exact opposite, yearning for flight and freedom and all that happy crappy, so of course they end up forced to be together in more ways than one. For most of the film their feet are chained together, The Defiant Ones-style. However, Anne Hathaway's voice is almost as dorky-sounding as Eisenberg's, so that undercuts the contrast a bit. I don't know when she recorded her role, but given that she plays a character shackled to a clay-footed loser who keeps dragging her down, at the very least it prepared her for co-hosting the Oscars. To be fair, the movie's amazing to look at, with breathtaking aerial shots of the dramatic scenery, server-crashing views of colorfully teeming wildlife, and even some great views of Rio's seamy underbelly (and even seamier, tin-roofed overbelly). But then, a movie set in Rio during Carnival would have to work pretty hard not to be. Even the voice cast is colorful, if you don't count the three lily-white leads. But none of them is really put to good use. I was fully expecting Jemaine Clement to save this movie when he finally showed up, but this is even more of a lost cause than Dinner for Schmucks. But I guess what really matters is that M. Edium loved it. He's still bringing up bits that he remembers, bits that I, sorry to say, don't. Aside from a chuckle or two and the big emotional climax, it's all kind of a brightly-colored, dully-plotted, witlessly-written blur. And a couple of Happy Meal toys. So if you're looking for a movie to bring your kids to where you don't feel guilty for enjoying it as much as they do, this is definitely the one. posted by M. Giant 9:08 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Hello...Have a fun day
By Yeah, I was pretty bored during that one too. Though I'll bet it was pretty in 3D.
By Thursday, April 21, 2011 When I was growing up, my family and I used to make the twelve-hour drive down to Kansas and Missouri to visit the relatives a few times a year. I haven't made the trip nearly as often after I grew up and got married, but my dad and I drove down together to see my grandmother last month. It's amazing how much faster that drive is without three kids who constantly need to pee and drink and eat and throw up and argue all the time about who's on who's half of the seat, and all before portable electronic devices were invented. While we were driving, my aunt -- who was at the nursing home with my grandmother at the time -- told my dad about helping her get ready for bed that night. My aunt collected Grandma's glasses, her hearing aid, and her dentures. Grandma cracked, "I suppose you want my peg leg next." Grandma did not have a peg leg. My parents have been down there for the past couple of weeks with my grandma, and tonight my mom called with the news that we had all been expecting for a little while now. I'll be making that drive again in the next few days. So if I don't update until later next week, that's why. Just so you know. posted by M. Giant 9:01 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:M., you have my heartfelt sympathy. My grandmothers have both been gone for over ten years, but I still miss them. And I know both of them would have snickered about your Grandma's 'peg leg,' and wished they'd come up with it themselves.
By Thinking of you, Jeff. Not surprised to hear you had a smart-alecky Grandma. I did, too. There's nothing better.
By As someone who is waiting for that phone call herself, I deeply sympathize. I'm so sorry. She sounds like a remarkable woman.
By I am so, so sorry for your loss.
By So sorry for your loss. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.
By I'm sorry for your loss & glad she got to know her cool grandchildren and great grandchild. Take good care.
