One of My Favorite Beers Is In The News
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Movie Report: Alien: Resurrection (1997)
I grabbed this film from within the cabinet because I didn’t want to watch the dozens of titles which I’ve recently purchased. And, I thought, “It’s the one with Winona Ryder, the third one.” Ah, if you’re a real fan, you are already telling me that this is the fourth installment in the franchise, and Alien3 is the third one of the series, the one in the orbital prison. Ah, yes, well, gentle reader, I eventually got that sense, too, when they were talking about this film taking place 200 years after previous events, and, oh, yeah, Ripley is a clone. So I’ve got the other one shuffled into the cabinet somewhere, and I guess I know how it ends.
So: Uh, spoiler alert for the previous movie, but Ripley dies, sacrificing herself after being impregnated with an alien queen. On a military research ship operating on the fringes of the solar system, the military is working to clone the alien by cloning Ripley from a blood sample. A group of pirates/mercenaries brings aboard some people in cryostasis to use as the hosts for breeding xenomorphs. Among them is a new crew member, Call, played by Ryder, who breaks in to where the scientists are holding Ripley in hopes of killing her before the scientists can extract the embryo queen, but she’s too late. And when the scientists actually grow some xenomorphs, donchaknow those gosh-darned killing machines escape at the same time as the pirates are trying to escape the space marines who think they’re up to something. So basically, it turns into a chase across the military ship while the xenomorphs. Fortunately, the new Ripley has xenomorph DNA mixed in with hers from the cloning, so she’s strong and resilient, but unfortunately is a little sympathetic to the aliens.
So it’s been a couple of years since I watched the first film (2021), and it’s certainly been a while since I bought the first, third, and fourth films (2013), so clearly I am not the biggest fan of the series. But I’ve seen a lot of things that slag on the movies after the second. Although the first was almost cosmic horror in tone as well as a slasher movie in space, Aliens was an action film, and this, too, is an action film and not so much a horror film, although it does have some budget for gore. So it’s an okay action film, with plot-dependent bad decisions and reveals/side quests/sacrifices that are necessary because the screenwriters are under pressure to deliver something cinematic.
So, okay. Given how long it’s been–almost thirty years(!), I am comfortable seeing them out of order. And I’m pretty sure I have not seen Aliens, the second film, available secondhand at book sales or garage sales. Apparently, people still hold onto it of all the films in the franchise.
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Movie Report: Who’s Harry Crumb? (1989)
I bought this movie last weekend and watched it right away. Actually, of that haul, I first picked out Revenge of the Nerds, but I then discovered that the disc was cracked and would play. Ah, gentle reader, I have not been in the habit of checking the condition of the dollar discs I buy–I have honestly only relatively recently gotten to the point where I consistently check to make sure that the folder contains the matching disc, but I might have to start checking the condition of the discs as well. Or not, if I don’t remember.
So this is a 1980s comedy whose plot we’ve seen before. When the daughter of a wealthy man is kidnapped, he contacts the Crumb and Crumb detective agency to investigate. That fellow, played by Jeffrey Jones (the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, if you need a reminder), is not a Crumb, and he puts the bumbling current generation of that well-reputed family of detectives on the case. Crumb bumbles his way through various plots at cross-purposes, including the wealthy man’s oversexed second wife, played by Annie Potts, who hopes to kill him before he can change his will, and the head of the agency itself being behind the kidnapping, hoping to get the ransom money to be able to afford the lifestyle that the oversexed second wife wants.
So it’s a series of often slapstick set pieces populated by Canadian comedians, and, you know what? It’s not a bad bit of film. It has its moments of amusement and isn’t a bad way to pass some time. You remember when these kinds of mid-tier movies, not blockbusters but not complete slop. They probably made more economic sense when you had a whole tail of other revenue possibilities for them besides the theater–video store rental sales, home video sales, licensing to cable or television…. Now you’ve got, what, cinema and streaming? So we lose out on films like this. The pity.
So I’m not the biggest John Candy fan, but I’ll think about picking up Uncle Buck if I can find it for a buck.
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Well, She Is From Up North
Not sure why my beautiful wife put Braunschweiger on the shopping list, but Braunschweiger she will get.
You know, we have been married for a couple of years now, and I am seemingly less equipped to read her handwriting than when we were younger. Of course, I have trouble reading my own handwriting at times. But I posit a thesis: Handwriting is used less to communicate between people these days and is more used for only taking notes for one’s self or for making lists. So it’s becoming, generally, less legible for other people to read than it had been.
