Category: diversions

L.A. Thrillers

Mostly by accident, this week I wound up watching two different thrillers set in Los Angeles: Chinatown, the 1974 classic directed by Roman Polanski and starring a young, amazingly handsome Jack Nicholson and a frighteningly seductive Faye Dunaway; and Point Blank, a 1967 film directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson.

Everyone knows about Chinatown. It’s a gripping film with a plot that closely resembles Churchill’s line about the Soviet Union: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Deservedly, Chinatown received 10 Oscar nominations (Best Picture, Best Actor for Nicholson and Actress for Dunaway, Director, and on and on) and won one, for Robert Towne’s screenplay, which is – judging by the film itself – a pretty fantastic piece of writing. It’s a shame that the soundtrack didn’t win the Oscar, too, because it is, note for note, just as good as the screenplay is, word for word.

Point Blank, I think, far from a classic movie, but it was based – very, very loosely – on a a pretty fantastic piece of writing, the classic 1962 noir novel by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark), The Hunter. The novel is set in 1962 New York, and brilliantly evokes that setting, but Point Blank is set, mystifyingly, in San Francisco (including, bizarrely, Alcatraz) and Los Angeles. The film takes all kinds of crazy and destructive liberties with the book’s tight plot, and veers off into what seemed to me to be cut-rate attempts to outdo Hitchcock, especially the what-the-fuck-is-happening psychedelic scenes in Vertigo. It doesn’t work.

Hooky Ride

Wednesday afternoon, I decided things were quiet enough at home and the weather was good enough outside (read, “very quiet” and “verrrrrrrry nice”) that I could take a long bike ride down to Faribault, partly for the fun of it and partly to have the guys at Milltown Cycles do a minor tuneup on the new bike after its first hundred miles. The tuneup took about half an hour; the rides about 55 minutes each way over some great roads: good pavement, light traffic, excellent scenery.

Riding Around

Riding Along

Thanks to the great weather and a relatively open schedule, I managed to do two long rides this weekend. (Long for me, that is.) Both were fantastic fun: tiring, sweaty, scenic, occasionally tough, satisfying. The new Surly bike is acquiring a nice layer of grit, but rides wonderfully, especially on gravel roads. On Saturday, I rode west and north away from town, on flat or gently rolling country roads.
Country Roads

On Sunday, I headed east and south, over some significant rolling terrain toward a notorious hill near the hamlet of Sogn. (It’s supposedly a mile long with a grade of 8% or 9%.) I’ve long wanted to try to climb the hill, but never had the bike for it.
Sogn Valley Climb

Today, I did finish the climb (that is, I rode from the first spray-painted “KoM” line at the bottom to the second one at the crest), though my runners’ legs didn’t like the new challenge. I’m sure I looked more lanterne rouge than polka dot jersey, but I enjoyed it anyhow. I also enjoyed – in a Beavis-and-Butthead way – riding through this place, which isn’t much more than an intersection and a township hall. Heh heh heh.
Wangs, Minnesota

Sinking Ships

For at least a year, this inflatable attention-getter has been moored at a car dealership in Clearwater, Minnesota, a little town along I-94 northwest of the Twin Cities.

The thing is bizarre, both in scale (huge) and in purpose. The stern of the ship reads “Titanic,” and here it is at a car dealership. Is this a joke on people who buy cars here? “We don’t sell lemons, but drive away from icebergs!” Is it a comment on the American auto industry, going to the bottom and taking a lot of people with it? Is it just a funny thing to have in the corner of your car lot? Who knows.
Car Dealer Attention-Getter.

Apostrophe Catastrophes

Since I’m too car-shocked (like shell-shocked, only caused by car travel with children) to blog anything substantial, I’ll follow up last night’s post on Fargo-Moorhead signage atrocities with this photo of the sign at the restaurant where we had a very nice extended-family dinner on Sunday.

To answer the sign’s question, what would be good for me would be better punctuation! But I’ll make do with Julia’s inadvertently apt misspeaking: as she tries to understand the differences between commas and apostrophes, she frequently asks if a particular mark is a “high prepostrophe” or a “low prepostrophe.” This sign is definitely a high prepostrophe.