By Tuesday, April 19, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil In this era of media saturation, it's rare that one gets to decide to see a movie based only on the title and nothing else. Fortunately, Chao e-mailed me the titles of some movies he was interested in as part of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival that's going on this month, and I immediately decided that I was going to see theone called Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. When I met Chao at the theater, I told him not to tell me anything about it, and if you don't want me to tell you anything about it, you should probably click away right now. Preferably on one of those ads to your right. The host at the beginning of the movie did say that it's kind of a spoof on 80s slasher films, with a hapless crew of good-looking college aged morons venturing into the woods and getting killed one by one. Which it is. Seriously, stop reading now. Ads. Right over there. So we meet these kids on their way into the wooded hills of West Virginia, and of course immediately hate them. While we're still waiting to find out which one's Tucker and which one's Dale, they soon encounter a couple of dead-eyed, creepy-looking rednecks in costumes straight out of Deliverance and are quite freaked out, because that's what happens. What doesn't usually happen, at least until this movie, is that the hillbillies turn out to be perfectly sweet guys. It takes a minute for us to get over our own prejudices, but suddenly you realize that they're being played by Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine as the titular Tucker and Dale. They're both rocking accents and have a rusty pickup truck full of open beer cans and sharp implements, but Dale (Labine) is just shy and a little slow, while Tucker (Tudyk) is a soulful philosopher in touch with his emotions and willing to pursue his modest dreams. It's the kids who are dangerous morons. Once everyone's up in the woods, the misunderstandings continue, as Tucker and Dale rescue the hot but hapless Allison (Katrina Bowden from 30 Rock), and her friends think they've kidnapped her for whatever nefarious backwoods purposes. Yes, they actually rescued her after an accident they pretty much caused, but still. Led by Chad, the alpha-douche who was obviously raised on too much Nietzsche, Hemingway, and his own origin story, the kids soon find themselves in a slasher movie of their own idiotic making, with Tucker and Dale as the exceedingly unwilling antagonists. Obviously it's not long before we find out who the real monster is. And yes, that's a cliché, but I'm having fun with it. Like the movie does. It sounds stupid, and it is, but it's also pretty damn funny. I've always liked Alan Tudyk, but he's a revelation here, displaying range and comic chops I had no idea he possessed. And yes, I watched Firefly (some). Speaking of which, as much as I try to avoid spoilers, you should be warned that there's a Tudyk vs. branch-through-windshield moment that will probably give you Serenity-related PTSD flashbacks. So should you see it? You should. I just don't know how yet. But, you know, if you ever get a chance, jump at it. Just don't overshoot your jump and…well, never mind. That would be a spoiler. posted by M. Giant 5:11 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Oh hell...I'm a HUGE Alan Tudyk fan and was so excited to see this but I still haven't forgiven Joss for Serenity so I guess I'll give this one a pass. Did you see Tudyk in the original Death at a Funeral? Genius!
By Monday, April 18, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Win Win I actually saw this movie by accident. What I wanted to see was Hanna. Sometime before nine PM, I checked the movie times in my area and everything was either really late or really far away, but somehow I tricked myself into thinking that it started at my third-closest theater at 10:10, when in fact that was the starting time at my sixth-closest theater, and when I got to the third-closest theater in time for a 10:10 showing that was actually at 10:45, I was like, screw that, it's Monday, and bought a ticket to the 10:05 showing of Win Win instead. If nothing else, I figured the optimistic title might make for a good hook for the story of how I ended up seeing it. So in this movie, Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) has problems, as every protagonist played by Paul Giamatti always does. His small-town family law practice is about to go under, he's going to need to replace the boiler in his office building before it blows up, the high school wrestling team he coaches sucks wind, his health isn't the greatest, and his best friend Terry, played by Bobby Cannavale, appears to have wandered in from some other, much wackier, movie. Or possibly a bad old sitcom. But just like we know any movie protagonist with a perfect life is going to run into some serious problems in the first twenty minutes, we also know that a movie protagonist who starts out with serious problems is going to be presented with a rare opportunity to fix at least some of them. Which, not to give too much away, is more or less what happens to Mike. The title, although the non-Cannavale parts of the movie are too subtle to hit us over the head with it, has to do with the fact that in so doing, he finds himself in a position to make the world a better place for some of the people around him. The only problem is that for all this to happen, he also had to do something really shitty. So it's more like a win-win-lose thing. I defy you to find a review of a Paul Giamatti movie that doesn't comment on his remarkable physiognomy, and I'm now discovering that the reason for that that it's pretty much impossible not to. It's riveting to just stare at that live-action Homer Simpson mug of his for hours, if only to figure out how the damn thing works. In Win Win, which is pretty much a quiet, living-room dramedy, he mostly holds it tightly in check, unsheathing those startling incisors only rarely and keeping his eyeballs inside his skull eighty-nine percent of the time. Amy Ryan as Mike's wife Jackie is unsurprisingly fantastic and real, almost enough to forgive