2025 in Review

Here are some posts...

1. Dispatch from Dinetah
   
2. The Robots are Crossing Linden
   
3. Singularities Up Close
   
4. By Any Other Name
   
5. GOOD BOOKS
   
6. Sailing
   
7. Cabin Trip 2025
   
8. "This is America" Polemic
   
9. Gardena Cinema For Mike: Part 2
   
10. Irony on America's Family Tree
    

Happy New Year in a few days!

AGA Holiday Show 2025

Last year was our first year, and we marveled at the scope.

This year we knew what to expect, and chose an early showtime to make life easier on our Saturday (parking; the melee; post-show lunching; the remainder of the day, which itself saw a birthday party to go to).

This year we grabbed a seat more straight on that last year. Getting there early helped.

I chose up high so we could have a back of some kind to lean against.

The photos don't really do the video justice, but the show was great. It's kind of what you expect out of 5 year olds and "choreography." It's like they understand that they're supposed to be "in unison," and they're really cute. 

I filmed both balance beam routines they had. I did that because just watching them gave me more anxiety than I would have guessed, and by filming them, I found myself occupied enough that I didn't tense up.

If my daughter ever does a balance beam routine? Let's just wait for that bridge...

UCLA vs. Oregon

Camille was awarded as Student of the Month. Yay! 

And there was a Major Award that came along with that. Wait...what?

Okay...I mean, she's great, certainly, and everyone loves her and she's helpful, bright, and kind. But when she was awarded with four free tickets to Pauley Pavilion to see a UCLA game, against Oregon no less, I was like...what? She's my daughter and she's great, but for being an awesome kindergartner we get $200+ worth of basketball tickets for free?

The seats were high up, but so what? Because of a silly error with the parking app and the (angry sigh) QR code needed to pay for it all, it only cost us five bucks to park (haw-ha). Plus, it felt a lot close. Plus plus, you could see all of the UCLA banners and championship detritus:

After Oregon took a 2-0 lead, UCLA sank a three-pointer and never relinquished the lead. They bloated it up to 18 points, and frittered it away down to 2 for a quick second, but a 7-0 run after that made it more comfortable.

Camille, having been the recipient of the award to come here, lost interest quickly, and besides making it onto the jumbotron, would rather have been painting or playing make-believe.

Above Corrie looks at the certificate. This particular Saturday was the "kids awards day," and hundreds of kids up with us in the "rafters" had the same certificate. The family next to us lived in Sun Valley, which, while I don't know exactly where it is, it sounds FAR from us.

Yankee fans are known for their knowledge of the game, or maybe that should be "the game." And I think I've heard the same about UCLA basketball fans. Anyway, during this game I was surprised at how, once an Oregon player would shoot an airball (it happened occasionally), for the rest of the game, whenever they touched the ball again, the crown would loudly chant "Airball!" over and over. I understand a hearty "Airball!" when you see it live from the opposition. But for the remainder of the game? It was rough and funny and made for an amusing conversation about sportsmanship with Cass. 

Besides the drive to and from Westwood, it was an awesome time. That, and besides forgetting to invite Auntie Peg and Uncle Dan...who knows if they would've come, and who could blame them, what with the traffic nightmare that comes along with evening basketball games with rivals...but I felt like I should've at least mentioned it. 

Anyway...it was a good time!

More Irony Found Deep in America's Family Tree

I found another track in American history that seems as unlikely as it seems a necessary part of our nation's identity.

It all started with a conversation with Corrie about an activist she'd heard about. His name was Walter Francis White. He was a Black American, but had very light skin, blond hair and blue eyes. He passed for a white man in most places, but was raised by his Black parents---his mother, though, was very fair skinned with light eyes. He used this ability while younger to do research on lynchings, as police and witnesses would never hesitate tho tell him the details. 

Eventually he was found out, and after being run out of town with his life intact, he parlayed his leadership skills into helping run the NAACP and working with both FDR and Harry Truman.

It seems pretty obvious that this dude could, and likely would, pass for white in the era. But he identified as a Black man, and instead of using his appearance to live comfortably away from the degradations of the times (or really, any times?), he fought tirelessly for justice, a job made more possible by that same appearance.

And that appearance---the very light skin, blond hair and blue eyes---points to a dark part of American history that most white Americans tend to ignore. Enslaved women had no rights over their bodies, and slave-owning white men could act with impunity. However reprehensible and disgusting their behavior could be, there were no laws prohibiting that behavior.

Of Walter's 32 great-great-great grandparents, only 5 were Black enslaved people, and 27 were white. When I found a transcript from an NPR conversation with the author of a biography about Walter, it was mentioned that his great-great-great grandmother fathered six(!) children with the slave owner, one William Henry Harrison.

When I saw that printed in the sentence, I said: wait---the President? And the sentence continued on stating that this Harrison was elected as the 9th President of the United States. One thing I learned on a bit of dive on him was that he was from the Virginia Harrisons (more on them in a minute) and he was the last US president born as a British subject in the Thirteen Colonies, having been born in 1773 on one of the Harrison plantations in Virginia.

One thing I did remember about William Henry Harrison was that he died within a month of being inaugurated. Exactly a month, it turned out, with inauguration day being March 4th, and his death coming on April 4th, 1841. Of what, you might ask? What felled this slave-raping Virginia Harrison? Salmonella. Yikes. The 1840s, man! 

The Virginia Harrisons were a prominent family back in Yorkshire that came to the New World to grow their fortunes, and not a persecuted religious group like you may find in the northern colonies. The Harrisons came in two waves, and ended up with two branches laying seeds in many places. Benjamin Harrison V was a corpulent slave owning Virginian plantation owner, descended from the Benjamin Harrison who made the journey from England in 1630. Benjamin Harrison the Vth, though, was both William Henry Harrison's grandfather, and one of the signees of the Declaration of Independence. He liked to lighten the tense mood by joking, since they all viewed that signing the Declaration was really just their own death warrant. He joked that his size would make his death from hanging fast, while the skinnier men would twist in the wind and struggle for hours to die. Hilarious. He also, generally, beefed with John Adams, whom he thought was too radical, while Adams thought the wealthy scion was too conservative and enjoyed a good time too often.

