Brigham's Blog: December 2011

30 Dec 2011

I stumbled across this article on the Interwebs: Top 10 Worst Lyrics of All Time. Of all time? Surely not. This piece is laughably short-sighted and seems to confine itself to recent songs. It ignores that VAST treasure trove of truly awful song lyrics, namely, the 1970's. And for a taste of that, I recommend this page, which, ahem!, I have contributed to.

Look at this 1936 Stainless Steel Ford Coupe! Wow!

I had a little bird/Its name was Inza/I opened the window/And in flew Inza... Last night I watched a NOVA documentary about my favorite unsettling historical incident: the 1918 "Spanish" Flu Pandemic. (It's called Spanish because Spain was the only major European nation whose newspapers didn't have a wartime lock down of information, and people came to accept that the flu originated in Spain. In fact, it apparently originated in Kansas!) Did you know that the single deadliest month in American History was not associated with wartime fatalities, but with this pandemic? 195,000 Americans died in October, 1918 - at the height of the influenza's effect. It went on to kill upwards of thirty million worldwide.

The curious thing about it was that the principal victims were the strongest and most robust people in society: those aged between 21 and 29 years old. Often, robust young soldiers. In effect, their immune systems went haywire, and they literally drowned in the fluid in their lungs. People would be perfectly fine in the morning and dead by the evening. Horrible. H1N1 is nothing to fool around with! H5N1, the so-called "bird flu," could be just as bad.

Want to read a really, really scary book? Read The Great Influenza - The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry. It thoroughly creeped me out!

I watched a classic of French (and even world) cinema last night: L'Atalante, from 1934. It was... okay.

One of my Christmas presents was King Crimson's recording of Red, from 1974. I have blogged about this album before. Suffice to say that the DTS multi-channel mix is revelatory; you can detect all the various guitar parts that went into the making of each song. I was inflicting this Lp upon my poor wife at high volume levels last night. She is not the fan of the work that I am.

It was the second rock album I heard after finishing Marine Corps boot camp in January 1975 and returning to civilization. (The first was David Bowie Live.) I liked it immediately, and knew it was good. I think it has since moved from release to cult item to classic, validating my opinion.

Another Christmas present was fun: The Amazing Magic Robot Game. He's infallible and always gives the right answer! (Okay, wise guy: Who is winning next year's presidential election?) My son and I were looking at this one morning, figuring out how this was so. It's a very simple and clever process, based on a bar magnet's property of attracting opposite poles and repelling like poles.

Let's see... I also got some great books:

1.) The Disneyland Encyclopedia - Lists every past and present attraction.
2.) A book testing the X-Ray Specs and other arcane comic book kids' products
3.) A book about anecdotes concerning old classic Volkswagen Beetles by owners

I'll blog about these as I read them, of course.

Well, that's it for today. I have a lot going on. E-mail to process, "to do" stuff resulting from the trip to Utah.

Have a great weekend and Happy New Year!

28 Dec 2011

We're back from Utah! We had fun doing things and spending Christmas with the kids; photos here. I just finished adding photos and captions and sorting them, etc. I think I'm done now. Actually, we got back the evening of the 27th; it's just that we were on the go all day yesterday. The day started with the morning wedding of the daughter of a family friend and ended sitting in traffic near the local big shopping all.

When we got home we collected our mail from the kid down the street who had been gathering it for us in our absence. I was very surprised to find a large box from Erv, the civil servant with whom I worked in Camp Pendleton's Base Telephone unit when I was in the Marines (photo above). I had previously sent him a Christmas card and he replied with a short letter - and then the box. I was very surprised to find my old construction hard hat in the box; Erv had taken it with him when he retired in 1978 - the same year I left the Corps - and kept it for 33 years! Photos here. I think we have a winner for the Most Unusual Christmas Present Award... It looks great hanging up in my garage over my USMC poster.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying, "The definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result." He obviously never worked with computers or software. Case in point: My son gave me one of his old wireless routers - it's far newer and better than the old one I've been using at home, so I decided to take it home and install it last night. Router configuration is widely acknowledged to be a pain, even with consumer grade equipment. So I printed up the IP address information from my old router and entered this into the new one. It repeatedly didn't work. I was flummoxed because I was sure what I was doing was correct. And then suddenly, with repetition something changed somewhere and it started working!

The same thing happened with getting my wife's Apple laptop to connect wirelessly. Try, fail. Try again, fail. Try, succeed. So... Einstein's quote needs an asterisk: "Except with software."

I have today off. It's my vacation day to sort of recover from vacation in Utah. Square away things at home, put the family scrapbook up to date, putter around and recover from jet lag, etc. Tomorrow I go into work (I'll save eight hours of leave) for what I think will be a short and uneventful day - we'll probably get early dismissal.

24 Dec 2011

Having a wonderful time with family and friends! Photos here. Merry Christmas!

20 Dec 2011

A happy anniversary to me and Cari, my wife. It was 31 years ago today that I acted upon one of the very best decisions - probably THE best - I have ever made in my entire life.

My friend Kacie trash-picked a great Iwo Jima memorial poster from work and gave it to me. It looks great in my garage. Every garage needs a little USMC, don't you think?

So I’m at the gas station with my VW bug yesterday, filling the tank, when this fellow walks up. I notice that he has an official-looking badge of some kind attached to his belt, but I can’t make it out. He smiles and says, “Hey, do you know who developed the Volkswagen Beetle?” I respond (somewhat wary of people who are even more extroverted than I am), “Yes. Adolf Hitler started a program whereby every German citizen could own a ‘Strength through Joy’ car.” “That’s right,” says he. “Do you know why they came up with the rounded beetle shape?” he asks. After a moment’s thought I replied that I did not. “The Romans. Their architecture, with the rounded arches, for strength,” he says. I don’t recall reading that in Small World, the paperback book about the car’s development that every VW buyer used to get, but no matter. Maybe I forgot that part. “Hitler was terrible – really evil,” he continued. Yes, I admitted that precipitating a war which caused upwards of 70 million deaths was indeed evil. “No,” he went on, “I mean evil. He was into Satan worship, the occult and the use of extraterrestrial technology!” It was then, that, rather than press for details about Hitler’s extraterrestrial technology, I decided to nod, smile and back away towards the Quik Market.

It reminded me of the old Twilight Zone episode Still Valley, whereby a Confederate officer (Gary Merrill) is offered a deal by the Devil to save his side from defeat. In the end, the Reb demurs, reflecting that if the Lord wanted the Confederacy to prevail He would have not let things get to the point it had in 1865. By this we see that not even the Southern Confederacy was as evil as Hitler, who was willing to take advantage of alien technology. Cheater.

Last night as I was channel surfing I came across a lurid program on the Spike channel entitled 1,000 Ways to Die. Since all programming on the Spike channel is designed to appeal to males, I found myself genetically drawn to it, drat those Y chromosomes! This show is morbidly fascinating. It's an account of actual odd and strange ways people have actually died - with lurid recreated scenes thereof. I mistrust it. It seems to be a curious mix of real history and tabloid television.

