Talking about Soccer

When the men's World Cup is happening, I'll tend to spend words on kits I like, teams I like for irrational reasons, players I enjoy watching every four years, since I don't go out of my way to watch, say, Kylian Mbappe during his regular season.

When the women's World Cup is happening, I may not write as much, but only because my country's team is good. Well, at least present in the tournament. Unlike the gentlemen last year.

And, while being present alone may qualify as a victory (um, right fellas?), this assemblage of soccer players is, possibly unarguably, the greatest team that's ever been. Should that be with all caps?

The Greatest Association Football Team Ever.

At least the Greatest National Association Football Team Ever.

I'm not using any gender modifiers, either.

This year, the association football---soccer---played at the tournament was widely seen as the best and highest quality it had ever been for the women's side. France, the hosts, were very strong and the second-favorites. The Swedish ladies kicked our butts in the Olympics. England and the Netherlands have some of the best (non-US) players in the ladies game. Germany and Brazil also sport strong organizations that can be counted on to field formidable teams.

The USNWT never trailed in any game at this tournament. They won every single match, never trailed, never went to extra time, never needed penalty kicks to decide a match. This kind of dominance is totally unprecedented in any World Cup.

The talent is spread across the men's national teams more, which is why (they'll say) you can't find this kind of dominance in any men's WC.

Whatever.

We all should appreciate what we just got to witness.

I love, also, how bonkers much of the country goes, and rightfully so. It's awesome that it's fully okay right now to celebrate a national hero like Megan Rapinoe: outspokenly anti-Orange Roughy, outspokenly gay, the first white athlete to kneel with Kap.

When the crowd is chanting "EQ-UAL-PAY" an they're being awarded the Cup---in France---you know a nerve was hit.

The pay. Holy moly, I was ignorant. I would have guessed, correctly, that they were getting paid less than the men. I would have been way off in how much less.

The men make more in losses than the women will make in four victories. The men will make more money just reaching the knockout stage of the tournament than these women will for winning the entire thing.

For World Cup tournament victories---single games, mind you---it's like, $16k for the guys, and $1300 for the ladies; for losses, $5k for the fellas, el zilcho for the ladies.

The women will have to essentially win the entire tournament just to make UNDER A QUARTER of what the men would make to get to the quarter-finals.

It's horsehit, but this is our world.

Some interesting reading material:

• Megan Rapinoe's girlfriend, multiple WNBA champion Sue Bird wrote a stream of consciousness piece titled So The President Fucking Hates My Girlfriend
• Megan herself wrote her own piece You Can't Get Rid of Your Girl That Easily

And, just to be fair to these athlete-authors, here's a list of essays and stories from the USWNT players, all courtesy of Derek Jeter's journalism website, The Player's Tribune:

• Crystal Dunn's American Girl
• Carli Lloyd's The Curb
• Alex Morgan's The Note
• Julie Ertz's Up the Mountain
• Mallory Pugh's The Reckless Child
• Lindsey Horan's This is Happening

In my line of work, just listening can be the biggest thing someone can do. 

Go ladies!

PAY THESE WOMEN!

Animation Discussion, No. 653, I think

This space has been used many times for animation discussions, possibly 652 times before, today will be no different. Again because my comments aren't working for me, let me start with Toy Story 4.

Part of my experience was that it was Cass's first experience in the theater. Another part is the movie itself. It was better than the cash grab it seemed it would be when it was announced. Pixar doesn't really cash grab, anyway,  

It tries to mine obsolescence as a human enterprise, which is novel and new. It has funny moments, it has tear-jerking moments, it has a complex antagonist whom you come to root for, unlike Lotso from the third movie, it has Keanu Reeves, it has terrifying minions and even a terrifying protagonist in Forky. 

Okay, Forky isn't fully terrifying...just a Frankenstein's monster toy voiced by Buster from Arrested Development. 

It's worth watching, a serviceable fourth installment of a beloved series. It's not as good as the third installment, but that's not really fair, since no Pixar movie is as good as Toy Story 3. It makes for an interesting and satisfying quartet.

We watched, and eventually let Cass watch, Ralph Breaks the Internet:

I enjoyed it. It seemed like their rendition of the Internet was very similar to Futurma's same from their Emmy-award winning episode where Leela thinks she's found someone from her planet (back when she thought she was an alien). The first edition, Wreck It Ralph, played off the notion of playing into stereotypes, being who people assumed you to be, how to change that, and how friendship can exist and grow in that environment. I had low expectations and ended up thinking it was great.

I had tempered expectations for this movie, and it turned out pretty good. All the Disney princesses in one place was pretty entertaining. Ultimately it was about letting go...and the visuals are great.

It was up against Incredibles 2 for an Oscar this year. Both lost out.

