Bryce Moore's Blog, page 68

Screen Size Matters: Bullitt

I first watched Bullitt probably around . . . fifteen years ago? Give or take. I was on a classic movie kick, and I’d heard a lot of great things about the movie, so I checked it out. As I recall, I watched it on my computer screen. It was . . . just okay. I remember telling people I thought the car chase wasn’t all it was hyped up to be. That it action scenes have come a long way since then.

If it weren’t for Daniela’s list that I made her, I probably wouldn’t have watched Bullitt again. However, it was on there, and so last night we sat down to watch it. (Slight aside for a moment to plug HBO Max. I know there are a lot of movie streaming services out there, but I’ve really been impressed with HBO, mainly because of their Turner Classic Movies hub. There are always a slew of really good movies to be found there. Are they the newest? No, but they’re excellent and well worth your while.)

Watching Bullitt on a 105″ screen was a much different experience than watching it on a 13″ screen. Sure, in theory screen size is all relative. If you put a 13″ screen close to your face, isn’t it about the same size as a 105″ screen further away? Yes, and yet definitely no.

For one thing, I was able to really appreciate the unusual camera angles and creative shots that went into the movie. It won an Oscar for Film Editing. It’s directed by Peter Yates, who actually began as a professional race driver, interestingly enough. The plot is well-written, and the soundtrack by Lalo Schifrin (of Mission Impossible theme fame) was excellent. But most of all, seeing the car chase on the big screen just made it feel much more immediate. It’s filmed in San Francisco, and some of the driving in it is just awesome. It helps that the entire movie takes a very realistic approach to everything, so when the action scenes come, they bring a much bigger punch.

Overall, I gave it an 8/10, which is much better than what I remember it being.

This is also a reminder that seeing movies in actual theaters is even better than seeing them in a home theater. Again, I get the whole “size is relative” argument. But which would be more impressive: seeing a 50 foot colossus from 500 feet away, or seeing a 5 inch action figure from 5 inches away? My proportions might be off, but you get the picture. You can tell your brain “it’s basically the same size” as much as you want, but in the end, you’re not fooling anyone. Maybe if you could watch it in VR, you might be able to create the same sort of effect, but for now, I’m really looking forward to hopefully getting out to the movies again this year.

Marvel movies demand it.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

To All the Paper Towels I’ve Used Before

It’s a well-known fact that not all paper towels are created equal. Some of them have all the absorbent qualities of cardboard, while others are like someone took a sponge and turned it into paper form through the miracle of modern science. The trick, of course, is finding that sweet spot where you’re not paying an arm and a leg for drying your hands, and you’re not just smearing water around while pretending you’re having some sort of an effect. There are bonus points for being environmentally friendly, as well.

And because This Is Important, I figured I’d devote a whole blog post to the topic. Ranking the drying methods out there, from worst to best. I’m going to use a couple of different factors to rate them each. First: ease of use. Second: affordability. Third: effectiveness. Fourth: environmental friendliness. Fifth: ick factor. You know you want to read it . . .

Public Restroom Drying Options

When heading to the bathroom in a public place, I almost always wash my hands. (The times I haven’t are more due to the fact that the sink is broken, or there is no soap, or the very thought of touching the sink convinces me it’ll be much worse in the long run, so I just go find some hand sanitizer instead.) However, there have been plenty of times I choose to just wipe my hands on my pants or air dry them instead. Here are some of the worst options:

Blown Air Dryers: Ease of use (2). Affordability (4). Effectiveness (1-3). Environmental Friendliness (3). Ick Factor (5). There are different types of air dryers. It’s a plus that they just need a press of a button or wave of the hand to get them going, but the thought of using one now (after COVID) leaves much to be desired. There are enough germs in a bathroom already. We really don’t need to make them more airborne. Plus, some air dryers are better than others. At the bottom of the heap are the one’s that don’t really blow much in the way of air. It’s more like a gentle breeze, and you’ll be standing there for the next 10 years before your hands are dry. Then there are the ones that make you stick your hand inside them to activate them, going on the theory that those germs aren’t just going to spread themselves, so it’s more helpful if you put your hands into a spot that can collect the germs and deliver them more efficiently. Then you’ve got the industrial wind machines that try to take your skin off, since skin can’t be wet if it’s not on your body. But blown air dryers really suffer because they are so hyper focused. You can’t wipe a table off with one. You can’t blow your nose with one. (Granted, I haven’t tried to blow my nose with one, but . . . )Hand Towels: Ease of use (5). Affordability (1). Effectiveness (5). Environmental Friendliness (4). Ick Factor (5). I suppose some places think they’re being home-ier by providing real towels to dry hands. I would sooner use a rabid skunk, but maybe some people out there prefer these? When I see a towel in a public bathroom, I can’t help but think what horrors that towel has seen over the last days or weeks. True, there are those funky machines that have towels on some kind of a rolling loop mechanism, where you pull down to expose a new piece of towel, but I’ve always found them more than a little suspect. If I see anything cloth-related, I’ll just wave my hands dry, thank you very much. I don’t care if they’re effective or easy to use. No.Paper Towels: Ease of use (1-5). Affordability (4). Effectiveness (1-5). Environmental Friendliness (3). Ick Factor (1). The good thing about a paper towel is that you know where it’s been. If it’s nice and crisp, you don’t have to worry about the ick factor too much. The problem with them is you never know the experience you’re going to have when you get one. Some of them absorb about as well as a rock. Some of them get drenched after you’ve put about a teaspoon of water into them. Some people solve this problem by just taking about a bakers’ dozen of the paper towels before they start to try to dry their hands, but that really sinks the environmental friendliness score. On the other hand, you can indeed take some of these for using elsewhere, so yay for that. In an ideal world, a public restroom has paper towels that dry your hands with a single towel. That rarely happens.Home OptionsPaper Towels: Ease of use (5). Affordability (2). Effectiveness (5). Environmental Friendliness (2). Ick Factor (1). If money were no object, and I didn’t care about the environment at all, then brand name paper towels would be where it was at. Bounty, baby. The quicker picker upper. My problem is that I hate throwing money away, and I hate just making extra unnecessary waste. Bounty does both of these. I generally compromise by getting the paper towels that are half as wide as the normal ones, and even then I end up tearing those in half to make sure I’m just using what I need. But I still have a hard time using one without thinking that I could have used a cloth napkin or a hand towel instead. That said, there are definitely things you just need a paper towel for. What sort of a monster kills a spider with cloth towel?Cloth Napkins: Ease of use (4). Affordability (2). Effectiveness (4). Environmental Friendliness (2). Ick Factor (3). They definitely get the job done. The big problem here is that they’re often too small, and they tend to get stained after a while, to the point that you debate whether or not they’re really clean, even after they’re straight out of the washing machine. I always feel kind of guilty giving guests cloth napkins unless they’re pristine. (The napkins, not the guests.) Also, these aren’t the cheapest route to go by any means.Hand Towels: Ease of use (5). Affordability (1). Effectiveness (5). Environmental Friendliness (2). Ick Factor (3). I mean, if I had money just coming out of my eyeballs, then I’d use hand towels for everything. Definitely absorbent. They’ll dry pretty much anything you need. But they just aren’t that good for single-use applications. Maybe I just need to get over my inner desire to make each hand towel last as long as humanly possible before I have to wash it . . . Actual Towels: Ease of use (2). Affordability (1). Effectiveness (5). Environmental Friendliness (1). Ick Factor (5). Proof that there can, indeed, be too much of a good thing. For one thing, buying actual towels is neither cheap nor easy to use for most tasks. You’ve just got too much terry. For another, when I go to the bathroom at a friend’s house and all that’s there is their actual towel, I start to get flashbacks to public bathrooms. Just sayin’.

So what’s the solution? What’s the one towel to rule them all? I’m afraid the search continues, for me. So far, the most universal towel option I’ve found happens to typically be “wipe your hands on your pants.” Unfortunately, this has a very low Wife Tolerance Rating, which often ends up being the most critical score of all.