Anyway, I was curious about the segment about the terrorists who accidentally and fatally irradiated themselves while attempting to create a homemade nuclear weapon but, so far, was unable to find evidence for this particular incident on the Internet. This particular segment is a rare example of a happy ending on this show.

I did, however, stumble across this mind-numbingly odd story about a Brazilian who obtained some dangerously radioactive material from a hospital - caesium chloride - and intended to fashion a ring for his wife from the material. Fun fact: If you find some scrap material from a hospital which emits a deep blue glow, you should probably resist the temptation to create fetching jewelry and instead contact the authorities, pronto. That blue glow is not an LED, but is in fact Cherenkov radiation, nature's way of saying, "You need to have an advanced degree in nuclear physics to be dealing with me."

Great Scott, you can watch entire episodes of this show online! Here's the episode I saw last night. I was hooked by the initial tale of the Japanese rock star who was trapped in a theatrical coffin with cups of dry ice smoke. (Guess how he died.) Must resist the temptation to watch more...

But, hey, why not? My wife - she of the refined taste - has been watching episodes of Breaking Bad, and last night told me about one story which featured a severed human head placed upon the back of a moving tortoise. But wait! There's more! The tortoise had explosives in it which, when set off, blew off the leg of a DEA agent!

Sigh.

You know, back in the postwar era those films noir I love to watch were sometimes considered sensationalist trash. I am thinking especially of 1947's Kiss of Death when Richard Widmark, in his film debut as Tommy Udo, ties a handicapped woman to her wheelchair with electrical cord and, laughing maniacally, pitches her down a flight of stairs, killing her. There's a story that when John Wayne finally met Widmark he said. "So you're that laughing son of a bitch?" As it turned out, Widmark, as the psychopathic killer Udo, attained faddish celebrity in the role (the Academy Award nomination helped). College kids aped Udo's tough guy speech patterns and sartorial style. It was all very weird.

But when you think about it, high art can also be lurid. Look at most of the plots to operas - or Shakespeare. Ever see Titus Andronicus? Interesting plot there: a woman is raped and her tongue cut out so she cannot tell who did it and her hands cut off so she can't write it, either. The Rape of Cassandra was a favorite topic of Renaissance painters - as was Saint Sebastian, pierced with arrows. It was ever thus.

You may or may not be seeing updates here for the next week or so; I'm taking time off for the holidays to see the Fam. As always, what you'll see here is dependent upon how bored or active I am.

Merry Christmas!

19 Dec 2011

This past weekend was a lot of fun! It started Friday night with a Cub Scout Pack Meeting. One of my Webelos scouts turned eleven so we "bridged" him out. (This involves walking across a wooden ceremonial bridge I constructed back in 1992.) It was an All-Marine performance on stage: the kid's dad just retired, there was me, and the Marine in charge of the eleven year-old Boy Scout troop is on active duty.

Saturday morning my wife threw a bridal shower at our house for a longtime friend of my daughter's. It's always jolly when a bunch of women gather in our house for a party. We were able to link my daughter in to the proceedings via our Apple laptop using Face Time - that was cool! Face Time... what a great invention! At last somebody delivered on the promise of videophones - and it wasn't one of the phone companies.

That evening we had one of the five families couples stop by for dinner at our place before driving into D.C. with us for the Navy's Holiday Show in the D.A.R. Auditorium. The concert was as good as always; this year featured little vignettes about sailors being on duty and wishing they could be home for Christmas, etc. It was quite poignant and well done.

The concert, however, was marred by a couple of things. The first was D.C.'s new regressive parking protocol. They now run the meters until 10 PM on Saturdays, with a two hour maximum. In order to get seats you have to get to the auditorium early, which means that in order to keep from getting ticketed you have to move the car during the show. From now on I'm parking on Constitution Ave. It's a further walk but there are no meters (now). I always dread going into D.C.; parking there is a nightmare. I think I'm going to write the Navy Band a letter encouraging them to move the venue to Northern Virginia, some place with better parking.

The other problem was the intense body odor of somebody sitting near us. When the air conditioning system breeze shifted in the right direction it was making me feel sick to my stomach. The husband of the couple we took said it was so bad his face was stinging! Our wives sat between us and neither one of them smelled a thing. Weird. See if I ever buy expensive perfume for Cari again. (Full disclosure: She had a clogged nose from an allergic reaction. It was a blessing in this instance.)

It's a sign of our twisted times that one gets lectured about wearing too much aftershave or cologne, etc., but there is no admonition to TAKE A SHOWER IF YOU STINK.

At the request of the orchestra director (a church associate), yesterday Cari and I did a multimedia Christmas show in the Washington D.C. - really Kensington, MD - Temple Visitor's Center. I read a Christmas message while the D.C. Mormon Orchestra played a piece called O Magnum Mysterium. Cari had the harder part: she ran the slideshow timing. It was my orchestral debut! A very short video is here. The spoken message is here. We performed the forty minute show twice for a total of nearly 1,400 people. It was well received; the ambassadors from St. Lucia and St. Kitts were in the first audience. I loved it, sitting among an orchestra and playing apart. True, this wasn't the New York Philharmonic, but it was still a lot of fun.

So... great weekend!

I have added two more 8mm family videos on my youtube channel to my Avocado Memories 8mm Home Movies page: Burbank Home Movies, 1970s and Santa's Village and Halloween, 1960. I think I have now exhausted my supply of Avocado Memories-worthy home movie footage!

I am happy to report that I have now completed all the Angry Birds levels. I am free! And no, I don't think I'll be buying the "Holiday" version.

16 Dec 2011

I have added two more 8mm family videos on my youtube channel to my Avocado Memories 8mm Home Movies page: Pool 1960 and Pool, 1969. Same subject, just separated by nearly a decade of time.

I do not remember the little pool we had in 1960, I only remember the larger above-ground pools. All through my childhood we've always had pools, consequently I've always felt at home in the water. When I started high school, in physical education class on hot weather Fridays we'd sometimes simply swim in the school pool. I loved this because the coach would throw in a ball and we'd play a sort of aquatic murderball. The person who got the ball would be swarmed by other swimmers and compelled to give up the ball - eventually. I quickly realized that I was quite good at this and could hold my breath and onto the ball for very long periods of time. I loved the rough and tumble. It should have told me that rugby, not basketball, football, baseball or anything else, was my game. An adult realization was that it wasn't that I was bad at sports - it's just that they weren't playing my game in high school!

Last night my wife and I watched some of part two of Monarchy - The Royal Family at Work (2007), an engrossing six hour documentary. What struck me were the pains and efforts workers and institution managers take when a visit by the Queen is imminent. Glass is cleaned, new hotel towels are purchased, wood is repainted, sidewalks are spotless, the red carpet is rolled out, etc. etc. etc. in excruciating detail. Everything has to be just so for the visit. People want to make a positive impression on the Queen. But... why? After all, this is a modern constitutional monarchy. The Queen's powers and influence are sharply curtailed; she's not even allowed to publicly voice an opinion about politics. Why go through all the effort?

