Marc Valdez Weblog

She gets it! She really gets it! But then, she's a dancer too!:

Wiseman gives us no obvious plot, no narrator, and no music other than that which goes with the dances. We move, ghost-like, around the theater: from studio to stage to costume shop, canteen, and administrative offices--always passing through the old hallways and winding staircases that join them. Ballet, he makes us feel, is a place and an institution as much as it is an art. Occasionally we re-emerge onto the streets, bleary-eyed, to glimpse the theater lobby or to travel to the Bastille Opera House, the company’s second (and garishly modern) home, but the film’s heart lies inside the Palais Garnier. We are there for nearly three hours, enclosed in the heavy stone walls of a tradition.

La Danse is the only film I know that successfully conveys what it feels like, physically, to be a dancer--to get inside a step or a phrase and to make it work on your own body--but also to live, as dancers do, absorbed in the repetitive, ritualized, and seemingly timeless practices of their art. None of this is monkish or self-sacrificing, as it is often portrayed. It is simply what dancers do: it is their work. (When I was myself a dancer I was always surprised when people marveled at the discipline of dancers: that, it seemed to me, was utterly unremarkable--a given.) Wiseman studiously avoids backstage gossip and competitive tensions, and says nothing about injuries, nerves, divas, casting sheets. He never indulges high-drama tantrums or celebrity worship: he does not even give us the names or the ranks of the dancers, nor does he identify Brigitte Lefèvre, the Paris Opera’s formidable director of dance. We do not know exactly who these people are, we only see the work they are doing.

...In 1995 [Wiseman] turned to--of all things--dance, and made Ballet about the American Ballet Theater, a close (and very long) study of the work of a ballet company. Yet the film--like the American tradition that it documented--had a freewheeling and relaxed rhythm that made it feel diffuse; it lacked the intensity of the art that it described. La Danse, by contrast, goes straight to the source: the Paris Opera is where ballet formally began. Founded by Louis XIV in 1669, it is a centralized national institution with an unbroken tradition.

It is not that Wiseman gives us a history. He doesn’t have to do so; it is all there in the art. The dancers may have sleek twenty-first-century bodies, but they inhabit an archaic society based on hierarchy and patronage: this is perhaps the only surviving court art in our hyper-modern age. It requires, as Molière once noted of Louis XIV’s theatrical ventures, “an army” of artisans--dressers, costume designers, seamstresses, makeup artists, painters, lighting technicians, cooks, ballet masters. Costumes are still sewn by hand, sequin by sequin, and toe shoes (dozens of them) are carefully sprayed, one by one, with the appropriate dye and hung to dry. Fabrics are dipped and stirred in great vats of color; lighting engineers painstakingly set each cue; painters plaster and re-paint the timeworn walls; and all the while dancers labor at their craft. The food in the canteen--presented to us fully plated in still-life close-up shots--looks as if it had been served that way for centuries.

...La Danse pays meticulous attention to the details of the art. Thus we watch a dancer struggle to master a single step (we are not told that she is an étoile, a “star” at the pinnacle of the Paris Opera hierarchy). She goes after it over and over again, with the ballet master and her partner coaching her, but she cannot seem to get it. Her body just can’t feel it. Finally her partner muses that “she imagines an arabesque where there is none.” Immediately we understand: she has to change her physical mind, shift her body’s thinking, in order to internalize the step. Figuring out how to do this takes some time, and we are made to feel the consuming repetition and the long hours that go into even the tiniest refinements in a dance. Wiseman offsets this concentrated technical analysis with images of languid stretching, and we sense the way in which dancers are always in their bodies, always aware and feeling them, even when they are not controlling them: the stretching is like the body daydreaming or doodling. At one point we get an extended shot of dancers’ feet--only the feet--which reminded me of the games that dancers like to play, such as identifying a colleague exclusively by the distinctive shape of her instep.

If Wiseman takes us inside the physicality of ballet, he also evokes its wispy ethereality. All theaters are haunted--with memories, past performances, yesterday’s dancers. Thus instead of walking his camera (and us) smoothly through the theater, Wiseman cuts from a dancer in a class to an empty room to a patch of light to a staircase; or from a staircase to a hallway to a studio. This might sound a bit arty, but it is not at all: the staccato rhythm and the visual disjuncture make us feel that we are appearing suddenly--invisibly--around the theater and in the dancers’ midst. (How did we get from the staircase to the hallway?) It is like a child’s trick: we see, but we are not seen.

In an art form with no standardized notation--no scores or scripts--the way that ballets are passed on from one generation to the next is vital, and Wiseman is not afraid to show us the process in all of its technical detail. Thus two older coaches working with a younger dancer disagree at some length over whether a dancer’s heels should drop fully to the floor when she bends her knees before a jump (more power), or whether they should remain raised a fraction of an inch from the floor (more agility and speed). If this sounds like hairsplitting--or shoptalk--it is not. Wiseman has chosen carefully. The “heels raised” approach was first introduced by Balanchine, and denotes a modernist orientation, whereas “heels down” points to a more traditional nineteenth-century manner. It is a debate that has been re-enacted in dance studios for decades. The coaches know this. They carry out the argument with consummate ease, each knowing exactly what the other will say but saying it nonetheless, because it still matters: what the younger dancers decide is one of many details that shape the future of the art.

The dancers in La Danse are like dancers everywhere: verbally reticent, often painfully so, but possessed of a striking physical confidence and ease. The company’s youngest dancers in particular appear childlike and timid. They do not talk much, and when they do they are self-effacing. No one thinks this odd, and in ballet it is not: deference is implicit in the art. Watching them, however, we realize that it is they, and not their coaches or an older generation, who stand for tradition and conservatism. These young people do not question their superiors or the tradition that is being bequeathed to them. On the contrary: in one of the film’s most striking moments, we observe an exasperated Brigitte Lefèvre urging her staff to push young dancers to experiment with new styles and techniques--to be more radical. Partly this is Lefèvre, who reached her prime in the 1960s and was an unusually bold and innovative artist, but it is also a general point. Young dancers everywhere want to dance the toughest, most technically demanding virtuosic roles. For this reason, the challenges of contemporary works, which often move against the classical grain, are less appealing. It is ballet’s youth that now anchors it in the past.

What about the choreography? Wiseman shows the tremendous range demanded of dancers today: from the raw athleticism of the British choreographer Wayne McGregor to the ornate lyricism and carnivalesque spectacle of The Nutcracker or Paquita. We get extended excerpts of these dances, mostly shot (I think) from the first wing. But these are not like the excerpts in other documentaries or films. They are not snippets or reminders, but improvements: many of the dances that Wiseman shows us--and this is especially true for the more modern works--are better on film, certainly on this film, than they are live.

