If i miss writing in time, i hope everyone is able have the observations that make passing through this solstice period a joy or at least the darkness eased. I am enjoying my LED lit branch (up all year) and tree during the long dark morning, and found that BritBox has streaming holiday light shows to run in the background of doing other things.
Some quick notes
no car news, but we don't really need two vehicles, so we are OK. What we have is a good reliable car (that is now dmaged) and a vehicle for taking things to the dump. Christine managed to find a really nice take things to the dump vehicle some years back, so we'll drive it about more and live with the lousy gas mileage.
Bruno and Marlowe have had a step of improvement in how they get along and how Bruno believes he can access the rest of the house. He doesn't need coaxing to leave his safe room, Marlowe is not nearly as vigilant. It's odd to see how things seem to have little jumps and not gradual change. We went from much coaxing to get him to leave his room on his own to him dashing out in the morning.
Christine is having a more serious flare (infection) of the issue that sent her to the emergency room in June. Less than a month to the surgery that should resolve things.
I am fighting my own self denigration around gift giving and not really winning but avoiding. I hope i can take some time off today to label and wrap and pack and ship. I had so much joy making and thinking about giving -- years of it imagining when i could gift things from the orchard -- and ... anyhow, i will focus on that and try to take the insecure part of me and tell her ... that people already know i am a flake so it's ok? No, wait, that's not the message. We'll work on that.
i've gotten in my (pathetically low count of) steps the past two days. I think i feel better for it. I am worried about how fatigue hit me out of the blue a few weeks ago, but i have no evidence that the fatigue is caused by doing things, i just NOTICE when i am doing things. Acting like i am fatigued all the time is not the solution.
Two posts back I was complaining about the cost of a postage stamp and here I am at it again. £18 for two takeaway portions of curry and chips? No way!
I'm not a cheapskate, really I'm not, but that's just not value for money.
This was in Crowborough. Crowborough is swish. It wasn't always. Up until the late 18th century the land south of Tunbridge Wells- the High Weald- was sparsely populated by charcoal burners and subsistence farmers- "ignorant and heathenish" people according to the local landowner who built a church to improve their manners. This injection of organised religion started a process that led to the town- which occupies the second highest land in East Sussex- being marketed to the late Victorians as a health resort. "Scotland in Sussex" is what they called it. (Thank you wikipedia for the forgoing information.) Arthur Conan Doyle was an early adopter and spent the last quarter century of his life in residence. There's a very bad modern statue of him in the town centre. When he drove past we noticed it was dressed in a little green jacket and an elf hat. I wish I'd taken a picture but there was nowhere to park.
Following Sir Arthur a lot of famous people have owned or own property in Crowborough. Dirk Bogarde, Tom Baker, David Jason, Cate Blanchett.....
Cate Blanchett may be happy to pay you £18 for her chips but you wouldn't want to try it on with an ignorant and heathenish charcoal burner......
Disneyland is still way more crowded than I was anticipating. We got over to the parks around 6:30pm and were planning to get dinner from the Festival of Holidays carts at DCA and assumed it would be less crowded there than at Disneyland, but the lines to get in were really long for some reason. Once we were actually inside it wasn't too bad (still crowded, though), so I guess it was just a case of a lot of people arriving for after work trips at the same time.
Hello, Dear Readers. I hope that Dreamwidth will let me post this, considering how long it is. Reddit won't, even when divided into separate translations.
This is a fascinating interview with some anecdotes about Francesco Tamagno. Please note that I had Perplexity first transcribe the Italian, and then translate that into English, keeping it as close to the original as possible. I have included both texts. Below, however, is the original link to check for accuracy. I loved the story of how he met Verdi and convinced him to let him take the role of Otello by making the notes higher! The joke at the end also made me laugh aloud. So he did sing Nesun Dorma after all! Just not for us on the living side! (For those new to opera, it was written after his death, and the title refers to no one sleeping.)
1. Spent most of the work day cleaning up data and while I originally thought it was going to take me a couple days, I actually got the whole file done today, which was nice.
2. We went to Disneyland for dinner. Still way more crowded than I would have thought with so many passholders blocked out, but not quite as bad as last Monday. We did have some really delicious food, though. And we finally managed to get some more of those cranberry orange loaves from Jolly Holiday and brought them home for breakfast tomorrow.
3. Jasper's really loving the warming bed now that it has lost its sides and become a warming cushion. Not sure if it's because of the new shape or because it's on top of a chest rather than on the floor, but he's into it.
Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.
Over the last week...
Posted & commented on bnha_fans. Final episode of the anime aired. Main series is truly truly over now!!!
I have a burning question (that came to me while putting my socks on), so I made a poll.
