Tail wagging, teeth snapping, legs flailing… you’ll have to imagine all that. Sometimes a girl just has to go a little crazy, right Daphne?
***
Want to make a fast friend by saving a greyhound in Central Texas? Check these pups out. Or go here to find a greyhound near you. You can also go here to find out why greyhounds are running for their lives.
If you have dogs who need proven leadership, go here to find a cat.
One thing I like about National Geographic is the Flashback photo on the last page. It’s always something interesting from many years ago. Today, I hereby steal their idea and begin Old Photo Friday in which I will post an old photo from my collection.
This is from sometime in the late 1970s taken with a Kodak 110 Instamatic, my first camera. I was at a car show in Washington, DC where I saw Greased Lightning, the Batmobile, and several other famous cars. The icing on the cake was getting to meet Batman – the real Batman – Adam West.
You could meet either him or Robin (Burt Ward), but I joined the Batman line, got an autographed 8×10 (since lost) and shook the caped crusader’s hand.
This picture reminds me of a more innocent time in which Batman could get by with nothing more than a stylish set of pajamas unlike today where he must wear a bulletproof armored Batsuit.
It’s been awhile since I watched any movies to round up.
The Count of Monte Cristo (Kevin Reynolds, 2002)
I Showed The Count of Monte Cristo at school. It was in the lesson plans for one of the classes I had to take over, and the kids had been looking forward to it. It was a solid action-adventure with a little bit of romance and humor. Everything was well done. Works nicely as a school film because it gives a lot to discuss in terms of revenge, forgiveness, and perseverance. Big Hollywood action that gets you cheering for the good guys. Three and half stars.
My Side of the Mountain (James B Clark, 1969)
My Side of the Mountain is another movie that the kids in one class were looking forward to watching after finishing the book. The book, which I recently read and really liked, tells the story of young Sam Gribley who runs away from home in New York City to live off the land in the Catskills. He spends a little over a year living off the land by gathering plants, hunting (often with the help of his falcon, Frightful), trapping, and fishing. It’s a neat tale about learning to live with nature. I wish I could say the same for the movie.
Good lord, it was bad. Almost everything that made the book so charming was stripped from the movie which attempts to sanitize Sam’s experiences living off the land. Sam doesn’t hunt or trap; he only steals a deer that some poachers had already killed so that it won’t go to waste. In a particularly stupid break from the book, Frightful gets killed by a hunter who accidentally shoots her while trying to kill a game bird that Frightful was attacking. Sam calls the hunter a murderer and the hunter tells him that Frightful was a killer too. Sam is sad, but the point is made that killing animals is supposed to be wrong. Now, I’ll go with the idea that trophy hunting is repugnant, but if you’re living off the land, you’re probably going to have to hunt. And if you’re an animal, such as a falcon, hunting is probably okay. I mean, those talons and razor sharp beak aren’t there for giving hugs and kisses to smaller birds.
The movie descends further into idiocy when Sam packs it in after getting snowed in (he lives in a sort of hollowed out tree/cave) one day around Christmas. This happens in the book as well, but Sam manages to survive and learns to avoid that predicament in the future. He makes it through the winter and is able to see the mountain blossom into new life with the coming of spring. Not in the movie. Sam gets rescued by two adults and he happily goes home, thus giving up on his dream of living in nature at the moment when he finally starts to see that nature is for real.
The last thing that bugged me, though my students didn’t notice, is that the whole story had been moved north. No longer did Sam run away from New York, now it was Toronto. Instead of the Catskills, he ran away to Quebec. Oddly enough, it was a Quebec in which no one spoke French, and Sam had no problem communicating with the few people he ran into because they all – every one of them – spoke flawless English. Stupid, stupid, stupid movie. No stars.
Scotland, PA (Billy Morrissette, 2001)
Dimwitted Joe and his ambitious wife Pat McBeth work at Duncan’s, a small fast food joint in Scotland, PA sometime in the late 60s or early 70s. Joe dreams up the concept of the drive through window but he’ll never profit on it as long as he works for Duncan. Three witchy carnys and Pat all convince him that Duncan’s could be his. Pat and Joe kill Duncan and create their own fast food kingdom: McBeth’s. Everything looks good until Lieutenant McDuff (Christopher Walken) shows up and starts asking questions.
Scotland, PA is a witty and dark comedy based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Despite the comic tone, though, the film is not a parody. It’s a retelling in a modern context. If you know the story of Macbeth, you know this is a tragedy, and it doesn’t end well for the McBeths or for a number of the other characters. It’s funny, sad, at times grisly (interesting deaths can occur in a fast food joint), but always witty and clever. Four stars.
There’s a dining room in the front of our house, but in the year and a half that we’ve been here, we’ve never once eaten in there or even wanted to, preferring to eat in the breakfast area. The light is beautiful in that room, though. Finally we came to our senses and decided to move the table, put in shelves around the walls and give our many books a home, thus building what kids call a “Lie-berry.”
Morrison, of course, quickly discovered the quiet joy of being a library cat. He’s been reading more lately, too. That is when he isn’t catching the sunbeams that spread out over his new favorite chair.
