A question about the typeface

Pat,

Do you mind this font? I really don't like the sans serif type that we've been publishing in. Dan, how about you? Does this look okay? Better?Worse? Doesn't matter?I took it off the default and switched it to Georgia.

Separate from the Mighty Mizzou

Gentlemen,

I have the great good fortune to announce that I have left St. Joseph, Missouri. While my visit only sucked somewhat (they were really long days away from Cin, but I did meet some very cool people), it was with a bit of trepidation that I learned only this evening of a new virus discovered by a doctor in St. Joseph, called the Heartland Virus, and it's delivered to you courtesy of ticks.

Okay, enough of that.

St. Joseph is famous as a jumping-off point, first for Lewis and Clark, circa, like, 1801, and then, just as famously, as the starting point of the westward run of the Pony Express. The Pony Express, of course, ran to Sacramento at its western terminus, but for all its cherished imagery and lore, only functioned as part of the U.S. Post Office for 19 months, from April, 1860, to November, 1861.

(The image at the right is the Buchanan County courthouse.)

I was told by my guide and boss that the Holiday Inn where we were staying at was directly on the Missouri River. Well, the river was visible from my fifth-floor room, but between me and the big, important river sat a naturally very ugly and complicated-looking power transfer station, and that other big conduit for freight and commerce, the four sets of Union Pacific tracks. So, yeah, I was at a considerable remove from the river. The map geek in me (never far from the surface) thrilled with the knowledge that as I looked across the river, I gazed on Kansas. It wasn't that great in person.

I worked all week for a refiner of biodiesel, and it's one of the more progressive, trend-setting companies involved nowadays. It will be a struggle to make it pay, because petrochemical products are still quite a bit cheaper to produce.

Sequel Contest on Grantland

So, Dan, it looks like it'll be just you and me for a little while, and while I haven't been posting, I've been thinking of a retrospective on superhero movies, a sort of expanded version of the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher/Christopher Nolan discussion.

One of the websites I read regularly, Grantland, covers mostly sports, but they also cover, in a more limited fashion, films and other pop-culture topics. Earlier in the week, they started a contest, a sports bracket system in which they had 32 film sequels ranked and pitted off against each other.

The guy, when introducing the whole thing they're calling Sequeltology, said that such an endeavor is kinda silly, since The Godfather II could be, in his opinion, the greatest American film ever made.

How it works is, the 32 movies that made the list get ranked, and then seeded, and then they're paired off, and readers get to vote for whichever movie they feel like voting for, with no rules about why you vote the way you do.

Here's a link to one of the relating articles. In the round of 8 we've got T2 vs The Dark Knight among others matchups.

Their endeavor, and their curious idea that the Rocky sequels would fare better (seriously, they thought Indy and the Last Crusade would fall to Rocky III)(give me a fucking break), got me thinking.

Sequels and spinoffs, the television versions, are a mixed bag for me. Nowadays they seem like they plan for a sequel in the pre-production phase, with it being a safe investment, as long as the first is good enough, or makes enough money.

It's unoriginal. That's my main complaint, but with so many book and comic adaptations being made, sequels are just part of this era of big-cinema. I liked The Dark Knight Rises, but it's as unoriginal as a sequel gets. One of the sequels on the Grantland list is probably the most original sequel ever: Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. It was seeded pretty low and has since been knocked out.

But can you imagine a sequel where the heroes from the first movie are killed, con Death out of death, and then using Station to save the world through their rock music...I mean, that's like a David Lynch fever dream just ate bunch of Sweet-Tarts and cotton candy.

I guess The Godfather II was pretty original, and it should surely win this contest.

One sequel I was upset was left off of the Grantland list was Addams Family Values.

Thinking about that classic, a rare sequel I enjoy far more than the original, I started to wonder what sequel I like the most. Other peculiarities show up on their lost, like Back to the Future II but not III, clearly the superior installment. Whatever: what's the best sequel?

Besides The Godfather II, of course.

What franchises do we have? Alien (Aliens, one of the top seeds, went down to Last Crusade); The Matrix; Rocky, Superman, Batman, Rambo, Spiderman, Star Wars, Star Trek...way more than really first come to mind...

The top three sequels from those franchises are probably Aliens, Empire Strikes Back, and...The Animatrix?

Does that even count? Whatever, it's better than Reloaded and Revolutions, am I right? I don't know, I can't remember the other two so well.

I haven't yet mentioned Indiana Jones or Lord of the Rings or Toy Story...

Maybe Toy Story 3 is my favorite non-Godfather II sequel...