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Right There With Adaptive Curmudgeon
He said:
“Depression People” wasn’t all old people, just some. You could tell by how they acted. They hoarded the tiniest resource. I remember seeing a box labeled “small bits of string” that had, you guessed it, small bits of string. It wasn’t a person who needed the bits for some logical reason, say a fly tying hobbyist. This was a person who’d been through The Great Depression. It created a desire to preserve things they might need. I remember other things; jars of buttons, dull needles, bent nails. All available for a song in the 1970’s. All carefully stored in case the “plenty” of 1970’s disappeared.
* * * *
Does some portion of each successive generation become “Depression People”?
I do not have a box labeled “bits of string”. I do have a bunch of campfire wood culled from old pallets. I’m damn near there aren’t I?
Who, me?
One of the reasons that I’m not making much headway on the garage is that I have so much stuff that I might use or repair someday, so I cannot throw it away today.
And AC talks about a broom that he didn’t want to get rid of. Ah, brother, I have not only a collection of brooms that do only an okay job and backup brooms that only do an okay job in the garage and a trashcan full of such tools in the shed, but when it comes time to retire them, I cut the broom handles off and save them for some unknown use in the future.
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Tell Me About It
Ozarks pumpkin harvest is less than normal so far: Late season heat helps pumpkins reach maturity
Ladies and gentlemen, the pumpkin harvest at Nogglestead:
One pumpkin smaller than a baseball. Our watermelon harvest was similar, but apparently the deer have cleared the melon bed pretty good as the autumn has approached. We had one mound of pumpkins, one of watermelon, and four of cantaloupe which did produce three or four melons for us.
The subhead says Late season heat helps pumpkins reach maturity. We had plenty of that. What we lacked for much of August and September was rain which is what fills them.
Overall, the gardens of Nogglestead provided us with about what we could handle, actually, except for tomatoes. I had a couple of zucchini per week for much of the summer from three mounds. I had a late harvest of a pound or two of radishes which was about what I could eat. We had enough cherries to make one pie before they disappeared. We never did get a blackberry harvest suitable for a pie. And I haven’t actually dug out my potatoes yet, so who knows what lies beneath.
The deer, though, made out like the hooved bandits they are.
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On The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets by William Speigelman (2002)
I picked this audio course up at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in April 2024, and a couple of currents in my life crossed to give me the opportunity to listen to the 12 hours of the course: First, I realized that I was spending a half hour a day in the vehicle on a number of days per week, so I could feasibly listen to a course, albeit slowly, and cross country season was starting which would also give me the chance to listen to a couple of the lectures per weekend. The second intersector was the fact that I finished the complete works of Keats after slogging through it for, what, a decade? Of course, there’s no book report for it since it’s a single book edition which also contains the complete works of Shelley (P.B., not Mary). And since that book looks like this:
| Keats | Shelley |
It might be another decade until I finish the book. If ever.
At any rate, this course focuses really on the poets and some of their works instead of English history around the turn of the nineteenth century, although we get a bit, which is why the course is and Works and not and TImes like the Ben Franklin course.
The lectures include:
- Romantic Beginnings
- Wordsworth and the Lyrical Ballads
- Life and Death, Past and Present
- Epic Ambitions and Autobiography
- Spots of Time and Poetic Growth
- Coleridge and the Art of Conversation
- Hell to Heaven via Purgatory
- Rivals and Friends
- William Blake–Eccentric Genius
- From Innocence to Experience
- Blake’s Prophetic Books
- Women Romantic Poets
- “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know”
- The Byronic Hero
- Don Juan–A Comic Masterpiece
- Shelley and Romantic Lyricism
- Shelley’s Figures of Thought
- Shelley and History
- Shelley and Love
- Keats and the Poetry of Aspiration
- Keats and Eros
- Process, Ripeness, Fulfillment
- The Persistence of Romanticism
With 24 lectures, he really does have time to cover the major poets, their biographies (often, in the case of the second generation, short biographies). And he emphasizes how each influenced the others and how each influenced poets who came later. I mean, I can see it: I can see how my own work was influenced by Wordsworth, and I surely wanted to be a Byronic hero back when I was steeped in this stuff in the university.
