Mark L. Van Name's Blog, page 64

Crappy seats, excellent dinner

Having exit-row seats and enjoying early or on-time arrivals were the two good parts of today's air travel.  The rest pretty much sucked.  I realize I'm fat, but the thinnest people on today's flights also had miserable times of it.  As the airlines find more ways to pack in customers, the flights become less and less enjoyable.  I dozed as much as I could simply to avoid the rest of the cramped and uncomfortable parts of the trip.  The rest of the time, I worked.  I was delighted to be on the ground in Portland and to walk outside and breathe non-recycled air.

Almost all of my day went to work and travel, but dinner was a delightful, as always, meal at Little Bird.  The lamb ribs with salad under them were particularly delicious.

Click the image to see a larger version.
Tomorrow brings many, many meetings and a ton of work.

I'm heading to Portland in the moring

Tomorrow will start insanely early for me, with a 5:15 a.m. wake-up, a quick shower, and a trip to the airport.  So, I'm going to make a short night of it.

We were recently discussing this trailer and the associated film.



This movie could be the kind of awesome small film that makes me happy to have sat in a nearly empty theater for a couple of hours, or it could be so self-absorbed that its one trick peters out early and leaves me wishing I was the sort of person who could walk out on a movie.  (I'm not.)

I'm hoping for the former and plan to see Swiss Army Man, but I believe the latter is definitely possible.

I'll let you know what I think.

"All Good People"

was one of the newer songs that Delta Rae performed last night.  They wrote it in reaction to the Charleston shootings.



Enjoy, and then commit to doing anything you can to helping end the senseless violence plaguing us in America.

Delta Rae rocks the Lincoln

Earlier tonight, I went to see my favorite local band, Delta Rae, at the Lincoln Theatre.  I've loved their music since I first heard it, and I've always enjoyed their live shows, but on stage I've also found them a bit aloof.

Not tonight.

The band came out full of energy and passion, and they owned the audience before the first song was over.  They played for about 90 minutes and never lost a step.  It was by far the best performance of theirs I've attended and one of the top ten or twenty live shows I've ever seen.  I felt privileged to be there.

Click an image to see a larger version.
Their set mixed new songs, all of which were strong, hits from their two albums, and even a couple of covers.  I absolutely loved it.

I didn't have time to eat before the show, so dinner was a late affair at Beasley's just up the street.  I received there the silliest soda glass ever.


Tiny and overflowing with ice, this glass made sure I drank my Diet Coke very slowly indeed.

If you get a chance to see Delta Rae, take it.  If the show they put on is anything like the one I saw, you will have a splendid time.

It's time for another episode

of Now with PT, which focuses this time on laptops and client devices.



Enjoy!

The weather is behaving irrationally

and so to retaliate, I have decided, at least while at home, to dress equally irrationally.

If you really want to see a larger version of this image, click on it--but don't blame me.
This outfit is bound to teach the weather a lesson.

By the way, don't think I don't know what you're thinking.  I do:  all sexy, all the time.

Oh, yeah, that's me.

Cone Man gets a portrait

In centuries past, the homes of the wealthy often sported portraits of their owners.  We're not into that, but Cone Man is, so now this portrait, courtesy of artist Nathan Bode, adorns the garage wall in front of where I park.

Click an image to see a larger version.
I like the way it captures the spirit of Cone Man, who is too much his own cone to let any frame contain him.  (The stuff below and to the right of the frame is unrelated garage wall art.)

I also like the way Nathan captured Cone Man's rugged, outdoorsman spirit while at the same time making him appear considerably less ragged than he really is.

I have not, though, had a chance to ask Nathan a key question:  is the frame just a frame, or is it a hint of the other-dimensional travel capabilities Cone Man possesses, capabilities that have led him to try more than once to conquer our world with creatures from the dark beyond?

I may well be better off not knowing.

WTF, Gay Telese?

I hate to pile on, I really do, but writer Gay Talese has put his foot in it in a way I can't ignore.  Check out

I didn’t know any women writers that I loved.

Really?

Rather than try to list all the women whose writings I've loved, let me focus on just two books by women that changed my life.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic, The Secret Garden, absorbed the third-grade me so utterly and completely that while re-reading it in class one day I became so completely entranced by the book that when the rest of the class went to lunch, I sat at my desk and kept reading.  My copy quite literally fell apart from overuse.  (Thinking about that, it might be time to get my own pretty new one and read it again.)  The book captured perfectly the escape I was seeking from my life.

Years later, the fifteen-year-old me discovered Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness and thought my brain would explode.  Its ambisexual aliens made me think seriously for the first time about gender identity and also forced me to accept how little I understood about any concepts of sexuality other than my own.

I don't know what Talese was thinking when he made this remark, but if he really means it, he needs to read more widely and inclusively.

Eye in the Sky

is a rough movie to watch, an hour and forty-two minutes centered on the human cost of drone attacks.  If that sounds like a dull political tract, it's anything but; the filmmakers infuse the story with plenty of tension and uniformly interesting characters.  From start to finish, you know where the movie is going, but the journey is intriguing and terrifying.

I didn't like all the characters in this film, but all of them came across as real people with real agendas facing complex issues as best they could.  Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman, in his last film, delivered strong performances despite having relatively simple characters to portray, but every actor in the movie did a great job.

It's easy to imagine a Hollywood version of this film that ekes out a happy ending in which everything wraps up perfectly and easily, but fortunately, that's not what we get here.  Instead, we end with victories and losses, which is the best outcome any conflict can generate.  No war, no matter how it may seem from the history books or the news reports, is without huge costs, both to the losers and to the people who fight it.  Eye in the Sky shows some of those costs.

I'm not sure you'll enjoy it, though I did, but I am sure you should see it.  As we move further and further into a world in which remote warfare is commonplace, we all need to try yet again to understand the costs involved.

more. worth your time

more. is a relatively new restaurant in the Glenwood South area.  Its menu was appealing enough that a group of us gave it a try tonight.  I'm happy to report that the food was so good that I'll return when the menu next changes.

The restaurant encourages you to share all of the dishes, so we did.  Every dish was at least good, and some were considerably better than that.  The two best plates were the sliders, which were rich and creamy and delicious, and the perfectly cooked hanger steak with chimichurri.  I and a few others also thought the mac and cheese was excellent, though it was too heavily herbed for some tastes.

The service wasn't up to the meal, and the high seats were rather uncomfortable, but I'm happy to forgive them those failings in return for the delicious meal.

Check out more.