William Henry Harrison's own grandson, Benjamin Harrison, himself was elected President, as the middle part of the Grover Cleveland Sandwich. There have been other prominent members of this branch of the Virginia Harrisons, like the feminist activist Mary Stuart, and the surgeon of the first successful kidney transplant, John Hartwell Harrison.

A different branch, normally called the James River Harrisons, came over a few years after Benjamin Harrison, settled in a different spot (Shenandoah Valley) and sport, as descendants, Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley. Holy hell!

The English Harrisons have a disputed history, as one claims they descended from Cnut the Viking settling in the 1300s, and another is less colorful if dating back further.

Anyway, I enjoyed the circular Americanism-irony of it all, like how Indian-killer John Parker had, as a descendant, Quanah Parker, an advocate at the federal level for all of the Southwest American tribal groups. And here we are again: slave-raping future president (who dies of salmonella poisoning) had, as a descendent, Walter White, a political and civil rights activist who worked up to the highest levels of government, trying to dismantle racism and segregation.

I should state: The Virginia Harrisons did divest their slave holdings after the Civil War, and President Benjamin Harrison was an abolitionist and has been remembered for his work to help franchise Black Americans.

Once I tried a thought experiment: did any non-royal father/son duo effect more lives than Admiral George and his son Jim Morrison, one the leader of the Navy during the Vietnam conflict and the other the frontman of the iconic band The Doors? These kinds of familial connections---the Parkers, the Harrisons, et al---make me want to maybe look a little deeper under the hood, so to speak, at the connections in America's history.

Slater Barron Across the Street

Wow. We were passing by the Art Exchange, or whatever they call it today, a gallery across Elm from us, and a large painting inside caught my attention:

It was five feet tall and more than three wide, which made it quite large looking from the street. It's expressive, and big. And I do what I can to make sure I bring the kids over to the gallery each time they have a new installation, no matter how weird or "ultra-modern" they may be. I like to expose the kids to the different artistic fruits that show up in our zone. 

But there were a series of these large (60"x40") pieces visible from the street as we walked by, and they were figures. This seems trivial, but trying to explain why a retrofitted ticker-tape machine that's connected to wi-fi and spitting out a constant stream of ephemeral internet chatter is capital-A Art to an eight-year-old and a four-year-old is a challenge. But they do grasp paintings of people.

Once we got inside, though, we could see that these were NOT paintings, rather they were constructed out of lint. Yes...laundry lint:

The level of feeling this artist, whose working name was Slater Barron, could achieve using different colored lint blew my mind. It's an achievement, surely.

After reading some of the literature they had on hand the picture began to fill in. Slater Barron was an artist who came to be called the Lint Lady specifically for these large scale lint pieces. They exist as a series and seem to all be named "Mother, 19XX", where each one is from a different year, mostly consecutively, like from 1983 to 1990. Her mom had Alzheimer's and they found her on the street, and maybe she'd been there for a bit. They got her into a facility that could care for her until she passed.

Slater Barron's given name was Marylou Slater, and as an artist in the 1960s and '70s, she realized that she'd never be taken seriously because of the obvious gendering of her name, so she took her husband's last name, Barron, and adopted a moniker using her last name with her husbands, so as to not be immediately dismissed.

She worked with different artistic media, worked trying to get respect for LA's art scene in the shadows of the NY scene, and tried to raise awareness for Alzheimer's research and the disease's impact on the family's of those suffering from it. Unfortunately she passed in 2020.

Here's her website if you'd like to see anything else about her. The installation will be up until January across the street, and I'd love to return.

Thanksgiving in Solvang Once Again

 Last year was possibly the first part of a tradition? Possibly?

Anyway, we made the trip to Solvang to celebrate Thanksgiving once again with my Auntie Anne and Uncle Val. Once again I made turkey and broccoli and greens and buttermilk pie. Once again we watched football and movies at unseemly decibel levels, and once again Uncle Val showed Cass a few pointers and then let him run amok on a video game, this time the FPS Battlefield 6. Cass may prove to be a natural.

This time the sky was beautiful and largely cloudless.

But the kids remain obsessed with the dogs:

And dog zones:

But nobody else made the trip this year, so there was less stress about the food amounts, but also less collective love to wade through.

We left Friday night around 8 pm, and made it back to our apartment in 2 hours, while it took us nearly 4.5 to get there Tuesday afternoon.

All in all it was a great trip and a good time.

Events with the Boy

Corrie suggested that Cass and I do this thing together, and I thought it would be a fun time and was a great idea, so I got the tickets and we decided to have a date night, just Cass and me:

It was a screening of Home Alone and the "Nostalgic Evening with Macaulay Culkin." It was at the Terrace Theater at the end of Long Beach Blvd, down the street from our place. We got dressed up and walked to the show:

Cass got a whole slew of compliments on his outfit. Which was pretty cool. (Looks like I need to cut down on the late night beers...).

We sat up in the loge area and a cool view:

I was surprised by the number of people who were itching to say the "Keep the change, ya' filthy animal" line. People laughed and cheered, and the times were fun.

Afterwards, during the forty-five-ish minutes that Macaulay spoke (aka: answered questions from a host), we learned a few things:

• His two kids love Home Alone, but neither know that he was Kevin McCalister; but, his oldest was looking a family photo from the early '90s and said, "Hey, that little boy looks like Kevin."
• Macaulay still seems to have beef---or rough feelings---about Jon Lovitz and gladly talked what seemed like legitimate shit about him at this sit-down.
• To dispel the rumors that Joe Pesci bit his finger during the shoot---when they have him stuck up on the door and Pesci's Harry is ready to bite his fingers off---Macaulay spilled the beans: Pesci did NOT bite him during the take, he bit him during rehearsal, and Big Mac still has scars/marks from it.

I highly enjoyed the time. Cass and I explored the center, got turned away when we went too far, rode the elevator all over, and down to a rather terrifying corridor underneath the parking garage, and then, when it was all over, we got to just walk home and away from the traffic jam that was created by the exiting masses.