The winner:

Beating out Incredibles 2 and Ralph Breaks the Internet? It must be pretty good...

We watched it recently with Cass (he kept seeing it in the instant queue on Netflix and eventually we put it on). We were trying something new for Fridays since our favorite Friday night restaurant closed. So we put it on and made finger foods.

Holy smokes is it good! The animation got to the point of being so realistic that they could get funky with it. Backgrounds sway into and out of focus, shading will occasionally be the dot forms you'd see in comics, and the actual real world seems manifested in the colorful blobs making up the distance. The animation is more cutting edge and experimental than I was expecting, and while Pixar and Disney do very special things with animation, with the craft and the storytelling, nothing they've put out pushes the edge of design like this Spider-Man project. 

The story leans into the weirdness, but has heart and humor and what feels like real stakes. It almost makes me want to go find some Miles Morales Spider-Man comics, because I know they exist.

There's definitely no reason to be upset at this Oscar outcome. 

Velociraptor, We Hardly Knew Ye

The NBA Finals are over and we should celebrate the Raptors:

I'm only half kidding. I don't hate the Toronto Raptors, even as I've been rooting like crazy for this Oakland basketball team for years now, ever since we saw them play in Portland in 2014, before they ever won any championships.

I went with this silly topic because that Toronto Raptor logo from their inaugural year, 1995, was clearly based on our favorite baddies from the 1993 film Jurassic Park, as classic now as it was 26 years ago.

My son loves it. He just turned three, and maybe I shouldn't have let him watch it?

Even in the reboot/sequel Jurassic World, the raptors haven't changed:

I mean, the graphics improved, and maybe they don't use puppets like they did for the closeups in '93, but essentially they're the same.

And they're totally wrong.

As in, those aren't velociraptors.

You may have heard this story by now: Michael Crichton liked the name "velociraptor" more than "deinonychus," which is what he based the actual character on. (DI-non-i-kus, if you're curious.)

I was looking through one of Cass's dinosaur books and saw what I was sure was the raptor, but it was labeled deinonychus. (That kinda lead to this dive, actually.)

Now, knowing that the name is wrong is only half the story, as in now we know, from analysis of the skeletons, that all of these dinosaurs were feathered.

Check out the re-imagining of our good pal deinonychus:

Wait...

So, okay, I get the new feathered look supplanting the outdated dinosaur-y look (is it nostalgia to prefer the dinosaur-y look?), but the size scale seems off. Is this size scaled correctly, because that doesn't seem like the movie character dinosaur?

I'm not the only person think that, apparently, since as I dove down the hole on this topic, there raged an argument online over whether or not Crichton used deinonychus or some other dromaesauridae example, that being the overarching family of theropods raptors belonged to.

It sounds like the consensus has shifted away from deinonychus---it was too small for the character from the book and not from Mongolia---and onto the achillobator: it was properly sized and seems to have been found, like velociraptor itself, in Mongolia.

Check it:

Here's an artist's rendition with feathers and with the older school face, sort of melding the two designs:

Could an animal's face actually look like that if the rest of them was radically different than originally imagined?

Here's a different artist's rendition, with a more updated look for the face:

What about the cool-named velociraptor itself? It was closer in size and girth to a turkey:

A gang of them could probably have taken down a person, but I'd take my chances with one of those old-school hard-metal rakes.

Check out the little cutey:

Their feathers may have been even more colorful...

The quill knobs, features on bones that anchored feathers, are the reason paleontologists today know so much about the feathers of any dinosaur that's considered feathered. The actual raptors, like these velociraptors, had strong enough quill knobs on their bones that they could have easily been used to glide across treetops.

Speaking truth to childhood imaginations:

I found this image and I think it's very cool. I wanted to share it, but it's not my creation. It also has some incorrect scaling, like it wasn't in on the deinonychus/achillobator sizing discussions, but so what, it's beautiful:

It collects the main bulk of the different types of raptors, gives them more accurate looks, and does a rather good job scaling them, previously stated differences of opinion notwithstanding.

To bring this discussion back to the NBA, the sole Canadian team, and reigning champs, also have a really cool, updated, logo:

Italian Post Script: Two Things

Thing, the First:

A Conversation

I forgot to mention a conversation that Corrie and I had while on the train to the beach on the last full day.

Riding trains all over both Rome and Naples one will see, on the occasion of being above ground, what the population centers of the city look like. And they're buildings, tall, tall buildings.

Riding through Naples above ground, I got to thinking about where we'd been in Rome and in the quick hours in Palermo and Naples: one thing you never saw were houses, like single family, single story homes. Maybe there are neighborhoods like that somewhere, but we certainly never saw any.

I remembered a conversation I had with Norm's birth mom, or rather, I remember her reaction to a photo from Marc's place in the East Village in Manhattan: "I can't believe people would want to live that close together," she'd said with a shudder.

