Jack-O-Lanterns and the Warm Cities

This year, like all f the recent years, we've purchased and carved pumpkins for the Halloween time:

This year we did it at a Halloween party. In the past Corrie would buy the cool paper overlays that you tape onto the pumpkin, and then trace out, and then carve out. This year, I was abandoned at the tarp with instructions (do Batman! do Godzilla!), and I did the best I could. I carved a pretty basic Jack-o-lantern (seen above and below on the left), and then I carved a Batman ('89) logo on one of them (as per the request).

Upon returning to check my work, I was told, No, do Godzilla. I handed a marker over and proceeded to carve out the (duckbilled...?) Godzilla that was there, opposite the Bat-symbol, seen below:

One other Halloween decorations I loved seeing everyday was this, visible right as the elevator doors opened on our floor.

It puts the lotion in the basket!

When we were kids, my brother and I, and out friends, in Sacramento, it was chilly! It was Fall in Sac, and it was basically cold-ish. Pumpkins would chill on the stoop for a while, preserved by the, eh, basically refrigerator-like air outside.

But now, once you pierce the pumpkin, you start the quick deterioration of said pumpkin. It will last only a few days before essentially liquifying on the counter/table. In the lotion/basket pic above, you can see at least one of their pumpkins, and it has been drawn and painted upon (both were---the other isn't quite visible). This helps them last longer.

I guess each year I'm surprised by how fast the pumpkins die, rot, liquify...quite horrifying, really, but that checks out due to the season, right?

Happy Halloween and an Age Old Question

Cassius is Aquaman, Camille is Elsa from Frozen, Corrie is Anna, which makes me, who cares very little about Halloween in general, Kristoff, Anna's love interest from Frozen. Super cool.

Also, I was thinking about Halloween monsters. Are you Team Vampire or Team Werewolf?

I tend towards team werewolf, and maybe later I'll explicate my theory about these monsters. Because nothing is more interesting than a long-winded breakdown of pros and cons concerning fictional characters...

It's boring even to write it.

I never saw the Twilight movies, but back in 2010 Corrie babysat my coworker's kids and the elder of the two, the daughter, had the trio watch one of the Twilight films, the one with the werewolves. Corrie came out of it, like, "Ooh, I'm team werewolf, for sure!" Having no idea what she talking about specifically (hot hairy tan boy versus hot pale goth boy), I was like, "Of course! Team werewolf is where it's at. They don't live forever, they're tragic in that thy can't control themselves, but it can be kinda safe in that it's once a month and be planned for..."

She said, "Uhh, sure honey."

We've been watching the Hammer horror movies and showing them to Cass. Well, I guess "them" isn't accurate, because so far it was only the Mummy ('59). He paid attention the whole time, which was pretty cool. Also, just saying, holy heck Christopher Lee as the decrepit old mummy was fantastic with his eyes and halting body language. That guy was a total professional.

Anyway, Happy Halloween!

It's either Ming Na Wen or Andy Serkis...

I guess this rabbit hole jump started with Harrison Ford, playing integral parts in two film franchises that defined my childhood:

And inspired by the weird fact that Bill Paxton is the only actor to be Terminated, Predator-ated, and, er, Alienated:

Look at that, Lance Hendrickson was also done in by all three...does that mean AVP is canon? I'm losing focus...(I stole the image from the Internet)(Most of the rest of these I made myself from individually stolen pics...)

I started to think about the different actors who played big roles in the two tent pole franchises of today's era: Star Wars and the MCU. Two obvious candidates are Natalie Portman:

And Samuel L. Jackson:

But then my brain went a little more obscure. Like: did you remember that Forest Whitaker, Paul Bettany, and Woody Harrelson are part of both the Star Wars Universe and the Marvel Comics Movieverse?

I said the "Marvel Movieverse" because Woody played Carnage in Venom 2, which isn't quite the MCU proper.

That Paul Bettany and Woody Harrelson were in the Solo movie I think gets overlooked.

