Bryce Moore's Blog, page 169

My Favorite Gene Wilder Film

I was really sad to hear that passed away yesterday. Even sadder to hear he’d been struggling with Alzheimer’s for the past while, which was why he’d been so reclusive. (Though I totally understand the reasons that wasn’t made public.) But I wanted to do more for the man than just a Facebook status update, because I flat out adore some of his movies. He had a style that was all his own, and it was utter bliss to watch. I’m not saying I loved every movie he was in, but when he was on, he was always a pleasure to watch.

The funny thing is, I think my list of favorite Gene Wilder movies are going to be the same as pretty much everyone’s. I ran through them one at a time, and there’s nothing really unique about them. He wasn’t in a slew of movies. He was in a few fantastic ones. That’s all you need to really make an impact on the world. My nominees for the top 5 Gene Wilder movies are as follows:

The Producers is pure genius. Wilder had been in some TV movies up until then, and he had a small part in Bonnie and Clyde, but his role as Leo Bloom is incredible. He’s so straitlaced and wound up, and so when he drifts into illegal territory, it makes him so panicked, you can’t help but laugh at the results. It’s one of my all time favorite movies, and everything about it is spot on. (Sadly, good Producers clips online are few and far between.)

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was a favorite growing up, and it remains so. To see how important and masterful Wilder was in it, all you have to do is watch Johnny Depp try to pull off Wonka and fail. Wilder was able to bring an insanity to the character without really being insane. (Of course, that crazy ride on the Wonka boat helped, but still.) We watched this movie as part of my 30th birthday celebration. I love it.

Blazing Saddles is another triumph, and Wilder is (again) a big part of that success. His turn as the Waco Kid is so funny whenever he shows up.

Young Frankenstein is all about Wilder. He makes that movie from start to finish, and I rewatch it about once a year. So much win. So many jokes on the screen.

Silver Streak is the weakest of the five, but I watched it when I was a kid, and I’ve rewatched it many times since. Really, the only reason it’s on this list is because I wanted a top 5, not a top 4.

With that said, how would I rank those movies? As follows:

5. Silver Streak (for reasons already outlined)

4. Willy Wonka

3. Blazing Saddles

2. The Producers

1. Young Frankenstein

Though honestly, making a decision between those top 4 was very difficult. They’re all wonderful for different reasons. But I think Young Frankenstein wins out in the end just because of the story behind it. How the sets from the original Frankenstein were found and used for the movie, so it’s a sequel to the Karloff classic from years before. It’s an adaptation to boot, and I’m a sucker for adaptations, if you know me.

How about you? What’s your favorite Wilder movie?

Keynoting in Waterville

Sorry this is late. I meant to post it earlier, but I’ve been a bit busy. (Seriously. That feels like something I just keep saying over and over. But I say it because it’s true.) Today I headed down to Waterville to give a keynote address at a library event. Fun times, but it means I’m behind on everything else. The lawn needs mowing, writing needs writing, Denisa is heading back to teach her first class of the semester, I need to prep for my trip to Utah on Wednesday, we have a school open house this evening, I’ve got my country’s 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to [assist] and Guilder to frame for it; I’m swamped.

Wait a minute. Something went wrong in that last sentence. Sorry about that.

This is just to say that I’m busy, and this is all you’re getting out of me for a blog post today.

Advice: Easier to Give to Others than to Yourself

Last week I had a discussion with a friend who’s going through some hectic times, and I was full of advice. I don’t mean I was lecturing or anything. This post isn’t about how people should just keep their opinions to themselves. I’m a firm believer in using the experiences of others to help yourself. I ask for advice frequently, and I’m always ready to offer my input to anyone looking for advice.

The thing is, it’s so much easier for me to give advice to others. Advice that seems sound and reasoned, and which I hope will help them. But when it comes time for me to work through my own problems, it’s a whole different story. I know in theory what I should be doing, but I can’t seem to actually do it. Is that making any sense at all?

It’s like with writing. I can read someone else’s work and see all the things wrong with it and make suggestions on how to improve it. That’s not very difficult for me at this point. But when I read my own work, I can’t see any ways it can be improved until after other people read it and point them out to me. I think I’m doing a great job following the same rules and guidelines I’d give other people, until it’s pointed out where I’m failing so heavily.

In life, people don’t typically have to point out where you’re failing. You figure that out on your own easily enough. The trick I see is that I can see solutions for other people, but sometimes I can’t see solutions for myself.

But even as I write that, I know it’s not true. I know what advice I’d give myself if I were to come across someone in my own situation. “You have to slog through this. It will get better. Be patient.” That sort of thing. It’s just that when I think those thoughts to myself, it doesn’t really do anything for me. It’s not like I can think to myself, “Be patient,” and then actually do it. I still worry and obsess over everything.

