This morning, I began another class at Hamline. Though dropping out of classes has become somewhat of a hobby of mine at Hamline, Jennifer is insistent that I not drop out of this one.
I had a class by this professor before. In fact, that’s one reason why I chose the class: if I see that a teacher is not a dipshit, I attempt to take more classes by the same teacher, thereby limiting my exposure to such dipshits.
When the professor asked what we were expecting when we signed up for this class, I raised my hand and (referencing the online description) said: “I expect to watch a lot of films.”
The professor, remembering me, said something like, “James, James, James,” which I think means, “You silly boy.” She then spent about 20 minutes explaining that we’d be watching documentaries, not films.
Later, she told the class that she grades more on improvement rather than on overall performance, so if we totally botch the first exam, don’t lose heart: she’s interested in how well we can turn that fumble around. I, therefore, plan to simply doodle on the first exam.
This evening, I once again hosted Atheists Talk. Tonight was a two-parter: first, I interviewed co-worker and GLBT rights activist Arthur Schultz, who gave info on why the freethought community should support GLBT rights, particularly by helping to defeat the asinine anti-marriage ballot initiative. Part two featured a discussion between me, Eric Jayne and Mindy Rhiger about Richard Dawkins’ latest book The Magic of Reality.
Friday, 03 February 2012
Owen has been sick for two days now. I took the day off of work to help out with Owen, especially since Isla has a class in the morning, Jennifer has an appointment around lunchtime, and I have to meet with my advisor at Hamline this afternoon.
I took Isla to her music class today. It’s held in a meeting room at one of the local libraries. I had a fun time, even if it is a little strange to just start singing and dancing around a bunch of other moms and dads (just one dad) that I’ve never met before.
Isla’s class is Music Together. The instructor knew her stuff. She kept pulling out a pitch pipe to ensure she was singing on key, and it appeared she had absolutely no inhibitions about said singing and dancing. She also knew how to keeps the kids entertained and interested, spicing things up with various dances, tossing bright scarves around the room, letting the kids play with instruments (they all took a turn at “strumming” the guitar) and just letting them do what they wanted when they wanted. For Isla, this meant that instead of using the drumsticks to beat the floor in rhythm, she would just hold the sticks in her hands and spin in a circle. Later, she attempted to escape over the gate. No one seemed to mind, though if there’s one thing that makes me more self-conscious than singing children’s songs with my daughter, it’s singing children’s songs without my daughter.
Anyway, I’m glad I went.
Also today, here are Bill Maher’s new rules regarding theists who seem to think it’s a stunning argument to claim that athiesm is a religion:
I dropped a couple of books off at the library book drop this morning.
I normally don’t do that. Almost always, when I have books to return, I also have books to pick up, so I just go into the library. In fact, even if I don’t have anything waiting for me, I still go into the library to return books. This encourages me to get off my ass, for one thing, and it also gets me to browse the shelves.
But there are three things I dislike about most library book drops:
1) They’re too high.
About twenty years ago, when Americans started driving Ford Land Destroyers en masse, fast food dives, banks, pharmacies, libraries, and any other place with a drive-though window began installing such windows really high. I guess they figure us losers down in our Chevy Cavaliers can more easily reach way up than the SUV snobs can slightly lean down. It’s a stupid design and I’d imagine people shorter than me have even more frustrating experiences trying to hoist their books over their heads.
2) They’re electronic.
It used to be, you just had to open up a door and drop the books inside. Kind of like a mailbox. Now, you have to hover the books in front of some eye and wait until it opens up. Then you have to shove everything in there as fast as you can or the door will shut. Again: a stupid design. In fact, at the Maple Grove library I visited today, they have a back-up drop just a few feet down from the electronic drop, for those inevitable occassions when the electronic one is on the fritz. This makes me wonder: why bother with the electronic one, anyway? Especially since the Maple Grove libary prides itself in its ostensibly green-friendly design.
3) They talk to me.
As soon as the door magically opens, some soulless voice begins giving me instructions – as if people who use a bookdrop are too stupid to know how to use it. I think they must have gotten a lot of patrons pulling up and requesting an order of fries, or something. One thing the voice tells me is to insert the items one at a time, because, you know, placing one book on top of another is sure to overload the precarious electronic system they’ve got going on. I think it says other stuff, too, but by that time I’m already driving away. Maybe it says, “Don’t drive away until this very important message finishes,” but I’ll never know.