Feel free to wax poetically about the topic in the comments. What about your characters? Sonny Crockett famously does not wear them. Rico does, but to tell you the truth, I haven't paid them much attention (I'll have to fix that).
(OK, the books aren't celebrating Hanukkah, they're celebrating Walpurgisnacht if anything, but I am. Quick takes, I don't have too much to say.)
The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard. Readaloud and reread, in honor of Tom Stoppard's death. It was very cool having an actual classics grad student read the part of young A. E. Housman, though ultimately I feel like I don't quite connect with the play, perhaps because of not being a classicist or not being sufficiently attached to Housman's poetry. (I do find it interesting to compare A. E. Housman to his Cambridge colleague G. H. Hardy, who mentions Housman a few times in his Mathematician's Apology, but I'm not sure I can fit into the context of this play.)
The Tempest, William Shakespeare. Also a readaloud, and of course a reread, as this is a play I know very well. Everyone agreed this time that Prospero is a jerk, but the language is still fantastic. Also, having read the role of Ferdinand that guy doesn't seem so great either.
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Walter Arndt. I've previously read three modern abridged translations of Faust (MacDonald, Brenton, and Clifford) that were designed to be performed on stage (partly to judge their suitability for readalouds), and then I ran across this in a Little Free Library and thought I would try a more literary/scholarly translation. Anyway, so I know how things go, but it's still interesting to see the things that get cut from the other versions, and will probably be more interesting once I get to part II. It makes an interesting comparison to The Tempest (which it is explicitly referencing by reusing the character of Ariel), but unfortunately as well as having to read it translation, I've also missed out on the opportunity to have imprinted on it at a younger age as I did with Shakespeare.
Gretchen and I watched the season finale of "The Floor" today. This is a fun little game show, because it combines knowledge and luck in interesting ways. Some of the categories I'm ok with and are places where I can do a lot of damage like, say, "Beatles Songs". Others, not so much... :)
And that's good. If it were too easy, it wouldn't be fun to watch.
Nostalgia is a trap. The people who indulge in it do so with selective memory, either their own or someone else’s. When I was a kid in the 80s, people looked back yearningly at the 50s as a simpler and better time, when families were nuclear, entertainment was wholesome and a slice of pie was just a nickel, conveniently eliding the segregation of black citizens, the communist witch hunts, and the fact that women couldn’t get things like credit cards or mortgages without a husband or some other male authority. Later people started looking at the 80s the way the 80s looked at the 50s, and they enjoyed the dayglo colors and the cheeky music and forgot apartheid, the cold war, leaded gas and smoking everywhere, or the fact that gay men were dying of AIDS and the US government (for one) couldn’t be persuaded to give a shit. I don’t feel nostalgia for the 80s; I lived in it. A whole lot of things about it were better left behind.
And still, nostalgia persists, because being an adult is complicated, and that time when you were a kid (or frankly, didn’t even exist yet) was uncomplicated. You didn’t have make any decisions yet, and all the awful things about the era existed in a realm you didn’t really have to consider. The golden age of anything is twelve, old enough to see what’s going on and not old enough to understand it.
Pleasantville is all about the trap of nostalgia and how its surface pleasures require an unexamined life. Tobey Maguire, in one of his first big roles, plays David, a high school student with a sucky home life who is obsessed with the 50s TV show Pleasantville, a sort of Father Knows Best knock-off where there patriarchy is swell and there is no problem that can’t be resolved in a half hour. For a kid from a broken home, whose mom is about to sneak off for a weekend assignation in a moderately-priced hotel, Pleasantville sounds like paradise.
That is, until David and his twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are, by way of a magical remote control, whisked away to Pleasantville itself, in all its monochromatic 50s glory, and forced to take on the roles of Bud and Mary Sue Parker, the two kids of the series’ main family. For Jennifer, who is a Thoroughly Modern Millennial, this is a fate worse than death; she had plans for the weekend, and they didn’t involve dressing up like a square. David, on the other hand, is initially delighted. He knows the series inside and out, is excited to be in the highly delineated world of his favorite show, and assures his perturbed sister that as long as they play the roles assigned to them, everything will be fine until they find their way back to the 90s.
You don’t have to be a devotee of 50s sitcoms to guess how long it takes until things start going awry. David and Jennifer, whether they intend to or not, are now the proverbial snakes in the garden, bringing knowledge into a formerly innocent world, sometimes literally (David tells other teens what’s in the formerly blank library books, and the words magically fill in) and sometimes also literally, but not using words (Jennifer introduces the concept of orgasms, and boy howdy, is that a game changer). As things get more complicated, some people get unhappy. And when some people get unhappy, they start looking for someone to blame.
