Velcrometer

Cage Rage II

2012-02-02T07:44:00.000-08:00

Cage Rage II

Like a lot of people, Trash and I spent a lot of time between Christmas and New Year's (and some after) cleaning house and purging some of the cruft that accumulates when you live in one place long enough, or have a young child who gets shitloads of toys every Christmas, or, as in our case, both.

One of the things we found was the old Bucky's original cage, untouched since the day the second Bucky had come home and we'd moved him into that new cage M. Edium had gotten and which the old Bucky had hated as much as I did.

Now, I'm not saying the new Bucky doesn't hate that cage, because he does. On the other hand, he hates everything. He hates getting touched, let alone picked up; he hates noise, he hates quiet, he hates dark, he hates light, he hates exercise and sleep. I think he even hates sunflower seeds and only takes them from my hand so I won't have them, because he hates me more than anything,

M. Edium had resisted moving the new Bucky into the old cage, given how hard he'd worked for the new one, but while we were cleaning up Trash suggested to him that like original Bucky, the new one might also be happier in the old cage. He certainly couldn't get any pissier. I think by this point, M. Edium was also tired of having a hamster that was too crabby to play with. He missed what we used to call Bucky Time. So this time, when Trash suggested switching back, he agreed. Or I assume he did, because I'd already left the room to get the old cage.

Soon new Bucky was in the old cage, and as hard as it is to judge a hamster's mood, his seemed to improve immediately. He hopped right onto his old-school exercise wheel and started running, enjoyed some food, made himself at home in his little plastic igloo, and most of all stopped swearing at us.

At first we thought that maybe now, or at least in time, he'd be a friendly little hamster who would love to come out and play and run around on our arms and hands and faces like original Bucky used to do. So far that hasn't been the case. In fact, he still refuses to let anyone pick him up or pet him. But he hasn't bitten me again, at least.

Actually, I don't even care. Now, instead of living in a cage that takes 45 minutes to clean and scarcely twice that long to get stinky again, he lives in a cage that I can clean from tope to bottom in ten minutes, and takes weeks to get even remotely smelly. Not that I plan to wait for weeks, now that it's such an easier and faster ask. In fact, I think I'm going to go clean it right now. And then I'll go clean it again.

Bucky may be slightly happier, but I'm a lot happier, and that's what really matters, after all.

M. Ovie Reviews: The Artist

2012-01-23T19:24:00.000-08:00

M. Ovie Reviews: The Artist

As a silent movie released in the twenty-first century, The Artist is an intentional anachronism. A gimmick. A stunt. A feature-length gag. I love it unreservedly and unironically.

Appropriately, this silent film is about a silent-film star. As it opens in 1927, George Valentin is on top of the world. But of course the world moves out from under him when the talkies are invented. And thus commences his long, slow slide, made worse by the Great Depression and his own hubris. Of course it’s a familiar story. It’s a silent movie. You were expecting Tree of Life, maybe?

Obviously it’s not really silent. It’s got a score like the old silent films did, but obviously my local art house doesn’t have an orchestra pit, let alone an orchestra, so there’s a soundtrack. And ambient sound isn’t entirely absent for the whole thing, although to say more would give too much away.

I don’t want to try to come off as someone who knows much about silent cinema, because I really don’t. My dad checked some Super 8 Charlie Chaplin movies out of the library a couple of times and showed them on the basement wall when I was a kid, but that’s about the extent of my experience. Oh, and one Halloween in high school I saw Phantom of the Opera at what is now one of my former workplaces, the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul (known at that time as the World Theater), with Phillip Brunelle playing the organ. And I guess I should count Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike, which I saw in Film Studies class in college. So feel free to go ahead and kick me in my pretentious head. But seriously, that’s it.

You don’t really need even that small amount of background to enjoy The Artist, though. Obviously the dialogue is pretty spare, and the subtitles (or "inbetweentitles," as the case may be) even more so. In the best silent film tradition, they're only used on thise rare occasions when you can't already guess what the actors are saying, and there are plenty of scenes with no talking at all, or almost none, and there are a lot of plot points communicated by characters silently showing each other newspaper headlines. So aside from a few of the talkier scenes, there's almost no interruption of the action. It also has some fun with the overall concept. After the old-school opening credits, the very first scene shows George in his latest movie playing a secret agent under torture, refusing to talk. Get it? He refuses to talk!

The movie has plenty of other, equally unchallenging symbolism, like the shitcanned George encountering the young starlet on a staircase (she's on her way up, he's on his way down) and the timely moment in one of his films when he's sucked down by quicksand, and the various ways he's an uncommunicative dick to his wife. And of course there's the whole theme of a guy trapped in a world that no longer exists, embodied by the fact that we're watching a silent movie, half of which isn't even set in the time of silent movies any more. But we're in on these obvious tropes, and we expect silent movies to be broad, so it doesn't feel like we're being insulted.

The cast is a bit more of a mixed bag. As George, Jean Dujardin is totally convincing as the dashing twenties-era movie star, with his pomaded hair, pencil mustache (which grows in as his fortunes decline), winning smile, and effortlessly physical acting style. John Goodman is at his rubber-faced best, constantly making me feel like he was born decades too late. However, the female lead, as good she is, has a 21st-century look that isn't quite de-Jessica Bieled by her chic bob; and oddly James Cromwell is the most inappropriately subtle actor in the film despite being the only one old enough to have been in silent movies (I exaggerate; he was born in 1940).

I think in the end, the amount you enjoy The Artist is proportional not to your feelings about silent films, but your feelings about Singin' in the Rain. In many ways, this story is almost a mirror image of that one (and the score doesn't go out of its way to not remind you sometimes). If Singin' in the Rain is Hamlet, then The Artist is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. And I love Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Much as I love The Artist.

M. Ovie Reviews: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

2012-01-11T13:17:00.000-08:00

M .Ovie Reviews: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Okay, here's how big a dork I am: the only reason I was remotely interested in seeing MI:GP at all was because I'm a fan of the director, Brad Bird, who previously directed The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Both cartoons, yes. I was kind of expecting another one, to be honest, but it didn't turn out that way. This is actually one of the more exciting action movies I've seen in a while.

There are a couple of interesting things about the way this movie is being marketed. First, there's no number in the title, which is usually a sign of a tired franchise with nothing left to say. Second, it's implied that this movie represents some kind of passing of the torch from Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt character to whomever Jeremy Renner is playing. Actually, neither could be further from the truth.

I can understand why a studio might want to downplay the couch-jumper's role, given that he's had a few PR missteps in the past few years that have left him not quite as popular as he used to be. But no, it turns out that this is very much an Ethan Hunt joint, with his hair, moves, chronic acrophilia, and messiah complex on full display. Renner steals a moment or two (and at one point a gun) from him, but it's Cruise control all the way. Feel free to kick me in the face for writing that.

As for the state of the franchise, I liked this movie a lot better than the second one (I can't speak to the third one, which I skipped). There's the obligatory globetrotting chase for an internationally vital McGuffin, but as always, what that is never seems as interesting as all the crap they go through to get it. Including that sequence with Ethan dangling from the ridiculously tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Even more shocking than that stunt is the scene immediately preceding, where Ethan expresses actual doubt that he can pull it off. That's almost a more impressive feat than jumping out a window a quarter-mile in the air. And then there's the sense that the world we live in is like a life-sized Disneyland, with spies able to go "backstage" at any given moment and use seemingly innocuous items like pay phones and train cars as vital resources that have been placed there for their express use. It's a little Get Smart at times, but you're having enough fun that you don't mind much.

Simon Pegg was also a nice surprise. Not that I expected him to suck, but that I don't think I knew he was going to be in it. He gets all the good jokes, of course, including one great spy-tech-based sight gag inside the Kremlin. Some chick I've never heard of rounds out the IMF team, with the primary job of looking uptight and not towering over Ethan Hunt too much.

Febrifuge and I saw it on an IMAX screen, which I would recommend for enjoying Bird's kinetic camera work to greatest effect. Because dude rocks it. Could have done without the eighty-foot close-ups of the dude with the broken nose, though.

A success overall, but you should probably leave the movie when Ving Rhames does. After that it gets pretty irritating.

M. Ovie Reviews: New Year's Eve

2012-01-05T21:48:00.000-08:00

M. Ovie Reviews: New Year's Eve

You know how there are some movies you don't think you'll like at all, but then you see them and your low expectations make them seem so much better by comparison? New Year's Eve is not one of those movies. I hated it even more than I expected to, which I did not think was possible.

In case you're blissfully unaware of the existence of this abomination, Garry Marshall has shat out another Love, Actually ripoff, with a sprawling cast of previously respectable stars phoning in mini-performances in a series of holiday-centered vignettes that all intersect at one point or another in the larger arc. It's one of those films where you can't help rolling your eyes every time the paths of characters from different story lines cross each other's, because it's all so contrived and forced and oh my God I'm actually making it sound better than it is.

The good news is that in this over-blended dog's breakfast of a couple hundred other (and better) romantic comedies, no one storyline is inflicted upon us for very long. The bad news is that every bad storyline always seems to give way to a worse one. Don't ask me how this is possible.

Trash (who sent Chao and me to see this turd, may she melt in Hell) didn't believe us when we got back and ran down the litany of familiar actors and even more familiar plots that were firehosed at us for two hours. You probably won't either, so let's just say that the cast of slumming thousands included not one Oscar winner, not two Oscar winners, not three Oscar winners, but FOUR FUCKING ACADEMY AWARD WINNERS. Revoke every last one of them, I don't care. Katherine Heigl was in it too, somehow quintessentially. She probably could have played every part and it would have been just as good.

So to sum up, New Year's Eve is a terrible movie, full of terrible people acting the way nobody acts and doing things nobody does and talking the way nobody talks, in storylines that were on the whole less believable than anything that happened in the entirety of The Muppets. By the time the allegedly funny outtakes rolled, we were so starved for actual entertainment that we chuckled once.

But I think the worst part is that the inspirational speech that one character gives, that completely transfixes the world for no damn reason, which you think signals that the movie is almost over and you can go home? You're only halfway done, my friend. That's just shitty.

2012-01-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Late 2011

Yikes, I'm so far behind on my movie reviews for 2011 it's embarrassing. Now it's not even the year any more. I think I need to just give up on full reviews of the outstanding ones and just do the quick capsule write-ups like I used to do. Otherwise there's no way I'm ever going to catch up. At this point I just hope I can remember them all.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

See? What did I tell you?

Puss in Boots

I was not expecting to like this at all, and I didn't love it, but I have to give it props for the eye-popping action scenes. Even in 2-D it's quite the spectacle, and I enjoyed the Rodrigo y Gabriela music on the soundtrack as well. Not terribly faithful to the source material, however. M. Edium heard about a stage production of the play happening in our area and said he wanted to see it. "You need to know," I told him, "that the play will have absolutely nothing in common with the movie except a cat with boots and a hat." M. Edium asked, "Does he have a sword, too?" And thus I stood corrected.

In Time

Andrew Niccol seems to fancy himself some kind of clever social commentator by virtue of the fact he keeps creating these alternate-universe situations that would never happen. Like anyone would give a shit about The Truman Show unless he hung out with a lot of Real Housewives, or a computer-generated actress like S1mone would be interesting to anyone at all. Now he drops a hamfisted class-warfare allegory about haves and have-nots in which time has replaced currency. You have to use time to buy everything, even as it passes without you doing anything. After reaching age 25, at which point they stop aging, most people have a very limited amount, which ticks down on huge glowing clocks on their arms. Justin Timberlake and his social peers live in grinding poverty with only hours left in their lives at any given time (which seems like it would lead to a lot more tragedy than the fate of his mom, played by Olivia Wilde, which at least puts an end to their creepy sexual chemistry). That is, until a chance meeting with rich centenarian Matt Bomer triggers a chain of events that turns him into a temporal Robin Hood, with Amanda Seyfried in an inexplicable Velma Kelly wig as his partner in crime. And it is SO DUMB. I know my description makes it sound dumb, but it's even dumber. The leads are a lot less Bonnie and Clyde than Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore in Wisdom. The tragedy is that this movie was trying so hard to make a point about economic injustice and just ends up stabbing itself in the foot with it instead. I mean, what happens to Cillian Murphy alone is worth a Razzie.

The Muppets

I took M. Edium to see this the weekend it opened, and then again the next weekend. One goes to Muppets expecting jokes and songs and there are plenty of those, but there was also a lot of nostalgia. The movie takes place in a universe where Muppets live among us, which is hard enough to buy into, but then adds another layer of unlikelihood by making it a world where the Muppets as a pop-culture phenomenon have also been over for decades. As though they haven't been all over YouTube the last couple of years just in preparation for this very movie. From there, the movie seems to set out to deliberately shatter the viewer's suspension of disbelief, from the internal timeline where they mount an entire production in two days to the idea that Jack Black would turn down the chance to be in anything. But M. Edium, who hasn't yet inherited my irritating tendency to pick things apart while watching them, loved it both times. Although I must say he wiggled a lot less the second time.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

You can complain about Guy Ritchie's version of Holmes all you want, but you can no longer go into one of those movies saying it's not what you expected. There's even less mystery per se than there was in the first one, but I'm glad to say there's also less annoying steampunk scenes. I also appreciate how these films don't pretend to be the end-all-be-all of the Holmes canon, instead dropping us into the mythology late into Holmes and Watson's dysfunctional bromance. I also love how Holmes and Mrs. Hudson are shown to harbor an incandescent hatred of one another. RDJ may not exactly match Conan Doyle's description, but you can believe that those big round eyes of his take in everything so effectively that the only way to convey it all to us mere mortals is with all manner of wacky editing tricks. As for Moriarty, the near-omnipotent "Napoleon of crime," I've seen scarier-looking villains behind the counter at the DMV.

Young Adult

It's hard for me to be objective about this movie. As I may have mentioned before, my signature is on an official Certificate of Matrimony with that of Diablo Cody. Yes, we were witnessing the marriage of one of her best friends to one of mine, but still. Unlike that document, she wrote Young Adult without my collaboration, and I have to say the results were positive. It's not a rapid-fire, laff-a-minute screwball comedy like I was half-expecting, but something much darker. Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a drunk asshole who lives in Minneapolis and refers to it as "The City," and returns to her small hometown to steal her high school boyfriend from the woman he married, not to mention his infant daughter. This is in a way a braver performance than Theron gave in Monster, because in that she was hideous throughout. Here, she looks like a walking "Stars Without Makeup!" section of Us Weekly for much of the movie, with occasional grooming montages showing how she gets herself turned out in full glamour mode for the losers she left behind (including, if we're being totally honest here, the ex-boyfriend). I was also expecting Patton Oswalt to totally steal the movie, because even if he's not conventionally handsome, he's a charismatic and magnetic performer, to the point where I thought he wouldn't be believable as an unpopular geek. But he solves that problem by not acting with his entire face for a lot of his scenes. The ending is very un-Hollywood, in a way that reminds me of the previous Jason Reitman film Up in the Air, in which George Clooney's character doesn't go through an arc so much as a circle, ending up much where he started. Still worth it, though. In fact the more I think about it the more I liked it.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I keep meaning to read Trash's John Le Carre books and never getting around to it. Decades, now, this has been going on. I figured going to see the movie version of this was as close as I was ever going to get. If you're into watching Gary Oldman overact, this may be the movie for you, as he explores a new way to overact by underacting. It's such an understated, nearly motionless performance that it nearly cries out, "Look at me!" The movie as a whole is pretty understated, in terms of the action and what little shooting there is, but it's greatly overstated in once sense, and that's in the early 1970s décor, fashion, and hairstyles, many of which are quite distracting. At one point late in the movie, one character makes a reference to how ugly the West has gotten. In 1973, it's impossible not to see his point.

I think I covered everything else earlier in the year, but if anything else comes to me I'll be sure and get back to it, unless I don't. And I still have to review Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, which I saw on New Year's Day, and rank all the movies I saw in 2011. Because I know you're all waiting anxiously for that. Especially the person whose name is on that marriage certificate.

Like Clockwork

2011-12-21T20:37:00.001-08:00

Like Clockwork

Anyone whose ever done any research into sleep disorders knows about the importance of a regular routine when it comes to getting to sleep reliably. I'm here to tell you it's true, but not necessarily in exactly the way you think.

Most weekdays at some time between 3:20 and 3:30 PM, I save whatever I'm working on, get in my car, and drive the three miles to M. Edium's school. I pull into a spot in the pickup line; turn off the ignition, the heat, and the radio; and tilt my seat back as far as it will go. The next thing I know, the daily alarm I have programmed on my cell phone is going off seconds before the school bell does, and I hop out to wait by the exit, alert and refreshed, until M. Edium comes out one to two minutes later. It's the high point of my afternoon.

There are some days when the routine doesn't work out quite so well. Sometimes a tight deadline might keep me at my desk as late as 3:32 or 3:34. That same pressure might make it difficult for me to relax and shut down my mind when I get to the school. I might almost get pulled over or hit by another car. On more stressful days like this, the process of falling asleep in my car can take as long as thirty seconds.

I was worried about the disruption in routine when I got my new car in October, and indeed that first day didn't go too well. I found myself lightly dozing instead of enjoying a proper ten-minute coma. But then by the next day I'd figured out how to lower the headrest, and once again I was able to deactivate myself like C-3PO.

In fact, my internal clock has come to count on it. On that last residential street, I'm already yawning in anticipation, and if I get stuck behind anyone slow, I ride their bumper, lean on the horn, scream obscenities, and give them a punitive little tap as I pass them, just so I can get my beauty sleep that much sooner.

Sometimes I feel a little self-conscious, sitting in that line of cars with the other parents with my closed eyes and open mouth pointed up at the dome light. Maybe some of them have noticed my pattern and have possibly even come up with their own little nicknames for me, like "Napping Dad" or "Pick-up Van Winkle" or "That Asshole." But since many of them sit there with their engines running for no reason the entire time, they're in no position to judge. Ten, fifteen minutes of post-peak oil going into the ozone layer. Do you know how long it's more efficient to leave your engine on than to turn it off and back on? Six seconds. Which, to be fair, it longer than it takes me to fall asleep, but it's a lot less than ten or fifteen minutes.

In fact, there's only one downside that I can see right now. Today was M. Edium's last day of school until the first of the year. He'll be home with us every day for the next week and a half, so there will be no need for me to go pick him up. I just hope he and Trash will have a little patience for the narcoleptic fits that are almost certain to hit me between 3:30 and 4:00 for the rest of the year. I might ask them to let me spread pillows and cushions around on the floor just in case I black out while walking from room to room, but I have a feeling that I'll be invited to crash out in my car. As usual. Which I'm actually okay with. And if that doesn't work, well…nobody cares if a guy's parked alone in a car outside a school when there's no class in session, right?

O Tannenbomb

2011-12-15T21:27:00.001-08:00

O Tannenbomb

It was some years ago when we started getting real Christmas trees. I'd like to say that the impetus for the change was that Trash finally got tired of my insistence on calling our old fake tree a "permanent tree," but I suspect that the real reason has something to do with the fact that the last year we had it, I strung 32,500 lights on it in Gordian tangles designed to illuminate every single needle, but which made it impossible for Trash to de-light it in a day's time without ripping out several of the fake branches. She was pretty irritated about that, and we had a standoff. I said I wasn't going to allow any shadows on our Christmas trees in the future, and she said that in that case she wasn't going to spend the entire week of New Year's trying to untangle the lights from it without wrecking it. At this point she was in such a severe state of post-holiday letdown that I was afraid she was going to throw her wire-cutters and hacksaw at me, so I agreed that we would get real trees forevermore.

As a result, M. Edium has never had a Christmas without a real tree in the house. He's used to the whole routine, from driving to the tree lot four blocks away, to picking out the perfect-shaped tree that somehow always looks shorter under the open sky, to the twining of it to the roof of our car for the short drive home, to the wrestling of it inside and the ceremonial marking-up of the ceiling, to the annual battle with the Christmas tree stand, which gets its annual drink of water.

But this year, he wanted a tree in his own room as well.

Trash and I weren't entirely on board with this, because his room's not that big. It's basically a narrow L from the doorway, with bookshelves on your right and his dresser and massive bunk bed dominating the left, leaving a passage so narrow that Trash and I can't get past each other in it. It's basically a galley bedroom.

But he insisted, and Trash figured out how to make space in his bedroom, and soon we were back home with a tall, full, symmetrical tree half an inch taller than our living room, and the shortest tree on the lot. We were expecting to get a Charlie Brown tree, but they didn't have any of those. He ended up with a Charlie Manson tree instead.

Our tree is lovely, with plenty of soft, plump, moist pine needles that barely deserve the name; they feel softer than the bristles on a baby's hairbrush after a few minutes in the oven. M. Edium's tree, on the other hand, is a footless porcupine crossed with a mutant cactus. The needles on that sucker are more like spikes. We thought we could cheap out and just stick the sawed-off trunk in a planter full of dirt, but after just a few minutes of trying that, my arms looked like I'd tried to bathe both cats in maple syrup.

So we had to get a small but proper stand for it, because it kept flinging itself at us in these terrifying homi/suicidal attacks until I could get it locked down. I left the lighting and decorating of the horrible thing to Trash and M. Edium, at least until my fingerprints could grow back.

But it's still there, and I still have to deal with it. It would be bad enough just having to be in the room with it when getting M. Edium in or out of bed, but I also have to water it. Because, you know, if you don't, the needles get all dry and pointy.

Gosh, what would that be like? Because right now, when I put on an elbow-length steel gauntlet and reach in through those carnivorous branches to add enough water to replace that which has evaporated into the air, I still pull my hand out feeling like I've just tangled with a brigade of Lilliputian archers. Those needles stick in your flesh, and no matter how quickly you pull them out, they leave behind a tincture of poisonous venom that causes the wound to sting angrily for a full hour. And yes, this is in our child's bedroom.

I remember when I was his age how I used to count down the days until Christmas with anticipation. One does that less as one gets older, naturally. But this year, I'm counting down the days until December 26th with…not anticipation, exactly. More of a grim knowledge of an ugly battle that I may not survive, but which must be fought to make the world safe again.

Cage Rage

2011-12-06T21:51:00.001-08:00

Cage Rage

After Bucky's death, our house was hamster-free for six days. It would have been less, but the house was also human-free for five of those days.

Last year, after getting a belt promotion in karate, M. Edium chose as his reward (and spent some of his savings on) a new cage for Bucky. Unlike the basic starter cage we got for him at first, this one had brighter colors, several elaborate pathways, and a little visiting tank on top where you can open the lid and pet your hamster if he feels like going up there. I also hated it. I knew while I was struggling to put it together for the first time that it was going to be a bitch to clean, because the roof and all the side segments would come totally apart as soon as I removed just one of them. Fortunately for me, Bucky also hated it. After we moved him in, he went from being a happy, active little critter to a miserable, nervous dust-bunny who spent all his time trying to gnaw through the neon-green bars. He seemed much happier once we moved him back to his old, white-barred cage. And so was I, because that cage took me only ten minutes to clean every time. I felt a little bad for M. Edium, though, working so hard to get a cage his pet hated. But then he said Bucky could have little vacations in it, and everyone was happy because he never did.

When we brought home the hamster that Trash and I both assumed would be called Bucky Junior or Bucky 2.0 ("I prefer just Bucky," M. Edium soon corrected), the barely-used cage was still down in the basement. And we figured that since new Bucky was going to have to get used to a new cage anyway, it might as well be the one M. Edium had earned. No reason not to, right?

I put off cleaning it until the hamster-cage smell was perceptible from down the hall. I should have put it off longer.

The first issue is that new Bucky is kind of an asshole. He hates to be touched, let alone picked up, and will dart away if you try. If you do succeed in catching him, he'll sink his teeth into your finger with intent to kill. The only way to get him out of the cage is to lure him into his exercise ball, which he enjoys for about ten seconds before rolling it into a corner to sulk and to try to fill it with as many little turds as possible.

This ended up being a surprisingly large number, given what a task the cage-cleaning turned out to be. First of all, I did my best to keep as many pieces together as possible, only to have the whole thing collapse into its individual elements like a house of cards. the spiral ramp has to be detached from the ceiling, which is a step I would have skipped except for how he seems to think that's his bathroom. The fancy wheel is fully enclosed and has an entrance so tight and twisted that the only way to get rid of the tiny little turds he's filled that with is to stick it under the bathroom tap and hope for the best. The water bottle it came with leaks horribly, so the aspen shavings on that whole end of the cage were totally soaked. But at least that was better than the reason I originally thought the aspen shavings were soaked.

So between disassembling, cleaning, rinsing, and drying all of these fiddly little bits and then putting them all back together (which isn't any easier the second time, or the third), digging out the old water bottle and hanging it from the bars, getting rid of the soaked bedding, and tipping a very reluctant Bucky back out of his poo-filled ball, the whole process took me about 45 minutes. Even better, this cage somehow gets smellier faster than the old one, so I'm going to have to go through the 45-minute process much more frequently than I had to do the ten-minute process. And for a new hamster who's a dick.

M. Edium isn't as sad any more about his original Bucky dying as he was. I, however, am much more so.

Road-Tripped Up

2011-11-29T20:43:00.000-08:00

Road Tripped Up

Trash and I used to take vacations all the time where we'd get in the car (or fly somewhere and rent one) and just drive. We'd travel almost at random, covering as much ground as we could during the day, and as night fell we'd pull into the first hotel we saw and get a room for the night. This has led to some memorable stays, like the place in Sioux Falls where the bed was shaped like an inverted U, or the cinder-block motel in Williams, AZ where we wore our socks in the shower, or the motel in Albuquerque with a room door that didn't latch. We don't do that as much since M. Edium, partly because he doesn't like to travel that way, but also because we don't like to travel that way with him. Also, we're not in our broke-ass twenties any more.

That's one recurring theme of our vacations. Another one is that we tend to show up at places either right before or right after natural disasters. Last summer we were in South Dakota after the flooding of the Missouri River, one year we arrived in coastal South Carolina just days ahead of Hurricane Fran, and this time we showed up in New England a week after a disastrous snowstorm.

It's not often that our two recurring themes converge. Which, as it turns out, is good.

This was just a three-day trip, mainly to check a couple of little New England states off our list at last. I thought that was too short a time to cover much distance, but given that within an hour of landing we were in our fourth state of the day, I had to admit I was wrong.

But the freedom of being only a few hours away (or less) from anywhere else in New England at any given time has a downside. When we left Harvard on Saturday afternoon, we had no idea where we were going to spend the night. We just knew we wanted to hit Rhode Island (and in the case of Providence and its drivers that evening, we ended up wanting to hit it hard), but had no idea where we were going to spend the night. We just had lunch plans the next afternoon in western Massachusetts, so we figured we'd just make sure to land somewhere that was within a couple hours from there (which, as previously mentioned, applies to most of New England other than parts of Maine).

We had dinner in a small town in western Rhode Island (not actually an island, as it turns out), then proceeded west. At some point after dark we started feeling tired, but didn't see anything in Norwich, CT that cried out to us. Before much longer we were in downtown Hartford, and were starting to think about where we might spend the night. Still, we're not really "staying downtown" kind of people, so we headed on north to find a place in a smaller town.

In Glastonbury, we started looking up hotel phone numbers on the GPS and calling them on our cell phones (such a better system than our old one, where Trash would make me get out of the car, walk into hotels, and come back out with an embarrassed, hangdog expression on my face), but none of the first few places we called had any vacancies at all.

By the time we reached Springfield, Massachusetts, pulling off at every other exit and trying all the hotels closest to where we were at that moment, we were even more tired, and starting to get desperate. Trash was speculating that at the increasingly late hour, inhospitable desk clerks just didn't want to deal with new guests. Eventually she asked one of them, "Is there some kind of event going on?"

Yes, there was. An event called the aftermath of one of the largest October snowstorms in New England history that had left millions of people with no heat, power, or anywhere to stay other than a hotel somewhere. Thus the run on hotel rooms. And thus the reason idiots like us were screwed.

Off the freeway in Springfield, in a spot overlooked by several giant chain hotels (all of which were full; we called), I got a hold of someone in Windsor who had a room and even quoted me a price.

"Fifty-five dollars a night?" I repeated for Trash's benefit. "Let's go," she said, not waiting for me to finish the call.

On the way over there, however, she belatedly put together two facts: the room price, and the fact that it's not 1995 any more.

"Wait, do you think it's creepy?" she asked me.

"Yes, I do," I said. "When I said fifty-five dollars a night? I wasn't repeating it as a selling point. I was repeating it as a warning."

Sure enough, when we pulled into the narrow parking lot of the rundown place and rang the doorbell so the desk clerk would come let us in, he smiled at us with his half-a-front-teeth and offered to let us see the room before checking in. We appreciated the offer, because there have been plenty of places where a look at the room in advance would have definitely affected our decision to stay there. As we walked single file down a hallway that you didn't even need a UV light for, I could see Trash in front of me already shaking her head.

Inside the room, Trash was too polite to tell the truth, which was that we'd rather sleep in the car than spend a night here. After all, how comfortable would we be in this room, where the only way we'd be able to sleep would be suspended from the ceiling? Fortunately, a polite way to convey that we wouldn't be staying here came to me just in time:

"Do you have wireless Internet?"

And that's how we got out of there. In case you ever find yourself in this situation, you can have that for free.

As we got back on the road and resumed the search, we started asking the desk clerks at chain hotels where their nearest hotels with vacancies could be found. After talking to one that had rooms in Brattleboro, Vermont (and surprisingly, New England suddenly gets a lot bigger when you want to be in a bed in the next half hour), I reached a guy in Wilbraham who had one room left, but it was a smoking room -- which I didn't know still existed -- and he sounded a lot like the guy at the other hotel, so I said I'd call back.