As always, I am sure the cinephiles will complain that it’s not representative of the true art taking place out there and, to an extent, I agree. However, as always, I will argue that the Academy Awards do a great job of giving notoriety to otherwise ignored films and encourage people to look outside the top ten box office hits.
Here are some of my thoughts on this year’s nominees:
Hugo leads the pack with 11 nominations, including best director (Martin Scorsese) and picture. When I first read the book Hugo, I recall thinking that it would be best brought to the screen by Tim Burton. But, as fate would have it, Scorsese – better known for his über-violent misogynistic gangster films – helmed the picture. Even though I think Scorsese is an awesome film-maker, I was a little concerned that this was outside his expertise. Now, all those nominations has me thinking I should give it a chance.
Oh, look! Meryl Streep is nominated for an acting award. Again. This makes nomination #17. Sometimes I’ve heard people say “Streep’s the one to beat,” as if she’s some sort of unstoppable machine. Here’s the thing, though: she’s only won twice, and her most recent win was in 1982. So…yeah, fifteen women have beaten Streep. In one sense, then, she’s the biggest acting loser of all time. If I was a betting man, however, I would wager that she will win this year.
For the first time since the Academy began the Best Animated Feature category (long overdue, in 2001), Pixar’s film is not nominated. Cars 2 came out in 2011. I haven’t seen it, but my tells me it’s the worse Pixar film ever. I believe her. Oh well. PIxar will have to stay home on Oscar night and take comfort in their Oscars for Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL•E, and Toy Story 3.
Max von Sydow is nominated for his role as the Renter in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I hope he wins. He commanded every scene he was in, he made the film much more fun to watch. Also, if he wins, he’ll be the oldest man to ever do so (he’s 32. Just kidding. He’s 82).
Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon is nominated for three Academy Awards. Wow. Just wow. I guess that’s what you get when you use an awesome album from Pink Floyd as your inspiration.
And what’s it like for non-popular people to find out they’ve been nominated for an Academy Award? Just watch the creators of Time Freak, on of the nominees for Best Live Action Short:
Finally, here’s one of the nominees for Best Animated Short, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. It’s like porn for book-lovers:
So, I think my books are finally in a state I can live with.
To me, one of the most stressful aspects of moving to a new place is that my books don’t have a place to call home. Soon after we moved in to our latest and greatest compound, I set about removing my books from all the boxes (and my 400 books were in about 50 different boxes because my wife has a policy of putting one or two books in every box). In the dining room, we have copious shelf space all conveniently kept behind doors (I guess that makes them cabinets). In fact, we have so much shelving space in the dining room, that I used one shelf for records and CDs, four shelves for board games, three shelves for Owen’s art supplies, then removed two large shelving units and sold them for $45, and STILL had enough room for all of my books.
At first, the books were just in random order, in random position. Some were lying down, some were standing up with the spine facing inwards, others were paired in a naughty, naughty 69 fashion. Clearly, this couldn’t last.
So, one day, I extricated all the books, placed them in stacks relevant to the subject matter, turned some of the stacks into shorter stacks when my wife complained that piling books 50 books high is a danger to small children, then began placing them on the shelves in the correct order.
But I ran into a problem.
It turns out, too many of my books are too tall. If I lowered a shelf so as to accommodate such books, this left too little room on the lower shelves. I tried removing some shelves, but then I didn’t have enough room for all of the books. Jennifer suggested placing all of the really tall books together. Geez, why didn’t she just suggest burning all of the books?
Anyway, as a testament to my unbridled genius and legendary humility, I figured it out. Let me explain it to you via photographs:
So here’s an overview of the majority of the shelving. These are (most of) our nonfiction books. They are all organized by subject, from most important to least important area of human endeavor. They begin with general knowledge in the top left, proceed through mathematics, physics, cosmology, astronomy, geography, biology (animal and then human), the social sciences, language, history, biography, the arts (painting and photography, then film and television, then music), humor, and religion.
Here’s where the enormity of my genius is on display. Notice this particular module of the shelving begins with the rest of my astronomy books. This then melds into books on the environment, nature, and the animal kingdom. Unfortunately, some of the nature and animal books are so tall, they were part of the problem I noted earlier. Therefore, I laid them on their sides, and adjusted the shelving such that it was only tall enough to fit these “sleeping” books. The bottom shelf picks up where these two modified shelves left off, continuing with the rest of the animal books.
