Whatta Fiasco

Bizarre. Utterly bizarre. If Mel Brooks were a Japanese director known best for producing extreme horror films but decided to make a comedy about death and family values complete with musical numbers and occasional claymation instead, this might just be that film. Delightful. Just don’t consider it representative of the rest of Takashi Miike’s work.

This would make a good double billing with Shawn of the Dead.

I finaly finished the last (original) disc of this series. It was worth the time spent. For a smash ‘em up robot anime, this piece has some great characters and chewy levels of interpersonal conflict that are slowly revealed. In many ways, although the situation with robots provides several critical metaphors for the story, the fight scenes are almost (but not quite) all wasted time. And the Dead Sea Scrolls tie-in is just silly.

[ed. - Huh, I remember liking this series a lot more than this review makes it sound. But the Dead Sea Scrolls? Still silly.]

Aparajito (”The Unvanquished”) is the second in the classic trilogy by director Satyajit Ray. Our hero, Apu, moves with his family to the bustling city of Benares. After his father dies, his nmother works as a cook and Apu works as a priest for a local village until a love of learning catapults him into university in Calcutta. More misfortune happens but he survives. I didn’t find this one to be quite as compelling a film as the first but it feels like a middle film.

Dear Managers of sports bars that pride themselves on serving a dizzying array of malt beverages, please give some consideration to basic training of your staff. I can understand that not every waitperson will be personally familiar with every single one of those beverages, but is it unreasonable to expect them to have at least a passing familiarity with the locally brewed products? Do not try to tell me that Copperhead is produced by Boulevard Brewing. Copperhead Pale Ale is produced by the Free State Brewing Company in my home town, just down the road from your restaurant. Boulevard also makes a decent Pale Ale. It’s called the Boulevard Pale Ale. Do not then compound the error by claiming that the 75th Street Royal Raspberry is also a Boulevard product. Apparently this waitperson had never heard of the fine 75th Street Brewing Company. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, please don’t just make shit up. Or at least try to make the fabrications more entertaining.

Dear Coffeehouse owners, we all know that Starbuck’s is a successful enterprise. For the love of all that’s hot and caffeinated, would someone please come up with a coffee shop that doesn’t use the same mermaid inspired color palette? Boooring. Just because you’re situated in the boringly bland suburbs in a cookie cutter strip mall designed to encourage people to drive from one end of the mall to the other doesn’t mean you have to be a boringly bland, cookie cutter coffee shop. Shake it up a little. Do something different. Anything. And stop pregrinding those coffee beans. And get a separate grinder to use just for the (nasty) flavored beans.

Dear Bagel shop owner, if you’re going to use one of those shove it in, automatic, mechanical bagels slicers, please have two of them. I realize that you use those things for the safety of your employees, and that’s a very good thing indeed. And I realize that they take up a huge amount of space and are probably horribly expensive, but you still need two of them. One is for the savory bagels and one is for the sweet bagels. That way your customers will no longer bite into their cinnamon sugar bagels to discover that they have cinnamon sugar garlic bagels. I bet you’d sell a lot more of the sweet varieties of bagels that way and your customers would be happier.

It’s an oh so very British homage to Romero, with plenty of gore and laughs, and more character development than I ever expected to see. This one was a pleasant surprise. A sweet zombie movie? Yes. But unless you’re a zed-word fanatic, you’ll be perfectly happy renting the DVD when it comes out.

Time to put away the historical weapons again for awhile and switch over to the sport stuff. I was really surprised by how well my knee held up on Sunday, so I ended up doing a lot more fencing on Monday night than I had expected. I wasn’t having much pain at all while fencing but started getting quite a bit of pop and crackle type pain when walking around between bouts. By the end of the night the knee stiffened up again, but I was getting a better range of motion out of it than I’ve had in several weeks. I even caught myself doing on honest to goodness lunge in a bout. Just maybe that amount of work combined with proper footwork finally broke a log jam of some sort in there. I’m beginning to have hope that it really will heal up and be back to normal levels of wear and tear soreness. Knock on wood.

Less happily, one of our fencers, lets call him Tristan, showed up to practice in a very somber mood which is quite unusual for him. He’s in the middle of his student teaching at a local high school and it turns out that two of his students were killed in a house fire over the weekend. He didn’t hear about it until he walked into school that morning and the entire day was spent dealing with it. He had held things together pretty well all day and then came to practice just to have something to do to keep himself busy. By the time he’d told us what had happened, he was starting to lose it. We spent a good part of the evening fencing, but also a good part of it listening to him. What a horrible thing to have to go through.