This is Sheila. She’s a Honda Civic Hybrid (my wife and her colleagues have decided that hybrids are female) and great fun to drive.
We ordered the car in January and it arrived last week. It has that nice new car smell and it runs beautifully. We’re getting close to 40mpg in the city. The stereo sounds great.
I’ve been trying to teach haiku. It’s a fun activity for when time is short at the end of the year. I especially like it because it’s simple, yet it forces kids to really choose their words carefully, something they are not often wont to do.
One student, having trouble with the form asked if I could go over it again and write one on the board for him…
First, five syllables
The second line has seven
Third line follows first
and then, this…
Haikus are poems
Usually do not rhyme
Just keep it simple
For some reason they found these amusing.
The 2006 ACL Fest lineup is out. I’m pleased with the list. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is the Sunday night headliner. I like them when I hear them, but since we usually leave during the last set on Sunday night, I’m glad the headliner is one I won’t feel bad about walking away from if exhaustion proves once again more powerful than music.
Other acts I’m looking forward to seeing: Massive Attack, The Tragically Hip, Galactic, Thievery Corporation, Calexico, Willie Nelson (who’s finally playing ACL!), Buckwheat Zydeco, Nickel Creek, and Son Volt.
The best thing about ACL Fest, though, is the number of acts I discover there. There are many on the list that I’ve never heard before so I’m sure I’ll be making quite a few discoveries.
(Saturn image from Cassini (3-27-04) courtesy NASA, aquired from Wikipedia. Click image for a larger resolution)
When I was very young, living in Virginia, my dad woke me up in the middle of the night to go outside and look through the telescope. He had it pointing at Saturn, and for the first time, I saw the rings. This was back when the Voyager probes were sending images back from the gas giants, the days of Skylab and the Viking missions. Back then, it was easy to imagine that someday I would travel to the planets.
Those starry nights along with thrilling days spent at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum ignited one of the longest running passions of my life: astronomy.
Eventually, Skylab fell, the Moon got farther away, NASA went from exploring to transporting, the speed of light remained inviolable, and I gave up on thinking I would ever travel the stars. But I kept reading. I kept peering out through the telescope, every winter staring for hours on end at the Pleaides and the star nursery of Orion.
In college my love of observational astronomy developed into a fascination with the bizarre nature of theoretical and quantum physics that always led me back astronomical weirdness: neutron stars, quasars, magnetars, black holes, radio galaxies. Thinking about this stuff is to ponder the very nature of existence.
Endless fascination, of course, always brings me to books and so it was that I read Stephen Hawkings’s beautifully illustrated The Universe in a Nutshell. The book is a wide-ranging overview of Hawking’s thinking about the nature of the universe and indeed reality itself.
He covers general relativity and quantum mechanics before delving into the various attempts to reconcile the two, including: 11-dimesnional supergravity, branes, 10-dimensional membranes, superstrings, and m-theory. Black holes, imaginary time, time travel and the big bang come into play as well.
The all-encompassing M-theory seems the most fascinating and his lucid explanation of the possibility that we exist on a four dimensional brane is particularly compelling. In this scenario, three of the four fundamental forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic) propagate only on the brane while gravity propagates across the interdimensional space (or whatever you’d call it) to other branes. It’s an interesting attempt to unify gravity with the other forces, and one that I’ll definitely have to read more about.
Other than relativity and quantum mechanics, this was all new to me and somewhat difficult to absorb while reading in bed at night. Hawking, however, knows his audience for this book is not one of professional scientists, but rather curious laymen, and his authorial demeanor is that of a kindly guide leading a tour through the most amazing museum, a museum that in fact encompasses everything.
I love reading books like this because they open my mind to ideas that are as exciting and awe-inspiring as when I was a little kid looking into the telescope and seeing Saturn’s rings for the first time.
Warning: some of the photos are of a graphic nature.
It seems that from time to time, especially on sunny days, the apes enjoy tormenting their poor greyhounds. No one knows why this occurs. One minute a pup is lounging on the couch and suddenly, without so much as a recitation of miranda rights, the poor hound is carried away to be tortured without any recourse or even a visit from the Red Cross or the Greyhound Protection League.
We have tried to document the atrocities in order to raise awareness.
Here is one of the torture rooms located in Austin, Texas. Notice the sweet smelling poison (behind the faucet) that will be slathered all over the victims’ fur.
Greyhound Phoebe wouldn’t talk, but you can see the poison on her coat.
Finally, Greyhound Daphne was put to the water torture, but she also refused to betray her loyalties. “Do your worst,” she said.
When water and shampoo wouldn’t work, they were forced to endure the psychological humiliation of being paraded around the neighborhood stripped of their hard-earned odor and looking all fluffy.
Finally, Daphne led the retreat back to the couch…
***
Want to make a fast friend by saving a greyhound in Central Texas? Check these pups out. Or go here to find a greyhound near you. You can also go here to find out why greyhounds are running for their lives.
If you have dogs who need proven leadership, go here to find a cat.