An artist-naturalist splashes through streams of consciousness... often, it's even her own...
Monday, December 22, 2008
Did you like yesterday's post?
CLICK for the classic tale of holiday angst from the Griswold's insane perspective. It's got it all: too many visiting relatives, too many Christmas lights, an overly expensive Christmas gift, a disastrous Christmas feast with gaseous results, and a miserly Christmas bonus. Much as it sounds like one, it's neither a documentary nor a memoir. And yes, it's delivered by the bunnies featured in yesterday's movie.
AND here's the seasonal memoir: "A Christmas Story", via hyper-bunny vision.
Do you like classic Capra movies? The black & white adds an element of class. Clicky for "It's A Wonderful Life" as performed by bunnies with squeaky voices.
At the end of the (extremely abbreviated) movie, there's some bonus footage if you run your mouse over the bunny silhouettes.
Watch, and enjoy. You'll feel like the richest man/woman in the world.
So. Hospital waiting rooms. They are not outrageously cushy. This one has no windows. BUT! We are surrounded by family and friends. That alone makes this room instantly warm.
We are watching The Day the Earth Stood Still while we wait for the doc to bring us word about Sandy's surgery. She's done, just needing to be closed. Of course we are right on the edges of our seats!!
In the autumn, it's for College Football. Today, it's the classic rivalry between Army and Navy. Brilliant! So I've got the game on with the volume down and Christmas music on, while I'm decorating the house for the season.
And I'm getting ready for marathon cookie-baking sessions over the next few days.
What could be more festive???
HA!!
I've always got an answer for that!
Try this:
Heh.
These are the folk who originally foisted the Mystery Science Theatre concept of full audience participation with the movie via smart-alecky remarks upon the world. I fondly remember getting my mom ever so gently hooked on this snarky method of watching bad movies.
She's on my mind right now. (She often is, but now especially, with the news about my mother-in-law.)
...and I really need some escapist humor today. This trailer made Rick and me howl with laughter. This is something Mom would have enjoyed, too.
Thankful Thursdays: Brad Meltzer and the Superman House
Superman was "born" in Cleveland.
Most people think he was a native of Krypton, but they're wrong.
Superman was born in a modest house in the Glenville neighborhood of the eastside of Cleveland, on a summer night in 1932. He wasn't born to bold Kryptonian Jor-El and Lara-El, nor even rural WASPish Jonathan and Martha Kent. He was born to a shy, inner-city Jewish kid named Jerry Siegel, on the night his father was either gunned down (according to one side of the family) or died of a heart attack as a result of being robbed at gunpoint (according to the other side).
I love my city. But this guy Brad Meltzer, an author of novels and comic books (which makes him cool "squared" mathematically, in my estimation), has made me feel very queasy-embarrassed about one way Cleveland has tragically fallen short.
Superman, the comic book, in its early form as produced by Action Comics, was written and drawn by Jerry Siegel and his neighborhood pal Joe Schuster. And Superman, the icon, has stayed relatively true to its original form. He's died a few times, but if you're going to be a legitimate comic book character, you'll do that more than once. In fact, you're going to die, be resurrected, have your history ret-conned, have your side-kick turn on you, meet yourself in a parallel universe, be drawn for several issues as a zombie or as a very small child with very small children superhero friends, have ridiculous animals assigned as your pets (or worse, peers), I mean the list is longer than Superman ought to have lived, and he's (given the number of lives he's lived) probably older than the United States by now. Just because that's mathematically impossible doesn't make it a feasible plot for a comic book...
What is sad, though, what has me so queasy and the issue which Meltzer has been shining the light on, is that the Siegel house is still there.
No one has built a Rite Aid on the site. Yet.
In fact, there's a family that lives there. By all accounts, they are remarkably friendly!! They know the history of the house. They've taken great pains to paint the house Superman red and blue. You can't miss the house on the street, it's said.
People visit them all the time, in fact, and they throw open their door, glad to invite them in to take a look at the house where Superman was born, to see the very room in which Jerry Siegel first conceived of the idea of The Man of Steel. They do this with a smile. Always with a smile.
The exterior may exhibit Superman, but the interior exhibits downtrodden, foreclosed Cleveland. I'll let this video speak for it.
Want to help??? Please do. You see the need. Click HERE.
I was first made aware of this "Save the Superman House" movement by Rick, and lately other people are taking up the cry. I'm glad to hear that. It would be a shame to let this landmark simply crumble into dust.
Here in Cleveland people come to visit the placque in front of the Heisman house (in Ohio City) and the Christmas Story house (in Tremont) and President Garfield's tomb (Lakeview Cemetery), and dozens of other important landmarks. Our friend Mike leads bike tours to show at least half a dozen interesting former auto manufacturing sites of long-past models (White, Studebaker, Peerless, others) that still exist, though in different capacities from their original uses. It's fascinating! It's all part of history. It's all part of what makes this city remarkable, and part of why I really love it.
