Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

A Return to An Outstanding Question From 2006

You know, if you just hang on, all the nagging questions (Deep Throat, Kenneth and his frequency) will be answered. 

Well, thirteen years after 2006, an answer has arrived for the question posed in this post: why is there a reference to "Scary Ghost Stories" in The Christmas Song?

There'll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago

I was so obsessed with finding the answer that I even contacted the composer's grandson via his blog, but he could only say that his grandfather was the composer, not the lyricist.

Facebook's algorithm must have looking in the blog archives, because FB posted Smithsonian Magazine's  Plea to Resurrect the Christmas Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories, which led to Smithsonian’s Why Do People Tell Ghost Stories at Christmas (which even references the song) and evidently the real question is, "Why Don't Middle Class Americans (Like Ellen) Tell Ghost Stories at Christmas,” because evidently Christmas ghost stories are a real thing people do. Or did. Or at least they did it for "much of the 19th century."

Long, long ago indeed.

 

Gary’s Comment

Gary complains sometimes that I don’t respond often enough when he’s speaking to me. There’s a certain amount of “oh” and “um-hmm” he requires. (No actual words, that’s interrupting, can’t have that.)

The last time he demanded to know that I was listening, I responded sarcastically with an overly loud and animated ”UM-HMM,” which prompted him to call me ...

An “insolent bitch.“

The “bitch” part rolled right off, because it’s true, particularly after that “UM-HMM,” buuuuut ... ”insolent?”

I thought about it a moment before I began laughing uncontrollably. Insolent? Insolent! Have I completely misread the household dynamic? Here I thought we were equals; evidently, I am an underling. An insolent underling.

We made up soon after, but you know next time he acts up I’m playing the insolence card. “Be quiet, you insolent puppy!” “Shut your insolent mouth.” “I shall not abide such insolence!”

Weekly Paint Progress: 11/28

This week the dog and pitcher went from this:

to this:

I knew there would be contrast problems with this.  I like the pitcher even less now, if that's possible.  The dog bank's still okay, though. What's left is the background-- all cast shadows, my least favorite thing.

and, happy Thanksgiving!

Christmas Decor

Christmas decorations at my house take five minutes to put up. Outside: plug in the robot reindeer on the porch, put the wreath on the mailbox. Inside: put the non-robot reindeer by the window, hang the tree. Last year it looked like this. (For a moment, anyway.)

This year the inside is just too cluttered for me to pull off last year's deception, when I tidied things up for just for the photo. The clutter has won.

So, I got creative. The one non-robot reindeer is now perched over the stairwell, standing on the leaf of my dining table that just happens to fit the span of the basement steps. 

He likes it. I like it. He peeks at me from his platform like a go-go dancer.

He might not look as good with the tree hung in front of him, or perhaps he’ll look even more festive.

Review: The Good Liar

We didn’t expect to see this one — Dr. Sleep was on the docket, but it didn’t start until 9 at night.

If you haven’t seen any of the commercials for The Good Liar, you are better off, and if you intend to see it, avoid the commercials. 

I feel I will appreciate Helen Mirren as an actress when she begins to show her age, but right now I find myself distracted by how gorgeous she is. Her jawline at 74 is tighter than mine was in junior high.

Ian McClellan looks his age, however. Both put in fine performances.

Generally, I think the word I would use to describe this movie is satisfying.

The Novel: Chapter 25

I know. Chapter 25. The first chapters are numbered 1, 2, 25, 7. 

Chronologically, chapter 25 occurs before chapter 1. It’s out of place in the narrative. 

Most of it is a lesson on how an oil rig works. Five solid pages are devoted to a description of a 90-second oil strike. 

The main character doesn’t appear at all. Two new characters appear, one is an ass and the other ... is an ass, but he contributes to the only pleasant scene in the chapter. 

Problematic. It needs some dreamy harp music, or narration. “Y’all remember when we struck oil?”

In Which It Takes Me Entirely Too Many Years to Reach an Obvious Solution

In the past three years I have knocked off forty pounds (vegetables/low fat protein, one starch a day), gained back twenty (I added back one additional starch), then lost thirty (eat anything I want except starch) for a total of fifty pounds. I saw 189.3 the last time I weighed myself: it was a happy day. As a result, my rings are rattling and spinning around my fingers. 

