Archive for category Uncategorized
My Name is Crew
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on April 4th, 2009
I am posting this because I need to keep track of these things. Dreamt last night Michelle and I put on a community event centered around the retirement of some guy that had been a social worker all his life. After the dance crew came off the stage, there was a PowerPoint presentation of his life that I put together (each slide featured an allegorical photo of a raven) and a country music song. All I remember is:
My name is Crew
My name is Crew
Saving kids is kinda what I do
[a capella]Leading them away from a path of self-destruction . . .
And so on. The ravens were a result of watching a David Attenborough documentary last night and Michelle points out "kinda what I do" is a phrase that Bill Burr repeated in the stand-up show we watched again last night. So that explains a bit of it, but I still don't get where these dreams with original music come from. I must be choking off my creative brain during waking hours. Earlier this week I'd dreamt my friend had walked into a convenience store and declaimed a filthy sonnet in perfect ABAB rhyme scheme explaining why he needed to buy the New York Times Sunday Magazine and not the whole paper.
Xmas Flick Tradition Continues for Hicks in Stix
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on December 4th, 2008
I bought myself a couple of early Xmas/ Birthday presents this week, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's. I bought those two old weepers in order to maintain the family tradition (my mother's) of watching at least TBoSM every Christmas. It won't be the same without her (and I'll probably fall apart when that dumb little kid calls Bing "faddah"), but it'll be something.
I would tell you neither movie is an Oscar winner, but Going My Way took home 7 (!), including Best Picture. Cinema has come a long way in the interim: there's more dramatic tension reading the phone book ("Will the Zs really make it at the end?"). The movies exist as frames for musical numbers, a bit of feel-good holiday cheer and not much else. All the same, I will assert (based on nothing more than hope) there are worse ways to spend 2 hours in front of the TV at Christmas.
I've seen both enough they run together, so much so I was surprised to see Barry Fitzgerald isn't in the sequel, The Bells of St. Mary's. It's a solo tour de force for Bing Crosby's Super Priest, who could kick the ass out of Ayn Rand's Architect and bed any woman he wanted, except he's so cool he's into the absitence thing decades before it became cool. The film overcomes two glaring issues:
- Allowing Bing Crosby anywhere near other people's children
- Employing Ingrid Bergman's nun as an educator, given the church could theoretically reassign her to a high school class full of pubescent males
Aside #1
To emphasize what an issue #2 is, I present a full list of all the women in the world my father ever suggested were attractive
- My mother (1,000,006 times)
- Ingrid Bergman (1 time)
. . . to get you to a conclusion that might as well appear in the opening credits. SPOILER ALERT: The school is saved! Like any holiday movie, it's not about the story but about the season and some feeling of continuity in life. Much as I'm making fun of the film, it'll be a mess 'round here when they get to singing "The Bells of St. Mary's": the last time we heard it, it was being sung by the girls' choir from St. Mary's Bay View at the funeral.
Like any good Spoil Yourself purchase on Amazon, I wound up with more than just what I set out to buy, adding a 3rd movie we used to watch together, The Grapes of Wrath after running across a post on the New York Times,
It was the kind of movie we'd watch if it was on TV on a Sunday afternoon when there was ironing to be done. The populism and underdog-nature of the story appealed to my mom, but we knew what really got her was the mom. She saw her own mother in her and, of course, I see mine (don't think the "Oh, Tom!" doesn't catch my ear). The final, famous scene ("Where ever there's a fight . . . ") always resonates. When I was young, close to my parents and just wanting to stay home, egotism made it easy to see myself as Heroic Tom Joad, leaving family and friends, purposely striding out the door to make the world A Better Place. Now that the roles are reversed, that I'm home and my mom is gone forever, the scene reminds me she's not exactly gone. She might not show up if you're getting trounced by a cop, but she's there in my relationship with Michelle, she's there in anything I do just for someone else, she's there in just about anything I do right. The idea that time is a coping mechanism, a way of perceiving ourselves in the physical world, it'd be nice to think you could step outside, take a hard right and see everyone that's left behind.
Aside #2
After a dozen viewings of Going My Way (and having seen The Quiet Man), it was disconcerting to run across Barry Fitzgerald as a bad guy in The Sea Wolf. I conveniently came across it one Saturday night on PBS and watched because Jack London's book had just been assigned in class. It was even worse than the time I saw Harry Morgan as a low-down, dirty ranchhand in Bend of the River; at least by that point I knew he was the kind of guy that would push his wife down a flight of stairs.
You can spare me the emails, I'm well aware (old movie on PBS + in high school + Saturday night) = LOSER.
Dearest Gmail,
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on June 27th, 2008
If you continue to swallow important information from clients inside your fancy "- Show Quoted Text -" block, we aren't going to be friends much longer. I love how you overcome my scatterbrained nature, but when you cost me money that means I can pay for something else to watch over my shoulder.
Celtics Win + I Am An Idiot
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on June 18th, 2008
But you knew that. One of the nice things about the Internet is the rise of what Charlie Stross calls the "lifelog", a searchable list of everything you ever thought and did, a permanent Friend Feed. I mention this because I was so damned right about the Celtics trade for Kevin Garnett.
"Weird, I don't really like it from the Celtics' perspective . . . Can't see the Celtics signing anyone for about 10 years . . . I'm done with Danny Ainge. This off-season has made it clear the Celtics' interest is in competing for entertainment dollars, not championships."
Stunningly, this isn't the dumbest thing I've ever said on Sportsfilter. That would be this:
"Roberts has a .335 career OBP; he's a leadoff hitter like Tony Womack's a leadoff hitter. I'm not down on the guy before he's played an inning, but no one needs a pinch runner."
Painfully Delicious
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on April 10th, 2008
Quicktime 1.0 Development team channels Michael Jackson.
Put Me in the 80%
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on April 1st, 2008
Where do I sign up for local weather alerts?
New Gnarls Barkley
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on March 10th, 2008
Two videos, second one is just ?uestlove doing his best teenage girl on MySpace act while the song plays. Not that I'd know, but the album might be on Soulseek
Retro Done Rite
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on March 3rd, 2008
Winter
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on March 1st, 2008
I can see where this would make a person suicidal. For the last few weeks, I've felt I must have shirked my duties this winter. Judging by the driveways, the house, the road, winter has been winning. We've spent the last two weekends trying to dig out the storm drain; what few drains are block has are connected by pipe apparently underwhelming in diameter, so having a drain just past the driveway feels like a responsibility. Instead, it currently sits under a mound of snow and what has to be three inches of solid ice. The whole thing seemed irresponsible: what had happened in a year that I went from being able to keep everything snow-free to being nearly buried? It wasn't a lack of shoveling. The skin on my hands is my skin from 40 years from now. It would take the most romantic of poets to call it rough hewn. It's cracked, brittle, old. Did the effort drop to old man quality as well?
No. Nothing happened to me. Last year we had two feet of snow at this point. Now we have nine. My favorite Ask Metafilter comment of the season, non-crazy division, was this:
"if it's still below freezing, tie a thread to the end of the icicle and anchor directly below so the drips travel down the line, and it'll quickly form a solid column of ice from your eaves to the ground."
Do they need encouraging? Around here they do that on their own, except, requiring three to four inches of diameter to make the twenty foot trip from eave to ground, gravity comes calling around ten feet and sends the icicle to the ground a bit more quickly than anticipated. Screw you, winter. You can kill me when I'm older.
How Do I Justify a Tablet as a Business Expense?
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on February 28th, 2008
Needs an iPhone version.