"CALL BACK NOW!" Trash roared when she got back from inside the gas station where we were making a pit stop.

Which I did, and only by virtue of being able to drive there in fifteen minutes were we able to beat one other desperate traveler to what was almost certainly the last available hotel room in western New England. The mattress was like a duffel bag full of socks and the blankets were of the fuzzy-rubber variety you find in your better motels and it smelled like an ashtray and was scandalously overpriced, but it was better than sleeping in the car. Oh, and as for our goal of being a morning's easy drive from our lunch date, we were so close that we had to drive to Worcester and back the next morning just to kill some time.

And we learned our lesson. Next time we'll plan our vacations around natural disasters with a little more foresight.

Credit Where it's Due

2011-11-15T20:25:00.000-08:00

Credit Where it's Due

Trash and I have sometimes admitted that Phil and Claire Dunphy on Modern Family are exaggerated versions of us. Actually, she's the one who says they're us, while I'm the one who says it's exaggerated.

One area that's not exaggerated, however, is that she's the responsible one. I'm not quite as hopeless as Phil when it comes to getting some things done, but it's not uncommon for her to have to remind me to do occasional things like turn off the stove, put on clothes, breathe, etc.

Then there are things that she doesn't even bother involving me in, like paying the bills. We used to share that job: she'd organize the bills, write the checks, seal and stamp the envelopes, put the return address on them, and earn the money we'd use to pay them, and my half of the job was take them to the mailbox, a task I was able to successfully manage more than half the time. But ever since we switched to online bill pay, I don't even have to have that level of involvement. She could be handling all our finances in Amazon gift card codes and airline miles and I wouldn't have clue one. It's like she doesn't trust me to handle it, just because I got my first-ever checking account into such a hairball that my mom had to fix it for me six months after I opened it. Even though that was, like, five years ago.

But there are certain times when the family finances are inexorably brought to the attention of both partners, and one of them is when one of you buys a new car and the credit reports get pulled.

I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Trash's credit rating is very nearly perfect. She doesn't carry balances, manages debt responsibly, and pays everything on time except the stuff she pays early, which is most of it, except for the stuff she pays crazy-early. I think we're ahead on the mortgage for our next house.

What surprised us both is that my credit rating is even better.

So there we were in the finance office at the dealership, as she sputtered incoherently about how it makes no sense; all our finances are together, she's the one who pays the bills, and it's totally unfair.

"Maybe you should pay them better," I suggested.

So then the finance guy is focusing all his attention on his computer and trying not to laugh while I speculate, "My credit rating is probably higher because I'm a dude." Whereupon he points out that with married couples, the wife typically has the higher credit rating of the two.

"Way to blow the curve," I say to Trash.

Paperwork is being printed up, and I'm being shown where to sign, and Trash, who has been running all these conversations on her own for more than an hour, has to sit back and watch me sign the paperwork as the primary owner.

"Maybe when your credit rating is as good as mine you'll get to be the primary borrower," I say as she signs her name on the line under mine. But after all the works she's put in, she's still having trouble adjusting to the fact that this part of the process is about me, and looks like she's ready to accept the keys.

"No, no," I say, "you'll just lose them. Maybe if you had the kind of credit rating that proves you're as responsible as me, I'd let you hold them for a minute."

After the paperwork is all done, she drops the pen in her purse. "Did you just take the man's pen?" I ask. "You're so absent-minded. This is why your credit rating is shit compared to mine."

I do enjoy my new car. I'm also looking forward to the Modern Family episode where it turns out that Phil has a higher credit rating than Claire.

Two Doors Down

2011-11-07T20:28:00.000-08:00

Two Doors Down

What with both my car and Bucky dying three Tuesdays ago and having to deal with all that fallout, it was a pretty unexpected day. The next day, Wednesday, five of us were traveling to New York for M. Edium's birthday trip. One expects the unexpected when traveling, especially when traveling with small children (his nine-year-old cousin Deniece was also with us), but this time we weren't the only ones who were surprised.

Getting everyone to the airport, on the plane, off the plane at LaGuardia, onto the Super Shuttle, and into Midtown where we were staying went mostly according to plan. We had booked a two-bedroom apartment to sublet through Airbnb.com. If you're not familiar with that, it's more or less Craigslist for home rentals, but with a less checkered reputation. People with available places can list them online, and people like us can rent them. It's not limited to New York, of course, but since that's where we were going, we figured a New York apartment would be our best bet. There have been stories, of course, of Airbnb deals going wrong, with people coming home to find their place vandalized, but since we were renting, not renting out, we weren't worried.

I want to be clear that what happened is in no way the fault of Airbnb, and having used it, I would recommend it unreservedly. But the particular place we rented also lists through a separate management company (which I do blame), and after the five of us and our luggage were dropped off on East 50th Street, it was my job to hike down to 45th street and several blocks west to actually pick up the keys from their office. There were going to be four adults staying in the place (Trash, Bitter, BuenaOnda coming in from Mexico to meet us later, and myself) in addition to M. Edium and Deniece, so I was glad to be able to get four sets of keys. Then I walked the 18 minutes back in the spitting rain to meet the others at the pizza place where they were waiting, and learned that Trash had lost her cell phone.

That's not the bad thing that happened, though, because Bitter called Super Shuttle and the van Trash had left her phone in was back in half an hour, with her phone still in it. The unexpected thing was when we went into the apartment building. Or rather when we tried to, because the key to the security door didn't work.

So imagine, if you will, three adults and two children under 10, all slightly damp and groaning under the weight of our jackets and luggage, crammed into the steamy vestibule of a Midtown New York City apartment building with a key that doesn't open the security door. No, make that two keys. No, four. No, eight, because we tried all eight. And I knew this was the correct address, because I'd gotten 10 e-mails with that address and had saved it on my phone. Which is an antique that brought me in for a lot of mocking over the course of the visit, but it does have the message drafts feature for storing important information as long as I don't accidentally erase it, which in this one rare case I hadn't.

Just as I was getting out that very phone to call the management company to shout a hearty WTF down the line, an actual resident came in and let us piggyback through the security door. We still weren't sure what was wrong, but I closed my phone for now, figuring that once we got into the apartment and offloaded our luggage we could figure it out.

So we all dragged ourselves and everything we'd brought with us up the stairs to number 2C, where the good news was that the other key definitely fit the lock on the apartment door. Better yet, it turned and unlocked it as well. So everything was mostly cool again.

Except you know how you look at pictures of a place online, and you get there and it looks completely different? Like you wonder how the photographer was able to take a picture through the wall, since that's the only way a picture could have made the place look that big? Well, imagine walking into your vacation apartment and it's totally different. Like, the wall colors, the decoration, the furniture, the layout…

…The dude sleeping on the couch…

We did not know what the hell was happening -- whether the place had been double-booked, or we were evicting a squatter, or what. After all, even if the security door key hadn't fit, the one to the apartment key did, so we assumed we were in the right place. Bitter explained to the guy we'd rousted that we were supposed to be subletting this apartment and he was like, uh, no you're not, because I live here. All the time.

So…back to the hallway. I was hitting redial really hard when Bitter happened to notice that one of the key rings had a faint address handwritten under the management company's label. A different address than the one we were at. Different from the address I had been sent multiple confirmation e-mails of, the one I had confirmed at the management office, and personally seen on their computer screen.

The good news -- the really good news -- is that the correct address was only two doors down, and not on 50th Street East or in Brooklyn or Manhattan, Kansas or something. So it was a relatively short haul to where we were supposed to be, where both keys worked and we soon found ourselves inside a different 2C. An apartment that, aside from the colors on some of the walls, looked exactly like the one we'd seen online. Best of all, both living room couches were totally unoccupied by humans of any variety.

So it really wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, at least not for us. The person I feel is the dude who was rudely awakened to the fact that two doors down on his very block is an apartment with the same number whose key also opens his place. Good luck finishing your nap after that.

A Good Day to Die, Part 2

2011-10-31T21:49:00.000-07:00

A Good Day to Die, Part 2

The evening before we left town, we discovered that my Saturn wasn't the only thing on its last legs.

Before bringing Bucky up to the neighbor's house so he could stay with them, as is his custom when we go out of town, I thought it best to clean his cage out, as is my custom. Still kind of wound up from my whole car situation we'd had to deal with that day, I carried the cage into the bathroom (a smaller room with fewer hiding places than M. Edium's bedroom), along with the bag of aspen bedding, a plastic shopping bag to dispose of the used bedding, his food, and his exercise ball. He likes to roll around in his ball while I clean the cage, and I'm happy to oblige. Although I'd be even happier if he switched roles with me, so I could roll around in a ball and he could clean the smelly hamster cage.

But the ritual was a little different this time. Usually he comes out of his little plastic house the moment I lift the cage, to see what's going on. Even if he's deeply asleep, he's usually up and around by the time I set the cage on the bathroom floor, and when I've removed the wire top from the plastic pan, he's usually ready to go. But this time he just stayed in his little house.

We've been noticing signs that he was reaching the end of the one- to two-year lifespan that dwarf hamsters normally enjoy. He'd been slowing down, not spending as much time in his wheel. He didn't seem to be eating as much. Oh, and the bald little pinkynail-sized tumor we'd spotted on his belly over the summer, which are apparently quite common and don't generally cause the little guys any pain, had ballooned to the size of…well, the size of Bucky.

For months, he hadn't seemed to mind or even notice it, not that he ever reacts to much beyond a sunflower seed handed to him. But the dried blood I discovered in his exercise wheel one morning a couple of weeks ago seemed like a serious sign, and that's when I started preparing M. Edium for the reality that Bucky might not be around too much longer. And Trash and I got into the habit of peeking into the cage to make sure he was still breathing. Which he always was.

Pet death isn't an entirely abstract thing to M. Edium. He remembers the deaths of our late cats Strat and Turtle a few years ago, but this would be the first time losing a pet that was all his. He's always understood that Bucky would have a short life no matter how well we cared for him. I think he got it. But he had one question I didn't have an answer for:

"What if he dies when we're in New York?"

Well, the night before I left, I watched Bucky sit motionless in the ball where I'd just tucked him. Then I gently tipped him back out onto the floor and watched as he helplessly wobbled on the tumor that, as of that day, was now preventing all four of his feet from touching the ground at the same time. And I decided that no, he wasn't going to die when we were in New York. But there was obviously only one way to prevent that, because he wasn't going to make it another two days, let alone five.

So when M. Edium got home that evening, Trash and I broke the news that Bucky had gotten much worse, and that the time had come. He agreed that no, he didn't want Bucky to die in pain, hours or days from now, in a less familiar house with people who, as much as they like him, aren't his family. We explained that we were going to bring him up to the vet (which, thank God, happens to be open late on Tuesdays), where the doctor would give him something that would help him go to sleep and then Bucky would be dead.

M. Edium nodded bravely through the welling tears, curled up in Trash's lap, and informed us that he was coming with us. Which, bravely, he did.

Soon all four of us were in the exam room we've been inside the least since we started taking pets there. The one with the comfortable furniture, and the hand-painted mural of Pet Heaven on the wall. It turns out hamsters aren't euthanized the same way cats are, with a simple injection. Bucky would be taken downstairs, in his food bowl where he'd been sitting motionless in since I'd finished cleaning his cage, and placed into a small Plexiglas case that would be pumped full of general anesthetic, and then he'd get the injection. Apparently even experienced vets have trouble finding a vein in a creature the size of a donut hole.

This was too much for M. Edium, who decided to retire to the lobby with Trash while I accompanied Bucky downstairs. It took a surprising amount of time for him to lose consciousness, although it may have been less than we thought because in his current state, consciousness wasn't too far from unconsciousness. But eventually he was out, the doctor gave him the shot, and that was the end of Bucky.

This was sad enough, but while downstairs, I didn't get the text from Trash. Apparently the permanence of death had finally hit M. Edium while he was waiting with Trash in the lobby, and he wanted to give Bucky one last petting and goodbye. So it was a bit of a surprise to return to that exam room and find him and Trash back in there as well, expecting just that.

He took it well, though, and I quickly chased down the sympathetic vet tech who had just boxed Bucky up for cremation, and retrieved the cardboard coffin. So M. Edium was able to give a last goodbye and pet to his little friend, who frankly was as responsive as he would have been had I gotten the text in time.

M. Edium also decided he didn't want cremation, but to bury Bucky in the back yard. So after we'd gotten the little clay imprint of Bucky's paws with the letters of his name and a heart stamped into it, we made the short drive home in the dark. But it wasn't too short for him to take Bucky out of the box and unwrap the washcloth so he could look at him. And then box him back up and pass him to the front seat so we could, too.

And when we got home, at a time not long before M. Edium's bedtime, on a day that had already gone completely pear-shaped, with so much left to do before we left town, we were out in the space that used to be the vegetable garden, digging a grave by the light of a flashlight and camping lantern. After a couple of feet of hacking through tree roots, M. Edium decided it was deep enough. We carefully placed the box inside and dropped clots of dirt over it until the ground was again firm and level. M. Edium moved a fancy tomato-ladder over to the spot as a marker, said goodbye, and we went inside. Given how his sadness over the death of his pet was warring with excitement over flying to New York the next day, he had a very difficult time indeed getting to sleep.

And given that the last thing he said before he did was to share his plans to dig up Bucky and look at him again when we got home, so did I.

A Good Day to Die

2011-10-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

A Good Day to Die

I knew I had to drop off my car at the shop as soon as I'd dropped M. Edium off at the school bus stop Tuesday morning. It was a couple hundred miles overdue for an oil change, and its automatic shifting was off, and just that morning it had just started to make a noise like a bicycle with an iPod in the spokes where a baseball card is supposed to be. Our repair place is just a mile from the bus stop, but to my surprise, I found myself actually hoping the car would be able to make it.

Which it did. I dropped off the car and walked home, and an hour later, the guy at the shop called with bad news. I had thought it was just the transmission, but the guy told me there was no way to tell for sure what was wrong with it, given that the engine was utterly destroyed.

After a depressing conversation with him about how a new engine and transmission would cost more than my beloved '99 Saturn station wagon is worth, at least in dollars if not to my heart, Trash and I had another, even more depressing conversation. She needed a car to drive to her professor job on Monday evening, which is the most important class of the semester. I would need a car to pick up M. Edium from school on Monday afternoon, which is the most important part of any given weekday. This was Tuesday. Early the next morning, we were leaving town, not to return until Sunday evening. And as vigilant and violent as our entire block of neighbors are about burglars when we're gone, they wouldn't be able to help us out. Bottom line: we needed to buy a new car today.

Trash and I try not to buy new cars any more often than we have to. I've been driving my '99 Saturn since it was brand new after my second twelve-year-old station wagon in a row died in the driveway. Trash loves her '06 Saturn Ion, which we only bought because the two-door '98 Cavalier she'd bought as her second car ever after the totaling of her '92 Geo Metro was unsuitable for putting a baby into. But M. Edium's been nagging me to get a new car, and Trash and I have been wondering how we're ever going to tow that used pop-up camper we bought last year. I'd been resisting, saying I had a perfectly good car. But suddenly I didn't any more.

We met my dad at the nearest Chevy dealership to take advantage of his car-buying expertise and employee discount. Funny thing about car dealerships: as soon as we walk in to buy a car, we're always immediately pounced upon by the oldest, most desperate, most Jack-Lemmon-in-Glengarry-Glen-Ross sales guy on the whole staff. Which is fine, except for how they're kind of slow, and distractible, and watching them try to operate their computers drives Trash to frustrated paroxysms of repressed rage.

But the experience wasn't as bad as it could have been. Trash took care of the paperwork and financing, as she does, while I worked on my laptop in the waiting lounge, trying not to be distracted by Rachael Ray cooking on the TV on a day when I had missed lunch. And after a mere two-and-a-half hours, I drove a perfectly lovely Equinox off the lot. It's higher and bigger than my Saturn, which I don't love. But it also has other features the Saturn didn't: OnStar, XM Radio, a dashboard "information center," a CD player, three working electrical outlets as opposed to zero, a cavernous back seat, and a front bumper that I've never had to try to Krazy-Glue back together. I was a little worried that the Equinox would only work on March 21 and September 21, but apparently it operates year-round.

So all things considered, I was actually in a pretty good mood when I got home. But then I had to go to the shop to deal with the Saturn.

I asked the guy at the shop if he thought I could drive it home, or at least onto the street where it could wait to be towed away by whoever I ended up donating it to. After all, it had gotten me to the shop, right? Turns out I didn't fully understand the seriousness of the situation. It seems that as soon as they got it into the garage and started the engine, a rod punched through the crankcase and shot a hunk of metal across the room. Which, most mechanics don't go to work in the morning expecting to be nearly killed by shrapnel. They couldn't even drive it out of the garage, forget about the idea of my getting it any further without a whole new engine. When I got there to clean it out, I took a look under the hood. Now, I don't know much about cars, but I know that when there's a piece of metal poking through a hole in the front of the engine, that's bad. I had literally driven my Saturn its last mile.

It was kind of sad cleaning all the stuff out the car I've been driving for almost 13 years. They don't make Saturns any more, after all. Or station wagons, let along Saturn station wagons. But it could have been worse in so many ways. Nobody was hurt by the flying metal in the shop, and it happened in the shop rather than at the bus stop, where I could have brained one of the kids M. Edium rides to school with. We're especially lucky that we're in the financial position we are, and that we had my dad on hand. And most of all, I only lost a car. I didn't lose a pet, like M. Edium did later that same day.

But more on that another time.

The Wedding Bassist

2011-10-10T20:14:00.000-07:00

The Wedding Bassist

Many years ago, when I was still feeling trapped in the call center and my future professional prospects seemed bleak, Trash got a recruitment offer from some former clients who had always been impressed with her genius. They were starting a new company, and offered her a fat pay raise to join them. The catch was that the job would be in Jackson, Tennessee.

But I could see that working. Trash was a recent recipient of a Master's degree that she had worked hard for, and I wanted to support her. And as for myself, maybe this could be my chance to try and make it as a session musician.

Don't laugh, now. It seems a little silly today, but at time my bass-playing powers were at their peak. BuenaOnda's boyfriend at the time, a way better bassist than me, told me he thought I had what it took. And maybe relocating to a city halfway between Memphis and Nashville would be just what I needed to make it happen. Well, that and a willingness to play a lot of country music. With the money the recruiters were offering her, she'd be able to support me for a good while, and if I followed her to Tennessee, she'd feel obligated to.

Never happened, though. Trash decided to stay where she was, and had a long, mostly happy career at that company that lasted until two years ago, when she switched to her even happier current job. And I started a blog and became a professional writer instead. As for Jackson, I've still never been, but it's apparently been plagued by floods and tornadoes that we haven't had too much call to worry about here in Minneapolis. I won't say I never looked back, because see above, but it hasn't been often.

Last summer, when I signed my rusty ass up for a month of Rock Camp for Dads, it was on more of a lark than anything else. Best-case scenario, I thought, maybe someone at the gig would hear me and want me to join their band. I knew this was totally unlikely, of course. It's what happened anyway. We started practicing without a singer in the fall, found one in December, and started playing gigs in January. We've played more than a half-dozen since then, which I kind of can't believe (although those of you who have been putting up with me plugging those gigs on Twitter probably can).

The upshot is that my old powers have been coming back, almost to the level they once were at. And although I still don't have any intention of moving to Tennessee any time soon, I'm starting to remember why I considered it.

Last month, I got an e-mail from the Rock Camp for Dads maestro, saying a friend of his was looking for a bassist to sub in for a wedding gig. I've never done anything like that -- by which I mean subbing, not playing a wedding, because this would be my third wedding gig -- so I sent an e-mail offering my services. To my surprise, they accepted.

This was a pretty tight schedule, mind you. The wedding was on a Saturday. We had time for one practice together the Thursday before, which was also the first time I met all of them. Before that practice, I had a week to learn about three dozen songs (a quarter of which I had, fortunately, played before). I drove out to the western exurbs, plugged in my bass, and played about two dozen of those songs with them before we called it a night. We didn't get through the whole setlist, but we'd get to the rest of those songs in a couple of nights. In front of the audience.

At the wedding, there were some sound issues, and a song tossed in that I'd never played in my life, but I'd have to say it was a success overall. I got paid, at least, which has to be a good sign.

It was just a one-time thing. I made plenty of mistakes. It was my second gig of the day, after one with my regular band at a neighborhood festival that afternoon. But it's kind of amazing how much it made me feel like a real musician. The feeling has yet to wear off.

And I didn't even have to move to Tennessee.

2011-09-27T21:15:00.000-07:00

Sorted Out

Almost two months ago, I was up at the cabin with M. Edium and my family when I got a text from Trash asking me how many Deathly Hallows there are.

"3," I texted back. I didn't hear anything back from her for a while, but when I talked to her that night, she explained that it was for early application for her membership to Pottermore.

You've either heard of this and have stopped reading, or you've never heard of it and you're about to stop reading. Pottermore, as I understand it, is some kind of super-special online experience-slash-community for fans of the Harry Potter books. Fans like my wife. I dig the books too, although not at much as she does. And maybe I would have tried to get into Pottermore early during this super-special sign-up window as well, had I not been thirty miles from the nearest Wi-Fi connection. That wasn't really Trash's problem, though, was it?

M. Edium and I got home a couple of days later, to find her still excitedly awaiting her password notification so she could join the lucky 500 people who got to go in and check things out early. Or maybe it was 500,000, I could never remember.

A week went by. Then another week. Then another.

Every once in a while she would bring up the Pottermore notification she was so anxiously awaiting. And I started getting good at teasing her about it. She'd sigh and say, "Where's my Pottermore?" and I'd say maybe her Uncle Vernon had intercepted it. Trash actually has an Uncle Vernon, although his temperament is the polar opposite of Vernon Dursley's and as far as I know he doesn't intercept her mail from his home 300 miles away.Or I'd go outside check the mailbox and come back saying, "Nothing but junk mail and owl bones."

Or she'd idly ask me if I'd gotten any interesting e-mails and I'd say, "There's this Pottermore notification. Which is weird, because I don't remember—" "Shut up."

She's been biding her time for what seems like forever, eager to get in before the main doors swing wide open to the general public on the first of the month, getting what sustenance she can from previews like a short story about the Weasley twins that made her cry every time she thought about it.

"Maybe you should check your spam filter," I suggested helpfully last week. "I did," she said. "Daily."

Finally, this morning, it came in, with only a couple of days left in the preview period. As annoyed as she was at the brevity of her early admission, she signed right in and got to work, setting up her account and picking out her familiar and getting assigned a wand (ten-and-a-half inches, phoenix feather core, hard. My question: "How did they know what you're used to?)

Eventually, after making her way down the whole length of virtual Diagon Alley and getting through all the other preliminary stuff, it was time to get Sorted. This is what she's been looking forward to for months. Sure, we've all done online Sorting quizzes before, but this was the honest-to-God authoritative no-shit sorting of all time, and Trash couldn't wait to start connecting online with her fellow Ravenclaws.

She nervously read a few of the questions and the options out loud to me while I was working and thus only dimly aware that maybe she was doing that so I could hear them, even though I was tuning her out pretty effectively. But then she let out a noise that I couldn't ignore. I got up and looked, and she was staring at her laptop motionless, her eyes wide with shock. "What?" I asked. She couldn't speak. So I walked around to look at the screen, which was filled with the color green and the giant word, "SLYTHERIN."

"You know," I pointed out calmly as she tried to remember to breathe, "Harry Potter's son was named after two Hogwarts headmasters--"

"I think I'm done with Pottermore for a while," she alt-tabbed.

I had to agree. It's really brought her nothing but grief. Well, it and me.

But y'all go ahead and enjoy. Grand opening this week, I guess!

Young Renaissance Man

2011-09-20T20:55:00.001-07:00

Young Renaissance Man

I've been to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival three times now. Once when I was about M. Edium's age, once when Trash and I were first dating, and this past weekend, when M. Edium was the same age I was when I first went. I'm not a RenFaire fanatic or anything, but I like to look in on it every couple of decades or so.

Our RenFest is weekends only, running from late summer to early fall. It's easy to make fun of how it's not really faithful to the time period. But then, if the "Privies" were really a latrine trench instead of ranks of modern Porta-Potties, and if you couldn't buy your kid a slice of pizza, and if everyone had to wear period costume (and not just the people who want to), nobody would show up. On the other hand, if it took place during the actual Renaissance and the admission price were still the yearly income of a family of four, nobody would show up for that either, so everything's a tradeoff.

And there really isn't a better place for people-watching. Of course all the people who work there dress up in costume because they have to, but then there are all the other folks who go to the same effort just for fun. It's tough to maintain one's suspension of disbelief, though, when one is looking at a French chevalier wearing Transitions™ lenses, or a perfectly detailed costume that might have come directly from feudal Japan except for how it's topped by the head of a doughy Scandinavian, or a strolling band of musketeers hanging out together while wearing fashions from completely opposite ends of the year 1638. I will say this about a lot of the costumes, though; I appreciate how difficult they make it for some of those people to sneak up on you.

This was M. Edium's first visit, but we met up with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, as well as M. Edium's cousin Deniece, who is one of those people who dressed up (but she's nine, so it's different). For some reason, she's suddenly emerged as a carnival-game ringer, having won a seven-foot banana at the Valleyfair ring toss the day before.

"A stuffed one?" M. Edium asked when I told him about it. "Shit, I hope so," I answered in not those exact words.

Anyway, she and M. Edium both played a slew of the games. She won him a plastic cutlass complete with scabbard at the dart throw, and at the tomato throw she ignored the human target's threat to kick a puppy (dude had an actual, live puppy back there) and pegged him square in the puss.

There's even a midway with rides, but not in the 20th century sense (yes, I know what century it is now, but midway rides don't). They're all run on human power. The swinging pirate ship is swung back and forth by teams of costumed bruisers, the turning swing ride is spun by hand, and the giant rocking horse is powered by two guys hurling their weight from side to side on it. This has obvious advantages in terms of the reduced environmental footprint, as well as near-silent operation that allows the timeshifted carnies to converse with the parents watching their kids on the ride.

"Have you seen the new bear yet?" one of them asked us. He told us the story of how one of the landmarks at the Festival used to be a large wooden bear, until it was infested by hornets and replaced. "Now we have a new bear," he said proudly. "Soon to be infested by hornets," his partner added.

People seem to do things at the Renaissance Festival that they wouldn't do in every day life. And I can't judge the people who endeavor to maintain an English accent all day or wear Gypsy bikinis in public, because the place even had an effect on me. I certainly can't think of another place where I've allowed M. Edium to throw knives.

Yes, there was a knife-throwing game, where contestants are encouraged to hurl heavy, pointed slabs of metal at paper targets on a wooden wall. I'm sad to say Deniece didn't hit anything there but her dad's finger. I understand the bleeding has since stopped.

The highlight for M. Edium, other than getting to come home to his mom armed, was a shop that sold actual metal weapons. I thumbed the edges of a few, and while they didn't cut me, it was only because I didn't press hard enough. I was reminded of a stage combat seminar I once attended (don't ask), where one of the moderators mocked wannabee duelers who wanted a sword that "can 'cleave a mighty oak in twain and then shave my chin as smooth as a baby's.' No. Buy an axe, buy a razor, stay out of sword fighting." These suckers looked like they'd split the difference, though.

M. Edium wanted to take a closer look at a particularly wicked poniard, which on him would be the equivalent of a rapier. Luckily, I spotted the sign on the back wall that read "You must be 16 to touch or purchase weapons." Another sign nearer the front said you had to be 18. I figured I'd better get out of there before I was too young to look at anything.

When we got home, M. Edium told his mom all about it. She asked if he would want to go back (because she certainly doesn't.). His answer? "Yes. When I'm 16 or 18."

Happy Long-Distance Anniversary

2011-09-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

Happy Long-Distance Anniversary

I've got kind of a lot going on right now, so maybe you could just help me out on getting this started by reading this. I'll wait.

Done? Good. Now read this.

And now this. You can probably see where this is going.

Of course it's natural, on the day of one's honest-to-God-no-shit twentieth wedding anniversary, to look back, to think about how I got here, to marvel over the fact that I've been married longer than I can remember being single. But I'm not going to do that today, because here's what my wife did.

As my Twitter followers are already aware, Trash happens to be in Los Angeles this week for some un-reschedulable business travel. I was understanding and patient about her, and didn't give her a hard time. I ripped her boss a new one, but that was it.

So the plan was to wait until she got home and celebrate over the weekend. I had the idea of sending flowers to her hotel in L.A., but she'd only have them for a day and a half before having to leave them. So in terms of doing nice things, I've simply had to content myself with staying home and rearing her child. Except I don't even get to do that, because she arranged for other people to pick him up and take him to karate and stuff.

So today, I'm working in what is a very quiet house in the absence of my usual office mate, when the doorbell rings right around lunchtime. Someone's here to clean the house, and she brought me a Big Mac!

(In case you don't know me very well, that's good.)

Not even done yet. A couple of hours later, the doorbell rings. Nobody's on the stoop when I get there, so I figured the mail carrier had just dropped off a package and rang to alert me. But when I look down, there's a paper bag from the local coffee shop with cookies inside, and on it is written, "Happy Anniversary! Love, [Trash]." Just as I was about to run inside the house and IM, "how did you do that??/?" I saw our friend Bitter skulking back down the street toward her car, hiding behind her coat. I suppose the kind thing to do would have been to let her get away clean.

