Happy Easter!

I have risen, I have risen, indeed! I hope the weather's as nice today as it was yesterday. That'd be swell! One liability with the bigger, better camera is that it requires more thought and care as to its transport. I got a little camera bag for it, but the nice thing about my older camera is it was so portable, which allowed me the opportunity for off-the-cuff, spur-of-the-moment shots. The new one requires more deliberation on my part. Ah, well. I'll get used to it. Also, its power source is AA batteries, which appear to allow for about 330 shots before the sucker runs out of juice. I'll have to dig out my rechargeable batteries, if I can still find them, and avoid wasting batteries.

You know, everybody talks about the Easter Bunny, but what about his more volatile cousin, the Ester Bunny? What about him? Hope the Ester Bunny has a good holiday, too! ; )

Hanna Solo

Saoirse Ronan as Hanna.

I saw "Hanna" today -- the trailer for it had seemed promising, but I was disappointed by it, ultimately. The fractured fairytale gloss of it fused with a kind of thriller element just didn't quite work -- the characters weren't well-developed enough for it to be character-driven, and the plot wasn't strongly drawn enough for it to be plot-driven. The action sequences weren't particularly stunning, and since everything was kept a step or two behind the curtains, there wasn't much to draw the viewer into the movie, alas. The title character looked very otherworldly, thanks to the striking young Irish actress, Saoirse Ronan, but the overall story just lacked the bones and weight to carry the premise anywhere. You've heard of damning through faint praise? Well, there's damning through faint film-making, and this had that. A lot of running, and yet going nowhere fast. Eric Bana did a credible job as her father/handler, and Cate Blanchett was steely-eyed (although she had precious little to do, really -- I'm curious why she took this gig, honestly), but there's something off about this movie -- I blame "Inception" -- I'll call it the "Inception Effect" -- faint film-making (I know a lot of people were sucked into "Inception's" seeming complexity, but it wasn't complex at all, was just crowded, and had many layers thrown into it to basically camouflage the meager fare of the plot to begin with. "Hanna" feels to me like a movie made in the spirit and/or style of "Inception," with the same meager results, only worse. The Inception Effect is like having a bunch of people crammed in a room at a party, but nobody's saying or doing anything interesting, and we're all supposed to overlook that, to be impressed by the volume of the chatter, without realizing that nobody's saying a thing worth remembering. Sorry if you liked that movie; I found it incredibly boring (except for the side plot that should have been the heart of the story, rather than the dream-caper aspect of it).

I bought a new camera, at long last -- I've had my old 6 megapixel (5x zoom) Olympus camera for many, many years now, and decided I wanted something stronger -- I got a 14 megapixel, 21x zoom Nikon DSLR camera. I'm well-pleased with it so far. I'll give the old Olympus to the boys -- B2 has already taken to playing with it, taking shots of his own. He and his brother'll be thrilled to be able to take pictures with it. I'm sure he'll have broken the camera in a week or two. Haha! I'll have to make a note of that, if/when it happens!

The weather was fabulous today -- 68 degrees and sunny. Windy, but very nice. It started out very cloudy and cool, but warmed up nicely. I went biking downtown. Really need to fix the alignment on my bike's rear tire, but have been putting that off. Now that prime riding season is beginning, I may attend to that.

Daze

I'm going to have to supplement my Great Friday with a Super Saturday and a Stellar Sunday, clearly! I'm going to get a lot of writing done this weekend. Exene has the boys, so I'm going to work on screenwriting, methinks. Try go bang some of that out. Always a challenge for me, but I've had a couple of ideas that have stubbornly banged around in my head for some time, and I want to just throw them on paper (or, well, into the computer, anyway) so they can vacate my brain. The weather appears to be very conducive for this kind of effort -- lots of rain and cold.

Woo hoo!

Rock ON!

The Pretty In Pink Blues

I'm amused by this piece about pink v. blue for kids. Shows how acceptable norms change over time. Amusing as hell that pink was THE masculine color, and blue was the dainty color, in times past.

We find the look unsettling today, yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.

Reminds me of pictures of my late 100-year-old grandpa, with his long locks and in his dress, seated next to his big brother in an old Victorian portrait.

a Ladies’ Home Journal article in June 1918 said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.

Bahah! It's just amusing how such an arbitrary thing becomes written in stone like that. So many things are like this. The loss of "neutral" fashions is likely a key component, too, although who wants to look "neutral," truly?

Great Friday

Rainy Friday. Hope it's not just a Good Friday; I hope it's a Great Friday.

Honey Badgers are Sweet!

I love honey badgers! This narration of them is sweeter, still....

http://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg

Station

Apparently the International Space Station (ISS) is going to be very visible lately, is going to be the brightest object in the sky short of Venus. That's kinda nifty. I'll have to check when it'll be flying over and try to spot it with B1; he'll love that, assuming we'll even be able to see it.

The weather's been pretty dismal the past few days -- we actually had snow mixed with rain the other day, although, as ever, I roll with it.

I'm going to sling out my SF novel to another publisher, see how that goes. I need to gear up for another round of querying my books to agents and publishers; never something I particularly enjoy, but most definitely part of the dance.

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately, which is why I've been fairly blog-quiet, too, I suppose. It's the combination of lots of big, bad news in the world and relative quiet at home, I guess.

