marlin errors

The baseball team -- the Florida Marlins...

First of all, the plural of "marlin" is not "marlins" -- it's marlin!  It's like if you wanted to name a team after deer. You wouldn't call them the Deers! Did this team have to dumb down the name for Floridians?

But this week, something even more lame. I had to take a double-take when I read the articles about the five-day suspension of the Marlins' manager, Ozzie Guillen.  Ozzie, originally from Venezuela, said in a news interview that he loved and respected long-time Cuban President Fidel Castro.  This apparently is something you can't say in Florida where there are so many Cuban-Americans who hate Castro, and he probably shouldn't have said it for the good of the Marlin(s) franchise.  Maybe he should even have apologized or explained better what he meant.

But getting suspended for saying it??  What is it that these people don't like about Castro -- his repression of free speech??

This was a gutless move on the part of this misnamed team.

momentarily considering a trip to HEL

The other day, I was fantasizing about getting on a plane to somewhere... the need to get away, did you ever feel it?  I browsed the Delta website and saw good fares to Helsinki (airport code HEL), Finland, and I would sort of like to visit Finland sometime so was tempted, but let me ask you this:  Why does it cost way less to fly to Helsinki than it does to go to Amsterdam, even though you have to fly through Amsterdam and change planes there to get to Helsinki?

I didn't make a reservation and slept on the idea and was over it the next day.

somebody in russia is up to no good

Somebody in Russia keeps trying to spam me with comments to my posts, and Google is somehow savvy enough to know how to filter them so that you the readers never see them.  But I see them: they forward to my email.  They are usually links to who-knows-what, Viagra type sites, and, since they get filtered, I don't know what these people gain by doing this.  But they must have a reason.

Lately, in particular, there are two old posts that they keep focusing on.  Almost every day now I'm seeing their attempts to comment.  I can't help but be suspicious that I should stop it from happening, whatever it is.

So -- I've posted every day since 8/11/10, but I'm going to delete those two posts so that they can't keep doing their dirty deeds (if that's what they are).  The posts are:  "the snake stories" on 3/17/11 and "piano man" on 3/22/11.  I will get rid of them within the next two days, so if you want to go back and see them, now is the time.  And you Russian dudes, move on to something else.

hopping down the bunny trail

Tomorrow is Easter, which Tom, my son, says is a "pointless holiday", and, if you are non-religious, that sort of makes sense.  Maybe it's just an excuse to get the family together.  I mean, are there really any kids who buy the notion of an Easter Bunny delivering eggs and candy?

"Here Comes Peter Cottontail" in this video is sung by the late Rosemary Clooney, a popular singer in the '50s who these days would be best known for being George Clooney's aunt.

helicoptering again

James's helicopter uncle still hovers.

But heck, what do you expect?  He had never flown all by himself before, and he's still such a young-looking (sometimes young-acting) 18-year-old, and he was really nervous about checking in and going through security with his carry-ons and such...

So of course I drove him to the airport instead of making him take the train and I stood there making motions to him ("take off your jacket", "take off your glasses") as he put things on the security conveyor belt and I stood there until he was well past the security checkpoint in case he had any problems.

But he apparently did fine and got on the plane to Philly and made it to New Jersey sometime this afternoon, and now he can be play the part of the college freshman, the working man, and the urban sophisticate triumphantly returning for a week in his home town with his friends and family.

And maybe next time I'll be able to let him take the train to the airport.

injuries are causing me pain

I just don't know if I can go to any more Timberwolves game this year.  I might have to give all those tickets away.  It's just too painful to watch.

The season was so much fun.  Even when the Wolves were losing, they were fun and they were competitive.

Then Ricky Rubio was injured in early March and out for the season.  Now everybody else seems to be injured:  Ridnour, Berea, Beasley, Darko...  The rest of the players seem to be totally demoralized.  When you consider that there are only five players in the game at any one time, basketball teams are pretty fragile.

Since losing Rubio, the team has hardly won a game.  This week they lost to Sacramento Kings and Golden State Warriors, two pathetic teams.  I think I might have to stop banging my head against the wall and just be content with the memories of the first half of the season.

nothing's rotten in Denmark

Trivia question:  What play is the sentence "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" from?

There apparently isn't much rotten in Denmark these days, as it turns out.  Jon forwarded to me the list of the ten happiest countries in the world, "happy" being based on responses to how satisfied people are with their present life and their predicted satisfaction with their future life, per Forbes magazine.  The happy countries:
1)  Denmark.
2)  Finland.
3)  Netherlands.
4)  Sweden.
5)  Ireland.
6)  Canada.
7)  Switzerland.
8)  New Zealand.
9)  Norway.
10)  Belgium.
(If you go back to my blog post on 8/18/10, you will  find Newsweek's list of the "best countries in the world", and the list isn't much different!).

Jon's comments:  "Be sure to point out that none of them are the US, and 8 of the 10 are in that horrible continent that has ruined itself with socialism" (-- more reasons to be proud of my left-leaning son!).  :-)
*****
Trivia answer:  The quote is from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

before cat became yusuf

This is Cat Stevens singing his 1972 hit, Morning Has Broken.  In the late '70s, he converted and changed his name to Yusuf Islam.  His Cat Stevens' songs from the early- to mid-'70s still sound good.

a day for which they predicted 80 degrees and sunny

It was a Sunday morning unlike what the weather people had been predicting all week. They had been saying 80 degrees and sunny, and all through the morning it never got any better than mid-40s and gloomy. Sometime after noon, the sun finally came out, and the temperatures maybe hit 65, which isn't bad but still felt like a letdown.  Maybe it was an April Fool's joke.  You know what jokesters those weather people are.

It was Palm Sunday and perhaps I should have gone to church anyway instead of being at the coffeeshop thinking bleak thoughts, but I have to admit I don't know why Palm Sunday is a big deal anyway.  Mary W., maybe you can explain that to me.

millionare fantasies crushed again

Last night's MegaMillions lottery jackpot was up to $640 million, and everybody who bought at least one ticket (I bought one) had moments of mentally rolling around in that much cash, even though the odds were 176 million to one against you.  I'm wondering, would we get to actually enjoy it, or would we too flooded with long-lost relatives and new "friends" to have any spare time?

It's not a problem I need to address right now.  It turns out that there were three winners (so the poor souls have the split the $640 million), and the tickets were bought in Maryland, Illinois and Kansas, none in Minnesota.  I mean, what is a person in Kansas going to do with $213 million?  You could buy the whole state for that much!  Probably the first thing to buy is a plane ticket out of Kansas!

drowning in 3D

Next week, the 1997 movie Titanic is going to be released in 3D, partly to coincide with the actual sinking of the real Titanic 100 years ago, on April 15, 1912.  It wouldn't be so bad to see that film again, I guess, if the fictional part of the story weren't so lame and if it weren't for that awful shrieky Celine Dion theme song.

How gratifying it was to read this morning that Kate Winslet, star of the film, says that hearing that song makes her want to throw up.  I wonder if Celine herself gets sick of hearing it too.

i wanna disconnect

Walking through the skyway to the gym this afternoon, I noticed how many people are plugged in as they walk:  headphones, either listening to music or talking to an invisible phone.  They don't notice people passing them.  I, on the other hand, must be a lot more sociable than most people:  I want to smile and say hello to strangers.  People might think I'm a little loopy if I did that too much, I guess.

...I wouldn't mind having a few days away from it all:  the cell phone, Facebook, the computer.... although what about my blog streak if I did that?  I'd need to get somebody to cover for me -- maybe my son Jon or my niece Ruthie.. My readers need a fresh slant anyway...

irrationally predictable

I spent more time than usual on the road today -- thank goodness I don't have a job that keeps me in the office all the time.  I was meeting with clients first on the far east end of the Twin Cities metro area and from there to a client on the far west end.  That's quite a sprawl, so I put plenty of miles on my car.

In between appointments, I stopped at a coffee shop (mostly to use the rest room), and while sipping my coffee, I told the guy at the table next to me how much I liked the title of the book he was reading -- Predictably Irrational.  He told me what the book was about, which didn't sound nearly as interesting as the title did.

Afterwards, I was wondering if I am "predictably irrational" and decided that I am not.  What I am is irrationally predictable.  I think it's time that i did something irrationally unpredictable.  Stay tuned.

even now, not everyone is appalled

James, in his first year of college, is taking an American history class.  He and I recently have had a discussion or two about what they are studying in class currently: racial segregation in the mid-20th century, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights movement, and, as we talk about it, he's a bit amazed that things were like that not that long ago.  I remember it all well.  And it's easy to think, how could this have all happened in this "land of the free"?