So when I give other people advice, is it equally worthless? I hope not, and I can think of one good reason why. Through the act of voicing our troubles and concerns and having someone other than us listen to them and offer input, we spread the load. It no longer feels like it’s one person against the world. It’s two people. Or three. Or more. And that act of spreading the load really helps me a lot, and it’s something that you can’t do on your own. In other words, sometimes it’s not so much the advice you’re giving that helps. That often ends up being the same sort of thing. Advice that could be given in all sorts of situations.

It’s the listening and acknowledging that make all the difference when you’re in the middle of trouble. (Though of course, sometimes just stepping in and actually helping solve the problems is possible as well.)

It depends, I suppose. Because there are other times when you’re not sure what the advice you’d give yourself would be, and what you really need is someone with outside perspective to waltz in and help you out. Or (even worse) the advice you think you’d give yourself is actually wrong, and if you were to follow it, you’d mess things up even more.

So I’ll amend that statement. Listening is important, and sometimes it’s all that’s necessary. But the outside perspective is vital as well. Combine the two, and friends can help friends even when there’s nothing they can do other than listen and offer input.

And that’s my deep thought for your Friday. See you on Monday!

Calling All Pellet Stove Users

As I’m finishing off the space above my garage, my eyes are now turning to heating the place. It’s not going to be a terribly big space, so it’s not like I need anything huge, and Denisa and I are looking at a pellet stove to do the trick. The local dealer has suggested a Harman P43 or a Ravelli RV80, but both of those will be rather expensive to buy and install ($4500 or so). So I thought I might turn to you, the lovely hive mind, to see if anyone has experiences with pellet stoves and models you might share, I’d love to hear them.

The issues I’m particularly concerned about are:

Price (duh)
Noise. We’ve heard some that plink a ton whenever they’re running, and the thought of having to listen to that every night for the rest of my life isn’t too appealing. I don’t mind the whir of a fan (a noise that’s constant), but the loud rattling of pellets onto metal sporadically isn’t too fun.
Not too big. I’m just looking to heat about 650 square feet with the thing, so it doesn’t have to be a workhorse.
Reliability. Having to constantly fix a cheap model defeats the purpose, as well. I’m looking at some models online, and they’re much less expensive, but it seems like if they break, you’re out of luck getting someone to fix them or getting parts. Anyone have experience with that?

Anyway. In an ideal world, I’d pay around $2000 or so. I’m on the hunt now, and maybe things will go my way for once with this project. Speak up if you have any information, positive or negative, to offer. Thanks!

Salt Lake Comic Con!

With all my vacations and running around, I realized yesterday that I still haven’t officially announced on the blog that I’ll be presenting at Salt Lake Comic Con. NEXT WEEK! That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, you can come on out to hear me speak, and I’ll even have some copies of THE MEMORY THIEF to hand out. Free!

What am I going to be speaking about?

Thursday at 1pm in room 255F, I’ll be on a panel discussing Writing for Teens.
Friday at 2pm in room 150G, I’ll be on a panel discussing Writing for Children.
Friday at 5pm in booth 1807, I’ll be doing a signing, and I should have my copies of MEMORY THIEF with me then. I’ll try to bring some copies of VODNIK with me as well, if you’d like to pick some of those up.
Saturday at 1pm in room 253A, I’ll be part of the “Build a Story: Professional Authors Create a Story from Scratch” activity, which sounds fun.

Other than that, I’ll be wandering around aimlessly, checking out the cool sights and seeing if I can’t score some sweet swag for the fam. Want to hang and play a board game or three? Let me know on here, Facebook, or Twitter, and I’ll see what I can do.

Hoping to see some of you there!

Home Renovation Rage

It’s not often I really lose my temper or get drastically upset, and I didn’t do that yesterday, either. However, work began again on the construction project above my garage, and in the course of figuring out where to begin, I found out something that made me see red.

Last year, back when my heroin addict wife beater of a contractor was working on my house, we had him do electrical work. The circuit breaker on our microwave kept going off, and we wanted that fixed. He swapped out electrical panels and upgraded everything, and after that, it stopped going off. Problem solved! Yay!

Except when I went back after the fact (once I began to suspect the guy had been taking us for a ride) and investigated, nothing seemed to add up. He was supposed to separate out all the different circuits onto different breakers, but that wasn’t the case. New electrical work was hooked up onto the same breakers as old work. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. Nothing alarming, just disappointing.

