Toys vs. Tools

We watched (and bought*) Twisters 'tonight' - and it was totally, absolutely pretty good.  For context, Twister was a movie that came about in the heart of my youth and is a movie that I truly love, unironically, and unapologetically.  It came out when I was 18 years old and weeks away from graduating high school, and it imprinted on me.  Twister is earnest, a little schlocky (in all the best ways), and a fairly fun ride (literally, too, as Brooke and I did the Twister ride at Universal Studios Florida, although not actually literally as the ride wasn't that great - I just remember standing in a room with a fence, and then it was kind of windy, but not at you, just near you...).

Anyway, the point is - Twister is a pretty okay movie that comes to some relevant (if somewhat cliched) conclusions - "Making something of yourself" and "Don't be a total sellout" and "Love love (or no divorce allowed or something...)".  The science bits / meteorology / plot stuff is all very good.  There's a science bucket full of science puffins, and if they get the bucket in front of the twister and all the puffins fly up into it, they get science to speak tornado!

Twisters on the other hand starts with some children hobbyists who have a geo-engineering science fair project that ends in tragedy.  The tragedy of standing in front of a tornado and being killed by it - shocker.

The first mistake was to make the movie as a completely standalone sequel - like, it didn't need to integrate big parts of the earlier cast, but some cameos and nods to the earlier work would have been nice.  And grounding it in the 'science' of the earlier - a bit of "standing on the shoulders of giants" - I think might have grounded the plot in some semblance of the realistic, but of course those are not themes that we like in our current era, whether fictional or non-fictional.

The young will save us, and a profound disinterest in the ideas that came before... (generally before 2015 or so if you investigate the thinking very deeply).  The absolute importance of being liked - and if you aren't liked publicly (praised visibly), then you may as well not bother.

The central message of this far inferior sequel seems to be about "Ways to 'keep' getting ahead".  The happy ending isn't anything about doing good science for the world, or even like getting married or being happy or anything but frakking starting a company!

Congratulations!, You made it, please begin exploiting... 

{sigh}

* renting on Amazon Prime is a total scam - the cost of buying is generally just under double the cost of renting, and I feel like most movies - you will find another time in life when you are going to watch it or show it or reference it, so just own it forever (until Amazon collapses, which at this rate will likely be after the US government collapses!).

The Lingering: Skulldiggery Book 3, by DM Gritzmacher (book review)

Probably your favorite bartender / real estate magnate returns (The Quarry, 2023) in an interweaving blend of eras and narratives.

Almost 44 years ago, Russell Stander found something.  Spending summers of his adolescence away from home and friends in Michigan, and instead a season-long visit to his idiosyncratic, elderly aunt in Western Illinois, Rusty is understandably in search of adventure.  As it turns out, he and his cadre of summer friends find more than they bargain for, discovering a mysterious, abandoned graveyard full of dark secrets. 

Stephen King and Peter Straub described the “dreamlike and slightly unnatural… characteristic of borderlands” in their novel Black House, and DM Gritzmacher’s third installment of the Skulldiggery series takes place just a short way down that most awesome (and awful!) of all American borders – The Mississippi River.  The story hops between the present day, the early 1980s, and the turn of the 19^th into the early 20^th Century, with each of the three eras meandering toward each other as the narrative unfolds.  In our modern moment, we find middle-aged bar owner Rusty returning to the small community of Almore, Illinois with his friend and employee, Tom Secrist, a retired police officer.  In the early 80s, we find the same Rusty, 10 years old (give or take), and a group of four friends wandering through the countryside in search of some fun and some adventure.  And eighty years prior to that, a mysterious figure on either side of the border that is The Mississippi (and the turn of that century on either side of 1900) also wandering that same countryside where the boys find themselves we are witness to a sequence of grisly murders told from the perspective of the perpetrator.

It's part Stand By Me and part In Cold Blood, with a dash of co
smic horror, and a world of related stories swirling all around the edges.

Engaging, leaving you hungry for more.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023

ISBN: 9798986638751

Page Count: 259

Publisher: Piqued

well this is embarrassing...

 So, I've just learned that a previous Roman Numeral J contest has yet to be resolved, and, as I am currently in the midst of a membership drive...

The question is: What is the most recent alcoholic beverage purchased by joel? For the purposes of this quiz, "purchase can be purchased for me by someone else, but the most recent beverage, whether it be at a bar, liquor store, or guy in a parking lot. The answer will change and will be checked based on time i check answers. As a bonus, if you can also name the brand you will gain an extra Mii (you can choose anyone you like, as long as i know what they look like or you can provide a picture). Ok, good luck, and good luck. Enjoy the coming week, and get your Men's Clubs planned now.