And then! My sister-in-law, who happens to be an internationally renowned florist (shut up, they do too exist) stopped by to drop off one of those flower arrangements she does that that are so bright and beautifully composed they make your flower arrangements look like they came out of the Kansas scenes in Wizard of Oz. During the tornado.

And I don't think it's even done yet, because Trash texted me to make sure I was going to be home tonight. Well, I am now.

I won't say it's the best anniversary ever, because she'd have to be here with me for that to be the case, but it's certainly the best one we've ever spent apart, even if it's the only one. And look how awesome she is, will you? I could be crabby about her being gone, but right now I'm just excited for her to come home tomorrow so we can get started on the third decade of our marriage.

M. Ovie Reviews: Apollo 18

2011-09-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Apollo 18

There are a few hard and fast rules about the "found footage" genre of movies. You know, those movies like The Blair Witch Project where the main characters are also the ones who ostensibly did the filming. I've seen enough of these to be able to go through the rules for you here.

1. There must be a reason for the footage to have been recorded in the first place. In Blair Witch and Troll Hunter, the main characters include documentary film crews. In Cloverfield, Hud is tasked with being the videographer for his friend's going-away party and finds himself documenting an alien invasion. In Paranormal Activity, Micah is a tech-savvy know-it-all tool. So it goes. In Apollo 18, the protagonists are astronauts, who are seem under a mandate to film nearly every moment of their mission. As astronauts do, when not performing calculus in their heads and working with equipment more temperamental than a TiVo.

2. You can't recognize anyone in the cast as actors you know. They all have to be unknowns, to maintain the fiction that what you're watching actually occurred. If they perform under their real names, so much the better. You probably still can't name a single cast member of any of the films I mentioned above, can you? In Apollo 18, the lead actor happens to be on Alphas, but I'll give it a pass because I'm the only person who watches that show (and I get paid to do so).

3. There has to be some way for the "found footage" to have been "found," or "recovered," or "released," or something. I hope it's not giving too much away to say that Apollo 18 doesn't really pull this off.

4. The main characters have to get deeper into their problem and make it worse for themselves long after any intelligent person would have thought better of it. This is fine when most of the people in this type of movie are idiots, as they often are, but it doesn't quite follow when the characters are astronauts, members of America's best and brightest who graduated at the tops of their classes and bested hundreds of other candidates for every mission. Although that might have something to do with why these astronauts were chosen for this mission, now that I think about it.

Again, I find myself lured into the theater by a fascinating concept that proves to have a disappointingly low level of imagination in the execution. How awesome is the idea of a secret moon mission? It's like the opposite of Capricorn One. And the fact that weird shit starts going down? It's the ultimate locked-room mystery, with the room 250,000 miles away. The problem, as it turns out, is that you need a suspect, and the movie's solution to that problem on a world with nothing but rocks is…clever, but problematic.

That's not to say that it isn't a fairly decent bit of filmmaking. It gives you some good, hard jumps, and it makes good use of the claustrophobic setting. For the vast bulk of the film, the astronauts are sealed inside something, whether it be a spacesuit or the interior of an equipment-packed LEM the size of a pup tent. But one does get tired of all the bursts of visual static and audio interference, which are relied on too often to produce scares all on their own. Static isn't that scary now, and it was even less scary in 1974 when you and your siblings used to argue about who had to stand next to the TV to hold the antenna.

The claustrophobic setting must be why the actors don't really stretch out much. The guy playing the mission commander has a good glower that never seems to go away, while Warren Christie scrunches up his otherwise blank, ill-shaven face every once in a while to connote anguish like he does on Alphas, although here he does it with increasing frequency as things go increasingly pear-shaped. They also become less believable. I'm not a xenobiologist, but I've done enough reading about NASA history to know that deviations from mission profile like we see here can make things go wrong even faster and more irrevocably than they do in Apollo 18.

I admit it left me with that lingering sense of curiosity that is probably the fifth rule of found footage movies. I did try to access the companion website, LunarTruth.com, and maybe I'll even see a couple of the first Apollo movies. 13 was pretty good, so some of the others probably are as well.

On the Hook

2011-09-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

On the Hook

When I went up to the cabin to meet M. Edium a month ago, he'd already been there for a few days. He was excited to see me, running up and giving me a hug and a kiss, but as is often the case, he was bursting with news. While I was trying to say hi to him, and my parents and my sister, he was all but shouting in my face, "I caught six fish!"

We're all familiar with the concept of traits skipping a generation. In my case, some traits seem to have skipped a generation so thoroughly I didn't think they'd land on the next one.

My dad loves fishing, and used to take us out on the boat as a family all the time. I think I was into it for a while, but eventually I lost interest in the waiting and the baiting, and instead took to bringing a book to read under the bow. So that's how I spent a lot of those voyages. Fortunately, Trash does like fishing, so she was happy to go out on the lake with him during our trips to the cabin after we got married, and thus she became the son my dad never had. If that sounds bitter, it's not meant to be; they each have someone to fish with, and I don't have to.

I didn't think M. Edium would get into fishing, really. Sometimes, when he's over at my parents' house, my dad will take him across the street to fish in the river, but I can't imagine they spend much time down there. M. Edium barely has the patience to sit through his favorite movies, let alone the time it takes to get a bite on a fishing line.

So then I got there and he tells me about having caught so many fish in one outing that the level of the lake had gone down, and he drags us all down to the dock so he can show off his catch in the live well of my dad's boat, and how it was all about using the right lerr (that's how he pronounces "lure," as "lerr").

Obviously he's been bitten by the fishing bug. Or, since we're talking about fishing, by the fishing disgusting, slimy invertebrate that some people like to carry around in Styrofoam containers full of dirt.

I was worried that I was going to have to take him tackle shopping. I've been tackle shopping once before, as a result of a bizarre series of tragic circumstances that even I can barely remember through a haze of humiliated confusion, and I'm not eager to repeat the experience. The whole rest of the time we were there, M. Edium kept reminding me we'd have to stop at the sporting goods store in town on the way home to buy an exact replica of the fishing lerr he'd been so successful with. I said I'd look for it, and I did, but I also didn't turn around and drive back through town again when I wasn't able to spot it the first time through. But that was okay, because it wasn't like I was going to take him fishing before my dad, who after all still had the original.

Since we got home, M. Edium's passion for fishing has abated somewhat, although this weekend when he heard that my parents were out on the boat near their house with my younger sister, he all but grabbed the phone to make sure no one else was using his lerr (since they were still tied to the dock, nobody was). I'm sure he'd still love it if he could make fishing a regular thing. Am I going to have to learn about all this? All the arcana and esoterica involved? Will I have to one day buy a boat?

If I do, I'm going to make sure it's really comfortable under the bow.

M. Ovie Reviews: Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-08-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Captain America: The First Avenger

I wasn't all that excited about seeing Captain America: The First Avenger, to be honest. I've never been a Captain America fan in any sense. But then I've seen it came out and got really good reviews and I'd already seen both Iron Men and Thor, and I had a free evening, so I figured, why not complete the set? I'm glad I did. After all, it's not like this would be the first time I'd had doubts on my way to a movie about a comic-book superhero, and Superman had turned out pretty well for me in 1978.

As spoiler-free as I try to keep these reviews, the movie itself doesn't help much. It opens with a scene set in the present day that pretty much gives away the ending and goes from there. Seriously, from the beginning of the third act you know exactly how this thing is going to end. Not that that's unusual in a superhero film, but one expects a little effort at keeping us guessing.

Then it's the height of World War II, and a skinny little runt named Steve Rogers is trying to get into the army. It's a pretty off-putting image, because he looks like I could take him, and yet the voice coming out of that birdlike chest is the deep rumble of a much larger man. That seems like something they could have fixed. After all, I'm assuming this first act of the movie was filmed last, after the producers had skinned beefy star Chris Evans and wrapped the bleached pelt around the stripped skeleton of DJ Qualls, which explains why we haven't seen DJ Qualls in anything for a while now. But scientist Stanley Tucci sees through Steve's pipe-cleaner-man exterior and recognizes him as the perfect candidate to become his first "super-soldier." Try to ignore the creepy implications of that, because events transpire in such a way that Steve also becomes the last.

The good news is that now he's a towering hunk of man, running barefoot through the streets of 1940s New York in uniform pants that have fortuitously become a fashionable pair of man-pris. But his challenges aren't over, because there's a war on. Not that he gets to go join it right away, oh no. In fact, he has to jump through quite a few unlikely hoops before he gets to fight, and even then it's not against the Germans as a geopolitical entity, but some crazed splinter group right out of…well, a comic book.

But it's all a lot more fun than it sounds, believe it or not. For some reason, comic book movies are expected to go for natural realism, whether it makes sense or not (and I suspect that reason is Dick Tracy), and there's enough stuff you can almost buy in this one to wash down the stuff you can't.

And of course, like the other moves I mentioned, Captain America isn't designed to stand on it's own, not really. It's more like it and the other movies I mentioned are part of a multi-movie buildup for The Avengers, coming out next year. It's won't be the first time we've seen an ensemble superhero movie, but it's probably the first time we've seen one with an ensemble of prequels. And of course, with all of these Marvel films, everyone knows to stay to the end of the credits for a "teaser" of the next one, which lasts about thirty seconds, or about five percent of the lengths of the credits themselves. At this point, these movies could get away with just being examples of the most effective closing credits delivery system of all time, but Captain America does it in a way that doesn't make you feel suckered about it. Mainly by making the stuff before the credits entertaining.

All My Bass Are Belong to Me

2011-08-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

All My Bass Are Belong to Me

When I just now totaled up how many strings in all are in or on the various musical instruments in our house, I came up with the rather alarming figure of 278. Yes, the majority of those are in the piano, but if you subtract 216 that's still a pretty big number.

It actually just reached that total this past weekend. Trash has been after me to buy a backup bass. Given how busy the band has been lately, she thinks I should have an extra axe on hand in case I break a string or pull a Townshend or something during a gig. I've been resisting the idea, not just because I'm cheap (which I am -- very, very cheap), but also because I pretty much already have my dream instrument, a Fender Precision Bass I bought more than a decade ago when I was in my first band, as an upgrade from the used Gibson Epiphone I'd bought with my high school graduation money. Yes, these are the kind of arguments we have: Trash wants me to buy more musical instruments for myself than I want to.

But she kept at it, and when we basically got a 20%-off-$500-or-more-coupon from Guitar Center, my resistance crumbled. I headed to the store. That woman always gets her way.

Trouble was, there wasn't really another bass I wanted badly enough, at least not there, and at least not for the price I was prepared to pay (remember how I'm cheap?). I mean, I could have dropped a grand on another P-Bass, but if I wanted to do that I wouldn't have gotten the Squier model in the first place. Plus it's totally contrary to my perverse self-pride in being the opposite of a gear-snob. I could have gone the other direction and nabbed the $99 Craptone they had stashed shamefully in the corner, but that would be leaving all that coupon-cash on the table. And I was torn between a desire to get something totally different from what I have and my partiality to the classics. The latter helped me rule out the multi-pointed hot-pink ones and the seven-string beasts with graphite bodies and collapsible necks and onboard MIDI interfaces, but I confess that I tried out a big white Thunderbird, on the grounds that John Entwhistle used to play them. It was like playing a snow shovel strung with power lines. Then I remembered that I wouldn't play most of the other goofy-ass looking basses The Ox routinely carried onstage anyway. I gave up, bought some other crap (there's always plenty of other crap you need at Guitar Center – it's like Target for musicians) and headed home otherwise empty-handed.

But then the next day, the last day the coupon code was valid, I went to the other Guitar Center across town, a larger one that I thought might have a wider selection. Which is where I found my new backup bass. Behold:

No, that's not my actual new bass, that's from a sales website. But mine looks just like it.

I'm not going to bore you with technical specs, because they bore me too and if I did I'd be a total gear snob. But what first caught my eye -- aside from the fact that it was laid out in a plush "coffin" case -- is the extra control knobs, as opposed to my P-Bass's two knobs that only allow me to control the ranges between soft-loud and boom-pimp. I also appreciate the pickups, a pair of humbuckers (dirty!) that rise up in the middle (dirtier!) to mirror the curvature of the strings so they'll all sound equally loud. Count the frets: 24, representing two octaves per string, my personal record. And it looks different, with its 3-D front and warped-Fender outline, but not too different. It's basically as close as I'll ever get to what I call a "space bass."

But I think my favorite thing about it is how light it is. It almost makes my P-Bass feel like I'm playing a snow shovel strung with power lines.

I got home with it and showed it to Trash. She agreed that it was pretty enough, but when I handed it to her she was like, "Whoa!" Even her self-described Muppet-hands, which alone kept her from taking up guitar at all until just a few months ago, fit all the way around the instrument's slim neck. She held it in her lap for a while and played a few notes, for fun. Which, to understand what that means, if she ever actually agreed to pick up my P-Bass, she'd feel like she was playing an oil derrick strung with anchor chains.

"Why don't more girls play bass?" she suddenly asked me from behind my new backup instrument. And instead of flashing on Tina Weymouth, Johnette Napolitano, Kim Deal, Sara Lee, and Meshell Ndegeocello, I realized, "I just bought you a bass, didn't it?" Meanwhile, M. Edium was asking me, "Can I have your old bass?"

I may need to go bass-shopping again soon. Now that I've gotten good at it.

* * *

If you're going to be in Minnesota this weekend, you'll actually have a chance to see my new bass in person. The band I'm in, The Question, will be playing a Toys for Tots benefit show at Sal's Angus Grill in Withrow, Minnesota on Saturday night. We're the second band on the bill and will probably be going on sometime after 9:00 PM. If you show up and say hi I'll tell you when and where our next gig after that's going to be. Hope to see you there!

M. Ovie Reviews: Cowboys & Aliens

2011-08-17T20:34:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Cowboys & Aliens

I've been excited about Cowboys & Aliens ever since I saw the title on Twitter and thought, dude, what a fun, stupid idea for a movie! Turns out I was only half right.

Let me start by saying my sister-in-law is the only woman I know who hates Daniel Craig. She doesn't seem to see what most people see, just a grumpy sourpuss. But maybe more people will see it in Cowboys & Aliens. I certainly did.

As is apparent from the advertising, Craig plays an Old West mystery man apparently dropped from the sky with some alien hardware locked to his wrist. Even he doesn't know who he is or where he came from, so he spends a lot of the movie seeking those answers, most of which turn out to be less interesting than you can imagine. And, almost in vindication of my sister-in-law's opinion, he mostly does it glowering from under the brim of an unflattering cowboy hat, with his mouth screwed up into a tight m. The plus side is that when he's doing that with his mouth we don't have to listen to his American accent.

In short, he doesn't appear to be having any fun at all, which is bad enough in a movie called Cowboys & Aliens. But what's even worse is that almost nobody else seems to be having very much fun either -- even director Jon Favreau, who can usually be counted on to do so. Harrison Ford plays a grizzled Civil War veteran who does a lot of glowering and tough talking, but he keeps himself from descending into self-parody in his one recent gig where self-parody seems called for. Adam Beach, formerly from Law & Order: Sex Police, has a fairly large role in his usual capacity as a charisma-sink, and Olivia Wilde's character basically kicks the Manson Lamps on high-beam and keeps them there.

Thank God for Clancy Brown and Sam Rockwell, who even as tired archetypes give it all they've got. Brown relishes his part as a crusty preacher, while Rockwell gets to deliver all of what this movie calls jokes from behind a Teddy Roosevelt moustache and spectacles. Other than those two, though, everyone else seems to be following Craig's lead and make sure everything comes off as seriously as possible. Which doesn't really seem appropriate for a movie called Cowboys & Aliens, does it?

I think therein lies the problem. Obviously a big part of marketing a movie lies with setting expectations, and I suppose I can't claim that the trailers lied to me. But if you put out a movie with that title, you're creating an impression that it's going be a fun, genre-bending mashup that lets you in on the joke. Instead, it sets out to be both a dead serious Western and a dead serious sci-fi actioner, and ends up not succeeding at either.

Instead, while you're watching Daniel Craig taunt his torturer, or Harrison Ford get captured and then form an uneasy alliance with non-English speaking indigenous life forms, you just wish you were watching them doing those things for the first time in Casino Royale and Return of the Jedi, respectively. And then you're wishing you were watching Sam Rockwell in a different genre send-up, namely Galaxy Quest. Makes it tough to enjoy this film on its own terms when it keeps messing with the terms of other films.

Seems like I've seen a lot of Westerns in the past year. Priest was a post-apocalyptic horror Western, Rango was an animated Western with a cast of talking varmints, and True Grit was, well, just a Western.

I guess I probably shouldn't be surprised that that was the best of the bunch.

Trail's End

2011-08-06T21:28:00.001-07:00

Trail's End

There aren't many places I went thirty years ago that I still go to. Not my home at the time, which we vacated near the end of the eighties. Not my elementary school, although I still have the occasional dream that I'm back there and this time I'm going to kick ass. Certainly not the Catholic church we went to, or any Catholic church at all, and church in general hardly ever. Not any of the stores or parks or friends' houses that used to make up my neighborhood circle. In fact, there's just about one place I still go to that I went to in 1981.

That was the year my parents sent for a brochure (yes, people used to do that) and decided to take us all up to a resort a half-day's drive away in Northern Minnesota called Trail's End. I thought it was a terrible, depressing name, ripe for mocking even by eleven-year-old me. You drove way up out of the northern suburbs, past Lake Mille Lacs, through Judy Garland's home town, and then another hour or so until you were off the paved road and making your way with increasing apprehension down narrowing dirt tracks right out of a Stephen King short story. But then, on that last Saturday in July 1981, it suddenly opened out into a sprawling collection of rustic, run-down cabins, overlooked by a slightly less rustic lodge and sloping down to the dock extending for what seemed like miles into Bowstring Lake. And then we all realized why it was called that. My parents, my two sisters, my aunt and uncle, their two daughters and I spent a week sharing a three-bedroom cabin. We spent a lot of time swimming and fishing and exploring the region, and one night my older sister watched Charles and Diana get married on the fuzzy screen of a portable black and white TV we never bothered with again.

It may not sound that great, but the nine of us went back that same week every year pretty much all through our teens, and at least a couple of us have gone back almost every year since.

That first year, the owners and proprietors were an older couple we referred to as Bert and Mrs. Bert, but after a year or two they sold the place to a younger couple with a couple of young sons. And they made that place their livelihood. The cabins stayed rustic, but got a lot less run-down. The grounds were completely made over, the docks expanded, some cabins torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. Every year we went back, something else was new. They were tireless, pouring all their energy into the place. Their dad used to say, "We don't need to go anywhere, we're already on vacation."

Most of us kids quit going in our late teens, at least for the whole week, but then we all started going back, at least for a few days. I brought Trash up there the first summer after we got married, although I admit I have a hell of a time finding the place the first time I tried to navigate up there on my own, in the days before even my early-adopter uncle had a GPS. One year we brought Trash's mom and stepdad with us and shared a cabin with them the same week my family was there. We've also skipped a number of years, and I haven't been back at all since M. Edium was born. Until this last week.

He went up with my parents and younger sister and my aunt and uncle last Saturday, for the whole week. My younger cousins, one of whom was younger than M. Edium is now the first year we went, both have husbands and kids of their own, and they also made the trip up for their first time in years, from Kansas and Texas respectively. My older sister was there the first half of the week, but had to return to work before I could drive up and join them on Wednesday.

Now, instead of nine of us in one cabin, there were fourteen of us spread across three cabins, one of which had been renovated since we started going and two of which hadn't been there at all, I don't think. The place has changed so much since my first sight of it, back when my dad was my age.

It's going to change more. The man who bought the place with his family decades ago passed away this spring. Some of us drove up to Deer River for the memorial, and we were far from the only family from the cities who did so, judging by the guest book. Just his last week, his widow signed the papers to sell it to a new family, who is going to try to run the place the same way it's been run all this time. That's going to be a tall order.

I don't expect the one place I've been going semi-regularly for 30 years to stop changing over the next 30. That would be the biggest change of all. I just hope it's not the end of the trail.

M. Ovie Reviews: Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer

2011-08-01T21:48:00.001-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer

M. Edium is a fan of several book series, but with one glaring, culture-redefining exception, most of them don't get made into movies. In most cases, this is entirely understandable.

Unfortunately, in this one case, they did it anyway.

M. Edium enjoys the books by Megan MacDonald that center around Stink, who is the younger brother of the protagonist of MacDonald's Judy Moody series. Apparently Judy Moody books are such a hit that the author launched a spinoff series. Or she was trying to score some boy readers. Either way, M. Edium really wanted to see Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer for Stink, and I thought, well, how bad could it be? I will now attempt to answer that question, although I will almost certainly fail.

Here's how bad it was: I was glad M. Edium likes to sit in the back row, because that way I could break my rule against texting in theaters and send Trash this exact message, three minutes in:

ZOMG I ALREADY HATE THIS MOVIE SO MUCH

And my phone doesn't do all caps easily, either.

So here is a partial list of all the things I hate about this movie. It starts with the protagonist beginning her day in the morning, which is the laziest beginning possible for a movie. At least her hair looks like she just woke up, but after a while you realize that it's going to look like that through the whole movie. Judy is a ragamuffin who looks like what you might get if you took a few decades away from Joan Cusack, and then took away everything else you like about Joan Cusack, particularly her smoldering charisma. Judy's also a borderline-bippolar idiot whose mission for the movie is to maximize her fun over the summer using a lame points system of her own devising which, as someone points out to her waaaay too late in the movie, sucks the fun out of everything, especially for the viewer.

I soon found myself agreeing with M. Edium that Stink is the real star here. Sure, the young actor playing him is locked in an epic struggle with a crippling speech impediment, but Stink's the Moody who actually makes things happen. Pretty much the best thing that can be said about perennial loser Judy is that she eventually figures out that she needs to abandon her own lame pursuits and glom onto whatever Stink's up to instead.

This is not to say the movie doesn't try hard with every frame, because it does. Oh, my Gaaawd, how it tries. Nearly every shot is a "wacky" close-up or other nutty angle with cartoon sound effects and text and arrows and other crap scribbled on the screen; nearly every cast member hams it up so much they're practically spiral-cut; and there are several irrelevant animated fantasy interludes that make you want to kill yourself and everyone involved in making the movie even more than you did before they started.

I'll give props to Heather Graham for almost not looking embarrassed to be there in several scenes. She plays Judy's stereotypical "free spirited" hippie artist aunt almost as though the rent isn't due, so good on her, I guess.

Oddly enough, I'm reminded of Eyes Wide Shut, about which my first reaction was that although I could see what Kubrick was trying to do, I couldn't decide whether he did it, or whether it was even worth doing. In this case, I can say without reservation that I saw what this movie was trying to do, it certainly did it, and it definitely should not have been done. Watching Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer manages to be both hyperactive and boring at the same time, which means that watching it is almost exactly like being trapped in a small room with an emotionally unstable third-grader. So kudos on accomplishing that, I guess.

M. Ovie Reviews: Thor

2011-07-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Thor

Still powering through my backlog of unreviewed movies. It hasn't been quite two months since I saw this, so it's still pretty fresh in my mind. Don't worry.

I'm glad to say that my habit of seeing movies while almost completely ignorant of their source material is holding up. I knew very little about Thor going in; just what everyone else knows, plus a joke about Thor deciding to go down to earth to get some human poontang that ends with the punchline, "You think you're Thor? I can hardly thit!"

Luckily, Febrifuge was along as my guide. He was the ideal companion to see this movie with, because he is not only a long-time comics fan, but also Nordic. And he dug it, so there you go.

Of the few reviews I read of this movie, critics seemed to be divided pretty starkly into Earth and Asgard camps, according to which sequences they preferred. I can see both sides. On the one hand, Asgard is everything that Clash of the Titans tried and failed to do with Mount Olympus: gorgeous, eye-popping, colorful. On the other hand, I really dig New Mexico.

Thor the character starts out as a guy you hate: a stubborn, arrogant dickhead who needs to be taken down a few hundred notches. Fortunately, he soon is, at least cosmologically. But he's not actually humbled until quite a bit later in the movie, and despite his plummy British accent, charming smile, and well-conditioned blond bob, it's kind of hard to root for him until that happens. Then, feel free.

And speaking of cosmology, it's a pretty bold move to make Thor's best earth friends scientists who are trying to figure out the workings of the universe that Thor hops around in like a subway commuter. The band of physicists led by Natalie Portman (as all groups of scientists containing Stellan Skarsgård invariably are) just happens to be working on some grand unified theory that just happens to match up with Thor's nine realms. Lucky, that. It just goes to show that if you're going to go into theoretical physics, best to keep things vague so there's still room for a comic-book superhero to drop in and say you're pretty much right.

Even I know that you can't tell a Thor story without Loki, but I have to admit Loki threw me for a curve on this one. He's Loki, what do you want? Even knowing to look for him, I didn't realize who he was for his first few scenes, because who ever expects Loki to be the biggest sourpuss on the screen? But that works to the film's advantage. One always expects the Norse God of Mischief to at least look a little…you know…mischievous. But even when he's playing the trickster, his "Ain't I a stinker" face is about as convincing as Jack Bauer's. Which is not a bad thing. In a way, the biggest trick he plays is on the audience, because when you think you've got a handle on Loki's plan and motives, you're wrong. Which is cool.

So I will say that you don't have to be a big fan of comics or Norse mythology to enjoy Thor. I will say it helps to have seen both Iron Man movies, because then you'll catch a nice shout-out or two and also know to stick around until the very end of the credits. And the movie wisely leaves a few questions open, chief among them the issue of whether Natalie Portman can still thit.

M. Ovie Reviews: Kung Fu Panda 2

2011-07-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Kung Fu Panda 2

Oh my god, I know, right? I am sooo behind on my movie reviews it's embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as some of the movies I've been putting off reviewing, but no more. I'm going to bite the bullet and get through all of the biggest movies of May.

So anyway, Kung Fu Panda 2. I didn't see the first one (I think it was the last movie Trash got to take M. Edium to and it's been all me ever since), so I can't really compare it. But that's okay right? Shouldn't all sequels be judged on their own merits?

Well, that's what I'd like to do, but I was constantly reminded that this was my first Kung Fu Panda movie. There are plenty of scenes with the Furious Five working well together as a team, which made me wonder how they got together. And Po is a Kung Fu master throughout, so I missed that whole learning curve thing. But it was quite beautifully animated and voice-acted, with nicely expressive animated characters and all that.

The only thing is that I wish I'd known more about the heavy adoption subplot. When Po's dad (a duck voiced by H!ITG James Hong) clatters into the picture without any immediate comment, I was all happy about finally seeing a kid's movie with a subtly positive message about adoption. Especially after Tangled.

But then it quickly goes off the rails, as Mr. Ping's tearful confession to his son that he adopted him sends Po spiraling into an identity crisis, and heading off to save China without acknowledging Mr. Ping as his dad. And then Tigress mocks Po (if gently) for not realizing earlier that the duck wasn't his biological father? Not cool.

It doesn't improve from there. There's a sequence in which desperate circumstances force Po's panda parent to abandon him in the forest, seen from the point of view of the helpless panda cub. It's not uncommon for adopted children to have abandonment issues, so I had to be very conscious of how this might be affecting M. Edium, which distracted me from fully enjoying the spectacular final action sequence.

He seemed fine, though, as always. Mainly, he was interested in knowing who gave such an excellent performance as the villainous peacock, Shen. My superpower had failed me in this case, so we had to stay for the credits to learn that it was Gary Oldman. Now Gary Oldman is M. Edium's favorite actor. We're halfway through Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban right now, and so far the most dramatic revelation is that Gary Oldman played Sirius Black in the movie. And when he was watching a Pokémon movie a few weeks later, he speculated that one of the voices in it might be that of Gary Oldman. I thought not, but how awesome would Gary Oldman be in a Pokémon movie?

Oldman (in an intense whisper): "Gotta catch 'em all."
Henchman: What do you mean all?
Oldman: AAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!

But back to KFP2. In the car on the way home I wanted make sure he was okay. We went over the whole familiar narrative about how his birth parents loved him and wanted to be sure he'd be safe and have a good home, just like Po's panda parents (although the latter went about it quite differently). "I don't want to talk about this," he insisted. When we got home, Trash could tell he was upset about something, and in private he admitted to her that although the adoption themes didn't bother him, the leaving-in-the-forest scene got to him a little. Hell, it got to me.

By the end, Po has embraced his adopted dad, but the final shot of the film not only sets up a third film, but indicates that the whole can of worms will be getting opened again. Hot damn.

It's just too bad that the filmmakers couldn't have spoken to someone who's close to adoption or has an adoption story of their own, to maybe help them handle these issues a little more sensitively. If only Angelina Jolie had been available to them somehow.

Open Sesame

2011-07-17T21:57:00.001-07:00

Open Sesame

With M. Edium out of the house for the weekend, I thought I'd take my lovely wife out for a fun, romantic evening. But instead we scoped out a local open mike night. For the first time ever.

Here's the thing: we both like live music, but who wants to go pay a cover charge for a band we might not even like? This way's much better. You find a place, you have a few drinks, you listen to some music. And if you don't like the singer, wait a few minutes for the next one.

And I will gladly say that we did not like the singer every time.

Trash liked the high-voiced kid who sang long, minor-chord ruminations on longing and loss and having been born to late to play in The Church or The Smiths more than I did, but not by much. Neither of us cared for the runty, dreadlocked douche who half-rapped some of what I'm thought he was sure was trenchant social commentary about the world being wack and then left two minutes later, making his friend carry his guitar.