It made me excited for the times when Cass will be older and we can get into different, more wild shenanigans.

Life Day Celebration at Gardena Cinema

Last time it was for the Temple of Doom.

That was two years ago, back in November of '23. This year the invite was for an endurance double feature, our boy Mike, the erstwhile comic shop owner, current comic-book writer, comic book writing professor, and drug counselor, having the itch to return to his friend's family movie theater.

In 2023, it was Mike's favorite movie, Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom. Last year he had festivities at a different location. This year, the party was a few days after the proper birthday, and the first film of the double feature was "A Disturbance in the Force." This is a very entertaining documentary about the infamous "Star Wars: Holiday Special."

I learned so much. I picked up a bootleg of the Holiday Special at a comic convention back in 2012 as a gift for my brother. I watched as I drank gin, and, if you read the link above about that bootleg, you'll see all the cliches about trashing that program. Had I seen the documentary, I would have said different things.

Not to spoil ALL the conclusions from the documentary, but: back in 1977, when the movie became the biggest things EVER (it seemed), studios had very low opinions about audiences and, therefore, had the characters and costumes and masks in all sorts of shows that are, eh, regrettable by how serious the universe is taken today. Some were laughable (Donnie and Marie), some cringy (all of them, but Lawrence Welk!), and some made sense (Richard Pryor and the costumes of Mos Eisley).

Anyway, two groups---George Lucas and the filmmakers team vs the variety show team---began work on the project. Lucas was there for one day, for a total of 12 hours, and they were, by all accounts, very productive and inspiring. It didn;t take very long before all of the filmmaking side were gone, and the variety show people were the only ones left.

In the end, the length of the special went from an hour (so, about 46-47 minutes of content), to an hour and a half, to two hours. Yikes! Harvey Korman plays 3(!) separate characters! Bea Arthur sings a song! Art Carney saved the production when he was sober!

So, after this funny and engaging documentary, we sat and watched the Holiday Special, having the knowledge of what was happening and who was making the scenes and the feelings of most people who worked on it...and it wasn't terrible!

Okay...it's kinda terrible. But it isn't as incomprehensible as I remember. It follows a structure that makes a level of sense, and isn't so wrong as to wreck the sacred canon. It's not...good, but it's certainly not as bad as my post about the bootleg makes it sound. And seeing it on the big screen was a treat.

The lava lamp intermission count-down screen was pretty dope.

If you have a local independent theater near you, and you like movies, you should go and give them your patronage as often as you can. They will surely appreciate it.

Happy Life Day!

It's almost official now!

Bowling!

Bowling has changed a bit in the ensuing years since I last went. I, um, don't even remember the last time I went bowling...it may have been with an old pal Dylan back in Sac between '99 and heading back to San Luis in '00. Anyway, it got expensive!

Corrie found a Group-On and we made a Saturday afternoon of it.

One of the cooler changes was about the bumper lanes. Maybe this is old hat to all the bowling enthusiasts out there, but you can program the bumper lanes to show up for any individual bowler automatically, and then they'll pop down as needed to return the game to the normal gutter-ball-is-allowed play.

Cass did pretty well for his first time. We played two games as a family, then Camille and Corrie went off to the arcade to play (as per a Corrie promise). Cass was locked in and played most of the game we played together without bumpers (which lead to some gutter-balls):

Corrie and I both had a few strikes and a few more spares, and my second game was the best score of the day, at 145 or so. Camille was awesome, cradling the ball like a spherical baby, running towards the line, and launching it with both arms.

We had so much fun! I could see us making a routine of it somehow...is there a club instead of the drastic and severe pricing? Family fun time!

Low-Fi Halloween Decorations

If you stroll around the big-box hardware stores---Home Droots; Lowe's, etc---or other big-box department stores, the Halloween decorations can get crazy...big animatronic displays, priced in the hundreds of dollars. These things are awesome, but they seem very baroque.

Sometimes the most charming decorations are some of the lowest tech versions...like the ballon tied to the drainage gutter in the neighborhood where we take the kids to trick-or-treat:

There were hundred of kids out in this neighborhood last night, as it's a very popular place for the holiday. You can check this post from last year to get a sense for the Candy Zone 3 for Apartment Families. But, even in our neighborhood, across the street, we've had a presence keeping watch for a month now:

As for us...I finally had a costume I felt interested in wearing for the first time in years...Bob Ferguson, from One Battle After Another. Camille was an axolotl and Cass was a Roman gladiator.

Corrie wore one the softball team shirts from my mom and brought her whistle, and played "softball coach" while we followed around the kids. One person recognized my outfit, and that made it worth it.

Anyway, I've got game 7 on in the background, and it'll probably be over by the time you read this. World Series, Game 7. Somethings are pretty wild.

Busy Weekends, Part 918

Is 918 really the edition we're on for this heading? Why not...

Friday night was a volleyball game at the Blue Pyramid:

But that's more of an establishing shot of our little burg. Up close it's a little more imposing:

Inside is pretty cool:

The seats we had were general admission, and they were great:

Long Beach State battled University of Hawai'i, but 'battled' may be a bit of a stretch, as LBSU swept the match 3 games to 0.

The next day, Cass and Corrie had a volleyball game of their own, and since all the players from the VolleyRaptors, their awesome team name, were at the Pyramid with us, they all got to see each other again a few hours later.

Since Camille was adamant about not going, we chilled at home and got ready for the No King's protest we would bike to once they got home.

Civic action  at its finest: with the youth fully involved.

But, the ocean was in view, which was nice...

Sunday could be my busiest day of the week generally speaking, what with laundry, grocery shopping, the floors (on a good(bad?) day), on top of whatever other cool family stuff we're doing (cashing in free lunch prizes; going to the beach; more bike riding; et al).

Anyway, as busy as it gets, I wouldn't change it for anything...

What are we watching here?

I've been watching baseball for a long time. I've been a fan for possibly longer, and growing up in a Yankees household from my dad, and a Dodgers household from my mom, lead me to being overtly familiar with "Evil Empires(TM)" charges. But...

