There’s so much I wanted to accomplish today, but my body is bent up in an s-shaped configuration thanks to tremendous neck pain.
I had to drive to the store to get more ibuprofen, and I stood in line there, with my head craned to the right, looking like someone who’s trying not to move their neck. Purchase: A bottle of Motrin and a turkey sandwich from the deli case.
It’s interesting trying to drive, when you’re blind in your left eye and if you turn your head left, an overwhelming pain takes over your neck. But I made it there and back, without incident.
Now to lay in bed all day. I wonder if I still have that vicodin from the last time this happened…
Month: June 2003
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Also seen tonight: Preview for ‘Shaolin Soccer,’ which looks quite amusing.
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Last night was ‘Winged Migration.’ Tonight was ‘Charlies Angels: Full Throttle.’
I loved the first one. I really did. It had everything a movie about three ultra-attractive women who fight crime should have. Most specifically, Lucy Liu with a riding crop.
Then again, just about any movie should have Lucy Liu with a riding crop in it. ‘Lord of the Rings?’ Sure! We can work her in some how.
This sequel adds some character development, which could have worked if they’d actually tried. Most notably, they spend all this time developing a back story about Crispin Glover’s character from the previous movie, and then he just shows up for 30 seconds at the end and dies. The rest of the so-called plot is stilted and irrelevant, but that’s fine, because its only purpose is to glue together fight scenes.
It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s stupid and inane with occassional glimmering intelligent moments, it has so many in-jokes it’s difficult to keep track (Example: Drew Barrymore, child star of the movie ‘Firestarter,’ has a Zippo lighter she carries around as a lucky charm, and in one scene she watches in amazement as a bad guy emerges from a wall of fire, just as her character did in that movie. The soundtrack music during this scene? Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter.’), but it’s worth going to see if you’re tired of using your mind. -
Last night, I went and saw ‘Winged Migration,’ which made me want to buy a movie theater so I could rip out the aisles and live in a big room where one wall is always occupied by… ‘Winged Migration.’
It’s thoroughly astonishing, and calling it something like ‘thoroughly astonishing’ doesn’t even begin to do it justice. There’s so much else to say about it that would slide off like the proverbial water off a duck’s back. But I’ll try anyway.
The premise is that we’re along with birds as they migrate. Up in the air with them, flapping along. Bird-cam. Mostly we accompany Canada geese, probably because they’re plentiful and hard to spook. The movie was an excuse to shoot the most beautiful footage ever shot of birds, and then edit it together. There’s footage of flying along with birds, footage of flocks of birds flying past, footage of a young seagull’s first flight attempt (reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff), footage of penguins swimming, footage of a kingfisher diving in the water for food, footage of geese looking for water in desert Utah, and so forth.
There’s blissfully little narration, so when we see, for instance, pelicans in Africa squawking at each other and then nuzzling their heads together, we have to try and figure out if they’re being territorial or sharing a Hallmark moment.
So, essentially, it’s not just a nature program stretched to 90 minutes, it’s ten nature programs crammed into 90 minutes, minus the play-by-play. -
La musique du jour is inspired by a blog from THYRIO, who complians about Jesus culture in the South.
Having grown up in a place that sits on the border between Suthun’ and West’rn, I can relate. In 1989, a band called Ten Hands broke on to the music scene, from Denton, TX, University of North Texas to be precise. North Texas is known for its music school. They’d be able to relate, too, because they wrote and performed songs with names like ‘The Big One Is Coming,’ ‘Jimbo, The Gay Methodist Minister,’ and the music for today, ‘Moses In My Life.’
Unfortunately, the live performance CD that documents these tunes was poorly mastered, and has degraded over time, so the recording quality is a little lacking. Hopefully, you’ll get the point, though.
Very little could beat the experience of going to a Ten Hands show. They were incredibly tight, could stop on a dime and shift directions without even thinking about it. They’d be too musically impressive to be all that much fun if they had a slick act, so it worked well that they were a bunch of slackers.
Then the percussionist left, and though they called themselves Ten Hands, they were really Eight Hands. Then another percussionist joined up, they started writing real, actual, heartfelt songs you had to listen to, and it became abundantly clear that Ten Hands had jumped the shark.
Aw, what the hell. Two tunes for today: “Let me see ‘em… PARAMECIUM!” -
So yesterday, while I was driving through Idaho, east of Twin Falls, I stopped at a rest area to eat some lunch.
I happened to park next to an interpretive plaque (when will state agencies learn to practice better point-of-interest hygiene?), at a trailhead for a tiny trail that led along a part of the Oregon Trail. I-84 and I-86 are built, in part, along the old Oregon Trail trade route.
I decided not to follow the traill, because I felt like I was in a hurry to get back to home sweet home. But thoughts of the trail were in my mind when I got to the next exit, which featured a place called Massacre Rocks State Park. Massacre Rocks? Who was massacred? Was it folks on the Oregon Trail? Was it the natives? Were they massacred on the rock, or simply near it?
I pulled off and drove on down that road.
I should point out that I-86 runs next to the Snake River, through a vast desert valley. It’s the kind of thing you picture in your mind when you think, ‘Desert Of The American West.’ A gray and brown landscape with all the charm of wadded and re-smoothed sandpaper.
But it’s an interesting place, geologically, and ecologically, and anthropologically, since it’s a major trade route of right around a hundred-plus years ago. And a few tens of thousands of years ago, it was under water, as part of the giant Lake Bonneville.
I entered the state park and parked my car (what else do you do at a park?). Right there, staring me in the face as I sat behind the wheel, was a sign that said ‘Geological Exhibit,’ at the foot of a paved trail leading to a cliff edge. Good enough for me.
Following the trail, I ended up at another set of plaques, these ones explaining about Lake Bonneville and the fact that this section of the Snake River valley used to be under a volcano, and that the buttes that make the far bank are the old volcanic core.
There was also an explanation of the giant flood that drained Lake Bonneville out the Columbia gorge, and how a break in the buttes on the far bank was a huge waterfall while this was occurring.
I like hearing the story of the Columbia deluge, since I can drive a few hours from home and look at the geology and see where it happened. It’s real hand-of-God type stuff.
Anyway. From my vangage point on the cliff, I saw some birds gliding around about eye-level. It was a group of three, one of which was far, far larger than the other two. After a few moments I realized that the wingspan of the large one was wider than the SUV parked on the bank below.
Too big to be a heron… I was looking at a whooping crane. There were more in the water, and I eventually saw another one gliding around far up in the air. Giant, mammoth birds they are.
I stood there and watched the one up in the sky for a while. There was nothing hurried about it; the long, gliding, even wing-gait, the elegant white plumage with stark black contrast. Poise and grace, control and easy efficiency.
I’ve been reading up on the whoopers since I got home. It turns out the Idaho whoopers are imported. They’re part of an experiment to get sandhill cranes to raise the endangered whoopers, but apparently sandhill parents don’t know how to teach their adoptee whoopers about the birds and the bees. Whoopers so raised end up not mating or producing offspring. The smaller birds I had seen with the whooping crane were sandhill cranes, smaller only in relation.
It also turns out that whoopers raised in captivity don’t learn to migrate, which seems pretty obvious after you think about it. So some folks have set up an organization that teaches migratory routes to whoopers and other endangered species raised in captivity. They fly an ultralight, to lead the young whoopers along the route.
Which leads me to another topic: A movie I really really really want to see, called Winged Migration. Which is lucky, since it’s showing here in town right now. But I digress.
I never did find out the story of Massacre Rocks, and had to read about it on the internet.