Please be assured that this Contest from 2007 still stands (tho it seems like it has become quite a bit easier since then!), but also that Roman Numeral J continues to provide the best up to the date information...

And so, it is my sorry news to deliver that Men's Club is no longer the institution that it was.  But instead, on each first Friday afternoon of each month we've been hosting a Commune Meet-up at 6pm CT since about 2012...

You (whomever you are) are welcome to join... Just let me know, and I'll set up a link.  It's weird times, I think for all of us just now, but we can all come together to acknowledge it, and figure it, and move on...

The Last Piece with Peanut Butter

 For almost all of my workaday life, I have been, nearly without exception, almost gonna be late. 

Almost gonna be late is a state of mild, yet steadily increasing panic that permeates every single morning before work for a person with my condition whereby you wake up feeling like it might be just a little later than you had intended to awaken and therefore may have to hurry a bit this morning, and then steadily, at each stage where you check the time you’re somehow a little bit later until you leave the house (first having to move your wife’s {who is btw blissfully still fast asleep upstairs} car into the street making you oh just that tad later) and start driving and realize that even if the streets are entirely empty due to some unrealized apocalypse and every light turns in your favor, you will only be 7 minutes late, and 7 is less than half of 15, so you can still count it as starting at 8, rather than 8:15. This all occurs only to realize upon arrival that nobody cares or pays attention at all to your comings and goings. 

For a prodigious sleepy-head, I have had some obscenely early staring times at my jobs over the years. I had to get to the library at MCC by 7am (I think my start time was actually 6:30, but the library itself opened at 7, so if I wasn’t there by then I was officially failing the public), and I think the Deli at Lake Lawn opened as well at 7am (again, I think I was supposed to get there earlier, but as long as I was there a few minutes prior would give the coffee time to brew I never got found out). Paint crew started at 6am (but had the advantage of literally waking 5 minutes before you started, blundering there, and then finding a room far from where Bob Sheets was working where you could sit on the floor and sleep for a couple hours, pretending like you were working on “the bottom of the wall”). 

Even after my rise into middle management (prior to my precipitous and predictable fall), when I was by no means punching a clock or needing to be anywhere by an absolute time*, I not infrequently grabbed the 6am Southwest flight to La Guardia or the 6am Hiawatha train to Chicago (both of which had me walking into the relative hearts of each of those cities at right around 9:30am local time). 

All of this is to say, that once in a great while (and today was one of those rare onces), I find my self awake and refreshed before my alarm is set to go off, and going through my morning steps discovering that today I might be running just a little bit ahead for a change, and might just have a bit of extra time for something (maybe a little reading, a toss with my dog, or in today’s case a {very slightly} leisurely breakfast). Today I had the time to make myself some toast and use up most of the last of the peanut butter jar thereon. (I’m delighted to discover that I’m not the first person to consider this issue

source: huffPo.com

!)

Scraping out (most of) the last of the peanut butter jar is an art and a skill that I have mastered over the years. It takes time and patience, and starts with assessing correctly that you have the appropriate amount of PB remaining in the jar: too much, and you may need to have another piece of toast (plus, you’ll have scraped for nothing!); too little and the last piece of toast (AHH!!…) with peanut butter will likely be quite disappointing or needing something else to cover over some of the gaps. 

Once you decide to take on this rewarding task, I like to start at the center bottom of the jar, and scrape out to the edges.  Don’t worry so much about getting volume on your knife at this stage, your more just trying to get enough together around the bottom circumference of the jar to get one or two small glomps^ of PB on your toast before you begin the orbital scraping process that should satisfy to fill in most of the gaps on your toast between glomps. For orbital scraping, begin at the top, and with your knife mostly vertical, scrape around the inside, where the grooves for the lid are. This should yield you a fairly good crop of filler creamy PB. Next, repeat but just below that first lip of the inside of the jar. This will likely be your most productive line of filler, so be sure to go all the way around. Continue thusly on down the jar until you have a satisfying piece of PB toast in front of you, and congrats!, you’ve (mostly) used up the peanut butter jar. 

Enjoy!!

* I am talking here start time or departure time from home in the morning, not for any other meetings or appointments throughout the day. For those, for me, time is sacrosanct and I am on time (or 3-5 minutes early for a meeting off site), every time. 

^ Glomp is the standard unit of measurement of peanut butter as recognized by the Seeger Science Ministry (SSM) with one standard issue piece if toast taking 3 to 4 glomps for full coverage. 

Not quite sure what to call it…

 

As I was finishing with the last of Walter Benjamin’s 1933 writings (the last was “Experience and Poverty”, which is about, among other things, the poverty of experience that we are/were enduring in our/his modern times), a buttered piece of raisin wheat bread from Mary’s Market and an as yet untitled Irish Coffee variation (unfortunately some bar in the Pacific Northwest has already coined another of their cocktails as Spanish Coffee, which was my first thought).  This one was made with the wonderfully sharp Empress 1908 Elderflower Rose Gin, but I imagine that any gin would sharp up your morning coffee to make for an enjoyable day of leisure.