I've been blessed with watching Jeter kick ass forever in the highest leverage positions. Watching Big Mo kill it every single time except for one. Watching Matsui go-go-Godzilla it in 2009. I got the complicated extra-inning Grand Slam from Freddie last year, matching the excitement of Kirk Gibson back in '88. The Maier-assisted home-run...the Flip Play...Mr. November stuff---and that's all from Jeter.

But what are we seeing now?

I wrote last year about hyperbole and Shohei Ohtani, and somehow this past Friday he topped himself. He had...what, the BEST single game someone can have? Maybe it wasn't clinching the World Series, but holy hell!

First inning, as the starting pitcher, he was on the mound. He walked the first batter, then promptly struck out the side. Three strikeouts in a row. I captured a screenshot showing just how crazy his pitches can be. This was the called third strike for out number 2:

I mean...what can you do with that? Lower outside corner, 100 mph...Seriously WTF? Out number 1 was a swinging whiff. Out number two was this called third-strike above. Out number 3 was another swinging whiff. 

Okay, so far so good. Lots of pitchers have been ass-kickers and dominant to open a game. Big deal. Well, none of them did what he did next: Shohei walked over to the dugout once the top half of the inning was over, dropped his glove, put on his elbow armor, grabbed his helmet and bat, and strolled out to the batter's box to lead off the game for the Dodgers.

Then he hit a 400+ foot homer. His next at bat he hit a homer out of Dodger Stadium. Out of the stadium. The number ascribed to the homer was 469 feet, but it felt like 600. THEN HE HIT ANOTHER HOMER.

In the end, Shohei Ohtani gave up less hits as a pitcher, 2, than homeruns he hit as a batter, 3. He struck out 10 batters, which has happened maybe a dozen times in playoff history. He hit 3 homers in a playoff game, which has happened less than a half-dozen times.

But he did it in the same game.

I'm not sure how long it will take after he retires for us to truly appreciate his game, but I'm going to try to appreciate it right now, as he looks like Babe Ruth mixed with Walter Johnson, being the best of both types of players.

This is really happening...going 50-50 last year and winning the World Series in his first year with the Dodgers was not the high point...?

Cinematic Car Chases

I've yet to go see "One Battle After Another" for a second time (but I'm trying to figure out how to take Corrie with me), but I've been ruminating on the car chases. 

Before seeing the film I'd heard about the wild and original take on a car chase, similar to hearing about the journey through music that we take in Sinners before seeing it---when it happens, I remember thinking, 'Oh, here it is.'

But there are two visceral car chase sequences, one very early, and another much later, likely to become known as The Chase. The first one is less about being chased than it is about getting away, if that makes sense, but you feel it as you watch it. Later on, The Chase is on a whole different playing field, and has callbacks to Bullit.

But that whole enterprise got me thinking about some of movie's better car chase scenes. Obviously Bullit ranks as the originator of the vocabulary, or at least gets credit for it. How it gets filmed, though, is practical and original, and so exciting to see in context in a film that shows its era: it demands you pay attention. When the follower becomes the followed, and the driver snaps his seatbelt, you're tense with anticipation---you know it's going to get crazy.

When Gene Hackman as Popeye is chasing the J train's elevated tracks down Broadway in Brooklyn in The French Connection, you can feel the true danger, since they filmed it without permits. The exhilaration comes from that real peril.

I've see the opening chase scene in Baby Driver, and while I think the cinematic nature of the chase looks nice, I find the getaway highly annoying. He keeps running into cops! He never gets away until the maneuver with the two other red cars and the overpass. I heard about it and saw it very soon after the opening chase sequence in Drive, which I found far superior as a realistic approach to chase scenes goes. It's how it would play out in reality, or at least I could be convinced as much. It's not flashy, a full daylight bank robbery getaway like Baby Driver...Drive is the dive bar that pours its gut-rot scotch into the PBR can for the five-dollar boilermaker, while Baby Driver is an overpriced bar at a themed restaurant in Las Vegas.

Maybe my reaction to the realistic quality in Drive contrasts to the glee I get watching all the cop cars that get destroyed in Blues Brothers. Or how about the general entire movies that are essentially car chases, besides Blues Brothers: Smokey and the Bandit; Road Warrior and Fury Road; all the Cannonball Run movies...

But that brings me back to realism and originality, two things I found in Bullit, The French Connection, Drive, and this new classic, One Battle After Another. All four of these look nothing alike, and feel both realistic and original.

Got My Copy

The news dropped about its eventual release on my birthday, and today was the release:

It got me thinking about the last Pynchon release and my life at that time, about crushing it in a few days...maybe a couple weeks. This book is certainly shorter than Bleeding Edge,  and it may even be shorter than Inherent Vice.

Also, it's been a heavy Pynchon dose recently, what with my recent trip to see One Battle After Another. I have some things I want to say/write about that, but I feel it may be necessary to either see it again or talk it out with a Pynchon head...or both. It's intense, and it seemed so unlikely a movie that like would ever get green-lit in this epoch.  But here we are.

Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction!

Schlittler Making Our Night

Seriously...the kid's name is Cam Schlittler. It was fun saying, or trying to say...

On the evening when Corrie headed out to Texas to supervise the construction site there for the next week, I had the Yankees-Red Sox game 3 of their wild card round playing on my laptop.

And some rookie, some flame-throwing kid with an awesome name who grew up a half-hour from Boston, came in and dominated for 8 dazzling innings. His motion was fluid and kept his grip hidden all night. When Boone, the Yankees manager, sent him back out for the 8th inning, I thought back to game 1, when he took Max Fried out when it seemed like it was too early...when Boston folks are happy the pitcher's coming out? And he hasn't thrown that many pitches?

Anyway, Schlittler set a record: 8 innings of no runs and 12 strikeouts with 0 walks...that kind of tells it all. It doesn't come close to the visceral feeling of watching batter after batter flailing away at pitches in the zone, out of the zone (although there were very few of those) and walking back to the bench, befuddled. When I saw a sinker zooming and dropping in the strike zone at 98 mph I thought: tough night for the opposition bats. Fantastic that it's my team making those pitches.