The reason is that Wiseman gives them a context and a history that they do not themselves possess. Consider Le Songe de Médée, choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj. We watch a dancer rehearsing the role, crawling forward and pulling her body heavily along the floor behind her (we don’t know this is from Medée until later). At another point in the film we see a dancer discussing the role (we still don’t know which) with a ballet master who reassures her that the performance will carry her, that she will find the role once the music, the costumes, and the spattered blood are real on stage. The dance, he says, has its own internal momentum and will build, step by step. Then we see the performance up close from the wings: the rehearsals rush to mind and “synch” with the dance, adding layers and depth. We are left with the astonishing feeling that Wiseman has re-assembled all the elements and thereby re-choreographed the dance, and also strengthened it by inserting it into a tradition and giving us visual images--and memories--that live performance precludes.

...By cutting from unidentified rehearsals with unidentified dancers to an unidentified performance, he focuses our attention purely on the dances themselves. There is no clutter of personality; just the dancer and the dance. The result is a film that allows us to know ballet and dancers more intimately than we may ever have known them, because we know the work they do.

Wiseman has called La Danse a “love letter” to ballet, and so it is. But it is also more. It is the film that ballet modernists have been waiting for: detached, controlled, at moments ironic. Wiseman does not shy away from artifice. Lest we be fooled, he distilled La Danse from some 130 hours of film shot over twelve weeks, and spent many months editing, crafting--choreographing--its sequences and montage. Nor does he mistake artifice for ornament, seeing it instead as a tool for getting to the truth--and for creating, as he has described his work, “reality fictions.” These “fictions” have nothing to do with the romanticized or melodramatic ballet of popular imagining; they are simply ballet the way it is now, for dancers. But--and this is the point--Wiseman’s single-minded focus on the craft and the inner workings of dance does not in any way trivialize or diminish the art. Ballet is all the more elevated and noble because of it. George Balanchine, to whom I imagine this film owes a debt, liked to say to his dancers of audiences, “they look but they do not see, so we must show them.” Now Wiseman has shown them, too.

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Hard to believe, but Coast-to-Coast AM with substitute host Ian Punnett featured an interesting, spot-on guest! There is hope for AM radio yet!

John Perkins discussed his book "Hoodwinked":

John Perkins has seen the signs of today's economic meltdown before. The subprime mortgage fiascos, the banking industry collapse, the rising tide of unemployment, the shuttering of small businesses across the landscape are all too familiar symptoms of a far greater disease. In his former life as an economic hit man, he was on the front lines both as an observer and a perpetrator of events, once confined only to the third world, that have now sent the United States—and in fact the entire planet—spiraling toward disaster.

Here, Perkins pulls back the curtain on the real cause of the current global financial meltdown. He shows how we've been hoodwinked by the CEOs who run the corporatocracy—those few corporations that control the vast amounts of capital, land, and resources around the globe—and the politicians they manipulate. These corporate fat cats, Perkins explains, have sold us all on what he calls predatory capitalism, a misguided form of geopolitics and capitalism that encourages a widespread exploitation of the many to benefit a small number of the already very wealthy. Their arrogance, gluttony, and mismanagement have brought us to this perilous edge. The solution is not a "return to normal."

But there is a way out. As Perkins makes clear, we can create a healthy economy that will encourage businesses to act responsibly, not only in the interests of their shareholders and corporate partners (and the lobbyists they have in their pockets), but in the interests of their employees, their customers, the environment, and society at large.

We can create a society that fosters a just, sustainable, and safe world for us andour children. Each one of us makes these choices every day, in ways that are clearly spelled out in this book.

"We hold the power," he says, "if only we recognize it." Hoodwinked is a powerful polemic that shows not only how we arrived at this precarious point in our history but also what we must do to stop the global tailspin.

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It's monsoon season in the Outback!

And the dams are ready to catch the inflow:

Rainfall and storm activity over the Christmas-Boxing Day period delivered some good falls across South East Queensland however it was largely isolated and inconsistent with no significant increase in dam levels.

The extreme dry state of the catchments meant most of the rainfall was soaked up by the ground conditions.

The good news is the majority of dam catchments, apart from Wivenhoe, are now primed to deliver inflows should the region receive any solid follow up rainfall over the next 5-7 days.

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Sleeping at 6 a.m. this morning, I heard a sound. It sounded like a small piece of wood being kicked along on pavement. Since I've been anxious about security issues around the home lately, I jumped up out of bed and quickly looked out the bedroom window.

I saw a man kneeling next to my car's rear wheel. What was he doing? Was he slashing the tires?

I pounded on my bedroom window. "Stop that!" I shouted. I pounded some more, slapping my palm on the glass in order to avoid breaking the glass, and yelled again. Then, I opened the window, and shouting at the top of my lungs, yelled "WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?"

As I stared into the soft light of dawn, in an instant, the man dissolved away without a trace. One instant I was asleep; the next - I was awake.

Whoa! Sleepwalking under duress! I've done this before, but rarely: it's been years. I was lucky I didn't shatter the bedroom window. And embarrassing - I hope I didn't wake the neighbors!

It took two hours to fall asleep again.

Later in the morning, E. returned home, and I explained about my sleepwalking episode:

E.: Chris and I were watching - what was that called? - The Andy Griffin Show.

M.: The Andy Griffin show?

E.: Yes, he is a policeman. Or maybe not a policeman, exactly, but some kind of security guard, because he always has to "secure the building." Anyway, he did some sleepwalking and he started making passes at this woman - I don't know who she is, exactly, but I think she's his aunt - because his personality changed when he was sleepwalking! It was so funny! Maybe your personality will change too! MMMAAAARRRRRCCCC! My poor baby brother!

Under the circumstances this seemed apropos, once again:

This felt a bit odd. In the Internet Age, everything is ostentatiously My-this and My-that - MySpace, for example. So, a distant politician is now My Politician, and he sends a pained personal E-Mail:

Dear Marc,

I want to tell you myself about this article published today in the Star Tribune. In it, I disclose that for many years I have been challenged by mild depression, and also that, for a brief period while I was in the Senate, I "slipped" in my recovery from alcoholism.

These are deeply personal matters, and it is very hard for me to disclose them publicly. However, I believe that you and others have the right to know them about me, as you consider supporting me for Governor of Minnesota.

