Steven Harper's Blog, page 82
May 14, 2017
Curious Incident
It was a fantastic adaptation of novel to stage. The stage is black with white lines that form a grid. A set of white boxes line the sides, and a single red chair sits stage right. Eventually learn the entire stage is embedded with LEDs that combine with lights and cookies to transform the stage into whatever set the scene needs, so we can pop quickly from a living room to a school to a neighbor's house to a city street. Noise and lighting sometimes become overwhelming, deliberately so.
The story is told entirely from the point of view of Christopher, an autistic teenager who discovers his neighbor's dog has been killed with a pitchfork. He sets out to learn who killed the dog, and discovers far more than he thought possible. It's based on the novel of the same name.
The stage reinforces Christopher's autism. The other characters, the set, the lights, everything happen from his point of view, so the actors don't act quite right--we're seeing them from an autist's eyes instead of our own. The same is true of the set. Lights snap from simple to confusing. Christopher acts in ways that are confusing at the beginning of the play, but by the end make sense to the audience, even as they continue to confuse the other characters.
The play was painful and difficult for me. There are a number of parallels between Christopher's situation and Aran's (though unlike Christopher's father, I've never gotten into a fistfight with Aran), which makes the play raw watching. I understand what Christopher is going through, and I understand what his father is going through. It was powerfully done and destined to become a literary classic, but I don't think I want to watch it again.
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The Great Car Hunt (Continued)
Always a pleasure.
Car dealerships are always busy on Saturdays, especially in spring and summer, yet they always close at 3:00. This strikes me as foolish. Darwin says it's to prevent you from shopping around in your excitement--you don't have time to go looking if everything closes at 3:00 instead of 5:00 or 7:00. This may be true, but when I go car shopping, I go with the attitude that I'm going to be at the dealership for several hours. My phone is fully charged, I have a book for backup, I eat a big meal before I go. And if 3:00 comes and we're still talking price and stuff, I'll keep going. No skin off MY nose. (This happened the last time we were there--we went for a test drive at 2:30 and kept the salesman there until 3:30. Tough titty. When I'm dropping several thousand dollars, the dealership can do things on my time.)
Anyway, we arrived at 12:30 and "our" salesman was duly summoned. We told him what car we'd settled on, that we wanted to trade in our current car and truck, and the numbers began to fly.
The trade-in numbers on the F-150 were initially scandalously low. This was, the dealer assured us, because the truck had a lot of rust on it and needed new tires. I know exactly how much rust there is, and tires are not a real factor in trade-ins. They also ignored the upgrades and repairs I'd put into the truck since I'd bought it. So I pushed the paper back and said they needed to do better. The salesman did the "call the manager over" thing, and he did the little "I don't know what we can do" thing. Darwin and I smiled and nodded and said he needed to do better. (Darwin quoted him a number three thousand dollars higher than we expected to get.) The manager said he could make some phone calls. We told him to do so, and off he went. I know he wasn't making them and he knew I knew he wasn't making any phone calls, but I suppose he had to dance the dance.
We waited a long time between spurts of number activity. I calmly played video games on my phone or chatted with Darwin. Meanwhile, the salesman was juggling two other sets of customers and he was growing more and more frazzled. I did not offer to let someone else take out place at his desk. I did not ask if we could speed things up. Time was on my side. Tick tick tick. Is it 2:30 already? Oh, did that customer grow annoyed and finally leave? What a pity. I'm just sitting here, waiting for some favorable numbers. I'll be happy to speed things up, but . . .
Eventually, the sales guy came back with a much higher trade-in on my truck. Way higher than we expected. Very good! The truck continued to pay off for us. (When we bought it, the credit union loan rep was shocked at how little we paid for it. Now we're getting more on the trade in than we owe. Ha!)
But the trade-in offer on our current C-Max was startlingly low. It was so low, in fact, that Darwin snapped, "Absolutely not!" and snatched the paper away. He crossed his arms and refused to discuss the matter further. The manager was duly summoned, and he said this was the best he could do.
"Then I'll be keeping my car," Darwin said, and they lost the sale of a new C-Max. Suddenly the salesman's commission was cut in half, despite all his work.
But we have a good deal on the Escape.
Now we're waiting for the processing of the loan paperwork. We have to go back one more time on Monday to finalize everything and get the actual car.
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Aran's Second Decade
Aran didn't make it easy. For his birthday, he wanted to eat at the Tilted Kilt.
Sigh.
The Tilted Kilt is a half-step above Hooters. Well, a quarter step. Eighth. It has a psuedo-Scottish theme in that the waitresses wear tight plaid mini-skirts and bikini tops under knotted shirts.
And my mother wanted to come.
So we all went. (I think my mother's husband Gene was a quietly happy man that day.) We all had a birthday dinner with chocolate or salted caramel sundaes afterward. Aran posed for photos with several of the waitresses.
And now he's 20!
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May 9, 2017
Why I Won't See Alien:Covenant
Then I learned it has a gay couple in it. A married gay couple.
You might think this would engender happiness. Joy. Even a certain amount a giddiness. Instead, my metaphorical ears went back and my hackles went up. I spent a few minutes looking up spoilers and discovered my hackles were justified.