People clearly want to see the place where Superman was born. It'd be a shame to deny them. It would certainly be sad to lose a cultural icon simply because of apathy.
The source of my queasy embarrasment is that the City of Cleveland is doing nothing to help save this landmark. They have been given opportunities. So it's falling to ordinary people. That's sad, really, because Cleveland does a good job of responding to needs of urgent natures; it's clear Superman's Birthplace isn't as urgent to the City of Cleveland as it is to potential visitors. Hence, it was the brainchild of an outsider, a non-Clevelander, Brad Meltzer, that sparked this movement.
I am deeply thankful on this Thankful Thursday that Brad Meltzer has taken up this great quest to save The Superman House.
It's Comic Book History. It's Jews-In-America History. It's Cultural History. It's Pop-Culture History. It's Movie History. It's Cleveland History.
This Transmission Has Been Unceremoniously Interrupted.
Yup. That it has. Even before it began!
>sigh<
Here's a sad, sad tale of woe. Fair warning. You may not want to read any further. Keep your eyes well away from all electronics!
Yesterday we had our quad-monthly visit from The Sears Guy, who not only pronounced our washing machine DOA (his arrival, that is), but (and I find this utterly amazing) he refused to charge us for the visit on the basis that our machine is so far gone. "Buy a new one, avoid the digital read-outs, make sure it's an up-right, and you'll be set; $400 is all it should set you back," he said in parting. Wow.
He was supposed to look at our broken dishwasher, too, but I didn't want to press our luck with the whole "no charge for a dead appliance" juju. I was pretty sure what he'd say. So it's hand-washing til we can scrape together enough to pay whatever the going rate of a basic dishwasher might be PLUS a washing machine for clothes.
When My Beloved got home, we were going to eat our dinner (the stove still works, though the toaster oven went to appliance heaven over a month ago) in front of the TV with a Dr Who episode. (Interruption: are you keeping an appliance count? Because that would make *3* dead appliances in this post. So far.) A friend of his at work lent him the DVD of the first series, starring William Hartnell.
We popped the DVD into the PlayStation (we have a combination DVD-VCR, but the DVD part is broken...) and got everything set up, hit "Play," and before we even got the FBI warnings: "TV system doesn't match."
I posted that here yesterday. First I had to pick my jaw up off of the basement floor.
Rick fiddled around with it, but after a bit he concluded that the disk was HD, and our TV (dated from 1994, perhaps earlier) was most DEFinitely NOT.
So we watched an episode of Brisco County, Jr. instead, because THOSE disks work just fine in our PlayStation.
Afterwards, just to see, just to make absolutely certain there was no fault with the disks, Rick tried playing the premier Dr Who episode (An Unearthly Child) in his laptop. No problems. No glitches. Absolutely no issues. Well, other than the fact that I was trying to head upstairs to bed.
I watched the entire episode standing up, punctuating every few scenes with: "I'm heading upstairs now. Let me know when we can rewatch this." >snerk< Like I'm superhuman enough to pull myself away from Dr Who!! (This illustrates one reason of several why we don't have cable/satellite.)
It was Rick's first experience with Hartnell: "Wow. Cranky." Heh. Wait'll he experiences the full bi-polarity Colin Baker.
Good thing we don't have a sonic screwdriver. That'd be on the fritz, too. Doesn't keep me from wanting one, 'specially now that I know they're so much more affordable than a washing machine...
Mmmm. Steak au Poivre, Ratatouille, and Haricot Vertes. Wow. Just yummy. It took ages to cook this meal but it was so worth it. 9:57pm mealtime, from a probably 6pm start on the puzzles and challenges!
Blanching tomatoes to go with the string beans. There was a steep learning curve involved here. It was a first time for some? All? Anyway, it was interesting... Ultimately, very worth it once the food was on the plates, though we all decided that canned tomatoes were nicely worth it for the convenience.
Steak. It does a body good. Mmm. SOOOO MUCH good. Prometheus smiles on us tonight. Our cavedwelling forebears nod in approval. Meat is good. And this meat will be garnished with a cream-brandy sauce, and that juice collected in the platter was also used in the sauce, per the recipe's suggestion.
Ratatouille! The steam is wafting the most wonderful fragrance throughout the kitchen. Can't wait!
In real life, the colors were brilliant. This picture was taken by a cameraphone. Sadly, so far the technology is substandard indoors at night. Please know this dish was marvelous both in flavor and in bold, beautiful reds, yellows, and greens of the fresh peppers, zucchinis, eggplants, tomatoes, and other produce.