The good news is they only got two songs each. I think Trash kind of kept forgetting that, because during that first guy's set, she told me to ask for our bill, and then we ordered another round, and then during that second guy's set she was more than ready to go. I had to keep reminding her that the people who would normally drive her right out of the bar would probably be done by the time we got to the door.

Besides the lamers were in the minority here. There were some surprisingly talented singer-songwriters, and Trash even bought one of their CDs so she can hear more than two of her songs. There was also a middle-aged guy who was going to play a very minor 80s new wave hit that I remember well, because it turned out that he was in the band recorded it, but then he couldn't remember the words and sang something else instead. Too bad, because I totally could have hollered the lyrics out to him.

Not all of the interesting stuff happened onstage, either. There was a guy who kept lurking behind Trash, close enough to smell the bacon in her shirt if she'd had any in there. Trash texted me, "I have a friend behind me." I thought she was talking about someone at the next table, but it later turned out that she was referring to some dude breathing down her neck right around the corner where I couldn't see him from my seat. It was an outer corner, you see. Nobody puts Trash in the other kind of corner.

We also enjoyed the two teenagers in polo shirts who kept walking back and forth holding their trendy single-malts so everyone could see them. Which we did. We also noticed that the level of the liquid never seemed to get any lower. "Do we notice those things because we're older?" Trash asked me on the way home. "No, we always laughed at people like that," I said.

As we left, the last performer we heard had just finished a keening song about desperately needing someone's body. Which seemed to make her girlfriend at a nearby table a little uncomfortable.

So in short, next time you're wondering where to go out, consider an open mike night. We'll probably do it again, so who knows? There's a chance you might even run into us.

Unless you're not in the Twin Cities and it's a night when M. Edium is home. Then the chances of that are pretty remote.

M. Ovie Reviews: Cars 2

2011-07-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Cars 2

The day M. Edium and I saw this, we weren't planning to. Our original plan was to drive from our rented cabin in West Yellowstone, Montana to the Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. But there was a 30-minute construction delay marked on the park road map, so we set out to find an alternate route. Here's something we learned about Yellowstone National Park: it doesn't have alternate routes. If it's not on the map, it's not there. Must have had something to do with the solid wall of mountains. Anyway, by the time we were able to finally take a left, we had been on the road for an hour and a half and were all the way up in Bozeman. So forget the Mammoth Hot Springs.

Instead, M. Edium and I went to see Cars 2 while Trash sat out in the lobby reading her Kindle and ogling Neville Longbottom on a big HP7P2 standup (even I was like, Yowza!). So here's what I have to say about Cars 2:

Some sequels are just an effort to cash in. Others are attempts to correct mistakes made in the original. Cars 2 is both.

Hear me out. I think at some point, Pixar realized they'd screwed the pooch with the original film in a very vital sense. Setting most of the story in a tiny town populated by like eight cars? How many toys are they going to sell that way? You buy your kids the whole population of Radiator Springs, plus a few alternate versions of Lightning McQueen, and you're done. At one point I was actually reduced to buying M. Edium a completely unaffiliated Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Matchbox car and telling him it was "Junior from Cars."

Now, I know that they later came up with a whole garage full of other toys like "Brand-New Mater" and mini versions of the cameo cars from the end credits, but even with the whole "World of Cars" stuff that's been on shelves for the last few years that are almost completely composed of total flights of fancy, they've obviously been flailing.

Well, it's beyond obvious that they weren't going to make the same mistake with the second movie. This time, they can sell the whole Radiator Springs crew yet again, even though the original supporting cast barely has cameos. Mater's the hero of this new film, and he meets plenty of cars along his globehopping adventures, each of whom will raise millions in merch sales.

Chief among these is Finn McMissile (Michael Caine), a steel-nerved British spy car bristling with gadgets. Of course you'll need to buy a different version of Finn for every gadget. There's also Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) in a fetching fuchsia paint job, for girls who thought sky-blue Porsche Sally from the original was a little too butch. There's a whole motorpool of villains, including one voiced by Joe Mantegna. There's Land Rover Miles Axelrod (Eddie Izzard) and Formula car Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro) and a colossal dump truck that not only provides a cheap tractor-tipping callback but will also tip the price point scale north of fifty bucks. There are cameos by world leaders, like the Queen of England car and the Popemobile, the latter of which will come in a two-pack. Even Mater gets into it, as a short scene of him playing with disguise technology gives us brief glimpses of different versions of himself that are probably flying off shelves as I write this. Just don't ask me how you're going to be able to tell your Ivan truck from your Mater-In-Disguise-As-Ivan truck.

And that's not even getting into all the possibilities for playsets that the new film's many locations opens up. Pixar makes Tokyo, Paris, Italy, and London look fantastic, but they'll look even better in your kid's playroom, am I right?

So as far as making a movie that lives up to the towering Pixar legacy, Cars 2 comes up a little short. But in terms of opening up a merchandising gold mine, it's a tour de force.

Of course, I will have to get M. Edium a toy of the car voiced by Bruce Campbell. I'm only human, right?

XM-I Getting on Your Nerves Yet? Part 2

2011-07-07T22:50:00.001-07:00

XM-I Getting on Your Nerves Yet? Part 2

As with last year's road trip, Trash is taking advantage of the long miles to torment me with XM radio. And this time, she documented it on Twitter, which, even though she limits her followers, will be excellent evidence for the prosecution.

There are specific rules: One, we have to listen to the song to the end. If Trash can't make it, it doesn't count, and she didn't tweet it. Second, she only tweets when I'm unhappy, so there are any number of songs that would be embarrassing to both of us. Three, one artist is banned. A second one was today. As you will see. Four, I am not allowed to turn down the volume, even though I can reach it better than she can. Five, no swearing allowed, because M. Edium's days of napping in the car are over. With those rules in mind, witness the horror:

you will be thrilled to hear that once again I intend to torment @mgiant w/bad music on our road trip. 1st up: Oh Sherry. I love XM radio.

I should have been gone.

HAHAHAHA Chris DeBurgh Don't pay the ferryman. OMG this one is too much for me. Really no way to top it.

Which is not to say she didn't try.

Ah yes, anything by Matchbox 20 will make @mgiant shudder. Have to remember that.

Joke's on her. Matchbox 20 has several songs I actively tolerate.

Marriage is give and take. Just sat through Ugly Kid Joe's Everything About You. SIGH.

I love that song because it's such a textbook example of a one-hit wonder.

Ah yes, a family favorite: Mambo #5.

I can't believe she played this with our child in the car.

@mgiant has no heart. Wham's Careless Whisper doesn't cause ANY happy feelings.

As Pamie said, it's not a happy song. Besides, I was happy when it's over.

@mgiant always packs CDs for our road trips. Does he actally think that will distract me? Because no.

I was hoping to hear some Mumford & Sons aside from the three songs that are currently on XM's rotation. That band has to be the greatest boon to Irish pub bands and other purveyors of deedly-deedly since beer.

Even The Nights Are Better is making @mgiant angry about how it's a rip-off of Arthur's Theme. #missingthepoint

Usually an accusation of plagiarism is enough to make her turn the channel.

Oh it is going to be a good morning! You Needed Me by Anne Murray makes @mgiant cry angry tears.

I drove Anne Murray to the airport once. She complimented my driving. She was a nice passenger. Unlike some people.

Wow. What are the chances that You Light Up My Life will actually cause @mgiant to self-harm? Stay tuned!

Actually, I find that song inspirational. If I can survive it, I can survive anything.

While listening to Killing Me Softly @mgiant stated that he doesn't plan to do it softly. You are my all witnesses!

Dammit.

OMG! It's OMC's How Bizarre. @mgiant is a lucky lucky man.

I would have been luckier if the song had been further along when she found it on the dial.

First up this morning? Jody Watley's Don't You Want Me? @mgiant: HELL NO. Guess that answers that.

Reunited by Peaches & Herb. YES YES YES. Except @mgiant's response was "What the hell are we listening to??" Neanderthal.

I never listened to the words before. Now I know why.

Followed by Wind Beneath My Wings! XM is on FIRE. Or at least @mgiant wishes it were. Or wishes *I* were. Hahaha

All of the firestarters were in the back of the truck.

@mgiant: Isn't this that Katy Perry song she sang w/elmo? me: yes! @mgiant: but you hate both of them! me: hehehehe

Color Me Bad should make even the coldest heart melt, but clearly @mgiant has a heart of stone.

By this point, I hadd retreated into myself.

For those of you wondering if there is any music off-limits, the only *artist* @mgiant has banned is Steve Miller. He HATES him.

I would explain, but once I get started ranting on this I'll have trouble stopping.

Interesting. Who would have thought the song to almost make @mgiant cry would be Hard Habit to Break. Sure, it's sad, but still...

He's addicted to her! It's so sad!

How Scritti Politti could make @mgiant say "you really hate me" I will never understand. This song RULES.

I actually don't hate this song as much as I remembered hating it. And there was a good chance she'd have kept looking for something worse.

Hahahaha Ginuwine's Ride My Pony. Poor @mgiant seems to be considering walking the rest of the way.

But not if I could find a pony.

A two-fer: Mr Big (Be with you) followed by Gerado (Rico Suave). @mgiant seems resigned.

This was at about eight thousand feet in the Grand Teton mountains. I had to conserve my oxygen.

@mgiant has a new way to fight the music: slowly turning down the sound Hell No.

It was worth a try.

Yes Yes Yes: High On You by Survivor. I note we are HIGH in the mountains. @mgiant just sighs.

I'm just going to sigh again now.

The Do Run Run Run! Shawn Cassidy! even better than Old Faithful!

But it was close.

@mgiant has called a ban on all songs by Capt & Tenille. 2nd artist after Steve Miller to recve full ban. Harsh!

She calls it harsh. I call it self-preservation.

The good news is that there's only one day of driving left. The bad news is that she's considering getting XM permanently.

Send help.

XM-I Getting on Your Nerves Yet? Part 2

2011-07-07T22:50:00.000-07:00

Best and Brightest

2011-07-05T16:25:00.000-07:00

Best and Brightest

There wasn't anything going on at the conference Saturday afternoon, so Trash and M. Edium and I got in the pickup we'd borrowed from my dad for this trip and drove down into the quaint, wooden-sidewalked, tourist-trap town of Jackson for dinner. Before heading back, we thought it wise to fill up the gas tank, since we're staying in a national park a half hour from the nearest commercial gas station. I had had a beer with dinner, so I went to jettison it while the tank was filling. Too bad the truck doesn't run on the kind of fuel that might have allowed me to conduct both tasks in the same place.

So I came back out and pulled the nozzle out of the tank. I had presumed that it had gotten full during my time in the bathroom, but I'm still not used to the gargantuan tank on this thing, which meant it was still filling. So of course gas spewed everywhere, including my clothes and shoes, before I figured out how to turn it off. Then I topped off the tank, which took three more seconds. If only I'd been a little slower.

Anyway, I wasn't about to get in my dad's truck with clothes reeking of gas, especially given how he's spending our time away replacing my car's back seat to get rid of the gas smell. Seemed like bad karma to give him the same problem that he was fixing for me. So we ended up driving back to the cabin with me wearing a hoodie I had in the back seat, and my underwear.

One feels a little awkward driving in one's underwear, even out here in this remote paradise. Because there was the traffic backup where the herd of bison was crossing the road and Trash nearly got into a fight with someone who persisted in blocking the road even when it was clear, and then there was the park ranger at the entry booth I had to talk to, and then Trash said that after we got back to the cottage and I had new pants, I needed to get the truck's windshield washed, since I didn't squeegee it in my underwear at the gas station where I'd taken the first steps toward immolating myself.

So then we get to the cottage and I'm like, "So you'll bring some pants out for me?" and Trash was like, "No." "Seriously," I said. "Seriously, no," she said. I tried to get M. Edium on my side, but he just laughed at me. Then they both got out of the truck and left me sitting there in my hoodie and underwear. "Any pants at all!" I hollered after them out the truck window.

After a minute or so, Trash thought it was hilarious to send M. Edium out with a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. His, of course. "You'll stop laughing when I put these on and bust them out," I warned.

Shortly thereafter ,Trash sent him back with the worst pair of shorts I'd packed, a red rayon number with "Bacardi" on one leg for some reason. So at least I was able to get out of the truck again.

I still had work to do. I showered before I caught fire from a stray spark. I got my highly flammable clothes out of the cargo bed where Trash had tossed them, then washed them in the sink as best I could using hand soap and a drain plug that wouldn't stay closed. I left my tennis shoes out on the patio to let the fumes disperse. I drove to the park's closed service station and cleaned the windshield. Time passed.

A while later, Trash pulled up my Gmail on her new Kindle and handed it to me. I don't touch the thing if I can help it, because I don't want to get blamed when it breaks (a strategy that already succeeded, when her "old" Kindle crashed in South Dakota). I couldn't make any actual e-mails open, so Trash convinced me to walk up to the lodge with my laptop and use the Wi-Fi there to read the emails that were showing as new.

I didn't bother changing clothes, because by now it was almost eleven PM and there hadn't been any conference stuff going on for many hours, so I figured the lobby would be abandoned. I was wrong. So here I was among some of the most eminent and fascinating people of our time, wearing Bacardi shorts and a t-shirt that said "It's Just Safer To Assume I Know Karate."

And this was at a time and place for which I had very recently spent hundreds of dollars on clothes so that I wouldn't look like an idiot.

As an added bonus, the timing corresponded to one of Gmail's outages, so instead of being able to get in and out of there quickly like I'd hoped, I sat there for ten minutes staring at "Loading..." and other error messages to avoid eye contact with any of the astronauts or university professors I'd met earlier in the day.

Finally I slunk back to our room. A few minutes later, Trash tried to pull up Gmail on her phone. This time it worked. We read the unread message.

It was a message we had already opened and read that morning, and apparently marked as unread. So I had just presented myself to my fellow attendees dressed as a gym hobo for nothing, on several levels.

This really has been a unique and remarkable experience.

Overheard

2011-07-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

Overheard

I'm at a conference right now in the Grand Tetons (and whoever named them that never met my wife), and it's pretty amazing. It's basically hanging out with the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World times two hundred.

Strict confidentiality rules prohibit me from naming any names, but I can tell you that I've met some fascinating, if not famous, individuals. Brilliant entrepreneurs, scientists, historians, former elected officials, and inventors are all here. It's by invitation only. Who invited me, you ask? I'm still working on that.

All I know is that this fancy vellum envelope arrived in the mail about two years ago, and I thought I was being invited to a timeshare presentation or something. But then Trash looked into it and quickly figured out that not only is it for real, it's something I really needed to go to.

This road trip we're on is kind of built around my attending this thing here in Jackson Hole, surrounded by Lord of the Rings mountains. I'm in seminars and lectures most of the day, M. Edium is in activities they offer for the kids, and Trash is exploring the grounds in and around the lodge, and working on a few projects. While admiring the ridonkulously spectacular view from the back patio, she overheard this, which was not from a Renaissance participant:

"You know, if I'm on a mission trip, and I have to share a room, or worse, a bathroom? Well, where's the appreciation?"

I've heard amazing talks on advances in so many fields these last couple days. But in just that one remark, Trash learned about some amazing advances in entitlement and missing the point.

The Long, Unhappy Life of Bob Marshall

2011-06-30T13:13:00.000-07:00

The Long, Unhappy Life of Bob Marshall

By this point, our family's pretty familiar with Highway 16, the main road that cuts from east to west across Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. There's the entrance, the campground with cabins we stayed at this time, the General Store, the tent sites by the creek we camped at last time, the Shady Rest Picnic Area (not a retirement home, like it sounds), lots of curves, probably a few bison and other animals wandering around, Legion Lake, and Camp Bob Marshall.

We don't know who Bob Marshall is or why he got a camp named after him, but it's not a terribly uncommon name. Which makes us wonder how other Bob Marshalls might react to seeing that sign. Imagine your name is Bob Marshall. You see a sign by the side of the road that says "Camp Bob Marshall." As a law-abiding citizen, you do your best to obey all road signs. So what choice do you have but to camp there for the night?

Sucks to be you, Bob Marshall, because you don't have your camping gear with you. Now you're going to have to turn around and go back to the Pamida in Custer to pick up a tent and all the other gear you'll need to rough it in the state park overnight. I hope you budgeted this into your travel time.

And you know, something else, Bob Marshall? It's bad enough if you're on a cross-country drive, because this is going to add a whole extra day to your trip. But what if this is on your daily commute between home and work?

I can just see your boss and coworkers asking each other, "Where's Bob Marshall?" "Oh, no, he probably drove through Custer State Park again." That means we won't see him until tomorrow." "When will Bob Marshall ever learn?"

And then you show up for work the next day, rumpled, mosquito-bitten, and smelling of wood smoke, and you have to explain how you needed to camp for the night because a sign said you had to. And your boss and coworkers ask, "Why don't you just drive a different way to work?" And you have to say, "But this is the most direct route! Going around would add like an hour to my commute." "Oh, Bob Marshall," your coworkers say, shaking their heads.

But you get through the day, and as you head home, you tell your coworkers, "See you tomorrow." But they just say "See you," because they know that there are signs reading "Camp Bob Marshall" facing both directions on Highway 16. And while you, Bob Marshall, are looking forward to seeing your wife again tonight, she knows full well that in a few hours she'll be calling you on your cell phone with its one bar.

"Where are you?" she'll sigh.

"Well, there was this sign," you'll explain over the rotten connection.

Lucky you had your camping gear in your car already. Sleep well, Bob Marshall. And don't unload your car before you leave for work tomorrow.

The Finger

2011-06-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

The Finger

Prepping for these long-range camping road trips is always stressful under the best of circumstances, but this one was even more so. In addition to the trip itself I was also supposed to be prepping for this conference I'm going to as part of the trip. Leaving aside figuring out what I'm going to say, this is the first time I've ever had to pack both camping clothes and business clothes. And it's not a question of if we forgot something, but what we forgot and how screwed we're going to be as a result. It's an ever-growing list.

We were still in Minnesota when I realized I had completely forgotten to do something vital. The good news is that it was something I could take care of on our next pit stop. If only I didn't forget again. Our pit stops can be a bit hectic, between me and Trash and M. Edium and all the shit that falls out of the back seat when we open M. Edium's door.

Just across the South Dakota state line, we hit a rest stop and I realized I wasn't going to be able to do it after all. The pen that I keep in my pocket at almost all times wasn't there. But I was in luck, because there was a sign in the restroom inviting visitors to sign the guest book, which meant there was a pen already there. As soon as M. Edium and I were back out in the lobby, I told him to wait while I got to work doing what I needed to do. It would only take a second.

"Can I help you?" asked the attendant behind the counter who I hadn't noticed in my urgency to complete my task. I realized that what I was doing might look a little odd, so I said, "Just signing the guest book," and signed it before making a quick escape.

M. Edium and I caught up with Trash out in the picnic area, which is when I realized my own pen was in my pocket after all. I did the necessary touch-ups while they were otherwise occupied and soon we were all back on our way.

The Missouri River is pretty much the only major geographical landmark between there and the Badlands, so we always look forward to the crossing. We didn't cross it the first day, however. For the first time, we were going to spend the night at it. This proved to be more literally true than we thought. We had reserved a camping cabin at the Snake Creek Recreation Area outside Platte, SD, and were hoping for a view of the river. When we got there, we discovered that due to all the recent flooding, the river was closer to our cabin than my old cubicle was to the office bathroom. I wanted to take M. Edium to the swimming beach, but he can't dive that deep. Instead he swam around the trees at a flooded campsite where the roadway disappeared under the quiet waters of a small inlet that, from what I understand, isn't normally there. Fortunately nobody was camping there or they might have objected to our invasion of their space.

The next morning we got back on the road. From our first sighting of the Missouri to our crossing it had been sixteen hours. Now, west of the Missouri, Interstate 90 begins to bristle with billboards. Not just for Wall Drug, either. There's the Reptile Gardens, the Auto Museum, the 1880 Town (complete with Dances with Wolves props), and the Rushmore Borglum museum, to name a few. This last tourist trap is all about the sculptor who "carved the mountain," and all the billboards are illustrated with the same drawing of Gutzon Borglum, gazing out ruggedly from under a cowboy hat and from behind his repressed black mustache, leaning back with his chin against his chest. Trash and I have been making fun of those billboards for almost twenty years, since the first time we drove out west in 1992. Every time we'd see one, we'd tuck our chins against our chests, and look at each other with our fingers laid across our upper lips to simulate the famous mustache.

I was expecting to start seeing these as soon as we were in South Dakota, but they were making a late appearance on this trip, and we didn't see any until the second day of our trip. Finally, some smaller ones started popping up. I let a few of these go by without comment. But after a while, we spotted a full-sized one and I leaned back, tucked my chin down, and held up my finger…with the ink mustache I'd drawn on it the day before, more than a hundred miles ago.

Trash hates to admit defeat, but she had to this time. I totally win at Rushmore Borglum.

Suit Up

2011-06-22T15:45:00.001-07:00

Suit Up

Trash and I don't generally invest a lot of money in our wardrobes. Not too many years ago, she was contemplating the possibility of a new job with a significant pay raise. "I'm going to go to the store and spend, like, a hundred dollars on clothes," she said dreamily.

I laughed, but I'm not much better. What clothes I don't get for Christmas or on the Internet I buy off a big table at Costco. After all, I've been a telecommuter for three years. Before that it was almost two decades of "business casual," punctuated by one year in an office where buttons seemed to be optional, not just on shirts but on pants as well. It all adds up to the fact that the last time I bought a proper suit for myself was when George Bush was president. No, the other one.

But because I've been invited to some fancy-schmancy conference over the Fourth of July weekend (more on that later), that had to change, big time. Or at least that's what Trash said when she fully contemplated the condition of my formal wardrobe:

A double-breasted charcoal pinstripe suit whose pants are held together only by the inside button and my belt;

A medium-gray suit whose pants crawl up my ass and are still spattered with Missouri mud;

A black blazer that was really nice when my mother-in-law gave it to me for Christmas 1991 but which is now as shiny as Darth Vader's helmet;

Another black blazer with big, brass buttons, from the Andy Bernard line of men's fashions;

A windowpane plaid suit, somewhere, I don't know, I can't find it anywhere;

A black David Byrne-sized suit jacket I bought in high school for ten dollars in lawn-watering money at the Salvation Army thrift store;

The one "suit" I ever bought on my own, a hundred-dollar number made of brown linen that looked pretty sharp in the store but on me appears to be made out of used grocery bags and makes me look like nothing so much as a polygamist. But -- a hundred dollars!

In other words, just enough to get me through job interviews and funerals, and Halloween while I tried to figure out which of those first two I hated worse.

Still, I didn't want to spend a bunch of money on new suits, so I suggested starting at Marshall's, which I hate more than funerals or job interviews. Trash, knowing this, nixed that and dragged me into Macy's instead. I know, right?

Since there wasn't time to have alterations done, Trash and a very helpful and patient salesman named John took me in hand (not like that, this wasn't Joey Tribbiani's tailor) and helped me find a couple of great suits off the rack. Black and gray, naturally. One of them is an Alfani, which I think is like Armani for people who can't type. They almost talked me into getting a tan-plaid sport coat as well, but it was so not me that it was rejected by my very immune system. Even adding on a pair of nice pants and several nice new dress shirts, we still got out of there in the mid-three figures. More than a hundred dollars, to be sure, but not as bad as it could have been.

There were a few hiccups. For one thing, I've apparently gone up a pants size, as I learned when the salesman looked at a pair of pants that I thought fit pretty good and he said were too small. I guess I've gotten used to a little constriction around the waist. But at least that explains why the dressing rooms didn't have room to lie down while I zipped up.

Also, it's not always ideal to shop for big-boy clothes with a six-year-old, who was alternately clingy and wandering off, or loudly warning me that someone would steal my (smelly, ratty) shoes. But he made up for it by making charming comments like one about a violet shirt Trash was holding, "That would be a jazzy look for Dad." That was before any of us saw the label that said "Slim Fit," though.

I'm happy with what I got, and more importantly, so is Trash. It wouldn't have turned out that way if I'd done my suit-shopping on my own. I would have come home saying, "But I've always wanted a purple suit! It was only sixty bucks, and look, it's reversible!" This way I have the confidence to walk into what I expect will be roomfuls of guys in ten-thousand-dollar suits and be mistaken for someone who belongs there, at least until I open my mouth.

Even better, now I have enough suits to get me into my sixties, and maybe I won't even have to be buried in my brown-paper-bag polygamist suit.

As for that and the other items that you may have read about above and thought that lots of less fortunate people would be grateful to have them? Well, we shall see, my friends. We shall see.

M. Ovie Reviews: Priest

2011-06-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Priest

I didn't want to see Priest, because everyone I know who's seen it (a surprisingly large number) only went to laugh at it and make fun of it. I didn't have anyone to do this with, so that pleasure would be muted for me. And even in the theater, there were only five or six other people. All of them alone, like me. Perhaps their spouses had also insisted they go, just to be mean, like mine had. But they probably hadn't also seen the last movie in which Paul Bettany played a fallen representative of God fighting to save humanity from supernatural beasties (and to a lesser extent itself) like I had, so it seems extra unfair.

I started out not minding it that much. The opening scene's pretty standard, but then there's a beautiful animated sequence setting the stage for whatever alternate, vampire-infested universe the story takes place in. Narrated by Alan Dale (who also plays a Church elder in the film), it would give HP7P1 a run for its money if there were an Oscar category for "Best Performance by an Animated Backstory."

And then we're dropped into an industrial Blade Runner hellscape, with skyscrapers to the nonexistent horizon and fat cinders raining just inches past our 3-D glasses, and that's actually kind of cool. It looks like an impressively realized world, even if it doesn't hold up past the first twenty minutes. Because it turns out that here's a reality where jet-powered motorcycles that have computer dashboards coexist with hurricane lamps, gramophones, and train station masters wielding pocket watches. But even that makes more sense than the movie's physics, science, sociology, or plot.

In the world of Priest, vampires are completely different from what we're used to. Instead of allegedly sexy guys with plastic teeth, they're eyeless, quadrupedal, semi-ballistic boogers with CGI fangs. So then a big revelation about a "new" kind of vampire rather loses its bite, if you'll forgive the expression, and I probably wouldn't respect you if you did.

Also in the world of Priest, everyone lives under an oppressive Catholic theocracy that both keeps the populace living in fear and misery behind impregnable walls and insists that there are no more vampires. Pick one or the other, Church, but not both. That makes no sense.

I did appreciate the clever casting. Besides Bettany, there's Cam Gigandet looking like Lucas Black in Legion, Stephen Moyer as a non-vampire, and Karl Urban and Brad Dourif demonstrating the bleak prospects facing third-tier Return of the King alumni.

But as dumb as it was, and as much as I didn't feel like I missed anything when I went to pee before the third act, I didn't hate it as much as I expected. In fact, I'd have to say it was one of the best postapocalyptic horror/Western/martial arts/allegorical remakes of The Searchers I've ever seen.

Jeopardized, Part 2

2011-06-17T20:21:00.001-07:00

Jeopardized, Part 2

So maybe you're wondering how the Jeopardy! audition in Kansas City went, if you're not in what is apparently the large segment of my readership that has already auditioned for, been on, or won huge amounts of money from Jeopardy! in the past. I figure now is a good time to bring the other four or five of you up to speed.

The drive to Kansas City the day before was mostly uneventful, save for an accident downtown that had traffic snarled so badly we saw people exiting the freeway down an on-ramp the wrong way. I went with our friend Bitter, and we practiced using a resource called What Is Quiz Book? 2 that I'd received for some long-ago Christmas and forgotten I had until Trash unearthed it minutes before we left. It was good practice for getting me into the Jeopardy! mindset, which as far as I can tell seems to involve a lot of remembering the category, being annoyed by the phrasing of the clues, and telling myself "Triple Stumper" every time I couldn't come up with the answer. There weren't enough questions in the book to keep us occupied for the whole seven-hour drive, but we also listened to a lot of NPR, which everyone knows also makes you smarter.

We scouted out the hotel where the auditions were being held the evening before, so we knew the route and the parking situation and which room to go to. That morning, we had no trouble finding the right place again. As far as I could tell, neither did anyone else. The e-mail was very clear about not arriving late, or you wouldn't get in. I think the only reason that one guy was allowed in was because his flight from New Orleans that morning had been delayed. Yes, people came in from New Orleans.

We were all herded into one room to pose for a Polaroid. The lady taking them immediately nicknamed me Spike, I guess because of what my hair was doing that morning (I'm currently pushing into the "Diminishing Returns" phase of my haircut life cycle). Although I'm a little embarrassed, I figure it's good to have a nickname because it'll help them remember me. Hopefully that'll override the fact that my Polaroid shows a bespectacled clown grinning down at the terrified viewer from atop a vertiginous tower of chins.

There's the paperwork, and there's the "warm-up" in which the Polaroid lady proves to be in showbiz every bit as much as Alex Trebek, if not more. Those people work, man. They explain a little about how the game works, like anyone besides me doesn't already know this stuff, and then we all practice answering questions by raising our hands in lieu of buzzers. You're not supposed to signal you know the answer until they're done reading the question, you know. This seems counterintuitive for someone who's won as many games of You Don't Know Jack as I have.