Is this an American thing, I asked Corrie, is the idea of living in your own little house, with some outdoor space close by, like in a "sub-urban" area of like-designed places, is that an American thing? Do they have those here, tidy little neighborhoods with rows of yards and single-family homes?

She laughed with a twinge of scoff and educated me on Levittown, the name given to William Levitt's housing developments, originally in Pennsylvania. This was the first "suburbia," and Levitt needed to convince townships that the folks in overcrowded inner cities (and let's remember that he means WHITE people in overcrowded inner cities) would love to move into these sub-urban neighborhoods. Time has proved him correct for America.

Suburbia is an uniquely American invention, and that's why, NO, you don't really find anything like that---sprawling areas of sparsely populated neighborhoods---in big European cities.

Thing, the Second

European Hygiene

So...Italians seem to have only a passing interest in using deodorant, and this extends to most of Europe in my memories, and I have no reason to believe that things have changed that dramatically.

I was having the conversation with Lola on the first day we were running around looking for quick food for dinner as we grappled with jet-lag and the like. What you need to reconcile, I told her, as an American in Europe, isn't that everyone has a problem with showering and using deodorant (or not indulging in either), but that WE Americans have a problem with excessive cleanness.

It is us that have the problem, not them. We care too much with being clean and smelling "fresh." Tough sell with an American teenage girl.

But tough sell for me as well, when I find bidets in every single bathroom in apartments, and nearly every single public toilet.

Remember what a bidet is?

It's right next to the toilet and is used to spray water directly on your ass after you drop a deuce. Toilet paper? Sure, they have some, but it's usually terrible, but nice cloths loaded up next to the bidet let you know: you're better off washing and drying your ass instead of wiping it.

Shower? Pass. Deodorant? You silly Americans. 

But super clean buttholes?

Oohhhhh-kaaaay.

First Trip to the Cinema

We took Cassius to the movies for the first time ever. Sure, he's seen movies on our television, but this was in the theater.with reclining seats and popcorn and candy treats.

It's funny how generations work.

My Grandpa Tom, my mother's dad, was always late to things, which caused my mom to be early to everything---multiple hours for flights (in the decades before 9/11), and nearly an hour before for movies.

At theaters, while early, we never got food or quarters to play video games at the arcade. Here my mom would quote her dad, "You don't come to the movies to eat or horse around. You come to watch a movie."

Affected by her dad in both directions.

Because my mom was so early to movies, Corrie and I while in college would stay at the bar until just before needing to get to the theater. The results were mixed at best.

Now that we have a kid that we've started bringing to the movies, we'd like to highlight the differences from home: this is where you do get treats like candy and popcorn. We do make popcorn at home, on the stove-top since we don't have a microwave, but candy just isn't a staple around here.

We joined his little buddy Ari and his parents at the theater so the boys could see their first movie together: we all saw Toy Story 4.

Italian Adventure Table of Contents

Here we go, all jump links (as in, they will take you away from this page without it going away):

1. Cass's Roman Birthday
2. Introduction
3. Day Zero
4. Days Before the Conference
5. International Pynchon Week, 2019
6. California Slang in Rome
7. Social Dinner
8. Temple of Minerva
9. Things I love about Rome
10. Operation Sicily: Intro
11. Numbers Fun & History
12. Siricusa
13. Answering Questions
14. Day Trip: Argrigento
15. Collesano
16. Day Trip: Cefalu'
17. Day Trip: Palermo
18. Arriving in Napoli
19. Day Trip: Pompeii
20. Neapolitan Impressions
21. Returning
22. Communication Stressors
23. Epilogue

I've added my last post and updated this. Thanks!

    24. Postscript 

Italian Adventure Epilogue

This is broken up into different parts:

1. Food
2. Traveling with Kids
3. Photo Dump
4. Final Impression

But let's just start with Mr. Cool:

1. Food

There's two aspects to this: grocers and restaurants. In the grocery stores or tiny fruit stands, what stood out was the cost (less than home) vs the quality (higher than home). Some of the smaller fruit places had more questionable selections, as in more pieces on the edge of turning and some that had even turned.

While some people would consider this gross, I saw it s a good sign, as in this produce isn't grown from seeds that are spliced with all sorts of crazy animal DNA to extend their shelf life: it was, eh, non-GMO, maybe because Monsanto doesn't own the rights to all Europeans's food.

The restaurants next to the entrances and exits of major tourist attractions were noticeably bad: poor quality and high prices.

If you ask New Yorkers where pizza was invented, they will tell you right there in the City. But most other people will tell you Naples. While we were there we had plenty of examples, and they were all great. Some more great than others, but all serviceable.

In Rome, early on in the trip, we went to a place and ordered pizza. Big deal, right? Only this pizza had been made on large rectangular sheet trays, the lady would cut pieces with scissors, and charge you by weight.

