Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
|
|
|
M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
|
|
Friday, May 25, 2012 As beautiful as Trash is, she's never had movie-star teeth. The bottom row's a bit crooked, which is something she's never been self-conscious about. It's part of her charm, like Jewel before she got her choppers fixed and got so damn irritating. And even if Trash were self-conscious about it, that still wouldn't be enough motivation for her to subject herself to long sessions in the orthodontist's chair. She has a longstanding terror of dentists, installed by an incompetent practitioner who mangled her mouth. In fact, her file at the office has a note instructing the hygienist to confiscate her purse and keys when she arrives so she can't just get out of the chair and leave. Again. For a while now, the dentist she goes to -- who deals with special-needs patients like small children, the developmentally disabled, and my wife -- had been trying to convince Trash to get braces anyway. Trash resisted, calmly but firmly. Until she broke one of her front teeth on…some water. Not ice, not the glass, just water. She made it into the dentist for an emergency appointment the day before she had to leave town for the week, and the dentist explained that her bottom teeth are shifting, and if they don't get straightened, they're going to start knocking out both her front top teeth, a bit at a time. Even Trash is vain enough to want to avoid that. She also wanted to avoid those uncomfortable metal braces that I and half the people I knew had in junior high school. So she decided to go with the clear plastic trays instead. You can't eat with those things in, but they pop out for meals, and then you brush your teeth, and then you pop them back in. Sucks for people who graze and snack throughout the day, but since Trash isn't one of those people, this would be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezie, as M. Edium likes to say. The first hitch came when she was at the appointment getting her first set of trays installed -- this in February, mind you, after a whole series of other appointments involving molds and casts and all manner of horrifying experiences for a committed dentophobe. The orthodontist showed her how to pop them in and out, and then reminded her, "Now remember, just water when you're wearing them." "Right, water and coffee," Trash nodded. "No coffee," he insisted. "Just water." Trash looked into his eyes. Then she looked at the half-full Starbucks cup in her hand. Then she considered forcibly introducing the two items. Because the thing is, Trash needs her coffee. As regular readers know, we both work at home, and part of our daily routine involves keeping her mug full and warm. She drinks coffee instead of snacking. Coffee is her snack. It's not that she drinks a lot, it's that she drinks a little over a long time. Trash tried to convey a bit of this to the orthodontist as best she could, given that she was suddenly shaking all over. "Just drink your coffee when you have your braces out," he advised, obliviously. Now, the thing about this system is that you're allowed to have them out for a total of ninety minutes per day. In that hour and a half, you have to fit in all your meals, snacks, and non-water drinks. Not to mention the fact that any time you consume anything other than water, you have to then give your teeth a thorough brushing, and brush your trays while you're at it. The time adds up fast, to the point where I've had to finally develop my previously nonexistent ability to have all of dinner ready at once on the nights I cook (yes, it's been hard on me, too). So Trash testily asked the orthodontist, "How do you drink coffee?" It does take Trash a while to get through a cup, but I don't know anyone who will habitually shotgun a whole mug and then slam the empty cup down on the table like a gunslinger at a saloon. Or at least I didn't used to. But it seems that there are three different reasons why different things aren't allowed when the braces are in. Some things get trapped in the angstrom of space between the trays and the teeth and immediately start corroding the enamel like termites in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Some things are hot enough to soften the plastic and cause them to warp, which is a non-starter for instruments that are fashioned with such precision. And still other things cause permanent stains to both the trays and one's teeth. Coffee, as it turns out, does all three. No wonder she loves it so much. So Trash has spent the last three month trying to figure out a coffee delivery system she can get away with. Waiting for the coffee to cool only solves one of the problems. Straws don't work because the coffee can't be contained once it's in the mouth. And I just haven't had time to steal an IV from the hospital. But she's making it work. She's drinking less coffee, but faster. Sometimes she'll allow herself a cup of hot water from the tea kettle, with a decadent lemon wedge in it. And