her for being gone from The Office for so long. Jeffrey Tambor is Mike's officemate/assistant coach who goes through the movie in a such a sad fog you end up wondering who's going to fix his problems. Bobby Cannavale is, well, see above. But the catalyst for a lot of what happens is the wrestling prodigy played by Alex Shaffer, a skinny, pale kid with a bleached mop who doesn't seem like anything at all until he gets into the ring, and then you get home and see on IMDb that he won the New Jersey state wrestling championship last year and you're not really surprised. The kid isn't called upon to do much acting, largely because teenagers don't do much acting, but he does pretty well with what he's given. He's so taciturn and reticent that he comes off sullen and disengaged, although he slowly proves himself anything but. I can relate to that, except for the second part. Don't worry, this isn't a wrestling movie, or even a sports movie. The sport could have been anything, up to and including male solo synchronized swimming, without taking away from what it's really about, which is trying to do the right thing for as many people as possible. Mike begins and ends the movie being asked how he is, and at the end, I think he's telling the truth. I still want to see Hanna, though. posted by M. Giant 12:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, April 14, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Source Code Okay, first of all, didn't see Moon.. Meant to. Didn't. Probably will someday. Not today. Let's move on. I saw Duncan Jones's second feature, Source Code, with Febrifuge the other night. We both liked it. He may have liked it more than me, having a) seen Jones's first movie Moon and b) being a former daily passenger on Chicago Commuter Rail. That second fact is relevant because a CCR train provides much of the setting for the movie. At the very beginning, Jake Gyllenhaal wakes up aboard it and is thoroughly disoriented until the train blows up eight minutes later. The end. Okay, obviously not. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and the crew of the Enterprise in that ST:TNG episode with Frasier, our hero has to keep reliving a specific period of time until he gets it right. The difference here is that there's an external clock to an even worse disaster, and that external clock is running out. Which, really, is necessary, because as we learn early on, this disaster he's reliving isn't something that can be averted, because it's already happened. As much as Jake resists the idea, he might as well watch Romeo and Juliet on repeat and keep hoping this is the time she'll wake up soon enough. Which nobody I know ever did, how about you? The movie actually takes place in three worlds. There's the train, and there's the place Jake Gyllenhaal returns to between train rides, and there's the sort of Mission Control where Vera Farmiga plays his Capcom with just enough repressed sympathy and Jeffrey Wright is the brilliant but cold-hearted scientist whose fussiness crosses the line into creepy. And it's quite impressive that we're constantly interested in what happens in all three of them. There are several points where Jake goes a little…let's just say "off-task," but it's not as annoying as it might otherwise be, because hey, we're curious too. That's tricky to pull off. Really, the only thing that doesn't really work for me is the love story. Jake falls in love with his seatmate by living the same eight minutes with her over and over, which, okay, but it's a little hard to see how she'd develop similar feelings given that for her, each time is the first. Which I'm not saying she does, because that would be a spoiler, and I avoid spoilers. Some people think that a sci-fi thriller lives or dies on the premise, and I don't think that's necessarily the case, because this is a pretty good movie even though the premise is almost entirely nonsense. If we accept the possibility of accessing and then reliving someone else's final eight minutes of life through their (incinerated, mind you) brain, maybe we can also accept the possibility of playing around inside those memories, and interacting with a somehow independent world that exists inside those memories, and possibly, if we're pushing it, causing people and things to react differently and learning things and going places the original person never could have learned or gone, but that's it. And then Source Code goes further than that anyway, to the point where at the end you're not entirely sure what happened. And not in an Inception-top way, either. Also, if this technology existed, I think they'd beta-test it by solving a few simple murders before relying on it to resolve a major Homeland Security crisis, but maybe that's just me. Besides, that would be a TV series, and we already had Quantum Leap. posted by M. Giant 8:07 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Jake's seatmate knew, and had a crush on, the guy whose mind he was inhabiting, so I can buy that she'd like Jake-as-other-guy too. Yeah, Jake wasn't acting like that guy always did, but she'd just see that as another layer to Original Guy's personality. Basically, she had all those previous feelings to fall back on; she wasn't literally falling for some guy in eight minutes.
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Chicagoans: you've already realized there's no such thing as "Chicago Commuter Rail" or its snazzy CCR logo; if I'd been a daily passenger on that, I would have driven my classmates nuts with humming "Who'll Stop the Rain" and "Fortunate Son" on a daily basis. But whole big sections of this movie take place on what is obviously a Metra train bound for Union Station. It seems to be one of the west-end lines, complete with Dunkin Donuts in one of the cars. When I lived in Chicagoland for grad school, I mused about using a Metra car for a concert, a play, or a movie set. Apparently so did screenwriter Ben Ripley.
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The producers paid Metra a good amount of money to shoot outside scenes of its trains for the movie, but apparently didn't want the Metra name used. Stupid, since we all *know* its Metra anyway.