So a good course to listen to. But, I have to admit, sometimes my mind drifted during the actual poetry reading, which should have been when I was paying the most attention. And the professor goes into a great deal of analysis and finds meanings deeper probably than the poet probably intended, which again shows me that I was wise to not become a professor myself with that English degree. No matter how much I like poetry, having to teach one or more courses like this every semester for thirty years…. Not gonna lie, I don’t think I’d like it much at all. But the results (like this course)? I like them.
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Book Report: Maxfield Parrish by Laurence S. Cutler, Judy Goffman, and the American Illustrators Gallery (1993)
I bought this book at ABC Books in 2022, and I paid $7.95 for it. Clearly, I was jonesing for some art books to browse during football games, as I was watching a lot of them back in those days. As it stands, though, this weekend’s two football game Sunday is probably an abberation in my current watching habits, but it did give me a chance to pad the annual reading statistics.
This is a large oversized coffee table book about an artist and illustrator who was most active during the early decades of the 20th century. Fred Maxfield Parrish was the son of an etcher/engraver/artist and was brought up in those circles. He had talent of his own and absolutely was in the right place and the right time. Whereas his father might have still been working on the Currier and Ives paradigm, but changes in printing technology allowed color, and the need for color illustrations for magazines exploded, and Parrish was right there to take advantage of it. He became a known name in the industry and by the public, and he got certain concessions in his contracts: The magazine could run the illustration one time, and he would then have reprint rights and he could sell the original. So he was making bank until radio and television came along and the long decline of magazines began, at which point he turned to watercolors for a couple of decades in retirement.
A good story, and as for the art–well, definitely what would come to be known as middlebrow stuff. Linear colored illustrations with some depth and thought behind them–he studied architecture and worked extensively to block his works to use the Golden Ratio. Better than the “high” art you get now, but they’re illustrations and prints, so more like watercolors than oil paintings.
Still, an enjoyable book and perhaps leading to some understanding about the business of mass art transitioning from the 19th into the 20th centuries. But it’s not like I’ll be able to use that in conversation as my cats have heard it all before.
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Thirteen Years On….
Thirteen years ago, I said:
I’ve had the shell of that empty Sears monitor sitting on a desk in my garage since then. I haven’t settled on idea what to do with it. Fishbowl? Make it into a fake fireplace-style decoration? I’ve also got the shells of a number of LCD monitors that I’ve planned to put corkboard in or whiteboard cut down from larger ones I pick up, but I’ve not jumped on that either.
So much of the multi-year garage cleaning project is being overwhelmed by the sheer number and volume/cubic footage I have of craft materials of various stripes that I’m not entirely sure I want to give up just yet. I mean, what can I do with the computer monitor shell? I’ve removed the cathode ray tube and electronics. I could, I suppose, make it into a corkboard or a whiteboard using the bezel and scrap the rest. Or maybe look for an LCD screen that fits it which I can put a Raspberry Pi in it for a digital picture frame or something. But it’s not been pressing for the last thirteen years, to say the least.
Pretty sure I did something with the eMac bezel though.
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Day-um – And I Thought I Disrespected Him
In Facebook posts, I’ve often made quips about Jay Cutler and air raid sirens going off when he played for the Chicago Bears, but I never disrespected him like this: Former NFL quarterback and Kristin Cavallari’s ex-husband Jay Cutler jailed in Tennessee
To be identified as the former significant other of another insignificant reality television star? Man, that’s harsh.
Of course, I’m personally moving from my sons’ dad to my beautiful wife’s husband since I’m no longer doing as many school events and am doing more tech community events which are circles in which my wife has moved for several years. But she’s really a star, not just someone willing to pretend to be one on television.
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Book Report: Danmark: The Four Seasons by Inga Aistrup (1984)
This, too, is a fairly recent acquisition (May) which I flipped through during the Bears game on Sunday. Unlike the Okinawa book, the other languages used in the captions use the Roman alphabet, so I recognize them as Danish, French, Spanish, and German (and I can almost suss out the captions in some of them). And all the photos have the captions, and an end notes-type section includes further information about some of the photographs, although I admit I did not flip back to look at the photos as I read the extra material.