I weighed 122 when I got my engagement/wedding band set, which has since been resized twice, broken, and fused together again. I weighed 135 when I got my anniversary ring, which has been resized once. So now I weigh 190 189.3, walking around with rings sized for a 240 pound woman.

I’ve spent a few years wearing very thin gold wire rings that fit on top of my big floppy rings so that I can draw my hands out of my pockets without leaving a ring behind. And now, yes, even those are getting too big.

Yesterday I remembered that I have Mom’s wedding band. Mom was half a foot shorter than I and she never topped fifty pounds less than my goal weight. Somehow, Mom’s wedding band fits me perfectly now. 

I used that to lock my wedding set down. Then I used it to lock my anniversary ring down. Then I got on-line to look at ring guards. Then I looked at cubic zirconian ring enhancers. Then I looked at silicon ring resizers and How to Resize a Ring with a Hot Glue gun. 

And then this morning — and I know it took me way way too long to figure this out, and I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out three years ago — I discovered that I! Have! Other! Fingers! And they are all fatter than my ring finger! I stuck my wedding set on my index finger, my anniversary ring on my middle finger of my right hand, and Mom’s wedding band on my Official Ring Finger.

I’ve had it that way for three hours now. Mom hasn’t risen from the grave to claim her bride. (Yet.) I feel a little like a gypsy with rings on unofficial fingers, but Mom’s ring is substantial, and my wedding set looks relieved that it doesn’t have to “represent” in this world of cubic zirconia engagement rings the size of sunflowers.

I haven’t run this configuration past Gary yet, but unless he feels that I’m defrauding the public with this setup I’m sticking with it. In fact, I might just get my great grandmother’s wee engagement ring out and put it on my pinky. Dad’s high school ring would fit my thumb. Everything's wide open now!

Heart

I spoke this morning with a young woman who got her college degree in Korea, then decided she wanted to get her Masters in the US, then she got two Masters degrees and a job here.

I can’t even begin to imagine doing the reverse: starting a life in Korea. I only have enough heart to fly to Korea and stay there in a hotel for two weeks. I cannot imagine having enough heart to fly to a foreign country, find housing, take classes.

That conversation today struck me because lately I find I am greatly lacking in heart.

I’m not considering living in Korea, but I am considering selling Mom’s house. I’ve never sold a house before. I don’t like it. I’d say it’s scary, but that’s not the word. It’s not fear of the unknown; I have a general idea of the house-selling process. I’m not afraid, I’m not worried, I just don’t have the heart for it. 

Here I have friends who hustle up grant money to direct plays in Germany, and friends who carve out a new careers in their forties, but I don’t even have the heart to do something as pedestrian as sell a house. If my brother wasn’t counting on half the money, I wouldn’t do it at all. 

It’s not even a house I live in, for Pete’s sake. What is wrong with me? is it age? Anxiety? Complacency? I need a pep talk.

This Year's Christmas Ornament

Every Christmas we both buy an ornament to memorialize the past year. Toilets and raccoons, alpacas and armadillos, tornadoes, cheetahs, Eiffel towers  and poodles for the year we went to Paris, a guitar for the year I took up the guitar, wine bottles for the year we took up wine.

This year's only memorable activity? We replaced our driveway. I considered just drilling a hole in a chunk of concrete and slinging it up the tree, but it turns out there's a person in England who makes personalized Christmas ornaments out of cement.

Gary's going to be hard pressed to find an ornament more perfect than that.

 

Weekly Paint Progress: 11/21

This week the dog and Pitcher went from this:

to this:

It only has brown, white and black in it (even the 'pink' pitcher is brown and white). I was pleased with the dog, so I stopped. I need to stop looking at the real-life pitcher and tyring to interpret it. Instead I need to just paint the simple sphere I know it should be.

Mail

"Oh, I'll just take a minute before dinner and go through my mail pile."

Most of my physical mail just alerts me that I've paid a bill on-line. It wastes paper, but Gary insists.

Sometimes, I get a letter stating that I need a mammogram, or I need to renew a license, or pay a doctor, or throw in another five dollars to an auto-pay account. I had those exact letters in a pile before dinner.