Ever since we moved away from Brooklyn back in 2009 (WAIT---WE LEFT SLO 19 YEARS AGO?), my connection to baseball, and sports at large, has been more tenuous and less, eh, visceral. I've written about many different sports things for this blog, but that's because of the amount of my brain I have dedicated to sports topics rather than the emotional attention I devote to sports...I've not devoted that kind of emotional attention since...2009? When the Yanks won that World Series and we left for Texas the next month?

Watching Eli win a second Super Bowl was definitely cool, even if we watched it Honduras, and of course I was interested in my Yankees last year in the World Series (lol that post was written before Freddie's walk off grand slam), but without reading the newspaper everyday while riding the train, or just drinking a cup of coffee on the stoop, has altered my sporting-emotional-levels, needs, and desires. It's surprisingly easy to care less. Like taking Facebook off your phone.

But still! Have your young kids try to say Schlittler's name! He's freaking awesome! For a storybook night, it was a transportation. And it was great.

Our Kitten Whisperer

Corrie has a nice habit of saying 'Yes' to the animal shelters when they call about fostering kittens. Some times it can have infuriating outcomes---in the short term---like when six kittens all have uncontrollable diarrhea for a week straight. Woof.

But fostering kittens does a few things: it gives the kids the ability to love on baby animals without making the multiyear commitment to having a pet; and it provides Corrie with an overarching structure to fulfilling needs on a daily basis that her brain has been needing since the cancer and chemo and babies and COVID experiences have sapped some focus-ability.

And, while she's obviously the true kitten whisperer, I've got a picture of my son under a pile of either four or five of our last batch of six kittens:

That makes it 14(!) total kittens over the last thirteen months. We even took a quartet to the Cabin. 

Anyway, Cass and Camille have their own, separate relationships with the kittens, and Cass may be a natural kitten whisperer...just like he's a natural athlete, reader, and mathematician...

Pynchon on the Brain

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon's newest book, is due for release in less than a month. Like Bleeding Edge before it, I'll be heading across town on the release date to get a copy in my hands. 

I was planning on starting a rereading of Vineland on the eve of the release of "One Battle After Another," the PTA movie based loosely on said book.

I'm planning on seeing it either by my onesie or with Corrie, who read most of, if not all, of Vineland back in 2012-ish.

I'm getting a presentation ready to send off for submittal for the International Pynchon Week 2026, which will be held in Dortmund:

Also, since I'm here with these thoughts on the brain, I should mention a few Pynchon-tangential items. First, two books (maybe I'll send Stone Junction along with Norm this Decemberween):

Pynchon wrote the intro to Stone Junction, and Matthiessen was one of Pynchon's favorite authors. I loved both of these books. Stone Junction is a roller coaster of Pynchonian batshittery, while Shadow Country is an unmitigated masterpiece about the nature of America and the ability of literature.

And one last thing, the movie "Under the Silver Lake:"

This was the most-Pynchon-movie that wasn't a Pynchon story that I can remember. Check out the trailer here to make your own determination. I'd like to watch it again and discuss it (didn't I already do that?). In any case, along with PTA's "Inherent Vice," "Under the Silver Lake" exists as a Pynchonian-curio, both happy under the same umbrella.

Pythagoras Day

I guess calling today "Pythagoras Day" is as good as anything, since it's a mathematically beautiful day. The date, either in the US (9/16/25) or everywhere else in the world (16/9/25), has the common rendition of the year as the sum of the day and the month: 9+16=25. 

I mention Pythagoras because he was a Greek intellectual and school-founder who's name has been attached to an ancient theorem about the sums of the squares of the two smaller sides of a right triangle being the same as the square of the longest side. Remember: a² + b² = c² ?

So, eh, today is like, 3²/ 4²/ 5², which us math heads find enjoyable.

From the "Whoa' Files

Um...at the Aquarium of the Pacific...

My boy looks like such a little, er, man. When did this happen?

We all went a bike ride the day before the car accident with Camille, and apparently it was cloudy that afternoon. I remember her looking pretty big for her bike that day, but that bike has since been dumpsterized. And she rides and rides...
 

Thoughts on Disney's "Wish"

I started this a few days back, and in my rare spare moments returned to the open laptop tab to keep my thoughts going (not unlike my mother's letters, I suppose). I didn't particularly like this movie, but I also don't have the hate-on for this movie. And, I didn't mean for this to turn into a treatise...but here we are.

I finally sat and watched Disney's most recent original story Wish from start to finish. And, since the kids put on Moana 2 while I did kitchen work, we finally caught up to the current time with the Disney animated feature cannon.

It seems to be popular to rip Wish online, and probably in person, too, but I don't spend time talking about these Disney movies to people unrelated to me. Some people like the songs; some people hate the songs...

Wish was written by the Boss-lady of Animation as a celebration of the Disney cannon, and as possibly a wish-upon-a-star origin story...and if that sounds preposterous, it's because it kinda is. 

When I first saw the trailer, I thought the animation of the Alan Tudyk-voiced baby goat (snort)(that's a plus for me) looking 2D while everything else looked 3D...or a mix...?...anyway, I thought it was interesting. I wasn't immediately turned off. If they're trying to celebrate the centennial legacy, a mix of 2D and 3D animation wasn't a terrible idea.

Okay...Rosas is the name of the Mediterranean island kingdom in the movie, and Asha, the heroine, is of Afro-Iberian heritage, marking a first for the studio. She has fair skin, freckles, hazel eyes, and long braids. She's 17 years old and has an interview set up to apprentice with the magical king, Magnifico. This king is voiced by Chris Pine because they needed someone charming and personable, because he's certainly a little off, but it needs to be believable that he could be put in power.

So...so far so good?

Now it starts to go sideways. The magical conceit/magical currency are wishes, core pieces/spiritual fire/manifestations of dreams/whatever you want to call it---your spark, your inner fire, your wish---and once you turn 18 you can hand it over to Magnifico for safe keeping. He'll pull it out of you, where it gets encased in glass, and floats up to join the other wishes he cares for and watches over in the upper levels of the castle. In exchange for handing over your wish, you get to forget what it was, and forget the possible disappointment of never achieving it. Every once in a while, he'll grant a wish, give someone the chance to have their wish granted, and this wish-granting ceremony is what keeps the people excited about this arrangement...I guess...