there's always the fact that this isn't permanent. She changes the trays every two weeks, and next week she starts on her 7th set. Which means she's almost twelve weeks in. Only sixty-some to go! It's going to be a long year and a half. posted by M. Giant 12:51 PM 0 comments0 Comments:Friday, May 18, 2012 M. Ovie Reviews: The Avengers As many comic-book movies as I've seen in the past few years, and as many as you've seen me review, it's a little surprising that I'm not actually a comic book fan. I think I'm becoming a comic-book movie fan, though. Particularly a fan of The Avengers. I've been a willing mark in Marvel's long con to which this is the culmination (see above) and we all knew that when this sequel to, like, six other movies showed up, I'd be there -- not least of all because I'd already invested in four of them. And pretty much liked most of them, so what the heck? But even with that and all the positive reviews, I knew better than to let my expectations get too high. But they did anyway, and then the movie exceeded them. I confess to being a longtime admirer of Joss Whedon, but also a cautious skeptic, given the whole Dollhouse and Firefly thing. I remain curious as to how he actually got this gig. As a comic-book geek himself, he was the perfect guy for the job, which should have disqualified him right out of the gate. Good thing somebody screwed up somewhere along the line. The Avengers turns out to be a perfect balance of...well, lots of things. For instance, there's the perennial question of comic geeks: "Who would win in a fight between Hero A and Hero B?" Before all the supers start getting along, thanks to a catalyzing event I won't spoil, there are plenty of permutations of Hero A vs. Hero B. (and sometimes hero C.) to take in, both superpowerish and verbal (both of which are enjoyable). Every hero has his or Black Widow's own personal tragedy to deal with, and they do, but without being whiny and mopey about it. And I think it's been pretty well established that a superhero movie's quality is often inversely proportional to its protagonist's level of self-pity. I.e., In this context, Iron Man > Captain America > Thor > Iron Man 2 > either Hulk movie, from what I hear. The other thing that makes this project Whedonesque is the whole gang-of-misfits-with-powers theme. The Avengers are like the Scooby gang (the real one, from Buffy) in that they all have their own special skills and abilities that fit together perfectly when it counts, but they're also outsized personalities who bicker like teenagers. There's a scene where everybody yells at Nick Fury (and if you're going to yell at SLJ -- who between this series and The Incredibles has been in most of my favorite superhero movies -- you definitely want five other superheroes to have your back) that reminded me of nothing so much as everyone turning on Giles in the library, in a Buffy scene that may or may not have actually happened. There's also the balance of each individual Avenger, which is somehow pulled off brilliantly. Nobody steals the movie (although RDJ comes close) and nobody gets shortchanged (with the possible exception of Hawkeye, and who cares about him since M*A*S*H went off the air?). Character development is balanced with action, humor is balanced with tragedy, and it all just holds together. As a director, I'm glad to say that Whedon avoids most of the usual Whedonisms. There's very little directorial intrusion, and almost none of those pointlessly interminable tracking shots he used to do all the time just to show off. I'm not saying he doesn't do them, but here he makes them count. Rather than trying to show up the series' previous directors Favreau, Branagh, or Johnston (I can't speak to Lee or Leterrier), he respects the visions they laid out in their prequels and integrates them into a whole. And unlike most overblown action movies, he lets his actors act. Every one of these invincible personages has moments of vulnerability and even fear, including Thor and Loki. To put it bluntly, Joss Whedon shows a lot of balls with this project. And somehow he keeps them all up in the air. posted by M. Giant 12:45 PM 0 comments0 Comments:Tuesday, May 01, 2012 M. Ovie Revews: Cabin in the Woods I don't know if there's any point in reviewing Cabin in the Woods in my usual spoiler-free style, since by now you've either a) already seen it, b) been spoiled by someone else, or c) have already decided to never see it anyway. I'll just say that if you fall into the c) group, you should seriously reconsider. But we've been spoiler-free since '03, so maybe I should talk about another movie I saw about this time last year, called Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. But I don't want to spoil that movie, either. I'll just say that if you're interested in a hilarious deconstruction of backwoods-set slasher films where a group of pretty young morons walk one by one into grisly deaths due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation they're actually in, you can't go wrong with either one