Sandbag Day

A year ago in Fargo, North Dakota, the snow melted as the rains came and the Red River threatened to drown the whole city. Volunteers came out in droves to help sandbag.


It is happening again this year, but the timing is even worse – the college kids who did so much good a year ago are on Spring Break this week. So Fargo has recruited high school and even grade school kids. I read an AP report earlier in the day that talked about a three year old with his little plastic shovel out there with his big brothers.

This report on MSNBC talks about schools shutting down classes so kids can help sandbag. If there is one funny thing about this, it is the idea that a town that never calls a snow day has called a sandbag day.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

One Lost to Live

I sat down in front of the family room television last night and turned on the pop up video of last week's Lost.  Because it is time for my mother to step awaaaaay from Madness.  She watched the first two seasons and then quit.  I forget what made her mad, but it may have involved Shannon losing Vincent.  Again.  After explaining the pop up concept to her, we both realized it wasn't doing enough to catch her up.  And it also didn't explain where exactly Vincent was.

As I was talking her through it, I was reminded of those weeks when we first discovered the soap opera channel on cable.  On Sunday, they would run a marathon of the entire week of General Hospital and we turned it on a couple of times.  Because Luke and Laura were back!  And Robert! And Anna!  So I tried to catch her up on what LukeandLauraandRobertandAnna had been doing for all these years.  Or anyway, what they were doing when I was in college.  And it was all so convoluted.

Explaining the last three years of Lost was like trying to catch up with General Hospital.  Except with phrases like "the space/time continuum".  But it turns out that YouTube has plenty of videos for just that purpose.  But it's funnier if you actually know who Dr. Chang is:

Joker

This is Joker, a bunny that I am babysitting for a friend on vacation.  He is a charming bunny and has a favorite game. 

At night, when I open his cage door, he comes out and gets right in Shadow's face for as long as he can stand it...then runs back into his cage.  Shadow also likes it, because he gets to feel like a big, bad herding dog.

He also runs back into his cage every time he sees the flash, so I had to turn it off.  As far as I can tell, Spooky hasn't introduced himself.  But the rest of us are having a good time.

The Old Settler

Writers’ Theatre won a million points with me for making such a hassle-free exchange of my tickets, when I decided on two weeks’ notice to go on vacation. Then, they won a few more points for sending me an e-mail reminder for Sunday that included a reminder about Daylight Savings.


That’s customer service.

The Old Settler is a story about two sisters of a certain age living in war time Harlem that take in a boarder – a nice Southern boy looking for his fiancée. The fiancée turns up, is a big pill and drama ensues.

The playbill made a big deal about how this is African American material. Well..it was set in Harlem, and the actors were African American, but it otherwise seemed to be a pretty standard drama about the American Experience. You know what made it an African American thing to me? The audience.

Writers’ Theatre, bless their hearts, try very hard to produce material that broaden our little literary horizons. But the reality is that the audience is extremely white and extremely suburban. That’s what happens when you set up shop in Glencoe. But for this production, I think a fourth..maybe even a third of the audience was African American. And it was awesome.

The theatre is really intimate – a hundred seats. I know I have told you that legend has it in one show, when a fight broke out in the action of the play, a member of the audience actually got up out of his seat to break it up. Because he’d forgotten. This show had near that kind of audience participation. A couple of audience shout outs when there was an argument between characters. Some big “Woooooo!”s when there was smooching. And – I kid you not – a collective Marge Simpson noise of displeasure when the leading lady declared, “I would have made him love me!” I have never seen this happen before.

The acting was fabulous. I saw the show with the understudy playing the lead role of Miss Elizabeth and she was wonderful. This clip seems a bit more forced than I remember it on stage, but I imagine this was taken during the dress rehearsals so I forgive them. The lady playing Lou Bessie reminded me a bit much of Jackee Harry's character on 227, except without any heart at all. I have pondered it for a day now, and rather think that was deliberate.

I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun at a show.

Two E-mails From My Brother

9:50 a.m.

MASH

So do you happen to know what episode the film breaks and so they all decide to do impressions of each other and so Colonel Potter does Father Mulkahey and says "Jocularity, Jocularity"? Do you have that on DVD? Could I borrow it? That, for some reason, has become the MASH quote in the office... well for when ever we get, uh.huh huh huh huh , uh huh huh huh huh. "Jocular".


11:11 a.m.

Re: Re: Re: MASH

So I went to a Barrington Tea Party meeting yesterday. Stood up at question time and said I was a registered republican, leaning left of center, and am mad that this organization that is claiming a base of fiscal responsability wasn't around 8-10 years ago when we invaded iraq, passed prescription drug legislation, pushed through tax breaks, and bailed out wall street. Wasn't booed, but I don't think people were too happy with me. One of the committee chairs said I should not give in to the dark side.

