Lives in a Shoe

Roxie!

On Sunday I picked up foster dog Roxie -- a gorgeous young girl, obviously GSD-and-something (maybe rottweiler?)  It started with an email from Perrin at Saving Great Animals:

Me? I Sit Right There Beside Milton Friedman

Take this political test.  Where do you end up?  And why?  Fast and fun.

Movie Review - A Rave

George and I watched a Blu-Ray of "No Country for Old Men".  I loved "Blood Simple" and I loved this too.  What I especially enjoyed was the almost complete absence of music in the background.  Lately it feels to me that a movie just smacks me in the face with sounds, grabbing me by the aural scruff and rubbing my face in phony emotion.  (Wow.  I beat the snot out of that poor metaphor.) This movie was silent for long periods, using silence as a visual artist uses space.  You could hear footsteps, and breathing, and wind, and birds.  I loved it for that. 

 

The NY Times wrote of the sound editor, Skip Lievsay:

 

"[M]ost musical instruments didn’t fit with the minimalist sound sculpture he had in mind, so he used singing bowls, standing metal bells traditionally employed in Buddhist meditation practice that produce a sustained tone when rubbed."

 

Tommy Lee Jones -- I could spend an awful lot of time watching his seamed, weary face and the little bald place on the back of his head.  This is a beautiful man, getting better with age.

 

This movie was demanding somehow -- enigmatic, tense, awful.  I'm glad we saw it at home because if we were in a theater and somebody rustled a candy wrapper I'd have to stomp out in a snit because I was paying attention.

 

I'd like to watch it again, and listen again.

 

 

Christmas Shopping

http://www.gentlemansemporium.com

Is that young lady's corset made of whalebone or alder wood? Does that carriage's strongbox contain spices from the Orient, or merely a vain man's truss?

Your vision can pierce any mystery when you are accoutred with Professor Ocularo's X-Ray Monocle!

Astonish your friends by diagnosing consumptive lungs from across a crowded train platform! Titillate your work chums by describing the ankles of any comely lass, no matter how tightly cinched her boots!

Radium Powered Fun for All Ages

Veterans Day

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

-- John Stuart Mill

Gratitude to Dad, George II, George III, Greg, Uncle Gene, Big Roc, Little Roc, Tim G., and all veterans --

and to Phil Ferro, friend of my girlhood, who died in Vietnam. 

Created by Resolution of Continental Congress November 10, 1775

To the memory of my Dad, Honor Man in his platoon, WWII, South Pacific; and to my nephew (and new father) Rocco Granato, Afghanistan.  Thank you.

  Birthday Tribute here.

Well, Good

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

Saturday Steyn

From Mark Steyn -- the entire column is below the break.

It's hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party's nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism...

In political terms, the message of the gazillion-dollar bipartisan bailout was a simple one: “Individual responsibility” and “self-reliance” are for chumps...

The President-elect's so-called “tax cut” will absolve 48 per cent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those that are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on the dole. By 2012, it will be more than half, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism, and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the nanny state...

Holy Namesake, Batman!

...To the Batmobile, and on to Turkey!

ANKARA, NOVEMBER 6 - The major of Batman, the small city in South-East Turkey, announced its intention to sue Warner Bros. for its Batman movie franchise. According to press reports in Turkish dailies, the major Huseyin Kalkan has said that they are preparing to sue the producer of the Batman film, who is claimed to make money by using the towns name, and has that they are investigating on the matter whether the case should be opened in the US or in Turkey. "There is only one Batman in this world," said Kalkan.

The rest of the article is here.  Hard to believe it's not a joke, but it's also hard to believe a mayor in Turkey would be that humorous.

Old Fashioned, Happy Day Wedding

Gorgeous church.