It did not take a minute. It took forty-five minutes. I had to get stamps, a pen, envelopes: I expected that. But I did not expect the rigamarole of signing on to the auto-pay, having to get a security code texted because I was using a new device, getting my purse because it contained the phone where the texts go - I won't bore you any more. Every little task had some tangential series of tasks that went along with it and sucked up all the time.

I finally got through my four letters with one computer, two apple devices, one phone call, one email, three visits to get something out of my purse, plus the stamps and envelope, and even after all that there was one letter I just slapped on my desk when I saw I could avoid it until January 2020.

I am spoiled.

Review: Ford vs Ferrari

Ford vs Ferrari is a mildly entertaining bromance. I’d watch it if it came on TV and I had nothing else to do. In addition, Matt Damon has a very cute nose. Those are the pros. There are no particular cons.

It taught me a lot about endurance sportscar races. (I would not advise studying up on the Le Mans race before you go, because the Wikipedia page has spoilers.)

It was okay, but if Jojo Rabbit was a ten, this was a four. I laughed at FvF three times, and I almost produced a tiny tear once, whereas with JoJo I laughed, I cried, I soiled myself.

All further movies this year shall be judged on the Jojo scale. FvF gets four Jojos. (Four rabbits? Four Heils up?)

The Novel: Chapter Two

I make fun of Gary over his rule that all TV shows must have an upstanding, moral person you can root for. I think someone needs to be sympathetic, but they don’t have to be a good person. Don Draper isn’t moral, but he’s sympathetic enough to watch as he makes his way. Same for Walter White or Nucky Thompson or Tommy Gavin.

I wonder what those characters have that makes them sympathetic. It it a sense of humor? Is it that they are more resigned than angry? I ask because Chapter Two of The Inheritance Novel introduces seven characters, all but a few are very unsympathetic. 

Two are physically violent, one is verbally violent, one is a drunk, one is a drunk addict, and there are two side characters who bring the funny. I have seven people and I don’t relate to any of them.

One is clearly the villain. He’s clearly an ass, but his backstory was probably the most relatable and detailed. Perhaps the villain is actually an anti-hero and I’ve read it wrong so far. 

So far I can say I am glad to have never worked with roughnecks on an oil rig.  I'll keep going, but I haven't latched on to anyone, and that connection's what I look for in a novel.

Peculiar Neighbors

We have neighbors who have a note by their doorbell that essentially says, “we don’t answer the door.” It isn’t the typical “no solicitors” sign. It makes it clear that they don’t respond for any reason, even if they are home.

One time some friends came for a party and knocked at the wrong door. (I suppose they felt the “we don’t answer” sign was in keeping with my personality.) And then, seeing people inside, they let themselves in. When my friends realized there was no menopause celebration at that address, they apologized and backed out.

I didn’t think of that for six years, until last night when a florist rang our bell. There was a bouquet for the neighbors, who were not answering, and it was too cold to leave the flowers on the porch. Gary took on the task of getting the flowers to the neighbors.

He peered into their empty front room, knocked, called out, no response. He left the flowers for a moment on their porch while he got their full names off an envelope in their mailbox. He came back home to google a phone number, and discovered that all the names on the mail were all aliases. 

The alias thing creeped him out. I pointed out it might be something innocent, like someone changed their name after a marriage. “Their first name?” he asked.

He went back to just leave a note and discovered they’d darted out to get the flowers off the porch.

I don’t know, man, it’s odd. And now, in retrospect, everything they do is odd. Every day they hose off their hubcaps. Why? They don’t put their car in their garage even though there’s room. Why?

I’d say they were quiet and kept to themselves like your typical serial killers, but they aren’t. I’ve had conversations with “Pam” the one I know as “Pam,” and I’ve discussed snowblowers with the older gentleman who lives there. So, not serial killers. Evading the law? Subpoenas? Witness protection?

Really really shy?

Positive/Negative Time

I recently got around to framing a souvenier print we picked up in New Orleans.

The framer asked if we'd been to Mardi Gras in 2018, as the print says, and I said, "Oh no, it's been years and years since we've been on vacation." I researched it, and it has been years and years in that it has been one year plus one year. We were there in February 2018, so it's coming up on two years once winter is over. It feels like five years since we've left the house.

 On the other hand, the Trump presidency has just flown by. I can remember election night like it was yesterday.