I’m not going to try to describe what this book is about, aside from saying that it’s an historical novel told from three different viewpoints at widely spaced points in time. Love, tragedy, the search for power and/or knowledge, betrayal. I really enjoyed it for the first two-thirds of the book, maybe even three-quarters. The ending I didn’t find so satisfactory. Not so coincidentally, the more the story line veered into more modern settings, the less happy I was with it. I may be strange, but I’m just not ready to see World War II treated as fodder for historical novels, at least not this sort of novel. Or maybe the conflict between the characters set up in that part of the book just didn’t come to life for me. It was still a decent book but I’m going to have to go back and try some more of his work.

Apur Sansar (”The World of Apu”) is the third installment in Satyajit Ray’s trilogy about a young man growing up in Bengali. By now he is a grown man on his own in the world but still struggling. He finds both joy and despair, taking us on an emotional rollercoaster ride, but there’s light at the end. It was a good end to this series, and if you’ve seen the other two, you really ought to see this one.

KC Renfest 2004 is now over. Glorious marvelous last weekend weather we had for it too. It was just cold enough that on Saturday I wore my silly acorn hat. It’s a ribbed stocking cap knit from a two-ply of two different colors of brown wool. I didn’t have enough yarn to make a turn up (or down) brim for warming the ears, but it comes to a silly looking curled point at the top. So it sort of looks like the top of an acorn and sort of like a pixie cap and even more like a Hershey’s Kiss. It made a lot of people smile. And on Sunday, when I got my hands on an actual chocolate kiss, I pulled out the little piece of paper and stuck it in the tip of the hat, just to make the silliness complete. I also got a commission to make another one of my favorite archers. He offered to trade me a hat for a piece of handmade amber jewelry. Oh, twist my arm! Now I just have to find some appropriate yarn and reverse engineer the thing.

Best of all this weekend was the last hour of the last day, when we get the sharps and the pumpkins out to play. This year it was mostly pie pumpkins (many thanks to the hat wanting archer for the extras!) plus a double handful of cabbages and one large purple eggplant. I almost bowed out of participating again this year, but finally decided what the heck. It was fun. I got to use one of the Spanish military sabers. Pumpkin guts flying everywhere. Yes, we got pictures. I’m still waiting to get hold of them as they didn’t get taken with my camera. (My little camera isn’t up to those sorts of action shots.) I hope to have some of them posted soon because at least one of them is one of my favorite pictures of me I’ve seen in some time. So stay tuned if you’re curious.

The other thing that happened on the last day was the Lisa finally got to go to renfest. Hubby called around and through arrangement, offer of funding, and a dollop of serendipity, Lisa and Louise and Lisa’s aunt all came up for the afternoon as an early birthday present for Lisa. She got some presents and money to spend and good things to eat. She even got to watch the pumpkin slaughter and enjoyed it much. A good time was had even though we didn’t get to see much of her.

Truth to tell, about half way through the season, with the unendingness of it all and the crap that was going on, I was seriously wondering why I was bothering and giving consideration to not doing it anymore. It’s still a bite to give up that many weekends in a row, but the fencing is good and the friends are wonderful, even when I don’t get as much time with them as I’d like. And running into old teammates of my fencing buddies and getting to hear stories from when they were in college would just be a shame to pass up. We’ll see.

My knee is still being troublesome so I decided to take tonight off from fencing in order to give it a little more recovery time. Instead I ended up at four different grocery stores in search of pumpkins for the great pumpkin slaughter this weekend. The first grocery store had reasonably priced pumpkins but they were almost all too big. I picked out the smallest of the lot, and when I went to check out, the girl at the register was surprised by how light it was for it’s weight. She was wondering what it would look like inside, so I told her we were going to be tossing it to carve mid-air with swords. She got the renfest connection right away.

The second grocery store had very few pumpkins, but did have some small pie pumpkins at forty-nine cents per pound. I picked up three likely ones. The guy at the register thought they might have been mini pumpkins (ha! no) but was otherwise not interested aside from being glad I knew ho much they cost.

The third grocery store was the organic grocery. They also had some nice pie pumpkins but they were twice as expensive. I’m sure they will make nice pies but I don’t need to pay for organic, free range pumpkins just to splatter their guts all over a field. So I got some smelly salve for my knee, a tub of plain yoghurt and some Australian blue cheese.

On the way home I stopped by the fourth grocery store where they had enormous piles of pumpkins outside. They were only a dollar each, but it was a limit of one per customer and they were all huge. Inside the store I found the pie pumpkins at two dollars each. The woman at the checkout there wanted to know if I was going to make pies with them. When I explained their destined fate, she looked vaguely horrified. Such is life.
Now the back seat of my car is full of pumpkins and the weather forecast for the weekend is very fine indeed.