What to say about this meta-movie? It could have gone wrong in so many ways. As it is, it’s imperfect and a little confusing (yes, a Barbie movie confusing) at times, but – overall – it’s magical. Pure entertainment.

Entertainment with a message, but Entertainment with a capital “E” first and foremost.

The movie begins with a brilliant take-off of the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith scene to introduce Barbie – a smiling Margot Robbie with looong legs – and then moves into BarbieLand, which is full of Barbies and Kens (and Alan and Midge…).

Eventually Barbie has to go to the real world (Ken tags along) and what they are surprised by what they find.

The movie takes shots at everyone: capitalism, the patriarchy, Barbie herself. Sure, she can be a doctor or astronaut . . . as long as you have a 26-inch waist and permanently flexed feet.

Choreography is amazing, both the Barbie and Ken dances, and there is so much going on in the background or just in an instant that it merits a second screening.

It’s made about $1.4 billion to date worldwide, and there’s a lesson for Hollywood: Sure, have your sequels and comic-based films, but the public will flock to watch something different that’s well made.

And this one scores five out of five stars on both counts.

I really don’t understand the stink people are raising over Amazon’s decision to begin including ads in Prime video (beginning Jan. 29, 2024).

There will be a $3/month fee to avoid this, but what’s the fuss? Virtually all streaming services have an ad-supported tier along with a higher-priced ad-free tier. There are exceptions – I’m looking at you, Apple+ – but if they don’t have an ad tier today, they will soon.

I’ve pretty much been expecting this for some time: Amazon Prime is for free shipping, the free video was just a perk (and, yes, a hook to keep you hooked).. And at $3/month to nuke ads, that’s not breaking the bank (though I expect that to rise year after year, just nickel and diming us to death). And would I prefer to shell out the $3/month? Of course!

I haven’t looked too deeply into this, but any streaming service that puts ads in their proprietary movies/series is making a mistake – sure, you can stream John Clancey’s Patriot Games here or there, but you can only get, for example, The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime – that’s often why you sign up for one service over another. Again, I don’t know much about this but…

Cover photo of my version
has a Dorthea Lange photo

The 1992 National Book Award for fiction went to Cormac McCarthy for his modern-day Western, All the Pretty Horses..

One of the finalists for that year’s prize was Dorothy Allison gritty Bastard Out of Carolina, a book that’s been sitting on the shelf of one of my bookcases for, well, decades. Not even sure when or where I bought it. Or why. I must have read a review.

Finally got around to reading it last week, and I really delayed my reading pleasure by 20-30 years. Gritty, sad, hopeful – just a snapshot of the human condition by a poor white extended family in a small 1950’s North Carolina mill town.

Narrated by the titular character – Ruth Anne, AKA Bone – from the time before her birth until she’s roughly 13 years old. It doest even seem hokey that she narrates the terms of her gestation (briefly) and birth – the way it’s written indicates that her family has a strong oral tradition, and she’s just passing on what she’s heard from her relatives, colored by her own experiences.

The men are the main breadwinners – this is the 1950s in the South – but they are almost all damaged goods and get relatively little play in the book. Feared by townspeople for their tempers, they are drunks, self-indulgent and philanderers. They protect their families as needed, but that was not their focus.

It’s the women who hold the families together – each is a vertebrae that form the spine that supports the entire group. And that even includes a young Bone, who is sent to a dying aunt’s house to help the cancer-stricken woman until her help is no longer needed. The female children spend a lot of time at different aunts’ houses – again, it’s the women who are the glue. Sometimes it’s the aunt helping the child, sometimes it’s the other way around.

The main theme of the novel is the intrinsically unbreakable bond between mothers and their children, but also of the women and all their female relatives. The men and boys will endure.

Without airing any spoilers, when this primary bond slips even just a little near the end of the book, it upends Bone’s entire world.

The book’s epigraph is a James Baldwin quotation and it really sets the mood:

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have let themselves become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

– James Baldwin

This novel reminded me of Jane Hamilton’s The Book of Ruth, about a different white trash family – this time in Wisconsin – and the (quite different) relationship between the daughter, Ruth, and her mother.

Neither is a feel-good novel, but both are well written and pack a punch.

In my last entry, I noted that his fall’s colors have not been as spectacular as other years, and blamed the deficit on the dtry spring we had.

Well, I was sort of right, and sort of wrong.