While handing over your wish doesn't seem mandatory, it seems like everyone in Rosas, once of age, does it. 

And because Magnifico is...not infallible, he decides which wishes are best for Rosas, and the granting of which wishes becomes an issue, because some wishes are deemed too dangerous for Rosas as a whole. Instead of "redistribution of wishes," think more "wants to play guitar for friends." This is where Magnifico's slip shows. The issue is both deep and creepy.

It's this central conflict that I think people complain about when they set up shop of "Eff-Wish Island." It's...weird. 

Something else to mention is that the stakes are, frankly, very low. Asha wants to save her grandpa's wish, and her mom's wish. She's not trying to save the world, or stop an evil king---even if it goes in that direction eventually---her motivation is to make her mom and grandpa happier, since giving up your wish has the unintended consequence of you feeling a bit lost.

There are no love interests for Asha---cool, no problems there, since we have Elsa and Vanellope and Moana and Maribel in the same boat---but her friend list is long, as we essentially don't get to know them. There are seven of them---shout out to Snow White---and while there's potential there, the execution of getting to know them falls short.

One spot the online community was divided on was the music. Some people love the main song and sang it to their newborns (per their own reportage). Some people think the songs are garbage because they're too vague because they were written before the script was done. I thought (1) there were too many songs, but I generally don't like musicals so there's a bias (it did feel like there were a lot); and (2) I couldn't make out the words, so I couldn't tell how generic they were, but I generally struggle with making out the words as it is anyway, so, whatever.

I guess that animation deal---the mix of 2D and 3D animation styles---was not a conscious decision as much as a fight between timing and cost and animation department personnel, which sounds like a "production from hell" issue.

One idea I also wanted to state, and that I told Corrie about when we talked about it, was that in my time working with teenagers, the teenagers by and large would have very little grasp on a dream or a wish or an inner fire that stokes your spirit, a wish to be able to give up for safe keeping once the age of 18 is reached. I think that the belief of the movie, or its writers---that the connection of your dreams/wishes to your drive to be successful---is lost on the core audience. 

The teens I know would not be able to identify with this idea, and won't be able to for a few more years at least. A certain level of maturity is needed to to feel deeply the connection between what drives you and how meaningful it is. Who are you? What do you want to do in this world? How can you get there? How can you motivate yourself to keep the sustained effort needed for that? These teenagers would struggle with every aspect of each of those questions.

In the end, Magnifico realizes what kind of power he can harness if he steals and absorbs the wishes, and the third act conflict is set up.

I never got the sense that it wouldn't work out for Asha; I never felt like the stakes were very dire; I thought the whole premise was supremely weird, and I haven't even mentioned the tiny star character that Asha made appear when she literally wished upon a star; I felt the friends were underdeveloped; and while I harbor no opinion of the quality of the songs, I felt like there were too many.

But, really, I felt like the exact same sentence could be written for Moana 2 (save for the star character). And while I do have some critical issues, I still don't hate the movie. I can see how it may have failed to find an audience, or failed to speak to the audience it was designed to cater to. That happens often in the collaborative arts industry.

One thing I just thought of is it seems like the producers made a movie for the kids that they were 30 years back instead of the kids we have today. Thanks social media!

It is pretty to look at, which is often the case with these movies. Is it worth hating?

Seriously? Masked gestapo gangsters are scooping up brown people off the street and sending them away---for misdemeanors!---and a silly imperfect movie with issues gets you all angry?

Labor Day 2025

I was invited (for the dozenth year) and attended for the second time, the Wilmington Labor Day Parade. Wilmington is a community near u sin the southland that was absorbed into LA proper and is built, by and large, by the longshoremen.

They're told that attendance in the parade is mandatory. How true that is...eh, anyway, when you unload a quarter-of-a-trillion dollars worth of goods every year, you get some power. And the pride in being part of the organized, unionized worker group, shines through in their days, as in: it's believable that participation in the parade could be mandatory.

Anyway, the first time I went I took Cassius. It was a good time. This time I brought both kids:

But the sun was out, and the air was thick with moisture. When did we move to the Everglades?

As the walking went along, the kids' dedication began to wane.

Prez Cecily was there, too...

As did mine, since I had Camille on my shoulders, and she was wearing a red gown...because what else should you wear to a Labor Day Parade march?

Somewhere along the walk we decided to peel off and head back, having saved a ton of chores for the off-day Monday, Plus, the heat and humidity was a serious drag.

Also, fun observation: I feel like there were far more people involved in the parade than watching the parade. Like...a lot more...between all the different unions and marching bands, it was pretty wild.

Kid's Magazine Cover

I've mentioned before about how many magazines we get (a lot), and the other day one showed up and my eyebrows raised when I saw the cover:

So...we get both Highlights and High Five---essentially the same magazine but for two age groups---as well as Ranger Rick and Ranger Rick Jr...which is basically the same scenario. So, this Ranger Rick Jr, above, has as a center piece article, a profile of different animals with cool head jazz, if you will.

It looks at moose, and roosters, and various beetles, and...well, that cover bird. When I got the magazine out of our mailbox, with the freaking cassowary on the cover, I said, "Whoa!" A cassowary on the cover of a little kid's magazine? 

Cassowaries are generally seen as the most dangerous bird, responsible for many of the serious injuries incurred by birds. Cassowaries, in the wild, rarely encounter humans, but when they do...look the hell out!

Charm of Yesterday, Convenience of Tomorrow

Ah, yes...

We have a Gallup "spot."

Disney Shenanigans, Part...Something

Now that I got that off my chest...

As we finish up the Disney movies, I'm struck by my Disney+ having most of the special features I would have watched on a DVD. They were cool, and I learned about the stuff that fascinates me. Collaborative art is very different than, say, painting or writing a novel or a poem.

Ever since 2010's Tangled, Disney was back. Toy Story 3 was a masterpiece, and Pixar has been hammering out doubles for a while.

