Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Monday, September 1, 2014
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Labor Day Sunday.
Aaaaaaaah.
This peaceful moment brought to you by the last big weekend of summer. "Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces."
Of course, I'm not on this spot as I write this. I am at home, working all weekend on end-of-the-month deadlines.
Even so, all is well. I like home. As Thomas Hood wrote,
Peace and rest at length have come
All the day’s long toil is past,
And each heart is whispering, “Home,
Home at last.”
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Teen wolf.
My dog is now a teenager.
He's gone from being a cheerful nut who obeyed most of the time to an unpredictable jerk who obeys when he feels like it. The biteyness that made his early days so action-packed has returned, with a much longer and stronger mouth. He'll be affectionate and playful one minute, needy and whiny the next, and growly sometimes in the middle. He's making me crazy. He makes me feel like a failure.
I thought that his little operation would prevent this. I thought wrong.
I'm told that this is a phase, as it is with human teenagers; that fortunately, in the case of dogs, it only lasts about three months, so we're already halfway through.
I hope so.
The teens are a particularly icky time of life for teens and those around them. I did not enjoy my adolescence overmuch. I am not enjoying the dog's now.
The mystery about all this is not why dogs would behave the same way people do at hormone-spurtin' time. I guess it's how we become our own creatures, not just a part of the pack, which dogs and people and I guess cats do, but not your lesser mammals. No, the mystery to me us why more people don't murder their teenage children. Adolescence lasts a hell of a lot longer in children than in dogs, and dogs can't make smartass remarks.
He's gone from being a cheerful nut who obeyed most of the time to an unpredictable jerk who obeys when he feels like it. The biteyness that made his early days so action-packed has returned, with a much longer and stronger mouth. He'll be affectionate and playful one minute, needy and whiny the next, and growly sometimes in the middle. He's making me crazy. He makes me feel like a failure.
I thought that his little operation would prevent this. I thought wrong.
I'm told that this is a phase, as it is with human teenagers; that fortunately, in the case of dogs, it only lasts about three months, so we're already halfway through.
I hope so.
The teens are a particularly icky time of life for teens and those around them. I did not enjoy my adolescence overmuch. I am not enjoying the dog's now.
The mystery about all this is not why dogs would behave the same way people do at hormone-spurtin' time. I guess it's how we become our own creatures, not just a part of the pack, which dogs and people and I guess cats do, but not your lesser mammals. No, the mystery to me us why more people don't murder their teenage children. Adolescence lasts a hell of a lot longer in children than in dogs, and dogs can't make smartass remarks.
Friday, August 29, 2014
Gentlemen, start your burners!
Come on, boys, let's hit it!
It's the last hurrah, the big roundup, the final hours, the end of the line, the last rodeo, the last picture show, the stop sign, the red light, roadblock, bridge out ahead. Labor Day Weekend! Summer's almost gone! EAT MEAT!
I love my grill, but it's not a big grill like the one pictured above. And I'm just fine with that. You know, it's not what you got, it's what you do with it. I'm perfectly comfortable with my small, yet potent, grill. Yes, I can say I've never had a complaint about... well, actually I have had complaints about my cooking. And my, uh, meat.
Forget all that. The real issue here is that summer is supposed to be over. Why? Because the kids are back in school? Like parents consider that a bad thing? Every parent I know has been playing taxi driver all summer. It'll actually be easier to have the kids in school.
Because it's cooler? But we still have three weeks or so until the autumnal equinox.
Because vacation season is over? But most people I know couldn't afford to go anywhere anyhow.
And yet it feels like it's all crashing down.
Still, seasons always end before they end. Fall ends when Santa shows up at Macy's, even though fall continues until around December 21. Whether March comes in like a lamb or a lion, it's supposed to come in with spring, although it's mostly winter. And June is the first month of summer, even though it's actually the third month of spring. It just feels like an extra ripoff this year, with Labor Day landing as early as it possibly can.
I guess it's too much to expect me to fight the zeitgeist by myself with my little gas grill. But if we all keep the BBQ fires burning, maybe we can push the summer needle a little past Labor Day weekend for a change.
 |
| Holy Mambajamba, it's MEAT! |
It's the last hurrah, the big roundup, the final hours, the end of the line, the last rodeo, the last picture show, the stop sign, the red light, roadblock, bridge out ahead. Labor Day Weekend! Summer's almost gone! EAT MEAT!