of these movies. In one of them, one horror-film trope after another is taken out, played with, turned on its ear, and stuck into your face by a half-familiar cast that includes Alan Tudyk. And the other one was co-written by Joss Whedon. This is prime Whedon, too. Mid-era Buffy quality writing, not Firefly or Firefly or Dollhouse (although cast members from the latter two shows show up). It's smart and funny and unexpected and fun. Plus it's thematically tight while doling out clues at an impeccable, completely non-exposition-y pace. Best feature-length advertisement for Whedon's upcoming The Avengers I can imagine. I don't even need him to come back to TV if he keeps making movies as good as this instead. So yeah, short review, because there's mot much else I can say without diminishing your enjoyment of it, which will be considerable. See CitW. Make it a double feature with T&DvsE if you like. You won't be sorry either way. posted by M. Giant 5:11 PM 1 comments1 Comments:I saw it opening weekend, not really knowing what to expect except Joss. A friend and I do weekly Superhero Movie Night and we were so excited for the Avengers we went to Cabin in the Woods on the justification that it was Joss and had Thor, so it counted. And I'm so, so glad we did. I don't usually like horror, but this one was so fun and crazy and I didn't expect the middle of the end.
By Monday, April 16, 2012 M. Ovie Reviews: The Hunger Games Making a popular book into a movie is a no-win proposition. If you change it, you piss people off. If you don't change it enough, you piss other people off. I don't know why anyone bothers, when at the end all they're going to be left with is a bunch of pissed-off people and tens of millions of dollars. In the case of The Hunger Games, I departed from my usual position of total ignorance of the source material. I'd read the book for the first time over New Year's, recently enough to remember most of it but long enough ago that there were some details that were less fresh in my mind, like whether Wes Bentley's Seneca is a new character invented for the movie. I should have either read the book earlier or waited longer to see the movie, because it wasn't that hard for me to pick a time when I could leave my seat to jettison my cherry Icee™. And The Hunger Games is a story that hangs on making you want to find out what happens next. Paradoxically, though, after I finished reading The Hunger Games, I wasn't very interested in finishing the trilogy, and people who have say that's probably a good call. I didn't want to mess up my enjoyment of the first book. For that reason, I felt like I was taking a bit of a chance seeing the movie. Which did mess some stuff up. It starts off appropriately gray and drab and impressionistically shaky-cam, giving it a late-B*G feel. Into this atmosphere, the entrance of Effie Trinket made up like a steampunk Elizabeth I is genuinely jarring. As District 12's emissary from the Capitol, much is made of her "Capitol accent," which American actor Elizabeth Banks interprets as British. But then they get to the Capitol and she's the only person who has one. Even Brit Toby Jones as Claudius Templesmith sounds more American than she does. Furthermore, the book describes the Capitol as a hotbed of highly advanced foppery, but I guess making that many other cast members and extras look as over-the-top as Effie was just too hard. I did like how the film opened things up. The entire book takes place from Katniss's point of view, so for any knowledge we have of what's happening outside the arena, we have to rely on her guesses (and, I presume, the later books, if I could be arsed to read them). As a result, the political situation she eventually emerges into comes as a shock, while we're a little more prepared. And, I might add, interested. The arena's command center, for instance, was like a cross between Minority Report and The Truman Show. Don't even ask if I'm Team Peeta or Team Gale, either. Is there a Team Cinna? Because damn, Jennifer Lawrence and Lenny Kravitz looked ready to rip each other's clothes off every time they were in the same room together. There was some stuff that I'm not going to quibble about the movie leaving out, like some of the more gruesome tracker jacker hallucinations, or the nature of the attack dogs at the end, or the whole Avox situation. Because the movie did something the book didn't: made me want to check out the next installment. Dammit. posted by M. Giant 7:28 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:
I know they had to keep it "PG-13," but my main quibble was that it wasn't graphic enough. The whole idea is that these kids are subjected to a horrific situation (kill or be killed) for the entertainment of others (and the political reminder of who is in charge). To whitewash the violence and horror of it all made it seem like no big deal (movie not book). That Peeta and Katniss look fairly clean and healthy at the end of the Games just ticked me off, since they were barely hanging on in the book, esp Peeta.