Also in Rome we got to eat nice doner-kabab (fourteen years waiting for that). These guys put french fries inside, and wrapped them up like burritos instead of stuffed pitas. Times have surely changed.

Corrie and Lola found gelato almost everyday for them and for Cass. I had some. It was good. But dairy in the middle of the day isn't my thing. I remember the shocked look on Lola's face when I told her, truthfully, that had I come to the Pynchon conference alone, I would not have had any gelato whatsoever.

2. Traveling with Kids

Lola had a habit of asking us what our favorite (fill in the blank) was so far. Dinners, locations, coffee places, gelato...also high school classes, college classes, educational stuff like that. 

We had hoped that having Lola with us would giver her a chance to get to bond with Cass and maybe even help us shoulder the load of kiddo-work.

Eh, that was a miscalculation. Now, I work with over a hundred teenagers every day, so I'm used to the annoying things that they do, being sociopathic narcissists and all. Spoiled princesses I don't get as much, but kids with trauma at home I do get, and Lola was just one teenager, so it was nearly refreshing for me. Less so for Corrie, who doesn't put up with crap like that ever, especially never having been the spoiled princess. Lola's mom having passed a few years back has shaded how the adults in her circle treat her, and she wasn't prepared for Corrie's not suffering princesses.

We were hoping she would have at least been more mature than Cass, and the fact that there were times where she wasn't made our job harder.

Tell me body language means nothing, and I'll show you this picture:

I'm glad she came and shared in our adventure. She had her own adventure as well, and she'll remember it fondly. To be fair to that picture above, this was very early in the trip while she was still adjusting to Auntie Corrie and Uncle Pat, and not being at home anymore, and this might have even been the barfing day. Because she hadn't been eating food and spent Cass's birthday in bed at the Roman apartment watching downloaded episodes of Criminal Minds, the next day she threw up (a lot) outside of the Colosseum (I heard), the foamy vomit of someone not eating. Corrie knew she hadn't been eating, waited for her to finish, and said: "Are you done? Do you need a minute? We got a lot of stuff to do...so..."

Then she asked what had she been eating, and they had a conversation about the need for calories in a bad way, and from that day on, early in the trip, she eased into having us around as her minders.

We knew how Cass was going to be, or at least live with him and could assume to understand how he could react to things, and I think the trip would have been easier with just the three of us, but it was good for Cass to have Lola around, better than her having Cass around.

But, for what its worth, she is a bright and driven young lady, and she'll surely mature in high school; she starts this fall in the 9th grade.

3. More Photos

There are some pictures I liked but didn't use before.

Victor took this after he dropped us off at the airport:

Three year old with the passport picture of a five month old:

Please, pleas, please start using the toilet; this isn't good for either of us (from the airplane):

Day one walkabout, at the wall:

Birthday at the Spanish Steps, non selfie:

"Wedding Cake" Building:

Marcus Aurelius Palazzo:

The remnants of the first brewery in Rome, brought in by the pope, because the Romans drank too much wine and slashed each other too often, and beer has less alcohol than wine. Makes sense to me. From San Lorenzo:

San Lorenzo density:

The main square in San Lorenzo, the site of weddings, funerals, christenings, and now a thriving drug market at night:

A mural on the remnants of a bombing casualty from WWII. The US refrained from bombing Rome because 1) it didn't have a ton of strategic value; and 2) it did have the Pope, and the US had lots of Catholic soldiers and din't want to hurt morale. Eventually they did bomb San Lorenzo:

Driving through a small town in Sicily on the way to Siricusa:

A rusted rail and the ocean, Ortigia Island:

Apollo's Temple, the oldest ruins on Ortigia Island:

Archimedes Square, daytime:

Running...

Largest modern church and symbol of modern Syracuse, not on Ortigia Island:

Cool fountain detail:

Dionysius Cave selfie:

Modern building, ancient island:

Main public square, Pompeii, Vesuvius in the background, Cassius in the foreground:

4. Final Impressions

I love Italy. I could live there, but I would need to seriously take a stab at getting enough Italian to get around. 

One of the reasons we moved to a big city from SLO in 2006 was to mentally prepare for a move across the Atlantic, and while our goals and plans have changed in the dozen plus years since then, the drive to really live in a place like that grows with each visit.

And by "live there", I really just mean Rome. I could stay on Ortigia Island for a while, and the same goes for Collesano, but I guess I've got the big city itch.

Is Rome a downgrade from Berlin? Zurich? Prague? Paris?

To answer: no, maybe, no, yes...

In Asia and Central America the smell of burning garbage wafts on the breeze, and we find it somewhat comforting. In the urban areas in Europe, that smell is replaced with Diesel and cigarette smoke, and while it's less comforting, it's a reminder that we're not in the proverbial Kansas anymore.