My first thought was 'why are you telling ME this, Mark (if I may be so bold as to call you by your first name, which I suppose I should, since it's My-World, even though I haven't thought to 'friend' you yet on Facebook)? I mean, even though we are on a first name basis, you aren't even my Senator!

Then, I remembered, I've given Mark some money. Not directly, mind you, but through 'Wellstone Action', which is a part of His-World. So, in a way, we're old acquaintances. Pals, even.

Mark, it's OK! Who wouldn't get depressed once in a while, facing the likes of Norm Coleman and Michelle Bachmann? What matters is that you aren't Republican! But remember to stay healthy, too. Because, in the Internet Age, we frequently get too busy, and lose that personal touch - with oneself, most of all. Liquid lunches are costly in more ways than money!

So, how's everything else going? How are the wife and kids?
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That's to be expected, I suppose. They have taste; I don't!

Still, it's remarkable. I LOVE Dance music, really LOVE it, but on this Top 50 list of 2009's Dance Albums, I got real excited about #2 (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and maybe #42 (Lily Allen), and that's about it! Didn't even hear about the rest! How about that?:

1. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz
3. The XX - The XX
4. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
5. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
6. Horrors - Primary Colours
7. Fever Ray - Fever Ray
8. Florence and the Machine - Lungs
9. Bat For Lashes - Two Suns
10. Wild Beasts - Two Dancers
11. F*** Buttons - Tarot Sport
12. Girls - Album
13. Mastodon - Crack The Skye
14. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
15. Manic Street Preachers - Journal for Plague Lovers
16. La Roux - La Roux
17. Arctic Monkeys - Humbug
18. Wilco - Wilco (The Album)
19. Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Pains of Being Pure at Heart
20. Jamie T - Kings & Queens
21. Doves - Kingdom of Rust
22. Bob Dylan - Together Through Life
23. Sun O))) - Monoliths and Dimensions
24. Mos Def - The Ecstatic
25. Richard Hawley - Truelove's Gutter
26. Bruce Springsteen - Working on a Dream
27. Future of the Left - Travels With Myself and Another
28. Low Anthem - Oh My God, Charlie Darwin
29. Kasabian - West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum
30. Muse - The Resistance
31. Martyn - Great Lengths
32. Bombay Bicycle Club - I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose
33. Big Pink - A Brief History of Love
34. White Denim - Fits
35. U2 - No Line on the Horizon
36. Passion Pit - Manners
37. HEALTH - Get Colour
38. Major Lazer - Guns Don't Kill People Lazers Do
39. Empire of the Sun - Walking on a Dream
40. Madness - The Liberty of Norton Folgate
41. Neko Case - Middle Cyclone
42. Lily Allen - It's Not Me, It's You
43. Noah and the Whale - The First Days of Spring
44. Telepathe - Dance Mother
45. Micachu and the Shapes - Jewellery
46. Dead Weather - Horehound
47. Sonic Youth - The Eternal
48. Japandroids - Post-Nothing
49. Franz Ferdinand - Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
50. Gallows - Grey Britain

Here is "Summer Clothes" from Animal Collective's 'Merriweather Post Pavilion', which I don't much like - I mean, it's OK; especially the visuals - but since it's NUMBER ONE it must not only be good, but the wave of the future!:


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And remember! Ron Cisneros likes the movie "Nine"! What better recommendation does anyone need?

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, critics!
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A vigorous internal dialogue:

Me: What's this? Jennifer Lopez in "Gigli" AND Madonna in "Swept Away"? Two movies that consistently rank among the worst movies ever made? Together on just this one shelf of videos? Should I buy them both at the severe discount being offered?

Devil on Left Shoulder: Buy them! They are conversation pieces!

Angel on Right Shoulder: NO! DON'T BUY THEM! These movies have no redeeming value. They aren't campy, or sad: they're just bad. They don't even have the conversational and historical value of "Plan Nine From Outer Space". People should pay YOU to watch them!

Devil on Left Shoulder: Buy them! These movies are landmarks of popular culture!

Angel on Right Shoulder: NO! DON'T BUY THEM! Paris Hilton is a better actress than either of these two dimwits! Watching these movies will plunge you into a time-sucking black hole of monstrous proportions! Highly-successful people wouldn't waste a nanosecond on either movie! And you do want to be highly-successful, don't you?

Me: Madonna was a pretty good actress in 'Evita'....

Angel on Right Shoulder: But remember, Madonna doesn't have to act to play a strident, vengeful megalomaniac. "Swept Away" shows Madonna's true range!

Devil on Left Shoulder: But how will you know unless you watch the movie?

Angel on Right Shoulder: ......

Me: I'll buy them both!

Interestingly enough, I didn't see "Heaven's Gate" on the shelves anywhere. Bargain hunters must have picked the store clean of this work of art!

Which leads me to reprint a large portion Joe Queenan's wonderful discussion regarding bad movies (I've posted it before, but I return to it again and again, for the nice warm feeling I get when I read it):

Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful. Anyone can make a sickening movie; we are already up to Saw IV. Anyone can make an unwatchable movie; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. And anyone can make a comedy that is not funny; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. But to make a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock requires a level of moxie, self-involvement, lack of taste, obliviousness to reality and general contempt for mankind that the average director, producer and movie star can only dream of attaining.

A generically appalling film like The Hottie and the Nottie is a scab that looks revolting while it is freshly coagulated; but once it festers, hardens and falls off the skin, it leaves no scar. By contrast, a truly bad movie, a bad movie for the ages, a bad movie made on an epic, lavish scale, is the cultural equivalent of leprosy: you can't stand looking at it, but at the same time you can't take your eyes off it. You are horrified by it, repelled by it, yet you are simultaneously mesmerised by its enticing hideousness. A monstrously bad movie is like the Medusa: those who gaze on its hideous countenance are doomed, but who can resist taking a gander?

The worst film I have ever seen is a low-budget 1969 production called Futz. It was about a man who fell in love with a pig, and even by the dismal standards of the era, it was dismal. There is also a special place in my heart for La Grande Bouffe, the 1973 film about four men who eat themselves to death, and for Anjelica Huston's 1969 debut in her father's A Walk With Love and Death, which also starred Assaf Dayan, the son of the Israeli general with the flashy eyepatch. Pasolini's 120 Days of Sodom is as vile as any film I have ever seen, The Way We Were as treacly and flatulent as any movie I know of, and the lighthearted Holocaust-era comedy Life Is Beautiful as morally repugnant - precisely because of its apparent innocence - as any film I can name. But these are personal tastes; I would never be so bold as to argue that a 39-year-old film about an arrant porcophile is the worst movie ever made, not only because so few people have seen it but because there may be several other movies about men who rapturously lie down with comely sows that are actually worse than Futz. Though I kind of doubt it.