Pleasantville is not a subtle film by any stretch: when people start deviating from their assigned roles, they change from monochrome to color, which allows the film to label part of its uniformly Caucasian cast as “colored,” which… well, I know what extremely obvious allusion writer/director Gary Ross was trying to make here, and the best I can say about it is that it is not how I would have done it. Also, any film where a nice girl character offers a nice boy character an apple right off the tree is not trying to sneak anything past you. The movie wears its lessons and motivations right on its sleeve, and in neon.
What are subtle, though, are the performances. With the exception of J.T. Walsh, who plays the mayor of Pleasantville with big smiling back-slapping friendly menace, no one in this movie is overplaying their hand. We notice this first with David/Bud and Maguire’s bemused way of getting both of them through the world, both ours and Pleasantville’s. But then there’s Bill Johnson, the owner of the malt shop Bud works in, who is initially befuddled when things are out of sequence, but gets progressively delighted the more improvisation gets added into his life. Bud’s dad George (William H. Macy) finds his role as paterfamilias slipping away and is befuddled rather than angry about it. Even Jennifer, who initially comes in as a wrecking ball, finds a lower gear.
But the true heart of Pleasantville is Betty, Bud and Mary Sue’s mom, played by the always tremendous Joan Allen. Like everyone else in Pleasantville, Betty starts off as a naïf, who only knows what’s been written for her. But the more she strays from what she’s supposed to be doing and saying, the more she understands that what she’s “supposed” to be doing and saying stands in total opposition to what she actually needs — when, that is, she finds the wherewithal to both understand and act on those needs. Her transformation is bumpy, not without backtracks, and deeply affecting. Joan Allen did not get any awards for this film, but it is an award-worthy performance.
(Also award-worthy: Randy Newman’s score, which was in fact nominated for an Oscar.)
It’s this dichotomy — high concept, deeply ridiculous premise, and heartfelt, committed character performances — that fuels Pleasantville and makes it work better than it has any right to. It would have been so easy just to play this film as farce, and you know what? If the film had been played as farce, it would have been perfectly entertaining. Watch the latter-day Jumanji films, the ones with Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black (and Karen Gillan! Whose comedic talents are underrated!) and you’ll see how playing a ridiculous concept almost purely as farce can be both amusing and profitable. There is a world where Pleasantville is one of those 90s comedy movies whose titles on the movie posters were big chunky red letters. It’s just not this world, and the film is better for it.
By now at least some of you may have figured out why I find Pleasantville so compelling and watchable. What Ross is doing in this movie is the same sort of thing I do in a lot of my writing: Take a truly ridiculous, almost risibly farcical concept, and then make characters have real lives in the middle of it. You’ll see me doing it in Redshirts and Starter Villain and especially in When the Moon Hits Your Eye, in which, you’ll recall, I turned the moon into cheese. A lot of people think doing this sort of thing is easy, which, one, good, I try to make it look like that, and two, if you actually think it’s easy to do, try it. It takes skill, and not everyone has it, and not every book or play or TV show or movie that attempts it gets it right.
Pleasantville gets it right. It looks at the pleasures of nostalgia and says, you know what, it’s not actually all that great when you think about it. It’s no better than the real world and the modern day.
It’s hard to believe it just now, but there will come a time when someone looks back at 2025 and thinks, what a simpler, better time that was. Not because their world is that much worse (I mean, shit, I hope not), but because by then all of this will be rubbed smooth and easy and someone who is twelve now will remember it as carefree. Those of us over twelve will know better what lies underneath pleasant nostalgia. So does this film. Nostalgia is never as great as you remember it.
I've been surviving very cold Chicago; I've been adulting, doing the Green Card renewal (which the CIS folks just sent me two letters stating my case is "in process," huzzah) and getting my Rexulti program application for 2026 ready for delivery to my delightfully old-fashioned shrink and The Amazing Nicki, and spending more time than I should cooking and baking rather than reading. But it's time to put all that behind me and return to my music meme, at least until I can think of interesting things in my brain that others might like to hear about. Therefore, I bring you -
A song from a movie soundtrack:
I've read The Lord of the Rings trilogy more times than I can remember. I also watched the three movies, both theatrical and extended release, dozens of times in total, in theaters, and at home. I love both the books and, with caveats, the movies.
I believe that the ending of The Return of the King, the third movie, is as close to perfect as it could possibly be. A major reason is the song written by Annie Lennox and Fran Walsh, with music by Lennox and Howard Shore. The words, which take from one of Gandalf's comments to Pippin before the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, and speak of Elves being called home to the Undying Lands, get me every time.
This could have been the song I chose as one that makes me cry, but it's for that strange mix of grief, awe, and yearning that is somehow transmuted into joy. And of course Annie Lennox's voice is the wind that fills the sails as the ships leave the Grey Havens.