So grab a Tennent's Super, relax a bit, and just watch the city bustle to its own beat:

You'll only miss the rat race.

Communication Stressors

Back in 2005, when young heads backpacked through Europe, all you had to worry about was securing your train ride out of town, figuring out public transit, finding an Internet cafe at some point early in a city just to book a spot in the next city, and where to find cheap beer and smokes. You know what fixes jetlag? ALCOHOL.

Today is a whole new world, and it probably should be, because I'm talking about technology, and fourteen years in tech is long.

There are no Internet cafes anymore. Maybe...in Romania...but come on, most everybody has a super computer in their pocket, capable of finding and booking an night's stay almost anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. It can also arrange rides by nearly any means, and even connect you with any person of your choice in the chain of people you may have to interact with to make all those things I just mentioned realities.

But what if your pocket super computer just won't connect? What if it can connect only to one specific thing (wifi) that isn't always reliable, or present in public places? What if even though you paid to have your device be ready to accept non-wifi networks, it still won't allow you access to mobile data?

That's pretty much what we faced, and I was reminded over and over again how stupidly reliant humans are on these devices.

In Rome, as we sat on the stoop in the heat waiting until when we thought our host was due to arrive and let us in, unable to message him, Corrie found some buried email message in which he did mention which button to buzz (none of them were numbered, and none of the printed names were this persons). He was inside, waiting for a call or our buzzing the door.

In Villa San Giovanni, our second stay, we found the apartment, but without wifi we couldn't message the host that we were outside. We needed to be on a  mobile network to have access to the AirBnB messaging. They had a phone number listed, and I called it a few times, checking and rechecking the number, only to be told it wasn't a cromulent number. Corrie went walkabout, looking for a restaurant or bar with wifi ("bars" in Italy aren't the same as in the US; sure they sell beer, maybe even liquor, but they're mostly a place to get a bite to nosh on, maybe a coffee, maybe make a bet on some races). After a time I left Lola in the car with a sleeping toddler to go find Corrie, only to be approached by the hosts. I went inside, got the tour and the keys and the instructions, all with no idea where Corrie was.

In Siracusa similar things happened: Lola and I were posted up in the car with Cass and Corrie was off for a while. I was parked illegally and had to move so often that I just started doing laps between the tiny. Somehow Corrie found the lady after finding the spot.

We were so late leaving Agrigento, and had no way of informing our host in Collesano that we were going to be a few hours later than originally planned. We returned to the city proper after driving away from it for a while and after a failed attempt to use a gas station's wifi. We drove around increasingly smaller and smaller streets, ending up in the old-town area (only newer than the temples) until we spotted a "Free wifi" sticker on a cafe's door. Lola and I went inside, I ordered an espresso while Lola doe-eyed the hot baristo, and sent a quick message: sorry, we'll be late. At least a restaurant in Collesano helped out.

In Napoli the instructions were a little more clear, and the gates were open, and that building had a large inner courtyard where kids played and older folks eyeballed everyone who entered. Because we buzzed the "Blue Room" as labeled, the lady there was able to lean out and beckon us, not needing the services of the cadre of residents ready to let her know her tourist guests were there.

That's basically the arrival story of every single place we stayed during the entire trip, and each one had a built in headache because of tech limitations. In one sense, these damn glass rectangles (as I call them at work) have made the reality of international travel just that: a reality. Depending on circumstantial limitations, they can also cause a maddening level of annoyance and stress, and could have really done worse than hinder us.

But look at those stories, also, for the underlying theme: it worked out, through luck, or the good graces of nice people, and isn't that the real essence of this whole endeavor?

If you leave your own little world and go out adventuring in other people's little worlds with honesty and righteousness in your heart, that's how the world will treat you back.

At least that's what we want to believe, and this trip was evidence to that. Our trips produced evidence like this before: how about "Frontera! Frontera! Frontera!" in Guatemala or the motor bikes in Part 7 in Vietnam, or the crazy nice people we met in Paris in 2005...

Changing Hemispheres; Norwegian Air; New Movies

The last full day at the beach in Napoli saw all of us get some sun. For my wife and son, who share a smidgen of native American blood, this amounted to teamster-burn for him (that was more a tan than a burn) and some red coloration for her on the skin above the bikini top and below her neck. The next day it was bronze. Our niece is half native, and while she's rather fair skinned overall, it was barely noticeable.

My skin had gone past red into the dangerous, sounds-like-wrapping-paper stage. Oh how we all laughed about this turn of events.

The next day was fun. Carrying the backpack wasn't that bad, but the strap on the car-seat felt like it was trying to cut my head off at the neck for the entire walk.