Yesterday, when I asked my new contractor about it, he went and looked at the breakers himself, which led him to say, “Whoever did this to you should be shot.”

Here’s the deal: when they “fixed” the breakers, all they did in reality was replace each 15 amp breaker with a 20 amp breaker. Easy peasy! No more tripping, no more worries.

Except that’s not how breakers are supposed to work. Wires in your home are rated for a certain amount of electricity, depending on their size. 14 gauge wire can take 15 amps. It’s the most common wire, as it’s thinner and cheaper than lower gauges. 12 gauge can take 20 amps. When you run too much electricity through a wire, it heats up too much, potentially causing the plastic around it to melt and, you know, light your house on fire.

Circuit breakers are designed to stop this from happening. When more electricity goes through a wire than it can handle, they flip that electricity off to keep things safe. If you switch from a 15 amp breaker to a 20 amp breaker, you should only do so if you’ve upgraded all the wire on that breaker from 14 gauge to 12 gauge.

Make sense?

So with the “fix,” my microwave no longer flipped the breaker, because it wouldn’t stop the electricity unless it got to 20 amps. 5 amps higher than what the wire on that breaker is rated for. In a nutshell, my house has been a fire hazard for the past year or so.

What really drives me wild is that this was completely unnecessary. We bought all the breakers new. He could have bought 15 amp breakers, but he chose to buy and install 20 amp ones instead. Why? I’d like to assume it was just ignorance. I’m just shocked someone could have so little regard for a person’s life. Honestly, stealing $3500 from me was one thing. This is so much worse. How do I feel about it?

Sigh. So guess what I’m doing today when I get home? Going down with my new contractor, who’s going to walk me through the process of swapping out all the 20 amp breakers with 15 amp breakers Denisa went out and bought today.

Good times.

Back from Vacation

Ah, work. A regular routine. It’s always a mixed bag when you come back from vacation. I like having that structure, but who doesn’t miss the freedom of being able to do what you want, when you want? This trip down to Pennsylvania had a whole lot of variety. Among highlights:

Driving out to Amish country to go to Chocolate World and eat too much shoofly pie.
Heading into New York to see Matilda (loved it).
Going to the LDS Philadelphia Temple open house.
Trading a $600 Magic card for a whole lot of awesome cards in return, as well as buying a good chunk of a Magic collection. (Including an awesome card catalog to store them in!)
Watching tons of Olympics. (Except anything to do with Ryan Lochte, who is a total waste of time)
Having lunch with my agent and an editor to talk over some prospective book projects.
Staying up until 2am talking to my sister and her husband, who happened to be in town at the same time.
Catching fireflies with the kids.
Going through old Slovak church records to find some of Denisa’s relatives.
Trying out my current Magic cube with a professional.
Buying a new wardrobe for the thinner version of me that now exists.

And much more. (Seriously, I must be forgetting a ton of things.) Some of those things might end up getting blog posts all on their own. Some will remain a mystery. But all of it was fun, and all of it is now over. Meaning I’m back at work. Meaning I have to slog through the 100+ emails waiting for me.

Did you miss me? I’m here this week, and then next week I’m heading out to Salt Lake Comic Con. More on that later, along with my full schedule. For now, I need to get back to those emails.!

On Vacation

I’m on vacation this week. I’d thought about blogging while I was away . . . but I’m not going to. I’ll be back next week to entertain you again, but for now, I’m just going to sit back and relax.

Try not to break anything while I’m away.

Getting a Home Phone Again

As our kids get older, it’s become important that Denisa and I be able to reach them when we need to. Sometimes that’s meant giving TRC one of our cell phones when he heads off somewhere, but that leaves us in an awkward position: whoever’s at home has no phone.

We’ve looked at various solutions to this. The obvious one is to get TRC a cell phone, but we really didn’t want to do that. I just don’t believe having a cell phone is a good thing for a kid. Not because I’m against him being able to call and talk to people, but because it’s so much more than that. A camera, a video camera, texting, internet, etc. There’s a ton of “stuff” that comes with a cell phone these days.

So why not just get a non-smart phone? We thought of that. But even the dumbest phones these days come with cameras and video cameras already installed. And not just that, but the things are expensive. Not break-the-bank expensive, but more than I wanted to pay. (For reference, the cheapest option I found was getting a Tracfone with 60 minutes of time for $20. You need to top that off every three months, which means it’s essentially $80/year.)

Could I do better?

This is when it occurred to me that the goal here isn’t to have TRC have a phone. It’s to have him be able to call us when he needs to. For most situations, he’s going to be out with friends. And almost all of his friends have cell phones. (Yes. This means I’m the one parent who’s too stubborn or mean to get his child a cell phone. I’ve accepted that fact.) So he’ll be able to reach us with their phone. When we need to, we can lend him one of our phones, as we’ve done in the past.