This brings me to my major point. To qualify as one of the worst films of all time, several strict requirements must be met. For starters, a truly awful movie must have started out with some expectation of not being awful. That is why making a horrific, cheapo motion picture that stars Hilton or Jessica Simpson is not really much of an accomplishment. Did anyone seriously expect a film called The Hottie and The Nottie not to suck? Two, an authentically bad movie has to be famous; it can't simply be an obscure student film about a boy who eats live rodents to impress dead girls. Three, the film cannot be a deliberate attempt to make the worst movie ever, as this is cheating. Four, the film must feature real movie stars, not jocks, bozos, has-beens or fleetingly famous media fabrications like Hilton. Five, the film must generate a negative buzz long before it reaches cinemas; like the Black Plague or the Mongol invasions, it must be an impending disaster of which there has been abundant advance warning; it cannot simply appear out of nowhere. And it must, upon release, answer the question: could it possibly be as bad as everyone says it is? This is what separates Waterworld, a financial disaster but not an uncompromisingly dreadful film, and Ishtar, which has one or two amusing moments, from The Postman, Gigli and Heaven's Gate, all of which are bona fide nightmares.

Six, to qualify as one of the worst movies ever made, a motion picture must induce a sense of dread in those who have seen it, a fear that they may one day be forced to watch the film again - and again - and again. To pass muster as one of the all-time celluloid disasters, a film must be so bad that when a person is asked, "Which will it be? Waterboarding, invasive cattle prods or Jersey Girl?", the answer needs no further reflection. This phenomenon resembles Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim ends up befriending his tormentors, so long as they promise not to make him watch any more Kevin Smith movies. The condition is sometimes referred to as Blunted Affleck.

Several years ago, I read that a movie about a blind dental technician and a paraplegic athlete who enter a white-water rafting competition was playing at a cinema near me. I immediately bought a ticket for Good Luck, enthralled at the idea of seeing what figured to be one of the worst movies ever made. To be honest, that is the reason I became a critic in the first place; criticism seemed to be a way to channel my unwholesome fascination with train wrecks and fires into a socially acceptable framework. The truth is, every time I go to the pictures, I get goose bumps all over, anticipating that this, after all these years, could be the worst movie ever made.

Sadly, it never is. Yes, Good Luck was bad. It was an inane premise, poorly executed, and the results were not pretty. But it was not so bad that I spent the rest of my life thinking about it. I didn't even spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about it. What's more, because there was no one else in the cinema at the time, and because I have never met anyone else who has seen the film, its imbecilic charms were not something I could share with others.

There is one other requirement for a movie to be considered one of the worst ever: it must keep getting worse. By this, I mean that it not only must keep getting worse while you are watching it, but it must, upon subsequent viewings, seem even worse than the last time you saw it. That is what distinguishes Ishthar from Gigli and Showgirls from Swept Away. Widely viewed as one of the worst movies ever when it was released in 1987, Ishtar actually has several comic moments. Gigli doesn't. Similarly, Showgirls has a certain campy allure that grows a bit each time I see it. Madonna's Swept Away doesn't; it seems more amateurish on each viewing, like a morass that starts out as a quagmire, then morphs into a cesspool and finally turns into a slime pit on the road to its ultimate destination in the bowels of Hell.

All that said, none of these very, very, very bad movies automatically qualify as the worst film ever made. While it may disappoint those who welcome my occasionally unconventional opinions, I am firmly in the camp that believes that Heaven's Gate is the worst movie ever made. For my money, none of these other films can hold a candle to Michael Cimino's 1980 apocalyptic disaster. This is a movie that destroyed the director's career. This is a movie that lost so much money it literally drove a major American studio out of business. This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that defies belief.

A friend of mine, now deceased, was working for the public relations company handling Heaven's Gate when it was released. He told me that when the 220-minute extravaganza debuted at the Toronto film festival, the reaction was so thermonuclear that the stars and the film-maker had to immediately be flown back to Hollywood, perhaps out of fear for their lives. No one at the studio wanted to go out and greet them upon their return; no one wanted to be seen in that particular hearse. My friend eventually agreed to man the limo that would meet the children of the damned on the airport tarmac and whisk them to safety, but only provided he was given free use of the vehicle for the next three days. After he dropped off the halt and the lame at suitable safe houses and hiding places, he went to Mexico for the weekend. Nothing like this ever happened when Showgirls or Gigli or Ishtar or Xanadu or Glitter or Cleopatra were released. Nothing like this happened when The Hottie and the Nottie dropped dead the day it was released. Heaven's Gate was so bad that people literally had to be bribed to go meet the survivors. Proving that, in living memory, giants of bad taste once ruled the earth. Giants. By comparison with the titans who brought you Heaven's Gate, Paris Hilton is a rank amateur.

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After waiting in line for a minute, or so, a person idling in the store suddenly sprang forward to ring up my purchase....

Me: Oh, you're a clerk! I wasn't sure. I thought maybe you might have been a customer, or maybe a security guard.

Clerk: Security would be good - they make a good wage. And speaking about security, have you seen the National Security folks out on the street in their little cars?

Me: No, what's that? Little cars? Like golf carts? Or meter maid vehicles?

Clerk: No, like a fleet of recently-painted 10-year-old Geo Metros. I've been seeing them everywhere today.

Me: I heard about some folks in Montana who faked being National Security folks.

Clerk: Maybe these folks are fake too. I don't know. But they're in uniform and they are present today on the streets, in force....

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Saturday evening, about 10 p.m., I walked past the intersection of 11th & I Streets in Sacramento, and listened.....

First, there was the familiar sound of the solo jazz trumpeter, who likes to practice in the parking structure there. Bright and peppy and jazzy!

Then, somewhere high above the street to the north, an eerie chorus of wailing and screeching birds perched on parapets echoed through the downtown street canyons. I don't know what birds those are, but it sounded a lot like a Tarzan movie soundtrack.

The combination was really peculiar to listen to!

And why not?:

L'Osservatore Romano on Tuesday congratulated the show on its 20th anniversary, praising its philosophical leanings as well as its stinging and often irreverent take on religion.

Without Homer Simpson and the other yellow-skinned characters "many today wouldn't know how to laugh," said the article titled "Aristotle's Virtues and Homer's Doughnut."

The paper credited "The Simpsons" - the longest-running American animated program - with opening up cartoons to an adult audience.