So: Denmark. Sounds interesting. It’s a relatively small country, a collection of islands and penninsulas between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. North of Germany, across the water from Sweden and Norway. It punched above its weight in history due to its location. It’s not a very tall country, as its highest point is only a couple hundred meters above sea level, and it has a variety of topography in spite of that. The photos focus on some of the more touristy old town areas and some of the rural areas. It looks interesting, but I do wonder how much it has changed since 1984 especially as Malmo, Sweden is just across the bridge.
I am starting to imagine that I will never have to choose whether to travel to Europe, but if I did, I might want to see Denmark.
Oh, and as a reminder, I must be on a Denmark kick as I did a little research on it in May when I found a Christmas card with a return address of Sundby, Mors, in a book.
Undoubtedly, Facebook will use this to surmise I like Danishes. And it would be right!
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New Nico Merch Has Arrived
This might look familiar to you since the photo with the tachi and wakizashi are on yesterday’s Good Junk Hunting post, but I’ve made them into Nico Sez t-shirts as well.
Nico sez: “I, too, have studied the blade.”
Nico sez: “Poor human. I don’t need artificial pointy ends.”
Available on CafePress now. C’mon, someone else buy one.
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Book Report: Okinawa (?)
On Sunday, I did something I really haven’t done in a while: I watched a couple of football games. And since the one was the Chicago Bears game, which they won not because they deserved to win it but because the Raiders deserved to lose it, I had the opportunity to flip through some art and touristy books between plays (which is most of the three hours of the televised football game).
The first book was the book on Okinawa that I picked up on Saturday because it was still on my desk (as are the swords).
As I mentioned, it’s a set of glossy photo pages bound with an iron comb and with a thin plastic front cover. It’s designed for tourists and dates probably from the 1990s (as one of the photos has the date 1992 attached to it).
English captions are really an afterthought, as the book is written probably primarily in Japanese, but looks to have two other alphabets in the mix (Mandarin and Korean?) Not all of the photos have English captions, so although I could look at the photos, I didn’t know where most of them were taken or what I was looking at–a lot of stone monuments and shrines, but little to explain them.
So this was a quick browser for sure, and it shows the wide variety of topography that Okinawa has. Including white sand beaches which were quite stained when my grandfather visited. I often mention, either because I want to bask in reflected glory or because I respect what the other men of my family did, that three generations–my grandfather, my father, and my brother–were stationed on Okinawa during their time in the Marine Corps. I was thinking about giving this book to my brother for Christmas, but I will probably keep it and stack it atop the precarious pile of art books atop a couple of my bookshelves in the common area.
So that must be some kind of record; I bought it on Saturday, and I browsed it on Sunday. Maybe not–I probably did that plenty when I watched multiple football games the day after book sales in the past. But I will likely not watch multiple games again.
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Facebook Is Better Than Santa Claus
On Thursday, I posted this on LinkedIn about my time in the print shop:
“You’ve got to pace yourself. You don’t want to run out of work,” Kenny said. Kenny was an old hand, for sure: he’d been at the printing company since the War, over fifty years before I started.
Kenny ran the t-head sheetfed press across the shop floor but came to help train me to run the web press–web meaning the paper it uses comes from a large roll that unspools as it prints and is cut into sheets at the end as opposed to a sheetfed press which takes sheets cut to size and picks them up one-by-one to impress ink upon them.
A web press more suited my style. Do good work fast. I once ran 70,500 impressions of generic prescription blanks in a day, and I was so pleased that I posted my initials and the high score on the little Didde. If I ran out of orders, Red, the foreman, sent me to the bindery section where I could learn the cutting, gluing, and packaging machines, or I was sent to work with Kenny to learn the t-head press or the giant forged steel Heidelberg press only used to print incrementing numbers on previously printed forms. That ancient Heidelberg was built in the U.S. Zone of Germany–that is to say, after Kenny started at the print shop.
But if you think this is going to be a simple post contrasting the Open Mindset and Closed Mindset which would make me more valuable than Kenny, you’re mistaken.
Because I bounced from machine to machine, and later from job/client to job/client, I have a lot of fodder for synthetic thought. I can bring ideas from outside a particular industry or vertical and can suggest things that people steeped in the current company might not.
Kenny, however, had deep knowledge of the existing technologies and processes at the print shop. He had have insights into how to make the existing processes more efficient based on the facts on the ground, the territory and not just the map.
For real improvement, you’ll need to apply both kinds of insight. And you’ll need an iterative process–maybe not 50+ years, but more than an outside consultant popping in, writing up some procedures, and popping out. The self-help dictum that “Real change comes from within” applies to businesses, too.