I love my grill, but it's not a big grill like the one pictured above. And I'm just fine with that. You know, it's not what you got, it's what you do with it. I'm perfectly comfortable with my small, yet potent, grill. Yes, I can say I've never had a complaint about... well, actually I have had complaints about my cooking. And my, uh, meat.
Forget all that. The real issue here is that summer is supposed to be over. Why? Because the kids are back in school? Like parents consider that a bad thing? Every parent I know has been playing taxi driver all summer. It'll actually be easier to have the kids in school.
Because it's cooler? But we still have three weeks or so until the autumnal equinox.
Because vacation season is over? But most people I know couldn't afford to go anywhere anyhow.
And yet it feels like it's all crashing down.
Still, seasons always end before they end. Fall ends when Santa shows up at Macy's, even though fall continues until around December 21. Whether March comes in like a lamb or a lion, it's supposed to come in with spring, although it's mostly winter. And June is the first month of summer, even though it's actually the third month of spring. It just feels like an extra ripoff this year, with Labor Day landing as early as it possibly can.
I guess it's too much to expect me to fight the zeitgeist by myself with my little gas grill. But if we all keep the BBQ fires burning, maybe we can push the summer needle a little past Labor Day weekend for a change.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Can't LEGO the past.
Saw The Lego Movie a few days ago, and am compelled to share my thoughts. Stop me! Stop me before I share my thoughts again!
Ha! Too late.
First off, it was a lot of fun. I don't know much about the creation of the film, but it was clever of them to do an anti-consumerism movie for a consumer product. Talk about hanging a lampshade on it! Also, the filmmakers clearly had fun with the project, start to finish. It was astounding to see a movie made for kids that did not have one poop joke---or if there was I missed it; the jokes were flying pretty fast. It was the only time we'll ever get to see Gandalf and Dumbledore in the same place. And Superman gets to treat Green Lantern like a nerdy kid brother, presumably because the movie Green Lantern flopped and Man of Steel made a ton.
Mark Mothersbaugh, who began his career writing infuriatingly catchy technopop songs, wrote the infuriatingly catchy technopop music, especially "Everything Is Awesome," which will probably win an Academy Award for best song. If that pimp song could win a few years back, I'm convinced there is nothing that can disqualify a song for nomination anymore, and there are far too few musicals to provide a competitive field.
I enjoyed the voice work, from some surprising quarters. Morgan Freeman made me laugh for the first time since he was Easy Reader. Chris Pratt, who looks like a JV Kirk to me in the Trek movies, was perfect as the unlikely hero. But I am sad that there's so little work for pure voice actors anymore, guys like Mel Blanc and Paul Frees in the old days and Larry Kenney now. I'm told that average workaday thespians can't even get gigs doing audiobooks. Everything is celebrity.
My philosophical problems with the film begin with the fact that hanging the aforementioned lampshade on a problem doesn't make it go away. It's still as much a movie-length commercial for a product as any Care Bears or Barbie movie is. I can endure such a thing if it's entertaining enough, just as I can watch an ad that's entertaining without feeling like I've burned 30 seconds of my life. This movie passed that test. (It had me at the "I just wanna go home!" gag during the first big chase.)
My other problem is with, well, people being made of Lego* blocks. I ran into this with the Batman game for the Wii a couple of years ago, when Robin gets his head knocked off, and Batman pops it back on and Robin's fine. Yes, you can do that with Lego toys, but it kind of lowers the stakes, you know what I mean? (Inconsistently, in the movie one character does "die" following decapitation while another character does not. Maybe in the Lego universe, decapitation is only fatal if you don't get your head plugged into some blocks quickly enough.)
I think what annoyed me most, though, is that Lego has been selling these complete scene sets for years, where they supply all the pieces for a castle, a Western town, a city block, or whatever, and you just build them to look like the picture on the box---and this is what we're supposed to rail against in the new film? That someone puts the sets together the way the manufacturer sells them? Lego has given you a set with everything to make a specific scene... and now they want you to screw around with it so you don't end up like Will Ferrell in the movie.** It's like selling a paint-by-numbers kit and then ridiculing the person who paints the picture, insisting that he ignore the outlines and numbers and just paint whatever he wants. Hey, Lego, that Western town was your idea!
When I was a kid, back in the Holocene Epoch, the Lego set didn't even come with people. The only special piece I remember was the window. You could put a Lego window in a wall. That was it! I don't even think there was a door. Maybe. Now everything is a special piece, but back then we had just Lego bricks of different sizes and had to make them into our own things.