Fryn' Pan

Vacation Eve

It’s only a long weekend, really, and neither the traveling nor the bedtimes will be easy, but I’m still looking forward to our “vacation” in Moorhead, Minnesota, from Thursday through Monday. It’ll be nice to think about proposals like, “Hey, girls, let’s see if your cousins want to go to the park!” rather than the other kind, of which there have been roughly eleventy billion since my last break from work – at Christmas.

And the girls – except at bedtime – absolutely love being up there. Nonna! Boppa! Nonna and Boppa’s dog! Cousins – including two “big girls”! Novel foods! Nonna’s collection of books and videos! The excellent Moorhead library! New playgrounds!

In short, this time is much more for them than for me or for Shannon – which is one of the reasons that I insist on using the word “vacation” to describe a period of time that will be decidedly unrestful and anti-relaxing. Julia and Genevieve deserve now to look forward to and later to look back on a time that we called “vacation” – even if their Mama and Daddy will be much more tired at the end of it than they are at the beginning. The girls deserve this not only because they’re kids and they ought to have a tradition of actual summer vacations, but also because in just a few weeks, their lives as they know them will be permanently altered when Vivi goes to preschool and Julia (*gulp*) goes to kindergarten.

So: let the vacation begin!

A Day’s Ride

As far as I can recall, it has been at least six or seven years since I went for a real bike ride – i.e., not my two-mile commute to or from campus and not hauling the girls somewhere. When Shannon and I lived in Minnetonka, we frequently went for 90- or 120-minutes jaunts down a local rails-to-trails corridor. Those rides were fantastic, but there are two reasons why we don’t do anything like that anymore: Julia and Genevieve.

So today’s ride over the roads southeast of Northfield was the first such endeavor in a long time, and I have to say it was fantastically fun and just the right amount of difficult. I rode for 1:13 and (according to Google Maps)  covered 29.6 km or 18.4 miles – about half an hour each on rolling gravel and asphalt roads, and the rest on grass and dirt (in Carleton’s bike-friendly – Upper Arb). The Cross-Check did great everywhere – all of those surfaces; uphills, downhills, and flats; straightaways and curves. On the other hand, the rider was a little skittish on the gravel, largely because of the body position required by the dropped bars. On the other hand, getting into the drops to pedal on flat pavement – holy cow fast.

And but so, a few lessons from what the first of what I hope will be many, many rides:

  1. 70 minutes of moderate cycling is nowhere near as hard as 60 minutes of easy running.
  2. Riding in direct summer sun is nowhere near as enervating as rollerskiing or running in the same sun.
  3. Trying to go uphill fast is still pretty hard.
  4. A pair of 12-year-old cycling shorts doesn’t have much padding left.
  5. A 12-year-old cycling jersey is more than up to the task.
  6. A liter of water in the Camelbak is waaaay too much for an hour’s ride.
  7. A person cannot and should not try to drink from the Camelbak while climbing a hill, no matter how dusty it is.
  8. A bike with dropped bars handles very differently through corners than a bike with flat bars, but mostly the same on uphills and much better on the flats.
  9. One set of clipless pedals has a very different release point than another.
  10. It’s an excellent idea, in retrospect, to master the new pedals’ release point before reaching the first stop sign.
  11. One hour of riding is more than enough time for the tiny hole in the cycling glove’s index finger to grow to big enough for the entire finger to come through.
  12. There is some spectacular scenery southeast of Northfield. it’s the last place I’d have expected “oh, wow!” vistas, but I found them anyhow.
  13. Take a camera!

Cross Check

I’ve been hankering for, and sorta-needed, a new bike for probably five years. Today – after the alignment of numerous stars, planets, moons, comets, and clouds of interstellar dust – I finally bought one: a Surly Cross-Check, from the guys at Faribault’s Milltown Cycles. The Cross-Check is more or less a cyclocross bike, which attracted me since my commute covers pavement and dirt and since I’d love to be able to ride on the asphalt and gravel roads around Northfield. More importantly, perhaps, I know quite a few people who have one of these bikes, and everyone raves about them. I’m excited to share the joy.

This will primarily be a commuting bike (after I move the fenders and lights from my current mountain bike), but I hope to keep the new bike pared-back enough that I can actually ride fast and even enter a race or two.

