So as I mentioned over on my other (much more popular) blog, when we had Dennis, our fearful vizsla, on Halloweens, we abandoned the practice of answering the door and handing out candy directly, instead putting out a big box of candy and a sign and dispensing it on the honor system*. Generally, this has worked out fine; there was only one year where, when we went to the collect the box at the end of the evening, we found its contents completely emptied (and, if I remember correctly, the box itself was out in the yard). This year, although there’s no Dennis around, there is a pandemic, and so there was no chance at all we would be interacting with ghosts and Batmen and princesses and whatnot**, and so, we put out the box and the sign and it was business as usual.
Continue reading “I Want Candy”An Annie-Versary
So as of the time of this post, it was exactly one year ago—9:13am on 11/7/2019—that I woke up on the floor in the living room.
Continue reading “An Annie-Versary”The Early Years: Jim Was In A Play Once
Many, many years ago, I came across a casting advertisement for a play that was going to be put on at the outdoor stage in Hanna Park, a local park created by (I think) and named after (definitely) Ed Hanna, a colorful and notorious* former mayor of Utica, NY. The play was The Children’s Crusade, which, as you might imagine, was billed as some sort of heavy drama about—you guessed it!—the Children’s Crusade. According to the linked Wikipedia article, “The traditional narrative is likely conflated from some factual and mythical events which include the visions by a French boy and a German boy, an intention to peacefully convert Muslims in the Holy Land to Christianity, bands of children marching to Italy, and children being sold into slavery. Many children were tricked by merchants and sailed over to what they thought were the holy lands but, in reality, were slave markets.” Sounds cheerful, doesn’t it?
Continue reading “The Early Years: Jim Was In A Play Once”Not a Review of “Adventures in Babysitting”
So the perspicacious reader may have noticed that there hasn’t been a “Not a Review” post in a while. For the most part, this is because we have temporarily canceled our Netflix streaming and disc-by-mail accounts, in order to save a few bucks* a month. The streaming part, we canceled because there’s literally** nothing on Netflix that my wife wants to watch, while I’m all caught up on Dark and The Umbrella Academy and Kingdom, and who knows when Stranger Things is going to come back, and when I tried to watch Warrior Nun I quickly concluded that it was more or less a Buffy wannabe, plus I immediately (and correctly) guessed what the big twist was going to be; and as for the discs, well, when they arrive I put them on the fireplace mantel until we watch them, which can sometimes take over a week, depending, and I kind of got tired of having red envelopes up there glaring at me and saying “You’re spending $10 a month for me to be sitting up here doing nothing.” (Under other circumstances, when we were not home all the time, one could tend to forget that the disc was there waiting; now, not so much.)
Continue reading “Not a Review of “Adventures in Babysitting””Carpet That Bad Boy
So a while ago I mentioned that we were watching Lodge 49, the short-lived comedy-drama set in, of all places, a Masonic*-type lodge up in Long Beach. The show only ran for two seasons**, so even at our snail’s-pace approach to bingeing TV shows, we already finished it. Towards the end, most of the regulars plus a few guest stars piled into a vehicle for a road trip to Mexico in search of a stolen set of ancient scrolls that putatively contained long-sought alchemical secrets. But while the characters were focused on obtaining the scrolls, my wife was focused on something else.
Continue reading “Carpet That Bad Boy”Teaser Tuesday: Surely You “Infinite Jest”
So this week—and last week, and the week before that, and the week before that, and for several weeks yet to come—I am reading one of those novels for which the term “doorstopper” was invented: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace.
The Subtitle Rebellion
So I’ve mentioned a few times that during the last year or two of Dennis’s life, when he got in the habit of complaining loudly in the evenings that he thought it was time for everyone to go to bed*, we humans got in the habit of watching television with the subtitles on, so as not to have to keep pausing and going back to catch missed dialog. Running with the subtitles on also has the occasional side effect of injecting a little bit of extra amusement value, such as describing characters’ speech as “French-like gibberish” or saying things that seem prima facie ridiculous such as “goo snarling“. But then, sometimes, you get cases where the characters say one thing but the subtitles say something completely different and you say to yourself, that can’t possibly be a mistake. To wit:
Continue reading “The Subtitle Rebellion”Trailer Tuesday: “The Outsiders”
So the other day we were scrolling through available movies on streaming, and I spotted The Outsiders* on the list. Readers of a certain age** are likely to remember The Outsiders, the novel, which we all read in high school back in the day. Or at least, most of us did.
Continue reading “Trailer Tuesday: “The Outsiders””Me: “Hey, look! The Outsiders!”
Wife: “What’s The Outsiders?”
Teaser Tuesday: “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union”
So not long ago I was reading The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon.
Teaser Tuesday: “The Rock Child”
So a little while back I read a book called The Rock Child, by Win Blevins:
Apparently this book was later republished under the title Of Love and Demons. The original title refers to a rock formation in the mountains; the revised title refers to … uh … well, I’m not sure, exactly. There’s not really anything supernatural here, but possibly the “demon” would be the book’s main villain, Porter Rockwell, an actual person sometimes referred to as “The Destroying Angel of Mormondom”, who spends most of the novel in pursuit of Our Heroes, consisting of the Mormon-raised half-Indian Asie, abducted Tibetan nun Sun Moon, and … Sir Richard Burton*?!
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday: “The Rock Child””
Viscosity 