May
31
True story, 2
May 31, 2009 | 1 Comment
While clumsily bumbling down the hallway in my building I ran armfirst into some blunt wall protrusion and have, at the end of the rainbow, discovered a fresh deep-purple bruise the size of a baseball.
Good going, clumsy bumbler. I’d be spinning falsehoods if I pretended this did not happen all the time!
May
30
True story
May 30, 2009 | 1 Comment
Zach: yay House
Zach: he’s so dreamy!
Caroline: Um, he really is, in case you aren’t being serious.
May
30
Up
May 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment
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.
May
29
Si, nos amamos!*
May 29, 2009 | 1 Comment
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!”
May
29
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.”
May
26
The difference
May 26, 2009 | 2 Comments
“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.”
May
22
A first for everything
May 22, 2009 | 1 Comment
Today I ate a genuinely good Subway sandwich! It’s not an urban legend.
The secret is their flatbread, which has great texture and body in contrast to their strangely airy-yet-serviceable normal bread. I ordered it with the veggie patty (a Morningstar product made of ground-up vegetables and the soy binder TVP), pepper jack cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, black olives, and a little honey mustard.
I love Subway for having an adequate, reasonably priced product made of mostly fresh ingredients. When I hear these new commercials touting the McDonald’s value meal “under five dollars” ($4.99), I hope McD’s is getting smoked by Subway’s $5 footlong.
May
19
May 19 Miscellany
May 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment
• 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?
May
18
Seong Moy
May 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment
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.
May
18
Best dressed
May 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Best-dressed two year old ever?
(via the inimitable Hel Looks)