Saw "Dead Snow" the other day -- I was less than impressed by it; it wasn't scary so much as it was gruesomely amusing. The stark white Scandinavian countryside was a great backdrop for horror, and those very Nordic-looking characters in it were amusing, too, but the movie was an exercise in excessive gore (so many disembowelings -- is that a preoccupation of the director?) And, sure, all that blood works wonderfully against the white snow, but the movie was pretty empty, even as escapist fare. The opening sequence was probably the best thing about it. I didn't like the way they had the Nazi zombies kind of roar -- they sounded like orcs doing lion impressions. That was distracting and off-putting. They already look monstrous, so making them roar monstrously was too much for human-scaled monsters. One of the grossest scenes has the floozie babe putting the moves on the portly film geek in an outhouse -- a sex scene in a frickin' outhouse?? Paging Dr. Freud! It was clumsily constructed -- the floozie takes an unlikely interest in the geek, joins him while he's quite literally taking a dump in the outhouse, rides him on the commode (?!?!) and the next thing we see, the geek is returning to the cabin by himself. Now, honestly, people -- this Scandinavian Poindexter (who looked more like the kind of guy who'd be giving swirlies to nerds) gets laid by the hot girl -- he just walks away from that, turns up in the cabin to swill some more brewskies nonchalantly, leaving her back in the outhouse to get rather gruesomely killed by one of the Nazi zombies?? Terribly constructed scene, clunkily rendered (and gross -- maybe putting the moves on a guy while he's taking a dump in an outhouse is a time-honored Scandinavian courtship ritual? Shudder.) The alpha guy stumbles across a cave that appears to be a kind of lair for the zombies, and actually leaves a couple of perfectly maintained MP40 submachine guns alone, even as he discovers the severed head of his missing girlfriend. Later, he picks up a German machine gun (from somewhere) that he mounts on his "snow scooter" (aka, snowmobile), and briefly uses. But seeing the guy see those submachine guns in this cave, seeing actual horror and carnage, and the guy's military service background is referenced in his first scene -- I was thinking "Helloooo? Pick up the fucking guns, Sven; there's zombies in them thar hills." Instead, he gets to engage in some sloppy disembowelment (see?) knife fights with the zombies. Anyway, these zombies are very fixated not on eating brains, but on eating guts. They do it every time they get after somebody -- you see them gobbling guts. So, either the writer had some kind of fixation on bowels, or the director did, or they both did, because it flows through the whole movie (haha -- "flows"). There are some darkly amusing moments in the movie, here and there (I won't spoil them, if you're inclined to see this movie), and a couple of reasonable scares that are mostly a product of a spliced zombie bushwhack coupled with a BLAST of sound, but this movie didn't rise above the promise of its premise, in my view. You can tell the director is a fan of Sam Raimi -- he opts for that kind of kinetic gore approach to horror, that over the top, so bad it's good kind of aesthetic, but the characters aren't strong enough to carry the narrative.

High and Dry

American Apparel has been fairly steadily pimping its high-waisted jeans, which is irksome -- high-waisted jeans just don't look good! So much so that they have to disguise it by having their callipygian models sit, breaking up the silhouette that high-waisted jeans inflict on a woman's body...

To make these jeans work, the model had to be hot AND topless.

Poole Emptied from ANTM

Dammit! Jaclyn Poole, my favorite surviving contestant on ANTM, got axed the last episode. I hate that. She was cute as a button, had a distinctive look, and was so sweet and charming. Her high-pitched, lil' ole' Southern Belle way was so nice, relative to the emaciated neurotic harridans that tend to dominate the show. Speaking of that, Alexandria, the villain's villain for this season, continues to skate on through.

Sigh. With Jaclyn gone, I guess I'll have to root for Kasia. And then, Anybody But Alexandria.

Snow Way!

It snowed a bit last night! Lordy! I'm not surprised, truly; it's the classic Chicago Seasonal Shim-Sham -- you get a taste of unseasonable warmth, before the cold comes hammering back. May is always pretty cool in Chicago, and I imagine this May won't be much different.

I sorted out the last logistical stuff for B2, so he's squared away for school. I just need to get the paperwork filed, and he's all set.

Scre4m

I saw "Scre4m" (Scream 4) today, and enjoyed it. Funny moments in it, and it's crazy postmodern, meta to the bone. Wes Craven still has the right touch with his slasher movies, although it's surreal, given his long history with the genre, making movies that refer to that genre (and themselves refer to the referrals -- I can imagine college students getting high and writing dissertations on this movie, because you really could). I especially liked the rather juicy (and difficultly-named) Hayden Panettiere in it. She was stealing scenes left and right...

She wasn't dressed like this in the movie, alas.

41

I turn 41 tomorrow, figured I'd squeak one last post while I'm 40 years old, still. Ha! I vividly remember turning 30, being amused at being equidistant from 20 and 40. At the time, 40 seemed a world away. Now I'm about to turn 41. I've gotten a lot accomplished in the past ten years -- a couple of kids, home ownership (and sellership -- hahah), a shitload of writing, a decade of quality work for a prestigious employer -- none of that was there when I was 30.

It makes me optimistic for the rest of my 40s, coming into my prime, getting done what I need done, and doing it with style. At the same time, it's staggering how short life is. Even though 10-year-old Dave (1980), 20-year-old Dave (1990), 30-year-old Dave (2000) and 40-year-old Dave (2010) confront each other in a kind of quantum face-off, and I can distinctly remember things from those various decades, it's still amazing and humbling just how fleeting that time is.

Each moment is so precious, but as you get older, it's hard to appreciate the moments the way you do when you're younger, when everything seems new. The "been there, done that" mentality of age can erode the gloss off of living, if you're not careful. I live very much in the moment, and find peace in it. I know I brooded far more about time and age when I was about 25 than I do, now. I still find the magic in the moments, even though I may have to be a little more conscious of them than I used to be.

So, I face 41 with a surprising amount of peacefulness. Another step into my fourth decade of life.

Grant Hart, "2541"