How about you? Got any good towel tips, or horror stories of what to avoid? Please share.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

So Much Time and So Little To Do

Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it. Thank you.

I’m really starting to stress at everything that needs to happen in the next month or so. Stressing to the point that I’m making multiple lists to try and remind myself that I’m really making progress on getting things done. It’s not really working, which is why I end up making even more lists. I’m not sure what the logic is there, but right this second, I don’t think I’m thinking very logically.

So I’m in jettison mode, and for today, one of the things getting jettisoned is a quality blog post. Instead, I leave you with this fine clip of Oompa-Loompas lecturing you about how you ought to behave. I think a lot of life’s woes could probably be reduced if we just had a team of Oompa-Loompas around to shame-sing at us whenever we made big blunders. (Seriously. Can you imagine the sort of song routines they would have come up with for the entirety of 2020?)

Here’s hoping tomorrow’s brighter.

Officially Vaccinated: What Next?

As of about an hour ago, it’s been two weeks since Denisa and I got our second COVID vaccine shot. Which means (theoretically) we can start going back to some of our old routines. It’s surprising to me how many things that used to seem very normal and not that stressful are now giving me low level anxiety (or worse). For example, I used to plan trips all the time. I don’t love flying (a well-established fact with long-time blog readers), but I love traveling enough to overcome my dislike of flying. The lack of travel was a real blow during COVID, and so it was high on my list of things to do as soon as I could.

I’m not one to shirk from doing something just because it’s making me anxious, and it was Denisa and my 20th anniversary just a week ago. So we’re heading to Puerto Rico next Sunday for a five night stay. That’s right! I’m finally using all these free Marriott room reservations we had stockpiled from credit card rewards, and we used up all of the credit I had with American Airlines from getting two trips canceled. We’ll be staying at a resort on the beach in San Juan, and we’ve got tours booked to hike through the rain forest, go kayak in a bioluminescent bay, snorkel, and scuba dive. These are all definitely things we haven’t been able to do in Maine, and so I’m really looking forward to it.

That said, it was still stressful to make out all the reservations and plan a schedule again. You’d think it’d be just like getting back on a bike, and I suppose it is. However, for that comment to make sense, you need to know about the time I was on my mission in Germany and was suddenly confronted with living in a city (Gotha) where the Elders had always used bikes to get around. My new companion asked me if I could ride, and I said of course. But I hadn’t biked since . . . middle school? I don’t know. It had been a while. He hopped on his bike and sped off. I teetered onto mine and tried to catch up. And it was true! I could still maintain my balance on a bike. But then I saw he’d stopped abruptly by a mailbox to send a letter, and I discovered I couldn’t remember how to stop a bike. I tried backpedaling (old habits die hard) to no avail. The bike had handbrakes. And I distinctly remembered being told never to use one of those brakes to stop fast. I couldn’t remember which one. In the heat of the moment, I panicked and chose at random.

I chose poorly.

I jammed on the front brake, and my front tire came to an abrupt halt, launching me up and over my handlebards onto the sidewalk. I ruined a pair of suit pants that day. (Good thing my suit came with two. I’d ruin the other pair a few weeks later in another bike accident. When my companion was transferred a month later, I hid both bikes in a closet and didn’t mention to my new companion that we had them. We walked from then on . . .)

So yes. Planning trips really is just like riding a bike.

In any case, the trip’s planned now, and I’ve got other irons in the fire for future trips. Out to Utah. Down to Boston. Down to Pennsylvania. Over to Machias. Camping. I will wear a mask and follow any social distancing/testing rules I need to when I go to these places, and I’m definitely wondering how stressed I’m going to be flying (with strangers!) after all this time, but I’m very much looking forward to being somewhere farther than an hour’s drive away from my house.

I realize the pandemic is far from over, especially when I look at the horrific things going on in India at the moment. But I still have to celebrate the progress that’s happening locally and personally. Hopefully there’s more and more of that in the days to come.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

YARPP: Related Posts

Cabinets: Purchased!