But here are the Mouse releases since:

• Tangled
• Wreck it Ralph
• Frozen
• Big Hero 6
• Zootopia
• Moana

Then the sequels start, with a few original masterpieces sprinkled in:

• Ralph Breaks the Internet
• Frozen 2
• Raya and the Last Dragon
• Encanto
• Strange World
• Wish
• Moana 2

Really, four originals sandwiched between Ralph, Elsa, and Moana sequels. If we ignore the fact that Moana 2 was originally a television program created for Disney+ (which makes sense if you've seen it: lots of side characters with no real background, uneven animation and baddie characters who oscillate between good and bad, seeming to need more time to develop), then we're looking at:

• Raya
• Encanto
• Strange World
• Wish

Such an odd quartet. We're going to give Wish another chance (I only saw fifteen percent, maybe); Raya and the Last Dragon is an excellent homage to South-East Asia, lovingly crafted and full of powerful women. It's great! Encanto may be the best Disney film...and I mention that without qualifiers. It's hyperbole...but maybe not. Strange World bombed at the theaters, but that may have had more to do with Disney and France beefing (so it never opened there) and the fact that any anti-homosexual countries (sadly, there are many) would have banned it, so it never got a chance. Anyway, it's beautiful and grand and full of a nostalgic adventure.

Zootopia may be favorite of any of these, but Ralph is interesting, and San Fransokyo is dope, and Elsa, Anna, and Moana have captured many a young person's imagination.

I had/have another time-suck idea about these movies, or these movies vs Pixar vs everyone else...

Are we doing that or are we enacting civics reform by pitchfork and torch?

What...what's going on?

Taking a break from the freak-out about...I dunno, the gestapo roaming around snatching people up, masked and armed...at least they were ran out of parts of here around the Southland, but they've been showing up to immigration courts where judges are supposed to be hearing their asylum cases? This is America?

Yes. This is America, or some nightmare that only the most cynical of us could have imagined. This is the end result of the world Reagan augured and Dubya anchored and now, after years of defunding education and eliminating civics courses and putting up cartoon characters as candidates, we got the worst version of Elmer Fudd---if he were a wife-raping white-supremacist---while one of our political parties has become the shining beacon for bigotry and anger and hate and fear. The other party is barely better, as they take money from the same donors and have been selling us out for the last few decades, too.

Get the pitchforks and Molotov cocktails ready...I wanted to come here and say something about conclusions as we finish up the Disney canon...but...

Every apologist has to be gone, ferreted out. Allies, it goes without saying, have to be gone. Profiteers, too. FUCK ALL OF THEM. 

The work will be difficult but necessary. Is it too late? We all hope not...

AI wants to put 11 (eleven?) links into this tiny polemic...links without my doing, like it wants to, what, make "Reagan" a clickable link? I'll do this myself, thank you very much. 

Will the robots make ferreting out the capital-B, capital-G BAD GUYS from our government easier?

TOGBIADB!

Construction at the Farm

Corrie's designing and building her folks' new house on the Farm. By next summer it should be done. Check out the awesome windows here:

That corner will have two enormous windows. What I really need is a person standing in the frame to give it scale. Maybe later.

Some scenes are pretty beautiful around here, just like at the Cabin, like:

Other times, you're like: where are my kids? And then you find them, together, both wearing safety glasses, one reading vintage Archie comics to the other:

Roadrunners and horny toads and barn owls...and coyotes and turkeys and deer...it's always something magical out here in panhandle Texas.

REO Speedwagon!

I'm not always sure where names for rock bands come from. The Doobie Brothers seems obvious enough, and I do know about Steely Dan, but today, at the Farm, I took a picture of the old truck you pass by on the way to the parking area and, well, click to enlarge so you can see for yourself:

Maybe even then you can't see it. But it's an REO Speedwagon! I didn't even know that was this kind of a thing.

Anyway...small world.

Cabin Trip 2025

Back in 2021, it was Fire Season, but this year, after last year's fire season, where we feared that much of the surrounding forest and maybe even the cabins themselves were lost, was different. There wasn't smoke in the air, like back in 2021; the air was clear and warm and smelling just like we all remember: pine forrest. The fire last year did not destroy the Cabin, nor did burn all the surrounding wilderness, but it did get very close.

The Gouge

A large gouge, it looked like, was first burned and then cleared, so it looks like a stumpy clearing, along the road the Cabin's on (HWY 172). This dense forest, and much of the surrounding forest, has been burned. I'll revisit this sadness at the end.

I took a few establishing pictures of the upstairs, as I was in a nostalgic mood and thankful my kids are probably starting to remember things like the smells and the sounds of the squeaky stairwell.

Camille chose the big bed in the room

Cass chose the Boss Bed by the stairs

I generally liked the alcove bed...

Anyway...

Corrie has a multiyear plan to do all of the hikes in Lassen Volcanic Park, which is awesome. We never really did too many hikes beyond Bumpass Hell when I was a kid. We saw Hot Rock and Sulfur Works, but real hiking wasn't exactly my family's activity. At least I don't remember. I remember being told, with my brother, to go head to the woods and not to return for a few hours. Reading and traipsing around the forest, that's what much of our time at Mill Creek was like.

But each year we're up here---me and Corrie and the kids---we do ever more hikes, working opur way through the park's many trails.

The first day we went to the park, Lassen National Volcanic Park, we drove in our usual gate, the south-east entrance, and drove around to the Cold Boiling Lake hike. 

We stopped for photo ops at Helen Lake, still with significant ice coverage, even as it was June 28th:

That volcano takes fantastic pictures, by the by.

The Cold Boiling Lake is a lake that is swimmable---as all lakes in the park are swimmable, except the ones that are heavy with geo-thermal activity, and swimming in them will likely result in you being dead.

The Cold Boiling Lake has some vents underneath that have been venting carbon dioxide in small amounts, so the water isn't any warmer, but the surface bubbles in spots, like it's boiling. So...cool, I guess?

The hike, though, was kind of a bummer, in the following sense:

It had been ravaged by the fires the year before. There was no shade, which we understand and all, but look above! How quaint and secluded and surrounded by wilderness would that hike have been? How long will it take to look that way again? 100 years? 200?