I need to change my attitude. I think so rarely about enjoyable things that they seem an eternity away; yet I think so often about the negative that it feels like yesterday.

 

 

Bad Ramps

There are two highway ramps in the Saint Louis area that I hate to take.

One is the ramp I take home if I have been south, and that is the ramp from 270 North to Page Ave West. It takes you on what feels like a 360 degree loop, and it's a bit elevated. I'm always conscious that one moment of inattention and I will be launched into the sky, and I will not be treated to instant death, but will hurtle down for three regret-filled seconds before I stick the landing.

So, that's a bad ramp, but it is not the worst ramp.

The worst is South on the Innerbelt to Highway 40 West. St.Louisans, you know the one I mean. The one that takes you on a gradual 90 degree turn ...

... from, what, two stories up?

You know how bad it is? Google Maps doesn't have a street view image of the vista from that ramp, I suppose because you see nothing but sky anyway. I tried to get an image but could not: after one click the image would just fragment and then another click would put me on Highway 40 at a normal elevation.

I think I've got another five years of driving this ramp before I take Mom's tactic and plan my routes on side streets making only right turns.

Pants

I was on eBay, scouting out olive pants, and I saw these.

In the past I would have given these pants a wide berth, because I don’t need any horizontal lines accentuating my already-wide ankles, but then I remembered how much I enjoyed wearing my unusual linen pants this summer. So even though I can’t pair them with 4-inch peach stilettos, I bought the pants.

Once I unpacked them I discovered that photo above is as phony as an ad for soup that’s been doctored with marbles and Vaseline. The ankle button straps took an evening of running a gather stitch, fusing, and ironing to get the pants to look as they do above. 

The first time I wore them, I felt they had a little Nazi vibe. Just a little, with the army green, and how they puff up above the ankles like they’re tucked in to jack boots. I was worrying about that when two ladies made a point of saying they liked my pants.

“Are you sure? They don’t look too much like Nazi pants?” 

“No, just kind of military. That’s what makes them cute.”

And yes, just as the linen pants were only popular with one demographic, this pair of ladies were not white, and once again all my white friends stayed silent. Now I feel compelled to keep pushing the pants envelope.  Palazzo parachute pants? Do they make pants with a bustle? Ooo, pants with a train, like you’d see at the Grammys. I’ll keep following this experiment until all the demographics are horrified by my pants.

Weekly Paint Progress: 11/14

I couldn't do it. I couldn't just paint the pitcher. Now it’s a pitcher and a toy dog bank.

This is the drawing:

That head is way too small. That's a chihuahua head on a bulldog body.

And I have to change the values that are there in real life. All too dark on one side and light on the other. You can’t even tell that the slope of the dog's back mimics the slope of the pitcher.

Meteor

I was dozing off Monday night when a huge boom woke me up. For an instant I assumed it was one of my nodding-off dreams, until Gary said, “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?”

”Frost boom!” said I.

”Fireworks!” said Gary.

”METEOR STRIKE!” said the Internet.

According to the dozens of Ring doorbell video systems that caught the image, a meteor flamed out about 65 miles to the northwest of my house and 38 miles above, because evidently that’s how low a meteor has to be to earth's surface to create the boom. I can’t say it landed, because it quite clearly burns up (There are several videos here on the local news.)

It certainly sounded like it landed, but per NASA that’s because at was moving at 33,500 mph, faster than the speed of sound, and created a sonic boom.

NASA called it “Event: 20191112-025148” - and it was only the size of a basketball and it came from “an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.”

It was quite exciting. And, it has spoiled all meteor showers, because they are so quiet and far away.

Review: Kathleen Madigan

So even though Gary bailed on me, Kathleen Madigan made me laugh. Her jokes about her parents still land, even though they’re a little sadder (her aging parents are covered with band-aids now instead of popping unlabeled purse mystery pills). 

There was a good chunk devoted to ridiculing the Democratic candidates for being old and another good chunk ridiculing millennials for being young. She’s four years younger than I am, so I was not offended by either. 

I laughed steadily though her act (and also the opener, another Saint Louis native who has issues with farmers - constantly with the callbacks to farmers, so he got bonus points with our city crowd).

Just in case you think I was only amused because I share the comics’ views on daylight saving time and parents and politicians, at one point Kathleen Madigan took down a shark victim and then turned to eviscerate the sharks. I truly could not breathe during that part.