I first posted about getting ready to renovate our kitchen back in September of 2018. At the time, I noted we had the basic plan in place for the layout of the room, but we were a bit daunted by how big of a project this was going to be. It might take a year to really get ready for it. (Ha ha ha.) In November of 2019, I wrote about how I was finally getting ready to move forward with cabinet selection and purchase. (Ha ha ha.) I had found an online cabinet company that would send us Ready To Assemble (RTA) cabinets, and it seemed like that would be cheaper than going with buying cabinets pre-made. In July 2020, I wrote about still gearing up for those renovations, and maybe looking at that fall to do them. (Ha ha ha.) I could have sworn I wrote a post in September or so, talking about how Denisa and I went to Lowe’s to do a consultation around cabinets, but I can’t find it now. We’d talked to friends who swore that would be cheaper and easier than RTA, and the consultation was free, so . . .

Yesterday, we finally ordered and paid for the cabinets. We did end up getting them from Lowe’s instead of the online company I’d found. Why? For one thing, they were less expensive. I’m not surprised it was hard for me to tell that at first. Figuring out just how expensive cabinets will be from Lowe’s is a bewildering process. It’s hard to find the prices anywhere, and when I’d guesstimated the cost, I hadn’t realized that Lowe’s discounts their cabinets. Heavily. So the price you see on the surface ends up being much less than the price you pay.

For example, our cabinets ended up being 40% off the final price, plus 50% off the stain we chose. Lowe’s was running a 30% off sale (that seems to be pretty much permanent, judging from the fact that every time I checked on the price over the last year, the sale was always running). We got that extra 10% off by applying for a Lowe’s credit card, which typically gives you 5% off at Lowe’s, but for cabinets this week, they were doubling that.

So the Lowe’s cabinets are less expensive, they’re the same quality as what I was looking at online in terms of construction, they’ll arrive pre-assembled, and I don’t have to worry about them anymore. I also had someone who actually knew what they were talking about help me design the layout. Maxwell was our assistant at the Augusta Lowe’s, and I was very happy with the help he gave us and how patient and courteous he was. That made a complicated process that much easier to handle. (All told, I think we spent 8 hours in that store over three different visits, picking out wood types, stains, layout, features, and all.)

For the record, we went with rustic alder for the wood choice, with a stain that will make it slightly darker and give it a matte finish. Our current kitchen has 7 drawers and basically 8 cabinets. The new one will have something like 13 drawers and 14 cabinets. It’s hard to match it up one to one, but we’re going to have many more storage options. I was worried the increased cost of lumber right now would have made them more expensive, but apparently that isn’t the case. The lead time, however, has gone from 4-8 weeks to 16 weeks, which might have been a problem if we were planning to do this soon, but we’re not going to start until August, so it’s not nearly as big of a deal.

At this point, the cabinet’s are ordered, the fridge is here, the dishwasher’s here . . . Let’s put it this way: if we don’t renovate the kitchen this fall, we’re going to have an awful lot of boxes around the house for way too long.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Movie Review: The Four Feathers (1939)

Daniela and I have been working our way through different movies some more, and the evolution of pacing in movies is an issue that I keep seeing pop up in some of the older movies. Today’s case in point is the 1939 film, The Four Feathers. It’s got a 7.5 on IMDB and is a good movie at heart, but it’s got several issues with pacing that really bring it down in my book, simply because film has gotten better at keeping a story going in the 80 years since this movie came out.

In the film, a man resigns his post in the army right before Britain goes back to war in the Sudan. He gives many sound reasons for wanting to be done, but he eventually admits his main one was that he was scared of going to war. Four of his friends each send him a white feather, a symbol of cowardice. He decides to earn his way back into their good graces by proving he’s courageous after all.

There are some things about the movie I really enjoy. In the course of the film, one of his friends goes blind, and the main character ends up saving his life, but never reveals it was him who saved it. There’s a scene where this is revealed, and it’s really moving and well done. You can also tell that a lot of effort went in to making the film as realistic and engaging as possible (for it’s time.)