What about Ewan McGregor? Not the MCU, but the DC movie, er, deal(?) and the Star Wars Uni, naturally:

He plays the bad guy in the second Harley Quinn movie. But I guess that Tatooine sand ages you quickly:

That got me thinking about who played roles in multiple franchises or comic book movies. As far as that goes, how about big roles, like Batman and the God Killer, from Thor 4, both Christina Bale:

Or Venom and the Batman villain Bane, another Englishman, Tom Hardy:

How's about Josh Brolin, playing Dwight from the Sin City prequel, and Thanos, and Cable in Deadpool 2:

Oh jeeze, what about Ryan Reynolds, now that I mentioned Deadpool:

How about one of my favorites, Stellan Skarsgård, in both the MCU (the Thor films) and Star Wars (in Andor), and I threw in his role as Bootstrap Bill in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies: (Where's the Chernobyl picture?)

Or Oscar Isaac, also of Dune, but surely Poe of the sequel trilogy and Moon Knight and X-Men baddie Apocalypse:

Even Rosario Dawson got in on the act, as Gail in the Sin City movies and as Ahsoka:

But to settle on the thesis (finally) for this whole endeavor: who is the ultimate king or queen of the super-hero/tent-pole movie cinematic universe shenanigans? 

I direct our attention to the title of this post for the two most likely culprits. For "king," as it were, I think it must be Andy Serkis. I mean, sheesh, check it out:

That's Klaw from the MCU (and Black Freaking Panther!), and Alfred from The Batman (so...DC comic movies), and as the prison boss in Andor (so the Star Wars universe too). BUT, he's also the motion capture king, starring as Golem in LOTR, Caesar in the reboot of the Planet of the Apes films, and already in the Star Wars universe as Snoke.

But ultimately the crown could go to Ming Na Wen. She's the only person who payed a Disney Princess (Mulan), exists in the MCU (from the A.G.E.N.T.S. of Shield program), exists in the Star Wars universe (as Fennec Shand from the Mandoverse) AND was Chun Li from Street Fighter AND was in ER. She even made a cameo in the live action Mulan, seen below:

I've been trying to put this together for at least a year now. In my head for longer. Finding the pictures and trying to paste them together taught me a few things:

• There are a few more lists like this I want to, like different actors playing the same character across multiple interpretations (not quite the exact premise from this piece, but that one acts like an intro or preface);
• I waste a bunch of time NOT working on shit I probably should be working on.
• What about Ah-nold movies, or Sly and/or Jason Statham? All those guys mostly make up their own...things. What was I trying to do again?

This is where I lost the thread. For the three-hundreth time. And started to be annoyed at myself.

So...Andy Serkis or Ming Na Wen. I'm telling you! Who'd I miss? Plenty, surely...

Sea Goat?

I was today year's old when I learned about Capricorn. I noticed a bizarre image on some printed material. I thought it was a hilarious fail by the printer, but it had the zodiac name "Capricorn" printed over it, or under it, looking silly like this:

I was born in April, making me an Ares. My brother is a Taurus. Ares is a ram, Taurus a bull. Cancer is a crab, Libra is a scale...I think...my knowledge of astrological entities is limited. Rams and bulls are easy to think wrap your head around. But...WTF is up with Capricorn?

Is it...half goat and half...fish? 

The answer is emphatically YES. It's the sea goat. I looked it up. The Greeks tried to work this sea-goat entity into their zodiac, it being a remnant of the Babylonian representation of Enki one of their gods. A holdover, if you will.

I never knew that Capricorn is a mer-goat. WHERE HAVE I BEEN? Maybe this is silly and obvious to most people, but I'm not most people...?

It made it onto coins?!?

I love how weird this world can be...

Mom's Letters

In May of 2020, while we were starting Month 2 of sheltering in place---if we weren't deemed essential workers (remember doing grocery shopping is masks at local restaurants? I do! We got arugula and fancy cheese from an Italian restaurant down the street...)---my mother started sending letters in the mail. She let us know that she was trying to do her part to help keep the postal service solvent, and getting physical letters is exciting.

Her plan was to send letters to me, to my brother Dan, and to our adopted homey Norm, and postcards to all four of the grandkids (Norman, Simon, Cass, and Camille, who was only a few months old when she started). And her plan was to do this every week until she lost steam or interest or energy.