We headed out early to catch that express train to Rome, and less than two hours later we were there. Then we made it to the airport on another train, and then we made it through security after checking as much as we possibly could, and we would have made my mother proud: we had a few hours to spend before boarding would start.

We were so early we didn't even have a gate assignment. While that was mildly annoying, it was way less stressful waiting at the airport than risking taking the slightly later train from Naples---not an express---and pushing our arrival time in Rome far too close to our departure time for comfort.

Cass and I played on the escalator for nearly an hour. Play may not be the right word, because it wasn't dangerous really, just up and down and up and down, big jump big step big jump big step.

They had a snackery, of course, by our gate when it was finally assigned, and they even had a toy delivery truck kids could sit in:

That was lots of fun until he realized he could reach those sugary treats from where he was sitting.

This was the anticipation time. Are you nervous because you're about to get on a crazy long flight with an obviously over tired and/or over stimulated little boy? NOPE.

I've been on flights when young humans are having a rough go, and making it rough for those close by. Dang, I used to think, hate to be that parent.

Now that I've been that parent, and the prospect was about to happen again, I realized the score from this side. If you have no kids, I'm about to tell you the truth, and if you have kids, tell me I'm wrong:

WE DO NOT GIVE TWO SHITS ABOUT YOU AND YOUR PROBLEMS WITH OUR WAILING KID. You got a problem with it? Really? Well, SO DO I. Do you have suggestions? I'm open to ideas. Either it will be awesome and helpful or it will be ridiculous and stupid, but there's only one way to find out, and if you've got the balls to say something, you better hope it's effing awesome. Your dirty looks fuel my eye-rolls and no, my kid didn't shit his pants, I've been farting for the last three hours.

I joke, for sure, but only a little. Cass did way better on the second flight, the trip home. He slept for, like six hours maybe, which benefited everybody around us, except me and Corrie. We were even more uncomfortable than ever. But it didn't matter, because the Boy was sleeping.

Because we left in the late afternoon and flew west...well, north of west, as we flew over Greenland and the Hudson Bay, over Manitoba and the Dakotas on the way into LA, it only really got dark when we landed, around 8 pm. It was pretty much daytime the entire flight.

And this was a good segue into the nifty windows on our plane: they had no plastic shade to open and shut. They had a dimmer function that would darken the windows to a specified darkness that you could control. When the plane was put into night-night mode---around 9 pm local time in Rome---all of the windows dimmed to essentially black and the cabin lights were negligible. When someone even opted to brighten his window, they'd come by and basically force them to return to blackout.

I thought that was neat.

On the first flight one of the stewards sounded and acted like a sociopath, and the crew's habit of wearing leather gloves didn't help him not look like he was about to strangle you. The second flight they were slightly better.

The video screens in the chairs had all sorts of movies and games. There were New, Classic, TV, Documentary, Kids...most of it was dreck, but I did catch two movies I'd never seen before and was interested in seeing, one on the way there and one coming home. Oddly enough I watched Inception afterwards in both trips, but heading to Rome I wasn't listening to it because of Cassius, and I couldn't remember why the kids are in, like, every scene, which prompted a more attention-heavy viewing coming home.

Anyway, on the way there, I watched for the first time "Dog Day Afternoon." It had been edited for language and looked like it had been cut up for commercial breaks, but oh my goodness is it great! I love the randomness of John Cazale's film acting career. A prominent and beloved stage actor, John Cazale appeared in only three movies in his entire life before the cancer took him, and all three of them were nominated for best film at the Oscars: this movie, where he plays Sal, Al Pacino's partner in the bank robbery; and the first two Godfather movies, where he's Fredo.

A few things I didn't realize about the movie were the truthfulness behind the story; how funny it can be, especially in the beginning; and I had no idea about the twist in the middle. It makes sense that it must have been pretty edgy when it came out in 1975, and why it was lauded and put in the National Registry in the Library of Congress as an important artifact. If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor.

On the way home I got to watch (mostly uninterrupted) "Suicide Squad." I'd heard all sorts of things about it, and very few of those things were positive. A colleague who I knew desperately wanted to like it had some good things to say, but it was mostly, "It's not that bad...Jared Leto as Joker, though..." and he shook his head.

I thought the biggest problem was that it didn't really know what it was trying to do, or what it wanted to be. It was very uneven. The scenes with Will Smith are a microcosm of the whole thing: in certain scenes he's the mouthy anti-hero the movie seems built for, in other scenes it's a tragic story of an incarcerated father, and in other scenes he's angry and enslaved, and we're not sure if that's good or bad.

The guy from Altered Carbon is the main military boss of the rag-tag team of bad-guys (good) but they don't seem to flesh out his relationship with the girl who is also the main antagonist (bad---because if it's not believable, does anything matter and do you give a shit?). Margo Robie as Harley Quinn is great, but her accent is all over the place, which is jarring, and sucks, because we know from "I, Tonya" that she can absolutely nail at least one American accent.