But there are a slew of things that drag the film down. Long stretches where they do little other than show riders on horses racing to battle, or people pulling ships up a river. Some of the characters’ actions just aren’t well conveyed, so they do things that don’t make sense, which can make them come across as dense. These days, action movies have learned enough about how to tell a compelling story that they’d be able to show the same things happening in a fraction of the time, leaving more room for real tension and suspense to flourish.

I’ve seen the movie was remade with Heath Ledger in the starring role, and I think I’m going to have to give it a try, just to see what they did with it. I know very often people accuse Hollywood of making pointless remakes, but there are definitely films where a remake can bring a movie to a new audience successfully.

But how do you review a film like this one? To me, I have to stick with using the same metric I use to evaluate any movie. Grading it on a curve doesn’t seem to make sense to me. Yes, it took place much earlier in history, and so it’s at a disadvantage of sorts, but it’s still just plain boring in many parts. (This is the same beef I have with Citizen Kane. I can recognize the huge influence it played on the future of film while at the same time admitting it’s just not very captivating by today’s standards.) In the end, I gave this one a 6.5/10, which was a let down. I’d seen it before years ago, and I remembered it being much better.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Running on Empty

In many ways, everything since 2020 began feels like it’s been going in circles. I’ll feel like I’m finally getting through whatever tough thing I’ve been dealing with at the moment, only to somehow find myself at a loss yet again the next day or week or month. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but one of the sad truths of the pandemic is that so many of us are wearing thin, it becomes that much more difficult to find the wherewithal to pitch in and help someone else out when you see they’re in need of it. For one thing, it’s hard to be aware of people other than yourself when you feel like you’re in crisis mode, and for another, even if you can identify someone else needs help, you quite likely feel like there’s nothing you have to offer them except commiseration.

(Commiseration. There’s a word for you that pretty much sums all this up. From Latin, pretty much meaning “to be wretched with.”)

In fact, if I had to think of a movie scene that sums up what I’ve been feeling like for the last long while, it would have to be the Griswolds in London, even if that’s a tad too international for expressing “stuck in the same thing over and over.” Still, there’s a desperation you get here that you don’t even really get in Groundhog Day . . .

Usually I like to end these sort of posts on a bright note of some sort. “It’s going to get better, because it has to, right?” I do still believe that, contrary to all evidence of the past year and more. But it can be awfully difficult to keep reminding myself of that fact.

I know I’m low on patience especially. I’m not nearly as understanding and long tempered as I usually am. If I see someone doing or saying something I think is foolish or wrong, I’m much too quick to jump to conclusions, take offense, or make a snippy comment that’s far from warranted. To make things even more frustrating, I can tell I’m doing it when I do it, and yet I still find myself doing it anyway. Sigh.

I suppose the bright spot would be to picture how much practice I’m getting in on trying to be kind and patient and forgiving even under these circumstances. When this pandemic is finally over and so many of the current stressors are behind us, think about how much better we’re going to be at handling everyday life! (Right?)

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Oscars 2021 Thoughts

I have always enjoyed watching the Oscars, but I must say that they have seemed to really struggle for the past few years. Part of it seems to stem from this sort of existential crisis they seem caught up in, questioning why they exist and what they should do about it. It’s been rightly pointed out that the Oscars have been historically very, very white to an extent that’s made the awards more than a little problematic. So I’m all for them taking steps to try and rectify that issue. However, at the same time they’ve been doing that, they’ve also been fussing around with practically every other dial they’ve got out there. Different hosts. Multiple hosts. No hosts. Focus on films. Focus on film makers. Downplay the glamor. Hype up the glamor. Be funny. Be not funny.

And meanwhile, the ratings get worse year after year, and they keep running around wondering what they’re supposed to do to stop the ratings slide.