The Fox show is based on "realistic and intelligent writing," it said, though it added there was some reason to criticize its "excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters."

Religion, from the snore-evoking sermons of the Rev. Lovejoy to Homer's face-to-face talks with God, appears so frequently on the show that it could be possible to come up with a "Simpsonian theology," it said.

Homer's religious confusion and ignorance are "a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith," the paper said.

It commented on several religion-themed episodes, including one in which Homer calls for divine intervention by crying: "I'm not normally a religious man, but if you're up there, save me, Superman!"

"Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong," L'Osservatore said. "But these are just minor mistakes, after all, the two know each other well."

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I went and saw this tonight at the Crest. Wonderful, wonderful documentary! The imdb summary says just about all that anyone need know when going:

The film follows the production of seven ballets by the Paris Opera Ballet.

The film should be around for the next week at the Crest Theatre.

Ballet is nothing if not academically exacting, and the film shows that well. Much of the film is preoccupied with classes and small studio rehearsals, where the dancers learn the craft they do so well.

Towards the end of the film, the focus shifts to performances, where the lessons we have been privileged to watch are executed, sometimes nearly-unrecognizably so, once the elements of costume, music, and lighting are added.

I missed about 5 minutes of the film (a projector bulb apparently burned out and I took a break). Bizarre stuff on a Spanish theme greeted me on my return (Mats Ek’s The House of Bernarda Alba, in performance). Just the way I like it! Absolutely jarring!

Here is a portion of the San Francisco Chronicle review (by John Killacky):

"La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet," Frederick Wiseman's astoundingly beautiful documentary, has sumptuous delights to satisfy every balletomane. Clocking in at more than 2 1/2 hours, though, it is clearly a film for the committed dance lover.

...Underground labyrinths, backstage corridors, dressing rooms, rehearsal studios, sewing rooms, cafeterias, administrative offices and the personalities that inhabit them embody the film and are in stark contrast to the public's experience of the opulence of the gilded proscenium, scarlet velvet seats, Chagall ceilings, chandeliers and grand marble staircases.

Intimate rehearsal shots detail contemporary choreographers Wayne McGregor and Angelin Preljocaj developing and refining movement phrases step by step. Viewers also witness repertory classics such as "Nutcracker" and "Paquita" being remounted and taught to a new generation. What a pleasure to be brought into the creative process as dancers go about their work unself-consciously.

Juxtaposing scenes of extraordinary dancer-athletes refining their craft are those of administrators in labor negotiations, designing benefactor events and discussing repertory. Occasionally, a snippy remark is captured: "Suzanne Farrell's errors become everyone else's standards." However, we also see the machinations of a huge bureaucracy at work.

Another review (by Pamela Cohn):

But the evolution of story, of structure, of narrative, is clear. It is clear in the way [Wiseman] captures the language of the choreographer to the principal dancer, of the ballet masters and mistresses to the corps de ballet, tasking them, individually and as a group, to embody the unrelenting drive to achieve a perfection that transcends the human form. Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, we watch pieces move from rehearsal studio to luxurious theater, replete with 2,200 scarlet velvet seats and Marc Chagall ceiling, all lovingly and meticulously vacuumed, scrubbed, and kept in pristine condition by a silent army of maintenance workers.

Interstitially, Wiseman inserts static portraits of the institution of the Palais Garnier, the 19th-century building that houses the company—cold, opulent, and solid like an ancient netherworld, almost ominous in its stillness and emptiness—and the city of Paris, shot aerially for the most part—staid, stony and gray—a bustling place seemingly oblivious to the microcosmic realm where the dancers, the choreographers, the administrative staff, the seamstresses, the food service workers, the cleaners and painters and musicians, live out their days working hard to keep a cultural institution alive and flourishing. These stills flesh out geography and story, and act as counterpoint to the sweating bodies, stretched tendons, pounding feet and corporeal sensuality of dancers entwined in impossible positions to illustrate the lust, vengeance and celestial love of these choreographed dramas. They all make it look “indecently easy,” as one ballet master describes the leaps and pirouettes of one male dancer who can suspend himself in mid-air with powerful lift and grace. Wiseman subtly, slyly, interjects snippets of a larger drama that is, at once, astonishing and exhilarating, routine and mundane, a hallmark of his and something that makes watching his films such a full and satisfying experience. This technique enables a viewer to, as Wiseman says, “think through their own relationship to what they are seeing and hearing.” As one fellow film lover put it to me after watching La Danse, “For the first time, I finally got ballet.”

The seven dances featured in the film, both in rehearsal and in performance, by a slate of the most exciting international choreographers, are: Pierre Lacotte’s Paquita, Rudolf Nureyev’s Casse-Noisette (The Nutcracker), Wayne McGregor’s Genus, Angelin Preljocaj’s powerful and bloody Medea, Mats Ek’s The House of Bernarda Alba, Sasha Waltz’ Romeo and Juliet, and Pina Bausch’s exquisite Orpheus and Eurydyce.

It is a joy and a rare privilege—and not just for balletomanes—to watch these artists perform at the highest level of their craft, all captured in sound and motion by an artist working at the highest level of his.

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Went with the DMTC folks Christmas night to see Rob Marshall's new movie "Nine".

Very Fosse-esque! More Fosse than Fosse! Indeed, now I'm left wondering if "All That Jazz" is just a rehash of Fellini's "8 1/2" (which I haven't seen, but if I can find it on VHS, I will). Given the subject material, it's no surprise that Rob Marshall ("Chicago") directed this film.

The quality was variable, but I certainly enjoyed myself.

The best number, in my view, was Kate Hudson singing “Cinema Italiano”, which, interestingly enough, does not appear to have been in the stage musical, but was apparently added for the movie, maybe just for Hudson. The musical numbers are so self-referential that having this musical number about something else than Guido Contini is all it takes to kick up the energy a notch. And switching black-and-white with color is awesome! As mentioned in reviews, Marshall's cutting back-and-forth is a problem for those trying to appreciate the choreography of the various musical numbers, but the linear structure of "Cinema Italiano", imposed by the fashion runway, defeats Marshall's attention-deficit-disorder.

Yeah, for me, the songs are the problems. Kind of forgettable tunes. If Rob Marshall improved the film by dropping in new songs, good for him!

I was a bit disappointed in Fergie – playing a sexy and now-easily-recognizable stock-Fellini character (but inarticulate: I’d hope she could do better than that). Nicole Kidman was fine – regal, sensitive. Penelope Cruz is very needy, but very sexy (won't kick her out of bed for eating crackers). Judi Dench is OK - cinema's answer to Jean Henderson. Sophia Loren is a bit creaky (but then she's 75). Marion Cotillard outshone everyone, as various reviews mention.