On Thursday, Facebook determined I was into prescription blanks:
To be honest, given that the phone number is only two digits, I probably did not print that particular item, but it’s reflex blue alright. Given how far the reach of the print shop was throughout small towns in Missouri and Kansas, I might have printed blanks for that drug store if it was still a concern in the 1990s.
A week ago, I posted a twee review of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.. And Facebook was like, “Oh, you like that show?”
What will Facebook think I like next? Facebook following me around the Internet? “Like” is not the word I would use.
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New Product Announcement
I’ve added a new t-shirt to the CafePress store:
You can order one if you’re so inclined here.
Strangely enough, my CafePress store has proven to be the most profitable endeavor of my “throw it out there” attempts at passive income. I’ve had it since 2004 when I made some off-color bumper stickers and then some political things which never sold. But when I started adding IT things badged with QA Hates You, I sold a couple–especially Project Manager Wall Clocks which have sold enough that I got a check from them back when they were new and which still sell steadily enough to cover the costs of having a CafePress storefront.
The Nico Sez line of apparel? I bought one to see how they would look. I’m wearing it as I type this blog post, actually.
The two apps I have on the app store? I sold one copy of Boxing Drill Companion to someone in Eastern Europe on the day I released it. I sold two copies of Dr. Franklin’s Art of Virtue Tracker: One to my beautiful wife, and one to her mother (who uses it every day, by the way, so: yay(?)). Which is almost $3 in revenue against $99 for an annual Apple developer account.
The books? Yeah, build your brand online didn’t work; not only did I spend $300 for a cover, but I sent out 50 to newspapers, magazines, and bloggers and got, what, five reviews? I’ve sold fewer than 100 copies of it and a handful of copies of the other books, but I’ve done my own covers for the others and have not sent out review copies except to the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Contest or whatever it’s called. Which might explain one of the reasons that I haven’t written much long form in a while.
And this blog? I think I got a check from Google AdSense once over a decade ago. Against the ever-increasing costs of hosting and, fortunately, no longer the cost of updating the SSL certificate, but, yeah, not a profit center.
With apologies to Stephen Crane, a poem:
A man said to the internet,
“Sir, I exist!”
Maybe I should focus on more Civilization IV. I lose less money that way.
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Good Junk Hunting, Saturday, September 27, 2025: Estate and Garage Sales
I mentioned that I needed to find a Lil Tikes or the equivalent for our Trunk or Treat trunk this year. So as I was roaming the southwest part of Springfield on Friday, I saw a lot of signs for garage sales. So on Saturday morning, I bundled the youngest into the vehicle, and a-hunting we a-went.
As it happens, at the first garage sale where we stopped, we found a stroller with a car-shaped base whose handle detaches for $20. And at the last place we stopped, we found a nonfunctional powered Disney Princess car for $10. So we got two for our tableau for $30, which ain’t bad. Although I’m not sure what we’re going to do with them when we’re done. Probably leave them in the garage for a decade.
I also picked up some other stuff.
One garage sale had dollar DVDs, so I picked up a couple:
- Harvey with Jimmy Stewart
- Apocalypto directed by Mel Gibson which will likely show mesoamerican native cultures as they were.
- Porky’s which I have not seen
- Uncut Gems, the Adam Sandler drama. Surprised it got a DVD release, actually.
- Revenge of the Nerds; saw this a bunch, but not recently.
- Who’s Harry Crumb, the John Candy film.
- The Equalizer, the reboot of the television series. No, not the Dana Owens one. The Denzel Washington one.
And…. We found an unexpected estate sale off of Scenic. It looked to be run by the elderly sisters of the deceased, whom I was told was a teacher who had been a world traveler and who had spent over a decade in Italy. The garage was full of travel books, the kinds of memento books about such and such castle or this or that city. A professional sale would have had everything half off on Saturday, but they were going only 25% off, which made for some real arithmetic, so I only got one book: A comb-bound collection of photos from Okinawa, where three generations of my family have served in the Marine Corps and the home of karate (see my book reports on the works of Gichin Funakoshi). I mean, I could have gone nuts, but instead…
Instead I bought a tachi/wakizashi sword pair.
