Jul 19

Chick-chicky boom

So you know how you get a song stuck in your head? I’ve had the same one stuck in my head for like three weeks now and it won’t go away. The song is ‘Cuban Pete’ from 1994’s The Mask. It’s really getting on the kids’ nerves, too, because I walk around the house singing it constantly. Not the whole song either–just the first few bars.

It’s not like I haven’t listened to or sung other music in the last three weeks. But until it fades from my memory I will just have to be content to be the king of the rhumba beat. When I shake my maracas I go chick-chicky boom chick-chicky boom.

Sigh.

Jul 17

Lookin’ for…um…whatever, and in the right places

I logged in to my blog control panel to see about penning a new post, and was surprised when I saw one of the phrases searched that brought visitors to my site:

 

 

 

 

Even weirder is that I have a post that matches is almost perfectly.

Jul 13

It’s Friday!

My friend B has a love / hate relationship with Friday. I won’t get into the origin story, but ever since he has worked with us he hates being reminded that it is Friday. And so every single Friday we try to make it a point to tell him that it is, indeed, Friday. Each week we try to top our previous efforts, finding increasingly creative ways to annoy him.

A couple of weeks ago I kind of let him down, and just had to simply tell him I didn’t have the effort to ‘do Friday.’

But today was different. I had been planning this since last week.

  • ME: Hey, B, I’m having a brain cramp; what was the name of that guy on the island with Robinson Crusoe?
  • B: Man, I don’t know. It was some weird name. Wasn’t he an Indian or something?
  • ME: Yeah, some kind of native. You’d think that he’d have a name like ‘Chickamauga’ or something.
  • B: Wasn’t he named after an object or something?
  • ME: It was something weird–wait–his name was Friday!
  • B (thinking that I had simply solved my trivia question): That was it! You got me.
  • ME: I did get you–IT’S FRIDAY!
  • B: I hate you, Dan, but only because you are wittier and cleverer than me.

He might not have actually those actual words on that last line, but I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant.

Jul 10

Review: Brave

We saw Pixar’s Brave last weekend. It was OK.

I didn’t love or hate the movie; it was just fine. Really, it just seemed like pretty much every other Disney princess movie: I’m a young princess, I don’t want to do any thing I don’t feel like doing, I am willing to do bad things to keep from doing it, I don’t care about the consequences, etc. Our princess does learn a lesson, but it doesn’t really change much of the course of the movie–only a small consequence at the very end; in every other way, she gets what she wanted. By comparison, look at Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in Iron Man, who learns the most significant lesson early in the movie, changing the course of his entire life as you had seen it to that point.

I really wanted to like our heroine, but if she was my daughter I wouldn’t like her very much (but then, I didn’t really like her parents in the film either).

The film is visually gorgeous, and it is humorous at times. The rest of the characters are fine, but I didn’t find myself caring about them a great deal.  I liked much of the music, but didn’t love it. Overall, I would say you could wait until it hits DVD.

Best part? The short film La Luna that precedes the movie, which was beautiful and imaginative.

I hate saying it, but Brave replaces A Bug’s Life as my least favorite Pixar film. Favorites? Up, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Toy Story 1 & 2.

 

Jul 04

Independence Day

After driving around in my wife’s Jeep this morning on my day off I had time to think, and had something really eloquent to say, but unfortunately I didn’t write it while I had it and now it is gone. I’ll just sum it up this way: I love living in America, even with all its flaws.

Anyway, I was going to display the text of the Declaration, but there’s no point as you can see a really nice version here.

Jun 26

Quotable: Ernest Hemingway

“Write drunk, edit sober.”

I had to learn this one from my daughter. Not that she drinks–that I know of–but the other night while I was up late working on the script for Vacation Bible School, I was typing so fast because my brain was firing ideas faster than I could record them, and I kept slowing down my own writing by trying to correct spelling and other minor details. She leveled Hemingway at me to keep me on task to finish writing.

Alcohol or not, the point is: write while you feel like writing and while you have the ideas coming. You can always go back and edit when you aren’t feeling particularly creative.

Jun 22

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury passed away recently at the age of 91.

I was 14 when I bought my first Bradbury book at the Higginsville Country Fair book sale in 1986. It was a paperback copy of The Illustrated Man. I bought it partly because I knew the name Ray Bradbury, but not knowing why he was important. Over the next few years I would acquire a large collection of paperback collections of his short stories. A few years ago I finally acquired my first hardback–a first edition hardback of, again, The Illustrated Man, from my favorite bookstore, 2nd Street Books in Osceola.

It was just the Saturday before Bradbury passed away that Elsa brought me this book from her room, and I commented for the umpteenth time that I should write to see if he would autograph it.

Jun 19

Consanguinity

CON-san-GWIN-i-TEE, adj., relating to or denoting people descended from the same ancestor. Consanguineous marriages are those in which the spouses are related to one another by blood, hence the root sanguine.

Jun 15

Sobriquet

SO-bri-KAY, n.; a nickname.

Jun 12

Contranym

n., A word that can mean the opposite of itself, such as ‘cleave.’