But the character of Harley Quinn in the movie is total bullshit, which leads to possibly the worst crime the movie commits: it makes a totally shitty, unlikable Joker. No wonder they cut his scenes precipitously. The fire guy, Diablo, could be the best character in the movie. In the beginning, at least.

I may bellyache here, but I plan on watching it again, just so Corrie and I can have this same conversation. And we will definitely be watching Dog Day Afternoon.

***

I'd wanted to put the discussions of the new movies in with this other, plane stuff because...because an entire post complaining about Suicide Squad in the narrative about our Italian adventure seems out of place.

Victor picked us up in the gloriously chilled air of June-gloom, LAX. It was maybe 68 degrees, and I'd been feeling like the planet forgot what a relaxing breeze could be.

The movies felt like bookends to the trip, and I fought the temptation to discuss Dog Day Afternoon in the opening few posts, even though I'd planned on it after we arrived in Rome.

Now we're back, and the adjustment is mostly taken, as it's been exactly a week now.

Neapolitan Impressions

Napoli is gross. Maybe not everywhere, but...

Some of the simple things to notice are that southern Italy (Rome included) is not as developed as in the north, and that usually pushes itself into your face with easy symbols like tobacco smoking.

Everyone smoked cigarettes. Maybe that's hyperbole, but it sure didn't seem like it. From Rome to Calabria to Sicily to Naples, people smoked cigarettes all the time in as many places as allowable, and even some that were suspect.

One cute image I was too tasteful to not photograph was in our neighborhood in Naples: a large man, lit cigarette in his mouth, hoisted his toddler into the space between his legs on his motor scooter while his wife, I presumed, also smoking, hoisted an even younger toddler onto the back of the chair behind the dad, and then climbed on herself, and off they zoomed.

Also, some supercool things you see in Collesano and Naples (as in those were the places I remember putting eyes on them) were toddlers and babies in the arms of passengers riding shotgun in cars.

Where we stayed in Naples was the al Virgeni neighborhood, which sprouted right outside the old-city walls, much to the chagrin of the Spanish overlords. They were basically tenements, but that vocabulary didn't exist. They were full of immigrant and newly freed people, dense and disease ridden, and quickly full of crime.

Naples has the distinction of being one of the longest continuously inhabited cities on earth. It is the third largest city in Italy, after Rome and Milan, and I read that it has the 99% Italian-born population, which is another distinction for a city of 1.5 million.

Where we stayed must have been home to that 1%, and while it may have been quite safe, it was one of the few spots where we actively kept an eye out for pickpockets. The fact there were signs posted all over telling us as much may have added to the ominous feeling in the air, but maybe not.

The streets in our zone were small and paved with large and very slick pavers; the sidewalks were only 20 inches long most of the time, and, despite the skinny streets, traffic was a crazy mix of Mr. Toad in cars and Evel Kneivel on motor-scooters roaring by and making Cass jump every half second.

I think that Naples would be an interesting place to spend more time visiting. I think that it's gross, and I think those ideas can coexist. I just won't do it again with two minors I'm in charge of.

One annoying thing is that the subway isn't a unified metro system, as in there are separate tickets and entrances to train tunnels and rails sometimes in the same exact location. It made me think of what New York must have been like a hundred years ago, with separately operated train lines.

I just figured that a city with, like, five-thousand years on New York would have figured something like that out by now, but that's a me problem.

The picture we got, though, were pretty cool:

Pigeon chasing

A traffic picture, but they never seem to capture the madness:

Largest and most protected sidewalk in a two mile radius

On the walk from our place to basically anywhere else took us by the next building, which turned out to be a practice attempt by a famous Italian architect for a bigger idea, and for a long time this was the most famous and biggest home in the neighborhood:

Know for the distinctive double stairway, it fell into disrepair a century ago, maybe, and now looks like an apartment building. That might be a pretty cool stay.

In any case, the statues above the door are either voluptuous or pregnant, and either's cool by me:

This image, the gentleman in the bowler smoking, seemed to be in multiple places, but the significance remains unknown to me. At least here, the trash is visible, because it was pretty much everywhere:

As we were getting ready to leave, Corrie said, "I don't want to jinx it, but I can't wait to get the hell outta here." It was about then that I started to put words on the eerie vibes I'd been getting from this city. She also said that nowhere during this trip, not in Rome (which she too also realized an enthusiasm for) and not anywhere in Sicily, did she get bad vibes from a place like she had in Naples.

"It's like...Detroit...or Gary, Ind...but only if those cities were in Alabama or Mississippi."

It was an astute observation.

I had just assumed it was the lateness of our visit relative to the trip up until then, but she was on to something.