Then they split us up into two separate groups, each in a different room. Unfortunately, Bitter, who is a much bigger Jeopardy! fan than I am (much like almost everyone I've talked to about this), isn't allowed to spectate. Nobody is, in fact. It's very secretive. You're not going to catch me writing down any questions or answers that we were given as practice, because I think they'll be able to find me and kill me before I even post this online.

So anyway, after being split into groups and doing some more practice questions and a written test (much like the online one, except I was able to go back and answer a few questions on the paper that I'd missed when they were first asked), there's the mock game, which is what I was most looking forward to. "Mock" is not really a misnomer here. There are only three questions per category, nobody keeps score, and there's no Daily Double or Double Jeopardy on the board. People are brought up in groups of three to basically take turns practicing with the buzzer.

And let me tell you, that thing's trickier than it looks. You have to wait for these little "enable" lights to come on before you can buzz in. If you buzz in early, you get penalized a quarter-second. Which doesn't seem like much, but the people I was up against were buzzing in in picoseconds, seemed like. It got to the point where I was buzzing in even when I didn't know the answers, just so I could have a chance to talk. At least, that's what I told myself about the two wrong answers I gave. Don't worry, I also got a couple right. But by the time that was over I was glad nobody was keeping score. I would have been that guy with a red number on his podium for whom everyone feels pity and contempt.

I think I did pretty well on the interview portion, though. Got a couple laughs plugging my book and talking about my old job at the radio show. It was hard to stand out there, though, because a lot of people showed a lot of personality. Given that my sister-in-law reacted to the news of my audition by chanting "Nerd! Nerd! Nerd!" I thought there would be a lot more duds in there with me, but that wasn't the case.

After everyone got a turn, it was over, and we were released to scatter back to the various sections of the Midwest from which we hailed (people came from Minnesota to Texas, so I don't think I traveled the farthest to get there). I was back at home seven hours later. Now all I have to do is wait to be called back. Apparently the pool they're putting together now will be active for the next eighteen months, so I could hear from them any time between the end of this month and…never.

They told us to keep trying, though. Lots of people do, and plenty of competitors made numerous attempts before ever getting cast, including one big winner she mentioned that I never heard of (not Ken Jennings). In fact, this was apparently not the first time for a lot of the people in there with me, because she recognized them.

None of them had cool nicknames, though.

Will I give it another shot if I don't get in? Probably. The online test was fun, as were the practice quizzes. Maybe next time they could have the auditions a little closer to home. I wouldn't mind going just to Des Moines or maybe Chicago or Madison next time. Kansas City's about the limit of my range for this kind of thing. Anywhere closer would be better. As long as it's not St. Paul.

M. Ovie Reviews: Super 8

2011-06-13T22:18:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Super 8

It’s obvious watching Super 8 that J.J. Abrams deliberately set out to make the kind of movie that held him riveted when he was growing up. Fortunately, he also realized that you can’t do that. Making a late-70s/early 80s blockbuster that’s completely faithful to the period would not fly today, for various reasons (seriously, go back and watch the sail barge scene in Return of the Jedi and marvel at how slow that action seems now). Abrams did two things to being this nostalgic period piece into the present. One, he amped up the action, and two, he poured in several healthy scoops of millennial meta. And pulled off both.

The action scenes are riveting and eye-popping, from an early train-derailment sequence that plays like a level of Angry Birds with freight cars to a third act of unrelenting mayhem of the kind we never saw in the 1979 this movie’s set in. There are make-you-jump moments that you don’t see coming, even after years of being trained to see them coming. As for the meta, it’s easy to comment on how this is a monster movie in which a monster movie is being made and leave it at that, but it goes further. Tween auteur Charles explains in his primitive way about how if you know as little something about a character’s emotional life you feel something when he’s in danger – something that a lot of movies have forgotten since along about 1979. But you don’t mind all this telling, because there’s also plenty of showing. These characters have backstories rooted in deep hurt that the movie doesn’t skimp on exploring.

I know that this is supposed to be a homage to Spielberg (who just happens to be a producer on this, probably just so they could get the Amblin E.T. bike next to the Bad Robot), but watching these kids working on their shitty little monster movie, I kept thinking about a young director named Sam Raimi. In Bruce Campbell’s autobiography, Campbell describes scenes from his and Raimi’s youth that one imagines as being just like the ones we see here, with kids holding lights and microphones and cameras while their friends speak lines while wearing their parents’ clothes, only without being interrupted by catastrophic disasters. But then if this were an homage to Raimi, there would be shots where the camera was attached to the top of a flying train car, and quick-cut sequences where crap gets assembled, and a lot more fake blood. There would also be an ugly yellow Oldsmobile and, well, Bruce Campbell. Really, Raimi kind of gets ripped off here. But then the director isn’t the protagonist, a lowly makeup artist/lighting guy is. Maybe this has elements of autobiography in it, but I’m not sure how unless as a kid Abrams saw himself as what Raimi and his crew used to call a “Shemp.”

As for the 1979 setting, at first I thought it was just naked nostalgia, but then I realized it needs to be set in a time before cell phones and the Internet and VCRs and TVs with more than five channels and video games that had more than ten pixels on the screen, and all those other things that are more interesting to today’s kids than making movies (not counting YouTube classics shot on cell phones), and when kids could just zoom around the neighborhood on their bikes without anyone caring. Alas, it also means that almost everyone and everything in the movie is distractingly hideous to behold, but I decided it’s a worthwhile trade-off.

There’s some age-inappropriate behavior from the kids, like how brave they are and one scene where they sit around talking shit in a diner instead of a park somewhere and another scene where two middle-school boys argue about their feelings. And there stuff you find out at and near the end that’s a little off-putting, like how the monster is dealt with, and what it looks like (like your Uncle Steve says, you always have to produce the monster and it’s always a letdown), and the motives that trigger a lot of pretty horrible action, but the end also tells you it’s important to let go of some things so I’m going to try and do that.

Finally, given the title, I have to give J.J. Abrams for not making his crew of young filmmakers number no more than six. The temptation to add exactly two more must have been almost overpowering.

Jeopardized

2011-06-10T12:41:00.001-07:00

Jeopardized

I wouldn't have even known about the online Jeopardy! test back in early February if it hadn't been for all the people posting about it on Twitter. In fact I almost forgot to take it. I'd seen the warnings reminding people to sign in 15-20 minutes before it started, so when a couple of well-timed Tweets reminded me that it was only a couple of minutes away, I figured I'd better snap to it, and even then I wouldn't be surprised if I'd already blown it.

The online test, in case you've never taken one, was pretty fun. You have to type in a short answer, and you have less than a minute to do it in, so Google's no help, which is as it should be. They don't give you the correct answer after you guess, or tell you which ones you got right or wrong, or even your final score, so after I was done I just forgot about it.

Or tried to, at least. I knew I got at least two or three wrong for sure, and one of them in particular was going to haunt me for at least a little while. But only because the correct answer was a character in a book I was reading at the time. A quinary character, but still. Embarrassing.

So I was pretty surprised when I got the e-mail telling me I'd "passed" and was being invited to a "follow-up appointment." I was also surprised to see that it was in Kansas City. Here I was thinking that my trips down to Missouri were over for the foreseeable future, and now it looks like I'm going back in just a couple of days. But for different reasons, obviously.

I know it's pretty early in the process to be exhaustively chronicling some whole "My Jeopardy! Journey!" thing, but that's kind of the reason I'm doing it now. I figure there's a pretty strong chance this is as far as I'll get, so I'd better start writing about it now before the whole story ends up being "I tried to get on Jeopardy! once."

There's some stuff I have to do to prepare, obviously. I have to take that day off work. I have to MapQuest the place where the appointment is going to be. They sent this letter that I have to print out and complete, with five interesting facts about myself, like I'm going to be able to come up with that many. I have to figure out where I'm spending the night before the appointment in Kansas City.

Also, I have to figure out when and what time Jeopardy! is actually on. It is still on, right? It's just that I've never actually seen a whole episode, so that's something I kind of need to look into. And did you know the title's always spelled with an exclamation point? That's something I just learned.

Oh, excuse me, "What is something I just learned?" Seriously?

M. Ovie Reviews: The Hangover Part II

2011-06-06T21:17:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: The Hangover Part II

By now everyone reading this (and most people not) is aware of the rap against The Hangover Part II, which is that it's essentially a remake of the first one, with a change of setting to Bangkok and several additions of the word "again" to the screenplay. While I don't disagree with this assessment, I think the movie could have forestalled some of this criticism with a title that implied less lofty ambitions. "The Hangover Iteration II" is sufficiently unpromising. Then people would know exactly what they were getting before they got it and have lower expectations.

I myself had pretty low expectations. On the other hand, I've only seen the first film once, quite some time ago, so my memories of it are slightly less fuzzy than those of our heroes. But then seeing this brought it all back again. In fact, there were so many elements repeated in the second movie that it's affected my memory of the first movie to the point where I'm not sure that stuff that only happened in the second movie didn't also happen in the first and I just don't remember.

See, the thing about sequels is that they're made because when there's something successful, audiences want (and studios want to sell them) something that is, according to the old saying, "the same, but different." The trick is walking the line between how same and how different. For example, The Matrix Reloaded was too different from The Matrix because of the addition of too many new characters, settings, and sucking. The Hangover Part II, on the other hand…well, see above.

But does it mean the end of the franchise? I doubt it. If Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets won't get a string of sequels axed, nothing will. I think we just need to adjust our expectations. After all, plenty of people tune in every week to a TV show with a similar premise to The Hangover's. Specifically, a group of people go haring in blind panic around an unfamiliar city on unlikely adventures, racing against time while following a tenuous trail of clues to an inexorable climax, led by a charismatic man named Phil.

So if The Amazing Race can have a starting point, an airport sequence, a Detour, a Road Block, and an elimination in a different international city almost every week, why can't every version of The Hangover do the same, only with an impending wedding, a bachelor party that begins with one drink and ends with our heroes waking up in squalor and disorientation with a member of their party missing (or mostly so)? And then why can't there always be a second act in which the same three guys struggle to reconstruct the previous night, following the indelible trail of their own shocking debauchery while running afoul of the local underground and law enforcement, just to find their missing friend? And can anyone think of a decent reason why, when their best hope has turned into a dead end and Phil has to call Tracy to break the bad news (it's always Phil calling Tracy, even if that makes no sense), Stu can't always have an epiphany in the middle of the call and solve the mystery using clues that they had since five minutes after they woke up, before returning to the wedding just in time and boldly standing up to the person who's been bringing him down? And let's always have the coda in which someone comes up with a digital visual record of the night in question to play over the closing credits, and also at some point Ken Jeong jumping out at them with his tiny penis. Hey, if it works once, right?

This is all making me look forward to recapping another twelve episodes of The Amazing Race in the fall. And I'm going to be the first in line for tickets to Dude, Where's My Car Now?

Unrelated: We're looking for a place to put M. Edium (now six and a half) in language lessons. Any good suggestions for Twin Cities-area would-be mini-polyglots?

World's Largest

2011-05-31T21:18:00.000-07:00

World's Largest

One thing we've tried hardest to teach M. Edium is that he's not going to get what he wants by throwing tantrums or having meltdowns. If anything, it controls our behavior by forcing us to do the opposite of what he wants. Fortunately it doesn't happen very often. And he's learned that the best way to change our minds is to make us laugh instead. That totally works.

Anyway, when we were in Orlando a couple of weeks ago, he wasn't that interested in Disney World or Sea World or Universal Studios or anything like that. But among the tourist brochures on the rack in the hotel was one for the World's Largest McDonald's, right there in Orlando. M. Edium was sold.

Looking at the map on the brochure, I got the impression that it was pretty close to our hotel, and thought it would just be a short cab ride there. So I was a little embarrassed when we showed up with twenty bucks on the meter. Good thing we were having dinner at McDonald's, so at least the food would be cheap.

M. Edium loves McDonald's, but he also loved everything non-McDonald's about this place, from the full deli menu (not that he took advantage of it), to the giant fish tanks we ate our dinner in front of, to the giant creepy animatronic piano-playing moon-faced dude from the 80s McDonald's commercials to the Chuck E. Cheese-style game arcade, complete with ticket dispensers and a little room where you go to redeem the tickets for what ends up translating into being ridiculously overpriced crap.

M. Edium had only played a few of the games before he visited this room and saw a few Pokémon mini-plushes, which he wanted to adopt with the same passion that has forced me to ban Trash from pet stores. It could be had for the low, low price of 640 tickets. Which, given the rate at which he was earning them (he's not so great at thee games), would translate to approximately one-point-seven car payments.

I got him out of the room and tried to distract him by cutting him loose in the giant child-Habitrail, but he was both adamant and inconsolable. "I'm going to win enough tickets for that if it takes me all night," he vowed. I told him that it would, but that wasn't an option. I could tell this was going to get ugly, but I wasn't sure this was the hill I wanted to die on. At least not on vacation. This wasn't just about getting a new toy. This was about rescuing a sentient being from a noisy, tropical purgatory.

Fortunately, I saw an out. Unlike at most of these kinds of places, you can also buy the prizes outright for a number of pennies equal to the number of tickets they cost. I proposed this option to M. Edium: "What if we didn't spend all night earning tickets and we just bought the Pokémon?"

Through his tears, M. Edium said, "That would make it seem cheap."

Bless you, kid. By cracking me up, you allowed me to make this a win-win situation. He didn't have enough tickets to earn the prize he wanted, but the eleven he was able to contribute seemed to satisfy him.

On our twenty-dollar cab ride home (seriously, round-trip cab fare plus tip on this outing ended up being almost as much as I paid for the rental car the next day), he told me all about Turtwig's powers or whatever. It's a turtle with a twig on its head, I don't know. But Turtwig became M. Edium's favorite "friend" for the whole rest of the trip. It even got to go with him to the Kennedy Space Center, in favor of "Shuttle" (a stuffed space shuttle with stuffed external fuel tank and stuffed SRBs) getting to return to his native home. Turtwig was adopted into the elite corps of stuffed friends who had gotten to come along on the trip, but M. Edium couldn't wait to introduce him to the rest of the family when we got home.

So of course we ended up leaving it in the hotel room.

The good news is that M. Edium is not unaccustomed to having his "friends" occasionally return from vacation a day or two after he does. And he doesn't ever have to know that this time, Turtwig didn't come from our Orlando hotel, but from Amazon. I just hope he doesn't find the spare that I also ordered.

M. Ovie Reviews: The Adjustment Bureau

2011-05-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: The Adjustment Bureau

On Saturday night, when the world failed to end on schedule as it always does, I went to see The Adjustment Bureau. Everyone was still on earth and The Adjustment Bureau was still in theaters. It was a night of unexpected wonders.

I actually liked it more than I expected to. You're probably familiar with the premise: an everyman shoo-in New York senatorial candidate played by Matt Damon runs afoul of behatted agents of varying sinisterness, who are bent on keeping him from dating Emily Blunt. Most of us don't require shadowy figures with mysterious agendas to prevent us from dating Emily Blunt, so maybe Matt Damon isn't such an everyman after all.

The film is at its best when it keeps things mysterious. It has an unfortunate tendency to overexplain things here and there, especially at the end, but it does so in a way that still allows the story to hold together. It's surprisingly tight, considering that much of it is built on the conceit of how little we really know. At some point, it becomes rather an interesting discussion about the tension between free will and predestination, although in the world of the film, predestination takes the form of the "Plan," a word you can almost hear capitalized every time someone says it. Obviously we know which side is going to win, this being a Hollywood movie and all. There's even a pivotal decision made at the literal base of the Statue of Liberty. I think that's only because they couldn't set that scene on her actual nose.

The Plan is illustrated by icons representing people that move across the pages of animated books. Which is a little anachronistic. After all, aside from the ubiquitous hats that the Adjustment Bureaucrats are always wearing, they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their look updated. Shouldn't they have iPads by now?

I can't complain over how quickly it moves, though. Not only do Matt Damon and Emily Blunt fall in love faster than any couple ever, even in the movies, but we get to proceed from the introduction of the Adjustment Bureaucrats to their complete explication in less than two hours. Compare that to the Observers on Fringe.

Now, as for that free will vs. Plan question, the film does hint at some interesting things about how sometimes seemingly chance events are deliberately triggered by Adjustment Bureaucrats as part of the Plan. Any movie like this has to make you speculate, "Wow, what if that's true?" Unfortunately, given all the stars that have to align for any feature film to be made, it's obvious that isn't the case. There are too many places where the fiercely secretive Adjustment Bureau, if it existed, could have easily sabotaged the whole thing in order to keep their secret.

The biggest twist was in the closing credits: only one milliner on the whole crew! Still, you may never look at people in hats the same way again.

2011-05-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

The Question

I'm always a little jealous when I see a fellow blogger getting a chance to invite his or her readers to see them at some live event, not least because who wants to go watch me blog, anyway? If I could get people to see me do that I'd be all set.

I'm not to that point, but I am at the point where you can come watch me be a rock star. Twice next month, as a matter of fact. I play bass guitar in a band of fellow middle-aged rocker wannabees, and as of last month we're called The Question. What's our band called again? The Question. This is going to be a viral marketing gold mine, I can tell.

Gig Number One: We're playing at a place called the Maxx Bar & Grill in Ham Lake, Minnesota on Saturday, June 4. It's our official bar gig debut (not counting the Hard Rock Café in January, that is), and we're opening for a well-established local band called Snaggletoof. If we bring in enough people, we might get to open for them again in the future, and I can nag you to come to that gig as well.

Yes, it's in Ham Lake, which is way the hell up at 17646 Central Avenue. But on the other hand, we go on at 9:30, which means you have plenty of time to get there. Hell, even if you're spending that weekend up north at the cabin, you only need to come halfway back to check us out, and then you can return to the north woods with your ears still ringing. I know it seems like a long drive, but it's straight up Highway 65, the primary artery of the northern suburbs and exurbs and eventually the Iron Range. I used to live there myself. In fact, I'm sure I'll see some old neighbors there. Not that I'll recognize them because I didn't live there long enough to have met any of them.

Here's the poster. Note the key words, "NO COVER."

Gig Number Two: If you've ever been to a St. Paul Saints game, you're well aware of the heady mix of minor league baseball and wacky randomness the franchise cultivates. If you haven't, you should come to the game on Friday, because we'll be playing at the tailgate party outside. This is in the more central location of Midway Stadium on Energy Park Drive in St. Pau, and if you come early enough to hear our whole set (I think the first band is starting at 5:00, although I have to confirm and get back to you), you probably won't have to walk from your car as far as you'd have to drive to the Ham Lake gig.

We'll be the second of two bands playing that evening, and technically I don't think you even need to buy tickets to hear us, because we'll be playing outside the gates. So really, we're not even shaking you down for the five-dollar general admission ticket price.

Come to one, come to both. And don't worry about not knowing any of our original songs, because we don't have any yet. We're still strictly a cover band, so you're bound to be familiar with at least one of our tunes, unless you've never listened to any rock music at all, in which case you probably should have stopped reading right at the beginning.

Sorry I can't plug any future gigs beyond June, but if you're aware of any openings, let me know in the comments. You've always come through in the past.

M. Ovie Review: Bridesmaids

2011-05-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Bridesmaids

Here's what I expected Bridesmaids to be that it wasn't: an ensemble comedy set largely in Vegas. Here's what I expected Bridesmaids to be that it was: quite funny.

The ad campaign implies two hours hanging out with six mismatched women, but there really aren't that many scenes with all six of them. And it's not really about the wedding, which mostly just provides a framework for a story of a person and a friendship in crisis. I know, you're laughing already, right?

The thing is, Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph are not only completely believable as lifelong best friends, they're also really funny together. There are plenty of over-the-top set pieces in this movie, but there are also some nice bits where it's just the two of them hanging out together and talking shit about people. Their relationship is complicated by the usual grown-up issues, namely Lillian (Rudolph) going off and getting married to some rich guy in Chicago while Annie (Wiig) is stuck in Milwaukee with a failed business, creepy-ass roommates, a lackluster love life, a crap job, and a car that's pretty much a running gag. At least Annie gets to be Lillian's maid of honor, but one of the other bridesmaids presents as a possible rival for not only that position but that of Lillian's best friend. So the rest of the movie is about how Annie, who's kind of awkward and goofy just as her baseline, takes that baseline further and further down in a spiral of embarrassment, ugly scene-making, and bodily fluids.

I wasn't expecting Kristen Wiig to carry the whole movie the way she does, but she's quite good. After all, she looks like someone who could actually have these problems, as opposed to if this had been a different movie with Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson, possibly denoting vulnerability by taking their hair a few shades darker.

Also really good is recidivist kleptomaniac Melissa McCarthy, who used to steal all her scenes on Gilmore Girls and Samantha Who? and for all I know Mike & Molly, which I don't watch, and then she does the same thing here. She's always played characters who are sweet if a little off-kilter, but here she's playing against type as Maya Rudolph's future sister-in-law Megan. She's aggressive and butch (but straight, oh yes), and you won't believe some of what comes out of her mouth. And, in one scene, other orifices.

Because this is a non-Heigl/Hudson movie in more ways than one. There's the obligatory scene where all the bridesmaids go into the dress store for the fitting and you're bracing for a musical montage of dress-trying-on, and instead we're suddenly in a full-on gross-out scene. I appreciated that quite a bit.

I also appreciated that there isn't any lip-syncing until the very end, and it's funny and embarrassing instead of just embarrassing like that kind of scene usually is.

I would have liked to see more of what I expected, ensemble-wise. Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey have a nice relationship as women on opposite ends of the innocence spectrum, but there needed to be more of that and less of Annie dealing with the two men in her life who both kind of dicks, although in different ways and to vastly different degrees. But that's quibbling. I think it's a winner.

And although they're very different in most ways, this movie has two big things in common with Sucker Punch: Trash picked both for me, and they both have Jon Hamm in them.

Indoor Pool, Part 2

2011-05-15T20:18:00.001-07:00

Indoor Pool Part 2

Here's what you need to know about our basement. It's half finished, with the TV and the furniture and the bar and the video games on one side of a dividing wall, and the washer/dryer/laundry tub on the other side of the wall, along with the catboxes, the chest freezer, and the area under the stairs that Trash's mind gravitates to when she runs across an episode of Hoarders on TV. The floor on the finished side is carpet, with painted concrete on the unfinished side. The unfinished side is also, thank God, where all of our past basement floods have been confined to. Until now.

This time, there was so much water on the floor that it was spreading out of the utility area and into the TV room, soaking the carpet -- and the area rug that we have covering part of the carpet (it sounds dumb, but it really makes it warmer down there in the winter). I knew I was going to have to deal with that, but before dealing with the width of the water, I was going to have to deal with its depth.

Enter the wet-dry vacuum, called upon to live up to the first part of its name in a big way. I sucked up enough water to fill the tank and dump it out several times, and then had to stop for a while because the switch got wet and touching it started to make my hand feel really funny. Not something I wanted to do too much of while standing toenail-deep in water. Then I switched to using big plastic cups to scoop water into empty 35-pound cat litter bins. While I was doing this, I wondered when the puddle would start shrinking. We all know how tall a gallon of milk is, but how wide were the forty gallons of two-inch-deep water I'd already dumped down the laundry tub?

Under the laundry tub is a floor drain, and the bubbles I saw rising from it while the laundry tub emptied gave me my answer: moot, because all the water I was dumping into the laundry tub was just ending up back on the basement floor.

It was at this point I started hauling kitty-litter bins full of water upstairs, out of the house, and to the curb, where I dumped the water out for the city to pick up later. I could tell this was going to be exhausting and time-consuming even if the puddle had finally begun shrinking, but on my third or fourth trip I caught a break: the floor drain had opened up and let out most of the water's sheer depth, at least, Now instead of a lake, my basement was a swamp. Yay!

But that was only the beginning of the good news. Other happy-making items included:

1. Thanks to all the basement-drying I'd done recently, there was relatively little cat litter scattered on the floor to turn into gross gray sludge like it usually does when it gets wet!
2. Because we've had a leaky basement before, most of the stuff stored on the floor is in waterproof plastic bins. They might even float if they needed to, but the water didn't get deep enough for us to find out. Maybe next time!
2. Water has never gotten into the storage area under the stairs before, which contains large cardboard boxes, our older luggage, and several guitars in cases. It did this time. Most of the bags and all the guitars were salvageable, although the suitcases now smell like unused cat litter. In fact, I discovered an acoustic six-string I didn't even know I owned. Bonus!
3. While wrestling the sodden area rug out from under the furniture and the TV room, I also found 29 cents!
4. I used to only have one or two bath towels that were dirty enough to use on the basement floor, but now I have four or five!
5. I know how much it costs to rent one of those giant, snail-shaped floor fans when I need to ($21 a day)!
6. Certain areas of the basement are now cleaner and better organized than they've been since before Christmas, thanks to all the ruined crap I had to throw away!

I can laugh about it now, because my basement is dry again, and has been for weeks in a row. And it has occurred to me that we live in a world where water alarms exist and can be purchased for a lot less money than it costs to clean an area rug.

Indoor Pool

2011-05-08T20:23:00.001-07:00

Indoor Pool

One of the best things about working at home is that you don't have to get ready for work in the morning. You just go to work, often checking your business e-mails with eyes that aren't even fully focused yet. As the natural lulls of a normal work day come along, you might take a break to brush your teeth, or put on deodorant, or maybe shave something. If I didn't have to take M. Edium to school during the week, I'm not sure I'd even own pants.

It goes without saying, then, that daily showers are a thing of my desk-bound past. As long as Trash doesn't mind my natural funk, why waste the water?

I'll admit that with the decreased frequency, the length of the showers I do take can increase accordingly. It just takes a little more effort to get back to as clean as I was the last time I stepped out of the shower a month ago.

Even so, I really didn't think about how much water I was using during one recent shower until I went downstairs with my dirty laundry and saw all my runoff on the basement floor.

What?

So, yeah, after finally dealing with the sink that kept leaking into the basement (okay, having it dealt with), I dried up yet another pool, then tried to figure out what the problem was. I turned on the tub, and the shower, both with the drain closed and the drain open, to see if I could figure out where this new leak was coming from. I was able to reproduce a slow drip from the drum drain suspended under the basement ceiling, but nothing like the deluge that the amount of water I saw on the floor would have required.

But as always, I'm all about the temporary fix. I switched to showering upstairs, decided to put off calling the plumber for a few days, and left the state for my grandmother's funeral.

Without going into that whole trip, I'm glad I went, even if the drive back on Tuesday through five states (if you count the hundred yards into Wisconsin) was a little on the long side. But at least I got to be home and relaxed for a few hours before I got a very urgent-sounding call from downstairs. Since Trash and Bitter were watching a DRV-delayed Glee at the time, I figured something had gone wrong with the cable. Imagine my surprise when I got downstairs and found Bitter up to the tops of her feet in water.

Now, I thought I had dealt with water in the basement before. Compared to this, however, those were damp spots. Humid spells. A fogged-up hand-mirror. I came down with a bath towel and Trash just laughed at me.

We realized the toilet had been running, and probably had for a while. Once we dealt with that, at least the basement ocean stopped spreading before it went completely wall to wall.

And it could have been a lot worse. As it turned out, the cable and the TV and the DVR were all just fine. Which meant that Trash and Bitter were able to watch the end of Glee while sitting in the dry quarter of the basement. While I tried to figure out exactly what the hell had happened, and what the hell I was going to do about it.

At the very least, I was going to need a lot of towels.

Vanity Unfair, Part 2

2011-05-04T19:38:00.000-07:00

Vanity Unfair, Part 2

I saw so many movies last month that it took me forever to get back to the story of our leaky sink and our wet basement. But that doesn't mean that story's over. Not by long, damp shot.

So yes, I felt terribly clever for using Legos to tilt the vanity counter forward so that any water leaking out of the fixture would go into the sink and down the drain. The only problem with that temporary solution was that I neglected to make sure it would actually work.

By raising the two back corners, I had adjusted the direction of the downhill flow forward, but hadn't neutralized the leftward slant. So the next morning when I got up, all the water had leaked from the fixture and around the basin, onto the bathroom floor, and then into the basement. So now I had two floors to dry. Stupid Legos.

After cleaning up both messes, my next project was to align the sink so that leakage actually did go down the drain. Using some flatter pieces, I leveled off the left-right orientation and then dribbled some water onto the fixture so I could watch it flow straight into the sink. Which it did. Now I could relax and have time to consider my next move. Well, my second-to-next move, because my actual next move was going to be to send it to There I Fixed It. I wished the fixture would start leaking again so I could feel clever.

I felt less clever the next morning, when I was in the bathroom and heard a slow dripping sound. I couldn't see it, though -- until I opened up the vanity cabinet. Which was flooded. It seemed the water that used to leak out of the fixture above the sink was now leaking out below it. Fortunately, most of the water-soluble stuff we keep in there had already been destroyed the previous summer, so that was a win. And by now I was getting really good at drying the basement floor.

It was then that I finally figured out the permanent fix: turn off the water supply to the sink until the plumber came.

It turned out to be a simple solution; the plumber simply replaced the faucet cartridge. I would have felt better about the bill had I not just replaced that very cartridge myself ten months before.

But the good news, as always, was that I was done having to deal with ponds on the basement floor for the foreseeable future.

The bad news is that it turns out I have really shitty foresight.

M. Ovie Reviews: Hanna

2011-05-02T21:43:00.001-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Hanna

I finally did get around to seeing Hanna, as promised, and I enjoyed it, as expected. It's a weird little movie, one that could pass as almost completely non-Hollywood if not for the Hollywood cast. Aside from the actors, it just doesn't seem interested in much of what is considered necessary for an action movie. Which is why it works so well as an action movie.