By Ha - I read in Rolling Stone that Jennifer Lawrence insisted on calling Lenny Kravitz "Mr. Kravitz," because she's really good friends with Zoe Kravitz. Her home training dictates that you call your friends' parents Mr./Ms./Mrs. I thought that was adorable, and I got more of a protective parental vibe from him, not a lusty one. I mean, I lust after Lenny Kravitz, but I didn't think Jennifer Lawrence did.
By
Who told you it was a good call not to bother with the rest of the trilogy? That's craziness! To me it just got better and better and appropriately darker.
By
The Hunger Games is the the first time I'm reading something popular since...I don't even remember. It's strange to actually know what my younger coworkers are talking about!
By One of the best movie that I saw this year.
By Wednesday, March 28, 2012 Back from the Dead Don't get me wrong, I like my new car. But I wouldn't have it if my old Saturn hadn't blown up and forced me to buy it. There was really nothing else to be done. As the guy at the shop told me, a hunk of the engine was catapulted across the shop when the started it. It was its time. In fact, as of just a few weeks ago when I drove by, it was still on their tiny lot. I would have felt bad about it taking up space if I hadn't signed the wreck over to them months ago so they could junk it. It was bad enough experiencing the ambivalent feelings I had just seeing it sit there, idle for months with no one driving it. Missing the open road. Missing me, the only one who ever truly loved it. Like I said last week, M. Edium not only didn't like my old car very much, he took to openly mocking me about it near the end. And he still mocks me sometimes for having driven it as long as I did. It wasn't exactly the fanciest car in the pickup line As far as he's concerned, the destruction of its engine was the best thing that ever happened to our family. So I was a little surprised to get a call from the car repair shop last week, asking me to bring by some lien release paperwork to show the loan had been paid off (which it had, years ago). That wasn't the surprising part. I knew the junkyard might want that before cubing it. No, what surprised me was that he needed the paperwork so they could get tabs for it. Yes, the impossible had happened. My car had been repaired. I felt a little weird about this, obviously, because they hadn't repaired it for me. Even I wouldn't have paid what they invested in buying and installing a whole new transmission in it. But it's not like they were going to sell it and keep all the money; no, they were going to use it as one of their loaner cars. If I thought it was weird seeing my old Saturn sitting at the repair shop for months, it's going to be even weirder seeing it being driven around the neighborhood by someone else. It must be like having a loved one in a coma from which it seems they'll never recover, and you move on with your life and get a new loved one to replace the broken one, and then that old loved one gets up and starts walking around. With a bunch of people you don't even know. It's not like they got a free car for nothing. They made the investment in parts and labor on their own behalf, and the owner has promised to work out some arrangement with me for credit for work in the future. As a matter of fact, I kind of can't wait until my new car breaks down some time. Because then I can drop it off and use the loaner car that used to be mine, for old times' sake. And for the sake of pure meanness, I'll probably also pick up M. Edium from school in it without ever telling him it's back on the road. posted by M. Giant 12:23 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Heh. I'd probably use my "credit" just in loaner car usage to pick up M. Edium every once in a while. Just to keep him on his toes, you know.