Today, I went on a journey to far away. Southeast of Cincinnati, to be more specific. While these past few days have been filled with icy roads, single digit temperatures, and disgusting slush of dirty snow and salt, today produced a much warmer and sunnier day. Thus, the snow began to melt, and everything turned to mud.
I know, of course, that cars can get stuck in snow, but it didn’t really occur to me all that much that cars could get stuck in mud. Today, I learned that valuable lesson.
So there I was, driving through curvy, wooded roads in the middle of nowhere, going to a house that was selling a beautiful, absolutely huge floral oil painting. When I got to the estate, I pulled into the long driveway and saw that there were two cars parked in the yard. I immediately thought that these two cars must be other buyers of these people’s Facebook Marketplace goods, so I figured I’d just park alongside the other cars in the yard.
I went in to the lovely home, acquired my big ass painting, barely fit it in my minivan (with the middle row of seats down, even), and proceeded to go on my merry way. Just kidding, I was stuck as heck! My wheels were spinning round and round in the mud and I was tearing up their lawn somethin’ fierce.
I walked, full of shame, back to their front door and knocked again, telling them I was stuck and I was sorry to be in the hair for longer than anticipated. Them, being an elderly couple, expressed their apologies for not being able to push my car or really do much of anything to help, to which I of course replied they’re completely fine and have nothing to be sorry for.
Funny enough, I had a ton of flat, broken down cardboard in the back of my van (that the painting was resting on). I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this before, but I remember a number of times where my mom was stuck in the snow and wedged cardboard under the wheels to gain traction and get unstuck. I thought I could do the same, but it simply was not working, and I was just making a mess.
So, I called a tow truck place. They said they couldn’t do it. I called a second place, but the number didn’t work. Finally, I called a third place, and they said they could be there within half an hour, and the minimum cost was $150.
I sat and waited in my car the half hour until they got there, got towed out, and then finally started the two hour drive back home. I was now about an hour behind schedule in my relatively packed day.
All this being said, my very exciting story of getting towed FIVE FEET ONTO THE ASPHALT is not why I wanted to talk about this incident. I wanted to tell you about this because I had an interesting realization once the situation was all said and done.
I was not mad. Like, at all. I got stuck in the mud, got my boots and car filthy, had to pay $150 just to get towed back onto the driveway, was behind schedule, and still had to drive two hours home. And yet, I was extremely and utterly unbothered.
Though I wouldn’t consider myself an angry or aggressive person by any means, I do have a very bad habit of letting very common or small issues completely ruin my mood and affect my entire day. And usually when something (such as getting my car towed) happens, it would make me think self-pitying, woe-is-me type thoughts like “of course this would happen, just my luck, fuck my life.”
(These thoughts, by the way, are extremely invalid because it is literally not my luck at all, I actually have pretty good luck and usually bad things don’t happen to me regularly.)
However, this time around, I did not have any negative thoughts like that, or feel stressed out at all. Truly, my brain was just like, “ah shucks, I’m stuck, that’s a little unfortunate, but no big deal, I’ll just call a tow truck and that’ll be that, and everything is fine!”
THAT NEVER HAPPENS IN MY BRAIN.
To go beyond feeling unbothered and not stressed, I felt grateful that I have the ability to call a tow truck, get unstuck within half an hour, and drop $150 on it without a second thought. My day is not even remotely affected by that money. I can still get groceries, I can still pay my bills, and in fact after that I got a full tank of gas, got a sandwich and coffee, and went to Kohl’s and spent like $250. It literally didn’t matter. I was more concerned by the fact I was an hour behind schedule than that I had to spend money on towing.
How lucky am I that I got a kick-ass painting, am able to get help when I need it without worry, and now I have a small story out of it.
Long story short, for what feels like the first time in a very, very long time. I didn’t melt down over an issue. I didn’t hate my entire existence because of a fixable problem. I didn’t feel like exploding just because something went wrong. I was fine! I wasn’t even mad or annoyed. I was perfectly okay. That feels so much better than getting angry.
Over 8,000 years ago, early farming communities in northern Mesopotamia were already thinking mathematically—long before numbers were written down. By closely studying Halafian pottery, researchers uncovered floral and plant designs arranged with precise symmetry and numerical patterns, revealing a surprisingly advanced sense of geometry.
People learned to count and do math, sometimes rather sophisticated math, long before they got around to writing numerals or equations. As for geometry, it's very easy to obtain workable patterns that scale well by examining nature. Fibonacci sequence and fractals both yield very useful parameters.
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Today, I went on a journey to far away. Southeast of Cincinnati, to be more specific. While these past few days have been filled with icy roads, single digit temperatures, and disgusting slush of dirty snow and salt, today produced a much warmer and sunnier day. Thus, the snow began to melt, and everything turned to mud.