Trash and I like camping with M. Edium, but Eric Bana is raising Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) in some isolated arctic refuge so far off the grid the grid looks like a line from there. Obviously he's passing along all his bad-ass survival skills to the teenaged girl, but she's getting bored and she wants the movie to start already. So Eric Bana's like, okay, if that's what you want, and she's like, yep, pretty much, which sets in motion a whole chain of unlikely and yet somehow inexorable events. Apparently Eric Bana's had this whole plan in place for years, which we don't know anything about until we see it playing out. I'm not going to go into detail, but after you see it, you can have even more fun imagining how Eric Bana explained it to Hanna in advance. And imagining Hanna repeatedly saying, "Wait, I'm going to what?" in the dozen or so languages Eric Bana has apparently taught her over the campfire.

So the plan is pretty much for them to split up and meet up again later elsewhere, with all sorts of adventures in between to show off their various quasi-superpowers. Which is all unlikely enough, but then Cate Blanchett shows up as an office executive from Hell, firing off Texas-flavored R's and L's through those choppers of hers that somehow seem a lot more predatory than usual. So we have our heroes and our antagonist, and a bunch of places to travel through, and a ruthless henchman who for some reason dresses like Owen Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums, and we're good to go.

Except we're not, because there's all kinds of other cool stuff going on throughout. This is a very stylish movie, with all of the action scenes shot in ways that are innovative enough to be interesting but not enough to be distracting, save one scene in which Hanna is chased through tunnels that are deliberately lit to look like a moving Escher-maze, and that's cool-looking enough that you don't mind being distracted. There's also the fascinating score by the Chemical Brothers, and I would just like to extend my congratulations to Mrs. Chemical for raising such talented boys. I'm the first person to ever make that joke, right? I almost have to be, I'm sure.

One time in a fiction-writing class, I learned that when writing a story, keep it interesting by not going with the first thing you think of, but the second thing. Everyone who reads it has already thought of the first thing by the time you get to it, so if you go with the second thing, it keeps it interesting and unpredictable. I like how Hanna seems to go with that second thing wherever possible. Like, you know how a person on their own in foreign lands will inevitably encounter a stupid American tourist, or even a whole family of them? Hanna flips that script by making the stupid American family British instead. It's the little things like that, you know.

There's some backstory, and something of a mystery, and some stuff about Hanna's origin story, but it's really not necessary. Hanna is at its best when it's stripped down to its essentials, when we're following the main character who is babe-in-woods, unstoppable fighting machine, and walking MacGuffin all in one. All the other crap the movie uses to explain her is just window dressing. Stuff from, if you will, an action movie that considered it necessary. Most of the time, this one knows better.

M. Ovie Reviews: Troll Hunter

2011-04-29T22:22:00.000-07:00

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.

M. Ovie Reviews: Rio

2011-04-27T21:08:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

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.

M. Ovie Reviews: Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil

2011-04-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-18T12:00:00.001-07:00

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.

M. Ovie Reviews: Source Code

2011-04-14T20:07:00.000-07:00

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.

M. Ovie Reviews: Surprise!

2011-04-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

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.

M. Edium Chooses

2011-04-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Short Stuff

2011-04-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

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.

Vanity Unfair

2011-04-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Science Fair to Middling

2011-04-03T19:33:00.000-07:00

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.

The Right Stuff

2011-03-31T22:02:00.000-07:00

The Right Stuff

Dave and Tara always seem to know exactly what to send M. Edium for Christmas, and this year was no exception. Aware of his interest in rockets and building stuff, and in our interest in giving him educational toys, they sent him a rocket to build. You know, just like in The Astronaut Farmer only smaller.

We had plenty of fun putting it together, but this week we got the opportunity to have plenty of fun trying it out. Now, none of what follows should be construed in any way as Dave and Tara's fault. It's my kid's.

1. On the day M. Edium decreed for our maiden flight, he had lost the three stabilizer fins. As you can see from the picture, these are flashy, sci-fi-looking pointy things made of foil-covered balsa wood. You'd think they'd be hard to lose, but he managed. I, in turn, managed by cutting some new fins out of a cardboard box. They weren't precision, or anything, and one of them even had a hole through it, but I hoped they would just keep the thing from zooming around the park like an untied balloon until it clocked someone on the bridge of the nose.

2. While carrying the rocket to the park, M. Edium tripped and fell over nothing at all, landing on the rocket. The fuselage was undamaged, but now at least two of the already-imperfect fins waggled limply. This proved to be an even bigger problem when we got to the launch site and discovered that the fins are not only aerodynamic, but structural. They're supposed to support the whole weight of the rocket before launch. In this condition they couldn't support an argument.

3. It's a chemical rocket, in the sense that it runs on vinegar and baking soda. You pour the vinegar into the "fuel tank" (essentially a plastic bottle that takes up most of the fuselage), put the baking soda into a plastic tube that fits into the fuel tank, give the whole rocket a firm shake, set it down, and stand back. It was getting close to bedtime, so I'd brought enough fuel for exactly one launch. After we got to the park, we upended the rocket and carefully poured the vinegar into the "nozzle" at the base, which took a few minutes because we were carrying it in a sport bottle (and remind me to rinse that out before Trash's next karate class). Once it was all in the tank, M. Edium immediately did what came naturally, which was to turn the rocket upright again. And since we hadn't closed the fuel tank, ¾ of the vinegar splashed out onto the snow.

Obviously NASA would have postponed this launch several dozen times by now, what with missing stabilizer fins, jury-rigged replacements, no way to keep the rocket pointing upright, and a quarter of the required fuel. But what the hell, we were here, right? They launched the Challenger, after all.

While M. Edium retreated to a safe distance (actually several safe distances – dude was half a city block away), I stuck the tube of baking soda into the fuel tank, gave the whole rocket a shake, and tried to figure out how I was going to keep it upright for the five to eight seconds until it went off.

Again, a minor rocketry/chemistry lesson. As the baking soda and vinegar mix, it foams up, as anyone who has ever made a model volcano (including M. Edium) knows. This is carbon dioxide forming. This gas is trapped inside the fuel tank by a rubber stopper, which pops off when the pressure becomes too great, sending the rocket soaring up to three hundred feet above out neighborhood. In theory. If the stopper's in too tight, the instructions warn, it won't pop. If it's too loose, it won't build sufficient pressure before it pops. The instructions don't really tell you what to expect if you're only using a quarter of the recommended vinegar, but I can guess the answer is "not great things."

So I tried sort of balancing the primed rocket between its one good stabilizer fin and the fingertips of one hand, but it tipped over. And the stopper popped, and the rocket skated about twenty feet across the snow. But at least we saw a good demonstration of the driving concept, right? Which led to the fourth problem:

4. "I wasn't looking," M. Edium said.

Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff is a great movie about the triumph of innovation and the American spirit, but it's also about the triumph of persistence. In most of the film, we're battling to catch up to the Russians in the Space Race, because of course back then – and even later, when the movie was made – we only knew about the Soviet successes and not the horrifying failures that came to light decades later. In the sequence I'm thinking of, rocket after American rocket explodes on the launch pad, sinks back into its own exhaust, or just pops off a pathetic little nose cone as though it's being piloted by Astronaut Gonzo.

Of course these were seen as failures, especially when they were the culmination of those dramatic countdowns they used to do. But NASA learned from every failure, and figured out how to fix the problems, and now here it is 2011 and we're all shuttling back and forth between our vacation homes on Ganymede and Europa.

The point is that NASA kept trying, and so will M. Edium and I. On our own, much smaller scale, if it's true that you learn more from your failures than your mistakes, this has turned out to be an even more educational toy than Tara and Dave realized. Having four launches' worth of failures in one attempt will do that.

Pok in the Eye

2011-03-29T20:52:00.000-07:00

Pok in the Eye

There are things that a son can say to his father that are like stabbing him through the heart with a spear made of dry ice. Things like "I hate you" and "Are we there yet?" and "I think I did something to your computer." In M. Edium's case, the phrase in question was "I think I like Pokémon better than Star Wars." We swore we'd never tell him what (or who) to love, but now I have some sense of what it felt like for fathers of earlier generations to hear, "Dad, I'm gay."

I was plenty into Star Wars my own self, starting when I was a year older than he is and going on from there through a period longer than he's been alive. I've been quite happy to share his Star Wars interest for the past few years, even though Star Wars means Clone Wars 80% of the time these days, and Clone Wars means proto-Stormtroopers as good guys, and ass-fugly spaceships, and a stripe-haired, orange, alien Bratz, and a dashing hero who's basically Young Hitler. Not always easy to get behind.

But at least it makes sense. A battle between good and evil. Pokémon, I don't get at all. Even the books don't clear anything up. I've tried to read a couple, and they don't make a lick of sense, even the ones printed in English. I was six pages into one of them before I realized it was supposed to be read from front to back and I'd started at the end.

I can understand how it started with him. M. Edium learned about Pokémon (God, it's even annoying to type) at either kindergarten or Montessori, I really don't care which. He knew kids who had Pokémon cards and thus he wanted some, so Trash went online and bought him a batch of used ones for a price so low they were almost worth it (or so we thought at the time). That made him happy. He started bringing them to school and showing them to people. Then he wanted to look at the new ones every time we went to Target (especially the shiny ones), and then he was wanting more, and then Trash found someone local on Craigslist who was selling a whole shoe box of them for 20 bucks, and now he has thousands of them. You know how if you're ever unwise enough to use glitter in your house for anything, suddenly the glitter is insidiously everywhere? Multiply the size of all those shiny little motes by a few hundred, print some nonsensical words and a freaky dead-eyed cartoon character on each one of them, and you have our house.

And yet somehow M. Edium is learning to identify them by sight. Or at least that's what it seems like to us; he could be uttering nonsense syllables and we wouldn't know the difference between that and his explanation of which Pokémons battle with, evolve from, are bigger or smaller than, or have sex with which other Pokémons.

It's not all Trash's fault, of course. M. Edium's own pack-ratlike tendencies mean that of course he was going to hoard Pokémon cards, and stash them in various different places around the house and refuse to commingle the "special" ones in the shoe box he keeps the others in. There are little stacks of Pokémon cards that I'm running into all over the house, like the corn kernels and alfalfa pellets I run into when I clean Bucky's cage.

And maybe I'm to blame as well. It's possible I'm encouraging his interest too much, being too indulgent. Today he showed me a printout of different Pokémon creatures crowding a single sheet of paper, seeming to jumble and writhe before my horrified eyes like a bestiary imagined by an alternate-universe H.P. Lovecraft who grew up on Japanese cartoons, and asked me which one I like best. I probably shouldn't have held back, but I couldn't bring myself to be totally honest with him.

"I hate them all," I said instead.

"Even that one?" he asked, pointing hopefully to some round, compact bundle of anime-face and nightmare fuel.

I cast around in my mind for something positive to say and landed on, "I'd like to have one of those to roast alive on a spit."

"What about that one?" he asked.

"I'm not filled with rage and loathing as long as I don't look at it directly," I sugarcoated.

Every once in a while, Trash and I are momentarily broken-hearted at seeing some new sign of how much our little boy has grown up. But now that Pokémon has returned him to babbling incoherent made-up words, and relating stories that make no sense, it's like we're getting a taste of that all over again.

UPDATE: Apparently Trash also had this exact conversation with him, verbatim.

M. Ovie Reviews: Sucker Punch

2011-03-27T22:18:00.001-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Sucker Punch

I have two introductory paragraphs for this review, so bear with me and you can pick which one you like better.

Intro 1:

Chao and I have gone to see midnight movies at the Uptown Theater a few times. Two of those were 3-D adult films from the 70s. The thing is that the Uptown only has one screen, so when you get to the ticket window you just say, "One, please" without having to state the title of the movie. And thus I feel less pervy doing that than I did asking a ticket vendor for a ticket for Sucker Punch.

Intro 2

Trash doesn't like going to movies in the theater, but she encourages me to go. She knows it makes me happy to see a new release in the dark, loud, distraction-free (welcome to Minnesota!) environment of the cinema. After M. Edium is in bed, she often sends me on my way to check something out, because she loves me. And also because it means that every once in a while, she can collect on these cumulative favors and send me to something like Sucker Punch.

Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of goodwill towards Zack Snyder. I loved his 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, and credit it with the current zombie renaissance (if the term "zombie renaissance" isn't redundant, heh heh). Unfortunately, it was also the last Zack Snyder movie where he could bring himself to put a normal-looking sky on the screen. Watchmen was doomed to disappoint no matter what, and any other director who filmed it would have made the same crucial mistake, that being to agree to take the gig in the first place. I just wish he'd settle down and tell a story again.

That's not happening in Sucker Punch. Imagine if you took Shutter Island, Inception, Moulin Rouge, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Kill Bill, and a dash of Showgirls and threw them all into Final Draft. You would then have about one-third of the janked-out kookiness that fills this movie.

The other two-thirds are mostly accounted for by a series of fantasy sequences so literally over-the-top that one sometimes finds oneself looking down at airplanes. As you're probably aware, the heroine of this story is a pigtailed blonde named Babydoll (allowing us to dispense with any feminine empowerment argument in favor of this movie right off the bat) who finds herself wrongly imprisoned in a mental hospital. But is it truly wrong for her to be there? Because as we see over the course of the movie, girlfriend is seriously fucked in the head.

So the deal is that she supposedly escapes into an alternate reality, which is where most of the action takes place, but then she keeps escaping from that reality into even more bizarre realities. And her fellow inmates get to come with her somehow. I don't know, you're probably better off not wasting much time trying to figure out how the various layers of reality interact with each other, because you'd probably be the only one. You're better off trying to untangle the gender politics. There might be a case to be made about women boldly fighting and working together to defeat their male oppressors, if they weren't guided on their quests by an old white male guru character and if they didn't do it while exposing their cleavage and thighs and spectacular hair and makeup. But then, you know, who would see it?

Bottom line, it's all about those fantasy sequences. As a result, it keeps veering back and forth over the line between the fever dreams of a horny twelve-year-old boy and the fever dreams of a self-loathing twelve-year-old boy.

The aforementioned Chao regularly hosts "bad movie nights" at his house, and has been doing so for several years, since several homes ago. He's always telling me about the next ridiculous crap, which is always something nobody ever heard of but it, say, features a gun that shoots fists, or something like Executive Koala, which is a taut psychological thriller about a businessman who has the head of a koala.

I can't wait to tell him about Sucker Punch. There's crap in there even he won't believe.

M. Ovie Reviews: Rango

2011-03-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Rango

Whenever I see a trailer for a new animated movie that isn't from Pixar (and as a parent I see pretty much all of those trailers sooner or later), my initial default reaction is a strange kind of suspicious yet dismissive eye-roll. I should probably stop doing that, because it's not really fair. Besides, have you seen the trailer for the next Pixar movie? Oh, my gaaaawd.

That was also my reaction to the Rango trailer, but as with most of these animated movies, I actually ended up liking it. It may look like a Western with talking animals, but there's quite a bit more going on than that. It's really more about a chameleon with an identity crisis. Get it? A chameleon with an identity crisis! Ha ha!

After a musical prologue by an owl mariachi band who will serve as the Mexican Chorus for the proceedings, the movie opens with a lizard voiced by Johnny Depp grappling with a really well-animated case of existential angst (actually dramaturgical writer's block, which to a screenwriter amounts to the same thing), before being unceremoniously flung into…well, the rest of the movie.

And so begins the Hero's Journey, with all the mythic Campbell elements those capitalized words imply. The movie doesn't properly start until the lizard makes it to the tiny, archetypal Old West town of Dirt, and, through a combination of bluster and luck, quite literally makes a name for himself, getting hailed as a hero and appointed sheriff (a job with the life expectancy of a Spinal Tap drummer). From there, Rango tap-dances up and down Maslow's hierarchy for the rest of the film, and I don't think it's a spoiler to say that most of the needs on that pyramid end up getting met. It's a kids' movie, after all.

But only just. Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy, because why not cast a British voice as a Wild West gunslinger?) nearly drove M. Edium out of the theater, and I'm pretty sure M. Edium didn't really follow the plot any better than I did. Even though the town is in crisis, the movie keeps insisting that it's Rango's story, which must be great news to the townspeople who are counting on him to save their furry and/or scaly asses. The mystery behind what's happening to the town is barely dealt with, in comparison to the time (and a rather witty, if not entirely sensical, Timothy Olyphant cameo) lavished on Rango's final trial of endurance.

But then, this is a Gore Verbinski film, which means the story itself is distantly subordinate to how it's told. Be sure to expect all of the stylistic restraint you enjoyed in Pirates of the Caribbean. There are plenty of eye-popping, fast-moving, server-crashing action sequences to punctuate Rango's long periods of whatever, and it's all so gratuitously detailed, from the giant cast of critters and varmints to every dusty, sand-pitted surface, you sometimes want to say, "Enough already!" The style extends to the soundtrack, which is so sweeping and iconic that I both think it flirts with plagiarism and intend to recommend it to my dad. Plus it features the definitive bluegrass version of "Ride of the Valkries."

Remember how Johnny Depp spent all those years trying to subvert his own teen-idol image by making himself look as weird as possible in as many movies as he could? He's outdone himself here, playing a character with individually-articulated goggle eyes, a neck shaped like a less-than sign, and a long row of teeth creepier than Depp's own (come on, you know it's true). But alas, this movie proves that not all of his charisma comes from his looks. I suspect that Captain Jack Sparrow wasn't the role that got him on cereal boxes because of the costume and the guyliner and the beard-dreads, but the voice. Rango uses that same voice, but with the Keef Richards drawl replaced by a Western one. Sorry, Depp, you're still charismatic even when you're green, scaly, and molting. Sucks to be you.

That voice is also the main reason why Rango wouldn't be better if you watched it dubbed into a different language without subtitles. It's a visual deluge that makes an effort to be about something…but maybe about too much.

M. Ovie Reviews: Cedar Rapids

2011-03-21T21:48:00.000-07:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Cedar Rapids

I thought Cedar Rapids was going to be two hours of "Hey, look at the rube!" And, okay, I was actually kind of down with that. The small-town-boy-in-the-big-city thing may be played, but if the aforementioned big city is Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that's a whole new level of rubitude.

Turns out it's more like a coming of age story, if you can have a coming of age story where the lead isn't far from forty. Ed Helms plays Tim Lippe, a naïve, idealistic, second-string insurance agent from Brown Star Insurance of Brown Valley, Wisconsin (a brace of self-contained ass jokes that are about as subtle as the movie's cruder gags get). He really only has one vice, and even that one doesn't count because he thinks he's going to marry her.

So an unlikely series of events means Tim is sent for the first time to represent his agency at a conference in Cedar Rapids. His boss, played by Stephen Root, is desperate to once more win the conference's "Two Diamond" award, whose very name is a constant reminder of how low-stakes this all really is to anyone who's not involved in it. Which is…not Tim.

Now, as we've learned from Mark Twain, the most corruptible people in the world are those who have never been exposed to corrupting influences. Thus we know that when Helms is sent to Cedar Rapids, it's only going to be a matter of time before he's drinking, developing inappropriate relationships with a married woman and a prostitute, paying bribes, smoking crack, playing way too many scenes without enough clothes on, and using salty language like "bullroar." But of course, this is a feel-good movie, which means that even if the big, bad world changes him, he changes it right back, just a little. Please try not to puke now.

I think this would make an interesting double feature with Up In The Air. Compare Ryan Bingham, who's so seasoned he can get through security in the first ten seconds of his movie, to Tim Lippe, who thinks he doesn't have to because he's friends with the TSA guy. And that's just the beginning of their diametrically opposed approaches to business travel and the perks and dangers that go with it. The little rental car that Tim pronounces "sweet!" would be a deal-breaker for Ryan. But then Ryan has a deal-breaker that isn't one for Tim, romantically, so there's that.

However, with its odd trio of salesmen thrown together in a Midwestern hotel suite, Cedar Rapids reminds me of nothing so much as 1999'sThe Big Kahuna, in which the characters played in this movie by Helms, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and John C. Reilly were played by Peter Facinelli, Danny DeVito, and Kevin Spacey respectively. But I won't hold that against Cedar Rapids. The Big Kahuna was a bad one-act play turned into a worse movie. In fact, I'd say Cedar Rapids is what you'd get if you took out The Big Kahuna's single-track philosophical arguments and replaced them with jokes, more (and more interesting) characters, additional locations, fun adventures, moral dilemmas, interesting stuff, and other good reasons to see movies.

Pat Down

2011-03-18T08:46:00.000-07:00

Pat Down

M. Edium’s lab partner came over to finish up their science project this morning, and she was bursting with exciting news, as they do at that age. It was all about how a leprechaun had been to their house overnight to drop off candy and toys and a cache of gold coins for St. Patrick's Day.

Now, we do Santa and the Easter Bunny and we'll do the Tooth Fairy and of course we've done the Birthday Demon, but we don't do any of that leprechaun crap. At all. We've never even heard of it. I barely remembered to put a green shirt on him before kindergarten to keep him from getting pinched.

I remember a few years ago when I started to read a book about raising boys that says we tend to socialize all of their emotions out of them but anger. Enough of the rest of that first chapter was bullshit that I bailed on the book that very night, but that's always stuck with me. Our culture is one that doesn't really encourage boys to express their emotions. Is it only a matter of time before M. Edium becomes shut down and repressed?

"I'm pretty jealous about that," he said forthrightly. If it's a matter of time, it's plenty of time.

"Well, that's what happens when you're Irish," Trash told him. "And you're pretty Swedish."

"Just wait till St. Olaf's Day, though," I said, dredging up some vague memory of my sister saying something about it when I was a kid that she may have been making up in the first place. "St. Olaf brings it."

After they got to work on the science project, Trash sent me to sneak out the back and head up to Walgreens for some last-minute St. Patrick's Day stuff. I figured I'd get it on clearance, but it had already been cleared. I had to settle for some green gumdrops, a little box of green Easter Peeps, and a General Grievous action figure with two lightsabers, one of which is green. After his lab partner left, we gave this sad little collection of gifts to him and told him the truth about where they'd come from, because who wants to deal with that leprechaun blarney every year? Besides his lab partner's parents, obvs.

He was happy about the action figure and his favorite candy, which is good, although he's inevitably going to get socialized out of showing his appreciation for Peeps no matter what we do.

Also, I think that book was wrong about boys not being in touch with emotions. Embarrassment is an emotion that comes to you when you get older, after all. And I'm pretty sure I saw him show some clear signs of it when I was going on about St. Olaf.

It's Science, But It's Not Fair

2011-03-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

It's Science but It's Not Fair

I remember my first science fair project, in fourth grade. I had looked forward to being able to participate for years. When I was finally old enough, my dad and I made a miniature steam turbine out of a lubricant can with a pen barrel poked through the screw-on lid, heated by a blowtorch, pointing the steam at a turbine wheel made out of the top of a soup can. I got the idea from a book whose author had clearly never tried the experiment himself, and never expected anyone else to because we had to make modifications for weeks to get the damn thing to work. I think back to being one of the winners at that year's district science fair and I think to myself, "Why the hell did those teachers let a fourth-grader into a crowded gymnasium with a blowtorch?"

I look forward to helping M. Edium with his fourth-grade science project. But I just can't seem to get excited about his kindergarten science project.

Yes, they seem to have done away with the age requirement since my day. I remember spending so much time neatly handwriting my written report, and now they've opened it up to people who don't know how to write yet.

M. Edium was, I think, more excited about the idea of the science fair itself than about any particular science project. But even when we explained to him that no, your Star Wars Lego spaceships are not considered science, he was still down with participating.

For a while, Trash and I were at a loss as to how to get him started. After all, part of the advantage of making kids wait until fourth grade to put something together for a science fair is that it's a good bet that by that time, they've at least been to a science fair.

But as so often happens, the key ended up being something we just had lying around the house. Sometimes it can be something as simple as an old electronic component or some Alka-Seltzer or whatever, that can serve as the jumping-off point for something that becomes bigger. Such was the case here. Our breakthrough came when we realized we had something in our house that might just help him brainstorm ideas. And that is the approximately two dozen different kinds of do-it-yourself, at-home science kits that he likes to experiment with.

Sometimes it's just all about the intuitive leap.

He ended up going with the avalanche kit. That's pretty fertile territory. He can learn all about what causes avalanches (snow), the different kinds of avalanches (deadly and deadlier) and how to survive them (don't be in one), among other things. I spent a little time showing him some avalanche videos on YouTube, but it's hard to stay away from the amateur videos. I've learned that there are three types of avalanches based on their morphological characteristics: dry snow, wet snow, and slab. By the same token, there are three types of amateur avalanche videos, broken down by what the camera operator says: Holy Shit, Jesus Christ, and Oh, Fuck.

The other problem is that he wants to spend all his time on the project "practicing," like it's all about the performance. He might be thinking about a science circus rather than a science fair. I would totally go to a science circus. Unless of course it was being put on by kindergartners.

Luckily, Trash hit on the idea of having him partner up with one of the other kids in his kindergarten class. She's been over to our house before when we dug out a science kit, so she thinks of Trash as the "science mom." Between Trash, and M. Edium, and the other kid, and her mom, there might not even be anything left for me to do.

I consider that experiment a success.

We'll One Day Have Paris

2011-03-14T09:42:00.001-07:00

We'll One Day Have Paris

As of today, Trash and I have been married for, no shit, exactly 19.5 years. We know people who have been married longer, but in most cases we're friends with (or married to) their kids.

Last night, Trash asked me what she thought we should do for our 20th anniversary in September. We don't have that thing where it's the job of one of us to arrange a whole deal and surprise the other. Too much work for the person arranging it and then too much work for the person who has to pretend to love it.

I suggested Paris, but as Trash pointed out, even though we're young and can afford it, our travel range is fairly well limited by how far we can fly within the battery life of M. Edium's portable DVD player. More than two hours beyond that is fair to neither him nor his fellow passengers. So I started trying to think of places in the continental U.S. that a) we haven't been to yet, and b) are sort of romantic. Ummm…I hear Virginia is for lovers? But at the time we were both pretty stumped.

We were in bed and the lights were already off. The only illumination in the room came from Trash's computer monitor, which had also not gone to sleep yet, giving off a dim, gray, low-angle glow from across the room. While we were talking about this, she turned her head to look at me and her lip curled oddly.

"Why are you smiling like that?" I asked.

"I wasn't, I was biting my lip," she said, starting to laugh.

"Oh, it looked like you were smiling in this light."

"That would have been a weird smile."

"I was going to say."

"Why did you think I was smiling?"

"I thought you already had an idea for our anniversary…and it was evil."

She laughed so hard she couldn't fall asleep for another half hour.

The reason I brought up Paris -- and have been, every once in a while, for the past three years -- is a line from a song on the Thelma and Louise soundtrack, which we listened to incessantly during the road trips of our early and mid-twenties. The line goes, "At the age of 37, she realized she'd never ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair." In our early and mid-twenties, that line struck us as unspeakably sad. I mean, how much would it suck to be 37?

As for that realization, we're on the north side of that number now, and have yet to make it. Yes, we've got a six-year-old, but we also have resources, and a future full of options. We know how fortunate we are to never feel trapped. One way or another, a tepid Parisian breeze will ruffle my wife's hair one day, even if by that time the sports car is being driven by M. Edium.

In the meantime, I can still make her laugh even after 19.5 years. Which is better than Paris any day.

Suck it, Paris.

Dance Card

2011-03-10T21:34:00.000-08:00

Dance Card

Remember play dates when you were a kid? Me either. In fact, the first time I ever heard the phrase was on an episode of Friends. For a long time, whenever I heard it I would also hear Chandler in my head telling Rachel, "You just turned [Ross] on and sent him on a date with a stripper." Eventually, though, I got over that, and now you'll have to.

But it would be awfully get-off-my-lawn of me to complain about how what used to be "Can I go over to _____'s house?" has evolved into a ritual of scheduling and preparation not unlike arranging multilateral peace talks. But it has taken a while for us to get the hang of it.

Maybe part of that is because we're lucky enough to live on a block with a half-dozen other children under eight, so we haven't had to work at it all that hard. Indeed, it's not at all uncommon for M. Edium to ask, "Can I go over to _____'s house?" anyway. But none of those kids, even though we consider them all his friends, goes to either of his schools. He has friends there too, so why shouldn't he get a chance to hang out with them as well? Hence the play date thing.

Trash and I had good intentions, but got off to a slow start. I was on a field trip with his Montessori school and so had plenty of time to work up the nerve to approach the mom of one of M. Edium's favorite classmates to set something up. And when I had, I realized that I had only the vaguest idea of when to schedule it. Mainly out of blind luck, I managed to come up with something that slotted in between school, karate, gymnastics, and swimming, and felt pretty proud of it. Trash would have been prouder if it hadn't been on her birthday.

Not that Trash has a perfect record either. I won't get into details, but although she did a fine job of getting one of "her" first play dates on the calendar, it was with the wrong kid.

Turns out it's much easier with kindergarten classmates than with the Montessori kids. They're all in afternoon kindergarten class just like M. Edium is, so they tend to have their weekday mornings free. M. Edium goes to Montessori four days a week, so he only has Friday mornings free. Thus we have developed a friction-free system whereby a different kid (or kids) can be dropped interchangeably into that handy slot on the weekly schedule. It's just a question of picking a kid and determining whether it's going to be at home or away. Like scheduling a high school football season for one team, except you only have to do it a week or two at a time.

