(past imperfect)
I saw this last weekend and loved it. It’s coming of age story, featuring Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson), a high school boy with a speech impediment. Hal doesn’t get the girl. Doesn’t learn how to speak normally. His father and mother break up and never get back together. His speech therapist acknowledges early on that he isn’t going to be much help. In fact, the only triumph in the entire movie involves Hal ordering a slice of pizza. Despite all this, it’s a feel good movie.
Highly recommended.
I put on the rail last week (between hail storms).
The fort project took just under a year to complete, but it’s finally done, and I’m happy with the results. The kids are pleased. Holly is pleased. Dad is exhausted!
Kidding. After all, I took a year to finish.
Here is a guided tour:
Inside, looking toward the front porch, with escape hatch.
Looking up the hatch.
The main entrance.
Looking down the rope ladder.
The view from the hammock.
The long climb.
All I can say is I must have wanted one of these when I was a kid. Otherwise, why would I have spent some much time and energy building it?
What a fun project!
It’s been snowing off and on this weekend in the greater Seattle area. When the snow isn’t coming down, it’s been sunny and mild. Pinwheeling between cold and hot all weekend long, I am reading Dinty Moore’s Between Panic and Desire. Good book.
Lousy weather.
This site can be a challenge to maintain.
WordPress, the software that powers this blog, is a web application written in PHP with a MySQL backend. The nice thing about it is that it’s free and enjoys popular development of a lot of themes and widgets. The bad thing about it is that it’s free and enjoys a lot of theme and widget development. Wait, what?
Yes, you read that right: the good is the same as the bad.
Here is what usually happens: You upgrade the site to the latest version of WordPress and then realize that half your widgets don’t work and now your theme looks funky. With a local installation of WordPress, you could try stuff out before you commit to the live site. The drawback for me is that I know very little about programming in general, much less PHP programming. Worse, I’m a Windows dweeb, so Apache and MySQL are scary to me.
Enter XAMPP.
XAMPP is free software that installs Apache and MySQL so you have the infrastructure to setup a local copy of WordPress, even if you use Vista or XP. Download the Windows version of XAMPP. The installer worked fine for me; the zip file has batch files to get you running. Once you get it installed, use a broswer to go to http://localhost.
The web client for MySQL is phpMyAdmin. God only knows why it’s called phpMyAdmin. Use this tool to create a new database with utf8_unicode_ci collation.
Download the latest WordPress files and add them to the xampp\htdocs folder, wherever you installed xampp. In the WordPress files, use a text editor, like notepad.exe, to edit the wp-config-sample.php file.
Fill in the variables for DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD.
Save the file as wp-config.php.
In your browser, go to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php and follow the instructions.
You now have a locally copy of WordPress. Feel free to mess it up. If it all comes tumbling down (as we all know it must), you can just delete the WordPress files and start over again.
Next up we’ll figure out how to get the data from the live site onto the mirror site.
I really enjoyed this movie.
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is world weary and slick. He fixes every lousy situation that comes up at his firm, but can’t muster the strength of will to fix his own broke down life. Interestingly, his home life is in about the same shape as his firm, but this is only revealed slowly over the course of the picture, by revealing how bad off the firm actually is (the poor state of Clayton’s home life is established early on). By the time you understand how bad off things are at the firm, Clayton has already begun to see the light with his family. But this change in Clayton isn’t obvious until the final scene: the last scene felt like a toss-up, whether Clayton was looking for a pay off, or following the redemption trajectory. For me, the ambiguousness at the end was the highlight of the entire picture.
I had been interested in seeing this, but somehow never got around to it until this weekend.
I had heard about Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas when I lived in the Bronx. It seemed like every dope fiend had an opinion about who was the better businessman and who was nothing but a snitch. There was so much talk I hadn’t realized these guys were gangsters from the late 60s and early 70s.
Although it’s a true story, somehow the movie doesn’t seem to come together well. Lucas (Denzel Washington) is a smooth character, especially in contrast to the plodding Roberts (Russell Crowe). Lucas is held up as an icon of black entrepreneurial skill, despite being a gangster. I am used to movies with a bad guy that you sympathize with, but Lucas doesn’t really get a sympathetic treatment. He just is what he is. Roberts comes off like a mope.
Not sure what to make of it all.
If you want to know more about food, read Michael Pollan. The man knows his food. He’s written at least three great books, one of which I already posted about. I wanted to jot some additional notes on the others.
Omnivore’s Dilemma is a look at the food industry. I got through the first part about corn, but then I had to put it down. He’s a great writer, but the market forces he describes bearing down on the food industry just became too depressing for me to bear. If you want something a little more upbeat, go with In Defense of Food, which describes how best to eat in a world as depressing as the one described in Omnivore’s Dilemma.
But what I like best about Pollan’s work has less to do with food and more to do with his ability to clarify economic and sociological forces that come to bear on an industry. In Botany of Desire he describes how the War on Drugs inadvertently gave us better and more potent marijuana. I haven’t smoked pot in ages, but I remember when it was light green flakes and often cost less than $20 an ounce. Pollan offers an entire history of pot and how the drug crackdown forced pot growers underground, where they tinkered with hybrids until they were able to grow incredibly potent pot indoors. A lot of the hooligans pulling these underground shenanigans were people right here in the Pacific Northwest (Matt Briggs’s, Shoot the Buffalo has characters in the PNW that make a living growing pot indoors).
Fascinating stuff.
My kids have become infatuated with Michael Jackson’s Earth Song. Holly and I have burned songs to disk for them prior to this, but the rate at which they are replaying this one is just ridiculous.
Dad grows weary.
