July 2006 Archives
I'm a writer, you monsters! I create! I create for a living! I'm a creator! I am a creator!
A watershed occurred in my family room last night, a conclusion reached, now anchored in stone beyond all reasonable bounds of certainty. I've been going this way for a while, sort of dancing around the notion, sensing it was there. But it's all been inside, internalized, nascent and unarticulated, waiting for the right moment to crystalize. Which it did during the course of two hours last night:
Any movie made by Joel and Ethan Coen is amazing and must be watched.
Fargo has long been a top-10 favorite. Raising Arizona, too. I've seen 7 or 8 others. Every time I watch or rewatch something by the Coen Brothers I see something new, something funny that I only just got, some new performance that I only just appreciated.
Last night I watched Barton Fink for the first time. Awesome movie. And I'm saying this despite the fact that I'm sure I don't understand it. It's 1941. Barton Fink is a writer called from Broadway to Hollywood, to write a wrestling picture starring Wallace Beery. Barton lives in a hotel. His room is stifling, moody, and claustrophobic. Barton has terminal writer's block. He meets Charlie Meadows, the affable guy next door. Barton Fink discovers Hollywood is hell.
There is so much to appreciate in Barton Fink. Detail and performances. The hotel hallway scene at the end of the movie (I'll show you the life of the mind!) is incredible. I can't imagine how they filmed it.
So watch Barton Fink. Watch it for the art direction and set design both of which are amazing. Watch it for Chet and the elevator guy and the Hotel Earle. Watch it for the detectives. Watch it because you are a writer and a creator. Watch it because you blog and know how hard it is to put words on paper.
Watch it because for all of us, Charlie Meadows is always right next door.
K-
'Cause Saturday night's the night I like
Saturday night's alright alright alright
K-
Complementary colors. D- wanted to know how I got the butterfly to sit still.
It's a secret, D-, it's a secret only great photographers are told.
K-
But not the usual hump day (although it is that, too). Yesterday, Baltimore maxed out its average daily high temperature for the year at 88 deg. On average it's stopped getting hotter and will begin to cool off! Today, Baltimore's average daily high begins its long, slow descent to January 4 when the average daily high bottoms out at only 41 deg.
I'm feeling the relief already.
K-
You all know how I feel about the lute. I've blogged about it often enough. And though I've heard your pleas for moderation and forbearance, it's been difficult - I should say, very difficult - to keep my lute-thiasm in check. It's just that the world needs more lute. We all know that, whether we care to admit it. The paucity of lute music is unconscionable, do you hear me, unconscionable. How can a civilized society... it's just that... what I mean to say is... man's inhumanity to man... unconscionable.
The. World. Needs. More. Lute. Period.
Evidently, great minds think alike. That world-renowned lutenist, Gordon Matthew Sumner, otherwise known as Sting, has an album forthcoming in October of John Dowland lute music. Of course, we all know Dowland was court lutenist to Elizabeth I back during the Renaissance and not a half-bad singer/songwriter. Everyone knows Dowland's best-known song, "Flow My Tears":
Flow, my teares, fall from youre springs,
Exiled for ever, let mee mourn
Where night's black bird hir sad infamy sings,
There let mee live forlorn...
*sigh*
Sting. Bringing his lute to the masses, singing. Mark the date. October 2006.
When the world becomes a better place.
K-
Out of my mind on a Wednesday moanin':
1. When I'm Supreme Dictator of the World, "brang" will be a word but "irregardless" will not. Double negatives in anything but exaggerated, facetious speech shall be punishable by water cannon. Sound like a plan?
2. Another of my SDW decrees... all automobile operators shall be required to know calculus. No calculus, no license. Know calculus, know peace.
3. I came down to the kitchen this morning to find my kid standing in the family room, eating cereal, wearing just a t-shirt and his underwear. Where did that come from? You weren't raised in barn, were you, D-?
4. My next Netflix offering, Living in Oblivion and recommended by Dan at InfoSpigot, is sitting on my shelf right now waiting to be viewed. I hope to get to it tonight. It's been a week since I last saw a movie (which was The Matador, a movie I really enjoyed and can recommend) and I'm beginning to suffer from withdrawal.