Then you look at one of the big issues of today:  the recent killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, and you hear people -- politicians, news celebrities -- excusing the shooter, trying to justify the murder.  It makes me realize that things haven't changed as much as I'd like to think they have.  Racism is alive and well.

magical mystery monday morning

march 1972: vineland, new jersey

I was a bank teller at the time.  There were seven teller windows at our downtown branch, and there was my very-English "Mr. Dixon" sign to identify me.  All the other teller last names were Italian.  That's how it was in Vineland, lots of residents of Italian descent...

... and what a big deal it was forty years ago this weekend, when the movie The Godfather was released!  The local theater was packed for days, and the film was the talk over coffee break for quite a long time.  There was some sort of Italian-American pride going on, even though the topic, the Mafia (a word that couldn't be used in the film), isn't particularly flattering.

Me, having read the Mario Puzo novel, I loved the movie too, and it has stood the test of time.  Its cinematic achievements are still apparent today, and it is without question one of the best movies of all time.

headbanging karaoke

The 1029 Bar is up there in Northeast Minneapolis, and Jerry had heard they had good lobster rolls, which they do, as it turned out.  But last night was karaoke night, and the only table left was right next to the karoake microphone, and we sat down and ordered our drinks right before karaoke started.

Karaoke, especially in a straight bar, is pretty hit and miss, and there were plenty of misses but, wow, what loud music, especially when you're sitting two feet from the speakers.  I guess it's been a while since I've been to karaoke and the music has changed (except for one Barry Manilow song that I recognized) and our eardrums were blasted out.  Everybody was having a good time but conversation was impossible, so after we finished our food, we headed to Rachel's restaurant, where the weather was nice enough for us to quietly sit outside on the patio and have another drink and converse.

backing up into yesterday

(The month of March sure has a lot of birthdays...)

All day, in the back of my mind I was thinking that I'd blog something about my brother Davy, who lives and works in China and who has a birthday today... but now I realize that he had a birthday today because it's already tomorrow in China...

So, Davy, if you're reading this, I hope it was good and that some friends there made dinner for you, at least.. I'll try to plan ahead next year, although planning ahead isn't my strong suit, as you know.

how Jon is doing

We celebrated my son Jon's birthday tonight, two days after his actual birthday and two years before that big milestone birthday that usually coincides with a mid-life crisis...

... and Jon is way too private a person for me to tell you much about him or to say anything about how cool he is, so I'll just throw a few random details at you about him...

He dislikes:  Eggs, seafood, sports, Republicans, socializing with strangers...

He likes:  Gardening, aquarium fish, cats, Taco Bell, geography, travel....

He's funny, articulate, creative, intelligent, fun to be with, and he seems very satisfied with his life.  Maybe he won't have that mid-life crisis after all.

the virgin jet

During this past football season, there was a young quarterback playing for the Denver Broncos who sort of came out of nowhere to lead his team to several last-minute "miracle" wins.  His name is Tim Tebow and he wears his squeaky-clean religion on his sleeve, so of course the miracles came from God, and, as it turned out, they didn't last very long.  My friend Todd, a Broncos fan, asks during that miracle time, "Why did God choose the Broncos of all teams?"  His son Caleb, about 9 years old, answers, "Because they are the team closest to him!"  (The Broncos play at Mile High Stadium -- very clever, Caleb!)

Tebow had his 15-minutes of celebrity, and today, the Broncos traded Tim Tebow to the New York Jets, a team that has one of the least-saintly fan bases.  Besides that, Tebow has started dating super models and country-music stars, so I have the feeling his well-flaunted virginity won't last much longer.

There was also some football justice today:  the penalties handed down to the New Orleans falsely-named Saints have begun for encouraging and paying their players to seriously hurt other team's key players.  Sean Payton, the coach of the Saints, basically a punk, has been suspended for a year, and other suspensions are coming to Saints coaches and players.  I still say, take away their Super Bowl rings!

LAS to MSP

It's the first day of spring (and it seems like it has already been spring for awhile) and it's my son Jon's birthday and it's a travel day for me, but I'm not out of here til late afternoon.  I'm ready to leave Vegas (which doesn't necessarily equate to being ready to go home), but this was the right place for me to come, as it turned out.  It was good to be alone and anonymous for a couple days while being surrounded by thousands of people -- Lots of long walks, lots of time to think and flush out my brain a little.

If I can, I'll try to make my next few blogs be not so self-absorbed.  On the other hand, maybe that's just what blogs are.

Happy birthday, Jon.... We'll celebrate tomorrow night.

oh.... and spring break too.

Another group that I'm finding go to Las Vegas this time of year -- the college-agers on spring break... and then there are the parents (teachers? school administators?) with kids who are here... why does anybody bring kids to Las Vegas, anyway?  Trust me on this, nobody want so see little kids when they're in Vegas.

And when did spring break for students come along anyway?  Certainly it was sometime after I was in school!

That's the Mirage Hotel in the video, which is where I usually stay, and the nightly volcano show.  Sorry about the sound quality.

madness and green stuff

When I made this last-minute Vegas reservation, it somehow didn't occur to me that it was St. Patrick's Day and also within March Madness month (since I admittedly pay zero attention to college basketball), and last night turned out to be one of the busiest Saturday nights of the year here.  When I come to this town, I generally try to avoid weekends:  it's just too darn full of people.  Last night, it was okay, though.  The mix of people dressed in green costumes and sports fans seemed to mix together just fine and they all least had the drinking in common.

People that know me are mystified, I'm sure, that I would go to such a crazy place when I need to get away from reality and stress and probably are surprised that, being the person they think I am, I ever spend any time in a city that is a monument to capitalist excess.  Oh well, what can I say?  It's one of my guilty pleasures, and I like it.  And if I were to ever to stay longer than three nights, I think I would hate it.

a leprechaun on his own

Wow, it's early, and I'm trying to wake up enough to get to the airport, on this the day we all celebrate Ireland.  The half of me that is Irish will try to think good Irish thoughts today and tonight.

Hope you all have a fun St. Patrick's Day.  And a special Happy Birthday today to my sister Nancy...

a cowardly couple of hours

It was another night at the Guthrie Theater last night, this time with my son Jon to see the current new production of Hay Fever by Noel Coward.  It's a play I didn't know but have liked other Coward plays like Private Lives and Blithe Spirit.

Hay Fever (and, having seen it, I have no idea why it is named Hay Fever) was first produced in 1925, takes place right then in the Roaring '20s, is sort of a goofy-family comedy.  It's a fun diversion and the theater was packed, so I guess the Guthrie has another hit on its hand.

class, take note: march 15 = the ides of march

It's March 15th, and I'm not going to go through the whole "Beware the Ides of March" thing again since nobody anymore knows what that even means.  Suffice it to say that for me personally it's a big deadline line, one to be dreaded, but that we made it through just fine, except for the few million brain cells that got left behind.

Worked until about 10 PM last night, and the temperatures were still so nice (I hate mentioning the weather three times in three days, but there it is) that I walked down to the neighborhood bar and had a Heineken and struck up a conversation with a guy where we ridiculed Rick Santorum's primary victories in Alabama and Mississippi...

... and the day after tomorrow, I'm heading West for some quick R & R....

something just ain't right

It's March 14th, it's downtown Minneapolis, and I'm working out on my office patio??

It's 70 degrees!

the forecast here and there

I think I should re-think this weekend's getaway.  Temps here in the Twin Cities -- 70s and sunny.  Las Vegas -- 50s and rainy.

some people are hard to replace

I'm still depressed over Ricky Rubio's season-ending injury the other night.  He was a bright spot in a Minnesota winter and a distraction from stress as he led the Timberwolves to playoff contention.  Maybe the Wolves can still pull out a decent season without him, but it's just not the same.  Without his skill and showmanship, the rest of the team is just, well, a bunch of basketball players.

(if you get an ad popping up on the video, you can click on it to make it go away)

that deferred hour

How long has Daylight Savings Time started this early in March?  Didn't it used to be the end of April?

Anyway, we sprung forward last night, and we won't get back that hour until next fall.

And, speaking of springing, what a spring day it was here in Minneapolis -- sunny and temperatures in the 60s!  This has been the best winter of the 34 I have spent in Minnesota.  The naysayers say a mild winter like this means we will have lots of bugs this summer and that it will be hell for allergy-sufferers.... But today was a day to be relished by everyone.

knees are way too fragile

Damn.  That's the thing about basketball teams.  Everything is working, everything is falling into place, and then you lose a key player to a serious injury and you start all over again.