Through this system, we've had a play date for M. Edium every Friday morning going back to mid-January. Some have been at our house, others at the other kids' house, and a few have already been reciprocated. The only problem is keeping them all in our heads, because you don't want to be talking to one parent about a play date and have to say, "Oh, sorry, we can't do four Fridays from now because he has a play date with Tucker that day because his original play date with Chloe got cancelled after Aidan and Hayden and Jayden had to reschedule with the Ians." I don't know the etiquette, but who wants to come off that slutty?

The Wheels on the Bus (and in my head) Go Round and Round

2011-03-08T22:43:00.000-08:00

The Wheels on the Bus (and in my head) Go Round and Round

There's this thing M. Edium does four times a week that I try not to think about too much. He gets on a bus and rides across town by himself.

Obviously, that's a gross distortion of what actually happens. About halfway through the school day, one or more of his Montessori teachers reminds him to put his coat and boots back on to wait for the school bus that will take him to kindergarten. They watch out the front window until the bus pulls up outside. Whichever teacher it is walks him across the tiny parking lot and right up to the door of the exact same bus that picks him up every day. M. Edium says hi to his bus driver by name, and sits down with the other same half-dozen kids who ride that bus ever day and who will be spending the next three hours with him at kindergarten. At the end of a 1.8-mile ride he gets off and meets his kindergarten teacher. He's done this, like, ninety times and he's never actually alone and it's a complete non-issue for him, but I'm not sure I'm over it yet. To the point where we pick him up at the end of the day instead of letting him ride the bus home. I'm just not ready for that. One of his classmates, who lives about seven blocks from us, tried taking the bus home the first week and ended up getting on the wrong one. You can imagine what a nightmare that was for that mom.

It also reminded me of something that happened when I was only a year older than M. Edium is now. My first week of summer school after first grade, I followed some kids I knew onto the bus, but as they got off at places I'd never seen before, I realized that I knew them from class, not the bus. Finally the bus was empty except for me, and I had to confess to the driver that I'd gotten on the wrong one.

She did not take it well. In fact, she screamed foul-mouthed abuse in my lost, frightened, seven-year-old face the entire 1.8 miles back to my neighborhood, and when she dropped me off four blocks from my house her sendoff to me was, and this is an exact quote which I am not making up and can still remember verbatim 34 years later, "If you ever do this again I'll beat the shit out of you." Dead serious.

So obviously my parents complained, and obviously the bus driver got in some kind of trouble, but even so. These after-the-fact remedies weren't much help to me when I was (it seemed) far from home and at the mercy of an unstable adult stranger with a large vehicle and no witnesses. That traumatic experience at a tender age left me with a lifelong fear of authority, making mistakes, confrontation, buses, beatings, and shit.

Obviously it was a different era. Get in a time machine and go back to that day, and you're three-fourths of the way to Mad Men, two-thirds of the way to Happy Days before it got lame. It would never happen today. A bus driver who pulled that in 2011 would be fired, blacklisted, imprisoned, and launched into the sun. And anyway, the one who did it to me is probably good and dead now. Someone that unhealthy-looking and rage-addled isn't likely to have outlived Kurt Cobain.

But you know what? I'm fine with picking up M. Edium at school. I don't know what I'd do if the bus came and he didn't step off it. I'm in no hurry to find out.

Besides, this way all the foul-mouthed abuse he gets on his way home comes from me.

Seriously?

2011-03-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

Seriously?

More snow coming down right now, to add to the six fathoms of it we've already had this year. M. Edium is enjoying it and is on his way outside. Trash and I, however, are just about ready to move to New Mexico. We'll break it to him when he comes back inside.

For now, he wants to tell you a joke: What does lightning wear beneath its clothes?
Thunderwear.

Thanks, we're here all week. Alas.

Neal Before Zod

2011-03-03T19:55:00.000-08:00

Neal Before Zod

Being a fan of Neal Stephenson since my old bandmate Kraftmatik lent me his copy of Snowcrash (he had me at the main character's name, Hiro Protagonist), I knew I was going to read The Baroque Cycle eventually. I just wasn't particularly looking forward to it.

It's not the size of it; I'm not afraid of a big book. I loved Under the Dome (even if an event on page 3,950 pretty much renders most of pages 1-3,949 moot), and Stephenson's own hefty Cryptonomicon kept me riveted, at least between the math problems that kept popping up every ten thousand pages or so. In fact, undertaking to read The Baroque Cycle, which consists of three bunker-busting tomes averaging 4,785,832 pages each, gave me the reassuring feeling of knowing what I was going to be reading for a good long while.

And I have been reading it for a while. I started the first book, Quicksilver (the others are The Confusion and The System of the World, and another reason I put off starting for so long is that I somehow thought there were four of them and I only had three) in September or October, I don't even remember which. And I confess that I've cheated on it with several other books since then, but they were all really good (Packing for Mars, Going in Circles, Full Dark, No Stars, World War Z, and Year of the Flood--okay, mostly really good).

It's just that it seemed like such a departure for Stephenson. I'm the last person to want to put an artist in a box (I once bought an Anthony Stewart Head album, okay?), but why was the greatest living cyberpunk writer (yes, I said it, Gibson) doing a historical novel in 17th-Century Europe?

I shouldn't have worried. Yes, it gets off to rather a slow start, but so does a supertanker. Then, before you know it, you're immersed in the 17th-century versions of the story elements that make up Stephenson's sprawling comfort zone: bleeding-edge science and technology, large and troublesome stashes of gold, unlikely shifting alliances, cryptography, smart people (both book- and street-), etymology, long periods of enforced chastity, architectural chaos, journeys to exotic locales, elite swordfighting and weaponry, Japan, the etiquette minefields of rarefied social classes, Qwghlm, nerdy Waterhouses, swashbuckling Shaftoes, and, every once in a while, a dizzying, showstopping list of random crap like this one.

And I love it. By any standard, it's a towering achievement, so much so that it seems churlish to point out its flaws, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to. At a total of 83.2 million pages covering more than a half-century, pacing and structural problems are unavoidable, with the events of a single day sometimes filling hundreds of pages while elsewhere years pass between one page and the next. There's a metric shitload of themes in play, some of which you're not going to care about (which may or may not be the same ones I don't care about), and with all those balls in the air, it's sometimes a little jarring when Stephenson goes after one that rolled off the stage during the part I was reading around Thanksgiving. But what else is he going to do? A book this length without those issues would be a dull, boring, monolith, and even if I find myself slogging through another lengthy explication of international œconomics and geopolitics during the reign of Louis XIV, at least I know there's going to be a heart-pounding, over-the-top, chase/battle/escape scene coming along any time now. And anyway, there are worse ways to learn about international œconomics and geopolitics during the reign of Louis XIV.

Because one of my favorite things about Neal Stephenson is that he writes about boring things in an interesting way, a goal I frequently meet half of. I even read his computer manifesto In The Beginning, There Was The Command Line… and found it fascinating, even if I violently disagreed with its conclusion that you can't really choose an operating system until you've programmed your own, because, noooo.

And it feels tacky to complain about the small-worldness of The Baroque Cycle. In a narrative that literally circumnavigates the globe, people from different plot threads are always encountering each other like a fifty-year season of Lost. And let's not even get into all the celebrity cameos by historical figures like Ben Franklin, Georg Friedrich Handel, Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Hooke, William Penn, John Wilkins, Benjamin Franklin, Blackbeard, Liebniz, every European monarch of the period from Charles II to Peter the Great, and Isaac Newton, who's less of a cameo than a second-tier character. Oh, looky there, I got into them.

But all of it's okay, even if it's implausible, because it's fun. And just when you're getting used to already knowing something about some "new" person that a certain character has just met, because you met them six weeks ago, suddenly there's an encounter that I'm not going to spoil except to say that it's going to make you want to go back and reread the previous hundred pages or so. And honestly, given how much time you've already invested, you might as well.

Really, the whole thing is just crammed chockablock with shit he shouldn't be getting away with, from a show-offy scene in a banca told as a dramatickal allegory encrusted with classical references and wordplay, to a long epistolary section decoded from an encrypted needlepoint. Seriously. But he does get away with it, because it's awesome.

So, having been reading this novel (I prefer to think of it as a single, eight-book, three-volume work) for more than one percent of my life, it's almost become part of me. Now I'm on the home stretch, with only a few thousand pages left to go. But I haven't finished it yet, and I'm not sure I want to. That's why I'm writing my first-ever book review about it now, before I'm done reading it, while my love for it is still complicated yet large.

Because the thing about a book I love is that as much as I want to see what happens, I don't want it to end. And the thing about the other Neal Stephenson novels I've read is that they don't end -- they stop. You can appreciate the distinction, especially if you've read Neal Stephenson. If that happens again after half a billion pages, I'm going to be pissed.

Post-Modern Family

2011-03-01T19:20:00.001-08:00

Post-Modern Family

Trash and M. Edium and I had originally planned to drive down to Iowa to see her mom this past weekend. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before here, but I'm pretty sure I haven't because it's kind of a long story.

It's not just her mom we see when we drive down. We also see her stepdad. And we also see her three adopted sons, ages four, three, and two.

I should probably explain, but don't expect it to be funny. A few years ago, Trash's mom, who was retired, decided to become a foster parent. If you've never done this -- and I certainly haven't -- what it involves is basically making yourself and your home available to host kids who are, as they say, "in the system." Most of these kids have been through more hell in their short lives than you and I will from now until we die, so it's all about creating a safe, stable environment. Or as much as you can given that it's not really meant to be permanent.

Anyway, Trash's amazing mom had, at different times, a dozen or so kids who were with her for a while who then got to go back home after their respective parents got their respective shit together. Then she was asked to be a foster mother for a toddler whose parents were abusive.

We know this about those parents because the toddler had a baby brother who was a year younger. Or we should say, we know there was a baby. The parents didn't seem to. Judging from his condition when my mother in law got him, they seem to think they had a loud, smelly houseplant. I'm not going to go into detail regarding the extent of neglect and abuse that was visited upon this child in the first half-year of his life, because that's behind him now. The good news is that at three and a half, he's been walking for almost a year, he can speak a few words, and his skull is much more symmetrical than it used to be.

But at the time my mother-in-law was given responsibility for this almost-completely-wrecked-before-it-started human life, the non-parents who brought him into the world were pregnant with a third child.

Let me assure you that these kids weren't just "taken away." The parents were given more than one chance -- too many, if you ask me. Long story short, by the time the third son was born, the State of Iowa was pretty well convinced that these people had no business being parents of anything, ever.

So that left my mother-in-law, pushing sixty and responsible for three small children, all under three years of age, while social services looked for someone to adopt them. And that's another long story, but you can probably imagine how a search for adoptive parents for three brothers a year apart, the middle of whom has special needs, went. They came back and told my mother-in-law they might be able to find homes for them all. Homes, plural.

So rather than split them up, my mother-in-law adopted them all. Which effectively put an end to her career as a foster mother, but launched her new career as an actual mother (for results of her first child-rearing career, please see Trash and her two siblings).

I don't know how she does it. I remember how exhausting it was just having one kid at those ages, and we got to have them one at a time instead of all at once. Last weekend, the youngest one got sick and spiked a fever so high he had to spend a couple of days in the hospital. We were going to go down and help out, but then the middle one got the flu and we didn't want to risk exposing M. Edium. I feel bad for not feeling worse about not getting to help supervise four small boys for the weekend.

But the long-term situation remains unchanged. These kids' birth parents, thanks to a plea bargain deal, are not only not in jail but merrily churning out more kids in a different state somewhere. And my mother-in-law is busy raising three toddlers while in her sixties. Sounds like a Modern Family spinoff waiting to happen.

I guess we'll have plenty of time to supervise them all eventually, is what I'm saying.

Hamstumor

2011-02-27T21:56:00.000-08:00

Hamstumor

Bucky's been with us since the beginning of July, but it's not clear how much longer he'll be with us. A dwarf hamster's life expectancy is only a year or two to begin with, but his might be shorter.

Last week, he was climbing the bars of his cage like he usually does when Trash noticed a bald, pink lump on his tummy. It was smaller than her fingertip, but on a dwarf hamster, that's the equivalent of a human walking around with a Butterball turkey sticking out of his solar plexus.

This was last Friday night, and I was able to make an appointment at the vet the next morning. I wasn't even sure they see hamsters. Especially a hamster the size of Bucky, who you can't see from more than a few yards away.

Anyway, I brought Bucky in that morning while Trash brought M. Edium to his karate class. One of the two vets who takes care of hamsters was the same one who took care of Turtle during her long illness a few years ago. He used to begin his examinations of her by saying, "Hey, squirt." He said the same thing to Bucky. "Squirt" seems like a more fitting nickname for him than a full-grown cat, but I could have done without the association.

Anyway, it turns out that dwarf hamsters tend to be prone to mammary tumors, which are often malignant. we have a couple of options: do nothing, get him a fine-needle biopsy, or just have it removed. All of which could add literally weeks to his life.

Now, nobody can accuse us of being callous toward our four-footed family members when it comes to vet bills, given how much we've invested in the past on trying to save our cats' lives. But is it cold-blooded not to want to drop four hundred bucks on a lumpectomy, especially when Dr. P. says that he often ends up just chasing them all over the hamster anyway?

Yes, he's cute, and yes, we all love him, but let's face it: he weighs about an ounce. His heart beats a hundred times a minute. The only noises he makes come from his wheel or whatever he's digging around in at any given moment. He has two moods, sedentary and active. Basically he's a cute, fat, furry bug.

And yet…

The other day, when I was cleaning his cage, I decided to take a look at his tummy to see if the lump had grown (after all, it had appeared almost over night), and figured I'd try holding him by the scruff of the neck like the vet had. The funny thing about hamsters is that their cheek pouches reach all the way back to their shoulders, to allow them to store food (like all the food he stashes in his bedding isn't enough to feed an entire family of…well, dwarf hamsters). With all that loose skin, the "scruff" can effectively be the entire front half of his body. Also, a hamster's brain doesn't shut off like a cat's does when you scruff him. A cat's scruff is like a pause button, but it turns out a hamster's is more like a fast forward. While I examined his belly, all four of his feet flailed madly at high speed. After a few seconds, I released him back into my palm, where he immediately gave me a punitive little nip on the finger and then went right to grooming himself as though the incident had already been forgotten.

That's the most personality I've seen him display. Here I thought his only emotions were fear, curiosity, hunger, and sleep, but it was almost like I offended his honor, whereupon he took satisfaction by means of a proportional response, and then moved on all, "Okay, we're square now. I know this won't affect our relationship our my supply of sunflower seeds."

Still, that episode gave me a lot more respect for the little critter. I think there's only one option open to us for the future: there's going to have to be a Bucky II.

2011-02-23T16:56:00.000-08:00

Ka-FWUMP

I remember last week well. We were having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. On Sunday I'd gone out on a fast-food run without my coat. That was only the beginning of a series of days with the temperature over freezing. Snowbanks receded and long-buried pavement reappeared, exposed to bright blue sky for the first time in months. Almost overnight, the experience of driving through our neighborhood -- which until then had been like negotiating the narrow back alleys of an old-world European city in big, dumb, American and Japanese cars -- became a liberating experience, with as many as two cars able to traverse the same block at the same time. I wore my spring coat. Trash wore no coat -- and this was on a walk around the neighborhood. It was glorious. Perhaps we'd broken the back of this long, punishing winter at last. Punxsutawney Phil had seen his shadow, March was on the horizon, and the narrow green fringes starting to peek out from the sunward edges of people's lawns would soon sprawl into meadows stretching to the horizon. I decided that my recent decision to buy a roof-rake to keep snow off the house could be put off until the spring clearance sales, and I made a mental note to make sure I started up my snowblower and run it out of gas, because it's not good for it to sit there with fuel in the tank until the next big snowfall in December. Trash opened a window. This winter had been rough, but at least it hadn't been long. Or, it had, but it could have been longer.

Which it proved by becoming longer.

As you may know by now, this weekend it started snowing again in our region, and kept snowing. It began right on schedule at 10:00 on Sunday morning, slowing down my errands. That afternoon, we all went to clear what had fallen thus far, on the theory that after we'd done that, it would take less time to clean up the inch or so still expected to fall. What ended up happening was that we went out later to clean that inch off the sidewalk, but we left it on the driveway because there were more inches to come.

So then the next morning, which luckily was Presidents Day so nobody had to leave the house, I went out to snowblow that additional inch, as well as the other inches that had fallen over the course of the night. AND THEN, at about M. Edium's bedtime, the snow was just starting to slow down. Trash wanted me to go out a fourth time. I protested that it was a waste of time.

"It's going to stop soon," she said.

"You've been saying that for 24 hours," I said.

But I went out anyway, and did another clearing of the driveway and the sidewalk and the steps and the deck and the patio and the cars. And it was still drifting down, sparkling fakely under the streetlights. Seriously, if I saw snow like that in a movie I'd laugh at it. Oddly, in real life, it wasn't as funny.

The good news is that it must have actually stopped soon after that, but it still ended up being one of the few February snowstorms in history that gave us a foot of snow without stopping.

But it's okay. We're over the hump, I'm sure. Before we know it, those fringes of green will peek out again, however briefly. Trash and I will take another walk, we'll open a window again, and April will be on the horizon.

Or May. Either way.

Diamonds in the Rough (or at least bumpy)

2011-02-21T12:46:00.000-08:00

Diamonds in the Rough (or at least bumpy)

At M. Edium's Montessori school, the activity of choice during “choice time” for him and a lot of his friends is playing with Legos. When I used to pick him up there in the evening, before he started going to afternoon kindergarten, he was always among the boys (and one or two girls) who were building spaceships or cars or whatever. And just like in any manufacturing industry, certain building supplies become valued commodities.

As always, it's about supply and demand. There aren't really specially-shaped Legos in those tubs at school, so it's not like everyone's always arguing over a certain cockpit canopy or engine or whatever. There are, however, specially colored ones. At Montessori, the transparent kind of Legos, whatever their color are so in demand that the kids literally call them "diamonds."

This is something we became aware of during our play sessions at home, when M. Edium would dig for red, blue, yellow, and orange diamonds. We didn't think much of it at first -- after all, most kids call Legos different names, most of which are fairly fanciful, if not outright free-associated. But once we learned about the situation at the Montessori school, it made even more sense. It's pure and simple nanoeconomics.

At the end of every year, Trash and I make a donation to the school over and above his regular tuition. This year, we seriously considered making the donation anonymous. And, since you can order any kind of specific Legos online in any color and shape, we considered making the donation in the form of clear Legos.

There's a book by Gregory McDonald called The Buck Passes Flynn in which the titular police detective looks into why huge amounts of cash have begun appearing anonymously on people's doorsteps. McDonald is of course better known as the creator of Fletch (and with good reason), but The Buck Passes Flynn is an interesting look at the unexpected (by some) havoc that can be caused when a market is suddenly flooded with a formerly scarce resource.

We kind of lost interest in the idea when M. Edium started kindergarten, largely because the Lego supply at his kindergarten is flooded with clear ones. As a result, they've become less of a prize to him when he plays at home, and he no longer joins in the battles over them at Montessori -- even for the coveted green one.

But that's not to say that he wasn't still amazed when we went to the Lego exhibit at the Children's Museum and he got to clap his peepers on a backlit "stained glass window" of clear Legos that was a good five feet on a side. And I have to admit that when I saw it, the first thing I wanted to do was box it up and ship it to his Montessori school.

Seriously, though, the urge to disrupt the zeptoeconomy at the Montessori School has mostly passed. Although we're not ruling it out for after he graduates.

Branson Misery

2011-02-18T12:50:00.000-08:00

Branson Misery

I've been thinking about this Serene Branson thing even before I saw the clip. One thing that comes to mind is that we all know how to come up with our own porn name or soap opera name, but now we have a way to generate our own entertainment reporter name. Just think of the first place you remember your parents taking you on vacation, and that's the last name. Then your first name is your mood when you recall that trip. For example, my entertainment reporter name is Bucolic Galveston. Trash's is Cranky Des Moines. What's yours?

But that isn't the main thing that interests me about the story. I didn't get a chance to watch it for a couple of days, because my work computer blocks video and my home computer has no sound, but when I did get around to playing it, I saw and heard pretty much what I expected and hoped to see and hear. Which was, more or less, what I sounded and looked like late on the of October 17, 2004.

I've written about this before -- in this blog, in my book (now on Kindle!), in a Six Feet Under recap where I made fun of Peter Krause getting away with a simple "narm narm [thump]," and I've thought about it every time I hear Sarah Palin speak, but now I have an excuse to write about that night again. Hot damn.

So here's what happened. I was tired, I was the father of a five-day-old preemie in the hospital, and the very next morning I was starting a new job I wasn't sure I'd be able to do. And I opened my mouth to tell Trash I had a headache, and what came out was pretty much this:

I even remember that exact expression of fear and confusion that what I was trying to say was somehow, somewhere, becoming totally divorced from what was actually coming out of my mouth. But even after all these years, it's a little eerie to see that expression from the other side of someone's face.

We've all seen the early speculation that she was drunk, or high, or catastrophically ditzy, followed by today's reports that it was actually an incredibly ill-timed complex migraine, like the one I had back in October 2004 (although the later reports don't mention me specifically). Maybe she felt something coming on too, even if she didn't know what it was, and thought she's be okay. But then those camera lights would have hit her migraine-sensitized eyes, creating a neurological power-surge that sent her speech centers into vaporlock, and from there it was Katie bar the drone fill arc nibble swish.

Yes, I'm laughing about it now too, because I've been there. Of course, I wasn't there while also on a live camera feed to millions of people, but then I rarely am.

The point is, don't feel too bad if you laughed. If she's anything like me (and I think we've established that she is), she's laughing about it herself by now. And she knows what she needs to do to avoid it: don't get too sleep-deprived, don't jolt an overtired system with too much caffeine, pop an Imitrex the minute that telltale blind spot appears in the center of your vision, and lie down.

Relax.

Think of Branson.

Reading, Writing, and Wrong

2011-02-16T15:51:00.000-08:00

Reading, Writing, and Wrong

Back when M .Edium used to watch the recordings of Curious George we made him off of PBS Kids (first-season narrator Bill Macy: accept no substitutes), there was a little interstitial promo advising parents to "read to your child fifteen minutes a day." Trash and I chuckled indulgently at how unrealistic that advice was. Like M. Edium would ever let us cut it down to that.

But one nice thing about those days, which we can't say about now, is that with us having to do all his reading for him, we at least knew every printed word that went into his head.

Then he started reading on his own, independently, in the last half-year, so we have no idea what's going on in his life any more.

Admittedly, we were a bit worried that he was taking longer to learn how to read than we did as kids, and also because it seemed less like he wouldn't read than that he couldn't. We suspected that his resistance came from a fear that once he could read to himself we wouldn't read to him any more. Being the clever, mind-reading parents we are, we confirmed this theory by asking him and hearing him say "yes."

But then came the advent of Captain Underpants in our house, which he enjoyed so much they put him over whatever hump was there. Do you know from Captain Underpants? There's some difference of opinion on our house over them. M. Edium loves them, but they're juvenile, inappropriate, and frequently gross. Which means I love them too, even if Trash doesn't. Anyway, if M. Edium was faking illiteracy, the day he got his hands on his first Captain Underpants and couldn't put it down? That blew his cover pretty thoroughly.

Captain Underpants also marked a sort of soft (and preshrunk and cottony) transition from us reading to him to him reading to himself, so I've read most of all of them by now. I can't say the same of all of his books. Books for kids that age are all about series, as you probably know. He's into another series about this first-grader with an obnoxious bowl haircut and a shark fetish who spends 60% of every book bickering with his sister and classmates. There are words in there he's not allowed to say. Sure, George Carlin's Seven Words in his world are Stupid, Dumb, Butt, Shut Up, and Gimme (yes, there are only five), but we're not thrilled about him seeing that language modeled by his literary heroes. Seriously, some of these children's writers are fucking assholes.

There's another series authored by someone more famous for his portrayal of an iconic sitcom character (Barry Zuckercorn, if you're curious) than for his writing. It's about a hapless fourth-grader who struggles with various learning challenges. I think it's great and relatable for kids who share those challenges, but should I be worried that a kid who doesn't have them might get it in his head to try to imitate them?

I think the issue is that we assumed that for a long time, anything he could read must be age-appropriate. Which was fine when he was slogging through board books by Sandra Boynton and the Very Formulaic Children's Author, but then a few months ago I read him a few chapters from Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing at bedtime, carefully editing out anything borderline, and then the next morning I went into his bedroom to be greeted with the top-of-the-morning-to-you announcement of "FUDGE [SPOILER] PETER'S [SPOILER]!" He'd finished it after I left the room the night before.

So, yeah, in case you were reading this whole entry thinking that he's just faking and doesn't actually have any comprehension, so much for that.

And now Trash and I find ourselves in the unexpected, unwelcome position of being our child's literary censor. I knew we'd have to do it eventually, to a certain extent, but the fact that it's started this early means that it's going to be a longer-term job than we hoped. The good news is that we suck at it.

Lights Out

2011-02-14T14:44:00.000-08:00

Lights Out

Trash and I both have fond, ancient memories of lying awake in our beds reading much later at night than we were supposed to. We always agreed that when we had our own kid, we'd never limit his or her reading like our parents limited ours.

What idiots we were.

In less than a year, we've gone from where he couldn't or wouldn't read at all to where if we let him, he'll stay up past midnight reading. Who knew?

Besides our parents, of course, and every other parent ever.

His relatively new ability -- not to mention willingness -- to read has drastically altered bedtime. Used to be we'd read him three to five short books, or a couple of chapters from a long book, and then leave him for the night to stare at his walls and interact with his stuffed animals. Which would be exciting enough to keep him alert and entertained for a while, but he'd eventually crash once he got tired of begging us for more books and ran out of other stalling techniques (i.e. another bedtime snack, a request for a hug and kiss, a truly epic visit to the bathroom).

Once he could read to himself, we'd read the same number of books, then give him a small stack of books to read to himself. That worked well, until he would get through that stack and then holler, "Can I have more books?" as though instead of being stored in a shelf two feet from his bed, his books are kept under lock and key in a vault under the garage of someone else's house.

Eventually, reluctantly, he got the message that he can grab his own damn books, and Trash and I enjoyed knowing that he would soon get into the habit of "reading himself to sleep," and those precious few minutes between his 7:30 bedtime and 10:00 would be ours again.

There were only two problems with this scenario. One was that he never completely got over the habit of asking for more books. And the night he asked for them at 11:30 PM on a Wednesday, we realized the "read himself to sleep" thing was not working.

Fortunately, we had mad a recent and serendipitous discovery. The weekend after New Year's we were heading back from Iowa in the evening. It was only six, but it was full dark, and the battery on his portable DVD player wouldn't charge. And we had a four-hour drive ahead of us. He figured out some good ways to entertain himself, though: eat some drive-through fast food in the back seat, beg us to let him watch a movie as though there were anything we could do about it, and then promptly fall asleep a half hour into the drive and stay that way until we pulled up in front of our house.

There was only one possible conclusion: darkness and forced idleness help him get to sleep! This should probably go into a medical journal somewhere.

As a result, we instituted a new phase of bedtime cleverly called "lights out." We read to him for a while, he reads to himself for a while, we turn off the lamp that used to stay on all night, he engages in a brief but intensive period of bitching, and then he falls asleep faster than he has in years.

Sometimes he protests that he gets nightmares when we turn the lamp off, but in those cases he's welcome to call us when he wakes up. And besides, I have a nightmare of my own I'm trying to avoid, and that nightmare is living with a kindergartner who's subsisting on seven hours of sleep per night.

So that takes care of the issue of when he's reading. Soon I'll talk about how we're dealing with what he's reading.

Gassed Up

2011-02-09T15:47:00.001-08:00

Gassed Up

See, I knew that the only way I could have broken the snowblower was if I'd forgotten to run it out of gas the previous spring. And I was pretty sure I'd done that, and even if I hadn't been, the empty gas tank when I first got it out of the garage confirmed that I had.

But then its failure to start even after I'd filled the tank told me something else had gone wrong. Full tank and all, I schlepped it to the repair shop in the back of my station wagon. And that was the genesis of my second problem.

As I've already mentioned, the carburetor was leaking. What is was leaking was fuel. And where that fuel was leaking was onto the carpet of my station wagon. For a long, bumpy drive. The back hatch wouldn't close with the snowblower in there, which meant lots of frigid air was blowing around inside of my car. Otherwise I'm sure I would have more quickly been alerted to the fact that the carpet of my cargo area was being soaked with enough gas to burn down a submarine.

The issue was considerably more noticeable after the door was closed and I was sealed in there, with the air outside freezing cold and the "air" inside consisting of yellowish fumes that made the road in front of me go all wavy. By the time I got home that evening (coincidentally, the day of the worm dissection, because I remember that after I helped unload the moving van at Chao's new house I stopped at Office Max to pick up the stuff you need to vivisect an invertebrate in your kitchen), my wool overcoat smelled like a refinery. Oh well, it was in need of a dry-cleaning anyway.

For a couple of days I left my car windows open in the driveway. I also pulled the carpet out of the back of my car and hand-washed it in the laundry tub using dish soap and a hand-scrubber. It didn't get all of the gasoline smell out, but it did enough that I could leave it in the back yard to freeze-dry. It was still there when the blizzard hit the following weekend. It's currently under three feet of snow, and in the spring I fully expect it to continue stinking of Blue Planet™.

Trash started encouraging me to take her car any time I went anywhere, because she didn't want me and M. Edium to show up at places reeking like we'd been slamming Molotov cocktails, battling twin headaches and having hallucinations of Vietnamese monks.