5. Quantities sold seem to be shrinking. For instance, yogurt used to be sold in 8-ounce cups. Now it comes in 6-ounce containers. I used to buy charcoal in 10 or 20 lb. bags. Now it's coming in 9 and 18 lb. bags. When did that happen?
6. We need the business leaders of this country to expand casual Friday to include shorts. With global warming setting in, long pants in the work place are becoming just too damn hot and uncomfortable. But this must be a top down movement. Supervisors and program managers need to take the lead on this. I can't start it.
7. I just finished reading Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, a novel about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji. The latter was falsely imprisoned in the early 1900s for horse-ripping. Sir Arthur led an effort to get Edalji's conviction pardoned. Though a big Sherlock Holmes fan, Barnes makes Edalji the more compelling character.
8. I have not listened to Thick as a Brick in a really long time. That was always one of my favorite albums. And the original LP had this way cool newspaper thing that unfolded from the cover. (Remember the girl in the goofy cover picture that was seductively lifting up her skirt? She excited my teenage libido almost as much as Carly Simon's nipples did on No Secrets.) If I had to pick one album cover I'd like to get back, it would be Thick as a Brick.
9. With CDs and downloads, album cover art is a dead art form. Too bad. Some were really creative.
10. It would be good to hear some Joe Walsh again, too. But not the Eagles Joe Walsh. I mean the James Gang Joe Walsh.
K-
The local Howard County Chamber of Commerce and other civic associtations are all abuzz over the fact that Money Magazine rated Columbia/Ellicott City the fourth best place to live in the United States. I always thought my neck of the woods had a lot to commend itself as a place to live. (And despite today's weather forecast in The Sun being "oppressive.")
Maryland got beat out by Fort Collins, CO, Naperville, IL, and Sugar Land, TX. I've never been to any of those places but as a yankee it's galling to have Howard County beaten by any place in Texas, especially one called Sugar Land.
For me, living anywhere in Texas would be as close to Hell as I care to get.
K-
I mentioned here that D- has begun work on his service project for Eagle Scout. The project itself is somewhat involved but step 1 is to raise money by splitting firewood. A couple of weeks ago, we tried splitting wood by hand. That was a non-starter.
So Saturday we took a more modern, much more manly approach. We got ourselves a big, honkin' machine. We used a hydraulic log-splitter. Twenty-eight tons of log splitting force. Nothing could stop us. Log after log we cut into fireplace-sized pieces. Nearly two cords worth. D- had five of his scout buddies to help him.
Splitting wood that has been sitting around in big, rotting, piles for a few years has one unique characteristic.
Insects.
We found troves of insects. As the hydraulic wedge prized open each section of tree, streams of things crawled out, flew into our faces, or fell to the ground. We never knew what to expect. Termites, termite larvae, huge grub-like things, monstrous beetles, bees, small, busy spiders, ants of all sorts. Splitting old wood is an entomologists dream.
It was just like opening a box of Cracker Jack.
K-
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About four this afternoon, I put a ration of mealworms in the bluebird feeder and retired to my deck to see what would happen. The parents came immediately and started flying back into the woods rather than to their nest.
I figured the nestlings had started to leave.
As I turned to get my binoculars, I noticed one of the fledglings sitting on top of the wind chimes on my deck. I guess the chimes were the first thing he saw when he bolted into the blue. He sat there motionless not quite sure what I was going to do. I managed to snap a couple of pictures before he flew off to join his parents in the woods.
Looks like my bluebirds are done till next year.
K-
Update 17 July 06: As of 7 PM last night, one fledgling remained in the box. When I got up this morning, it was gone.
Installed Movable Type V3.31 today. It seems to be working OK but I somehow turned off all my comments. I'm not sure how I did this so I suspect that if anything isn't working it's commenting. I'll have to keep an eye on that.
Switched over to mt-config.cgi OK although I'm still using my V2.61 main index template.
K-
Have I mentioned how much fun I have with my macro lens? The blow-up (click on the thumbnail above) is 18x12 inches and it's still reduced 50 percent at 72 ppi. Now that's resolution.
I can't wail till later in the summer when more insects are around.
K-
Earlier in the year, our dentist "discovered" that D- still has quite a few adult teeth that have yet to emerge. Why this discovery occurred when D- was 17 and not younger is a mystery. Suffice it to say, D- has 4 adult teeth that seem disinclined to grow.