A while back, I bought a rapier. I looked at the rapier, bought didn’t have enough gift cards for it. Well, come Christmas, I had enough, and I went back, but the rapier was gone, and the little cabinet had a katana instead. As I had my heart set upon a rapier, I didn’t buy the katana. And when I steeled myself (ahut) to buy the katana, it was gone. Eventually, though, a rapier reappeared, and I bought it. It’s now on my wall with the others, but I was a katana short of satisfied.
This pair was marked $50, which meant it was under $40 for the pair, and so I bought them. Although I’m not sure where I’ll put them as my bladed wall is full already (like so many things here). Perhaps I will move things around to fit them in. One thing is sure, though: they won’t remain on the stand. The cats knocked them down in the few minutes I had them on the table to take a photo. And we don’t want any fractional kittens at Nogglestead.
The family member collecting the money said, “Ah, the ninja swords,” and I corrected her: “They’re samurai swords.” They’re different, of course, and a samurai probably would have shown her the steel had she mistaken him for a ninja. I would expect her sister would not have made the mistake.
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Brian’s Garage Is The Trenchcoat Schtick
I have said that Nogglestead has the trenchcoat schtick, where you can find anything at times somewhere (in the linked example, I found a jump ring on the kitchen counter that I could use to make a pendant out of an English pound coin).
But sometimes the things one finds are of dubious utility.
I’m on a multi-year project to slowly clean out my garage which is not impassable but is getting there. For too many years, it’s been a life of “clean out the car by throwing things from the car into the mess beside the car” and “just put it down anywhere when you’re done with it” even if that is atop something else just put down instead of away so that after a few rounds or strata of that behavior, you cannot find anything. Or even the multi-year process of cleaning the garage involves taking things from the shelves and sorting them into bins and then determining I need more bins, and then leaving the bins scattered around the floor for weeks until I get additional binnery which I just set down atop other things when I unload them from the car (combining the best from “clean out the car by throwing things from the car into the mess beside the car” and “just put it down anywhere when you’re done with it”).
Also, as I’m culling things, I’m building up a solid bank of boxes of items to donate to charitable garage sales and whatnot (but they only arise once a year or so, so I cannot clear them as they go).
So, basically, I’m moving the clutter and reorganizing it and, once in a while, throwing something out. But not a lot. Maybe a couple of cubic inches every couple of months move to the garbage bin. I even finally discarded the child-sized foam martial arts sparring gear that my boys have not used in almost five years and have since way outgrown. The web-drenched martial arts bags, though, remain on the pile.
Whenever I think about buckling down and doing it, I’m overwhelmed. Which means the “process” is mostly me wandering around and nibbling at the margins. It came to a head Thursday when we had a garage door man in for a bit of repair, and he asked if I had any bolts. Ah, gentle reader, I have several sizes of carriage bolts that I have used, this summer, for repairing my gates–along with matching nuts and washers. But when he asked, I could not find them. Hours later, it occurred to me that I’d used a bucket to carry them to the places where I used them, so instead of looking for them in bins under the piles on the floor, I should have been looking for buckets under the piles on the floor.
So while the garage door man worked, I wandered around the garage, wondering where, again, to begin.
And I began by taking this from one of the built in shelves:
And putting it into a box on the rick of donations that we’ve gathered.
Model rocket wadding? Why do we have this? I don’t remember the boys having model rockets at all, although I don’t remember every gift they received (or even that I gave them) which they might have messed with for a day or so and then set aside. I haven’t seen any other parts of model rocketry in the garage. I just…. don’t know.
So it goes into the donations bin in hopes someone will find a quarter’s worth of use out of it, but….
Well, I wish every decision I had to make was this easy.
You would think it would be just as easy to determine a fate for every pine board that our family has broken in martial arts classes testing over the last fifteen years would have an easy solution, but no. I think I need another bin or two to contain and consolidate the collection. So I will leave them where they are for now.
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Movie Report: Gattaca (1997)
The film stars Ethan Hawke and Jude Law, so you know it’s a serious film, not an actioner or thriller like, say, Paycheck or Johnny Mnemonic (which I have seen since I read the book, but that was before I bored you a twee “movie report” on every last film I’ve seen recently).