It occurred to me that there is something intensely noble about doing, or serving, in the absolute best fashion you can. Certainly the various cooks and servants do not think themselves demeaned by the effort they provide; they are proud of themselves and of the perfection of their service. Perhaps it's not the Queen that really counts for these folks - it's the effort. For her part, the Queen is shown during what must be a grueling workday for an octogenarian: making small talk, asking an endless variety of questions, attempting to show interest in the lives of others, making herself available, graciously putting people at ease. She's aware of the painstaking efforts made in her behalf and she accepts the service, just as she has for the previous 59 years of her reign. Does she take it for granted? I think not. I suspect there's an interesting give and take at play, here. Others provide service - she accepts it. She provides service for the state in her own fashion - the nation accepts it.

The impression I get is that the royal family are a net asset to Great Britain. Certainly, I am not aware of any American who has worked so long and so hard for his or her nation as the Queen has for hers. It also occurred to me that there is an advantage in a constitutional monarchy that we do not enjoy as a representative democracy: the nation is represented by a single human being who provides a focal point for patriotic feelings. As beloved as an American President may become (and, let's face it, this is very rare), he simply does not embody his nation as does the Queen. There is something mystical about it.

Well. I always knew that were I a British subject I'd be a Tory.

I also watched a Robert Greenberg lecture about the concerti of Sergei Rachmaninoff (shown above) - it was wonderful, as usual. He pointed out something I didn't know. For a German composer such as Johannes Brahms, who took a theme (or melody) and developed, varied, re-stated and modulated it, the important thing about the theme was what could be done with it. For a Russian composer such as Rachmaninoff (or Tchaikovsky), what was important was the theme itself, and themes follow themes without any need to develop them greatly. Which is better? I shall not weigh in. I like having both approaches just as I like having both Brahms and Wagner. (It's hard to believe now, but when they were alive a furious ongoing debate was waged about which one pointed the way to the future of concert music.) A Brahmsian work unfolds with interest upon repeated playings and provides an intellectual interest. A Rachmaninoff work simply sings and gladdens the heart!

Funny quote: "Some people achieve a kind of immortality just by the totality with which they do or do not possess some quality or characteristic. Rachmaninov’s immortalizing totality was his scowl. He was a six-and–a-half-foot-tall scowl." - Igor Stravinsky

I also started watching the third season of The Wonder Years. It was a very well written episode about a family vacation to the beach, which had as a theme how vacations are more stressful and less fun as they kids grow older and have interests, demands and agendas of their own. I have certainly been there! It also featured a clever summer romance theme involving the protagonist, Kevin. The young actress who played his love interest later went on to become a hardcore porn star. Nice.

The weekend! Tomorrow night we're going to the U.S. Navy Christmas show with one of the Five Families. On Sunday I put on a show of my own at the LDS Visitor's Center at the D.C. Temple; I'm doing the spoken part of a multimedia/live music Christmas presentation. I have no idea what my lines are or how I'm following the music. The fellow who is involved with it tells me that there may be an audience of upwards of 1,400 people. This should be interesting!

Have a great weekend!

15 Dec 2011

A friend of mine at work who knows I like apples sent me this link. (I wouldn't normally read the Huffington Post.) Apple crispness analysts are getting replaced by machines!

Last night I finished season two of The Wonder Years. Two seasons down, four to go. Great show!

I have added two more 8mm family videos on my youtube channel to my Avocado Memories 8mm Home Movies page: Christmas 1960 (my toys) and Dad and Del/Pottery Shack (May 1960). More to come, as I have time in the evenings to make these videos.

An Avocado Memories reader remarked on my Facebook wall that it's nice to be able to hear my mother's voice (in the 1987 narration) relating stories via these videos. As I went to bed last night, however, I realized with a shock that I have no audio recordings of my father's voice. He died in 1983, before we had access to or owned a camcorder. And I never got his voice on audio tape anywhere that I can think of. It's funny: He died 28 years ago and only now do I feel bereft in this way. I would like to hear the sound of his voice again.

Last night I watched The Changeling (1980), with George C. Scott. Is it a ghost story? A political thriller? A detective mystery? It's all three! Actually, it's not too bad; a superior haunted house flick. I think my favorite film in this genre, however, is probably The Shining (1980), or The Haunting (1963).

The City of Burbank buried away another time capsule earlier this week - they seem to like those - this one being a special Centennial capsule. My pal Mike attended the ceremony, so I covered it here (12/14/11 entry). As they buried away a Centennial History book that cites our website, I am happy to note that my name appears in the capsule. Future generations can look at it and marvel.

I am now listening to the highly-regarded 1969 Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed, which I have never heard. I have read somewhere that this Lp documented the end of the peace and love hippie era; indeed, the infamous Altamont concert followed the day after the release of this album. So it's sort of like a rooster crowing atop a mountain of dung - which pretty much serves as a metaphor for that whole 1960's Woodstock thing. 1967: The Summer of Love. 1968: An ugly year of assassinations, social divisions and unrest. 1969: The cynical end of the decade. Altamont and Charlie Manson. And, as I have just read, the first confirmed American death from AIDS. A shabby year redeemed only by the Moon landing, as I recall.

Let It Bleed begins with Gimme Shelter, which is promising because it's my all-time favorite Stones song. One reviewer calls it "terrifying." "Terrifying?" He's easily frightened, I think. The rest of the songs (as I'm progressing through the Lp) all seem to have a Texas barroom aesthetic to them. Londoners in Austin. I'm not impressed... but then, I'm not a Stones fan. A few months ago I listened to their 1972 Exile on Main St. over and over again to see if I liked it, but it left me cold. When I was in the Marines I bought a Sticky Fingers cassette back in 1975. This was just before I drove from Los Angeles to Wichita Falls, Texas to report for duty at the Sheppard Air Force Base, where they ran a telephone cable splicing school. I have since associated that drive with that music - but haven't felt any interest in listening to the album since then.

I have a workplace Christmas (technically, "holiday") luncheon today. I am such a misanthrope... this feels more like an ordeal than something I'm looking forward to...

14 Dec 2011

Time to re-visit our old friend the Higgs Boson. It appears they are closing in on seeing evidence of it; they haven't actually come out and said "We've found it," but it appears they are getting close. Which I am sorry to see and have predicted otherwise (without really knowing what I am talking about). Have you ever read an account of the Standard Model with the Higgs Boson? It is complex, complicated and inelegant. It seems to be that the truth is simple; quantum mechanical models right now are far from it and unsatisfying. Let's just say that I have a philosophical - not religious! - problem with the models scientists have come up with.

Earlier this week I got an e-mail from Agamemnon (real name not used), an Avocado Memories reader who needed help with a toy he had as a boy. He described it as a space toy that was "a globe on legs" - I immediately thought of the Ideal Astro Base and suggested this. (It was the one space toy I never owned.) He looked at the picture and said, in effect, Hmmmm... I don't think so, but promised to dig up an old photograph showing it. He did. Here it is, from fifty years ago. Yes, it was the toy I thought. But check out those pajamas! Hahaha! He confirmed that it was a case of "If you wear these pajamas you get the toy." I asked if I could run it in my blog if I concealed his identity (for fear of acute embarrassment) and he agreed. Enjoy.