I remember taking a huge pile of them and making all kinds of little sculptures (little houses, dogs, larger houses, people, horses, more houses, whatever) and putting them out on tables with little tags like an art museum. My mom forced herself to go through it and ooh and aaah, God bless her. It didn't look like much, but it was a lot of fun, and made me into the world-famous sculptor I am today.***
That's sort of the play Lego wants you to do with its sets, although by supplying the pieces to be used in particular ways they hinder you from doing exactly that. What do you want from me, Lego?! And apparently you shouldn't ever glue the blocks in place to save your creation, not ever. So it's okay to dismantle things at Legoland or at the Art of the Brick exhibit. Go ahead! It's fun!
Anyway, on the bright side, The Lego Movie makes a tremendous amount of fun of the tropes of the modern adventure film, and for that I have to give it high marks.**** And it gave Abraham Lincoln a rocket chair. Who doesn't love that?
But any parent who watches the movies knows the real bad guy in the Lego universe is the brick that waits in the hall, or on the stairs, for your naked feet in the middle of the night. That guy is a bastard.
* As an editor I have wrestled in the past with others who want LEGO to be all caps, as in the company nomenclature, for news stories and the like. But the word Lego is from the Dutch leg godt, or play well; it's not an acronym like IKEA. Remember, kiddies, when you're copyediting, just because a company insists on funky punctuation or spelling does not mean you have to play along. They want you to write (as an imaginary example) joSEph?ne"Z B..eaUty PROdUct!s in text because they know you'll ID the company name immediately by the stupid way it looks, but for the benefit of your reader (and your sanity) just write Josephine'z Beauty Products.
** A good thing to not end up as in any of his movies, actually. *** Not really.
**** They have a sequel slated for 2017, but it's hard to imagine they'll capture lightning in a bottle twice. This movie has the feel of a one-off, a nonpareil, a lovely experience that can't be forced to repeat. I guess we'll find out.
Ha! Too late.
First off, it was a lot of fun. I don't know much about the creation of the film, but it was clever of them to do an anti-consumerism movie for a consumer product. Talk about hanging a lampshade on it! Also, the filmmakers clearly had fun with the project, start to finish. It was astounding to see a movie made for kids that did not have one poop joke---or if there was I missed it; the jokes were flying pretty fast. It was the only time we'll ever get to see Gandalf and Dumbledore in the same place. And Superman gets to treat Green Lantern like a nerdy kid brother, presumably because the movie Green Lantern flopped and Man of Steel made a ton.
Mark Mothersbaugh, who began his career writing infuriatingly catchy technopop songs, wrote the infuriatingly catchy technopop music, especially "Everything Is Awesome," which will probably win an Academy Award for best song. If that pimp song could win a few years back, I'm convinced there is nothing that can disqualify a song for nomination anymore, and there are far too few musicals to provide a competitive field.
I enjoyed the voice work, from some surprising quarters. Morgan Freeman made me laugh for the first time since he was Easy Reader. Chris Pratt, who looks like a JV Kirk to me in the Trek movies, was perfect as the unlikely hero. But I am sad that there's so little work for pure voice actors anymore, guys like Mel Blanc and Paul Frees in the old days and Larry Kenney now. I'm told that average workaday thespians can't even get gigs doing audiobooks. Everything is celebrity.
My philosophical problems with the film begin with the fact that hanging the aforementioned lampshade on a problem doesn't make it go away. It's still as much a movie-length commercial for a product as any Care Bears or Barbie movie is. I can endure such a thing if it's entertaining enough, just as I can watch an ad that's entertaining without feeling like I've burned 30 seconds of my life. This movie passed that test. (It had me at the "I just wanna go home!" gag during the first big chase.)
My other problem is with, well, people being made of Lego* blocks. I ran into this with the Batman game for the Wii a couple of years ago, when Robin gets his head knocked off, and Batman pops it back on and Robin's fine. Yes, you can do that with Lego toys, but it kind of lowers the stakes, you know what I mean? (Inconsistently, in the movie one character does "die" following decapitation while another character does not. Maybe in the Lego universe, decapitation is only fatal if you don't get your head plugged into some blocks quickly enough.)