The Minnesota Timberwolves are having such a fun season, every game has been one that we Wolves fans look forward to, and now one of the leaders of the fun is out for the season with a serious knee injury:  Ricky Rubio, the rookie from Spain, has a torn ACL ligament resulting from the wrong twist of a knee in last night's game against the Lakers.

Tom and I are going to tonight's game versus the New Orleans Hornets, and now I feel a sense of dread and sadness.  I'll still be wearing my Rubio shirt, but who knows what the team will be without him?  Can they adjust, or will somebody else blow out a knee?

what's he smokin' now?

Amazing.. Just a day or two after I trashed doofus TV-evangelist Pat Robertson for blaming last week's tornado victims for not praying enough ("twisted twister thinking", March 6), he is back in the news, this time for his perfectly sensible comments advocating the legalization of marijuana: "This war on drugs has just not succeeded"; “I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up."

He's obviously trying to get on my good side and this is a nice gesture, but he has a long ways to go.

no thanks, I gave it up for Lent

My friend Elke in Germany wrote about what some of her friends are giving up for Lent this year:  one is fasting on "everything"; one is giving up chocolate, one alcohol, one sex (which for many people wouldn't take a major effort)...

I grew up in a church where the word Lent was never mentioned, and even though I've been connected to a more mainstream church in recent years, Lent, that part of the church year between Ash Wednesday (whatever that is) and Easter, is still kind of a mystery for me.  Still, the idea of giving up something for Lent, even though I don't understand that concept either, is kinda cute, so I went through a few years of finding something to give up.  One year, for instance, I gave up Nestle Crunch bars, which I was sort of hooked on at the time (And on Easter that year, I flooded the office with Nestle Crunch bars).

Elke's note reminded me that I hadn't given up anything this year (at least not intentionally) and it's already two weeks past Ash Wednesday.  Maybe what I'll give up is giving up something for Lent.

the effect of sleep deprivation on blog quality

For instance:  a 14-hour day at the office yesterday, back here at 7:30 this morning.  Oh well.  It's what I do this time of year.

I mentioned to Jerry on the phone that I was thinking about taking that weekend off following the Ides of March deadline, maybe even a long weekend.  "You need to get away, dude!" he said.  "Why don't you go to Las Vegas?" (I'm paraphrasing -- he never calls me "dude").  And before you know it, he had gone on his laptop booking a flight for me and I had called for a free hotel room, and it's set, the 17th through the 20th (Sorry, Jon!).  If Las Vegas can't make me think about something beyond my work load, then I'm in really bad shape...

... other than that, I got nuthin' today!

twisted twister thinking

I thought about saying something about the recent Rush Limbaugh fuss, but why?  We all know he's still a big fat idiot and that he is an entertainer, not a newsperson, and that he makes $50-million a year spouting garbage and getting attention.

But that old tele-evangelist Pat Robertson popped up in the corners of the news this week again for some of his own garbage-spouting, and it's more worthy of eye-rolling because this doofus really believes what he's saying.

Last week there were some horrible and widespread tornadoes sweeping through Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, killing at least forty people and destroying whole towns and ruining the lives of many.

Pat Robertson's "Christian" reaction on his 700 Club TV show:  First of all, why were these people dumb enough to build houses in areas where there are any chances of tornadoes?  Second, if enough people in those areas had been praying, God would have intervened and stopped the tornadoes.

I guess that means that people who lived in tornado-prone states last week and did not have tornadoes were doing lots of praying.  And people who do not live in tornado-prone states are smart.  This is all very surprising to me, although not nearly as surprising as the realization that people contribute money to this dude's ministry.

sometimes up, sometimes down

The original Supremes, singing their third-in-a-row #1 hit, "Come See About Me", released in 1964. In case you don't know them, that's Florence Ballard ("Flo") on the left, who was rudely kicked out of the group in 1967 and died in poverty in 1976; in the middle, Diana Ross, who went off into her solo career in 1970; and, on the right, Mary Wilson, who stayed with the Supremes through many reincarnations, who wrote a terrific autobiography called Dreamgirl: My Life As A Supreme (which totally trashed Diana Ross), and who, by the way, I kissed on the cheek several years ago.

Regardless of how they later turned out, in 1964, at age 18, I was crazy about the Supremes, as my parents watched and kinda shook their heads. Sometimes I remember that feeling when I see my nephew James at age 18 being gaga over Lady Gaga. I try not to shake my head.

i already lost it

It was way too nice of a day today to give thought to a blog (Tom and I had a great drive along the St. Croix River), so I'm moving the Monday video to Sunday night...

Turn the volume up....

reason to hate the saints

Well, finally... I, the casual football observer, have some validation.

It was that playoff game two years ago, the Vikings vs. the New Orleans Saints, that pushed me over the edge.  It was so obvious that the Saints had a game plan of seriously injuring Vikings quarterback Brett Favre.  Apparently they could not rely on their football skills to win.

Yesterday, the NFL formally charged the Saints with having unofficial "bounty" payments to some of their players if they were able to injure a key player enough to put him out of the game.  That 2010 Vikings game was specifically noted in the charges.  Let's hope the NFL throws the book at them -- suspensions, fines, loss of draft picks -- but unfortunately they can't take away that Super Bowl win that wouldn't have happened without their barbaric tactics.

Here is my original rant, from January 31, 2010:  http://hrdfax.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-last-football-comments-for-long-time.html.

it's just us and the birds

This stage version of The Birds, written by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, is in the Dowling Studio, the smallest of the three theaters in the Guthrie building (located on the ninth floor -- amazing views from the lobby). The Dowling is general admission as opposed to reserved seating, and James and I arrived about ten minutes early. The place was already packed! We couldn't even find two seats together. On a Thursday night! This show is apparently a hit... Lots of college-age-looking people.

If, however, they were looking for a story paralleling Alfred Hitchcocks's 1963 film version, they would have been disappointed. This Birds has four characters, isolated in a remote farmhouse, and they are possibly the last people left in the world after the birds have taken over. If you can forget Hitchcock, this is a good, suspenseful story on its own. The acting is terrific, the set is amazing.... and there are times you can feel like the birds are all around you, even though you see none of them.

it's a gas gas gas

People, as we know, are idiots, and we know that when gas prices go up, the President, whoever he is, somehow gets blamed, even though a President has no control over gas prices.  Gas prices are, in fact, controlled by the oil companies and speculators.

Gas prices here are heading upward dramatically at the moment, even though supply is good and usage is down and the only possible disruption of oil supply is the fabricated potential showdown with Iran.

Coincidental facts:  It's a Presidential election year.  The oil companies and speculators would love  to see Obama defeated for re-election so that they could have a President more sympathetic to their selfish interests.  During this and every price increase, the oil companies will show record profits.  They know the voters.
*****
"The Federal Trade Commission has ruled that oil companies are not gouging customers. They say, technically, they're screwing customers." --David Letterman.

leaping into the slush

According to Wikipedia, a person born on February 29th can be referred to as a "leapling" or a "leaper".  "Leapling" sounds way cooler of the two choices, so I wish all those leaplings out there a Happy Birthday, as I did four years ago today (http://hrdfax.blogspot.com/2008/02/happy-birthday-leap-people.html  ) and will again four years from now.

It's been a mostly snow-less winter here in the Twin Cities, so a couple days ago everybody was kind of excited to have a big snowstorm ("maybe 18 inches!") predicted for yesterday and today.  It turned out to be one of those enormous snowstorms that never happens.  We got a lot of rain, then a freezing rain/snow mixture, all of which added up to practically no snow accumulation and a lot of wet, icy, messy roads and sidewalks, car crashes and power outages.  A real snowstorm would have been a lot more fun.

'the birds' is coming

Back in 1963, that was the advance tag line for the then upcoming release of Alfred Hitchcock's movie, The Birds - "The Birds is Coming!", grammatically challenging but effective.

The other night, James and I watched The Birds, which on some demented level I always enjoy, because on Thursday we're going to a stage version of The Birds at the Guthrie Theater, an American premiere. We of course are thinking, How do they do the bird scenes on stage?, the answer being that the stage version is nothing at all like the film version, even though they are supposedly based on the same Daphne duMaurier short story, and there won't be any birds on stage, just lots of suspense. Another thank-you from me to the Guthrie for the complimentary blogger tickets. We are getting a lot of theatrical variety this season.

imagining ashes on ryan seacrest's tuxedo

I'm not used to seeing the "red-carpet" shows before the Oscars, but Ruthie and Joan were there watching with me last night, so I sat through the gushing interviews until the watching finally paid off, with Sacha (Borat) Baron Cohen's stunt -- dressed as The Dictator, he dumped ashes, theoretically those of Kim Jong Il, all over Ryan Seacrest (American Idol?), one of the gushing interviewers.