By Tuesday, April 12, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Surprise! Last month, Trash bought me a Groupon for something called Talk Cinema. At the art-house theater near our home, they apparently do this thing a couple of Saturdays a month where people can go, get free coffee, watch a movie that isn't even in theaters yet, and talk about it afterwards. The catch-slash-draw is, you don't know what the movie's going to be until you show up. Honestly, it could be anything. I was kind of looking forward to being surprised. Now, if life were a Seinfeld episode, Chao and I would have shown up to learn that today's presentation would be some near-parody of a French costume drama, with a poster of people in period outfits making out under a tree, maybe with the word "Princess" in the title. But Trash had watched some trailers on Hulu a few nights before while I was in the room, so I knew there were plenty of modern, gripping, independent, international films coming out, and many of them looked gritty and grim. It was probably going to be one of those. The hypothetical French costume drama would be just too on-the-Gallic-nose. Well…  And as a bonus, it even has the sound of the word "poncey" in the title. This isn't exactly a feminist piece, which shouldn't be surprising given that it's set in the sixteenth century, based on a short story written in the seventeenth, but I think I've gotten used to people working around that. During the 139 minutes of this film, the last half of which my tankard of Pibb Xtra started crying to get out, I kept waiting for the titular princess to exercise or even achieve some degree of agency over her own life, but from beginning to end she's pretty much at the mercy of the men in her life. There's her loser dad, her loser fiancé, the loser fiancé's allegedly hot brother who just looks like a French Eric Balfour to me, her upright but nerdy and jealous husband, her arrogant father-in-law, her husband's old teacher (who becomes hers in the course of events), and the King's brother, the Duke of Anjou. Basically she just gets bounced off these various men like a cue ball, and on the rare occasions when she's allowed to make decisions, she makes shitty ones. I probably shouldn't have expected more from a seventeenth-century story, but then I didn't have any reason to expect anything at all. It's pretty low-tech, with no special effects of any kind. Unfortunately that extends even to the battle scenes, which, given that the story is set during the war between the Catholics and the Huguenots, there are plenty of. It's college-theater fight choreography, but then people who see this won't be there for the fight choreography in the first place. People will go for the costumes, which I hope I won't embarrass Chao by saying we were both pretty impressed with them. Fifteenth-century clothes often look pretty ridiculous to our eyes, but this cast pulled it off pretty well for the most part, moving like they dress that way every day. And people will see this for the costumes. In the end, though, I kind of wished we'd held off until the next Talk Cinema event and seen that movie instead. What movie? I have no idea. Still, though. And I don't even drink coffee. posted by M. Giant 9:06 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
For a French movie, there sure was a severe lack of boobs...
By Sunday, April 10, 2011 M. Edium Chooses I thought it was going to take over an hour to get through our $1,000 matching contribution on Sarah's Donors Choose contest, but Trash and M. Edium burned through it not like it was a grand, but a grand prix. Here's a taste of what they dropped the cabbage on: Word Matter - in honor of M.Edium's first dictionary AND Pamie's first mention in one: Learning through Legos - If you're not brand-new to this blog, you KNOW why M.Edium selected this one: Visit the Moon and Reach for the Stars - Santa brought M.Edium a high powered telescope for Christmas, so we should bring one to these kids. There is No Skeleton In Our Closet - SCIENCE! And DISSECTION! Dissecting--Icky, Gross, Science Fun and Learning - I mean, you read the title, right? Science Rocks! - Science and Rocks - a perfect combo: Earthquakes of Early California/The Science of Earthquakes - We have had many discussions about the recent events in Japan, so this was an easy connection: Ever Seen Blood Pop And Burst? Well Now You Can! - Ugh. What's Wrong with Buffalo's Weather? - Weather may be a recent interest, but science isn't. Best of all, all but one of these projects is still open, so you can still make a contribution of your own to carry any one of them (or any eight of them) over the finish line. we believe in you! Thanks to Trash for pulling together the project list. I couldn't