Aug 03

Review: A Matter of Loaf and Death

loafanddeathI’ve been a big fan of Wallace & Gromit ever since Heather and I saw The Wrong Trousers in a tiny-screened art house theater. The kids grew up on the original three shorts, and we loved Curse of the Wererabbit as well. However, none of us much cared much for Nick Park’s latest, A Matter of Loaf and Death.

If you are looking for the classic, steady, careful pacing seen in Trousers, you will be disappointed. Overall, Loaf felt as if it had been hastily assembled, and the pacing jumped from shot to shot, almost as if just enough was animated to convey a thought and then they moved on.

Aug 01

Change we can believe in

“The reforms we seek would bring greater competition, choice, savings and inefficiencies to our health care system,” –U.S. President Barack Obama.

Thank goodness we have a man in office not afraid to bring the inefficiencies to the U.S. health care system that we so desperately need. Maybe we can finally catch up with England.

Jul 30

Powa

I recently upgraded a computer for a woman, a pale brunette with a Slavic accent. Imagine if Bela Lugosi had a daughter with Lydia from Beetlejuice.

“Do you need to be set up as an administrator?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she began.

And then a dark, conspiratorial, accented whisper:

“I want all de powa!”

Jul 28

Whiskey in the Jar, Part 2

If you read my previous post about Whiskey in the Jar, I told you that story so I can tell you this story.

Several years ago at a party we were playing Encore, a game where, when given a word or a topic, you have to sing seven consecutive words of a song on that word or topic. If you were given the topic of colors, you could sing “the yellow rose of Texas, yes that’s the girl for me,” or “paint it black, black as night, black–.” You don’t even need to finish your verse, but part of your seven words must be from the pertinent section of the song (usually not a problem, as you’re more than likely to sing the chorus.

It might sound easy, but you’d really be amazed how many songs you only three or four words from, followed by “something something.”

Our team was given the topic of geography, and I sang “as I was going over the Cork and Kerry mountains,” from Whiskey in the Jar. As I mentioned before, the song is 400 years old and has a few variations. 

One of the members of the opposing team was a notorious cheater, and when cheating was impossible, a rule zealot. She challenged my entry: “That doesn’t count, because it’s the ‘Farf and Kerry mountains’, not the ‘Cork and Kerry mountains’!”

Now, contrary to what many people think, I can play board games non-competitively and still be happy (except Monopoly–go for the throat!). However, that doesn’t mean I will tolerate losing to someone who insists on winning. And sometimes I can be kind of a juhk.

“Oh yeah?” I countered, snarkily. “There are different versions, and mine was done by a little band you might have heard of, called METALLICA!”

Jul 26

Whiskey in the Jar

Whiskey in the Jar is an Irish folk song dating to the 1600s. The song has been covered by scads of musical acts, including The Kingston Trio, The Ernies, and Metallica.

It’s about a Irish highwayman who robs an English captain and then returns to his woman with the money. After he goes to sleep, she betrays him to the English captain (a la Samson and Delilah, but instead of cutting his hair she fills his guns with water).

There are several versions of the song, varying the precise locale or the woman’s name, but the biggest variation is the ending: in some, the hero gets hanged. In others, he goes to prison, and in some his brother breaks him out of jail and they both go to lie in wait for the captain.

Aside from the chorus, Musha ring dumma do dumma da, Whack for the daddy-o, there’s whiskey in the jar-o, the song has nothing to do with whiskey (other than being Irish).

Jul 24

Hardwood, books & movies

I love books, and have for a long time. I think a lot of it stems from when I was a kid, when we would go to the mall. Mom and my brother would go somewhere, and dad and I would go to the bookstore.

I don’t know what dad was looking at, but I spent a lot of time sitting on the hardwood floor of Walden Books reading. The only book I remember reading was a book of behind-the-scenes stuff from Star Wars: how they did the effects, actors’ names, etc.

This book is what started me on a path of memorizing useless trivia (actors, directors, special effects guys). But it also got me to watch any movie that had actors from Star Wars in it. I first watched Dr. Strangelove because it had James Earl Jones in it, and Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia because they had Sir Alec Guinness in them.