Tom, who is crazy about slapstick, loved it, suggested that I post a video of that Seacrest moment today since Monday is usually my video day, but I'm not finding a good YouTube clip that doesn't have advertisements or something else annoying, so I'll skip and do a different video tomorrow instead.  If you didn't see it, you'll have to just imagine Ryan Seacrest with ashes all down the front of his tuxedo as he tries not to freak out.

When the Oscars show actually started, it was a good one, well-paced, with Billy Crystal doing his usual great job as host.  The Artist and Hugo won most of the awards, so I liked that of course.  Otherwise, the highlights of the night were the Cirque du Soleil production, Angelina Jolie's leg and Meryl Streep winning Best Actress.

they might be shot

I'm biting my nails this afternoon, very unsettled, makes me wonder if my nerves are shot.  Little things are bothering me.  Take this laptop, for instance.  It is so slow and weird lately that at this moment I'm tempted to throw the stupid thing out the window.

The day started great, you know how I love Sunday mornings anyway.  The problem with Sunday mornings is that there are too many choices of what to do, and sometimes too many choices makes me end up doing none of them, which makes me disappointed with myself.  Today, though, wasn't like that.  I started with a workout at the gym, then coffee at the Starbucks across the street from the gym, then I went to church (Plymouth Congregational, you remember).  I ran into Lee after the service, Lee getting a mention here because he is a good friend and also a regular reader of this blog (Hi, Lee!).

This afternoon, though, is, as I say, unsettled.  Maybe too much coffee, maybe a troubling email, maybe thinking about the work I could be doing if I went to the office.  Expecting company soon for Oscar-watching.  Might need to break out the vodka soon after that.

diverted to Iran

I wasn't able to escape to Europe yesterday, but I did manage to escape to a movie theater.

As you know, I'd already seen all the Best Picture Oscar nominees, so I picked a film that so many critics had picked for their 2011 Top Ten and yet wasn't nominated.  It should have been.  It is way better than the nominees.

A Separation is an Iranian film in Persian language with English subtitles.  It is nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and also for Best Original Screenplay.  It could easily win both awards.

The story centers around two families in present-day Iran.  It sort of lightly touches on some current political and religious aspects of Iranian life, but mostly it's an engrossing story about universal family and relationship issues.  At a time when so many political leaders are calling for bombing the heck out of Iran, sort of an Iraq-revisited -- again the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse -- and generally making all Iranian people into something evil, it's good to see the other Iran produce the most human film of the year.

escaping from stupid quotes, for one thing

Today as I work, I'm listening on my computer to a Sirius radio channel called "Escape"... and maybe it's because thoughts of Escape sounds particularly good today.

Where would I escape to if I could?  How about this?  -- catching tonight's non-stop flight from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Amsterdam?  After lingering in Amsterdam (my favorite city) for a few days, maybe some meandering through Europe with just a backpack, hopping trains to wherever I felt like going?  Stopping to see my friend Elke in Germany, skipping down to Italy, then back up through Spain and France, doing some writing in Paris?

It's nice to know Europe is there, if I could just somehow find my way back there.

Oh! -- and I just ran across this quote, made somewhere, sometime, by Mitt Romney:  "I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become."

Such talk, in its abject ignorance, reflects the worst of American has become.

competing with regis

A quote from a Golden Girls episode:
ROSE (Betty White):  I'm the most boring person on earth!
SOPHIA (Estelle Getty):  Did something happen to Regis Philbin??
*****
Today at the office we ordered a couple of pizzas for lunch.  That led to a discussion of whether my wanting one of them to be a plain cheese pizza (or, in my generous spirit of compromise, maybe with just some sausage or pepperoni) instead of both of them having tons of olives, green peppers, onions, and all that other crap made me a boring person.  It didn't help my case when I admitted that I also prefer plain potato chips to any of other snack and that my favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla.

But me boring?  HA! The true connoisseurs of pizza, chips and ice cream are right here in my corner.

Howard ranks the Oscar nominees

The Academy Awards are Sunday night, and I continued my tradition of seeing all the Best Picture nominees before the show, which means cramming a lot of movies into February.  Thanks goodness there were no insufferable nominees (think: Saving Private Ryan) this year.  Here, in my cinematically uneducated style, is how I would rank this year's choices, from "Most deserving to win the Best Picture Oscar" to "Lesser deserving."

1.  Hugo.  Okay, call me sappy, but I think this is a terrific movie, 3D or not.  Martin Scorcese shows that he is a superior director no matter what kind of movie he makes.
2.  The Artist.  I admit that I've gone back and forth on this, and maybe tomorrow I would have picked The Artist as #1.  It's the most innovative of the nine nomineees, and it showed that a silent, black-and-white film can be very entertaining in the 21st Century.  The dog steals the movie.
3.  Midnight in Paris.  If you don't know who Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the other writers and artists in 1920s Paris were, you might be lost, but I hope that my blog readers do know who they were.  Woody Allen should get a Best Screenplay award.
4.  The Help.  Good book, good movie, my main complaint being that some of the characterizations, especially those of the white bigots, are just too cardboard, too stereotypical.  Octavia Spencer will win Best Supporting Actress.
5.  The Descendents.  This is a fine, solid movie, and with Hawaii and George Clooney, how can you go wrong?  Overall, though, I don't think it's a remarkable enough film to be a Best Picture.
6.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  I liked this film way more than I thought I would.  I think it would have been better with an actor other than Tom Hanks as the dad who dies on 9/11 -- he just never stopped being Tom Hanks.
7.  Moneyball.  Baseball, the Oakland A's with a tiny payroll, Brad Pitt.  It's a fun David-vs.-Goliath flick.
8.  War Horse.  Spielberg, please stop using that uplifting, manipulating John Williams music in your films!  It's so distracting and irritating!  Very real-feeling World-War-1-in-the-trenches scenes.  Loved the horse.
9.  The Tree of Life.  It's one of those movies where you get to the end and say to yourself, "What the heck was that about??"  It maybe deserves a Best Cinematography award, though.

That's it from here.  Please watch the show Sunday night so that I have somebody to chat with next Monday.  It's okay to skip the red-carpet pre-show though, which gets more annoying by the year.

whether to spend money on a future madonna

When he was cutting my hair today, Brian asked me if I'm going to the Madonna concert.  I guess he and his partner and planning to go.

'Told him my sister and my niece have been sort of trying to talk me into going with them and I'm on the fence.  I like Madonna okay, who wouldn't?  A lot of her '80s music still sounds good and so does her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor.  You know this concert will sell out, it will be a happening event.

But I'm such a spontaneous person, and here's the deal:  Tickets go on sale this month -- very soon, I assume -- and the concert is not until November!  It kinda gives me the shakes to plan that far ahead.  Help me out with this.

and the oscar goes to -- #3

The Oscars will be on next Sunday (finally, I know you are thinking), so this will be my last prior-year Oscar program clip for awhile. This is 1965, the awards for the years 1964: Bob Hope is the host, Sidney Poitier is the presenter, and Best Actress Julie Andrews' speech is very Julie Andrews.

Also, today is Presidents' Day, and I thought about saying something about that but I knew I couldn't top last year's Presidents' Day post, so here it is, if you want to see it again: http://hrdfax.blogspot.com/2011/02/from-washington-to-obama-in-less-than-4.html

extremely, incredibly

I try to avoid going to a movie in an outer-ring suburb, but we waited too long and that's the only place we could find Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close still playing, so we put up with young airheads as they moseyed through the cineplex and as they noisily moved from movie to movie obviously doing anything to get a little attention.  Remind me next time to get to a movie before it gets lost out there in oblivion.

But Ruthie and I were able to talk Tom and Joan into going with us, so we had a good time.  The movie, based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel that I read several years ago and mostly forgot about, was better than I was expecting, the main weakness, in my uneducated mind, being that Tom Hanks was playing the part of the father who died on 9/11.  I don't mind Tom Hanks generally, but in this film he just never stopped being Tom Hanks, and that was a distraction from the story.  The character should have been played by an unknown actor.