have done it without her, and I don't just mean I wouldn't have. posted by M. Giant 4:52 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, April 07, 2011 Short Stuff I feel like kind of an ass for not talking up Sarah's latest Donors Choose contest. It's just been bad timing for us. M. Edium is prepping for a big karate tournament on Sunday, two of my biggest day-job projects ever are in my lap concurrently, I'm sad about my grandmother, I keep having to clean up ponds in my basement, M. Edium is dealing with some crap at Montessori, and if Phil hadn't mercifully given me the week off you probably wouldn't even be reading this. But that's no excuse for my abandoning public education in this country to the forces currently arrayed against it and hell-bent on its destruction, now is it? I won't bore you with the depressing story of how M. Edium's kindergarten class got its room supplies, because it's apparently normal now. Just go to the contest pages and BOGGLE at some of the stuff that's not getting paid for in public schools these days. And then, you know, pay for it. We haven't gotten around to our own contributions yet, but that's coming up quick. I won't go into detail, but M. Edium is going to have a lot of shopping to do. Update: Well, now it can be told - we're doing a $1,000 match for the first $66,000. Which y'all already hit today, so we've got some work to do. And then on to the next match! Update Update: M. Edium picked his projects! He's super excited about each one of them. We'll post them later so you can join in the fun. * * * It's a big week for dictionary excitement. Hours before Pamie learned that she was in the OED, M. Edium picked out and bought his own first dictionary. He gave it a test drive while reading that night's bedtime story, Double Fudge by Judy Blume. Words looked up: "hives," "unanimous," and "laryngitis." We haven't checked "muffin top" yet. Update Update UPDATE!: Not to give anything away, but one of the projects M. Edium funded had to do with dictionaries. By the way, have you read those Fudge books lately? There may be crueler, eviler parents in literature, but I can't think of any who are more incompetent and ineffectual than Fudge's. It's like his older brother was born already in fourth grade and Fudge is the first actual child they've ever had to deal with. * * * So this middle-aged-dad-band I'm in has another gig lined up, playing for the tailgaters at the St. Paul Saints game on Friday, May 20th. Should be a fun gig. M. Edium's looking forward to it. We went to a game last year and there was a band playing then as well. We're both excited about that band being me. The game (and the gig) is happening at Midway Stadium on Energy Park Drive in, of all cities, St. Paul. I assume, at least. If it's an away game we might have to go to Sioux Falls. * * * Even though M. Edium is six, I'm still semi-accustomed to being woken up in the middle of the night to help tend to his nocturnal emergencies. Sometimes it's bad dreams, sometimes it's a fever, sometimes it's just a wish to be carried into the bathroom. I should probably put the kibosh on that last one some time soon. But the other night it was piercing ear pain. I woke up about 20%, got out of bed, and thought, woozily, Oh, great, he's got an ear infection in the middle of the night, what am I supposed to do now? But then, as I was heading down the hall, I realized it was my ear that was hurting. He wasn't even awake. Kind of a good news/bad news situation, but with the line between them reeeeeally blurred. So I thought, How the hell did I get an ear infection in the middle of the night? But then the pain was gone this morning, so I figure I was just sleeping on it wrong until it protested. It probably wasn't even that painful, and just seemed that way because I'm a big pissy baby when I'm trying to sleep. What felt like a screaming, intolerable ten during the half-minute I waited for the sweet relief of blissful oblivion would probably be about π. And the even better news is that M. Edium doesn't have an ear infection. As far as I know. posted by M. Giant 8:49 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:It's okay he hasn't looked up "muffin top" yet. Keep his innocence for as long as possible!
By Fudge's parents are seriously the worst. I mean, he eats Peter's pet! And they're like "whoops!" he's horrible and Peter is just constantly expected to suck it up.
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Ah, Fudge gets his comeuppance--at a certain point he becomes the middle kid. :P
By I used to fall asleep in a way that somehow cut off circulation to my ear. When I'd roll over and the circulation would come rushing back, the pain would wake me up. Luckily it doesn't last that long.