Pre-Concert BS by the Traitorous Husband

Months ago we both tickets to see Kathleen Madigan downtown on 11/9.

Evening of of 11/8: Gary said, “I feel bad.” I began organizing my list of friends I could call upon to step in when Gary flakes.

Morning of 11/9: Gary said, “I feel pretty good.”

Late morning of 11/9, Gary said, “I don’t feel good.” 

I contacted two friends, but neither of them could take Gary’s ticket. As I was calling my third friend, Gary said, “I can go. I’ll be fine.”

Thirty years of this made me reply, “No, you’re just jacking me around,” and I kept dialing the next friend in my list.

“No. Stop,” he said. “Really, I’ll be fine. I want to go.”

Five minutes before we were going to leave, he said, and does this shock you, “I can’t go. I’m too sick.” 

There was some screaming, and the one friend I contacted right after that call could probably report how disgusted I sounded, but of course she had plans as well. There was no time, of course, so I just put out a call on Facebook that if anyone wanted to meet me downtown before the concert I had a free ticket, which of course went to waste, because the only taker saw it too late. This caused me to waste the pre-paid parking ticket as well, because I didn’t want to hike three blocks alone downtown at night, but I made it into the next-door Blues hockey parking garage before it closed.

Once in my seat, I offered Gary’s seat to the woman on the other side of it. It turns out she was there alone because HER worthless ticket-wasting husband did the same thing, only his excuse was, “I just don’t feel like going,” and he had pulled the same stunt before with Elton John tickets. We bonded, obviously. (Her husband didn’t waste cruise tickets by forgetting his passport, but he did waste a shore excursion because he went back for his hat and missed the boat.)

I was very fortunate to encounter a fellow sufferer. (I am a little surprised she spoke to me, given that he betrayed me while my hair was still un-fixed, which means I stomped out of the house and I hadn’t done anything but dry the roots, so it was just chunks of splayed hair.)

Later, during the act, I noticed there were other empty seats in our row. How many seats belonged to other seat-wasting dogs-in-the-manger who jacked their wives around? Live and learn. In the future, I will not believe the “No, really, I’m fine,” mid-morning dodge, and just go ahead and get another date.

Opera Sale

Every few years the Opera company will sell off old costumes from old productions.

I nabbed a fez from The Magic Flute and a skull mask from Orfeo & Euridice.

I was doing some research to find out who Ms Thelwell is, and it turns out I have seen her as Gilda's nurse in Rigoletto, and as the paramour Ruby in Fire Shut Up in My Bones.

I have a fez and a skull. I am prepared to star in an opera about dead Shriners. I might have to write one about the Maine Pumpkinfest Shriner go-cart crash.

The Novel: Chapter One

Okay - I have read Chapter One of the PaterNovel.

It really isn’t that bad. He was a journalist, so he knows how to hook you in with a good lead. All the exposition is knocked out in Chapter One, but it was still pretty readable.

Our hero is in Oklahoma looking to rescue a lost love named Aggie. I’d say this was another example of his poor name choices (her full name is Aggie Lawless), but Aggie is a good Texan name. Texas A&M students are called “Aggies” (the A stands for Agriculture). I’m sure that’s where he got the name.

Only, of course, Mom’s name was Margaret. From Margaret to Maggie to Aggie isn’t that much of a stretch. But it is a stretch, and it’s sad and silly that I’m stretching. I will be doing this all through the novel; I am certain of it. Searching for connections that are not there.

Physical Solutions

I thought of something to make cold and flu season more tolerable.

(It doesn't involve avoiding colds or the flu, though I have been washing my hands several times a day, and I confess I considered wearing gloves at work. I'm not full-on germaphobe, though. A little girl coughed in my face on Halloween and I didn't wash it off.)

In our house, when a cold or flu or sore throat gets bad enough, we do reach for symptomatic relief, stubborn though we are. Usually the symptomatic relief is all jumbled under the bathroom sink. I've tried to organize it, but still, rooting under the bathroom sink with a head cold is hard. Rooting around under the bathroom sink when your husband has a head cold is hard too. ("ELLEN GET ME SOME COUGH DROPS THE NEW ONES NOT THE STALE ONES.")