What do you do about that you ask? We could do nothing and let him deal with it in later life, but dire warnings about abscesses and bone grafts make us leary of this. So step 1 is applying braces so that the adult teeth that are already in-place can be adjusted slightly to allow the recalcitrant adult teeth all the room they need to emerge. We've done this... just in time for senior pictures.
Step 2 is to pull-out all the baby teeth in the way. There are five of those. And step 3 is to "expose" the yet-to-emerge adult teeth by attaching small sub-gum hooks to each so the orthodontist can apply upward pressure using the braces and tiny chains. The hope is that this pressure will get the teeth to grow.
Steps 2 and 3 require an oral surgeon. And because pulling the baby teeth and exposing the 4 adult teeth requires general anesthesia, both the oral surgeon and the orthodontist thought it a good idea to have D-'s wisdom teeth removed all at the same time. One fell swoop kind of thing...
Yesterday was the big surgery day for D-. Four wisdom teeth and five baby teeth were to be pulled and four adult teeth exposed. Two hours in a dentist's chair under general anesthesia. D- was nervous. Not so much from the post-operative pain but from being knocked-out. But what a trooper he was. Off he went. Two hours later the nurse came to get me. Unfortunately not all the work was completed. Four wisdom teeth and four baby teeth were pulled and two exposures completed. But two hours was the limit they wanted to keep him under; they did as much as they could. He has to go back for the rest in a couple of weeks.
I am very proud of him. Despite the braces and despite the oral surgery, D- has been his usual cheerful self. No complaining, no whining, just his usual upbeat self. When other folks would have gotten down, D- has retained his sense of humor. Even five minutes after his surgery yesterday, his good nature shown through. As soon as he got into the car, he grabbed my glove box camera and snapped a self-portrait. I couldn't stop him and he doesn't even remember taking the photo.
Because the photo was taken right after surgery, it's pretty graphic. So don't go past the jump if you're at all squeamish about dental aftermath.
You have been warned.
K-
Today was the Fourth of July in Maryland. Which is to say it was the Fourth of July everywhere.
Independence Day was hotter than hell here: 94F with 74F dewpoint. I mowed the lawn. I was not happy. Although my new blade cut through the vegetation without problem.
Dinner was typically American: bratwursts, french fries, and grilled portobello mushrooms. Yummy. I'd go to the fireworks but it's too hot. Well, no, that's not quite right. I wouldn't go to the fireworks. It really doesn't matter what the temperature is.
Maybe I'll burn an American flag instead. Or maybe a picture of Orrin Hatch.
Happy Fourth.
K-
D- has started work on his Boy Scout Eagle project.
He's going to construct composting and mulch bins for our church. The first step is to raise money for the materials for the project. He decided he would split and sell some logs that are just sitting on the church property. He gets 75 percent of the proceeds for each cord sold.
We know that a log-splitter will make the job easier. Unfortunately, we need someone to haul the log splitter from the hardware store and then haul it back. Everyone we know with a trailer hitch was out of town this weekend, so we tried to do split the wood manually.
Splitting logs by hand is seriously hard work. We hadn't gone 45 minutes before we were both finished. That we were trying to split red oak - with all its tough grain - didn't help matters. We finished with 8 pieces split.
Next week we're renting a log-splitter.
K-
It's time for a new lawnmower blade!
When I was young, I would roll my eyes at the thought that some future Saturday morning of mine would be spent changing out the cutting edge of some infernal combustion, mechanized, contraption. I hated mowing the lawn as a youth; I don't like it any better as an adult. I tried to turn the kids into herbivores but that experiment failed. That I would spend my hard-earned money - admittedly grudgingly - on such a thing for a task I abhor only adds lemon juice to the wound.
I remember in my French IV class back in high school, everyone had an assignment to describe to the rest of the class - in French - the item listed on a slip of paper we drew from a glass jar. The object I had to describe to my Franco-pretender classmates?
Lawnmower blade.
I had no idea what the French for "lawnmower blade" was. I still don't. I guess that was the point of the exercise. I think I ended up calling it a "grass knife" and did some silly pantomime to get the point across. Babelfish tells me it's lame de tondeuse.
Could the Harry Homeowner bullshit get more boring?
K-