At any rate, in the near future, prenatal genetic sampling/testing allows parents to select for ideal traits in their offspring, which leads to a bifurcated society where God babies/naturally conceived people are called “in-valids” and are left to the lesser jobs of society. One such person, played by Hawke, finds a black market fellow who will help him impersonate a “valid.” Jude Law plays the man whose identity Hawke takes, a champion swimmer and genius who is a parapalegic and hence is shunned for his infirmity. Law’s character provides blood and urine samples so that Hawke can work at Gattaca, a space exploration company, as a navigator whose work and plans earn him the right/privilege of launching on a mission to Titan. But in the week before Hawke can relax his ruse while he’s off world, the mission director at Gattaca is murdered. Despite the care he has taken for some years in removing loose skin and hair, he leaves a stray eyelash near the scene of the crime, and it is swept up, and the authorities know an in-valid was near the scene. So he has to continue playing the role under increased pressure and in getting through new challenges, including checkpoints and random sweeps of the Gattaca headquarters. Along the way, he finds that some people hope that he succeeds and help, and that his greatest opponent is his augmented brother who is heading up the investigation.
So: Eh, all right, I’ve seen it. A little more serious than it needed to be to be really entertaining–the pace was not enough to really be tense, and it lacked enough action to make it compelling. I should probably start a rating system for how many times I paused the film and went upstairs to fold some laundry in the middle of it or something–much less times where I paused a film and came to finish it another day. I must have paused this film three or four or five times.
Still, it must have punched above its weight and resonated with enough people at the fin de siècle that they refer to it today. Kind of like today’s…. erm…. well…. What will members of this generation allude to in twenty years? Probably nothing. Maybe hollaback meme templates.
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I Know The Feeling
I don’t want to spoil it for you, gentle reader, but our holiday trunk this year will be used car salesmen. So I have been haunting thrift stores trying to find not only loud sports coats and shirts for our family to wear but also a cheap used Little Tikes car for our tableau.
I went to Red Racks, and I had trouble finding the men’s apparel because it was on the opposite side of the store from the other clothing. As I wandered, I found the toys section and one of the standard orange Little Tikes cars for $20. Perfect! I might be done shopping the first week!
So in my rotation through the store, I found the men’s section and sourced an ugly yellow plaid shirt, and I was passing through the records section on the way to the toys. I half-heartedly flipped through some of them, and as I headed to the toys, some guy was wheeling the car to the cash register.
So I know how this feels.
I cannot tell you how many of these I have seen at garage sales this year because I was not looking for them. Now, I can tell you how many I will see: 0.
Doesn’t help that cross country season runs right up to the Trunk or Treat, and I won’t have much time to crawl yard sales looking. But we’ll think of something else if we don’t find one or two.
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Book Report: Rowdy Joe Lowe: Gambler with a Gun by Joseph G. Rosa and Waldo E. Koop (1989)
I picked up this book in June, and since I’ve been reading a lot of Westerns this year (The Man from Skibbereen, Westward the Tide, Homicide Near Hillsboro (sorta), and Once More with a .44, which is only four books this year, but it seems like more), I thought I would read a real history book about a character in the old west. Probably because I watched a lot of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. concurrently.
And, well. This book is more a history of the towns where Joe Lowe visited and some of the stories based on what people said about him than a true biography. He left no diary or journal, and this pre-Internet book relies on the authors, one of whom is in England, relied on historical societies to provide news clippings containing the title character–and they would have had to rely on whatever indexes they had at hand to find them.
So we get the story of Ellsworth, Kansas; Witchita, Kansas; Newton, Kansas; San Antonio, Texas; Leadville, Colorado; and Denver, Colorado. Joe Lowe lived in and often operated dance halls in this cities, which often brought him into conflict with other dance hall owners, cowboys, gamblers, and the police. As I mentioned, much of the coverage is quoting newspaper articles about his court cases or public recrimination for dance halls, prostitution, and whatnot with some connective tissue in it. Many of the articles mention him as having a great reputation for being a bad man, but I don’t know if it’s borne out by the text–I have no real insight into how other such personages were described in the papers of the day. But Joe Lowe did apparently know some of the other more recognized names from the era, including Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and others. So maybe the book really is talking about a legend about whom I’d never heard.
Still, a good read and interesting because I’ve somehow become interested in the old west in my dilettante fashion. Looking at the front matter, I see Roda wrote The Gunfighter: A Man or Myth?. Which I have seen and passed over many times on my to-read shelves since I bought it seventeen years ago. In a post my sainted mother commented on. At any rate, I might not pass over it the next time that I see it.
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