Really, the only time that things really get tricky is when he’s at home and we’re not. Denisa and I were away from home last year when he came from school one day. Normally that’s fine: he has a key, and he’s more than old enough to take care of himself. But that day there was an emergency, and he didn’t have a way of calling us, since we both had our phones with us. But it didn’t make any sense to get a cell phone just to leave it in the house every day. It’s almost like it would be better to have a permanent phone that just stayed there, attached to the wall.

Duh.

So I looked into signing up with the phone company, but that was going to be just as expensive as the Tracfone. There had to be something cheaper.

Obitalk.

It’s a $50 device that hooks up to your router and then connects to Google Voice, allowing you to make phone calls for free. It’ll even call internationally for like 3 cents a minute, if you need to. There are only two difficulties. First, it only works if you have power and internet. That’s a stipulation I’m okay with. It’s going to be rare enough that it happens that we can deal with that when and if it does. Second, it doesn’t do 911 calls unless you sign up with a separate service, which costs $15/year.

$15/year is a cost I’m willing to shell out for, so after talking it over with Denisa, that’s what we went with. I set it up this week, and it works like a charm.

The funniest thing is watching how excited TRC and DC are by this new device. “Look Dad! It will tell you who’s calling! It even remembers who called!” “Look Mom! You can press this button on the base station, and it’ll make the phone ring so you can find it if you lost it!”

Yup. My kids have never really had a home phone. So for once, I get to feel all cool about my extensive knowledge and experience with out of date technology.

Score.

Olympic Thoughts

Yes, I’m a certified Olympics junkie. When the Olympics are on, my consumption of other media drops to about nothing, and I get inundated with all the news about the games. What team is doing well is what sport. Who said what. How so and so did last night. I love it, ever since my parents got me a VHS tape with all the highlights from the 1984 summer games. I watched that over and over, and I’ve loved the Olympics ever since.

Of course, any time you go from only seeing sports now and then to seeing them all the time, it’s inevitable that you notice some things you wouldn’t otherwise catch. Here are some general observations I’ve had about the games this time around:

I don’t understand why we interview athletes after they perform. I have yet to hear any of them say anything really worth listening to. It all boils down to “it was very hard, but I still did well,” or “it was very hard, and I lost.” Which is sort of like having someone tell you what you just watched. And the bits and pieces ahead of the events? Where the announcers tell us what we’re going to watch? Equally silly, unless it’s going over the basic rules of the sport. But as soon as you get announcers saying the equivalent of “If they’re going to win, they need to score more points than the other team,” then they might as well just shut up and get to the action.
Perhaps because of how redundant announcer jobs are, they end up saying a variety of really stupid things. This isn’t entirely their fault, I suppose. There’s all that empty airtime to fill, and you have to fill it with something. (I guess?) But at least they could try a bit harder not to say really stupid things. Like crediting a female swimmer’s gold medal to her coach/husband. That would be a start.
On the other hand, announcers definitely add something to the viewing experience. I’ve watched some Olympic streams that are just the video and sounds of the arena, and the experience is much worse. I think this is mainly because I’m not versed enough in the sport to understand when someone is doing well or poorly. I can watch a basketball, baseball, or football game, and I don’t need anyone to tell me what’s going on. Diving? Gymnastics? It’s much more difficult. So announcers are there to confirm what we’ve seen. To say when something was really good or really bad. Stick to that, announcers, and we should be fine.
I wonder if a significant portion of the US watches these games to confirm that the US is, indeed, superior to the rest of the world. “Just look how bad we beat China in basketball!” As if this proves anything. When you get down to it, America is a place with enough money and luxuries to give a large portion of the population the means and time needed to go dink around in a pool or on a field for an obscene amount of time every day. It would be a shame if we couldn’t do really well at random sporting events. I’m way more impressed with people who have had to overcome struggles and hardship to succeed. This is in no way meant to put down the accomplishments of the athletes. They do awesome things. But for many of them, the main reason they have the luxury of doing awesome things on the field or in the pool or in the arena is because they have lives that give them the means and wherewithal to practice their eyeballs out every day.
Which is why the stories behind the athletes are so important. Seeing some random person do well is just sort of meh. Seeing someone overcome the odds is awesome. In light of that, I don’t mind the post-event interviews when they ask the athlete bits about their life or how it all connects. That’s fine.

Anyway. No more time to post today. Getting ready for a trip tomorrow, so it’s busy busy busy. Plus, the Olympics are on. Didn’t you know?