Speaking of Avocado Memories, I have added three more 8mm family videos on my youtube channel to my Avocado Memories 8mm Home Movies page:

Me and Jimmy in 1964, part two (2 1/2 minutes) - Skateboarding down Robinson St. in L.A. on those horrible early "Roller Derby #10" skateboards. They had nasty metal wheels. In addition to a rough ride, the least little unevenness in the sidewalk would halt the board and throw you forward for an inevitable knee scrape. I recall having scabby knees for the entire summer of 1964. Note my clever use of Little rascals music. The youtube software apparently didn't know it in order to send me a warning e-mail about copyright infringement.

Disneyland Visit, 1969 (3 1/2 minutes) - I practically grew up in Disneyland, but this was one time when we brought the movie camera onto the People Mover. In 1969 I was especially fond of Tomorrowland, which, in 1967, had recently had a total renovation. It's my least favorite land now. Mom narrates; her favorite ride in the park was "Small Worl'."

Knott's Berry Farm Visit (April, 1960) (2 1/2 minutes) - I was four, and remember nothing of this visit. But Mom brought the movie camera and so we have footage - hooray! At the 1:03 mark Dad can be seen whispering sweet nothings into the ear of "Marilyn" (image above), a plaster dance hall girl who is one of the most photographed objects in the park. Generations of Dads have sat with her. Mom narrated this in 1987, but is somewhat distracted by the fact that the grandchild she was holding at the time, Julie, was busy filling her diaper.

How many more videos will I make? Until I run out of appropriate material or interest, I guess.

I am now almost done with season two of The Wonder Years; it's 1969 and Kevin has now turned thirteen, just as I did that year. As I mentioned, it's fun to spot places I know in Burbank. Last night I saw a street sign for Parish Place behind a character.

Burbank: I posted a neat photograph onto Burbankia, this one shows a crowded San Fernando Road for the evening of the 100th anniversary celebration, July 8th. We're in the City Hall tower with the mayor and some select others; I think we're concealed by that yellow ribbon, or off to the right - I don't know. Perhaps this image is a Photoshop composite. But we had a great vantage point to see the fireworks.

Yesterday, my pal Mike attended a meeting of the Burbank City Council, where he and others were recognized for contributions to the 100th anniversary celebration. I was in absentia. Mike got something or another in recognition; he's mailing mine to me.

It looks like I am doing a reading performance at the LDS Temple Visitor's Center this Sunday. A friend of mine is a professional musician (his wife is a viola player for the U.S. Army Band) who is doing a string arrangement with a slide presentation; I am speaking. What, precisely, I don't know yet. Something about Christmas, natch.

13 Dec 2011

Yesterday morning when I got up it seemed unusually cold in the house. My suspicions were raised when I went to slice some butter onto my toast; we keep the butter in a covered butter dish on the kitchen table - it cut like it was frozen. Snap, snap. Confirmation came when I looked at the thermostat: it was 59 degrees.

I teleworked yesterday, so I attempted various things during the day seeking to fix the problem myself: I put new batteries in the thermostat, recycled the power, etc. The furnace would go on, warm up a bit, then shut off, never warming the house. So I finally called the tech. We paid thousands of dollars for a new furnace back in August, so I was NOT pleased.

As it turned out, a kink in an excess length of hose was causing moisture to back up, which caused a pressure switch to fail... etc. It was a quick and easy fix. I was happy to hear one of my favorite phrases from the tech: "covered under warranty." (It's right up there with "ample free parking" and "Mister Clark, your pizza is here.") We gave the tech some cookies, held the thermostat at 73 degrees for a while and I allowed my feet to thaw.

As my son would say, First World Problem. (Third world problem: the cattle died so there's no milk for the baby. First world problem: I can't find a good news app for my iPhone.)

My wife and I watched a documentary which sorely tried my patience the other night, Babies, a French production from 2010. It might instead be called The Lactating Third Worlder Film. It deals with the birth and first months of four babies, one in San Francisco, one in Mongolia, one in Tokyo and one somewhere in Africa. The African kid seemed to be continually hounded by flies, and when his pendulously-breasted Mom wasn't smearing red crap all over him she was wiping his bum with a corn cob. Nice. The Mongolian kid was surrounded by livestock and kept getting annoyed by his older brother. The San Franciscan baby's parents were hippy dippy types who sang idiotic songs about how Mother Earth will protect us. The only interesting segment was the kid in Tokyo. One reviewer called it "The feel good movie of the decade." I beg to differ.

On an entirely different track, we also watched Monarchy - The Royal Family at Work (2007), part one of a fascinating documentary. We Americans seem to have an insatiable appetite for the doings of the British royal family, so this was fun. Just before I went to bed I wondered, how am I personally related to her most Britannic Royal Majesty Elizabeth II Windsor? So I quickly found a text file on the Internet, royal92.txt, which lists Elizabeth's ancestry all the way back to the early Middle Ages, renamed it royal92.ged, merged it with a scratch file of my own ancestry and merged the individual I know we both have in common: Geoffrey Plantagenet (1113 - 1151). All this in about seven minutes. As it turns out, Elizabeth II descends from Geoffrey's son Henry II. I, however, descend from Geoffrey's illegitimate son Hamelin. Figures.

Anyway, I let the computer have at it and it turns out Elizabeth II is my 26th cousin, three times removed, through the Geoffrey Plantagenet connection. There may be a more recent common ancestor; I just don't know about him/her. As I announced this to my stunned and awed wife as she lay in bed, she asked, "So, am I related to Elizabeth II?" She knows that we are ninth cousins, three times removed, so the question is logical: If you are distantly related to the Queen and we are distantly related to each other, am I distantly related to the Queen? It's confusing, which is why I let a computer do the work. But the answer is no, my wife is not blood related to the Queen. Using the information I have. She probably is, I just don't know how, in other words.

I uploaded another couple of videos to my youtube channel:

My Beatles Party (1964) - When I turned eight in April 1964, my Mom threw me a birthday party. Since the Beatles were huge, she got us plastic guitars and we "performed" to Beatles songs. Five minutes, silent. Well... that is, I added some early Beatles music to the video. The youtube software scanned it when I uploaded it and told me via e-mail that I might run into a copyright issue with EMI and the music might be removed, but that hasn't happened yet. I hope not... the Beatles songs fit so well. But if they do yank it, I found an old 1960's Lp at a yard sale of "Music to Accompany Home Movies." I can digitize and use that - that ought to be fun.

Me and Jimmy, 1964, just over a minute. This is some footage of me and the great friend of my boyhood, Jimmy Rutherford, fooling around in my back yard. I used the most obscure 1960's music I could find that I liked and which I thought fit: Burt Bacharach's Any Old Time of the Day as performed by the Franck Pourcel Orchestra. It stumped the youtube software, anyway. I don't think I'll get into trouble with that one. Jimmy's sister Kathy met all the Beatles, by the way. She was the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Beatles Fan Club. I recall her saying once, "I'll KILL the girl who marries Paul. If I can't have him no one will!" I was shocked when I heard her say this. But... perhaps in time she found somebody else. Paul certainly did.

NOTE: My wife was not really stunned and awed.