In brief: yee-haw! It’s beautiful, but it’ll never again be this shiny.

Surly Cross-Check

I-Me-My (Another Facebook Fad)

(The au courant Facebook fad.)

1. What time did you get up this morning? 5:30 a.m. Half an hour later than usual.

2. How do you like your steak? Well done, with fries.

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema? Uhhh… It’s been a while, but I think it was The Wackness.

4. What is your favorite TV show? If I could, I’d watch 30 Rock and/or The Office, but the girls’ bedtime routine long ago destroyed any TV watching I could do.

5. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? I’d choose somewhere boreal and forested: northern Minnesota, Finland, Ontario, British Columbia, Siberia. Winters are a must.

6. What did you have for breakfast? Two homemade zucchini muffins, with a dab of butter on each one. Fantastic.

7. What is your favorite cuisine? “Cuisine,” probably Thai and Indian. “Restaurant food,” excellent pizza.

8. What foods do you dislike? I don’t dislke many foods, but I won’t eat brussels sprouts, and would avoid smelling them if I could.

9. What is your favorite place to eat? If I could eat dinner anywhere in the world tonight, it would probably be the best pizzeria in Naples. Anywhere in the U.S., the Liberty Bell Chalet in Hurley, Wisconsin. Anywhere in the Twin Cities, any Punch Pizza location. (Yeah, there’s a trend.)

10. What is your favorite dressing? A nice balsamic vinaigrette.

11. What kind of vehicle do you drive? A silver Saturn VUE.

12. What are your favorite clothes? My favorite ensemble would be jeans, long johns, hiking boots with thick wool socks, a thermal t-shirt, and a light fleece sweater. Cold-weather clothes just feel righter than anything else.

13. Where would you visit if you had the chance? Scandinavia.

14. Is the glass half full, or half empty? Usually half full.

15. Where would you want to retire? See question 5.

16. What is your favorite time of day? In the summer and fall, early evening. In the spring and winter, afternoon.

17. Where were you born? Menominee, Michigan.

18. What is your favorite sport to watch? Cross-country skiing, distance running, and especially bike racing.

19. Who do you think will not tag you back? Dunno. The whole tagging phenomenon is kinda played out, I think.

20. Who do you think will tag you back first? I have no idea.

21. Who are you most curious about their responses to this? I’d love to see my wife’s answers; some of these questions’ answers would be interesting.

22. Are you a bird watcher? I enjoy watching birds and learning about them, but I’m not a hobbyist, by any means.

23. Are you a morning person or a night person? If I could, I’d stay up till one or two a.m. every night. I love being up late, alone.

24. Do you have any pets? Sabine, an old, chunky cat.

25. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share? My oldest daughter starts kindergarten in three weeks; my younger daughter preschool at the same time. I can distinctly remember, and still feel in my arms, the first time I held each of them, newly born.

26. What did you want to be when you were little? Until I was in high school, I was sure I’d be a soldier.

27. What is your best childhood memory? I have a lot of great childhood memories, but the very best ones are all outdoors – staying in the woods at our “hunting camp,” sledding, riding bikes for hours around our farm, learning to ski…

28. Are you a cat or dog person? I like both, but I’m not sure I have the time, money, or patience for a dog right now. Or, really, a cat.

29. Are you married? Yes, and I’m much better for it.

30. Always wear your seat belt? Yes.

31. Been in a car accident? Several times.

32. Any pet peeves? Lots, but bad writing (especially by those who should know better) is a perennial one. I also loathe the way lots of people habitually respond to questions inappropriately – rudely, curtly, ironically, overly-familiarly, not at all.

33. Favorite pizza toppings? Pepperoni, green peppers, and tomatoes.

34. Favorite flower? I like the way flowers look and smell, but I’m not sure I have a favorite. I like what roses do for Shannon’s mood, though.

35. Favorite ice cream? High-quality vanilla shouldn’t be underrated.

36. Favorite fast food restaurant? Errr, I suppose something lame like McDonalds or Subway. I have never understood why there’s no real national chain for fast-food pizza by the slice.