Anyway, the next day we spent at the beach, taking two separate train lines to a beach in the north of the city. The sand was abusively hot, but the water was super nice.

Afterwards we packed and tried to mentally prepare for the next day: express train 140 miles to Rome, a different train o the airport, and the flight home. The time was nearing to catch up with our past.

Day Trip to Pompeii

When my brother and I were kids we were gifted, or came into possession, a box with National Geographic VHS cassettes of their special programs. Maybe it was just a single cassette, because either the first one we saw, or the only one we had, was the episode about Mt. Vesuvius destroying Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Seeing those poor people frozen by the ash in the throes of death fascinated the hell out of me. Our cabin in the mountains is in the vicinity of a live volcano that last erupted in 1914, so images of volcanic activity were already in my imagination.

But with Vesuvius, criminy, two cities were fully destroyed and thousands of people were killed.

That I could one day go visit the 2/3 excavated ruins of Pompeii wasn't a thing for me. Maybe it was, buried in the recesses of my brain, waiting for an opportunity to come out.

Over the years and the courses of our travels, Corrie and I have seen a great many ruins, and by the time we made it Pompeii, another stifling day with a worn out toddler, I was as ready as ever to check out the site.

Quick background that fascinated me this time around: After the eruption in August of 79 CE, some attempts to recover bronze and some other precious items were carried out, but eventually those efforts petered out in a few  months, and both Pompeii and Herculaneum were eventually lost, as in fully. From history books, from cartography, even their names. For over 1600 years both places remained forgotten. It wasn't until the late 1700s that they were rediscoverd and the excavations began. That work remains unfinished at Pompeii, as a third of the site is yet to be reclaimed.

Forgotten, for 1600 years...

We took a train down to the stop, and were accompanied by thousands of our closest tourist-sisters and brothers.

Gotta love Italian: excavation = scavi

The trip took about forty minutes, but we traveled through city the whole way, the southern hinterlands of Napoli and the northern reaches of Sorrento, all merging as one metropolitan area.

We paid for an English language walking tour which helped us skip lines, and would give both Corrie and Lola some historical background to the remaining structures. Having Cass in my purview meant I missed most of the talks; he was very interested in chasing pigeons and not doing anything else.

One thing stood out for me while at the site: it's friggin' huge! They say it clocks in at 140 acres, which sounds big, right? But in practice, that's like the Lower East Side. Check out the Google Map photo grab:

That entire oval is nearly the entire town! In the upper left quadrant you can see two roads meeting as they leave the frame. that was the route to the Villa dei Misteri, a wealthy person's coastal villa that we didn't have the energy to see. The coast used to be right up to the left flank of that oval above, but the lava floes added a few hundred meters of land, pushing the coast away.

One could easily spend a few days exploring the various neighborhoods of ancient Pompeii. We didn't have the energy nor the time, but what can you do.

Our tour started at some form of public space, Vesuvius visible off in the distance:

Much of the ruins looks like the bottom picture---house after house laid out in nice streetly rows, a dense community swallowed up by ash:

Frankly, those rows of living quarters goes on and on, in most directions, and it would be easy to get lost in the mix.

We did venture to the little theater (as opposed to the big theater), and Cass showed off his habitual line-stepping:

The little theater hosted smaller events than the large Colosseum-like large theater on the other side of town.

Many of the floor mosaics still existed in some degree of completion, like the entrance to this home showing off their pet:

Apparently the lucky charm image of Pompeii was a boner:

I'm not joking. The erect phallus and testes were mostly all over the place. On the cobbled streets you could see them pointing in a certain direction; we were told this meant that a popular prostitute lived at the end of the pointing, seeing as how prostitution was a prized and prominent profession.

Lotta' good all those boners did that August day in the year 79, am I right? Too soon?

The only bathhouse open to the viewing public was the men's, and here's a picture of both the natural light streaming in and the stacks of floor tiles designed, Corrie tells us, to keep the floor elevated so warm air could be sent underneath, keeping it heated:

Many of the corpse casts have been moved to museums, as the Italian government would like those macabre dudes like me who wanted to see them to go to separate facilities and keep the coffers full, as maintaining these sites isn't free. They did have some, though, and one of the spookiest is the following, a dog spazzing out, spazzing to death, actually, in the super-heated poisonous air of the pyroclastic flow:

Not to end on the crazy bummer of dying pets, I'll share an analogous thing from today, a crosswalk:

Well, that picture kinda sucks...the three elevated street boulders near the center frame acted as a crosswalk. The spacing between them corresponded to the wheelbase of the era's wagons and their elevation to the height of the sidewalks meant that your robes or gowns would not be in the muck of the street. Pretty cool.

Afterwards we ate at an expensive touristy restaurant right outside the exit, and then bolted for our place in Napoli. Cass was in good spirits as we waited for our return train: