OF A GOLDEN AGE

Zach: yay House
Zach: he’s so dreamy!
Caroline: Um, he really is, in case you aren’t being serious.

Pixar makes one phenomenal movie after another with a near-alarming success rate, begging these questions:

Will they ever produce a bad movie, as some people hope for whatever reason? Or have the uneven results of other studios — especially other animation — lowered our expectations this much?

In any case, Up is just as good as Toy Story 2 and Wall-E, maybe better, and blends elements of both in a meaningful way. The characters are real and whole, especially protagonist Carl, whose nostalgia and mourning are anchored in the brilliant first twenty minutes of the movie. Pixar’s most poignant scene, ever, happens during a sequence where Carl and Ellie’s lives are told in a series of silent vignette shots, in one of which Ellie cries in an obstetrician’s office.

Carl and his accidental Boy Scout friend Russell take flight and end up having, you know, an adventure. They meet Dug the dog, whose talking collar makes him a mainstay of the movie’s advertising campaign. (The other dogs refer to Russell as “the small mailman” because of his scout uniform.)

By twenty minutes in, I loved Carl — dude, he’s voiced by Ed Asner — and wanted him to break free of his old life; every character introduced in the movie has a whole separate identity and backstory. Even the villain has a rational origin story and relatable motivations way back in his life.

In the interest of disclosure, I teared up at least four times during this movie and it was probably six. The Pixar short before the movie made me laugh so hard I cried and that kind of set me off for the rest of it.

At the showing I went to, the theater was crowded with parents with children of all ages. I think the target child audience for this movie is somewhere around 10 and older, because it contains a lot of intense stuff and a lot of slow stretches. A four- or five-year-old behind me spent the whole movie squirming, kicking my seat, talking loudly about how he had to “poopoo,” and saying he wanted to go home. I wanted to punch his mother in the face every minute. Of course, they stood up during the end of the movie and left before the credits, because having their terrible idiot kid there wasn’t enough, they had to actually block other people from seeing the end.

Zach directed my attention to this dispatch on new Chick tracts, which reminded me of my favorite one ever: In which a teacher fruitlessly tries to teach her students that gay families can be full of love the way straight families are, only to reinforce that public schools are evil. It’s in Spanish.

Last year at a funeral for one of my dad’s oldest, most beloved friends, a minister informed us that “Even Hitler himself” could have given himself to God and gone to Heaven. Don’t get me wrong — religion isn’t for me, but I don’t for a second think anyone else should or should not believe in a specific way. But in this case, leading us to believe the most blatant war criminal and murderer in the history of the world was in line right next to our grandparents, friends, and predecessors was probably not a good move.

After the ceremony, we remarked to the life partner of the deceased that the minister was a little much for us, to which he looked embarrassed and said, “He’s my brother.” Whoops!

* “Yes, we love each other!”

This morning I was in the shower when my phone rang. It could be work, it could be my parents! I jumped out of the shower and sloshed into my main room to find the phone. The caller ID said “Mom.”

“Hi honey,” she said. “Dad and I just had a math question.”

“I saw Emerson, Lake, and Palmer in Canada,” my mom said this weekend.

“The difference between me and your mother,” my dad said, “is she saw Emerson, Lake, and Palmer in Canada; and I saw Black Sabbath in Amsterdam.”

• Research Beyond Google compiles some tools you might not know about for use in educational research.

• New Videos to Demonstrate Durability of Tungsten, well, we all know how I feel about tungsten.

• The New York Times recently offered a recipe for homemade yogurt, but I trust Alton Brown’s methodology more.

• Do you know what a killer cancel is?

Seong Moy (b. 1920s) is a modern artist and printmaker whose work is atraditionally gestural:

      

Having never seen the man himself, I found it charming when the Smithsonian Flickr feed posted this photo, demonstrating that indeed Seong May was conservative in appearance — excepting, of course, his sly Mona Lisa smile.

But those browline glasses! My goodness.

Best-dressed two year old ever?

(via the inimitable Hel Looks)

I drive a 1996 Chevy Corsica which is in great shape. Some things in it do not work though, and I’ve entertained the idea of getting my air conditioning fixed for a while. A year or two ago, after I paid for a freon charge that bled out in twenty minutes, the guy mentioned that the evaporator core may have rusted out. He told me it would be about $500 to fix and I went SEE YA.

The other day, my employer sent me to a mechanic to get some minor repairs on our company van, and I asked the guy there about the evaporator core. “$500 sounds high,” he said. When I looked up the part and it was $155 on Napa’s website, he told me, “Sure! Bring it in and we’ll install it. Labor will be $212.”

On a whim I gave the $500 guy a call, a year or two later, and explained the scenario to him. I told him the Napa price and he said to me, “If somebody brought that part in and asked us to install it, we wouldn’t do that for them.”

“What? I didn’t say I’d bring the part in,” I said. “I figured since you get wholesale rates you could get it even cheaper!”

“That’s where we make our money,” he said. “I get it for $10 or $20 cheaper than you’d get it, and I’d charge you about $215 for the part.”

Wow, man. There goes any business I would have given you, ever. Incidentally, the whole price he quoted me was $675. DREAM ON.

Today is my half birthday. I’ve been quiet lately, and it’s because I’m a lousy jerk!

Today’s Miscellany is a short but meaningful lady edition.

The New York Times has an eye-opening piece about woman-on-woman workplace bullying. Last night I had dinner with one of my favorite women, and we talked about how relating to coworkers can be difficult, but I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this in workplaces — however, every female in America who went to or currently goes to public school knows how mean girls can be.

This Guardian piece offers 10 things you must tell your teenage girl, even if she won’t know how true they are until later. Especially interesting to me: “New research shows that girls who are given alcohol before the age of 18 by their parents are more likely to develop a drinking problem.”