37. How many times did you fail your driving test? None.

38. From whom did you get your last email? My last personal email (i.e., not an update email or a work-related one) came from a neighbor, announcing (for the second time in two days) that (for the second time in six months) he’s quitting the townhouse-association board.

39. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card? Presently, a bike shop or another kind of outdoors-activity store.

40. Do anything spontaneous lately? Hmm… Outside of checking email or Facebook, no. My life isn’t structured for spontaneity right now.

41. Like your job? Yes, enormously. I am every day surprised to have such a rewarding job.

42. Broccoli? Yes, please.

43. What was your favorite vacation? I think my honeymoon – at an almost-deserted ski resort in the Upper Peninsula in late August – was great. The several trips I’ve made with Shannon to the North Shore and San Francisco have all been wonderful too.

44. Last person you went out to dinner with? Definitely Shannon – about a year ago.

45. What are you listening to right now? Genevieve, fighting sleep by having a one-sided conversation with Julia.

46. What is your favorite color? Navy blue.

47. How many tattoos do you have? None, though if or when I achieve certain life goals, that’ll change.

48. How many people are you tagging for this quiz? None.

49. What time did you finish this quiz? 8:26 p.m.

50. Coffee drinker? The more, the better, but always black.

Playgrounded

Playing at the playground is, I think, the dominant experience of summer for my girls. We don’t have a playground at home, so I think we’ve been to almost every playground in Northfield, which is only probable given that we can’t have a playset at home. The girls go – mostly with Shannon, but often with me (nine days running today, I think) – to a playground pretty much every day, and sometimes twice a day: morning at a playground on the circuit of errand-running, afternoon at the playground right by our house.

Late in July, the girls finally reached – or perhaps, I finally realized that the girls had reached – a point at which they don’t require constant monitoring, the hovering that starts with preventing toddlers from crashing and falling, proceeds to keeping more adventurous kids from having the (statistically unlikely) skull-splitting or arm-breaking accident, and eventually becomes a reflex. “We’re at the park, so I’d better stand right here, five feet from the slide.”

This is somewhat a relief, given that Shannon and I have now spent four years monitoring one or both of the girls at playgrounds near and far. God only knows how many millions of calories Shannon has burned circumnavigating the slides, the ladders, the tunnels, and the bridges. When I do wind up, by that reflex, standing right here, as I did this afternoon, the girls now say, point blank, “Daddy, we don’t need help! You can go sit down!”  This is bittersweet. I like not having to climb through kid-sized tunnels or smack my head on a too-low rail, but it’s kind of a shock to get kicked off the jungle gym by your own offspring.

I’ve discovered, in the few weeks since the girls made this jump to independent playground play, that the key is to keep a literal distance from the slides and ladders. If I get too close, I’m sucked in, and I find myself, ten minutes later, standing there, dumbly watching the girls. If I stay clear at first, the powerful gravitational forces of nearby benches can do their work, and I find myself, ten minutes later, watching them, studying the clouds, even – amazingly – doing a drawing or two. I still find myself getting ready to jump up when I see  Vivi tottering on some high spot or Julia choosing against all reason to go headfirst down a steep slide, but the comfort of the bench makes it easier to remember that such behavior is exactly why the whole playground is covered in mulch or rubber matting.

Random Songs

I’m slow to get to this Facebook trend, but here it is… The instructions were essentially to list the first 25 songs that come up on your iPod. I don’t have my entire music collection on my iPod, so this is more representative of the stuff that I have on there because I know I will like when it comes up.