I'm sure you've got some opinions on this, like Aliens should kick everybody's ass...and I think we had a talk about LOTR, where you said you preferred Two Towers in the sequel department, but you could have been lecturing me for talking shit about it (which I only did half as a joke, since for the longest time it was the only DVD of the trilogy that we owned, and consequently, watched).

And dad, if you're reading this, feel free to chime in...maybe it wasn't such an impact, but...2010: The Year We Make Contact is just waiting for a tease-out.

Sidewalk Grilling

I have a few movie posts brewing, and yesterday I put together a bleeding-heart rant over on another blog I keep (yay jump links!) about the best movie characters, but first I wanted to say something about grilling.

Back in 2009 I wrote a piece on my old blog about Gonzo Grilling, or, grilling on our stoop in Brooklyn. And the this past Sunday, Dan and I talked about having just gotten new grills and about how both of us wee going to be testing them out. I don't have the backyard that you've got, Dan. All I've got is the sidewalk.

And we used it:

We set up our outdoor chairs on a spit of grass and set up our brand new little Weber on the concrete, making sure we were out of the pedestrian walkway. Instead of lighter fluid, I made a nice pile of newspaper balls and tightly wound "logs" to set beneath the coals, fired it up, and waited.

It was a pretty good wait, maybe forty minutes, but it finally took.

Here's a shot of what we had working: sausages, eggplant slices, and potatoes in foil.

The eggplant was in our farm-delivery box despite the fact that neither Corrie nor I particularly like it. We've since had it removed from future boxes. It didn't turn out super great.

I had corn on the cob working in this picture with the remaining potatoes.

In that first shot you cans see the long shadows of late afternoon, and in this last one, dusk is in an advanced state. Also visible: crutches, a big Murakami book, and cups for beer.

Sunday Sidewalk Grilling. Sweet.

Movie Post II: Experiments

One of the offshoots of the previous post on 2001 was remembering the experimental nature of some of the footage. Specifically, I’m thinking of the sequence where the astronaut, played by Keir Dullea, is flying toward the “surface” of Jupiter, and he begins to encounter a really outré light show. A whole long series of merging light objects move and speed and flow until we and the character are all dizzy and disoriented. I read where Kubrick was looking for a new effect for this sequence, and some techie guy showed him this and he was sold.

That made me think of the first Tron, a Disney product that was long on effects and short on script. It was praised for its use of new effects, and I have long thought that efforts like this are bold and useful, if not completely successful as works of art themselves. The more successful uses of the technology usually come along later. I can’t think of any successful uses of the Tron effects, but then I don’t have a lot of exposure to movies.

That brings me to Mars Needs Moms. Pretty ridiculous, right? The whole thing was shot using an experimental process, shooting actors in 3-D motion-capture suits. The mom even looks like Joan Cusack. I don’t know where this process is going, if anywhere, but Mars Needs Moms shares qualities with other experimental movies: the effects are the only reason to watch or think about them.

Okay, one last thought which on sort of the same subject. I read where in the early days of making The Incredibles, Brad Bird said they made the faces of the characters so realistic that they began to look fake. Talk about irony. So they had to make them more caricature-ish so that audiences would be more accepting. So, can we stump for the making of the next Incredibles? Please?

Movie Post I: My Onetime Fave

I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was about sixteen, and for a long time, like several decades, it remained my favorite movie.

There was the sequence at the beginning with man’s apparent evolutionary forebear, who discovers a solid rectangular object, and in short order, learns to kill. (Like they weren’t predators prior to that, right?) But, okay, we’ll go along, and recognize that the writer-director wanted to make a point about moral progression in humans. We jump forward in time to our own near future, where we encounter human settlement on the Moon, and sure enough, there’s the same monolith, causing the same kind of curiosity and alarm. Then the movie takes a completely different direction, and we join Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood on their mission to Jupiter. HAL the computer gets a mind of its own, people start dying, yada yada, and then the real fun starts.

Kubrick takes us on some kind of metaphoric journey as the Keir Dullea character ages before our eyes, in rather sterile (symbolic?) circumstances, and then dies, and then circles Earth in outer space, an embryo in orbit.

When I first saw this, I was awed. There wasn’t anything I could find fault with, and kind of enjoyed the freedom it gave me to speculate about meanings. But of course, I was sixteen years old, and the movies I had seen before that did nothing to prepare me for it. I have seen it since, and there are parts, particularly when the astronaut battles HAL, that seem so slow as to be interminable. If Kubrick did that on purpose, what was the purpose? Yes, the silence of space is realistic, and the scientific/technical effects of this part of the movie hold up pretty well even today, but … geez! Now, I think of this movie as interesting, personal, experimental, and pretty self-absorbed. I think there’s a danger, into which a lot of reviewers fell, of taking this movie way too seriously. Because I don’t think Kubrick had a very exact point in mind. I think he wanted to play around a little bit, explore some metaphysical territory while making a man-in-space epic, and generally play around with some special effects. Do you guys think that’s too dismissive?