Who else? Oh yes, Daniel Day Lewis. He needed greater range of expression.

Like I say, variable quality, but not a wasted evening by any stretch.

Bruce sends the Washington Post review. It's supposed to be a scathing thumbs-down review, and I largely agree with it, except that I give the film a thumbs-up. As a movie, it's certainly better than lots of others out there:

"Nine" bounces into theaters as a bright, shiny bauble of cinematic self-reference and mythologizing, begging so insistently to be loved that it winds up pushing the audience away. Rob Marshall's frantic, fussy adaptation of the Broadway musical -- which itself was an adaptation of a classic film -- suffers all the distortion that its hall-of-mirrors provenance suggests. It's a film within a film about a film within a film, and seems to lose layers of authenticity with each iteration, finally becoming a profoundly alienating experience.

"Nine" is about Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis), a legendary Italian filmmaker who in 1965, on the eve of directing his latest picture, finds himself creatively blocked and preoccupied with the women in his life, madonnas and whores alike. An insurmountable flaw of "Nine" is that it asks viewers so blithely to identify with a protagonist whose overwhelming ego, insecurity and selfishness they're meant to confuse with artistic genius.

Guido, of course, was invented by Federico Fellini in his 1963 movie "8 1/2 ," a semi-autobiographical reverie on art, sex, obsession and forgiveness. But the characters and material that in Fellini's hands made for such a delicate, funny and self-aware meditation become in "Nine" a meaningless exercise in style for its own sake, whipped by Marshall into a nearly incomprehensible froth. It's a measure of how disjointed the movie is that, when a reel was shown out of order at a recent screening, no one appeared to notice.

The grabber about "Nine" is that it stars Nicole Kidman, Penlope Cruz, Marion Cotillard and Kate Hudson, some of the screen's hottest actresses in both meanings of that word. Judi Dench and Sophia Loren are also on hand to lend gravitas, as well as Fergie, the pop-star outlier who delivers one of many brassy, bawdy set pieces, as a prostitute from Guido's past. Where that number goes out of its way to be sexually aggressive, by far the most crassly erotic performance goes to Cruz, who as Guido's mistress sings an ode to carnality using two ropes as the rough analogue to a stripper's pole.

Every actress gets her moment, each with a song that is more instantly forgettable than the last. In "Chicago" and "Dreamgirls," Marshall proved that he doesn't know how to film dancers, compulsively cutting away from movement rather than letting it play. Oddly, Marshall's edit-happy style matters less with "Nine," which doesn't feature dancing so much as metrically timed writhing, stomping, sashaying and posing. (The "Glee" kids would call it "hairography.")

Day-Lewis's singing voice is undistinguished, but his spoken voice, with its silken lower registers, is seductively musical; still, he can't imbue much interest in a portrait of the artist as a raging -- and aging -- narcissist. Of all his gorgeous co-stars, Cotillard alone delivers something that resembles a true performance, in a smoldering, heartbreaking turn as Guido's long-suffering wife.

Cotillard's moments slow the proceedings a bit, inviting viewers to contemplate a fleeting view of genuine human vulnerability. As for the rest of "Nine," it's crammed and crazy and ultimately kind of craven, baiting filmgoers with star power and showstoppers and delivering little more than pastiche.

Here's an idea: To experience all the joys of "Nine," do yourself a favor and rent "8 1/2 " and "All That Jazz." Pop some popcorn, plump up the couch cushions and settle in for a delicious, dazzling night at the movies.

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As I mentioned once before, Video Clearance Center on Howe Avenue is sort of a museum of VHS tapes. Circa 1990, it was the biggest show in town when it came to video sales, but when DVDs arrived they were stuck with a huge backlog of supply. They've been struggling ever since - gamely adding DVDs to their collection, but still having trouble moving the old VHS stuff.

Lately, they've been having an extended going-out-of-business sale (supposedly ending january 10, but may last longer, depending on sales). Some genres of tapes are as much as 90% off original price! Thus, cutting-edge technology aside, I've been stocking up on VHS videos.

Yesterday I watched Woody Allen's 1994 movie "Bullets Over Broadway". Very nice, amusing film!:

Woody Allen sends up the world of Broadway and the gangsters who love it in this Runyonesque comedy, one of his very best.

John Cusack is the Allen surrogate, a nebbish playwright who's struggling to remain true to his artistic vision amongst countless obstacles. Those obstacles include: a gangster's girlfriend (Jennifer Tilly) who Cusack is forced to cast in a lead role; her bodyguard (Chazz Palmienteri), who reveals quite a few dramatic instincts; a high-maintenance diva (Dianne Wiest, uproarious); a leading man who eats too much (Jim Broadbent); and a dithery actress very much in love with her dog (Tracy Ullman).

Because Allen sets his movie in a world he knows well (NY theatre), this feels like one of his strongest and most realized screenplays. The whole thing is a riot. Between Wiest, Tilly and Ullman, I still can't decide who's funniest.

And part of the fun of watching this tape was watching trailers for upcoming 1995 movies that I don't remember ever hearing of, featuring cutting-edge actors that have left no trace....
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At dinner, discussion turned to hitting birds with baseball pitches. Seems unlikely, but apparently it has happened fairly recently:

In a freak accident on March 24, 2001, during the 7th inning of a spring training game against the San Francisco Giants, [Randy] Johnson threw a fastball that struck and killed a dove. The unlucky bird swooped across the infield just as Johnson was releasing the ball. After being struck by the pitch, the bird landed dead amid a "sea of feathers." The official call was "no pitch."

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Slate has their list of the decade's best movies, made by putting together a consensus of other lists. So many lists to track!

Here at Marc Valdez Weblog, where ignorance is the rule rather than the exception, I have to report that I didn't even see most of the movies on this list. Nevertheless, if I had to rank the movies that I did see on Slate's list in order of quality, this is how I'd rank them:

No Country For Old Men (2007)
Billy Elliot (2000)
Lord of the Rings: The Return Of The King (2003)
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (2001)
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
WALL-E (2008)
The Dark Knight (2008)
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
Being John Malkovitch (2000)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
Pirates Of The Caribbean (2003)
Mamma Mia! (2008)

And, of course, there were all the other movies that didn't make this list. Certain movies, like "Australia" and "Coraline" should be on this list too, and near the top!
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The article is short on specifics, allowing the mind to digress:

'I have no idea why they have a gun like this,' watchdog investigator says

Researchers at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in New Mexico accidentally blew up a building with a "Civil-war-like" cannon earlier this month, raising further fears about the safety of the facility that has seen more than its share of security breaches in recent years.