12 Dec 2011

On Saturday we drove to Occoquan, a nearby historic area, and walked around. We haven't been there in years - for good reason. Occoquan is what I call an Estrogen Towne, filled with shops containing goods that no heterosexual male could possibly be interested in: soap, bath linens, tole-painted items (often signs with slogans about cats), dried flowers, scented candles, knitted baby clothing, paperweights, thank you card and envelope sets and pillows. The contents rarely vary from store to store. There is a bead shop in Occoquan, a sewing shop, a cookbook store and some flamboyant store with windows dressed in glittery purple and pink items. I was never certain what they were selling. There used to be a Goddess/occult book store in Occoquan, but I guess the economy has been hard on those. If you don't have a job you don't have the money for tarot cards and how-to books about manufacturing dream-catchers.

There is almost always an Irish or Scottish store in these neighborhoods, which provides the sole interest for males. The one in Occoquan sold Guinness-themed items and, hang on!, rugby shirts. In fact, I was thunderstruck when we stopped into a store containing nothing but Christmas ornaments and village sets and found a rugby player Christmas ornament. I bought one because it was so unexpected; Cari bought glassy ornament of a slice of blueberry pie. She makes wonderful blueberry pies.

Getting back to Estrogen Townes, another characteristic of the shops in them is that I'm forever banging my head into things hung too low from the ceiling. On Saturday it was glittery snowflakes in the ornament store. The implied message is, I think, You are not expected nor wanted here. Why not simply hang no-male strips in the corners? Or a tole-painted sign which says If you have outdoor plumbing you may leave?

I think what happens is that the local jurisdiction designates the area as a historic district and a horde of women descend upon the place and open businesses designed to get other women out there for lunch and to buy trinkets. Old Town Alexandria is very much an Estrogen Town - except it has some pubs. (In fact, the most completely female store I have ever stepped in is in Old Town; we were there last week. It's crammed to the rafters with bath goods and three Bedlington dogs - see image above - roaming at will, looking very much like little sheep. It's run by three gay guys, one Bedlington for each gay, I guess.) As I recall, New Market, Maryland is another Estrogen Towne, as is Ellicott City, Maryland. Harper's Ferry, West Virginia is a wanna-be Estrogen Town. What's keeping it from full femininity is the presence of the National Park Service displays about gun manufacturing and the American Civil War, a really good history-themed bookstore and river and mountain overlooks. Also, I saw no Bedlingtons.

We had lunch at a cool little Occoquan "Belgian bistrot" specializing in Belgian beer, the "Cock and Bowl." I guess some canny small businessman figured there had to be at least one place in towne with contents appealing to males, and it's the old stand-by, beer. I want to eat there again.

We also visited a pie store that is reportedly haunted. I talked to a teenage girl who claimed to have seen the ghost of a "blue-coated" man walk by. Civil War soldier? She didn't know. It's odd, because the building is less than ten years old. Hmmmm. I was assured that Occoquan is haunted, and, like Old Town Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Harper's Ferry and many other historic districts, there is a Ghost Tour. Just tryin' to make a buck, which, in this economy, has become a noble effort.

There was a Civil War interest building in Occoquan, pictures here. Used as a general's headquarters. Now the home of a store containing, you guessed it, little of interest to a Y-chromosome bearer.

Yesterday was pretty boring, so I amused myself by watching episodes of The Wonder Years and making videos:

Gettysburg National Tower Visit, 1987 (3 1/2 minutes) - As a historical reenactor I was supposed to loathe this structure, but as a Dad I thought it was fun, if a little nerve-wracking, to visit with my little son. It was brought down with explosives in 2000 - good video.

Baby Thrill-Seekers (1 1/2 minutes) - This is a video which should cause you to go, "Awwwww."

The Marine Corps Follies (almost 6 minutes) - A collection of all the extant 8mm and Super 8mm footage of me in uniform. True to form, I am goofing around.

Oh, my pal Mike confirmed that the Arnold home in The Wonder Years is 516 University Ave. in Burbank. I see the 1988 cedar shake roof has since been replaced with a conventional roof. My high school girlfriend lived on University, up the street. I think the street was optimistically named by the developer who had designs upon USC or UCLA moving there - it didn't happen.

My son called to my attention a really appealing ad Apple did promoting their sale of Beatles music on iTunes. Here it is. I love it! It is great fun seeing all those familiar Lp covers being animated in this fashion.

I see Jerry Robinson died last week. He was a very important part of the early Batman artistic team. Bob Kane would have you believe he pretty much did it all, but no, it wasn't like that. It's one of the great scandals in the comic books world.

9 Dec 2011

Now it's time for me to pursue a Social Cause. No, it's not the environment or racism or something like that. It's basic manners. I mean the R.S.V.P. It's a French phrase, Repondez, s'il vous plait, or, simply, "Please respond." For planning parties, gatherings, wedding receptions or some such thing which requires money and logistics, it's put on the invitation to assist the host or hostess in assessing how much food to buy, how many chairs to set out - that kind of thing. This year Cari and I have been stunned by how many people simply ignore these gentle requests. HOW RUDE. Look, when somebody wants to feed and entertain you, all they're asking via the R.S.V.P. is a simple question: Can we expect you there? You owe the host or hostess a response. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, here, but please pass the word along...

Whew! I finally got the Burbankia Slide Show posted onto youtube. My page with the setup and the links is here. When you consider the time it took to collect all this history, lore and information, format it into slides and present it - and then edit the video for posting, this represents a LOT of creative work. My pal Mike spent much time on it as well, finding the source materials and making the posters which adorned the library walls. I was looking forward to it and really enjoyed doing it, but I have to admit - I'm glad it's done. But that was our contribution to our hometown's 100th anniversary celebration, and it was a good one.

Mike tells me the library is talking about doing another one next year. We shall see.

I watched another couple of episodes of The Wonder Years last night, more Burbank. Curious, I did a couple of screen grabs and confirmed that the schoolyard shots were taken at John Muir Junior High. Mike remembers his PE coach yelling at him about doing sit-ups at the exact filming spot. (Mike went to Muir, I went to the other school, Luther Burbank Junior High.) I even have a tentative location for the Kevin Arnold home, on University Avenue. Mike is going to check it out. (Remember responsible investigative reporting from yesterday's blog? "If your mother says she loves you - check it out.") Last night's episode was laugh-out-loud funny; at one point, Kevin, thoroughly confused by girls, is knocked out by his jilted girlfriend and imagines he and his friend are in the Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain," wherein beautiful girls use wrist activated devices to incapacitate Kevin and his friends! (Earlier in the episode they had been watching that episode of Star Trek in the Arnold family basement.) Wonderfully clever...

In real life, the actress who plays Kevin's crush, Danica McKellar, is interesting. Wikipedia article here. Note that she graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from UCLA and is even credited with proving a math theorem, the Chayes-McKellar-Wynn Theorum. Not too shabby. I see by doing a google image search that she has done a lot of pin-up work as well... she seems to truly be Hollywood's Wonder Woman.

Cari and I watched Christmas With the Kranks (2004) last night. It was... okay. Cari liked it more than I did. The film was universally panned by the critics (they didn't like the message of the Kranks being shunned because of their non-conformity) but was a box-office success nevertheless. I got a kick out of the fact that Seventies stoner Cheech Marin portrayed a cop.

