Despondent It’s election night and there are about one third of the races that have been called by NBC News. It’s a dead heat with Biden having a slight electoral vote lead at this point (98 to 86) but it is far from an ebullient night so far. I don’t believe in getting despondent about an election because my natural optimism doesn’t lend itself to going into the dark early on. I hate all the…
Anticipation Do you remember that Heinz Ketchup commercial with the ketchup moving down the neck of the bottle in slow motion towards the waiting hamburger? They used the 1971 Carly Simon song Anticipation from her hit album of the same name. I imagine no one but Carly thinks about that song any more without thinking about Heinz Ketchup. Interesting factoid, we have all wondered our whole lives whether its ketchup or catsup and what’s up…
A Mitzvah For Mary Growing up in Latin America and then Wisconsin did not give me much opportunity to meet Jewish people. Strangely enough, my first Jewish friend was Michael Feldman, who I met when we moved to Poland Spring, Maine. South-Central Maine is more like Appalachia than the typical postcard of Bar Harbor. Michael was there because his grandfather Saul owned the Poland Spring Resort, one of the oldest resorts in America, dating back…
Mawwiage If you had asked me who wrote The Princess Bride, I would have said Christopher Guest. In actuality he only acted in it as Count Rugen, the infamous Six-Fingered Man. Rob Reiner actually directed the movie, but one of the standouts that we all vividly remember is when the clergyman, played by Peter Cook, presides over the marriage of Prince Humperdinck and Buttercup. Despite not wanting to be cast in the Trumpian light of…
Wakey-Wakey One of my favorite movies is The World’s Fastest Indian, starring Anthony Hopkins. The obvious reason for my affection is that the subject is motorcycle speed racing on the Bonneville Salt Flats of Western Utah. Any movie about motorcycling is of interest to me, but this one holds a particularly special place in my heart. It is about an old New Zealand codger named Burt Monro from Invercargill on the South Island, who spends…
Brad Moon Rising I have now given Handy Brad eight months of more or less continuous employment. Assuming an average 35 hour per week, that means I practically have had a full-time staff member most of the year to help me with my projects around the house. Those have included re-stuccoing the back side of the house and deck, re-flashing the deck, power-washing the entire house’s stucco, replacing the utility room outer doors, building concrete…
We’re Not In Kansas Anymore I worry about Kansas. My friend David bought the rights to a recent book about the life of Carry Nation, the hatchet-wielding leader of the temperance movement who was also a Suffragette. He asked me to write a treatment of the book for a possible movie. I did that and ended up learning more about Ms. Nation than I had intended. The project hasn’t gone anywhere just yet, but we’ll…
On The Precipice This morning as the sun rises once again through my live oak, I find myself wondering what’s next. What do you call pre-postpartum? For one reason or another, things have stacked up around here with an end-date of mid next week. The obvious event is the Tuesday national election that has been the subject of all of our viewing pleasure and speculation for the better part of two years now. And yet…
The Gambit of Life I have begun watching the Netflix series called The Queen’s Gambit. It is a series set, like so many others of interest to me these days, in the 1960’s and it centers around chess. It is the story of a global chess Grandmaster by the name of Beth Harmon who is the orphan of a mathematics professor and a very troubled mother with a great deal of intellect. She is raised…
If You Need Me I’m Here The new way of life with regard to movies seems to be that when a studio wants to release a film they partner with one of the established streaming platforms like Netflix, Prime or Apple much like they used to partner with a distributor and then eventually sell the TV rights to an HBO, Cinemax or Showtime. The truth is that I have little or no idea how movies…