According to an "occurrence report" filed by the lab and obtained by the Project on Government Oversight, the accident took place on December 16 as researchers tested a gun that "acts like a Civil War cannon," according to a POGO press release. Though no one was injured in the incident, it did cause $3 million in damage.

The watchdog group reported:

The explosion blew the doors off the building -- which is described in the report as, "two doors were propelled off the facility."

The Facility Operations Director "declared a management concern due to the significant facility structural damage incurred resultant of the shot." Parts of the cannon were found outside the building.

"I must say that this is a new twist in the long history of screw-ups by Los Alamos," said POGO’s Senior Investigator, Peter Stockton, in a statement. “I have no idea in the world why they have a gun like this, let alone [are] testing it.”

As Rachel Morris notes at Mother Jones, "This is not the first time that Los Alamos has fallen short when it comes to safety and security matter." POGO's "long history of screw-ups" at Los Alamos is documented here. One recent case of note involved the theft of three computers from the laboratory where nuclear technologies are developed and tested.

A recent Inspector-General's report says that the Department of Energy's Office of Science, which oversees Los Alamos, has been delinquent in enhancing its cyber-security.

Despite the various security concerns, the private contracting team managing the facility recently had its contract extended by the government for another year. Among the companies managing Los Alamos is Bechtel, the engineering firm that landed lucrative contracts in Iraq following the US invasion.

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Because I went to NM early and saw the family two weeks ago, as far as I'm concerned, Christmas is over - long over. So, this extended Christmas week feels like lonely tumbleweeds blowing through a silent ghost town of the Old West. Not even a lizard to distract from the emptiness!

So, as often happens when this sort of thing happens, my mind has turned to genealogy.

This week's finds include the surprising discovery that grandfather Felipe Valdez had a sister, named Felipa. Since she is absent from family lore, she must have disappeared early, but why that might have happened, I don't know.

Another surprising discovery is that father-and-son forebears on my mother's side participated in the Siege of Louisbourg, during the French-and-Indian War. The ethnic cleansing of the French from Acadia was a particularly horrible event in American history, and I've mixed feelings about family members getting all mixed up in that.

So far, those are the two most interesting Christmas presents. That, plus the logorrheic "The Clinton Tapes", which will take a while to read....

So, thankfully, Pam is teaching ballet this afternoon, and tomorrow afternoon. That's the real soothing balm.....

(toink, toink, toink....)

E.: MMMAAAARRRCCCC! There is a magnet in the game that is dragging the ball in-between the green brackets and making me lose! It's like a Bermuda Triangle! MMMAAAARRRRCCCC!

(toink, toink, toink....)

Because I seem to be a dependable sort of fellow, I'm Michael Rowe's stunt Improv Workshop host when he can't make it. This week, and next, he's out-of-town, so I'm in charge.

Last night, just 2.5 people showed up (one was very late) and I ran them through the paces. Hard, but fun at the same time! We played simple exercises (Yes, and...; ABC, What are you doing?; Buzzers & Bells, Just questions, etc.) But we need more people....

(Tuesday evenings, basement of the Geery Theatre, 22nd & L, 7:00-9:00 p.m., $5.00, $2.50 for kids)

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Sounds like Amy Winehouse would make a good SARTA judge:

Amy Winehouse could be facing another police investigation for assault.

The British singer allegedly attacked a theater staffer at a holiday pantomime show in Buckinghamshire, England, on Saturday night, according to a report in the Sun newspaper.

The British newspaper says Winehouse, 26, became boisterous and shouted obscenities at the cast of a production of Cinderella, which included Hollywood actor Mickey Rourke.

Staff tried to usher her into a private box, but the singer allegedly kicked and punched front-of-house manager Richard Pound before being dragged out by her own security staff.

A Winehouse pal tells PEOPLE: "Amy was invited by a friend of hers starring in the show," adding that no charges were brought against her. "She wasn't arrested, and she hasn't been questioned by the police yet."

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Macabre and humiliating photos of Leyva's posed body have set the stage for revenge killings (that have already started).
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Good....
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Parker Griffith (D-AL) becomes a Republican, taking with him oodles of DCCC cash in the process. But the GOP's been waging a scorched earth campaign against him and the trouble is, the voters remember....

Winds in southern Arizona mean trouble:

Video

At least four people have died in a multiple-vehicle crash caused by a heavy dust storm that has closed Interstate 10 just north of Casa Grande, the Arizona Department of Public Safety said.

The crash occurred just before 11 a.m. on westbound I-10 near milepost 190, where emergency crews found at least 20 vehicles involved in the wreck, said Officer Robert Lee Bailey, a DPS spokesman.

A commercial vehicle exploded and the DPS has dispatched a HAZ MAT unit to the scene, Bailey said.

Several vehicles have caught fire and become engulfed in flames, Bailey said. An unknown number of people were injured ranging from severe burns to traumatic injuries, he said.

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While everyone else is thronging the malls and crowding the highways, the cast of DMTC's "The Producers" is learning how to use walkers....

Proven right again:

The German Skeptics Society has admitted all its members' predictions for 2009 were wrong.

The society said it checked out 140 forecasts for 2009 and every one turned out wrong.

Its members predicted the assassination of President Barack Obama and terrorist attacks in the German cities of Frankfurt and Berlin.

One of the few predictions which came true was the death of Michael Jackson.

But the society said this had been a "permanent prediction" by its members.

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The loss of Senate collegiality, due mostly to simple cruelty.

Republicans give no quarter; no longer can they request it:

Another example came last night, when the ailing Robert Byrd was wheeled in at 1 a.m. to break a filibuster on the manager's amendment. Byrd's presence was not required, especially considering that he'd clearly telegraphed his intention to vote to break the filibuster. But Republicans forced him to travel to the chamber. Indeed, shortly before he arrived, Sen. Tom Coburn headed to the floor to propose a prayer. "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight," he said. "That's what they ought to pray."

The Senate hasn't just lost a bit of its collegiality. It's become heartlessly ferocious -- a place where the death of an honored friend presents an opportunity to kill his legislation, and in which the infirmity of an ailing colleague is seen as a potential path to procedural victory.

It is, of course, a tough world out there. There are greater injustices than senators being mean to one another. But the Senate's rules are predicted on courtesy and cooperation. The body cannot function without unanimous consent, and procedures like the filibuster were included because the expectation was that the body could routinely discover consensus. At this point in its history, however, consensus is a laughable goal. Basic decency doesn't even seem achievable. And if the behavior of the Senate has changed, then so too must its rules.

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I was worried about this:

WARSAW, Poland – Polish police have recovered the infamous Nazi sign stolen from the former Auschwitz death camp cut into three pieces, and said Monday it appeared to have been taken by common criminals seeking profit.

Five men were arrested late Sunday after the damaged "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Sets You Free") sign was found near one of their homes in a snowy forest outside Czernikowo, a village near the northern Polish city of Torun, on the other side of the country from the memorial site.

...Security guards patrol the 940-acre (200-hectare) site around the clock, but due to its vast size they only pass by any one area at intervals.

After occupying Poland in 1939, the Nazis established the Auschwitz I camp, which initially housed German political prisoners and non-Jewish Polish prisoners. The sign was made in 1940. Two years later, hundreds of thousands of Jews began arriving by cattle trains to the wooden barracks of nearby Birkenau, also called Auschwitz II.

...The grim slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" was so counter to the actual function of the camp that it has been etched into history. The phrase appeared at the entrances of other Nazi camps, including Dachau and Sachsenhausen, but the long curving sign at Auschwitz was the best known.

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Harder than herding cats:

Once burdened with physically demanding chores, exhausting farm work, and other unpleasant duties, man's quality of life dramatically improved after his successful domestication of the common woman.

Though for years women had roamed free throughout most of Asia, Europe, and Africa, experts estimate that by around 3,000 BCE men had begun putting them to work.

"A valuable commodity with seemingly endless uses, the woman has played a crucial role throughout human history," noted historian Alan Helbling said. "Not only could she be trained to perform a variety of tasks, but once her spirit was broken and her energies reined in, she could be taught to come whenever she was called."

"They're really quite magnificent creatures," Helbling added.

...For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, women continued their work in the field and at home, often showing little sign of their once liberated nature. However, by the mid-20th century, a number of strange occurrences were reported: Spooked by the growing civil rights movement and loud protests taking place across the country, hundreds of women suddenly broke free from their restraints and, for the first time in millennia, ran wild, joining four-year colleges and professional workplaces along the way.

The majority have yet to return.

"They'll come back—you'll see," cried Kentucky resident Dale Berring, who saw his woman leave for greener pastures almost 10 years ago. "And when they do, there'll be hell to pay."

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The big iceberg that came so far north:

Icebergs frequently calve off Antarctica’s ice shelves, and they often get swept up in strong circumpolar currents that carry them around the icy continent. Occasionally icebergs drift northward, out of the continent’s orbit. Only rarely, however, do icebergs drift as far north as Australia without melting, which is why scientists were surprised to spot a city-sized iceberg, desginated B17-B, drifting toward Australia in December 2009.

...The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse reported that the iceberg shrank from roughly 54 square miles (140 square kilometers) to 44 square miles (115 square kilometers) over the course of one week and then broke into hundreds of pieces, many several kilometers long. B17-B was spotted some 1,054 miles (1,700 kilometers) off the south-southwestern Australian coast in mid-December 2009. In November 2009, New Zealand issued a shipping alert about iceberg B17-B.

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Arrogant D.C. cops acting inappropriately over a snowball fight.


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There is no greater joy at Christmas time than reading friend Bruce Otis' annual Christmas letter!

A number of years ago, Bruce hit upon a multiple-choice-answer format for his letter that is wry and whimsical and very enjoyable to read. I think we should all abandon simple Christmas cards for this improved format! (I tried it once, but I'm not as wry or whimsical a writer as Bruce.)

In a portion of this year's letter, Bruce discusses his and his daughter's (ultimately successful) efforts to launch a balloon into the Minnesota sky:

Dear Reader,

Oh No! The year of pain apparently is not yet over. Once again it's that time when you must endure those glowing Christmas letters that make you want to

(_) convert to Islam
(_) get off my Christmas letter list.
(_) get ripped then convert to Islam.

This letter provides relief as you decide how depressing or uplifting this letter will be.

2009
Merry Christmas

The economic storm clouds that were gathering on the horizon as noted in last year's letter certainly came to fruition. Nowhere was this more evident than where I work. The first week of the New Year brought the first of many weeklong furloughs and devastating layoffs. To date we have lost about 60% of our folks. A furlough is

(_) an excuse to stay plowed all day.
(_) better than getting laid off.
(_) time off without pay.
(_) a great opportunity to perform volunteer work for the community.

Our economic struggles did not go un-noticed. Deep in the dark halls of the Capitol building in DC, our fine public servants were diligently putting together a stimulus plan that would surely

(_) fail.
(_) get votes.
(_) drive us further into financial ruin.
(_) come in handy.

While Congress was debating the bill, Danika and I made a 5-foot tall tissue paper hot air balloon and christened it "Stimulus 2009". We waited patiently for a quiet cold winter evening. Then on Jan 24th all systems were a go. The 150,000 BTU Nipco kerosene heater was fired up and in short order was glowing red. Danika and her buddy Anna grabbed the bottom corners of the balloon and directed it over the 90 degree elbow attached to the outlet of the heater. This quickly inflated the balloon an created so much buoyancy that the tissue paper started to tear. Subsequently I had to skip my big speech and the balloon was launched. With an outside temperature of -5 degrees F, it took off amazingly fast. The winds of change, however, immediately took the balloon into the neighbor's maple tree where it was destroyed in short order.

Not to be discouraged (or bored for that matter), I went to work on a second balloon - naturally christened "Stimulus II 2009". To avoid the errors of the last launch, we positioned the balloon much further away from the feared maple. With the balloon inflated, we waited for a breeze that would push the balloon north of the tree. When the conditions were right I gave a very short but upbeat speech and had Danika and Anna release the balloon. It took off with breath taking speed and flew right into the maple, and about 20 feet from the tattered remains of the first one. I was stunned and felt

(_) like chopping down the damn maple.
(_) I was littering big time.
(_) like Charlie Brown.
(_) that this was indeed an omen.

I spent the rest of the afternoon looking for chores to offer a distraction to my disappointment. At one point, by chance, I looked out the dining room window and was shocked to see Stimulus II 2009 rolling across the yard. Apparently the wind had changed direction and allowed the balloon to fall free from the grip of the dreaded maple. I ran outside to find, to my surprise, the balloon generally intact. The balloon was repaired and on the next day launched again. This time it

(_) caught on fire.
(_) flew pretty good.
(_) was sabotaged by right wind extremists.

....