When Will You Make an End? In the 1965 epic film, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II has commissioned Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) to paint the Sistine Chapel. As we all know, the Sistine Chapel ceiling is the best of the High Renaissance artworks and was finally completed in 1512 after four years of effort by the ornery Michelangelo. In the movie, Pope Julius starts asking Michelangelo regularly, and eventually on…
My Personal Rainbow It is a transitional weather morning here on my hilltop. It rained and was stormy yesterday and last night and it looks like today it wants to alternate between that weather and clear and sunny by tomorrow. I am sitting at my desk on hold with some service provider or another. I have started to be in the habit of acknowledging that I now live on the West Coast and the rest…
The Burden of Refinement We live in a modern, civilized and refined world. The last few nights we have watched some movies set in the late 1950’s and we are reminded that it wasn’t so long ago (a mere sixty years ago) that things were a lot less civilized and refined. We have watched Far From Heaven and Loving, both stories set in that era when I was a young child and when the country…
Betty Betty Betty My entire family has now gone to the dogs. Carolyn, who always wanted a dog from the youngest age and was denied by circumstances, had to invent her own dog in her plush Stieff floppy-eared mutt called Ted. As soon as she was in her own stable home environment with her now-husband John, they went and got themselves a little black and white Havanese that they named Abraham Lincoln or Abe for…
Return of the Monkey There seem to be many monkeys in my life. No, I do not live in the tropics of Costa Rica, where monkeys are constantly in the trees around you, making their presence all too obvious (as we saw a few years ago during a holiday visit to the fond place of my 5-6-year old life). In that never-never land of vagueness between an early childhood memory and a pseudo-memory that has…
Scam Artists I Have Known Yesterday the Geek Squad came and with much wrangling (mostly “not my job” kinda stuff), I managed to get my TV’s switched over from Direct TV satellite service to streaming (I have the Cox Cable Gigablast 1 Gbps service). I have Apple TV ($149.95 and already obsolete from what I can tell) on the Office and Guest Room TV’s. I have FireTV from Amazon ($29.95… what a deal) for the…
Moonrise Madneess It’s 5:30pm and I am enjoying a long-overdue hot tub soak. I’m not sure why I don’t go in whenever I want, but I have a system now where the tub filter goes on every day at 1pm and circulates until 4pm. If I want to go in and I want it warmer than ambient air temperature, I have to hit a toggle on my cell phone app, It can’t really get much…
Stucco! Stucco! Stucco! With a nod to Richard Fleischer’s 1970 iconic hit movie, Tora!Tora!Tora!, that won acclaim for its special effects and realistic warlike cinematography, I feel the need to wrap up my tale of stucco with regard to my Hobbit House since I have flip-flopped more than HGTV and the DIY (now Magnolia) Network combined. Given how many homes out here on the chaparral are stucco construction and the number of immigrants who pride…
Alone in the Vastness I have written these words many times since 1995, which was when I acquired my Rikelme painting of a lone tree standing on the Pampas of Patagonia. The painting is called Solo en la Imensidad (Alone in the. Vastness), and I have always admired the sentiment of the lone and solid tree standing by itself and giving life to a small ecosystem around it. There is nobility in that tree and…
Wag the Dog Twenty-five years ago Barry Levinson directed a little movie. He had directed such greats as The Natural, Tin Men, Rain Man, Diner and Sleepers, so he is an accomplished director who knows how to tell a great story through some complex plots. In 1997 he made a movie with Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, Woody Harrelson, Anne Heche, Kristen Dunst and William H. Macy. It was about a scheme by a U.S. president…