But now, after my great idea, all the medicines are easily accessed from a chest-level shelf in the linen closet.

Now when Gary feels a cold coming on, he just reaches in the linen closet for the cold/flu container in the back, and perhaps he might pluck a few pills from the pill container on the right. If he has a sore throat, instead of whispering, "ellen my throat's sore get me some sucrets the red ones not the green ones" he can even ... well, one of us can plunk the sore throat container on the bathroom counter for the duration of the illness and browse at will.

Oh, and for those who are thinking, “Damn, that’s a lot of drugs,” what you see here is a drug larder. It’s our in-home personal pharmacy. It is stocked full of NyQuil backups and four boxes of Tylenol Cold and Flu capsules so there will be no 2 a.m. runs to the store. There are also medicines for illness we’ll probably never get again: weird one-off creams for plantar warts and gels for tooth pain and pills for bladder infections. (Sigh.)

Many linens had to be exiled to the basement to make this work, but I think it will be worth it. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 11/7

This week, the gourds went from this:

To this ...

When they were originally this:

To be fair, the photo was taken from a slightly different angle.

I had wanted it to be loose and Fauvist, and the left gourd is at least pretty loose, but the nodules were just too picky and challenging on the right gourd. Next time I am regressing even further and I think I am going to paint my pink pitcher. Nothing else. Pink pitcher, round, arcs, one color pink, highlights. Big brush, loose.

I am pleased with the left gourd. I might go back and black out some of the bottom. And the top highlights around the gourd stem should be lighter than the ones on the bottom, obviously. Still, that left ground jumps right out at you, doesn’t it?

In Which I Am Surprised by the Electoral College

I remember our amazement in Social Studies class when we learned that one job of the electoral college is to step up and protect the public from voting in an unfit tyrant. 

I had no idea, but it turns out some of the electors took their Social Studies seriously and there was an organized effort to change votes in 2016. Here’s the Wikipedia article on it. It would have been nice had they searched their hearts and then all voted for Clinton, but they were not that generous. They only needed enough Trump votes to change to take away his majority, and the decision would go to the Republican-run House of Representatives. 

They failed, but I wonder if next time there will be enough “faithless” electors to spark a coup. It’s happened before - Andrew Jackson, the man on the twenty, didn’t win the presidency in 1824 because there wasn’t a majority in the six-way election. 

I think my Social Studies class was placated by the teacher telling us we’d probably never see that particular check and balance actually happen. She didn’t realize how much quirky political stuff I’d witness later in life. Of course nothing has yet  surpassed President Ford, the President no one voted for. The 2000 election came close: the motorcade turning around, Bill Hemmer going to Pluto, Al Gore certifying his loss with protesting Senators. That was the same election in which I happily cast my vote for a dead man. I’ve been around for three of the four impeachments too. What’s left? I haven’t seen the Speaker of the House ascend to the presidency, or the designated survivor, and I haven’t seen a military coup. Short of a fistfight in the Senate, that’s about all that’s left to surprise me.

A Novel to Wrinkle Your Nose

After sorting the two copies of Jerry’s novel by page number, I set off to divvy it into chapters. My plan was to read it a chapter at a time. 

Of course, I immediately discovered entire chapters are missing. I hope that they were useless exposition that he threw out in disgust. He seems to edit himself somewhat: in a script he wrote for a city promotion piece, after he wrote the part that covers the city’s beginnings he boldly scrawled “FUCK THE PAST” and then scratched out that page.

Sorting the chapters required that I look at the top of every page, and somehow that meant I read more than when I was looking for every page number at the bottom. Some things became clear:

1. Someone, a child I believe, is threatened.
2. In the final chapter, someone (perhaps a woman) is murdered.
3. A few pages later there is a trial, and then it abruptly ends. The pacing of the plot might have issues.
4. There’s a lot of dialect (like, a Huckleberry Finn level of dialect) in the dialog between the oil roughnecks. It isn’t bad. Colorful.
5. What he’s bad at? Names. Men are named “Tex” and “Pardner” and I swear, there is one man known only by his last name, which is “Lawless.” Perhaps he meant to add some subtlety in the next draft.

I didn’t want spoilers, so I tried to see as little of the novel as possible. Unfortunately, I couldn’t avoid smelling it. Who could guess a man could smoke so much that his novel would still stink of cigarettes decades later?