Anyway, the lake was pristine and beautiful:

The next day we went to the park (er, the next day), we drove on to Summit Lake, did the trail around it, and then the kids got in and swam around. It was a rather glorious and warm day.

Here Corrie is with the kids as I finished the last fifth of the walk, got the car, and drove over to the beach zone:

It was a campground with a Day Use area, and that's where I parked the second time, moving from one Day Use spot to another. We decided to all come back and swim together as a family a few days later.

The next Park trip we decided to drive into the park from Chester, the town 20+ miles away to the east. It drives up the Warner Valley and branches off to two separate southeast entrances, one for Juniper Lake and one for Warner Valley. 

Since the Juniper Lake region, with four easy going hikes we were looking forward to, was fully shut down due to fire, we went with Warner Valley and the mostly chill Boiling Sulfur Lake hike.

The drive was pretty and unassuming, and shocking how well it was preserved, as the fire hit much of the environs. In the beginning of the walk, the water features were slamming:

And the little boardwalk was very nice, transporting you to a Ghibli movie:

But the fire scars were serious:

Can you imagine how dense and beautiful and awesome this hike was twenty months ago? In that picture, you wouldn't see any blue sky. 

This lake (with Lassen in the background) is one you would not want to swim in:

The sulfur steam coming off it were powerful, and keeping upwind---weather permitting---was the plan.

Not every trip was to Lassen Park. Some were to our little slice of Mill Creek. The fire made the hike down to the creek stones easier, and then we traipsed around the water:

It was the next day at that same location, when we saw river otters. In my 45 years of going to this place, I never even heard that we had a specie of river otter in North America. But on this day, we saw a family taking a baby out for a swimming lesson, only for the baby to nearly get washed away. It was magical. (The baby was definitely safe, in case anyone's concerned.)

Another park trip had us doing the Paradise Meadow hike, and then planning on heading back to Summit Lake to swim.

We stopped again at Helen Lake to throw snowballs (and rocks) onto the ice:

Paradise Meadow was a hike that was untouched by fire:

It's pretty, and not very long, but mostly up the entire time:

You follow a creek that oscillates between tumbling and rushing:

But it's all so beautiful:

Near the end there was a clearing in the woods. Itw as smallish and covered in ponderosa pine needles, and I thought to myself: It's nice, and all, but all that walking up for this? But the path kept going, so I just kept going. It turned off to the right, and a green glow pushed into the woods:

And when you get through those last trees, the high marshy plateau was breathtaking:

We tried to keep it mellow for the 4th of July. I took the following picture explaining the rather robust backstory for Candyland, a game we played multiple times an evening:

When we were kids, my brother and I would put peanuts in the shell on the deck bannister to lure the bluejays. They would fly down, spy us with cocked heads, and happily snatch up the peanuts. Sometimes we'd even shoot them with water pistols, but they never stopped coming.

I always wondered why our bluejays did not look like the bluejays on the logo of the baseball team. Ours had black faces and not a shred of white anywhere. When I looked it up, it turns out they're Stellar Jays, named for a guy named Stellar. That's what we get on this side of the country.

But, a few years ago, we saw zero jays. Our last trip, in 2023: zero jays. It was sad. You couldn't even hear the call.

This trip I heard the call a few times, and even snapped a picture of one out the window at the kitchen sink:

They weren't everywhere like when we were kids, but it was nice to see them around, even if it was just a brief view.

One of the activities we'd do as kids during this time of year was head to the pancake breakfast. Down at the general store/resort, they would set up large griddle tops outside and spend hours making pancakes, raising money for the volunteer fire department. I remember it being well attended as a kid, and again, this year, it was well attended:

They even had a parade, woith firefighters and kids on bikes and, visible below, the great Lady's Kazoo Concerto:

The kids even got to give a high-five to Smokey Bear:

(Cass sure looks like he's enjoying himself...)

Our next trip to the park would be our last, and we made sure to stop at some of the easy-to-get-to classics we'd skipped so far, like Sulfur Works:

The video is more telling...

Fumarole

The ice at Helen Lake had receded quite a bit, too:

We finally drove around to Hot Rock:

And parked at Manzanita Lake, at the northern entrance on the main road. We hiked around the lake and then decided to kayak it if they had available kayaks.

See? He enjoyed some stuff...

This volcano just doesn't take a bad picture! Along the Manzanita Lake hike:

And from the kayak:

Cass and I shared one kayak, and Corrie and Camille had the other. I was nervous about capsizing, but everything went okay. I was really only scared the car fob wouldn't work; the lake is, like, four feet deep for over 80% of the surface.

Another tradition we keep up was the "Stump Picture." A huge tree had been cut down in the '60s, and my mom and her siblings and cousins had their pictures taken on the new stump. Years later, in the '80s, the tradition was kept up, as the stump aged. Now, the stump is just a soft memory of it's former mighty status, and we can only fit a single kid on it:

We found another stump, though, of a possibly 250 year old tree. This was in the Gouge area close to the Cabin.

The bark was as thick as Cass's hand in some places:

This was part of the Dealing with Fire and an Ever Changing Climate section of the trip. It was basically an ongoing situation, but the reality has never been so close. The smoky air in '21 was certainly real, but the woods close by seemed protected and off limits. But not now. 

The piles of heavy timber sit past the Gouge, both within a mile of the Cabin. They seem to come from the clearing of burned trees down the way, in the area of the road closure on HWY 172. This old growth lumber will provide some good wood for construction purposes, but it all needs to be trucked away to the fancy new lumber mills:

Boggles the imagination...

Cass and his stack:

These are some big, former trees:

I didn't want to end this on the FIRE part, a downer. When I was writing the into, days back, I put the pictures down here at the end and figured I'd leave it until it was time.

Now that it's time, I want to talk about something else. Anything else, really. 

We brought the kids' bikes, and they rode like crazy. Cass got a flat halfway through our visit, so later Camille would ride alone on the street for fifty feet in both directions. We painted watercolors and played games. We read books and enjoyed good cooking. We never pulled the television out, and we never handed out the tablets.

In fact, the kids never even asked. No TV, no phone, and no service for our digital devices. For 11 days, my kids got the true 1987 experience. And they loved it.