And now I've seen all nine of the Best Picture Oscar nominees, my goal.  In a couple days, I'll rank them for you, "most deserving" of the Oscar to "least deserving".  I know you're waiting with bated breath.

the anti-contraceptive people

The Presidential campaign is getting more stupid by the day.  As the Republican candidates try to out-conservative each other, they have become obsessed about the "evils" of birth control and family planning.  To them, the part of the Obama health care law that more or less mandates health care plans to cover birth control options shows that he is anti-religion, anti-Catholic, certainly anti-family.

Never mind that, even among Catholics, polls show that 98% of sexually active Catholic women in the U.S. have used birth control methods banned by the Catholic Church -- rules made by theoretically celibate men, of course.  And, if they are using the Genesis legend as their reason for such oppressive beliefs -- God telling Adam and Eve to "be fruitful and multiply" -- consider that there were only two people then, now there are more than 7 billion.  Maybe they were a little too fruitful.

Rick Santorum, somehow a serious candidate for President, has said that sexual intercourse should only be for the intent of procreation.  Newt Gingrich says that Obama has declared war on the Catholic Church (I wonder if any of Gingrich's mistresses ever used birth control!).  What an embarrassment for this country that such talk is not laughed off the national stage.  I  miss the days when phrases like "population explosion" and "zero population growth" were part of a more intelligent dialogue.

a place where you can't blame the liquor

Hey there.  Hard to believe, but I took a day off, maybe to re-group (this was supposed to be my cruise week, you know), and am here at Mystic Lake Casino.  I used one of my free hotel nights, and it's only a half hour or so from home and a decent short getaway.  Work-wise, I'll make up for it over the weekend.

Mystic Lake has become quite a sprawling complex, and I like it even though it has a lot of slot machines that are too complicated for me to understand, so I mostly avoid them, which is a probably a good thing.  The hotel rooms are nice.  What is weird about Mystic Lake is that it is a totally alcohol-free facility -- booze isn't even allowed in the hotel rooms.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't alcohol-free gambling not what nature intended gambling to be?

madness continues

My month of seeing the Oscar nominees for Best Picture before the February 26th Academy Awards is going by quickly.  Out of the nine nominated films, I have just one more to see -- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close -- and I'm just waiting for my niece Ruthie, who is currently sick as a dog, to be able to leave her sick bed long enough to go to the movies with me.  If she isn't well by this weekend, she might have to wait for this movie to come out on DVD!  Not sure that I want her hacking her brains out in the seat next to me anyway, now that I think about it.. j/k, Ruthie!  :-)

I saw a good little film the other evening -- Beginners, starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer -- about a man who "comes out of the closet" at age 75.  Christopher Plummer will certainly get my "vote" for Best Supporting Actor as the fun-loving late bloomer.

facebook as a weapon

There are many good things about having Facebook -- hooking up with people you haven't seen in forty years, for instance -- and there are just as many bad things.  You've read about the cyber-bullying and all that extreme abuse.  But there is also the personal contact that Facebook replaces, the way people can use it to hurt each other, and the way bad news is often transmitted these days.  People find reasons to "de-friend" each other or leave Facebook, offending in ways that didn't use to be possible.  I sometimes wonder if Facebook has peaked.  As soon as somebody gets pissed enough, they drop out, and, the way things are going, we will get all get pissed enough eventually.

eli's coming

Jerry picked me up for lunch today, and we decided to try the new Eli's restaurant (http://elisfoodandcocktails.com/) across the river.  For the past two or three years, the original Eli's, located just two blocks from the condo, has been our go-to place to eat when we can't think of anywhere else to go, and it seems to be the most popular small casual-eating place in the neighborhood.

I'm sure it was a big decision for them to open a second location, but sometimes ya gotta take a chance.  The new place has a cool feel (not as cool as the original, though), same good menu and food... a fine place to hang out and chat about life...

and the oscar goes to -- #2

It's April 1968, the Oscars for 1967 films. The show took place on April 10, postponed at the last minute from April 8 because of the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4. I was very into movies that year and it was just a couple weeks before I, the unwilling draftee, was inducted into the Army to be transformed into a killing machine.

In the Best Actor category, I was hoping for Dustin Hoffman to win for The Graduate, my second choice being Warren Beatty for Bonnie and Clyde. Rod Steiger was great in In the Heat of the Night, so it shouldn't have been surprising for me that he won, but I was anyway.

Audrey Hepburn is the presenter, cool as always.

[Click on YouTube, then come back to me]

events at target center

Last night, Tom and I were at Target Center, a few blocks from home in downtown Minneapolis, for the Timberwolves/New York Knicks game.  The sports figure of the moment (this month's Tim Tebow) is Jeremy Lin of the Knicks, and he wasn't overly impressive in this game but the Knicks won anyway as the Wolves collapsed in the fourth quarter.  This is life as you know it, if you are a Wolves fan.

And this is how people communicate in 2012:  I was checking out Facebook on my Blackberry occasionally during the game, and friends' posts kept popping up saying that Whitney Houston was dead.  These days, rumors like that travel fast in the cyber world and are usually wrong.  This one was right.

Whitney Houston's peak was in the '80s and the early '90s, and she was a superstar.  After that, she became a tabloid tragedy and a lost soul.

And, as I sat there in Target Center digesting all this, I remembered that my sister Joan had brought me to a Whitney concert right there in that arena, and we sat not far from where my Wolves tickets are, just a few feet away.  It was in the early '90s, the "I'm Your Baby Tonight" World Tour.  I wasn't the biggest fan, but her concert was enjoyable and I recognized the power of her voice. Her style was just not my style.  My style would have been more the style of Whitney's mom, singer Cissy Houston, or Whitney's cousin, Dionne Warwick -- all their '60s work.

What a sad story.  How devastating it must be for her family.  And for her fans, who haven't forgotten her.

number seven hundred

Today I join The 700 Club.  Not -- God forbid! -- Pat Robertson's 700 Club.  This is my 700th blog post, and I would think that makes me part of just a very small group:  those who don't give up on their blog merely because they run out of ideas!  Heck, if I stopped blogging when I ran out of ideas, I wonder when that would have been??  :-)

It's a work day Saturday, and, as I work, I am listening to the '70s station on Sirius Radio's website, at the moment re-broadcasting Casey Kasem's American Top 40 Countdown from February 9, 1974.  As I listen, I'm hearing some songs I never heard before (that never made it into the Top 30, probably)  and some songs that should have been forgotten... and some songs that are fun to hear again.  This was the era of Elton John in his prime, and I was at that moment fanatical over his album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. A month later, my son Jon was born, and my priorities, well, made an adjustment.
*****
At the end of the Countdown:  #1 was "Love's Theme" by the Love Unlimited Orchestra; #2 was "The Way We Were" by Barbra Streisand.

how howard is doing

I had an email from a good friend of mine this morning, saying that she reads my blog daily... "so I have a picture of WHAT you are doing, but I sure am wondering HOW things are going for you..."

For anybody else wondering the HOW, let me assure you that I'm fine.  I'm hoping that the changes at home are temporary and that Jerry will be back soon and everything will be hunky-dory, but I also recognize that it might not happen.

What I'm noticing in myself these weeks is that I at times have been extremely hyper... too much coffee, too many working hours, and maybe a suppressed anxiety.  I have become more productive in the office than I have been in years -- sort of an Energizer Bunny -- which is a good by-product of all this from a business perspective, as long as I don't stroke out!

My blog is my ten-minute-a-day moment away from reality, a daydream into the alternative crevices of my brain, and therefore not terribly helpful for gauging my real-life mental geography.  But know I am well and grateful for those people who care about me.

meaningless get-togethers

I'm amused that Mitt Romney did so poorly in the Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado caucuses this past Tuesday.

He doesn't do well in caucus states, and I think there's a reason for that.  My experience with caucuses here in Minnesota is that the people who are driven by an agenda or some sort of passion are the ones that show up on caucus night.  A caucus is not representative of the voting populace.

And most Romney supporters feel no passion for him.  They have no reason to take two or three hours out of a winter evening to go sit in a room listening to their neighbors vent when it just leads to a non-binding straw poll where they vote for a candidate they are only lukewarm about.  The Rick Santorum supporters at least feel passion, not for Santorum himself but for his message of bigotry and exclusivity.

Romney will be glad to get back to the primary-election states, where less effort will be required by his supporters, and, let's face it, he probably doesn't have many real supporters:  they are just voting against the other wacko candidates.

judy, what were you thinking??