Review: Motherless Brooklyn

Here’s what was wrong with this movie: it was not Jojo Rabbit. Motherless Brooklyn was a good movie, but I saw a great movie a few days earlier. In comparison to the  laughfest/sobfest  that was Jojo, this one left me flat. 

It was also not Boardwalk Empire, though two prominent BE actors were cast in it.

It was also not a Martin Scorsese movie. I had attributed it to Scorsese based on the lead narration. I forgot that 1950s detective movies also have narration.

It was also not Trump: the Art of the Deal. Terry Gross on NPR said, essentially, oh, come on, a power-hungry New York developer, played by Alec Baldwin, are you saying that character isn’t Trump? The director snapped out “Nope” so fast I thought, well, he must be lying. 

Gary loved it, though, and he’s usually a harsh critic.

Embroidery Project Complete

Here is the shirt with the embroidery covering up the bacon grease:

(Not every flower is covering up bacon grease: about half of them were to balance out the other side.)

I worked on it so much that the neural track of embroidery just kept spinning even when I was done. My brain kept embroidering as we went to the movie theater and watched The Current War. I saw a thread on the floor of the theater: it looked like embroidery thread. The color of a jacket made me want to thread a needle with the yellow thread.  I saw things on screen and pictured how they would look embroidered. I kept getting triggered by Michael Shannon’s mustache. Couldn't you embroider that face?

 

Review: Jojo Rabbit (Absolutely No Spoilers)

I truly don’t want to talk about the plot of this movie, because it’s just so ideal, and so tightly woven that every throwaway image  is going to come back and either punch you in the gut or make you laugh. Seriously, don’t even watch the commercials. Well, perhaps you can, because there was a genius in this movie in the way it would make you forget something until the moment you needed to laugh or cry.

Well ... it made ME laugh. The young man in front of us laughed exactly once. Don’t be that guy. (Don’t be stupid. Be a smartie. Come and join the Nazi party.) 

No doubt he was judging me, even though all I did was laugh at the points I was meant to (and gasp in horror to pay for it, believe me).

Comparisons to The Producers are pointless. That was half the movie this was. I’m sure no one sobbed hard through the last fifteen minutes of The Producers.

 

Review: The Current War (Exactly One Spoiler Regarding a Circus Animal)

I initially wanted to see Motherless Brooklyn because I was convinced it was a Martin Scorsese movie. It's about crime and it's narrated and it has Bobby Cannavale in it. Understandable.

I don't like gangsters, but I like it when Martin Scorsese has them explain themselves.

Instead, we got tickets to see The Current War, which was, surprise, produced by Martin Scorsese.

"The Current War? Why do you want to see THAT?" Gary grumbled. 

As I mentally answered, "Benedict Cumberbatch," he continued, "... The reviews for it are awful. And why are you supporting Harvey Weinstein?"

Evidently this was the movie that The Weinstein Company was supposed to distribute just as Harvey was exposed. Gary didn't know it was shelved for two years while they found another distributor, and they took that time to re-shoot some things.

"Gary, I just want to know more about the story. All I know is that Edison and Westinghouse were rivals and one of them" [SPOILERS] "electrocuted an elephant to show that the other one's electricity was deadly."

People, I watched that entire movie steeled to watch a big elephant death scene, and then it never happened.  Elephants flit by on screen, elephants are shown as ghostly stylized images, there is much elephant foreshadowing. There's an animal death demonstration scene, but a horse is electrocuted (off screen), not an elephant.

The credits weren't even over before I was on Wikipedia checking out the facts. Fact 1: Edison did kill animals to prove the dangers of alternating current. Fact 2: Later in life, well after the rivalry, Edison filmed the electrocution of a violent elephant that was being put down by a circus company. I suppose it was just something dramatic for him to film, but afterward people conflated the two and assumed Edison was still making his point.

Also, I saw so many antique light bulbs that it reminded me to check in on the world's longest-lasting bulb at that New Jersey firehouse (still functioning, now with a bulb cam).

I don't know why the reviews were bad: I enjoyed every bit of it. It looked gorgeous, it sounded gorgeous, Benedict was gorgeous, the main characters were complicated, and can you just imagine what it would be like to have electricity installed in your town?