In the 1965 movie The Agony and the Ecstasy, staring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s regular and frequent answer to the Pope’s question of “When will you make and end?” (painting the Sistine Chapel), is, “When I am finished.” Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling from 1508 to 1512, a span of about four years, which was actually fast for the scale of the work. A few reasons…
An expression I have always enjoyed using in general conversation is about the passage of time. We’ve all seen movies they’re they use the visual trick of having pages of a calendar fly off or seasons pass through seasons from spring to summer to fall to winter and we are all made to feel that there are times in storytelling where one needs to show that time marches on and indeed time either changes nothing…
We are in the countdown week before our summer fiesta. I’m not sure why we have never done this before. We live in fiesta territory and we are surrounded by Hispanic culture so it seems like something we should have done before this. I carry an Hispanic surname and am regularly asked if I identify as Hispanic, which I don’t. I spent six of my first seven years living in Latin America, first in Venezuela…
Repo Man ia a 1984 cult classic sci-fi comedy starring Emilio Estevez as Otto, a disaffected LA punk who falls in with a crew of repossession agents led by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). Otto gets pulled into the repo business and ends up chasing a mysterious Chevy Malibu with a bounty on it. The trunk supposedly contains something otherworldly (aliens, or their remains) that melts anyone who looks inside. It’s all deadpan, anarchic, and satirical…
For almost six weeks now my weight has hovered at 260. I noted this morning that I was at my absolute lowest point on the scale, but I just haven’t made that downward move into the 250s, which I very much have wanted to see happen in August. I still have a few weeks left, so I’m hoping that can still happen before I fly off to Amsterdam for our river cruise and mountain climb…
A funny thing happened on my way to our fiesta yesterday…I got a message from my old business school friend John, telling me that he had cleared his decks and was prepared to host us in Mexico City (or slightly outside in the town of Malinalco) during the middle of November. Naturally, I had assumed that did not work for him, so I had booked us a five day excursion to Oahu in the second…
One of favorite, lesser-known movies is a small 1998 film starring Matt Damon, Edward Norton and John Malkovitch. It’s called Rounders and its about the underground poker scene in NYC. It does a better job of explaining the allure of poker and specifically the culture of Texas Hold’em than any other movie I know. What 21, the MIT card-counting team movie with Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess, did for Blackjack, Rounders did for Hold’em. There…
Long before we moved out here to this hilltop, we recognized that wildfires were a way of life out in this area and that we would have to do everything we could to be vigilant and aware of how to protect ourseelves and our hilltop from them. We had our two and half acres largely cleared of non-succulent brush and while I have allowed portions of the property to revegetate, its been mostly with succulents,…
I’m going to head over to Oasis Nursery this morning and buy a few plants to spruce up a few of the stragglers in my garden. We have guests coming to stay for a few days from Las Vegas. This is my nephew Jason and his partner and most recent baby mama, Nicky, with their new baby, Carson and Jason’s grown daughter Katie. We don’t see our Las Vegas kin very often, but are very…
We have all come to a point in our evolution as members of our modern lifestyles where we all tend to use e-commerce for almost everything. I do most of my purchases, whether clothing or pharmaceuticals or gardening supplies, online. The other thing we all do online these days is purchase travel and entertainment. Thanks to Amazon Prime and other vehicles like Shop, PayPal and various other enabling payment and fulfillment providers, the process seems…