 To tell the truth, I wasn't particularly in the mood to go to the theater last night, but I had these tickets and, well, you know...  But I was lucky enough to get my niece Ruthie to go with me, and doing something with Ruthie is always an momentary-crisis adventure that somehow ends in laughs:  her losing her driver's license in the lobby, losing her debit card under the seats in front of us, that sort of thing...

But how quickly I got in the mood!  The play is End of the Rainbow, and it turned out to be one of the best shows I've ever seen at the Guthrie.  The Guthrie is the venue for the American premiere of the play, which started with a successful run in London.  From Minneapolis, it moves on to Broadway.

End of the Rainbow is about Judy Garland in 1968, the last year of her life, when she is a drunk, drugged-up, foul-mouthed emotional disaster, when she is making an extended appearance at the Talk of the Town club in London.  The set goes back and forth (very effectively) between her London hotel suite and the stage at the Talk of the Town.  The most amazing part of the show, as you will also be saying afterwards if you go to this play, is Tracie Bennett as Judy.  First of all, she is a convincing Judy Garland, but you will be in awe at the sheer energy it must take to play this manic role night after night.  She is on stage for practically the whole two hours, and none of that time is restful.  How she cannot be totally exhausted after each performance is beyond my imagination.  Or maybe she is.

Highly recommended! This is a hot show, man!

After we double-checked to make sure Ruthie had all her belongings, we went back out into the chilly night.

the head stomp

Oh damn.  Kevin Love has been suspended for two games merely for stomping on Houston Rockets player Luis Scola's head.  What's funny is that Tom and I were at that Wolves game last Saturday night and had no idea it happened.  Ah, the magic of instant replay!

and the oscar goes to -- #1

OK, the Oscar month thing again. Here is a flashback to a previous Academy Award program, in 1988, when Cher won Best Actress for Moonstruck, which, coincidentally, is my favorite movie. Her dress is awful and her speech is lame, but, considering that is Cher of all people (!) winning an Oscar, it was definitely a memorable moment. You also get to see Chastity in the audience still being a girl!
*****
Sorry if you get re-directed to YouTube to watch this.  Please come back after that.

mid-winter sports update

It's Super Bowl Sunday, and is it just me, or is everybody other than Giants and Patriots fans thinking, Who cares?  You might be having a party and consuming obscene amounts of alcohol and Doritos, but for me it's going to be an evening of doing something else.  You know I usually love football, but it was a dreary season, very unexciting, and I feel no remorse over it ending.

But moving onto basketball --  I am back into the Minnesota Timberwolves in a big way.  The season got off to a late start because of a lockout by the team owners, but the Wolves, thanks to Ricky Rubio and Kevin Love, are so much fun to watch that I have been making the best of my season tickets.  This says something about the low expectations of Timberwolves fans, but we are very excited that they are at .500 -- a 12-12 record, which might not sound that great to you, but consider that their record last year was something like 16-64, the worst in the league.

Hockey?  Locally, the Minnesota Wild got off to a great start early in the season but have mostly collapsed since then.

Skiing?  Snowmobiling?  With no snow, it has been a bad winter for those folks.  As for the rest of us, we're thinking, Hey, baseball spring training starts next month!

But, anyway, if you watch, enjoy the Super Bowl.  At least you get to see Madonna at half time.

bug shows

I had dinner with my son Jon last night (at Hell's Kitchen, in downtown Minneapolis), then he came over to my place.

And it's not like Jon and me to sit there and watch TV, but the TV was on and we somehow gravitated to the high-number HD cable channels, those channels that I don't really even know exist.  And it was eye-opening.

There are some weird networks out there, dude.  We found ourselves flipping back and forth between the Animal Planet and the Science Network -- shows with names like "Monster Bug Wars", "Killer Ants", "Animal Hoarders" and "Infested."  It was strange, seeing thousands of killer bugs in High-Definition ripping apart other animals or infesting homes, yet we couldn't look away either.  There's a world out there that I don't know about, and maybe thats okay!

I say to Jon, "How can there even be people who watch this stuff?"  And he responds, "Hey, if there are people who watch the Kardashians, then there are people who will watch anything!"

today's decision

This morning someone told me that he had once been advised by a therapist, "When you wake up in the morning, you make a decision about whether to love that person in your life."  And somehow that made sense to him.

And I'm thinking, what hogwash.  Where is the passion in that?  Love isn't a mental decision, is it?

resisting fear of my shadow

I don't know yet what happened with that groundhog in Punxsutauney, Pennsylvania this morning, but Groundhog Day here in Minneapolis, in the middle of this freakishly warm winter, is dark and foggy, in a sort of Wuthering Heights sort of way.

...Which means that I didn't get scared by my shadow and didn't go scurrying back into my burrow for another six weeks of winter.

...Which is good because I don't feel like hibernating right now.  There is too much fun stuff to do here above ground.

movie madness 2012

(.. or maybe it's just plain ordinary madness...)

Sorry, long-suffering blog readers of mine, but it is February once again, which means that the Academy Awards are coming up at the end of the month and I have that odd tradition of making sure I see all of the Best Picture Oscar nominees, which means that I end up cramming a bunch of films into the month of February.

This year there are nine Best Picture nominees, and I've so far seen four of them:  Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen), The Artist, The Help, and Moneyball (Brad Pitt).

The five I plan on seeing before February 26: Hugo (Martin Scorcese in 3D), The Descendents (George Clooney), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, War Horse (Spielberg), The Tree of Life.

So pardon me as I make much ado about nothing, and fair warning:  I might hit on one or two of you good people to see a couple of these shows with me.

pacmen doing their dirty deeds

Ho hum.. Another Tuesday, another over-reporting of a Republican presidential primary, this time in Florida.

I was just reading, today is also the day that the names of the major contributors to the "Super PACs" will be released.  Do you know about the Super PACs?  If you don't yet, you will in the general election, if you are in the U.S. at least. They are the PACs (PAC=Political Action Committees), thanks to our right-wing Supreme Court, to which zillionaires and corporations can make unlimited contributions.  Those PACs can be created to promote specific political candidates separate from the accountability of the candidates themselves, so they can be used to create TV ads, for instance, that are full of lies and slime and distortions and the candidate himself or herself can play innocent -- "I have no say in what they do. It's free speech."

One example is that Las Vegas casino owner (of the Venetian Hotel, a casino I will never walk into again) who has contributed about $10 million to a Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich.  Of course, this guy is worth $21 billion, so contributing $10 million would be like you and me handing a dollar to a panhandler.

So, as everything else in America is these days, it's all about Super Money, the big monsters gobbling up the rest of us.  It will be a disgusting election year, and maybe that's the real goal of the Super PACs:  to turn us off so much that we won't vote.

obama goes green

It's not often that we have a President who does something cool, but President Obama did it last week at New York's Apollo Theater -- singing a line from Al Green's 1972 classic "Let's Stay Together"...

... and, just in case you forgot, here is the original --

going down with the ship

Remember the February cruise I announced we were going on?  It looks like the trip plan is off (and it has nothing to do with that cruise ship sinking in Italy about a day after I told you I was going on my first cruise), so maybe this won't be my first year to take a vacation during a busy season after all... OR who knows?  Maybe, since everybody seems to think I should take a vacation break, something else will come up...

Yesterday's drive out of the Twin Cities turned out to be fairly directionless after all (but I do love driving my car!).  I went about eighty miles north, noticed or remembered how many grossly overweight and Tea Party people there are in outstate Minnesota (coincidence?), hung out there for a while, got bored, came home.  The skyline of Minneapolis welcomed me.

a good mood, revisited

The blog post that over my blogging years has gotten the most hits -- by far! -- is my February 13, 2011 post "good mood food".  It's mostly because lots of people over the past year have Googled that Arby's tag line, which was just about to premiere back then, but it might also be because there was a cool photo of my son Tom with three of the Minnesota Timberwolves Dance Team members.

Deja vu -- see the pic above!  Last night Tom and I went to the Wolves basketball game vs. the San Antonio Spurs, and he had a chance to have his picture taken again with Dance Team members.  His big smile with these nice ladies plus the Wolves winning the game put us both in a good mood -- even without Arby's mozzarella sticks! 

there are times when i'd rather be in new jersey

For instance:

I need to work part of tomorrow (Saturday), and I feel such an urge to get in my car after that and drive somewhere  -- you know, maybe do an overnight.  I still haven't given my new car a really good workout, and driving, for me, can be very therapeutic and maybe I need something therapeutic.

But there is the usual dilemma of where the heck to drive to, especially in January -- or do I just drive aimlessly?  Everything is most directions from the Twin Cities is so the same!

Minnesota and the states around here are just so f-ing BIG!  Hence -- a benefit of New Jersey -- it is so f-ing SMALL that within two or three hours of driving time there is so much to potentially experience -- and it's not all the same!

Sometimes the same is good.  Sometimes the same is a killer.

how James is doing

We are under the same roof and sometimes like ships passing in the night, but I had a chance to catch up with James last night, have a nice dinner, hear how he's doing.

Over the past seven months, I've needed some self-imposed reminders of what it's like to be 18 years old and some reality checks of what it must be like to be 18 in the year 2012.  Trust me on this, I'm glad I was 18 when I was rather than now.

He seems to have settled into his life as a working college student, and I keep reminding myself how far he has come since June.  He was definitely meant to be a big-city kid.  His second-semester classes are off to an excellent start, and I'm proud of how he has eased into this winter semester.  He takes 'most everything in stride, maybe better than I would if I were in his shoes.

mitt romney's taxes, or lack thereof

This isn't about what a bad candidate Mitt Romney is, it's about what a bad tax system we have.

Much has been made of Romney finally releasing copies of his tax returns this week and what a relatively small percentage of his $21 million earnings (or whatever) went for taxes.  Then he went on TV to say that he doesn't apologize for being successful.

Nobody begrudges him success, I guess.  The complaint is that the bush tax cuts made unearned income (capital gains, qualifying dividends) taxed at a much lower rate than earned income.  So people whose income comes from W-2s, from going to work every day, often pay a much higher rate of tax than a zillionaire who just watches his money make more money.

Romney should be saying, "Hey, that isn't fair -- I should be paying more taxes."  Instead, his tax plan says that zillionaires should pay even less than they already are.  He then plays to people who don't understand taxes (the majority of voters, of course) and says "Lower taxes!", and they buy into it.  Hence, our economic catastrophe.

a little less evasive but not totally

I was glancing at my blog statistics and noted that my "page views" the past three days have been quite a bit higher than usual.  I can't help but wonder if a certain Facebook post on Sunday (I am beginning to hate Facebook, by the way) made some of my family and friends wonder what the heck is going on with me and thought that I might shed some light here.

So here's the deal in a nutshell:  Jerry has moved out for a while.  He needs some alone time, and everybody needs some alone time now and then.  There was no fight, everything is friendly, I'm optimistic that everything will work out okay.

And that is most of what I know.

And I thank people for caring about me and about us.

beware of soft shoe shufflers

The Concert for Bangladesh - 1971. Lead vocals by George Harrison and Leon Russell.

et tu, indeed!

a gloomy January Sunday afternoon...
... and my mind is still on Brutus a little bit... I realize Julius Caesar is just a play, but how amazing is it that the character Brutus loved Caesar as much as he did but could still be talked into pushing that fatal dagger?  Where was his higher loyalty?

praising, not burying



photo by Heidi Bohnenkamp

 As I lamented in my post on March 15, 2011 ("et tu, dudes?"), people aren't required to read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in high school anymore; thus, certain phrases have been lost to recent generations: "Beware the Ides of March!", "et tu, Brute?", "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him", "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears..."

Until last night, I had just seen Julius Caesar performed once.  It was back in my senior year in high school, a class trip to Princeton University.  That production was a traditional staging and very well done, as I recall, and I always prefer a period staging of Shakespeare rather than an updating to more modern times.

The new Guthrie Theater production, in association with the Acting Company, updates the story to present day.  It takes a little time to get used to seeing Caesar and his assassins in business suits, some rap music in the background, the protestors looking very current (even an "Occupy Rome!" sign), but somehow it all works.  The acting is top-notch, of course, especially Will Sturdivant as Brutus.  Brutus is always the star of this play, you know.  Or maybe you didn't know.

rest in peace, Etta

Etta James -- January 25, 1938 to today, January 20, 2012. Thanks for all the good music over the years.

the second mrs. gingrich

... a busy day at work today, but I just took a couple minutes to look over the internet headlines and had a couple chuckles over this afternoon's Republican presidential candidate tidbits... (I only chuckled until I realized that these are the candidates of one of the two major U.S. political parties and how embarrassed we should all be by them) --

-- Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, dropped out of the race today.  Oh what a loss.  He was the perfect candidate for those voters who want to feel smarter than their President.
-- Newt Gingrich's second wife, who he was hooking up with when he was divorcing his cancer-stricken first wife, has been interviewed by ABC News and says that Newt wanted to have an "open marriage" with her so that he could fool around with Callista.  The second wife said No and Newt divorced her when he found out she had multiple sclerosis.  Then he made Callista wife #3.

First thought:  Do we really need to hear all this, about Newt's philandering, insensitive ways?  Second thought:  Are all these joke candidates (Gingrich, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, etc.) being staged just to make Mitt Romney somehow look palatable?

somebody else's dysfunction

I was going to look and see what year Tennessee Williams's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premiered, but the Wikipedia site is down today to protest the pending SOPA legislation in Congress, which maybe we will discuss another day.  Suffice it to say that Cat premiered in the early to mid '50s and that a sanitized film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman came out sometime after that.

The Guthrie Theater has a new production of the play, and Jerry and I went to see it last night, thanks again to the generosity of the Guthrie Public Relations Department.

The Guthrie does Tennessee Williams well, as we found out in last year's production of A Streetcar Named Desire.  A story of a neurotic Southern family, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is steamy and provocative, and this is not the sanitized version.  It will keep you awake.  This show features Emily Swallow (pictured above) as Maggie, Peter Christian Hansen as Brick, and David Anthony Brinkley as Big Daddy.

ready for tennessee

Our visitor, James's cousin Danny, heads back to Jersey today, and we are relatively back to normal.

A busy week of entertainment is upon us, though, at a time when I probably should be working more, but oh well!!  Tonight Jerry and I head back to the theater for the Guthrie's new production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams, followed by another night at the Guthrie on Friday -- Julius Caesar.  But we aren't just total theater geeks -- tomorrow we're going to the Timberwolves/Pistons game.

I'm hoping that a quiet evening alone at home is somewhere on the horizon.

what cooperation looks like

My friend Theresa pointed out this video to me... 23,000,000+ hits so far...

Five people on one guitar... It's a Canadian band called Walk Off The Earth. I kinda liked it.

brad and angelina are back in the audience

I'm coughing a little less, which should make you happy because how many blog posts can I really get by with talking about my cough?  So my cough comments are done, even if it kills me.

But I'm still mostly hunkered down on the sofa, having watched a couple of football games on TV today that I had only a marginal interest in and now having The Golden Globe Awards in front of me, as I patiently wait for Ricky Gervais to say something outrageous.

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, a holiday for bankers and government employees but not the rest of us.  I'll be at my desk trying not to blog about cruise-ship sinkings.

as i continue to cough my brains out

... On a cold snowy Saturday evening, I'm just trying to stay warm... It seems like I cough less when I'm warm... and, as I cling to the hope that I don't have pneumonia, I'm doing some channel-surfing...

... There on CBS, the Patriots are murdering the Broncos, so Tebow can forget the playoffs and head off into an off-season fifteen minutes of celebrity...

... There on ABC, amazingly enough, is Miss America.  Wow, Miss America made it back to one of the main networks!  It's really horrible, what they have done to that program.  Bert Parks might be rolling over in his grave (Is he dead?).  But it's easier to make sarcastic remarks about this with Jerry and Danny than the Patriots game is.

...  And the 49ers beat the Saints!  Yes! 

(cough, cough, cough)....

'heat wave' in january

This winter in Minnesota has been unbelievably kind... relatively high temps, hardly any snow.

It finally turned cold two days ago -- it feels like January, at least for a little while.

But I'm still feeling the warm afterglow of seeing Martha Reeves of the great '60s Motown girl group Martha & the Vandellas last night at the Dakota.  They sang their big hits -- "Heat Wave", "Dancing in the Street", "Nowhere to Run", "Love Makes Me Do Foolish Things", etc. as well as some newer songs.  Martha gets out of breath now after a couple songs -- she's 70 now -- but she gives it her all, and the crowd loved her.

I got to meet Martha after the show, chat a little, get my picture taken with her, I even got to kiss her.  I kinda wish I would have brought all my Martha album covers with me to be signed by her.  Maybe there will be a next time.

a month from today

I have mixed feelings about all this.

You know how incredibly busy I am with work from January to April.  This year, somehow, I have been talked into taking a week off during that time -- a first for me.  And it's not just a week off -- Jerry, the fast-talking salesman, talked me into going on a cruise -- another first.  I always thought I was too young to go on a cruise -- now I think maybe I'm too old... But we are going nonetheless.

So a month from today, we leave from Fort Lauderdale, Florida heading off into the Atlantic and the warm Caribbean for a week.

Whether I can relax knowing about the work flooding into my office back home is the big question.

Jesus loves the little broncos

Wouldn't you know it?  The first year in a long time that I have hardly paid any attention to football (thanks mostly to a pathetic season for the the Vikings and the Eagles) is the year that Jesus decided to become a fan of the sport.  He helped an apparently otherwise mediocre Denver Broncos quarterback named Tim Tebow win games that should have been near-impossible to win -- hence, a miracle, of course.  Will divine intervention lead His team to the Super Bowl, or will the momentary media hero be stopped short of the Promised Land??

the upcoming baby shortage

If you're Catholic, forgive me for the following rant.  I was going to go on and on today about the Tim Tebow thing, but then I read what Pope Benedict said yesterday and it overrides even the Tebow silliness.

Per the Pope:  Gay marriage "threatens the future of humanity itself."

My first reaction:  The Pope thinks that if gay marriage is legal that it will be so appealing and irresistible that there will be no heterosexuals anymore, thus nobody left to procreate?

My second reaction:  What are all the gay Cardinals around him thinking when he is spouting this nonsense?

Tebow?  Maybe tomorrow.

martha my dear

It seemed fitting to have a Martha & the Vandellas video for this Monday. Who'd a thunk that back when I was a Martha Reeves fan back in the mid '60s that I would finally see her way out there in a hard-to-imagine 2012? My sister Joan and I are going to see her and the latest version of the Vandellas on Thursday at the Dakota Jazz Club, a very intimate classy club here in downtown Minneapolis. The Motown sound lives on.

speed-psychics

Last night Jerry and I went to a party given by a friend/ex-neighbor who is into psychics, mediums, "the other side".... and Jerry is a bit into all that too.

She had invited a husband/wife psychic team to this party with the intention that whoever of the party guests wanted could have a reading and maybe a "visitor" from beyond.

Twenty-minute sessions each.

I don't particularly want to know my future or to speak to somebody who had passed, but I'm game for most anything so I went to a session with the husband-medium.

He tried so hard to convince me that there was a man over my left shoulder and a woman over my right shoulder, relatives from my past.  I have had many many relatives who have passed, but his descriptions of these two people didn't fit any of them -- although I've sort of wondered if the woman could have been my Aunt Stella.

Their fairly general words of wisdom for me:  Keep doing what I'm doing -- meaning, don't retire (which I can't do anyway) -- and take a winter vacation this year (which I never do up til now but have already planned for this winter).

But I'm wondering, if we are dealing in twenty-minute intervals, how do the spirits get in and out of the room so fast?  Maybe I got stuck with the leftover spirits from the previous person!

with woody and danny

I have a cold and I hardly ever have colds, so I'm finding it hard to ignore and am just giving in to it.  It's Saturday, a good day to just curl up on the couch and be a potato.

James's cousin Danny, age 19, is visiting us for two weeks and James was at work, so we found a movie on Pay-Per-View to watch -- Midnight in Paris, a Woody Allen  movie starring Owen Wilson as a character that normally Woody Allen would have played but too young for Woody Allen to actually play anymore.  It's about an American writer in Paris who has flashbacks to the "golden years" for writers and artists in Paris, the 1920s.  It' a good story, a sturdy movie for a Saturday afternoon when you're feeling a little woozy, and, who knows? maybe it will get some Oscar nominations.

january 6, 1989: atlantic city, new jersey

It's my sister Joan's birthday today, and, as we usually do each year, we are taking her out for dinner tonight.

I remember my favorite of Joan's birthdays (so far):  It was her 30th.  She was still living in our hometown in South Jersey, and I was visiting from Minnesota.  It was a Friday night, and just north of us there was a major snowstorm going on.  In Millville and south of us, nothing.  So Joan and I got in my rental car and headed down to Atlantic City for the evening.

Back then, the Atlantic City casinos were packed on Friday nights, but, since nobody could get down there from Philly or New York that night because of the storm, the place was dead -- which was perfect for us.  We went to Trump Castle out there on the marina (this was back when I still did Trump casinos) and had dinner at a casino steakhouse restaurant named Ivana's.  Ivana was Donald's wife several wives ago.

We were practically the only diners there, and we received amazing service.  What I most remember was the prime rib -- absolutely the best prime rib I have ever had in my life.  I can still almost taste it!

I think we even did okay in the casino that night!

I'm hoping that my little sister is having a good birthday today and that we can show her a good time tonight, but I know that she is remembering back to that 30th one too.

you're not gonna hear silence from me

A warning to my daily readers:  The Academy Award nominees will be announced soon, and you know how I always make myself see all of the Best Picture nominees (yeah yeah I know -- even though movies aren't nearly as good as they used to be and the whole awards system is a corporate crock, but give me a break).

Considering the potential nominees, it may turn out that the only probable nominee that I actually saw in 2011 was The Help.  So I'll be seeing some movies between now and February 26, the date of the telecast, and you'll be hearing about it.

The other day, we went to see The Artist, a film that is making all of the critics' Top Tens for 2011.  It's a way different movie from the usual stuff.  It takes place in the late '20s, early '30s when movies were going from being silent to being "talkies".  The Artist is all in black and white and mostly all silent, shot in the style of the silents.  Like I say, you need to be prepared for something out of the ordinary, but it's a cool movie, it will make you feel good.  Possible spoiler alert:  The dog steals the show!

weaving back and forth

I was driving the freeway out to the suburbs to meet a friend for breakfast this morning and finding it remarkably easy to figure out when following a vehicle whether the driver was on his or her cell phone or even texting.. There is that weaving and erratic driving that tips me off.  Scary!

A couple more thoughts about the Iowa caucuses that happened last night, and then I'll try to be non-political for a few days...
--  It's funny that the conservative caucus-goers got so desperate for a non-Romney candidate that they ended up voting for Rick Santorum, one of the joke candidates.
--  This morning, Michele Bachmann dropped out of the race, and Rick Perry might drop out soon.  Two joke candidates gone.
--  Newt Gingrich is pissed and is looking for some revenge against Romney.  Gingrich is a jerk, but he might be fun to watch.
--  Putting it all into perspective:  The Iowa caucus every four years tends to thin out the ranks, but it's all so incredibly distorted.  Romney "won" by eight votes over Santorum. About 120,000 Republican voters went to the caucuses.  There are about 3 million people in Iowa.  There are about 300 million people in the United States.  So 4% of Iowans attended, and .04% of all Americans had a disporportionate say in which clowns move on and which clowns go home.  Democracy, anyone?

the other iowans

This evening, finally, those Iowa Republican caucuses are taking place, and I keep thinking what a negative impression of Iowa the world by now must have of Iowa. I mean, considering the voters that the Republican candidates seem to be targeting, you'd think that Iowans are uneducated, intolerant, racist and, well, kind of stupid.  And that's not true at all.  Iowa is a pretty cool, progressive state.  It's just the majority of tonight's caucus-goers who seem to be uneducated, intolerant, racist and, well, kind of stupid.

Pity the rest of the state's citizens.  They've been bombarded with awful negative attack ads on TV and have had to put up with the disruption of their lives by obnoxious campaigners.  They'll be glad to see the campaign move on to New Hampshire.

love those 3-day weekends

Getting 2012 off to a good start with an '80s song...

Tom buys an iPhone

My son Tom has given in to peer pressure of the world around him and today bought an Smart phone -- an iPhone.  I haven't seen him this excited in years.

... and I might be right behind him.  My Blackberry is falling behind.. maybe I need to go Apple....
*****
How did your New Year's Eve go last night?  We stayed at home, welcomed 2012 with Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin on CNN.  There was a minor brouhaha later about one of the singers at the Times Square celebration who purposely messed up the lyrics to John Lennon's song "Imagine".  This is how part of one of the verses goes:  "Imagine there's no countries, It isn't hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too..."   The dude changed that last phrase to "And all religions too..."  He may have felt this was being politically correct, but it changes the meaning of the whole damn song!  I wasn't the only person who noticed and objected -- Twitter was alive with protests! I say, cool, something good finally happened on Twitter!
*****
Oh no, I wonder if Tom is going to become a Tweeter.