By Tuesday, April 05, 2011 Vanity Unfair We keep a small sponge behind the faucet in the downstairs bathroom that we use for wiping down the sink. The other morning, I noticed that it was pretty well soaked and sitting in a small puddle of water. In fact, the puddle had spread, and was dripping over to the corner of the sink, where it was slowly dripping down between the side of the vanity and the wall, into a dark, inaccessible alcove. I mopped up the water, tossed the saturated sponge into the tub, asked Trash when she'd last used the sponge (she hadn't), and forgot about it. But I was reminded of it when I went downstairs to do laundry that night and found a small lake in our basement. It was obvious what had happened. Somehow the faucet was leaking not from the tap, but from the base where it joins the sink counter, and obviously had been doing so all day. And all that water was now on the basement floor. And, as an added special bonus, in the catboxes. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be) I have some experience drying that floor. Between spring snowmelts, rainstorm runoff, a leaky roof, a blocked laundry drain, and that time the chest freezer got unplugged, I've gotten entirely too good at this. IT's just a matter of finding the bath towels stained from the previous occasions and trying not to be too bothered by the fact that I'm going to end up killing half a roll of paper towels before transforming the floor-pond into just a giant damp spot. So with that emergency taken care of, I still had to figure out how to stop it from happening again. Which is something I had no idea how to accomplish. What I'd ordinarily do is call the incompetent loser plumber who "fixed" the faucet last summer and raise some hell, but since said plumber was me, that wasn't going to get me anywhere. It was Trash who came up with the idea for a temporary fix, which was to simply shut off the water supply to the faucet. That's what I did a couple of times overnight, but it was an imperfect fix; most of the time you don't want the second thing you do in the morning to be reaching under the sink to turn those little handles so you can wash your hands. Another backup plan was to jam a bath towel into that crack between the vanity and the wall, where the water had pooled up and leaked into the basement in the first place. And that worked, too, because it was pretty wet when I pulled it out. But all of this was putting off the ultimate solution, which I knew would require me to put all my paltry plumbing skills to bear. And I was going to be gone all day Saturday, and I didn't want Trash to deal with that mess and M. Edium --or M. Edium to have to deal with that mess and Trash, had that been the case. I looked at where the water was coming from, and where it was flowing, and knew what I needed to do. Water flows downhill, so I just needed to change which direction is downhill. And to do that, I used some of the building material with which I've always been the most skilled:  Yes, that's a Lego, elevating the back of the sink so that water leaking out of the faucet base will trickle into the sink and down the drain instead of behind the vanity and into the basement. Brilliant, yes? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. More later. posted by M. Giant 10:24 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, April 03, 2011 Science Fair to Middling I remember the science fair of my fourth grade year as something that loomed large and intimidatingly in my mind, and took up so much time, that sometimes I forgot that M. Edium's own kindergarten science fair didn't have to be the same way. For either of us, even. It actually ended up falling to the moms to take care of it all, which worked out well for the kids and for me. Trash brought the model mountain for the avalanche, and his lab partner's mom brought the water utensils and the instant snow, because we thought it best to keep those two items separate until it was time, lest both all the fake snow and all the water get used up before the day of the science fair even came. And by all the water, I of course mean all the water in the city. Trash and the other mom had to bring it to the school to set it up early in the morning for whatever reason. There are all sorts of requirements, like you have to say if your project is potentially messy (yes) or could spill (yes), but M. Edium's must be relatively tame, because it didn't even press the envelope of things that weren't allowed, like open flames, live animals, body parts, germ cultures, nuclear waste, or captured demons. I have to say, for a couple of kindergartners, they did a great job. They pretty much did their own research, and most of their own writing, although the moms did help a little with some of the actual lettering. While they were setting up -- in a gymnasium full of other projects by fifth-graders, fourth-graders, and one other kindergartner, another parent came up to Trash and asked, "How old?" Trash, expecting to have to be defensive, started explaining about how it was two kindergartners working together, but how they did 98% of the work themselves. "Huh," this other parent said. "Better handwriting than my fourth-grader's." Most parents didn't actually get to go until after school that day. And even after that, because for some reason the science fair coincided with the "Celebration of Learning," in which we got to visit M. Edium's classroom and look at all the work he's been doing, most notably his books and stories whose primary moral appears to be that he doesn't have a Nintendo DS yet. But after that was over and done with (and we had gotten the message that he really, really wants us to buy him a Nintendo DS), it was time to adjourn to the gymnasium. I don't want to spend much time describing the other kids' projects, out of respect for their privacy and that of their families, but there was a surprising number of really cool projects in there. Lots of them were illustrated with photographic lab notes, and most had fun little demonstrations. For the most part, it was a pretty impressive display. Which is not to say that there were a few projects that made me feel a little surprised that there was only one other kindergartner participating. But M. Edium and his lab partner each got to run through the miniature avalanche demonstration several times, and without any pressure of the goal to make it to the next level like I had in fourth grade, he simply had a good time. He and his lab partner both got their little green participation ribbons, and when we left, he was happy to just bring the avalanche kit and leave the poster board display behind. And of course he's looking forward to next year's science fair. And if I have to do as little work next year as I did this year (it would be impossible for me to do less), I am too. 
posted by M. Giant
7:33 PM
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