The Road

Turk and I saw The Road today. We'd both read the book, which is utterly harrowing; almost unremittingly bleak. Cormac McCarthy managed to find new depths in a sub-genre that most writers, critics and readers thought had been mined out by 1960. It brought me to tears more than once.

How could such a book be filmed?

I have no idea. Yet it was done: the movie is a faithful, well-cast, emotionally painful adaptation of the book. They did add a musical soundtrack...but the film would have been too terrifying and heart-wrenching to watch without it.

At the end, credits roll by on a black screen with a soundtrack behind it, a very ordinary series of sounds that, suddenly, are impossibly poignant. For me, the film was a reminder of just how short, how tragically short, "forever" is.

Go see it. Bring a hankie.

Um, Hi?

I am awake. I'm not hung over (from one beer? Puh-leeze!). But oh, did I oversleep.

BlogMeet Begins

Over a dozen of us at Brugge!

UPDATE: A wonderful time! Alas, I had a (rather large) glass of their ale "The Black" which is remarkably pleasant on the palate and (uh-oh) unexpectedly high in alcohol; at about the 2/3 point (sipping, accompanied by plenty of food -- pommes frites and mussels -- mind you, we were there over two hours), I realized my legs would not hold me if I had to stand. I am still plenty tipsy and must, therefore, defer additional posting until later.

Howsomever, I must relate that mechanical marvels were exhibited, Joanna won a small prize (and is looking enviably model-like these days) and it was a pretty darned good BlogMeet! Brigid has pictures. (See the very, very dark beer in the glass next to Turk? That's the stuff!)

Turk has a video!

BlogMeet Today!

See here for BlogMeet info. 1500 this very afternoon! See you there, riiight?

Off to shoot at innocent little paper targets now, after a Healthy Breakfast. BlogMeet report later.

At The Bottom Of Our Wells

Others have linked to it but I'm gonna anyway: XKCD graphically and simply explains gravity wells.

Hoping this is available as a poster!

(I go now to the shower and eventually to the superdupermart, having promised to make Breakfast Hash this morning. Um, for a given value of "morning.")

Third Planet, Holiday

Preliminary Report: We attempted to view their primitive entertainment, a device known as the Lomax or Imax, but were rebuffed: all "tickets" had been purchased prior to our arrival. Fortunately, all was not lost: alert scouting located a source of printed amusement in the immediate vicinity.

...Turk and I set out to see Avatar in immersive-ish 3-D, but no luck. However, right around the corner was a huge used book store, one I didn't even know existed! Pretty kewl and we found a lot of good things there.

Then we set out for (my) home and Turk endeared himself to wimmenfolk of Roseholme Cottage forever by offering to make us all Reuben sammiches! We stopped and picked up the fixin's and then proceeded to make good on his offer and I do mean good. Voila: ...Readers will be shocked to learn I had never had a Reuben; my problem is, I love corned beef and the best local source of Reuben turns out vast sandwiches, almost too big to eat. I just go for the corned beef and gorge myself.

This may have been short-sighted of me. Certainly the Turk Turon version of The Reuben is a delight to the eye and a wonderment to the palate. Accompanied by a dill pickle and washed down with a glass of Hen's Tooth Ale, it is nothing short of a marvel!

As this ActionCam shot, live and direct from the galley kitchen at Roseholme reveals, the Turk Reuben won the immediate and whole-hearted approval to Tam K, too; it was all I could to to get her to wait long enough to snap a picture.

(A sharp eye will spot one of my more decorative teapots atop the cabinets over the cooker. It is in the form of an old-fashioned wood-burning range, complete with pots, pans and tiny teakettle. Oooo, recursion).

UPDATE: Fervent thanx to Nathan, who corrected my small-town misspelling. (Ruben, Reuben, what's to know? They just called us all "rubes" when we visited the big-city stores, or did we hear it wrong? It's the workboots, isn't it? Sigh. I'm gonna go cry in my room!)

Okay, I'm Awake!

Dinner at Morton's was fantabulous, as ever! Turk Turon was once again my charming companion for the evening and we had a grand time.

...I'm finding that a champagne cocktail before, a wee bit o'Drambuie (warmed over a tumbler of hot water) after and a flute of bubbly to toast the New Year are almost too much! On the other hand, a "small" single-cut filet mignon (huge!), salad, asparagus and hot-chocolate cake do ameliorate the effects.