No, we only had a handful of truly spectacular trees . Our neighbors have a Mountain Ash that was a brilliant red and yellow this year – but it didn’t last long. No streets where you look down the block and see a half-dozen or so spectacular specimens.

But what we did have this year was a very long turning of the leaves. The picture to the right is our backyard Silver Maple. A beautiful (ans squirrel-favorite) tree, it really doesn’t have much autumn interest. The green leaves will turn a little yellow and then fall off.

This year is probably the most yellow it has ever been – and this has been trees up and down our (and others’) block(s). At the bottom of the photo on the right, trees on the block east of us can been seen popping over the houses, punctuations of yellow and some orange still hanging in there.

It’s been very pretty – and viburnum bushes this year have a saturated red color that has lasted in some cases for weeks.

So – it’s been a weird fall color-wise, but it turned out better than I initially gave it credit for.

I’m gassing up my car on the way home from the eye doctor.

My eyes were dilated for the exam, so I’m wearing this funky sunglasses-like insert so I literally would not get blinded by the light.

On a positive note, my eyes appear healthy and just a little bump to my prescription – and my last appointment was at the beginning of COVID, 3.5 years ago.

As you can see, there’s a little fall foliage in the background. There have been exceptions – a tree or bush with vibrant colors – but mostly a drab changing of the leaves this autumn. We had a dry spring, and that’s probably the cause.

Well, I did my best for three and a half years: Masks when needed, fully boosted, minimal social contact.

But on Friday, Sept. 15, I tested positive for COVID.

And trust me, it was not a false positive. It’s now the following Tuesday and I’m almost back to normal.

There were no stomach or intestinal issues (thankfully), but this variant of the virus just knocks you on your ass. Starts off with sinus-head cold like symptoms, then get some soreness.weakness, and – of course – the fevers. Didn’t get any night sweats like I did after getting the vaccines, so there’s that.

Just sucks away any energy you have ever had. Can’t read, can’t code. Basically, just watch TV.

Still unclear where I picked it up, but from what I read, this is a very infectious variant – and I was just getting ready to get the newly approved vaccine. I guess I’ll have to wait a bit now before I can get that booster (limited natural immunity due to fighting the infection).

It wasn’t that bad, just a lengthy period of feeling just … blah.

Well, it took me several months to plow through it, but I finally finished Susan Orlean’s essay collection, On Animals.

All fifteen essays, all 235 pages. Several months…

I think you can see where this review is going….

The essays – all on animals in case that was unclear – are a collection (assuming “the best”) written over the past twenty years, most originating in “The New Yorker.” It’s not laid out chronologically, so an essay from 2020 can be followed by one written a decade earlier. Many short story collections are chronological, so one can see the writer mature/themes change as the author ages.

While I’m sure Orlean has picked up a trick or two over the years, her writing is almost always brilliant – it’s just that sometimes the essays missed the mark for me. Oft times it was just the overreaching that turned me off. Editors!

The introduction (written in 2021) really sucked me in, and it was followed by great first essay – from 2009 – about chickens. Delightful.

But I really got bogged down in a essay about tigers (too disjointed), and essays about show dogs and rabbits were just *shrug* – whatever. And while I learned a thing or two about oxen from “Carbonara and Primavera,” the abrupt ending still baffles me. Read the last line on the page, turned to continue the essay and: nada. The story was over.

She seems to genuinely love animals – her last essay, updated for this collection – is an overview of her (now sold) upstate New York menagerie, giving her time to muse on hens, turkeys, Angus beef and cats (adopted strays included). Much to love.

My favorites are the previously mentioned essay on chickens (“The It Bird”) and tale of donkeys in Morocco (“Where Donkey’s Deliver”). In the latter essay, she kept asking the donkey owners the names of their animals. She assumed that the donkey owners, like Americans, name their animals.

They don’t – they see the donkeys as tools; naming one would be like naming a wheelbarrow.

Overall it was a disappointment, but there was enough good in there to not mark it as wasted time. Just not up there with collections by E.B. White or Malcolm Gladwell, for example, and I thought Orlean could crack into their level.

One of the interesting aspects of the essays was the drawing at the beginning of each essay. It’s a line drawing – but a single, continuous line – to create the animal the essay addresses.

Here is the one for the essay on tigers:

My brother-in-law is a graphic designer, and when I mentioned these animal icons to him, he was familiar with the process and said there was a special name for it. They would do exercises with the technique in art school.