I will not see this movie. I will not rent the DVD. I will not support this movie. And I urge you to do the same.
SPOILERS (you are warned)
According to various on-line sources, the sins of the same-sex relationship portrayal are the standard ones we've come to expect. First, although there were several initial shots to the contrary, there is little or no indication of a marriage--or any kind of relationship--between the two men throughout the film. They don't touch. They don't exchange endearments. There was apparently a brief moment of hugging between them in a preview, but that scene has been cut from the film, and that preview has been removed from the Internet. In other words, gay people are still invisible. No LGBT characters are actually in the spotlight. No LGBT protagonists. Just a couple of background guys who may or may not be in a relationship.
But the worst sin comes early in the movie. Hallett, one of the men, becomes infected with the alien infection, and a baby alien bursts out of his face. (Not his chest, like in the other movies, but out of his freakin' face. He's gay, so we have to up the nastiness.) While the ship's captain leans in to murmur quiet apologies, Hallett's husband Lope whispers, "I love you" and then is forced to walk away.
One more time, we have the tragic gay. Gay men continue to be the objects of tragedy and disgust and ridicule. We're only interesting or worthy if we watch our partners die. No happy relationships for the gay guy. In fact, we're going to get an alien burst out of our faces, just to super-compound the tragedy. Because, you know, just dying of an alien tearing out of your chest isn't bad enough for the gays. Let's make it worse.
No.
I will not spend a dime for that movie. I urge you to avoid it as well.
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May 6, 2017
Endless Surveys
Am I the only one who’s tired of the surveys?
Every I do business with sends me a “customer satisfaction survey.” The plumber installs a new faucet, and the next day I get an email. “How did we do? Click here!” I pay the electric bill, and a side window pops up. “What did you think of our service?” I order something online, and I get redirected to a new site. “Do you like us?” I pay for groceries, and the cashier hands me the receipt with a gentle demand to fill out an on-line survey. “I get a bonus if you like my job,” she says with earnest puppy eyes.
My insurance company is the worst. I get an email from them that cheerfully asks, “Would you mind completing a short survey? It’ll only take five minutes.” I delete it. Two days later, another arrives. “Hey, bro! We haven’t heard from you about that survey. Can you hit us up?” I ignore it. Another couple of days go by, and yet another shows up. “ ‘Sup, brah? Uh . . . kinda twisting in the wind here. Haven’t heard from you. Just wondering if you’re still interested in me. Us. But you know, whatevs. Uh . . . fill out the survey when you get a sec, ‘kay? Or not. But let me know so I can move on. It’s okay.” And a few days later: “So you don’t like me, is that it? You’re a real self-centered jerk, and I’m going to tell all the other insurance companies about you. You freak! You—oh, god, I didn’t mean any of that. I’m such a mess. Please, please, please fill out the survey. I promise it’ll just take a second.”
Delete.
“Tell us what you think!” “Rate us!” “Grade us!” Every company wants feedback, feedback, feedback. It’s as if they’ve suddenly developed an inferiority complex. My money and continued custom isn’t enough—they need praise.
They’re mining data, too. They already know where I live and how old I am and a bunch of other information about me. Now they want to cross-index it with my responses. On MY time. No thanks.
But . . . but . . . PRIZES! We’ll give you a gift card! Well, a chance to win a gift card. Well, a chance to enter a drawing to win a gift card. Have you ever heard of anyone who filled out a customer satisfaction survey and then actually won something worthwhile? Me, neither. I did hear a rumor that my second cousin’s neighbor’s best friend’s wife got a fifty cent coupon for grooming after she said she liked the way the pet place stroked her shi-tzu, but don’t quote me on that. I think the grocery cashier is in the same boat. The store holds out a promise of a bonus if enough people give her a thumbs-up, but sets the bar so impossibly high that no one actually gets one. When did any corporation give its minimum wage workers a real bonus?
We all want praise, I know, and as a society, we don’t hand it out often enough. When the guys at my regular sushi hangout produced some exceptional sushi one evening, I paused on my way out the door and said across the bar to them, “You guys were =on= tonight! Delicious stuff!” And one of the waitresses thought I was the nicest guy ever. Another time, my ex and I were having a bad day and we stopped for dinner at a restaurant, where the staff seemed to go out of their way to be extra nice to us, and we felt rather better for it. I wrote them a letter of thanks and later learned the manager framed it. Maybe if we said such things more often, companies wouldn’t feel the need to bombard us with surveys.
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May 1, 2017
Lost Morels
Most Michiganders who are into morels have a super-sekrit spot only they know of. They don't tell anyone where it is, and sneak out to that spot, often after dark, to harvest the tasty, rare morels. (I'm not kidding about the after dark part.)
Here's my secret: morels grow like crazy on my front lawn. Dozens of them. Every year. I walk out my front door and there they are. They don't grow on anyone else's lawn in the neighborhood--just ours. I don't have an explanation for it. Just my good fortune.
However . . .
My husband, whom I love more than life itself, contracted a lawn fertilizer company to goosh our grass. They came out a couple weeks ago. So this week, when I found this:
Are they safe to eat? It rained a LOT in the two weeks between the times the lawn got gooshed and the time this year's crop sprouted. Hmmm . . .
The question here is, do I love my husband more than I love morels?
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