Ahh...Paris in the Morning

"It was a date."



How does she look, pop?

(This would be the first time I ever embedded a Youtube video on any Blogger blog I was involved with.)

Here's the route Claude took:

Pretty sweet...

Deleting the Emoticon

My "smart" phone has, on its touchscreen keypad used for texting, a key with the emoticon ":-)" printed on it. I would never begrudge anyone their use of abbreviations or emoticons while texting, while personally I engage in neither. I even use semi-colons in texts for chrissakes. But this emoticon key is very large and below the delete key, and my "smart" phone is a little touchy---actually, it can get pretty annoying as it oscillates between not picking up any amount of touch to triple entering even the slightest brush over a key. It's especially bad with that damn emoticon key.

Say I'm trying to text the word "the", and it doesn't pick up the "h", leaving me with "te" and I notice it (which is also a rarity). Dammit, I mutter, and try hitting the delete key twice (because I've invariably gotten to "te_"), but since the combination of the size of the emoticon key and the random touchiness of the touchscreen, I'll end up with "te :-):-)". When I notice, I can erase the first face with one stroke of the delete key, but the other face will need three strokes to make it disappear.

And that's assuming I don't hit the emoticon again.

(Sigh)

(Trivial escalation.)

Adding thirty

My microwave oven has a button you can hit, that adds thirty seconds of cooking time, and just starts running - you don't have to hit the Enter/Start button. I sometimes use it when heating water up for tea or whatnot. I've found that I can hit it four times (totaling 2:00 minutes of cooking time) in less than a second. When I do that, I can see the timer go from 2:00 to 1:59. I have also found, however, that I cannot add five sets of 30 seconds. Whenever I hit the "add thirty" button the fifth time, it's always at 2:29, and I can't hit the button fast enough to see 2:30 that way.

So that's what it feels like to put up a pointless and trivial blog post. I can see why people do it.

Salvo from Old School

So I guess it shall be written that I was the last one of us to post first.  That make a lot of sense... I am the youngest and the prettiest.

Where to start, where to start... Well, I guess a skyline, right?  Try this on for size.

Now, whether or not you can tell this is actually made of Legos.  Maybe later I will post an image of work, but the way that my company has algorithms working... they make the Agents of the Matrix seem like the automatic door openers at King Soopers (just for you dad).

And, because skylines aren't cool enough, I thought it would be fun for a picture of Salvo.  Not just any Salvo, but none other than David K. Hasle - Code Name: Salvo.  Be careful, his Primary Specialty is Anti-Armor trooper with a Minor in repairing the Dragon.  Now, I have no idea what the hell a Dragon is in regards to GI Joe, but this man can repair the hell out of it.  Look at him!!

His gun is friggin' spring loaded!!!  Shoot... that's hella cool.

Now, on to this nonsense about which Simpsons season is best.  Because, well, you both had some great ideas, and I will not say those seasons are not good.  I'm sure we can all agree on any season with a well rounded Tree House of Terror will be a pretty good season.  I just have to be the one that points this out... Season 6 is actually, in my mind and therefore correct, better.  Three things I have to point out here:

1. As mentioned before, a very well rounded Tree House of Horror including their take on The Shining, a lunch lady who helps Skinner eat the children, and all of our favorite, the Time Travelling Toaster Episode.  And, at the end, the whole family is inside out...
2. All the actual single episodes, like Bart vs. Australia, Homer who is thought to be a pervert when all he wanted was a Gummi Venus de Milo, Itchy and Scratchy Land, and who could forget that rare glimpse into the future with Lisa's Wedding where you can see that Bart is actually working towards getting his law school degree.  Too many other great episodes to count, so here is a link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Simpsons_episodes#Season_6_.281994.E2.80.9395.29
3. Lastly I hate to throw this in there, but I have to, just to help make a point.  It was the reason everyone tuned in to the next season... it ended with the first part to Who Shot Mr. Burns? and, as a marketing and viewer ploy, worked... even with us.

So, not sure how I will hold up in the baseball posts, but I can do some research and make a point or two.

And to prove that everything is cooler as an action figure, I give you this:

 And this... notice the 'Zero Points of Articulation' on the Monolith.