By Wednesday, March 21, 2012 Bumper Car As much as M. Edium likes my new car, it took him some time to get used to some things about it. Like getting in and out. He may have been annoyed and occasionally even embarrassed by my old Saturn station wagon, especially when I picked him up at his elementary school in a chi-chi suburb, but at least it had smaller doors and a lower drop to the pavement than the new vehicle. Now, getting out of the Equinox, he's in the habit of facing the back, bracing one hand on the edge of his seat and one hand on the door handle, and swinging his feet down to the ground. Naturally, this has the side effect of swinging the car door open as wide as it will go. And one day, probably, even wider. Which can be a problem if I park next to anything, which I find I frequently do. It's not always convenient to do otherwise, however. Not long ago we went to the grocery store to pick up just a couple of things, and the only spot on the first two levels of the parking ramp was next to a support column on M. Edium's side (he sits behind the shotgun seat). I went ahead and parked just inches from it, since I'd decided that M. Edium wasn't going to get out that way this time anyhow. I told him to wait and get out on my side. There was a bag of stuff on the back seat on the driver's side that I was going to put in the cargo area in back, but then his path out of the back would be clear. I told him to wait while I did that and then I would help him get out so as to protect the car next to us, and I closed the back door again, until I could be there to keep it from swinging wide. Even with the tight fit at the car's right, there wasn't a great deal more space on the left between my car and the one parked next to me. If he did his Cheetah-swing from the back driver's side door it would surely hit that car. So while I was moving around to the back, he opened the door anyway. A toy of his fell out onto the ground, and with the unthinking reflex of a child, he swung right down after it. Putting half his weight on the partially open car door and causing it to swing open as far as it could before hitting the car I'd parked next to with a blood-freezing thunk. I was upset. Things happen, especially with kids, but when you warn them not to do something, and you explain why, and they do it anyway, it's a little tough to let them off the hook. "Dents cost hundreds of dollars to fix, do you realize that?" I said to him in the store. "Do you have hundreds of dollars?" "No," he said plaintively. "I only have thirty." He was only referring to his cash on hand, but it still made me feel bad for him. Somewhat. So of course I was tempted to just drive off after we were done shopping. Technically, it wasn't my fault. But that wouldn't have been right. And what kind of message would I be sending my child? I couldn't let him see me do something like that. Maybe I would have given it more serious thought if he hadn't been with me, but then if he hadn't been with me, the dent wouldn't have gotten made in the other car anyway. I'd also been texting Trash during this time and we were in agreement on doing the right thing. Meanwhile, the other car blossomed in my memory from just the ding on the door to an entire silver Mercedes shining otherwise pristinely around it, a typical vehicle for the suburb we were in. We were screwed. When we returned to the parking ramp, I was all ready to leave a note, but the car's owner was returning at the same time, with her friend. This was going to be awkward, to be sure, but I saw that her friend was carrying something that told me we might be all right after all. Her first words to us were, "I'm sorry," meaning she was sorry she'd crowded our space so much. I said, "No, we're sorry." And then, without missing a beat, without anyone prompting him or even looking at him, M. Edium bravely piped up, "I dented your car with my door." I was almost as proud of him as I would have been if he hadn't just caused potentially hundreds of dollars in property damage. The other car's owner came around to the other side and looked at the ding, which was certainly visible but nowhere near as large as I remembered it. I looked at the thing in her friend's arms, a long, puffy, white bag with a hanger sticking out of it. "Oh, that's no big deal," she shrugged. "It's an old car anyway." Sure enough, as I looked for myself, the sparkling Mercedes I thought we'd ruined was a lightly pre-battered Mazda. "Let me give you our contact information anyway," I said. But no, she didn't want it. It was no big deal. She was impressed with M. Edium telling the truth, and to be honest I think she and her friend were both in a really good mood after buying that wedding dress. So with more expressions of contrition and gratitude, I let them squeeze into their car and waved as they drove off. M. Edium and I followed. But we'd both learned an important lesson. M. Edium learned to be mindful of the cars next to him when he gets out of mine. Nothing like this has happened since. And I learned to always park in the middle of at least three empty spaces when he's with me. Unless of course we park outside a bridal shop, but we don't make a lot of runs like that. posted by M. Giant 8:52 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Isn't that what the child locks are for? And what would you have done if the other car left before you got out of the store?
By I have always enjoyed your tales MBig but I have to agree with anonymous number 1.