Notice, too, that lying these books down resulted in an empty area on the right side of the shelves. I filled this space with unusually small books – the kind of books that inadvertently get pushed into the back. The one on the second shelf, for example, is a field guide to birds. Now, not only won’t this tiny book get lost in the shuffle, but I can access it easily when going camping (and, yes, I do take it camping).
More genius. For some reason, our collection of dictionaries consist of two sizes: absurdly small and freakin’ huge. Again, I adjusted the relevant shelving and laid the two large dictionaries on their sides and placed the baby dictionaries on top, where they can snuggle in and stay warm. Awww. Note that keeping these dictionaries on their sides is less stressful on their already taxed spines. Yes, my solution is that awesome.
On the adjacent wall of the dining room is this shelving unit. I am using it for our fiction collection. This one had me stumped for a while, but by simply putting the books in alphabetical order (by author’s last name), I was able to place half the books on the top shelf and half on the bottom. The taller books are all by author’s with last names beginning with K-Z. This left too few books on the top shelf to look “right,” so I supplemented the shelf with two previously unused bookends.
The only oddballs here were the Little House collection of books and Gone With the Wind, a mammoth tome my wife picked up while touring Margaret Mitchell’s home in Atlanta. I deftly solved this predicament by placing these two items – which, I think you’ll agree, have a certain “oh, look at us!” quality about them – on their own shelves. I placed them at an angle, because that’s all cool and whatnot.
FUN FACT: The bookends were a wedding gift – a subtle reference to a Simon and Garfunkel song, but not the one you’d think.
Finally: This shelf is in the kitchen. There was no room for them in the dining room, but that’s okay. As you can see, this shelf is largely cook books, so they belong in the kitchen. The other books on this shelf have to do with home improvement so, you know, they seem to fit closer to the tool box, too. Now that I look at this photo, I see our book about vegetarian cooking is upside down. Damn. That’s gonna bug me to no end.
And, no, you can’t borrow any of them.
Now stop getting all voyeuristic about what books we own and get on with your own life.
So, today, Owen and I returned to Lowe’s. This time, he built a Tyrannosaurus rex (no, not a real one, a wooden one, silly).
The T. rex kit included two sets of stickers: one set for making a funny dinosaur, and one set for making a realistic dinosaur. Owen decided to use the funny stickers on one side, and the realistic stickers on the other side. Way cool idea, I thought. Everyone else at the table just used the funny stickers exclusively. In fact, looking around, it appeared no one used the realistic stickers. I’m wondering why the preference for cutesy, fuzzy-wuzzy dinos. Cute puppies, now that makes sense. But when I think of carnivorous 6-ton dinosaurs, my mind doesn’t go to cute. Oh well. If we understood what people under ten years old were thinking, we could let them vote and then all of our problems would be solved.
Anyway, here are pictures of my son showing of his Cretaceous model:
Here’s the funny side of the beast. There’s a lever on the back of his skull (just like in real-life!) allowing the mouth to open.
Here, Owen and his dimples show off the realistic side of the dino. You know, the side that doesn’t demean one of the most magnificent animals to ever grace this planet.
Here’s a picture I’m including just to demonstrate the funny dino’s tongue. Look at it just dangling there! Hilarious! Somewhere, a T. rex is rolling over in its grave.
Today, I finally updated the Words of the Year page here on my blog. In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, direct your eyes to the top of this page. You’ll see four tabs. Click on the one that says “Words of the Year.” Then read the five very short paragraphs.
I know not everyone is a linguaphile like myself, but I still think you’ll all see how choosing a word every year is a great way to track the changes that occur in my life. By simply reading the words I’ve selected each year since 1999, you can see places I have moved to, children that have come into my life, jobs I have had, schooling, and religious events in my life.
Second, the four of us (JamesJenniferOwenIsla) went to Freestyle Yogurt this evening. It’s a new yogurt shop here in St. Paul at the crossroads of Lexington and Randolph (better known as “Where Trader Joe’s is located”). The way it works is you grab a paper bowl, then select one or more of about 12 different yogurt flavors, then head over to this buffet of toppings, including candy, fruit, nuts, and syrup. The bowls are a little on the large size, which I’m sure is intentional because the cost racks up by the ounce.