It's official: I am playing WAY too much Angry Birds. Last night I dreamed that I was using slingshots to fire CDs. In one level of Angry Birds there's a background which is meant to represent a city at night; for those I was flinging around film noir DVDs. At some other targets I was selecting classical music CDs - for another, pop CDs. I was shooting a Kinks CD in London. This has got to stop!

The weekend! I have no plans. We are done Christmas shopping so there will be no cursing and Scrooginess in the parking lots.

Have a great weekend!

8 Dec 2011

I'm in the process of uploading Burbankia slide show videos to youtube; I thought I could do it in two chunks, a 41 minute segment and a 51 minute segment, but only "verified" youtube users can upload videos that long.

To become verified you need to supply your cell phone number. No, thanks. So I have cut it up into seven segments of under fifteen minutes each and am 4/7ths of the way through it. I should finish tonight. Uploading and processing takes rather a lot of computer processing time.

I'm been sitting on this video since about July; it wasn't until recently that I found a usable software tool with which I could edit. And there was the wedding, shoulder surgery, the garage project, etc.

I watched the 1968 The Odd Couple last night - it was okay. I originally saw this at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City when Mom and I visited in Summer, 1968. It was a notable visit: we saw a live show featuring the Rockettes doing that synchronized kick thing and the movie, I forget in what order.

I loved New York City... we took a tour bus and got to go up the Empire State Building. That is still one of my favorite things to do. Our tourist hotel had a red flashing hotel sign outside the window, just as I had seen in innumerable movies. (I didn't know it at the time, but these were films noir.) I got a real kick out of that. I remember looking out of the window at all the buildings and imagined Spider-Man and Daredevil swinging from building to building, just like in the Marvel comics I was reading at the time.

Mom and I took the ferry from Battery Park to the Statue of Liberty, and actually hiked all the way up to the crown. I can't recommend it. It was very hot - this was in August - and the view of New York harbor from the little triangular windows in the crown is anti-climatic and generally unimpressive. Can you even do that anymore? You couldn't when I was last there in 2005.

What I found impressive last time I was there was the museum in the base of the statue, which describes what the statue meant, how it was built, shipped over here and constructed, etc. Long time readers of this blog know I frequently stand up for the French, whom I think are unfairly singled out for scorn, and I intend to again. Who else but the French would have the audaciousness to construct a beautiful 150 foot statue for us and give it away as a goodwill token? Do you see anything remotely like that in the United States from England, Germany, Italy, Kuwait or anyone else? No. Let's keep that in mind the next time somebody proposes calling french fries "freedom fries."

By the way, I just read this morning that in blogging as I do, I am NOT a journalist. A federal judge says so. This means that I do not have the legal shielding that journalists enjoy. If I were to report that somebody is a thief and a crook (many names spring to mind - Twain once called Congress "America's only native criminal class"). I could get sued for libel and it would stick. I consider this to be a bit unfair for one reason: I have read, more and more often, articles written by supposedly credentialed journalists on supposedly credentialed news sites which read like the rantings of children. The standards are certainly not what they used to be! I have been longing for the days of Huntley/Brinkley "hard" news reporting for some time, now - this just reinforces my opinion.

In the article, the judge ruled that the blogger in question, "...had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts (my italics), evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story."

Okay. Let's set the controls on the Wayback Machine to the afternoon of 4 July 1983. I had just finished seeing a horrific accident at my first Civil War reenactment in a Kiwanis Park in Provo, Utah. A man who was serving as a member of a cannon crew had rammed a charge down the barrel when the charge, apparently lit by a remaining spark or ember, ignited the black powder, blowing off parts of both the man's arms. It was, as you can imagine, awful. Some hours later, my wife and I drove about an hour north to see her sister in the outskirts of Salt Lake City when I heard a report on KSL radio: "A man taking part in a Civil War reenactment in Provo was critically injured this afternoon when he was struck in the chest by a cannon ball."

This doesn't even remotely pass what we at work call the "Ho Ho Test." (That is, if uttered in a meeting, will people laugh?) Did nobody in the newsroom ask, "Are they actually using live rounds in battle reenactments? If so, what is the survival rate for reenactors? Is this hobby growing?" Yet the report was broadcast out to 160,000 or so people in the greater Salt Lake City region. There's a tale that a gruff old news editor once had a saying, "If your mother says she loves you - check it out." Apparently those days started to fade as long ago as 1983. At least in Utah...

I am a responsible blogger and try to get my facts straight when I write. For instance, in those Burbankia slide show video segments we had presented that Norma Jeane Baker - later Marilyn Monroe - worked at a Burbank airplane factory when a Yank magazine photographer discovered her and used her picture on a cover. We later found out that she worked in Van Nuys at the time; I include this correction with the text accompanying the slide show videos.

I like to think if myself as a dedicated amateur, somewhere between a dilettante and a pro.

7 Dec 2011

Using the video editing software I described yesterday, I made a short family video I call We Are the Champions!, after a hand-clasping gesture my oldest child introduced to his graduating class. It's six years in two minutes. But you know what's annoying about the creative process? As soon as I finished it I thought, "Why not include the parts where the graduating classes all triumphantly throw their caps into the air?" Sigh. Maybe I'm not done with it after all...

I am now working on a pair of videos of the "Burbankia" slide show Mike and I gave in Burbank in July for the city's 100th anniversary. Part one is 41 minutes, part two is 51 minutes. These are taking longer because the computer has to process more video.

I watched a couple of episodes of The Wonder Years last night; I always get a kick out of spotting the Burbank locations in the backgrounds: the Verdugo Hills, the Burbank Power and Light structure, the path up the mountain that I hiked in 1972 and 1973, the YMCA building... what fun!

One episode was concerned with Christmas 1968, and how Kevin wanted a color TV but his father wouldn't buy one. It was revealed that they finally bought one in 1970. What's with them? My parents were both blue collar workers and we bought our first color set in mid-1965, geez. But then, there are two more kids in Kevin's family and it appears the wife doesn't work outside of the home - so perhaps we had a better (consumer) standard of life. The writers also blew it by covering Christmas 1968 in the first season - the major event everyone my age remembers is the Christmas Eve Apollo 8 broadcast of earth rise over the moon with the Bible reading. But this wasn't a part of the second Christmas episode. I call foul!

Also, one episode depicted a pretty young teacher showing Kevin's class a film of Martin Luther King giving his famous "I have a dream" speech; later she directs a school play about civil rights. Not in 1968! At least, not in my school district. This is obviously more flavored with the 1980's than 1968. Parents would have complained; the Generation and Racial Gaps in 1968 were very wide. So the authenticity of this episode was... not so much, as they say. However, the teacher was pretty in a foxy 1960's kind of way, and Kevin finds himself enchanted with her approving smile... he then stares at her breasts. For a twelve year-old boy, that was pretty authentic!