By Tuesday, March 13, 2012 Summer Cool It was time to plan how M. Edium was going to spend his summer. At seven years old, and more than halfway through first grade, he's at that awkward age. He's too old to go back to Montessori or day care for the summer, and he's too young to be allowed to hang around the house all day driving his mother and me crazy for three months while we're trying to do our work-from-home day jobs. Last year wasn't so bad. He'd been going to half-day kindergarten the previous school year, filling the other half-day at the same Montessori school he'd been going to since he was three and a half. The problem with that was he'd been going to that Montessori school since he was three and a half, so he pretty much knew all the stuff they taught there. We kept him there for the balance of June and July, ignoring his increasingly strident complaints of boredom, then winged it for August, which proved less than ideal. He spent some time at a couple of camps and at my parents' house and even at their cabin up north, but that only took us so far. Not that he minded getting to watch a DVD or two a day when he was home, but too much screen time turns him into a recidivist felon on crack, just like all the studies say. So this summer, with three months to fill instead of one, Trash knew she was going to have to get a head start on getting him into the various programs. We're lucky to have access to plenty of resources where we live: the local community center, the community education department of the adjoining affluent suburb, the Science Museum of Minnesota, the YMCA, and most of all, Trash. She'd learned from experience last year that the good stuff fills up in advance, and quickly. So she's been interviewing M. Edium all year on what kind of activities he'd like to do. Which, given his eclectic tastes, made him seem like a rich kid from the Upper West Side when taken all together. Still, last Sunday Trash sat down with her laptop and what catalogs we'd received up to that point and started sifting through all the various programs available this coming summer. Most of them go for a week, and many of them are half-day classes. And she was booking them all months in advance, on websites that didn't always function smoothly or over the phone with the weekend skeleton crew. As I said on Twitter at the time, it was a bit like using barbecue tongs to assemble a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces are made out of Jell-O. But after a long afternoon of clicking, calling, and summoning M. Edium in from his snow fort to ask him, "Would you like this?" Trash had constructed a summer that any kid would envy. Or at least, any kid that likes the stuff M. Edium likes. There were two immovable tentpoles to work around: one being his one-week karate camp in August, where he's all but guaranteed a belt promotion; and the other is the previously booked week at the cabin by the lake with my parents (and, part o the time, myself), which last year changed his life by introducing him to the joys of fishing. Sometimes things skip a generation, you know. So Trash went to work slotting stuff in. You may have seen the product of his "Jedi Moviemaking" after-school class on YouTube; he'll be taking a similar class with a Harry Potter theme, so you can look forward to the sequel. He's also taking a Wizarding class, so it'll be like a summer week at Hogwarts but with less death. Other classes include one on invention and one on spycraft, so we'll get to have our very own miniature Q from James Bond in the house. Or a q, if you will. We're returning to Renaissance Weekend, so he gets to do Camp Renaissance again, where last year he met in person a paleontologist, several NASA employees including an astronaut, and a one-time pilot of the Goodyear blimp. He's also looking forward to spending more time with his favorite babysitter, with whom he bonded so effectively last summer by making her do everything he wanted to do. And if that's not enough, he's also doing golf, sailing, fencing, and horseback riding camps. At this rate there's nothing left for him next year but polo. He also wanted to do something music-related, but we're just sticking with his regular weekly piano lessons. And his final request was for something with dance and gymnastics. Trash found him a dance, gymnastics, and cheerleading camp, which he resisted until we told him that a cheerleader once grew up to be the president of the United States. Which is the first and last time we ever point to that dude as a role model. Trash was so proud of her accomplishment that for days afterward she carried around the notebook listing all the classes and showed it to people. I would have referred to it in writing this post but she's out showing it to more people right now. The best part is that if he hates anything, he only has to stick with it for a week. But he could potentially discover interests that he might pursue for the rest of his life. We're happy to be able to give him this opportunity. Sure, all those classes add up, but they'll pay for themselves next summer. At which pointhe'll be old enough to not only stay home all summer, but spend it building a second story on the garage. posted by M. Giant 4:58 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