Opening Salvo

I was going to make this a Jeter vs Ripken post, but I think I'll save that for later, so I don't just copy and post the email I sent Dad.

This is more important: Which season of The Simpsons is the best?

Maybe it should be your favorite, but I think people who have favorites seasons invariably believe them to be the best.

This topic is broad and full-flavored. It's not as narrowed as Favorite Episode, or Top 5 Favorite Episodes, or favorite peripheral character, or favorite couch gag or chalk board scribbles or even favorite Albert Brooks character (that's a no-brainer: Scorpio). "Favorite season" almost implies "best season", doesn't it? It's not a single entity. Liking Carl more than Lenny doesn't imply one is better than the other. A season is made up of between 20 and 25 episodes, which is a pretty wide spectrum of stories and jokes and animated bits and things that burrow their way into your psyche and lodge themselves there permanently.

If you had to be stranded with just one season on disc, which season would that be?

Disclaimers: I think I chose this topic for a series of easy outs: I could correspond with Norm about Pynchon and Murakami for days; I could correspond with Dad about Murakami and the Yankees for days; I could correspond with Dan about films and video games for days. So, I thought an easy way to get us started would be the Simpsons. Also, on a more personal note, I have many seasons on DVD, and have watched them in the last five years, so it's more fresh for me than it may be for you guys. But, and I was considering this, information about the show is easy to come by. And it's fun to think about.

It's a pretty trivial Opening Salvo, for sure.

If you guys have other stuff you want to talk about, feel free to let loose your own Opening Salvos.

Best Season: For me it's between Season 4 and Season 7, with a lean towards Season 7. Season 8 has the insanity pepper episode, and the Grimey episode, which made it hard to look elsewhere. But Season 7: Radioactive Man the Movie; Flanders tries to baptize the Simpson kids; Homer turns into a big fat dynamo; Bart sells his soul; Lisa stops eating meat; George Bush moves in across the street; 22 short Springfield stories; the Flying Hellfish; and one of the sweetest episodes between Bart and Lisa ever, a summer spent at the Flanders beach house are some of the highlights. And there are more awesome episodes I didn't paraphrase.

Season 4, starting with "Kamp Krusty" and ending with Gabbo knocking Krusty off the air, is chock full of classic episodes, the beginning of the foundation of a great show starting to stretch into really creative places. Season 7, to me, is that fully realized dream.

So, that's that.

So...Calls won't be necessary...

Hey Dad, Dan,

It seems like I won't be needing to make any calls to make my case. Over the last few weeks, the emails we've been exchanging inspired me to start a blog where we could have discussions about things, or, maybe, start discussions about things and respond accordingly.

I was planning on calling both of you guys, discussing the idea with you, and then going ahead with the site. First I wanted to see how the site could work, so I clicked on the "New Blog" button on one of my own blog accounts, named it accordingly, and then went to try and tell it who should be contributors. I started typing "L-u-" and Dad, your name popped up, next to your email address, the same thing happened for Dan. After your names were up there, the prompt button said "Invite". 

I clicked it without thinking about it, and that was that. Dan's voicemail let me know that both of you guys had pretty much figured out the plan.

So...the background image right now is books, but I can change that; I just was looking for something studious. 

The ideas I had for types of posts range from sports to movies to books to whatever else you might feel like. As an example, I was thinking of making my first real post be a little bit of a write up on that Jeter/Ripken comparison, and in talking with Dan, another series of posts seem like they could come from the Tim Burton's Batman franchise vs Christopher Nolan's (which obviously lead to wonderful things like Beetlejuice vs Inception). 

Maybe we could choose the best Murakami book, Kubrick film, or Yankee center-fielder. You know, that kind of stuff.

Compelled as well I am to enter a city picture.

The new methods of communication...welcome to the New.

Thanks fellas, thanks for getting it.

Preemptive Post II

Dan,

I didn't see your name on the blog before. Perhaps my first post to Patrick was a bit hasty. He did, after all, call it Sherwood and Sons.

Perhaps we can focus on movies, where you and Pat would out-expert me by a pretty long sight.

I've had a sudden urge to post a gratuitous pic from Paris - keeps the site from being too graphically static.

Preemptive Post

Well, Patrick!

I've received invitations in my time, but this is unique! I hope you don't mind a preemptive post.

I opened my email this morning - again hoping for anything on the job front - and there was your surprising and welcome invite. I don't know how many posts I can make, or if there is to be a focus for the blog. From the artwork you've chosen, I'm thinking maybe ... books?

At least we're exploring new ways of communicating in these days thick with opportunity.