We had Webelos Den meeting last night and made paper bag puppets, crafted a fine script and put on a play to meet some of the requirements of the Showman activity pin (the little dude at the one o'clock position in the image above). The cast of characters included Santa Claus, "Boss Elf," an assassin, a ninja, a caped superhero, and, as the hero of the piece, Robert E. Lee (!). The kid who is fixated on potatoes - I mentioned him last week - came up with a number of creatures who are known as "Lomatoes," which seemed to be a combination of potatoes, watermelons and some other fruit or vegetable, I forget. They had wicked, jagged teeth. As you might have guessed, this production was an action play, with most of the paper bag characters confronting each other in combat over the theft of Santa's sleigh. The final scene was reminiscent of Mozart's Don Giovanni as staged in the film Amadeus, with noise, destruction, demons, confusion and the stage itself collapsing in a heap. The boys declared themselves mightily pleased. As for me, thirteen ten year-old boys all yelling makes my ears ring and puts me into a daze.

I am still in search of a good iPhone news app. I was using the Associated Press app, but on Saturday, when everybody knew that Herman Cain had dropped out of running as a presidential candidate, the AP app had nothing about it - at least not that I could find. The top story was still, "Cain will announce his decision on Saturday." Unacceptable! So I have loaded the ABC News and the BBC news apps. I tried the CBS news app again, but the very first thing that came up when I opened it was an obnoxious ad with audio - no thanks. (This app gets two stars by reviewers for this very thing, advertisements over news.) I'm unsure about the BBC app... it appears, unsurprisingly, to be somewhat Eurocentric. The only reason I loaded it is because I am an incurable Anglophile.

6 Dec 2011

I was strolling around during lunch one day in Shirlington Village where I work; look what I saw.

I watched an interesting, if maddening, docudrama last night: England, My England (1995), purportedly about the life and career of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), baroque composer. (I saw Purcell's King Arthur not too long ago; I was impressed with the music but not the production.) Perhaps Purcell's most well-known melody is the Rondo from his Abdelazar Suite. (Hear it here. Do you know this melody?)

England, My England was well cast, well acted and very sumptuously produced - and the music was gorgeous - but, sadly, the narrative flow was a mess. It was a play within a plot within a movie kind of thing and it was often hard to tell what was going on. What's more, in this two and a half hour production, the adult Henry Purcell doesn't make an appearance until after an hour into it! It also lacked focus: arguably, it was more about Charles II and the Restoration than about Henry Purcell.

And why insert scenes of 1960's British anti-Vietnam protests in a film about Henry Purcell? (And why were the British even protesting in the first place? It wasn't like they were in any danger of being drafted...) I suppose the director was making a heavy-handed observation that there was political turmoil in Purcell's time just as there was 300 years later. But why point that out? There are always wars and political turmoil...

This film did feature an interesting sequence about King William of Orange and Queen Mary, and had a stunning performance of his stately and solemn Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. (A good performance of this short work is here.) In it, rather than one drum there was a whole line of them... it sounded wonderfully powerful. Weirdly, however, this film also used Wendy Carlos' synthesized version which served as the theme music for the 1971 Stanley Kubrick production of A Clockwork Orange. Why? I have no idea. To suggest the work's continued relevance, I guess.

Anyway, I was ready to give up on England, My England early, but the acting and setting hooked me in spite of the clunky plot development.

I watched another episode of The Wonder Years... series one is set in 1968. As I figured I would, I spotted an anachronism (I'm sure there will be more): in one scene Kevin's sister walks in the room carrying the well-known Panasonic "Plunger" model 8-track cartridge player. I am almost positive that those weren't available until after 1970 or so. They are now much in vogue among the 8-track set. (Yes, there is such a thing.)

Yesterday I spent some time figuring out the video editing software I was looking for: as it turns out, you can download Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 for free; it does just what I need it to do. (Unlike iMovie on my wife's Mac.) So I created what I think is a funny video account of the Clark Family grocery shopping in 1991, when the kids were little, and posted it on youtube. Yes, I actually took a clunky old VHS camcorder to the grocery store. I figured that it would be fun to look back on those daily life activities twenty years hence. So... I needed to figure out three software applications to produce this: "Bootstrap," the converter to take the video off a DVD and make a .mp4 file of it, Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 to trim it and make a title card, and youtube to upload it and create the annotation boxes.

I'm going to try something a bit more difficult later this week, where I have to cut and paste video for various sources, insert still images, etc. Once again, like the iPhone videos, old dogs learning new tricks.

There's a Webelos Den meeting tonight; one of the other leaders is going to do the "Showman" activity pin. I think we're making brown paper bag puppets. I'm the Enforcer: the adult leader who separates the overly chatty boys and compels one of them to keep all four feet of his chair on the ground. There are times I think this particular kid is going for some kind of a record by sitting in his chair with only one of the feet on the floor. If he could levitate off the ground, he would.

5 Dec 2011

I graduated from physical therapy Friday, that is, after eighteen weeks I had my last PT session for my shoulder. That last thing left for me is to be able to crank my right hand up the middle of my back as my left can do - this is the last pain free motion to be restored to me. (I have some exercises with a strap to do to enable this to happen.) The surgeon says that in January I should be 100% healed and resume lifting heavy objects with my right arm. I can move my arm in all sorts of directions now without any pain - it feels MUCH better than it was back in late July, before I got the surgery. So... success!

Saturday was unexpectedly fun. After consuming a can of Coke (was it Diet or Regular? - as reported in the media, they look alike), we drove into Alexandria to look in the Pendleton store to see if I could find a replacement for my favorite but now sadly moth-eathen wool shirt, and stumbled into the Scottish Christmas Festival in Old Town; the place was packed. After finally finding a parking place we did indeed find me a nice shirt at 25% off - hooray!

There were guys in skirts, uh, kilts, all over the place and, of course, bagpipers: Bagpipes I, Bagpipes II. We also saw a beautiful 1972 Lincoln Continental Mark III parked on King St. We had lunch in a La Madeleine and strolled into some stores, and made our way over to the Carlyle House, where my Revolutionary War reenactment group the First Virginia had an encampment. We chatted with some old friends and left... lots of fun! That evening we had our church's Christmas party, for which we acted as servers/kitchen staff. That was fun, too.

By the way, since discovering that I could easily upload iPhone videos to youtube, I have created a "channel" for myself, here. I have eleven uploaded videos there now - that will increase. I'm also learning how to edit them - trim, add voice balloons, titles, that sort of thing. Another example of old dogs learning new tricks.

I finished reading all of the Neil Gaiman Sandman trade paperbacks. As I reported before, they are good. I don't feel they're as good as his fans claim they are - but no matter. The most fortunate creation in Sandman without a doubt is his winsome, cutey-pie older sister, Death, she of the goth garb and bubbly demeanor. Whereas the skeletal guy with the scythe is grim, she's a gamin. According to Gaiman, Lady Death is not a personification of death, she IS death. When the last universe dies its entropic heat death, she will be there to turn out the lights and shut the door. A very clever literary creation. If they ever do the threatened movie or television production, casting her will be a major concern. They need to get her character just right or people will be very disappointed.

The character's appearance is based more or less on a real girl named Cinnamon; maybe they can cast her...

2 Dec 2011

Photo collage Don Tracey put together. The problem with doing this sort of thing - as I well know - is now it has to be updated each year! But I like it.

By the way, on my Picasa photo page I have an album entitled "Drop Box"; it's a collection of various images from 2011, mostly cell phones shots. It's not a family album, just a random sort of thing. Take a look.