Check out my Flickr site (click on the badge on the right side of the blog) to see pictures taken with my regular camera to be reassured that Americans truly do eat food that doesn't all come out of cans and fast-food cardboard. There's a set called "Iron Chef 2008" that tells the whole story of this year's series of competition.
A clue! We found a clue! Yes, and all objects were happily inside this box, hermetically sealed from the germies of the trash bin in which it was hidden. 2 teams are already working on 2 different parts of the meal. We are all getting very hungry! And it's starting to smell good too. We're trying hard not to despair: French cuisine is not a speedy 'fry-up'! ;-) class="mobile-photo">
This is what took so long to find the next stuff for dinner, and the next clue. The solution was to look under the bag in the trash can. Well hidden, indeed!
The *beginning* of this week's mystery ingredients are on the kitchen work island. The rest of the meal? We have to find, discover, and decode the rest! It's going to be an adventure! Stay tuned...
This photo just got added to a Flickr pool (group of photos from all sorts of other Flickr members, usually on a theme) called "Fix or improve it with duct tape". Just thought that was funny. At least as funny as the picture. I had never heard of this group before, or even seen it whilst browsing Flickr.
I do think it's an appropriate venue for Chris/Doktor Wienerschnitzel/Professor Fate. Maybe now he'll create a new character called the Dandy Duct Taper, or something. Duct Tapir, the animation? We'll have to wait and see.
He took me to see Sweeney Todd. Exceptionally excellent movie. Just plain GOOD. The music, the costuming, the casting, the photography... all breathtaking. People singing who have never sung, at least, they've never sung in a movie role before -- just crazy GOOD.
I love this movie. I love my marvelous husband (I can't get enough of calling Rick "my husband"!!! That's just so cool.) ever more everyday, but today especially, simply for having spent the afternoon in the theater with him, watching this movie.
Did I just call this a good date movie? Yes. Yes I did. It is if you have a morbid, gothic sense of humor like we do. If you listen to Nine Inch Nails and like old school punk like The Crampps and The The and the Circle Jerks or even the newer stuff like Marilyn Manson (I love his shows), this is your romance. If you like true crime or old style pulp fiction (not the movie, although the movie was good too) or film noir mixed with Dickensian despair, then yes, this is the date movie for you. If (like me) you find yourself clinging to every episode of both Life and Pushing Daisies, this is a near-black-&-white version of a fusion of those, with a little Jack Skellington added in for culinary pleasure.
Humor, in the midst of killing and cannibalism and human suffering? Oh, yes!! Particularly in one song that speculated about the flavors that certain people would bring to the pies based on their position in society or their occupation. Hillarious. Omigod, I just LOOOOOVE this movie!!!
I am soooo in the mood for meat pies now. Just, (ahem) you know, not long pork.
Some of Ridley Scott's finest cinematic hours have been tweaked, spit-shined, picked clean of lint, and are being reissued today. I have always admired the way he made the images of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968, leap off the pages. Casting was quirky and precicely right. Just marvelous eye candy. It all made me feel that I was truly there, in 2021, post-apocalyptic Earth, triaged among the masses too radiation-sick to depart for ('escape to', really) colonies on healthier planets.
If you haven't read the book, you must. This is one of those rare movies that actually followed the movie faithfully, and did so without rabid hordes of followers threatening to leave their parents' basements in a pasty-white, blubbery, blinking-in-the-sunlight rebellion to pressure the director and writer into submission waving dog-eared copies of (TITLES OMITTED, you -- we -- know who you -- we -- are.). Plus, it's classic Philip K. Dick. If you're into paranoid sci-fi, no one did it better. He is (along with Ray Bradbury; I have to name the two together) one of my all-time favorites.
I resent, however, this being almost 2008, that I am still without my flying car. I love my VW Golf; I just want it to be designed to go airborne on purpose.
If it's the final cut, are they done with the cars? Can I have one?
You know, I'd be content to settle for this DVD under the tree, and give the flying cars a miss. I'm gonna bet those cars have awful emissions.
I'm deliriously, happily married to Rick. We have a basenji named Cleopatra and 3 manic (as a result of the dog) cats. They all appear on the blog regularly, as does the garden. On occasion, you may mistake this for the local Ag Report, but I assure you I am an artist, and eventually my work will make an appearance.
In the meantime, I find enjoyment in life's daily distractions.
We work to be part of the solution in Cleveland as members of a giving circle called The Cleveland Colectivo, giving microgrants to grassroots neighborhood projects throughout Cleveland and the inner-ring suburbs.
Rick and I are avid bike riders, and we captain a BikeMS team called Patti's Paladins. Visit our team website pattispaladins.com to learn how you can help us fight Multiple Sclerosis. Join us for a ride!