Guinness later said that he hated Star Wars and that George Lucas’s dialog was awful, and he barely mentioned any of the Star Wars movies in his autobiography. It’s really too bad, because I wouldn’t have watched any of his “good” films if it weren’t for his work in a space opera that he detested.

But besides the movies and trivia, I developed a love of hardwood floors. My house has hardwood throughout most of the main floor, including my office. Soon, I plan to line the walls with shelves for my books, including my books about movies.

Jul 22

Shibboleth

Pronounced SHIB-ol-eth. A shibboleth is a word, phrase, or mannerism that a group of people uses as a test to see if other people are members of that group.

It might also be a joke. For example:

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary code, and those that don’t.

If you are waiting for me to tell you the other 8 kinds of people, then it is clear that you fall into the second group.

During World War II a shibboleth that American soldiers used to determine whether someone was Japanese or not was to ask them to say, “lollapalooza.”

The word is Hebrew, and means either “kernel of grain” or “brook,” depending on who you ask; obviously neither has anything to do with passwords. The word’s current use comes from chapter 12 in the book of Judges.

What happens is a bunch of jerks from the tribe of Ephraim come to visit Jephthah (who has just successfully defeated the Ammonites) at his home in Gilead. The Ephraimites insult the Gidealites and threaten to murder Jephthah, and in response Jephthah gathers his army. Being a rather astute student of history, he utilizes a tactic seen years before when the Israelites fought against the nation of Moab (recorded in Judges 3): they sieze the fords of Jordan, preventing their enemies’ escape.

Jephthah then set up a checkpoint, where he asked all passers-through to say the word, “shibboleth,” as he knew that Ephraimites pronounced the word, “sibboleth.” The Ephraimites lost 42,000 men that day.

Some Bible scholars have decried Jephthah’s actions as wicked, but I see it differently: if you bring 42,000 people to someone’s house and make a death threat, you shouldn’t be alarmed when they take your threat seriously. Also, you might not want to threaten someone known to be an effective warrior and general.

While not technically accurate, the English poet John Milton summed it up the most eloquently:

“Without reprieve, adjudged to death, for want of well-pronouncing shibboleth.”

Jul 20

Schadenfreude

German word, pronounced “SHAHD-n-FROID-uh.” The literal translation is “shameful laughing,” and it means laughing at the misfortunes of others, kind of like I do in that story about Timmy’s cough.

Jul 19

No, ma’am

My dad, Lonnie,  had a lot of skills: auto mechanic, aircraft mechanic, small aircraft pilot, welder, torchcutter, and storyteller.

You can see how most of those overlap quite a bit. So it was a great surprise when he told me he had taken typing when he was in high school. It came out like this:

“One day I was in typing class and I had done a terrible job that day, and at the end of class our teacher called on us to tell her how many words a minute we had typed.”

“Jim?” she called.

“Forty-five.”

“Margaret?”

“Fifty.”

“Lonnie?”

My dad called out his abysmally low score.

“Ten.”

“Did you say ten?” she asked incredulously.

“Yes!” my dad answered irritably.

 

Remember, this was back when corporal punishment was legal and encouraged.

 

“Do you want me to come back there and slap you?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

Jul 16

Truman, Missouri, and music

President Truman was a musician and a Missourian. However, he didn’t care much for our state song, The Missouri Waltz:

“It’s a ragtime song and if you let me say what I think–I don’t give a [expletive deleted] about it, but I can’t say it out loud because it’s the song of Missouri. It’s as bad as “The Star Spangled Banner” as far as music is concerned.”

I don’t know if he hated the song before his presidential campaign, but it was while running for president that bands played it ad nauseam at campaign stops

campaign

But at least he had a plan if Dewey actually had defeated him:

“If I hadn’t been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house.”

The closest he ever got to his fallback was playing piano at the White House press club during the few days he served as vice president. The woman on the piano is 20 year old Lauren Bacall.

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The picture created quite a scandal. Harry’s wife, Bess, was not amused.

So what was he playing anyway? According to Bacall, he was playing:

“…badly, playing the Missouri Waltz, or something.”

Photos are from The Truman Library.