Americlecticintellectica
Archer (age 3.8) has just read his first book — the same as the first book Jonah ever read.
We always suspected he was paying closer attention to Jonah’s reading than he let on, and he just proved it by making short work of this book almost a full year ahead of Jonah’s own schedule.
So, how many two-time Grammy nominees rang your doorbell at dinnertime last night?
We got an unexpected visit from Kayo Miki, a violinist with Quartet San Francisco, stopping by on her way to L.A. for the awards show. Her friends, our next-door neighbors, had already left for L.A. to attend the show, had forgotten some things at home, and had asked her to pick them up and bring them along; and since we have the neighbors’ keys for feeding Slater, their cat, we were her first stop.
We chatted as I let her into the neighbors’ house and she explained that they’re nominated in the “Classical Music Crossover Album” category and they’re up against Brian Setzer (!) and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir — as if those others need any more publicity. Good luck tomorrow night to Quartet San Francisco!
Feeling deflated since the withdrawal of John Edwards from the race for president, I have been wondering whether to cast my primary vote tomorrow for Barack Obama, who is the next best candidate, or to vote for Edwards anyway, throwing away my vote in order to make a statement about the control of our electoral process by the mass-media oligarchy.
I hate the idea of my vote being against the candidate I like less rather than for the candidate I like more, which is what a vote for Obama would be for me.
Then I saw the following Obama video and now I know how I’ll vote. If enough people think this way about Obama, then it doesn’t really matter what he is actually like; the people will hold him to their idea of him and he’ll succeed or fail by that measure.
Not really, but yesterday was Super Sunday and tomorrow is Super Tuesday, and I didn’t want today feeling left out, like an overlooked middle child.
So we went to a monster truck rally on Saturday, me, the wife, and the kids.
It was Jonah’s friend Liam’s sixth birthday. Liam’s into monster trucks and after the aforementioned party at his house most of the guests piled into their cars and drove to the OaklandMcAfee Coliseum. It was a miserable night, cold, windy, and wet.
Our first surprise came when traffic was backed up for two miles on the highway. All monster-truck traffic? (Turns out the Foo Fighters were playing next door at the OaklandOracle Arena at the same time, so it’s impossible to know how many were cool rock fans and how many were trashy demolition junkies.)
Our second surprise came when we needed cash to enter the parking lot and we had none. So we had to leave, get cash, and then re-endure the long line of cars.
Our third surprise came when we realized the monster truck rally was an outdoor event. Andrea and I were both fighting colds. Our sore throats tingled in unison.
I unhappily contemplated the possibility of another bout of pneumonia. The things we do for our kids…
Our fourth surprise came when we saw how many true fans had turned out in the cold and the rain for the dubious pleasures of sticking foam earplugs in their ears and watching those ridiculously modded vehicles struggling weakly through the mud, occasionally rearing up to expose their undercarriages, sometimes rolling over old, junked cars, but mostly doing donuts and spraying mud in all directions. (Surprise 4a was how often the crowd came to its feet. Surprise 4b was how often I thought of Fonzie and Pinky Tuscadero battling the Mallachi brothers in the demolition derby.)
Our final surprise came on the drive home, mercifully just an hour later, when Jonah said he’d like to return to another monster truck rally as soon as possible and Archer averred, “Monster Jam is cool.”
Here is the background image from the main page of IndianaJones.com, the website promoting the upcoming film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:
Obviously the crate is meant to be the same as the one in which the government’s “top men” squirreled away the Ark of the Covenant in an enormous warehouse at the end of the first film.
Only look: the number on the crate in the new picture is 9906573. Could I have been the only one to notice immediately that this does not match the number on the crate in the first film, 9906753?
No, I know one more person who immediately spotted the (apparent) error: my equally film-geeky sister Suzanne.
A moment while I indulge in a little parental pride: last night Jonah and Archer were at a birthday party that included the obligatory piñata. After withstanding some unbelievably motivated bashing by six-year-olds (and Archer, who actually managed to score the first piece of candy out of the thing), it finally spilled its guts onto the cement floor of our friends’ garage. (For reasons of good taste I’ll omit any description of the brief carnage that then ensued other than to liken it to a pack of hyenas tearing at a fresh carcass.) In the aftermath, Jonah and Archer compared their respective hauls. Archer, holding a week’s worth of candy in his bag, lamented morosely, “I didn’t get as much.” Without missing a beat, without any hesitation whatsoever — indeed, with eagerness — Jonah immediately put a smile on Archer’s face with, “I’ll share mine with you!”
[This post is participating in South Dakota Dark’s Deeply Superficial Blog-a-thon.]
In the summer of 2002 I was briefly, wonderfully unemployed, and a stay-at-home, first-time, brand-new dad. Of course even the happiest parent (me!) needs a break once in a while, and one day, in between feeding, burping, bathing, changing, cradling, playing with, and otherwise tending to my infant son, I read a film review that said, in part:
The best moments […] give you the peculiar joy of feeling that, for a few moments at least, you’ve escaped the laws of gravity.
and
You can take all the shots of rolling surf the movies have given us and not find anything like what you see here. The camera enters into the curl of waves so that the rising wall of water looks like rippling blue-green glass.
and
The visual beauty of the movie can be enough to make you laugh with pleasure.
and
The movie was shot entirely on the north shore of Oahu, and the outdoor scenes are suffused with an unusually clear light. You feel as if you could just walk up to the screen and breathe in the ocean air, or feel a fine spray of mist on your face.
all of which was exactly what the doctor ordered. So my wife gave me an afternoon off and I went to see Blue Crush. It was just as thrilling as the review led me to expect, even if its story was a conventional one about a self-doubting potential champion risking it all for the big prize. I talked it up to everyone I knew.
Oh, incidentally, the film stars a group of athletically built beauties who spend most of their screen time wearing very nearly nothing.
Now, not everyone to whom I enthused about the film was in the same mental space I was; they weren’t primed for a cinematic beach-vacation-by-proxy, and they hadn’t been buttered up by a rhapsodic online film review. Instead, when one or another of them finally saw Blue Crush it was, “Oh I see what you liked so much about that movie <wink>.”
It wasn’t like that at all, honest! I mean, sure, a couple of hours of tanned and vigorous young ladies in swimsuits is not exactly hard to take. But the superficial pleasures of Blue Crush are many and they are not all prurient.
[Cross-posted at DailyKos.]
John Edwards has ended his presidential run.
I would like to jump straight to the final of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, “acceptance,” but it’s probably unhealthy to skip right over the other stages, so please bear with me as I race through:
There, OK. Now I can do acceptance.
In truth, either Obama or Clinton could get the job done, but as I’ve written before (and as others have written, and I’ve highlighted): it’s not just the person, it’s the narrative. America urgently needs to turn the page on its recent past and make a fresh start. Hillary may have the best intentions, but rightly or wrongly she’s still an indelible symbolic link to the past. Only Obama represents real change, and the world needs to see real change in America.
On the bright side: even if nothing else progressive happens in the next administration, we still have the fact that the handsome, rich white guy couldn’t compete with a black guy and a woman. We’ve come a long way, baby.
My sister unearthed this old cartoon by me among our mom’s papers. I don’t remember drawing it, but hey, it’s kinda clever. Thanks for scanning and mailing it, sis!