Morton's has retained its speakeasy ambiance, complete with one of the most skilled and professional bartenders to be found in these parts; you just know this guy is ever alert to the possibility of havin' to push the hidden button that conceal all evidence of Demon Rum...or not, but it's a fine excuse to post Turk's photograph of a champagne cocktail. The glass has been dipped in cinnamon sugar! There's a sugar cube fizzing away madly in the bottom of the glass, tormented by two drops of peach bitters; but it all turns out nicely after a few Secret Ingredients are added and soothed by the addition of champagne.

Perhaps I'll post more later -- for now, I've gotta git: I just woke up!

By Popular Demand?

Be good, or I'll upload more.

New Year's Eve Day

...And here I am with nothing suitable to wear! A hasty try through what used to be L. S. Ayres (later May Co. and now Macy's, shorn of all history, tradition and elegant-esque lunch room, though the latter limps on at the State Museum; and just how sad is that?) found nothing that appealed.

I miss the old Glendale Mall, which had a shop that specialized in formal and sub-formal wear; it didn't take all day to claw together the rudiments of attire suitable for a holiday event. Macy's, by whatever name and even more so in recent years, is determing to be A Destination, in part by so scrambling the clothing collections that unless you're a serious, semi-pro shopper, the process is a chore and you'll be wanting to take notes.

I'm tempted to hit Goodwill first, but at 5' 10", it's a rare day when they have much nice in my size.

...But if that's my only complaint, I should maybe not complain too much! I'm for the shower; then I'll don my pith helment, assemble the bearers and off into deepest Merchantia....

Morning, Blank Slate, No Time

Well, a little time, but only 'cos I am waiting my turn at the shower.

I'm covered up with year-enders at work, so much so I have not even shopped for Something Suitable to wear for New Year's (goin' to the speakeasy steakhouse, yayy!). I only have to dress like a grown-up one or two times a year, which I consider an advantage of my job. It usually is -- not so much when you want to go someplace where jeans, a hoodie over a knit top and workboots are not considered appropriate. (On the other hand, ooooooo, the food at Morton's! The company's pretty nice, too).

I've been working on a holiday "Starship" yarn, this one set during the short period of open warfare between USSF/NATO allies and the Edgers; I have a neat photo-essay for "Retrotechnologist" planned...but there's a list of awkward, difficult and/or boring tasks to get done at the Skunk Works before the holiday break, none of them so routine that I can do them and noodle plot points or pity comments at the same time.

The good news is, I'll have a week off and hope to make some actual progress. But today, not so much.

Economic Sense

In no little haste this morning (I worked 8 hours on/8 off/8 on Sunday and Monday, a trick that takes an increasingly greater toll, especially since I'm still getting over the flu; came home last night, ate a snack and sailed off to dreamland, debarking with utmost reluctance this a.m.), so it's a linky morning -- and something worth linking to: Markets Fail. That's Why We Need Markets. Complete with a thumbnail sketch of rent-seeking, why it is bad and the role of governments in enabling same, plus the skinny on the useful service markets provide in letting notions that don't work fail before they become too large.

It may be just horse sense to you and me...but the readin' public has yet to internalize it. And good luck tryin' to hammer the least glimpse of it into most congressthing's skulls, even with the very finest hammer.

On Mad Bombers

...The day the Nigerian groin-bomber flamed out, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano fatuously proclaimed, "The system worked." Interviewed by network news this morning, she backed away from that statement, saying she was -- and I paraphrase -- referring to the system of inconveniencing air travelers even more in the interest of security theatre, which kicked in almost immediately. Yay, hooray, air travel will suck even more and even fewer people will bother to fly.

Yet in a way, she was right. A "system" no bureaucrat -- certainly no DHS secret policeman -- would notice did work. While official reaction to the intel stage was weak, it should be noted the nitwit's own father (and, presumably, co-religionist) thought his son was lookin' a little jihadist around the gills and wrote to his government and to ours in warning. (Stop and think about that'n for a moment; it's a good sign). The active-intervention stage worked very well -- seeing something out of the ordinary, Dutch tourist Jasper Schuringa said his first thought wasn't to signal a flight attendant or wait for an air marshal to break cover, but rather, "He's trying to blow up the plane."

"I basically reacted directly," Schuringa said Saturday in an interview with CNN. "I didn't think. I just jumped. I just went over there and tried to save the plane."

Best line I've seen so far: "Aggressive intervention [in commercial air travel] has become the new societal norm." Air Marshals? Ms. Napolitano, we're all Air Marshals now.

The official attempts at protection failed; the amateur efforts, thanks to a very large dollop of luck, succeeded.