A friend of my son's named Ian Friley is an amateur filmmaker; he does funny stuff. Here's his recent sixteen second short about the Friley Family Thanksgiving. I think it's hilarious; I love the Dad's reaction. He swears that this wasn't staged.

What do you get when you combine 300's visual style with the American Civil War? This. I suppose it was inevitable. I admit... I kind of like it. It's visually exciting, anyway. Madness? This is MANASSAS!!!

I watched the 1975 Akira Kurosawa film Dersu Uzala yesterday. It was excellent. It's the story of a Russian surveyor who befriends and is befriended by a hunter when they encounter each other out in the wilds of Siberia, no more, no less than that. Based on a true story. It reminded me somewhat of Nanook of the North (1922).

I also watched the best prison film I have ever seen: Le Trou ("The Hole" - 1960). That's saying a lot because the prison flick is a sub-genre of film noir, and so I've seen a bunch of them. This film is a lot like The Asphalt Jungle (1950) in that you become emotionally attached with the prisoners staging the jailbreak - the protagonists are not just criminals, they are human beings who have done criminal things (exactly what criminal things isn't described). So you're pulling for them: in Asphalt Jungle it's a heist, here, it's a prison break. It runs over two hours... normally, I prefer shorter films, but there was a method to the director's madness. At one point you see the prisoners bang and chip away on the concrete floor of their prison with a steel bar for what seems like an extended length of time, the message being, of course, that this is hard, hard work. Excellent film. Like Dersu Uzala, it was also based on a true story, by the way.

I am just over 8/11ths of the way through Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. For comic books they are quite good - with an asterisk. I think in this genre - comic books or "sequential art" - there is a temptation to mistake daring or outrage with quality. For instance, there is a nightmarish character (we are mostly dealing with dreams, remember) called "the Corinthian" who has teeth in the place of eyes. His schtick is carving out the eyeballs of his victims and eating them (presumably with the sets of teeth which are where his eyes should be). GAK! However, I suspect middle-aged comic book reading fanboyz around the world (who have never read Dante's Inferno or the classics which inspire Gaiman) think, "Kewl, this is SO awesome!" and praise Gaiman to the skies. Certainly, I have tired of reading the Introductions to these books, which consist primarily of some noted writer telling us how brilliant the whole series is. I quit reading them. And the Sandman graphic novel I finished up last night, Worlds' End, was awful, a real falling off from form. Still, I understand there is some talk of doing a movie; this could be promising.

Last night my clever wife brought home a couple of small sheets of Fornasetti wallpaper she had found as samples. We both decided that we really didn't have a place in the house where we could use it, but we like the style. Pietro Fornasetti (1913-1988) was an Italian artist who specialized in the use of the sun and time and black and white; his style is quite distinctive. I was first introduced to it when I was a kid via some coasters owned by Del Casher, a lodger/L.A. session guitarist who lived in a converted garage on the property of the house we were renting. A clean set of those coasters are now worth hundreds of dollars (or more!) on e-Bay... I made some imitations by doing digital transfers of Fornasetti sun designs onto square tiles. I'm still looking for a use for those in the house.

Well... the weekend beckons. Tomorrow night we're providing kitchen staff help at a church Christmas Party. (If I were the Corinthian, could I eat three times as much food?) Other than that, we have no plans. But that's okay: my wife recently admitted that both of us sitting in the quiet living room, reading, with a fire in the fireplace, was what she envisioned she wanted many years ago. So it's good.

Have a great weekend!

1 Dec 2011

My nostalgic web site about my childhood in Burbank, CA, "Avocado Memories," is now fifteen years old on the web. Fifteen years! You don't find many web sites that old that have been on the Internet and continuously updated for all of that time. I should pat myself on the back. (Pat, pat.)

Yesterday (Mark Twain's 176th birthday) my pard Chris read Mark Twain's A Private History of a Campaign That Failed. It's an excellent short story - you should read it if you haven't. (Grab it from the link I provided and upload it to your smart phone or reader!) It's a highly fictionalized account of Twain's two-week service as a Reb in the Missouri State Guard. It takes place in Marion County, Missouri. It first came to my attention in 1983 or so, when I saw a teleplay of it broadcast on a PBS station; as I was starting Civil War reenacting at the time I found it engrossing. The production is also interesting because it incorporates another work of Twain's as a coda: his celebrated War Prayer.

The War Prayer was written by Twain but only published after his death. "Only dead men can tell the truth in this world," twain claimed. A rather poorly-written wikipedia entry describing the work is here. I am unable to find a video link to the Campaign that Failed PBS special, but here is a youtube link to the ten minute War Prayer part of it. Check it out, it's great!

It is no doubt a powerful work, and fully expresses Twain's disgust with the United States going to war with Spain in 1898. I suppose these days it is occasionally cited by activists as a blanket condemnation of war. As it is a strongly religious work - the strange messenger purports to be sent from God - let's look at that aspect of it for a moment.

Does God hate war? As He sent the Prince of Peace down to us 2,000+ years ago, the answer would seem to be a resounding "yes." I suspect it's a bit more complicated that that, however, and as evidence I suggest a reading of Deuteronomy 20:17, where the (admittedly Old Testament) God commands the Israelites to massacre the Canaanites and others. Verse sixteen uses the phrase, "...thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth." Whew. That's... genocide. Ethnic cleansing. We have all sorts of powerful phrases in use to describe this sort of thing when we humans do it. Subsequent verses are also interesting, and say, more or less, "Kill the people but save the trees." What's going on, here?

Well, if you are expecting me to describe the Mind of God - forget it. I can't. Others attempt to rationalize this, as this Biblical incident has caused Christians a good deal of concern over the years. I won't even try, save to perhaps use the old saw, "God works in mysterious ways, and His ways are not our ways." But I would have loved to read a late period Twain essay about God's dealing with the Canaanites. I don't think there is one, however. But Twain's various quotes about war suggest a strong antipathy; he was clear about that.

A couple of decades ago when I was writing articles for Civil War reenactment unit newsletters and a national magazine dedicated to the hobby, I attempted to write my Great Anti-War Article. After all, here we were, guys who ran around in uniforms playing war on the weekends, and it was an easy matter for journalists and the public to look at us with disgust and opine, "Those guys are weird - they love war." I wanted to refute that. But after some tries, I found that I couldn't. As Twain's creation Huck Finn said, it was like trying to pray a lie. I just couldn't honestly write the pat, "I hate war" prose.

My views about war are nuanced and hard to describe, exactly. But put simply, denouncing war makes about as much sense to me as denouncing cancer, or hurricanes. True, we humans cause war (unlike cancer and hurricanes), but I agree with the unknown (it's usually attributed to Plato) who said "Only the dead have seen an end to war." It seems to be a part of our universe. "This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games," said William S. Burroughs. I agree.

In the end the best I could do was to gather provocative quotations from wiser men on the subject of war and throw them up on the Internet as a webpage. I also finally eked out an article about men who feel bad because they did not take part in a war, or act as soldiers, and posted that as well. Perhaps some day - when I'm retired? - I will be able to fully explain myself.

Brigham's Blog