Next week I start full-time work for the first time in some time, but today I’ll enjoy a bit of the life Ibiza… Afternoons, and coffee spoons. Maybe some T.S. Elliott...

What a Difference a Score Makes...

 It occurred to me this morning*, while I was driving around listening to A History of the World in 6 Glasses, and a reference was made to Sumerian transaction records of beer disbursement (think stone spreadsheets) in the 21st Century BCE, that we get further away each century (and each decade, and, indeed, year) from our Mirror Year (i like to say it in my head so it rhymes!) - the equidistant year on the opposite side of the very arbitrary Moment Zero - and therefore, likely, know less and less about each mirror year than we did previously.

Last weekend I had the opportunity at Gary Con to play two sessions of Gary Gygax's post-TSR role playing game, Dangerous Journeys, which is set on Ærth, an alternative historical Earth, and (in these sessions and in the primary sourcebook of the game) takes place in a version of Ancient Egypt.  As part of character generation in the game, you (can) roll for all aspects of your lot in life, as we all do as we're being rolled up - your level of wealth, parentage, personal traits and peccadillos, as well as physical and mental abilities - and that rolled lot in life affects how you bumble through the world.  The GM didn't explicitly say it, but we easily could have been setting out on our adventure in the year 2024 BCE.

I've been thinking about life in the modern world versus what life might have been like in earlier generations (and even ancient - when does ancient start by the way? - generations), and how someone from one might settle and mettle in to another...  As I started to dig in to the 21st Century BCE, I did find that there was a lot less that we seemed to know (according to our repository of all knowledge, Wikipedia) than even one century later in the 20th Century BCE.  This biasedly confirmed my original take that we will always continue to know less than we did about our mirror year (or more so our mirror century, as in any given year big things can {and do} happen to let them stand out), but I had just been considering that, due to an increase in academic inquiry and improved methodologies and overall knowledge, I would have expected instead to find some kind of equilibrium of knowledge of our mirror year.

Although the highly arbitrary mid-point was only invented around 500 CE (aka AD), I think it's not too much of a stretch to think that people living in the first few centuries of the Common Era were, while certainly aware of the goings on of their immediate ancestors, in terms of civilizational history perhaps comparatively even as to our own knowledge of our own mirror year.  Traditional Western history had the idea of a Dark Age prior to the European Renaissance, however at that same moment Arabic cultural, scientific, and philosophical civilization was preserving the ancient knowledges of earlier Ancient Greek tradition.

I think we like to think that our modern situation makes us special (exceptional, as it were), and that we are uniquely positioned to understand and judge not only our forebears, but also our less geographically-fortunate (shall we say) contemporaries.  Every age thinks of themselves as Enlightened however, and only when we have some time distance do we start to suspect that an era may not have been all that.  I don't, however, think that that interim of time is necessarily the century (or centuries) of retrospect that we might think, historically.  I wonder if it really might be closer to just 20 or 25 years or so that we can really start to intelligently reflect.  

Which means, depending on when we want to mark our start of our foolish historical moment (whether it's the 2016 election of a game show host as president; the first as tragedy, then as farce "Tea Party" elections of 2010; the launch of Twitter in 2006; or more depressingly perhaps the height of dumb cancel culture, which hopefully is in our past, but not sure how far back...), we may have quite a wait yet, or be close to the moment when we can finally get a grasp of what we've wrought...

* I've helpfully charted my core sentence in this paragraph in purple...

lost thoughts

 

Posts that never were

... so there was another eclipse

not published on

4/9/24 11:27 AM

urbane outsiders

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7/12/21 2:54 PM

Mid o' Winter

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1/12/19 11:58 AM

Book Club!

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9/28/14 9:19 AM

It's My Birthday Too, Yeah!

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3/21/14 7:20 PM

All You Need is Love (Need is Love)

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1/4/11 10:04 PM

Skills and Bones

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1/11/10 10:45 PM

i think of miron...

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4/18/08 9:45 PM

I think there was a part of me that wanted to Stephen King these titles, like they were short stories of mine (his), and I would explain where they come from or what they were going to be or whatever... 

I don't know there is value in keeping these (let alone posting these), but they're a long-line  of half thoughts - based on where they land in my timeline, I think I could reconstruct bits of most of them, but they are gone... Happy to discuss and figure them out (maybe these ought to be the first 8 episodes of the Roman Numeral J podcast (working title is "This Could Have Been an Email")!)