I think what annoyed me most, though, is that Lego has been selling these complete scene sets for years, where they supply all the pieces for a castle, a Western town, a city block, or whatever, and you just build them to look like the picture on the box---and this is what we're supposed to rail against in the new film? That someone puts the sets together the way the manufacturer sells them? Lego has given you a set with everything to make a specific scene... and now they want you to screw around with it so you don't end up like Will Ferrell in the movie.** It's like selling a paint-by-numbers kit and then ridiculing the person who paints the picture, insisting that he ignore the outlines and numbers and just paint whatever he wants. Hey, Lego, that Western town was your idea!
When I was a kid, back in the Holocene Epoch, the Lego set didn't even come with people. The only special piece I remember was the window. You could put a Lego window in a wall. That was it! I don't even think there was a door. Maybe. Now everything is a special piece, but back then we had just Lego bricks of different sizes and had to make them into our own things.
I remember taking a huge pile of them and making all kinds of little sculptures (little houses, dogs, larger houses, people, horses, more houses, whatever) and putting them out on tables with little tags like an art museum. My mom forced herself to go through it and ooh and aaah, God bless her. It didn't look like much, but it was a lot of fun, and made me into the world-famous sculptor I am today.***
That's sort of the play Lego wants you to do with its sets, although by supplying the pieces to be used in particular ways they hinder you from doing exactly that. What do you want from me, Lego?! And apparently you shouldn't ever glue the blocks in place to save your creation, not ever. So it's okay to dismantle things at Legoland or at the Art of the Brick exhibit. Go ahead! It's fun!
Anyway, on the bright side, The Lego Movie makes a tremendous amount of fun of the tropes of the modern adventure film, and for that I have to give it high marks.**** And it gave Abraham Lincoln a rocket chair. Who doesn't love that?
But any parent who watches the movies knows the real bad guy in the Lego universe is the brick that waits in the hall, or on the stairs, for your naked feet in the middle of the night. That guy is a bastard.
* As an editor I have wrestled in the past with others who want LEGO to be all caps, as in the company nomenclature, for news stories and the like. But the word Lego is from the Dutch leg godt, or play well; it's not an acronym like IKEA. Remember, kiddies, when you're copyediting, just because a company insists on funky punctuation or spelling does not mean you have to play along. They want you to write (as an imaginary example) joSEph?ne"Z B..eaUty PROdUct!s in text because they know you'll ID the company name immediately by the stupid way it looks, but for the benefit of your reader (and your sanity) just write Josephine'z Beauty Products.
** A good thing to not end up as in any of his movies, actually. *** Not really.
**** They have a sequel slated for 2017, but it's hard to imagine they'll capture lightning in a bottle twice. This movie has the feel of a one-off, a nonpareil, a lovely experience that can't be forced to repeat. I guess we'll find out.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
East side, west side, all around etc.
Saw a guy in a T-shirt that said, I Miss the Old New York.
Not sure which one he's talking about. The old New York that built a wall at Wall Street as a fortification between the white settlers and the natives? The old New York of the Gilded Age, with its Astors and Coopers and big hotels and elevated trains?
One suspects that he and others like him mean the old darker, grittier one where everything was falling apart and everyone was broke and Times Square was packed with XXX movie theaters. I was a kid back then, but even I knew that you could pick up venereal disease just following Broadway up through Times Square in those days. The New York from the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
If that's what they miss, they're in luck! The city's rookie mayor is cut of the same cloth as previous New York politicians who have let crime run rampant, instituted confiscatory taxes, and used the whip of social engineering to drive businesses and the middle class out of the city. When you have no middle class, you have to suck up to the rich, because they're the only ones left with any serious dough. When you have no middle class, and you have nothing to offer the rich, you have to get money out the poor, and the easiest way to do that is by appealing to the lowest possible motivations---booze, drugs, sex, violence.
A lot of people hate the prettied-up chain-store-driven Times Square. A lot of people have short memories.
Not sure which one he's talking about. The old New York that built a wall at Wall Street as a fortification between the white settlers and the natives? The old New York of the Gilded Age, with its Astors and Coopers and big hotels and elevated trains?
 |
| This one? |
If that's what they miss, they're in luck! The city's rookie mayor is cut of the same cloth as previous New York politicians who have let crime run rampant, instituted confiscatory taxes, and used the whip of social engineering to drive businesses and the middle class out of the city. When you have no middle class, you have to suck up to the rich, because they're the only ones left with any serious dough. When you have no middle class, and you have nothing to offer the rich, you have to get money out the poor, and the easiest way to do that is by appealing to the lowest possible motivations---booze, drugs, sex, violence.
A lot of people hate the prettied-up chain-store-driven Times Square. A lot of people have short memories.
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