Billy Bragg and Wilco, ‘California Stars’ (Mermaid Avenue)
Brad Mehldau, ‘Ruby’s Rub’ (Brad Mehldau Trio (Live))
Wilco, ‘You Never Know’ (Wilco (The Album))
The Bad Plus, ‘Thriftstore Jewelry’ (Prog)
Pavement, ‘Summer Babe (Winter Version)’ (Slanted & Enchanted)
Dosh, ‘If You Want To, You Have To’ (Wolves and Wishes)
Pixies, ‘Dig For Fire’ (Bossanova)
Radiohead, ‘Electioneering’ (OK Computer)
Sigur Rós, ‘Heysátan’ (Takk…)
Duke Ellington, ‘Diminuendo In Blue And Crescendo’ (Ellington At Newport (Live))
Uncle Tupelo, ‘Chickamauga’ (Anodyne
Trip Shakespeare, ‘Your Mouth’ (Lulu)
Art Blakey (w/Messengers), ‘A Night In Tunisia’ (Night In Tunisia)
John Lennon, ‘Oh Yoko’ (Rushmore)
The Beatles, ‘Get Back’ (Let It Be)
El Ten Eleven, ‘Every Direction Is North’ (Every Direction Is North)
Thelonious Monk, ‘Straight, No Chaser’ (Monk’s Blues)
Radiohead, ‘House Of Cards’ (In Rainbows)
Battles, ‘TRAS’ (EP C/B EP)
Sonic Youth, ‘Silver Rocket’ (Daydream Nation)
Django Reinhardt, ‘Alabamy Bound’ (Classic Early Recordings)
Pavement, ‘Stereo’ (Brighten The Corners)
Dave Brubeck Quartet, ‘Take Five’ (Time Out)
Hank Williams, ‘Honky Tonk Blues’ (40 Greatest Hits)
Billie Holiday, ‘Pennies From Heaven’ (The Lady Sings)

Seven Points of Contention

Here are a few things over which Julia and Genevieve have argued with each other or with me in the past week:

1. Whether, when they pretend to be “big kids” going to school, they can both be “vorteen,” or whether they have to be different ages, “like five for you and fourteen for me.”

2. Whether a particular crayon is more or less blue/red/brown/orange/etc. than another crayon of almost exactly the same color. This argument isn’t helped toward a peaceable conclusion by the stupid “Kid’s Choice” names Crayola is using these days.

3. Who can can lower her head further into the bathwater. (This is particularly meaningless since their heads are different sizes.)

4. Who gets to use the scooter on the trip to the park. This one rankled me because, after five minutes of disputation and compromise, the winner – Genevieve – abandoned the scooter before we reached the end of the block.

5. Whether it’s “okay” to laugh – as Vivi often does – when the other person bumps her head, stubs her toe, or is otherwise slightly hurt. (For the record, it’s not. Unless you are a grown-up and can laugh silently at a particularly comical “injury,” like Julia falling out of her kiddie chair after being cautioned roughly ten times in two minutes that she will, in fact, fall.)

6. Whether sandals are appropriate footwear for walking or playing somewhere with lots of tiny pebbles and/or sand, like, say, any playground in ten miles of our house.

7. Whether that sound outside was a car, a motorcyle, an airplane, a helicopter – or a monster.

Sunday Morning

The girls and I enjoyed a leisurely wander around downtown Northfield this morning. The weather was perfectly warm and sunny, so we were able to comfortably walk from the coffeeshop south along the river to the lovely new spot where the ducks and geese congregate, waiting for bread crumbs. After jumping off each and every stone there, we headed north on the riverwalk, crossing the river on the pedestrian and 2nd Street bridge, which proved to be excellent spots for throwing rocks and sticks into the river – attracting quite a few ducks who were instantly annoyed that the sticks weren’t edible. The girls ran, walked, skipped, hopped, danced, and even curtseyed (Julia being one of the few people in the world who can curtsey and still move forward); I mostly just walked very slowly and prevented anyone from falling down or in.

Having been walking for an hour or more by then, we stopped at a little white riverside gazebo, where we rested and enjoyed a game of Simon Says, which was amusing mostly because Vivi doesn’t yet understand that when you’re the leader, you’re supposed to try to trick the others into doing something that Simon didn’t say. She’s just too goodhearted to have figured out ways to make everyone else foul up.

Amidst all this low-key activity, it was interesting to watch downtown wake up. When we started, around nine, only the coffeeshop had anyone in it, and not even many people at that. As we walked, a few more people meandered by – a few runners and walkers, a few couples out for coffee – but things only livened up to the normal downtown hubub around eleven, as peopled streamed out of the downtown hotel and streamed into the couple restaurants offering brunch. And shortly after that, the sidewalk out front of the coffeeshop filled up with cyclists finishing their morning rides. It says something about Northfield that our resident biker gang wears spandex and rides $4,000 bicycles.