My parents lent us their pickup truck to visit Trash's mom in Iowa the weekend after New Year's. I met my dad at a McDonald's halfway between our houses and he drove my Saturn home. Between one thing and another, I didn't get it back for two weeks. When I went to pick it up again, it was still a non-smoking car, not only because nobody's allowed to smoke in it but because if anybody had tried they would have been instantly blown up.

When I got home, I left all four doors and the rear hatch wide open, hoping the frigid wind would carry some of the fumes out of the car and to some unfortunate family in need of something to burn for warmth. I was even clever enough to turn off the dome lights so they didn't drain the batteries. I felt less clever the following morning, when I realized that not only had I failed to ever go out and close the doors, it had also snowed six inches overnight.

It wasn't fun to scoop six inches of snow out of the back, front, and middle of my car with one of M. Edium's beach shovels, but after the heater had melted most of the residue, I had to admit that it had taken the majority of the smell with it. Now the inside of my car only smells like the street in front of a gas station rather than the giant tank underneath it.

I'm hoping that the smell will continue to dissipate over the remainder of the winter. I always enjoy driving with my windows open in the summer, but this time I'll be looking forward to it even more than usual. It's either that or spontaneous combustion.

Snowblown

2011-02-07T19:21:00.000-08:00

Snowblown

You think I've written enough entries about my snowblower problems? Yeah, me too. I agree. Let's have another one.

As I've probably mentioned, it wasn't my idea to get a snowblower in the first place, because I knew I was going to have to be the one to keep it running, and also because I knew I wouldn't be able to. But she prevailed, and we're now on our fourth snowblower. This is my favorite one, because it doesn't require me to mix the fuel and the oil before I put it in the tank, which means at least I'm not going to break this one the same way I broke two of the previous ones. And when I say the same way, I mean literally the same way.

But then the first snow came, and I went out to start the snowblower -- the new, reliable two-stager I wasn't going to be able to break -- and it was broken. Simply would not start.

Trash and I had made a deal the previous winter that if I bought this new snowblower, I would have to bring it in to have it fixed the very day it broke. Fine, I said, and heaved it up into the back of my station wagon so I could drive it across town -- with the back hatch open, of course -- to the one place in town I know of that fixes small engines. When I dropped it off, they said it would be about two weeks, give or take.

Well, the very next weekend, it snowed for three days straight, a frozen deluge the like of which even we Minneapolitans hadn't seen for over a decade. And when I called the engine repair place for an update, they said, "Oh, about two weeks." It took several hours just to dig a path down the front steps. If my brother-in-law hadn't come over the next morning with his snowblower, we'd still be snowed in.

I gave it another week, and then, at Trash's insistence, she had me call another place, one her brother had used, one that was a lot closer because it's right by M. Edium's Montessori School. You know, the one that's three miles away?

Anyway, not only were they much closer, they were much faster. I picked up my snowblower from the other place (where the ETA was still, oddly enough, two weeks), drove it back to our side of town, and dropped it off at what is basically a neighborhood hardware store. A mere three days later, they called me to say it was ready to pick up. The repairs, while not cheap, were at least cheaper than a new snowblower or even a used one. And best of all, the problem wasn't because of anything I'd done wrong, but with a leaky carburetor, something I wouldn't have known how to cause even if I wanted to.

So now that I've had a functioning snowblower for the past several snowfalls (I'm not going to jinx it by saying anything beyond that), I'm still dealing with a more lasting problem that came about as a result of the snowblower breakdown. I'll get back to you on that one.

Dishwashed Up

2011-02-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

Dishwashed Up

When we got our new dishwasher a couple of years ago, I figured our dishwasher troubles were over for a while. Turns out they're just over for a year at a time.

First, there was last year's mishap with Trash slipping and falling on the open dishwasher door, and let me just say that when that happened, I was glad I hadn't yet seen Garden State.

The resulting damage (to the dishwasher, that is) was an easy problem to visualize, and resolved simply by my ordering a couple of hinge brackets and replacing them. But the last week, when I went to start the dishwasher and nothing happened but an unfriendly electrical buzz, I was at a loss.

Well, almost at a loss. Fortunately, after years of experience with the two sucky previous dishwashers, I know about a dozen troubleshooting techniques. But then when starting it and stopping it twelve times didn't work, I resigned myself to an indefinite period of washing dishes by hand.

After breaking a glass during the first load on Saturday morning, I gave it another try. I called the customer service number inside the door, but the first thing they told me to do was shut off the circuit breaker to the dishwasher. Unfortunately, the dishwasher is on the same circuit as the cordless phone I was talking to the help line on, so in order to find out the second thing they wanted me to do, I had to turn it back on and call back. And the second thing they wanted me to do was call a local repair shop. Did you know they still have those relics of the past? They do, complete with their antiquated M-F business hours to make it even more authentic.

Then I did some online research. I was able to determine that the problem was not with the float, which is supposed to slide freely up and down on its shaft and activate a mysterious little magic switch deep inside the receiving tube (you can't see it, but it's in there, and if you get it just right it does what you want). It certainly did that, even with a puddle of gooey white fluid that had spurted out and pooled around its base. I felt like I should clean up the unused dishwasher liquid before I proceeded any further and this paragraph got any dirtier.

But then the other five tips all involved taking the whole thing apart and probing around in its guts with a voltage tester. Do you own a voltage tester? I don't, and am not even sure I would know how to use one. My dad has one, but he was in Florida, and given how handy he is (some things skip a generation), he probably brought it with him.

I did, however, take off the kickplate and the front door panel and look at all the wires to see if anything looked broken. Nothing did. But I wiggled as many wires and connectors as I could get my hands on,. Surprisingly, after I put it back together (having only lost one screw, a new personal best), it still didn't work. And we were having friends over for dinner that night.

Luckily, they not only didn't object to washing their own dishes by hand, one of our friends also suggested a solution. Since no water was flowing into the machine, could it be that the supply line was frozen?

Sur enough, all I ended up needing was a hair dryer. Or, as it's called in our house, the thing you use to shrinkwrap the windows. Then it was just a matter of digging a bunch of crap out of from under the sink to get access to it. And then doing the same thing under the kitchen sink to get to the supply line after I'd gotten the TYUTSTW unearthed.

Before long, the low-tech approach accomplished what the high-tech couldn't; I started the dishwasher and heard the clunk of a dislodged ice-plug hitting the inside of the tub. High-tech only does so much good when, as in my case, it's paired with low-competence. I was just glad I hadn't tried to rewire it from scratch.

Buckyball

2011-02-02T19:21:00.000-08:00

Buckyball

We're not as careful as we used to be with Bucky, I have to admit. When we brought him home the first week of July, we were all about protecting him from the cats. If nobody was upstairs, M. Edium's bedroom door had to be closed at all times, just to prevent Phantom and Exie from even thinking about trying anything, even though Bucky was safely locked into his cage. This precaution lasted almost into the third week of July.

But we still maintain common-sense precautions. Even though cats are not still invariably ejected from the room during "Bucky Time," they are at least ejected from the bed. Usually.

And when M. Edium bought Bucky his first exercise ball, Trash made the rule that even with the ball, Bucky and the cats could never be in the same room. Alas, getting to see that was 92% of the reason I got behind getting a hamster and a ball in the first place, but I got over it. Especially when that precaution went the way of all the others, and Bucky was even given the run of our whole top floor. The funny thing about all these rules is that they seem silly when you no longer follow them, especially when there's an exercise ball to protect him. And then you hear this "clunk…clunk clunk cluncluncclunk" noise coming from the stairs and…well, you know. Not our finest hour, that.

Still, Bucky loves his ball. If you remove its lid (a circular hatch that's approximately the relative size of Antarctica) and hold the open ball up to his open cage door, he'll eagerly scramble from one to the other, ready for a roll. Not so much the week or so after that little stairs incident, but he got over that after we got better at blocking the route to the top of the stairs.

Anyway, that's what we did one night last week. It was Wednesday, which for the past year has been the night of his gymnastics class, so we were a little off our rhythm. The three of us (Trash, M. Edium, and I) were busy hanging a model Solar System over his bed, one planet at a time (I regret to inform you that my suggestion to use a box of Nerds as the asteroid belt was vetoed).

So what with getting the little bits of fishing line the right length and poking the tacks, into the sheetrock ceiling, we got distracted from our usual task of listening for the soft rumble of Bucky's ball on the hardwood. If it stops, it means one of two things: 1) he's stuck, wedged between one thing and another thing, or 2) the hatch has come loose and he's wandering around on the floor.

Having failed to notice any of this, I stepped around the dresser to collect Saturn and saw four highly significant yet discrete items, all several inches apart but sharing the same square foot-and-a-half of floor space:

1. Bucky's ball.
2. The lid of Bucky's ball, solus.
3. Bucky.
4. Exie.

"AAAAAAHH!" I said, scooping up Bucky before I'd gotten to the third "A." He went back in his cage as soon as I was able to determine that he was all still there. And boy, did Exie get a lot of praise. It might have confused him a bit. Why are they buttering me up so much? I'm the worst hunter ever!

Anyway, it's obvious we're going to have to make another run to the pet store soon. We need to pick up:

1. A new Buckyball with a tighter lid
2. A dwarf hamster for Exie

Well Preserved, Part III

2011-01-31T18:37:00.000-08:00

Well Preserved, Part III

So after we set up a time for Febrifuge to come over and help with the worm-dissecting, Trash happened to be on the phone with our sister-in-law and happened to mention the upcoming...procedure. Which is when M. Edium's cousin, then-eight-year-old Deniece, asked, "Can I come too?"

So by that evening, between several phone calls and a trip to Office Max, we had everything you need to dissect a worm: dead worms, wax paper, pins, a magnifying glass, a razor knife, a Physicians Assistant, and a third-grade girl.

Febrifuge had come prepared. In addition to a little cork pad and some additional tools (I almost said "utensils"), he'd also brought a camera to take the photos you see in this entry, printed MapQuest directions for the inside of a worm, rubber gloves, and -- best of all, if you ask me -- his old lab coat, which he gave to M. Edium. So that's something my kid has in common with the young Flint Lockwood.

When it was time to get started, I positioned myself on the far side of the kitchen, with a center island between me and any viscera. Don't judge me, though. Trash went all the way upstairs.

The kids, though, were there for the duration. Never once did they show any intention or even desire to flee.

But as you can see from the number of pins they used, the worm tried to make a run for it.

I'm not going to throw up close-ups up the dissected worm up here, but it's not because Feb didn't take any. It's just because I don't want to make you throw up.

But I'd have to say that every meaningful sense -- the most meaningful being that I had to have almost nothing to do with it -- the worm-dissecting was a complete success.

Except for one thing. In our downstairs freezer, we now have one dead frog and eleven dead earthworms.

A week later, Trash was cleaning out the kitchen freezer and asked me to take a few items downstairs. I said the downstairs freezer was full.

"But you said last week there was plenty of room," she reminded me.

"That was before the frog and the worms were down there," I explained.

"They don't take up that much space," she scoffed.

"They take up a lot of psychological space," I said.

Oddly, though, I've kind of gotten used to them. M. Edium has talked about doing more dissections in the future, but I think a more likely -- and frankly, not undesirable -- outcome is that they'll just sink to the bottom of the freezer, never to be seen again until either the freezer breaks down or we move. And one of those will have to happen before I die, because I don't want to end up in there with them. I take up a lot of psychological space too.

Busy Busy Busy!

2011-01-29T09:13:00.000-08:00

Busy Busy Busy!

So for the first time in my life, I can claim to be a mild-mannered newspaper reporter by day and a rock star by night. Although to be honest, I'm also pretty mild-mannered as rock stars go. And I'm not so much a "rock star" per se as "a guy in a band that's playing a gig soon." And also the "newspaper reporter" thing would be more accurately described as "columnist for an online news outlet." And furthermore the rock star thing is more by early evening than by night...I'll come in again.

OKay, so I'm playing bass guitar in a band that's currently called Who The, which despite its name is not a The Who tribute band. We're playing tomorrow (Sunday) at a fund raiser at the Hard Rock Cafe in Downtown Minneapolis. We're part of a whole festival of bands and blues jams that's going from 4:30 to 8:00, and we're scheduled to go on at 6:05. That's give or take, of course. You know how musicians are.

Also, I've got a new column on the Southwest Minneapolis page of Patch. If you're not aware of the Patch thing, it's basically a hyper-local news site that focuses on neighborhoods instead of cities or metro areas. My column is called "The Southwest Dad" and is about being a parent in this part of town. The title may make it sound like it's in reference to the Southwest United States, but it's actually Southwest Minneapolis. Which is kind of a shame because it means I don't get to use my idea for a logo of a Kokopelli wearing a cardigan.

So those are my two new gigs as of this weekend. Which is why this is a very short entry.

2011-01-26T15:24:00.001-08:00

Well Preserved, Part II

I don't think I ever wrote a follow-up on what happened after Trash agreed to order M. Edium some "preserved specimens" to dissect. That's partially because for a long time, nothing did happen.

As I mentioned before, your regular civilian householder can't just mail-order dead animals. We had to have them shipped to the same address where the catalog had been delivered, i.e. M. Edium's Montessori school. Trash did the ordering, so I have no idea how long they were supposed to take to get there. But after a few weeks, M. Edium's teacher Mr. N. mentioned to me that they hadn't shown up yet and I should probably call.

I was like, "Yeah, I'll get right on that."

Because honestly, I would have been perfectly happy forgetting all about it, and I was prepared to bet that M. Edium would have eventually forgotten about it too (a great bet, because I would have won no matter what). But Trash, Ms. "Never Say No To Science" Mom, insisted on calling to find out what was going on.

After finding the number, getting a customer service rep on the phone, and having her pull up the order, Trash got something like an explanation. The order wasn't lost, or filled incorrectly, or sent to the wrong place. It wasn't filled at all. I'm not the one who did the talking, but my understanding is that the place that is accustomed to filling bulk orders for classes and schools declined to mail us a dead frog and a dozen dead earthworms because it was "weird."

No argument here.

But Trash got them straightened out, and they agreed to go ahead and ship the stuff out. Hot damn.

For a while we weren't sure how the dissection was actually going to happen. Six is probably a little too young to cut him loose with his first scalpel. At the same time, Trash wasn't going to help him, because she doesn't even like to touch a dead animal when she's cooking it. And don't look at me, because I'm not Mr. "Never Say No To Science" Dad. Trash had originally thought we'd have to have her mom help the next time we went to Iowa, because she's the only person in the family with medical lab training. Sure, the last time she'd dissected anything was probably back when Jack Klugman was also doing it on Quincy, but doesn't every grandmother dream of getting that call from their grandchild asking, "Can you help me dissect a worm?"

Happily, Febrifuge stepped up, which is good because not only is his training decades fresher, he also lives in the metro area. Having to be around when a worm gets dissected is bad enough without having to drive it four hours in the car first.

Before long, a white cardboard box showed up. "It's still not too late," I said before they opened it, and then it was too late. Inside was a big, stiff, brown frog sharing a plastic bag with a puddle of formaldehyde, and a package of what, if one didn't know better, might almost look like the most expensive gourmet pasta you've ever seen, in the form of twelve long, straight noodles vacuum-packed side by side.

Horrible, yes. But we never say no to science. It was a little weird having them in the kitchen until the dissection took place. It was also unexpected when Trash happened to be on the phone with our sister-in-law and happened to mention the upcoming…procedure. Which is when M. Edium's cousin, then-eight-year-old Deniece, asked, "Can I come too?"

And we went from there.

M .Ovie Reviews: Tangled

2011-01-24T08:26:00.000-08:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Tangled

M. Edium had been wanting to see this for a while, so I had the idea that maybe he could review this one. But then in the parking lot he said it was his second-favorite movie after Megamind, so I reconsidered.

We ended up going on my birthday. Interestingly, much of the action takes place on the lead character's birthday, as well. Surprisingly, that's not all it takes to make a good birthday movie. Albert Brooks also starts movies on his characters' birthdays, but I would not advise seeing Lost in America or Defending Your Life as part of your birthday celebrations. This was much more fitting.

I have to say that when I saw the trailers for this movie, it looked really dumb. Somehow I got the impression that it was all about this smarmy dude getting beat up by sentient hair. Of course, I'm certainly not the first to complain about how mis-marketed this film was, so I'm going to stop now.

Because the thing is that it was actually really good. Somehow I missed the fact that it was Disney's 50th Animated Feature, which is not the kind of thing people should be missing (this is not the kind of movie people should be missing, but I'm repeating myself). Instead, the ads make it look like a typical DreamWorks Animation knockoff when it totally isn't. As a computer-animated Disney film, it's an odd mix of old and new. It looks like Pixar, though not as gratuitously detailed, and yet everyone's dressed like it's Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. There's anachronistically snarky dialogue, but there are also actual songs, actually sung by the same actors who do the speaking, like in an old Disney musical (and composed by Alan Menken, no less). And it's that hoary Disney mainstay, a fairy tale about a princess, but it's got enough edges and twists to keep it from being a dull bedtime story.

I'm not complaining about the dialogue, because there are a fair number of standout characters who don't say anything at all -- and a couple of them are even human. The king and queen are both persistently silent and yet heartbreakingly expressive, the chameleon gets his points across without ever saying a word, and the horse will crack you up with a look. It's like non-verbal communication is the new 3-D or something.

That said, Tangled is an awful title. Rapunzel's hundred feet of magical hair is many things at any given time, but the one thing it never is, no matter what happens to it, is tangled. That amount of hair should be getting snarls in it from any activity beyond semi-complicated thoughts, but it behaves itself ridiculously well. Between its getting dragged through the wilderness, being carried like a bundle of firewood, and a couple of full immersions, not to even mention its customary use as an elevator, she should have arrived at the end of the movie looking like Sideshow Bob instead of [SPOILER].

And as an adoptive parent, I really should be used to the ubiquity of parent issues in children's pop culture. Dead, absent, and just plain horrible parents are everywhere from Narnia to Hogwarts, and you have to navigate them carefully. Just as one example, a couple of years ago, M. Edium asked who Princess Leia's father was and I heard myself saying, "Bail Organa." So I had mixed feelings when Rapunzel rebels against her adoptive mother, and it's okay because she's not her "real" mother. In the car afterward, I had to make sure we talked about the ways his adoption was different than Rapunzel's; for instance, we didn't steal him and stuff him in an isolated tower for selfish reasons of our own. His tower has all kinds of local amenities.

Other than that, though, I loved it, and so did . Rogue with heart meets princess with balls. Those aren't my words, but M. Edium's. More or less.

Footwork

2011-01-18T11:36:00.000-08:00

Footwork

Part of Trash's job is to research stuff people ask her to research. Sometimes it's for other people in the company, sometimes it's for people in her department, sometimes (on rare occasions so it doesn't look like I'm taking advantage) it's even for me. Often, it's for her boss. Researching stuff is not only her job, but her superpower. You ask her to look into something, she won't just look into it. She'll stick her head in there so far that before long the only part of her you'll see is the soles of her feet. She'll disappear up its fundament and come back out the other end able to tell you how it works in ways that even it didn't know about.

But speaking of feet…

A few weeks ago, Trash got a request from her boss to do some in-depth research on pedicures. She even wanted her to get one. Take pictures. Video, if possible. Really learn all about the whole pedicure industry from the inside out. The whole Trash package.

Another thing you need to know about Trash is her atavistic aversion to all things feet. Feet are erogenous zones for some people. For Trash, they're the exact opposite. She doesn't want to be near them, she doesn't want to touch them, she doesn't want to think about them. If there were a way for her to leave them out on the front stoop when she came into the house, she would. She hates feet.

So listening to her boss outline everything she was going to have to endure with her feet was making her crazy -- although she was doing a fantastic job of hiding it.

In fact, here's how much Trash wants nothing to do with feet. A couple of nights before this call from her boss, she was talking with our friend Bitter about pedicures, and wondering why it's so expensive to just have someone paint your toenails. Bitter blithely explained about the trimming and the scraping and the rubbing, and before either of us knew it, Trash's own feet had completely failed her. Literally, she was suddenly forced to collapse to the floor in revulsion.

Which was, of course, the point at which I got the idea to have her boss ask her to research pedicures.

It was surprisingly easy. Trash's boss and I get along pretty well. We have several shared interests, the chief one being tormenting Trash. She IM'ed me with an unrelated question that morning and I bounced an answer back and said, "Hey, by the way, can you make up a reason to have Trash to research pedicures?" and while I was still formulating an explanation she was like, "Sure!" and the next thing I knew it was all set up.

So, among the many, many advantages of working at home, add to them this one: I got to listen to Trash's end of the conversation as her boss asked her to do something that gave her hives. And while listening, her boss and I were IMing back and forth. I felt like Ashton Kutcher with not as many Twitter followers.

Finally, I couldn't keep from laughing, and Trash busted us. But it was win-win-win, I think. Trash's boss and I had a good laugh, and Trash got to show her boss some real loyalty. It's not often you can mess with someone's head and advance their career at the same time.

And you should have seen her on Christmas when she opened the present I gave her: a gift card for a free pedicure. Magical.

M. Ovie Reviews: Season of the Witch

2011-01-12T11:09:00.000-08:00

M. Ovie Reviews: Season of the Witch

Like I just said, there’s really nothing out right now that I still want to see, but Trash all but drafted me into going to Season of the Witch. And the reason she picked that movie was because, as usual, she was staying home.

I went in knowing almost nothing about it, except that it was Nicolas Cage in some medieval adventure. Two reasons to skip it, as far as I was concerned. It's been a very long time since Nicolas Cage was the best thing in a movie, although he came close in Kick-Ass, largely by being the anti-Nicolas Cage.

Here he goes in another direction, undertaking the ambitious actorly task of phoning in a performance in a movie set before the invention of phones. Cage plays a disillusioned Crusader who, along with his sidekick played by the usually awesome Ron Perlman, gets roped into transporting a suspected witch across the undifferentiated European countryside during the 14th century. This is done by means of a horse-drawn jail cell on wheels. Alas, this means that not only is Nicolas Cage not the best actor in the movie, he's not even the best cage in the movie.

At some point early on, I started to wonder if Sam Raimi had anything to do with this film. And I’d have to say he did, but only indirectly. As we know, Raimi got his start making cheap rip-offs of horror movies. Well, in a lot of ways, this is a cheap rip-off of a Sam Raimi cheap rip-off. There's lots of BOO! moments, bullshit scares, gratuitous gross-outs, and swords that make a lot of noise even when they aren't touching anything. There's even a character who looks like Sam Raimi, for God's sake (although he turns out to be Al Capone from Boardwalk Empire, so I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice the resemblance).

And that's just the filmmaking tics. It's Raimi-lite plotwise as well, from the shaky geo-historical setting populated by wisecracking Americans to the reverse-Necronomicon that both the prologue and climax hinge on. Unfortunately, it's all fake-Raimi, like biting into a big chewy chocolate-chip cookie that turns out to be a manhole cover packed with raisins instead.

Plus, Sam Raimi would never be so clumsy as to set up a central question like "Is she or isn't she a witch?" and then tip his hand so early. He'd rather replace that hand with a chainsaw.

I wish I could tell you how Cage and Perlman acquit themselves as action heroes, but as seems to so often be the case lately, any and all fight scenes are shot with so much quick-cutting that trying to actually follow the action is futile; all you can do is wait for it to be over. There was one scene in which I actually experienced something like suspense, but it was during a slow-moving scene of a bridge crossing. And even that was filled with editing cheats: "Whoa, how's he going to get around that big hole -- oh, never mind, he's already done it."

Speaking of cheating, this movie needs to make up its mind about the 14th-Century Church. We first meet our sympathetic heroes as a pair of jovial veterans, making mordantly world-weary quips as they cheerfully go about their genocide. Then Cage loses his faith and peace of mind as a result of the one atrocity he commits (totes by accident!) in years of Crusading. Then we spend a lot of time dwelling on the hypocrisy and superstition of the Church, only to find out at the end that it Kind Of Has A Point, when it comes to the really scary shit.

I did, however, enjoy the end credits. The names of the crew members were so scattered with umlauts and diacriticals that it looked like someone threw a bucket of road salt on them. Whatever else all those foreign names may signify, I hope they mean that wherever this film was made has a good exchange rate, so that Nicolas Cage could get the most from the paycheck he clearly made this movie for.

2010 M. Ovies

2011-01-10T19:43:00.000-08:00

2010 M. Ovies

So now that it's the second week of January and you're completely sick of anything with "2010" in the title, I thought now would be the ideal time to post my rankings of the movies I saw in the theater in 2010. Strike before the iron is cold enough that your tongue would stick to it, that's what I always say.

You'll notice that there are a number of movies in this list that were not actually released in 2010, or in a couple of cases, even in this century. I have addressed these anomalous entries by devising a highly advanced algorithm to account for what I call the "20th Century Classic" factor, which will properly weight their quality against the new releases with which they had to compete. After many tireless hours with my dad's slide rule and various university math department message boards, I believe I have succeeded in incorporating them into my rankings so that they are judged no more or less subjectively and arbitrarily than the rest of the list.

So here goes, in order from best to worst:

1. Toy Story 3. Almost perfect.
2. Inception. Far from perfect, but in the most interesting way.
3. Shutter Island. I admit it. I'm a sucker.
4. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. A huge sucker.
5. Rashomon. Groundbreaking and riveting in 1960.
6. The Evil Dead. The scariest movie I ever saw in 1983.
7. True Grit. Better than the original, in the sense that I actually saw it.
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. Thankless, but solid.
9. Iron Man 2. That cliche about sequels? Movies like this are the reason for it.
10. Centurion. Some of the movies within this movie were really good.
11. The King's Speech. Spit it out already.
12. Megamind. Trying so hard.
13. Knight and Day. Underrated (but not underrated enough to rank higher).
14. Date Night. Great cast, crap movie.
15. Alice in Wonderland. Probably would have liked it if I'd seen all of it.
16. Tron: Legacy. Better special effects don't fix the premise.
17. Legion. The apocalypse as first-person-shooter.
18. MacGruber.
19. Kick-Ass. A dark myth trapped in a tedious coming-of-age slog.
20. Dinner for Schmucks. Hypocritical and sanctimonious.
21. Youth in Revolt. Audience member in revolt.
22. Predators. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
23. Clash of the Titans. Some interesting new stuff, but all in the first half hour.
24. The American. Perhaps there will be a sequel in which something happens.
25. Salt. My eyes rolled longer than the credits did.

I wish I could say that every one of these movies had at least one actor in it that I've recapped for TWoP, but six of them didn't. Fortunately, six other ones had at least two, so it averages out. In case anyone cares but me.

So now, on to the 2011 list. I'd probably be getting a better start on that if there were anything playing right now that I remotely want to see.

Sock it to Me

2011-01-05T07:29:00.000-08:00

Sock it to Me

I'm not going to tell you yet again that telecommuting doesn't have drawbacks, because it does. For instance, some claim that it causes your social skills to atrophy. Back in August, one of our neighbors asked me at the block party whether I had found that to be the case, and I wittily replied, "Uhh…talking…not good as…before [large swig of beer]." And I haven't talked to anyone since then, so clearly I don't need to worry about that.

The biggest problem -- and trust me, I am fully aware of how minor this is -- is that it's hard on my socks.

At first, this wasn't a problem at all. I had too many socks as it was, mainly as a result of the fact that whenever anyone asks me what I want for Christmas, the first thing that comes to mind is socks. For, like, fifteen years. We keep them not in a drawer, but in a laundry hamper in the closet, is how many we had. But then when I started ruthlessly throwing away pairs that had holes in them, the pile shrunk. As time went on, they stopped overflowing the big laundry hamper, then got moved to smaller laundry hamper, and by the end of this year, it was starting to get difficult to find complete pairs in there among all the socks we never wear but still keep for some reason.

So why the high-speed hosiery attrition? My theory is that spending my whole work day without shoes leaves them unprotected, and some spots on our floors aren't exactly a bowling alley. Between the room thresholds, a few rough floorboards, the odd protruding nail, and one floor grate in our bedroom that snags not only socks but also pant cuffs and even the occasional shirt-tail, it can be dangerous around here for socks. Christmas came just in time, and when I asked for socks, it wasn't just because it was the first thing that came to mind. I was getting desperate.

So why, you may ask, didn't I simply buy a pair of house slippers? Well, I had a few reasons. It's bad enough that Trash makes me wear actual pants during the day; having to wear the next-best thing to shoes around the house on top of that seemed untenable. Plus there's the whole Ward Cleaver vibe that I'm not crazy about, even if I wear a hoodie instead of a cardigan and chomp a pen between my teeth instead of a pipe.

But last month, as Trash was finishing up her Christmas shopping, she summoned me to her computer so I could help her pick out a pair of slippers online. With my sock population rapidly dwindling, my resistance was as low as my sock supply by this point, so all I wanted was a pair of slippers that didn't look too much like shoes on one extreme, and not too much like cartoon characters on the other. They didn't have my favorite color in stock for my size, but I sucked it up. Trash was giving me a gift, and it's the thought that counts, after all.

So Christmas came, and I opened my slippers, and my God, why didn't anybody tell me about these? They're so warm and soft, like your feet are being constantly hugged! And any concern I had about feeling like I was wearing shoes evaporated. These are to shoes what pajama bottoms are to pants, except I can wear them all day. And they're shoes I can wear on the furniture, to boot (no pun intended).

So now my only question is, how long will these last? Because maybe I should be considering a laundry hamper full of slippers to go next to the laundry hamper full of socks, no?