This year’s show was . . . not good. This isn’t really because of COVID. I went into it recognizing that social distancing was going to make for a different production, and I was okay with all of that. Yay masks. Fine with a smaller crowd. But I’d also heard they were going to focus more on films, which was also great in my book. Instead, they focused heavily on providing a little snippet of information about each nominee (typically), and then let those nominees give their acceptance speeches for almost as long as they wanted, without any orchestra to play them off the stage. There was no opening to speak of. No significant number of skits or anything to really break up anything, with the exception of a trivia thing, in memoriam, and some humanitarian awards. They even had the musical numbers for best song all done in the lead up before the actual show started.

And the event still went 17 minutes longer than it was scheduled to.

Look, I understand that the Oscars are an award show. But this one focused on the awards and really skimped on the show. I can’t imagine the vast majority of people who tuned in for a bit thought it was riveting television. Certainly not Super Bowl level of entertainment. Even a bad Super Bowl game is still more engaging than what was on the Oscars last night. “Come watch over three hours of people thanking their loved ones and giving impromptu political or social justice speeches, peppered with ads!” If you love cinema and love knowing all the ins and outs of who’s doing what, then maybe this was the bee’s knees. Or if you’ve seen all the different movies and are genuinely interested in the outcomes, then this might have been more engaging. But for the average layperson? This was Snoozeville.

To me, the answer isn’t that difficult as soon as you realize what the question is. “How in the world can we make three hours of television focused on the best movies of the past year interesting for people to watch?” Well, you start by actually focusing on the movies. Show me more clips. Heck, even showing trailers for each show would be better than giving out snippets of info about each of the nominees.

“But all these movies aren’t popular with the general public!” True. So then are we harmed at all by having the evening lean into the “movies of the past year” theme, and highlight some of the more popular movies that came out then. There’s just so much to do with movies. So many movies made. So many movies to celebrate. And instead we get a procession of people making speeches that go on for too long, in areas so many people just don’t care about.

I’m not trying to say all the awards don’t matter. I love every aspect of film making, and I do keep track of who won Best Cinematography or Sound Design, and I try to check them out, because that really interests me. But I recognize I’m in the minority. Each year there’s this pull between “The Oscars are too boring and so no one is watching them” and “But the awards really matter, and it’s important we give people the chance to make acceptance speeches.” And the more I think about it, the less I think it’s possible that those two problems can be solved. Because we just saw what a show looks like when it’s all acceptance speeches and all about the film makers, and it was the first time they’ve had under 10 million viewers.

If we keep that trend up, the Oscars won’t matter at all, because no one will watch and no one will care. (It’s already heading that way as is.)

So something has to change, and I’d be totally fine with that something being “the winners come up, get their statue, and then go backstage to make their acceptance speeches, which can be watched online or on a different channel.” Obviously that’s quite extreme, and I wouldn’t say it’s the only option. But 60 seconds of mic time and then it cuts dead no matter what might also be an approach . . .

I didn’t miss the stupid schticks they’d do before they announced each winner. The fake banter between the presenters. That’s all stuff that can be moved elsewhere. I also kind of liked having the musical numbers peppered in the pre-show, just to free up some more air time. But all that air time can be filled with things other than “people talking about stuff most people don’t care about,” even if it’s stuff the people involved with really care a lot about.

Let’s put it this way: when I was growing up, the Oscars was an event. I’d stay up late for it and look forward to it each year. My kids tuned out this year about fifteen minutes in. It was just too boring. That’s a bad sign, if I’m in the “I want the Oscars to matter” crowd . . .

What did you think about the show? Did you even watch it?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Final Weigh In (for now)

Let’s cut to the chase. I was 177.4 this morning, meaning that I’m down 11.4 pounds since I began six and a half weeks ago. And I’ll be honest: my heart’s just not in this anymore. I know my goal was 175, but I’m low enough now that I don’t feel like continuing, and 6.5 weeks of oatmeal and peanut butter sandwiches has proven to be as many weeks as I want to go.