I was telling these things to my mother in the car this afternoon.  Her response?

He can do that, but he can't call his mother for ten days.

Overheard at Barnes and Noble

Teenaged Girl:  Does "Fiction" mean Real or Not Real?
Mother:            (........)
Mother:              Not Real.
Teenaged Girl:  Well, you know I never go to the library!

Wind Farms

The Chicago Tribune just ran a rather good article about the pros and cons of wind farms out in DeKalb County. DeKalb is about an hour and a half from Chicago, so not exactly the middle of nowhere.


So. The pros: Clean energy and a lot of people stand to make a lot of money from the projects. The investors, the counties and the farmers that are leasing their land to the energy companies. Here is the statistic that struck me:

“Each turbine, which takes up about 3 acres total, pays Halverson about $9,000 per year, he said. That compares with the going rate of about $180 per acre per year to lease farmland in DeKalb County, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”

The first arguments I heard against wind farms were “eye sore” (which I don’t buy because I think they are rather pretty) and “noise pollution”. The article goes on to say that there are reports of vertigo and migraines, not to mention some really stressed out farm animals. It seems the vertigo comes from the low frequency sound that can mess up your sense of balance, like motion sickness. And the migraines can be caused by the “shadow flicker” of the sunshine on the turbine blades.

I would be prone to both of those things.

One of the local residents took this video to show what the “shadow flicker” looks like. It doesn’t seem that bad until you think that it is happening every single day all over the house.

 

I couldn’t live with this.

I am not sure what the answer is, except perhaps to find less populated areas for the turbines and better methods of distribution to support the necessary distance. I wouldn’t want to give up on the concept, though.

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan

Book 10

This one is particularly spoiler-y. You have been warned.


I had extremely high hopes for Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. Atonement was great, Saturday was even better. And Amsterdam’s press said things like “darkly comic”.

Molly Lane was a fabulous photographer-type that had lived this great life of art and love and lovers and blahblahblah. At some point in middle age, she is diagnosed with a disease that is never properly identified (although it sounds rather like Huntington’s), but her decline is rapid and she is mentally and physically helpless until she dies. The story opens with her funeral. In attendance are two of her former lovers, Clive and Vernon, that happen to be friends. And another lover. And her husband, George.

Is the husband’s name always George?

Early in the piece, Clive approaches Vernon with a request that basically amounts to, “If I ever end up like Molly, please put me out of my misery.” So they make a pact. The action continues as we follow these two men through their lives over the next weeks. And we wait for one of them to get sick, but knowing that is too easy a device for McEwan.

I also waited for the character of Molly to be fleshed out. How did she come to know and love these men? And then marry such a weasel? And maintain these friendships? While I was enjoying the build up, I was also woefully disappointed that this never materialized.

Then I hit it. The point in the story where you see where it is going and it is all about the plot and not about the characters or the language and it goes at a dead run.

Warning-warning-here is the spoiler!

George and Vernon have a couple of rows, each decides the other is crazy and they determined to “put him out of his misery”. Because that was the pact.

Seriously.

In the end, they are dead. It didn’t seem “darkly comic”, it seemed crazy. And sort of mean.

Fine. I'll Write Something Nice.

But it starts with:

I am so old that I have started reading "The Glenview Report".  The newsletter from my village board.  Because I care.  Or something.  There were two pieces of news:

Most of the newsletter was taken up with an explanation of the new contract with the garbage collection company.  Three things happened:

1. We lost the option of having twice weekly service.  That was fine with me since we dropped to once weekly service over a year ago and have been perfectly happy with it.
2. We are all required to use the garbage collection company's special garbage cans that are designed so that a contraption on the truck can lift and empty them.  The Village is going to pay for us to get them.  That is doubly fine with me since we already have said special garbage cans and will no longer have to pay the fee to rent them. 
3. After these changes the monthly cost of the service is...wait for it...going down.

So we get the same service and pay less for it.  Go Glenview.

Also, in a small corner of the newsletter was a piece about Lockheed Martin renting space in our big, fancy police station for training and stuff.  Inasmuch as I think the big, fancy police station is a monstrosity (that I resent even further since the library has had to fight tooth and nail for every dollar) I have to say I am pleased to see that some revenue is being generated through it.  $75,000 was the number reported, I believe.

So thank you, Village Board.  You seem to have done some good work here.

The End of the TV Season

USA Today is reporting that this season is it for Kiefer Sutherland and 24.  I'm good with that.  I have been watching the entire season on double-speed DVR. 

And maybe, if 24 is done and Lost is done, I can get back to Academic Earth.  Because right now I can't even get through my Ken Burns DVDs.

And all the books I want to read!