Balls and Walnuts
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Coins of the world
From Rhodesia and Nyasaland, I bring you
High five!
dancing elephants.
Yeah, I got nothing. But you’ll be glad to hear I finally donated six boxes of books to the local library. Kept something like ten boxes, but six is a start.
D.
A truly awesome opening
We heart Colbert.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Carell Corral | ||||
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D.
What I did this weekend
Among other things, I watched movies.
Best of the bunch was Let the Right One In, a subtitled Swedish coming-of-age vampire movie. It’s about a bullied 12-year-old named Oskar (who is a very dark child, despite being all blond and blue-eyed and Swedish) who befriends Eli, a girl (maybe) who has been 12 for the last 200 years. The cinematography is spectacular, the film is well paced, and the child actors are mesmerizing. Most fascinating thing: leaving aside the whole bleeding your victims to death thing, is Eli evil? For most of the movie, I saw her as a practiced user who victimizes the men/boys who become fond of her. Won’t spoil the ending, but it did leave my early judgment somewhat shaken.
Next up was Dead Snow, a subtitled Norwegian zombie movie. Nazi zombies. Fast Nazi zombies. Who prey upon a group of witless but attractive medical students. I know, I know, what more could you ask for? Some originality, for one thing. One of the med students is afraid of the sight of blood. Another is a horror movie aficionado, who really ought to know better than to get laid early in the movie, because of course that means he’s one of the first to die. (Movie tropes dictate that the woman gets it first, because naughty women are more intrinsically zombie food than naughty men.) I recommend you pass on this one.
Finally, we watched a Woody Harrelson movie, Zombieland, a non-subtitled American zombie flick about a neurotic young guy with irritable bowel syndrome who as the movie starts thinks he’s the last non-cannibalistic guy in America, or what’s left of America, which he has renamed Zombieland. But he soon meets up with Woody Harrelson, an actor who surprises me because I never thought the Woody from Cheers would ever amount to anything. I liked him in this, and thought he and the protagonist (Jesse Eisenberg) had great chemistry and were a hoot to watch.
A horde of flesh-eating children. What's not to love?
But then they had to bring a couple of other characters into the film: Abigail Breslin who is supposed to be twelve in the film, probably really WAS twelve, but looked about fifteen, and love interest Emma Stone. They play con artist sisters, and the trouble is, in this cut-throat world these two are just too evil to live. This was sufficiently annoying that my wife stopped watching it (shortly after yelling at the screen, “SHOOT THEM ALREADY!”) but Jake and I trudged on.
It’s all a matter of suspension of disbelief. Or perhaps a trust in male hormones; after all, there’s a good chance Emma Stone is the last eligible female in the mainland 48, so why wouldn’t the two guys put up with a seemingly endless stream of abuse? I had no problem believing that, but my Vulcan wife couldn’t buy it.
Fun movie. Not my favorite zombie movie (Dead Alive and Fido vie for that top slot), but it had enough style and humor to keep me entertained. Much better than boring old fast Nazi zombies speaking Norwegian, anyway. Aside from an annoying cameo by Bill Murray and the aforementioned “why don’t they blow them away” problem, Zombieland (not to be confused with Brad Dourif’s Zombieland, also released in 2009) was a fun ride, great fare for the Fourth of July weekend.
D.
More photos
Now that I’ve figured out how to use our scanner, I’m a scanning fool.
Jake with his grandma
Happy days.
Jake does Avedon
Somewhere around age 5 or 6, Jake lost interest in photography. It’s a shame. I think his Lego infatuation deep-sixed all other interests.
Jake with his favorite food.
He’s in McCarren Airport, by the look of it. Boy mit pizza.
The family . . . shame these aren’t digital photos, you know?
D.
The child is father to the teen
Slow vacation-Monday morning, although I am on call, so anything could happen . . .
I’m cleaning our spare room, and found a few photos to share. These are scans from print photos, hence the cruddy quality. First, Jake at 16 months:
How dare you dress me in so many primary colors?
And at six years (no telling what Karen’s doing inside the Miata):
Bwaahaahaha! I locked Mommy in the car!
And finally, Jake at age 8, already perfecting the look which would be his stock and trade as a teenager (Karen says, “Proof that he was never a child.”)
Jake with his cousin Katie
D.
Dreaming of pets
This happens to me regularly: I’ll dream of neglected pets. Call it unresolved guilt; I still wonder whether I could have or should have done more for the pets I’ve owned who have died on my watch. Snakes don’t handle big moves, nor do frogs. Lizards and frogs often have narrow climate requirements.
In these dreams, I’ll find cages with forgotten pets in a back room I don’t often check. Last night, I was trying to clean a cage in which I had added way too many species. There were poison dart frogs and anoles, a Chinese water dragon, a dumpy frog. While I was cleaning the cage, the lizards kept trying to make a break for it. The water dragon leapt out, I grabbed his back (taking care not to grab the notoriously detachable lizard tail) and some of the skin came off in my hands. In horror I examined my lizard, who was in obvious pain, trying to decide whether to suture the wound, dress it, or give it up and euthanize. I dressed it.
Toward the end of the dream, I noticed two snakes poking their heads out of the cage’s substrate: a red-tailed boa and an emerald tree boa (which we’ve never owned). Long forgotten pets who had somehow survived, possibly by munching on our other pets.
In real life we take care of our animals, of course, but in these dreams I am often guilty of unthinkable callousness: I have left cages without food or water for weeks or even months, only to discover that my pets have grown, reproduced, thrived without my help. No connection with reality, in other words. In the real world, some pets fail no matter how much effort I put out (like my two water turtles, purchased last year, who refused to eat anything I put before them).
We have always kept pets. The morality of keeping pets has always interested and troubled me. Once a pet is in the pet store, he’s already a captive. Am I doing a favor by buying him, knowing I stand a better chance to do right by him than the little kid with a passing whim? Or does my purchase merely provide positive reinforcement to an industry that continues to capture/breed and imprison wild animals?
The logical endpoint of that line of thought would leave me a vegan, of course. And that ain’t gonna happen unless I can figure out how to fix a vegetarian meal that doesn’t bore the hell out of me and everyone else in this household.
D.
Potty humor. Literally.
My nose/head still hurt and all I really want to do is sleep, but it’s only 9 PM, and I doubt I could convince Karen to go to bed that early. So that means you get more drivel from yours truly.
Are you familiar with the TNG Edits? Here’s an example (most aren’t quite this juvenile; phallic humor is more typical):
Here’s a link to the others. Go crazy, spend a few hours soaking in the wonderfulness of jandrewedits. One of the recurring jokes is Data’s artistic . . . um, abilities. Here’s a good one.
I wish I had the time and energy to do this kinda stuff.
D.
Innaresting
I’ve got one of those interminable low-level headaches. The bridge of my nose hurts — how weird is that? It would only make sense if I had broken my nose, either recently or in the past. If in the past, then I could complain, “It’s my roomatiz.” Maybe it’s my sinuses, but it doesn’t seem quite right for that.
We watched District 9 tonight . . . again . . . this time with Jake, who insisted on stopping the movie every thirty seconds to ask a question. I feel like warning his future wife, “If you care about your marriage, never watch DVDs with him.” Oh, who knows, maybe he’ll marry someone who will do the same. Anyway, I found Live from Joburg (the short from which District 9 was derived) on YouTube here. And here’s an interesting short from the same director, Neill Blomkamp.
See you tomorrow.
D.
I don’t know if I have the guts
Don’t go below the fold if you are the type to issue fatwas . . . but I just wanted to share something that made Karen and I both gasp. And that’s saying something.