I did some research; I was expecting a fancy-pants French or Latin word/phrase.

All I could find was “continuous-line” or “single-line” drawing. Not terribly exciting.

I first saw a trailer for this off-beat indie film about a couple years ago (maybe on imdb.com?), but it was streaming on Hulu I think, which I don’t have.

But it looked quirky, so I made a note of it on my phone and would occasionally check if it hit DVD (and the library had it) or had reached Amazon Prime.

Yesterday, I saw that it had hit Amazon Prime, so I watched it.

Basically the story of an introverted guy – almost agoraphobic – who works at home as a video editor in his Brooklyn apartment. Long story short, he manages to lock himself out of his apartment, and so he has no choice but to get to know his neighbors: The piano prodigy who lives above him and her horrible mother, and a top-floor neighbor who is in the midst of a threesome with a couple from Oslo, a pregnant woman next door – and an older woman who has recently lost her husband but wants to try out online dating.

Combine that with altercations with a prickly cop (Sunita Mani, from Mr. Robot) who writes parking tickets just to stick it to folks, and it’s an interesting examination of life in a neighborhood.

I don’t know where it was filmed, but it pretty much all takes place in Brooklyn (?) on a beautiful autumn day. Nice atmosphere.

Oscar material? Nah. Just good character actors in a slow-arced, not overly-complicated indie vibe film.

Glad I ran across it.

A couple of Saturdays ago, Romy was washing dishes in the afternoon.

As she was cleaning our (oldish) coffee maker’s glass carafe, she bumped it up against the sink edge. And – of course – it cracked the bottom.

What to do? Can one even buy a solo carafe? And if so, where to buy? Will we have to buy a whole new coffee maker? We have no backup coffee maker and it’s nice to have coffee on Sunday morning.

I think you see where this is going – whipped out my phone and fired up the Amazon app, found the exact 14-cup Cuisinart glass carafe…and it was available for same day delivery (we have an Amazon warehouse near us).

Placed the order at about 3:30 pm; it was delivered before 8:30 pm – and no extra charge (we do have Prime).

Amazon has issues – especially around labor – but on that day, Amazon really delivered for us.

P.S. – Still not sure where to buy just a carafe except online. Decades ago, I bought replacement carafe(s) from Service Merchandise, but I don’t even know if they exist anymore.

Update – Service Merchandise – at least the name/logo – still exists, but only online and only sells jewelry. It was a great store for stuff like carafes and so on. Nostalgia blast. Walmart also carries the solo carafe, but online only, three days to ship and about a 30% higher price tag (and no Prime shipping…).

Heather “Dooce” Armstrong died Tuesday, May 9th, 2023. Dooce was 47. Her death was a suicide, which will come as no shock to anyone who followed her blog (Dooce.com, of course) over the years.

Dooce was an early voice in the nascent blogging era, a mix of drama, family drama (two daughters, dogs, husband turned ex-husband), meditations on Mormonism and more that somehow just worked.

As her following grew, she began accepting ads and became known as a “mommy blogger” – which means different things to different people.I pretty much stopped reading her then, but I missed her voice.

She was frantic and frenetic; she could do a detailed entry about teaching her dog a new trick and then, in another entry, post about postpartum blues in the clearest and shortest of entries. Those latter entries were written in blood.

As were her entries about her depression in general, her highs and lows, her battles with addiction.

She made the intertubes a better place, even when she didn’t feel the same vibe.

RIP.

When I was reading blogs in the early days, I read quite a few, but as authors have tired or moved on (in the beginning, to Twitter and Instagram) there are fewer and fewer to read.

As far as individual bloggers go, I only read a few:

• Jason Kottke – kottke.org He’s just back from a year-long sabbatical to recharge his batteries. He finds the best stuff online.
• Dave Winer – scripting news. Depending on who you ask, the first or second blogger, still going strong.
• John Gruber – Daringfireball.net. Mostly Mac stuff, but also some commentary on the world we live in.
• Kevin Drum –jabberwocking.com/. Where he set up shop after leaving Mother Jones (magazine and blog). Always a good read; focus p\on economics and politics. Even when I disagree with him he’s compelling

As for me, I’ve been blogging for a dozen years now (May 2001), but my output has been sparser & sparser as the years have gone by.

I write when I have something to say, and I guess I haven’t had much to say as of late.