Don’t get me wrong, though, I think charging by the ounce is a great idea to keep me from pigging out. I think if there was just a flat fee of, say, $4.00 for yogurt, I would pile that sucker high with every topping in the place and then just sit down inside the bowl like I was taking a yogurt bath. But charging by the ounce…it forces me a modicom of restraint.
After weighing our options (pun intended) we sat down in the highly swank dining area (Owen and I sat at the surfboard table). The desserts were superb. I ate every bite, which, of course, goes without saying, because if I didn’t eat it, it wouldn’t be a bite. Tasty. Tasty. Tasty. Jennifer pointed out that it was pretty healthy, too, which is the sort of thing she has too tell us when were gorging on chocolate.
Afterward, I grabbed a bumper sticker and slapped it on my laptop (my computer – not my thighs). Owen picked up a marker and drew a robot on their wall (in the designated drawing circles).
Anyway, I recommend the place. Support a local business. Go there.
This was my first time at the theater since May sixth of last year, when Owen and I went to see Rio. I was a bit torn as to what we should see, since – in a stroke of coincidence – my two favorite novels from this century were both made into motion pictures and released to theaters within a week of each other. (The other one is The Invention of Hugo Cabret.)
Jennifer nixed my idea of sitting in the back row and making out the whole time, which is too bad because this might have been a far more interesting blog post than it is. Winner = Jennifer
She also said she doesn’t like when I buy snacks and then sneak them into the theater, because that’s rude to the theater. I told her I don’t care about theaters’ feelings. Winner = James
For those keeping score: Jennifer – 1; James – 1
So…I’m always a bit apprehensive when an extremely well-written novel is made into a film. I think this apprehension comes from the fact that so many page-to-screen transformations positively suck. There are only two cases, in my opinion, that the movie was better than the book:
Jurassic Park (the movie) is better than Jurassic Park (the book). The former finally gave viewers the magnificent creatures that had long since died out. The latter was just a heavy-handed sermon on the dangers of mutating frog DNA.
The Ten Commandments (the movie) is better than Exodus (the book). The former is an epic story, the latter is a wordy, repetitive list of names.
Charleton Heston: living intense.
So, in these cases, it was almost easy for the films to outstrip the source material, since the books weren’t that great. But when a book is awesome…the movie inevitably fails (I’m looking at you, 1984).
Well, the record remains in tact: Extremely Lou (that’s what the marquee at the theater called it) is not as good as the book.
But it’s still a very good flick.
The cinematography and editing did an admirable job of capturing the cluttered thoughts in Oskar’s brain and the photographs that are so integral to the story. The acting also left me pleased. I like Tom Hanks work, but I’m not crazy about Sandra Bullock. In this movie, though, I thought Hanks’ character was a bit one-dimensional, and some of his scenes made me cringe with embarrassment. Bullock, on the other hand, toned it down enough to where I really liked her character.
I think this is Sandra Bullock. It might be Steven Tyler, though – I can’t really tell them apart anymore.
While the book fascinates by showing us Oskar’s point-of-view, however, the film doesn’t have that luxury; we have to observe him from the outside. Still, Thomas Horn does an excellent, believable job as Oskar, which I’m sure must’ve been a difficult role to portray. Also top-notch was Max Von Sydow, as The Renter, who steals every scene he’s in. His Best Supporting Actor nod is well-deserved.
The two negative critiques I heard about the movie were…
1) Using the events of 9/11 to tell a fictional tale is exploitative
2) The book leaves Oskar’s mental “condition” ambiguous, while the movie ruins it by stating that he is autistic.
Let me respond to both of those criticisms:
They are moronic.
There’s nothing exploitative about using a real tragedy as backdrop to a fictional story. It’s been done for centuries. There is nothing disrespectful or irreverent toward the events or victims of 9/11.
Additionally…the movie never tells us Oskar is autistic. The only explicit dialog regarding his difference is by Oskar himself. He tells The Renter he was once tested for Asberger’s Syndrome, but that results were inconclusive.
The film is faithful to the book, filled with the mystery, suspense, sadness, and hope that the novel is likewise fraught with. All in all, a good time at the theater. Even if we didn’t make out for two hours.