The good news is that I was still going along at a good clip, even at the end here. I mean, I’m down 1.6 pounds for this last week, which is the most I’ve been down in a single week for well over a month. Clearly if I wanted to keep going, I could. And two or three weeks from now, I’d make it to 175. I might end up doing that after a bit of a break, but . . . I guess there’s a balance between how bad I want to lose weight and how much I want to eat pizza, and it’s Tomas’s birthday, so the “eating pizza” part of me just veto’ed the rest.

Still, I’m considering this “mission accomplished.” In a month and a half I got my weight back down to a spot I’m very comfortable with. I’ve added some weight lifting back into my regimen, and so I’m still going to be working at doing things to keep getting into (slightly) better shape. Where will I go from here? Well, for now I’ll be transitioning back to a maintain eating style, meaning that I’ll still generally be eating a small breakfast and lunch, but I’ll eat more for dinner than I have been, and occasionally have some dessert. I’m going to do that for 3-4 weeks and see where I am.

Thanks for putting up with these weekly posts from me. They honestly help a ton in making and keeping and reaching goals, even if I know they’re not the most interesting topic to all of you. It’s amazing what a little accountability will do for even the least attractive goals out there. If any of you have something that you’ve always wanted to do (whether it’s losing weight or writing a book or learning a language or whatever), I wholeheartedly recommend making a public goal. It doesn’t have to be on Facebook. It can be nothing more than telling your family about it, though the more people you tell, the better this life hack works. Also commit (publicly) to a regular check in, and ask them for help remembering. Once you’ve got that in place, it’s really just a matter of sticking to the plan. I know this doesn’t work for everyone, but it definitely works for me.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Birthday Week

Tomas and MC have birthdays within a week of each other. MC had hers on Saturday, the day Denisa and I were laid out by the vaccine. We did our best to try and still make sure she had a special day (Denisa and the kids blew up balloons and put up streamers the night before, knowing there was a fair chance we might not feel great the next day), but it still wasn’t quite what we could have made it, and we felt bad about that. The good news is that MC is eight, and she didn’t seem to notice anything was that different. She was ecstatic to get presents, eat cake and ice cream, and have vegan mac & cheese (her request) for dinner. “Best birthday ever,” she proclaimed at the end, though she has a tendency to say that about every day, so I’m trying not to wonder just how bad all the birthdays were before this one.

Of particular note is the fact that she turned 8, and so she’s now able to be baptized. We’ll be doing that May 1st at 10am, and at the moment it’s looking like it’ll be in Waterville of all places, since the baptismal font in our local building has some technical issues. If you’re interested in Zooming into the proceedings, let me know and I can get you a link. If you’re interested in coming in person, I think we can accommodate that too, as long as you don’t have anything against wearing masks. MC’s very excited.

She’s also particularly proud of herself for learning how to ride a bike before she turned 8. Denisa suggested she set that as a personal goal, and MC worked hard to get there. It was a rush of effort at the end that finally pushed her over (and a ton of attention from Denisa), but it’s amazing to see how fast she went from “can’t stay on the bike” to “pedaling wherever she wants.” And for bike riding, at least, the paved back driveway to the assisted living center they put in front of our house turns out to be pretty perfect.

Tomas, on the other hand, is turning 17 tomorrow. His life is in a very different spot compared to MC’s, filled with things like SATs and AP classes and finding jobs and learning how to drive. He had a surprise birthday party earlier in the week, socially distant and outside, but thrown completely unbeknownst to him. We even managed to rope his driving instructor into it. It was Tomas’s first day of actually driving, and his instructor pretended to get lost in town, having Tomas take wrong turn after wrong turn, until he ended up at one of his friend’s houses. (It really helped that Tomas hadn’t been to that house before. It also helps that non-drivers generally don’t pay any attention to where they’re being driven, so it wasn’t like Tomas already had a good sense of where he was in town in the first place.)

Last year his 16th birthday was pretty much swallowed up by COVID, so it was really nice to see him have such a good one this year.

In any case, if you see or talk to either of those two this week, make sure to wish them a happy birthday.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.