And she still hasn't lost steam or interest or energy. So 3+ years in (nearly 170 weeks in a row!), we've received an enveloped letter and two postcards. And because I'm a paperwaste-packrat, I saved nearly every letter:

This stack is a Russian-literature scale epic of the minutiae of, er, my mom's life. I love the letters. Imagine sitting at a computer everyday and writing a paragraph summarizing that day. And then doing it again for rest of the week. Then printing the week's summary out and mailing it away. And then keep doing it for years. You may imagine the mundanity tsunami-ing a reader. But the pacing, the events, the beefs---major and minor---add to the beauty of everyday life.

At first, as we would read them, I would get a weird sense of: why would this be shared? Then, as the weeks went on, as they turned into months, and as the pile grew and the months stretched into years, the letters would make us laugh. We'd laugh for a few different reasons: sometimes the mundane would end up incidentally profound; sometimes the stories were genuinely amusing, as my mom's a funny person in her own right; and sometimes the absurd difficulty in running down the minutiae of daily life just leads one to crack up.

We all have things and activities in our lives that we find exciting. But I'd wager that many of us think that those exciting activities and things are buried in the mundane. From what I've heard from the masses, it sounds like one of life's primary goals is to survive the mundanity, to persevere, to just make it to the next stretch of excitement. And that's the connection these letters makes with any reader: we can all see ourselves getting frustrated at a grocery store or with a coworker, we can all feel the dread of possibly having to move and then dealing with the hassle of actually moving.

Who hasn't ever been annoyed with their partner but still happy to be on the adventure with them? Who hasn't ever had to bite their tongue in someone's presence for myriad reasons (maybe they're your supervisor and wildly ignorant; maybe they're a stranger and you're not sure if they're a lunatic, et al)? Who hasn't had to deal with getting old and how aging effects their joints? (Well, eh, kids obviously...)

It's also pretty neat to see ones-self in the stories and anecdotes. A holiday visit here, a trip to Legoland there. Please give so-and-so a call, or send this person a card. This person's sick, this one got a new dog, a grandson's marching band is competing for trophies...the prosaic mosaic of life, in a huge stack, becomes a poem.

Over the last few years the postcards have also stacked up. The stack got so high that the clutter was eventually dealt with: some came to my work to be handed out or stapled to the wall; some were tacked up here; many were destroyed by young hands and confined to the trash. 

Also, over the years, babies were born and elders passed on. (Love you always Auntie Erm! Welcome to the world of air-breathing Enzo and Luna!) The pandemic still seethes in the background, mostly becoming endemic, but people seemed to be different. Less willing to put up with shit. Workers are having a moment. As office workers began to be forced back to the office full-time, laborers and white-collared unions started to fight back. Teachers standing with service workers in LA; entertainment writers; actors and crew workers; auto workers in Detroit; Kaiser workers...

Not sure if those changes could have been accomplished without the severity of the global shutdown. It wasn't the wholesale change some of us wanted, but it's better than before. The status quo may have shifted.

And through it all, documenting one woman's interior, the granular activities of a week's worth of days, my mom's letters persist. And they're beautiful. And, come to think of it, there's probably one in my mailbox downstairs right now. I'll go get in a minute, and read it out-loud (as we do here), and then add it to the stack. Three years on...

A Gentleman Caller? (Quick Spider Update)

I checked out our new spider neighbor one morning this week and saw:

Is that a gentleman caller?

The day after this, the web was mostly wrecked and had been started again much closer to the white trellis. And as of now, the large spider seems to no longer be living among us. Maybe she was ready to lay some eggs, or maybe they hatched.

But the more I think about all that, I shudder and change the subject in my brain.

Maybe I should beef up on my arachnid ecological studies...

We're just sharing the balcony

We have a new flatmate as it were:

A large orb weaver spider has constructed an enormous web on our tiny urban balcony. It looks pretty cool silhouetted against our stormy sky this past weekend:

At night, and at different times of day, it's quite hypnotic to watch her go about her business of cleaning and maintaining her web. And some of the silhouettes are spectacular:

Hazy afternoon

Hazy night

I expected a bird to have had it as a snack by now, but not yet. Until then, its been a nice series of encounters, and hopefully when Corrie waters the plants the web won't get too messed up. 

Urban nature encounters must be celebrated whenever they happen. A lesson from a city dweller...