Consortium of Seven: Year 2

 Happy New Year, everyone!  As I put this up it's already 2021 in *checks world clock* Baghdad and Moscow, so I hope your year is going great already.  I still have about 9 hours left here in the Chicago area and a Hogmanay dinner to make, so let's dive into what I found this week.   What do I remember about this?  Mostly that it's a space horror movie, there were plenty of jokes about Venom  being a sequel to it and...nope, that's it.  But frankly, this cast means I'm giving it a shot.  I'm a sucker for space horror, even if it might be a straight-up Alien  knockoff.   ____________________ Hey, I've seen this one!  My friend Amy Watts is a fan of it and made me watch and this is a sweet, smart little high school movie that's a lot better than you think a Vanessa Hudgens movie would be.  (I have nothing against Hudgens; I'm just not of her generation so mostly think of her as just a Disney Channel actor, which I fully realize is reductive and unfair.

                                                                                              Bud When Eleanor Roosevelt was a young bride and having difficulty making conversation at fancy dinner parties, her mother-in-law suggested she use the alphabet and just pick any subject beginning with, say A. Then Eleanor could ask, for instance, “Have you ever been to Alaska?”  I have now exhausted my repertoire of subjects beginning with A – not that I expect you to care, dear Reader – so I am moving on to the letter B. Kind of like Sesame Street, but without the fun Muppets. In their stead, I offer you Bud. We had been on the phone for hours, my old friend Margarette and I, she in Kansas and I in Indiana. When we agreed it was time to hang up. I said, “May you sleep well and wake refreshed and may tomorrow bring you wonderful surprises.”   The next day, Bud arrived. I don’t think it was a coincidence. Margarette worked with wounded, ill, and injured soldiers and had been tasked by the comm

Continuing with my new series of much shorter blog posts on the subject of choosing books that offer you reading value for time spent.  Interested in books about ships and the sea? This week I compare  not single books but rather volumes of collected fiction. We begin, as always, with one or more books to skip.  Book(s) To Skip : The first three volumes in the Horatio Hornblower series by C. S. Forester ( Beat to Quarters, Ship of the Line, Flying Colours). Why to skip :  Forester's books are entertaining but not written by someone who actually spent time on the water.  After failing the physical exam for the armed forces in Britain, Forester did his part in the war effort by writing propaganda materials encouraging the U.S. to join the Allied efforts during the Second World War.  Forester does include accurate details of life aboard ship during the Napoleonic Wars, but this writing feel the same as reading about someone's day-to-day experiences. There are details about shipboa

by whiteray Ah, yes, the sweet spot. In baseball, it’s a maybe half-dollar-sized place on the barrel of the bat. When the ball meets the sweet spot, good things happen: the ball travels more true, the jolt of the impact through hands and shoulders feels more solid, not off-center, and the sound, well, there’s nothing that sounds quite as good on a baseball field as the crack of the bat when the ball has met the sweet spot. My pal Schultz, a long-time music fan like me, borrowed the term. He says every music fan has a sweet spot, a cluster of four, five, maybe six years whose music laid the foundation for the rest of that person’s musical life. A listener can expand his or her horizons, can learn of new musicians and new forms, but at base, Schultz says, it all comes down to the music of the sweet spot: The music he or she heard during those formative years remains the most potent. And that sweet spot is generally in a person’s youth. I’ve read essays and news accounts of studies

Stretched out thin as a pencil line on scratch paper  lying on the crisp cotton covers weary nerves jerk the point up and down but not so much, really now, this is an old line begun long ago Long ago when it thrilled to step upon the stepping stones set in tufts of wet green grass, on the way to brick steps,  to grandparents’ hugs, brown cows in the pasture, and a little curving creek The delight of waking to possibilities   of a day where you might encounter a witch (old neighbor) or find a treasure (cobalt glass buried in the red clay) or with  your sister or cousin play in the attic, or under the house, scratching the dirt Being brave and kind and learning useful things  or simply ordering your crayons by which you like best. Sorry, cadet blue.  ~Dorothy Dolores

Despite (or because of) being brought up in the church, I’m not a religious person. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the positive aspects present in all religions. After all, it would be downright unpleasant to argue against alms-giving & it seems churlish not to feel thankful from time to time. I’m very partial to the “treating others as you’d have them treat you” thing, the whole “don’t murder people” rule is certainly good advice & not being lazy just seems like common sense. I like that religions have ideas about the energy of humans lingering around, perhaps through reincarnation, afterlife or as spirits; although I don’t believe in them, they can bring people enormous comfort. You can call any religious holiday simply a “holiday” but it retains its etymology as a “holy” day. We may never have got weekends off if it wasn’t for religious observance & Christmas Day finally became a public holiday in Scotland in 1958.    Field of Light (Bruce Munro) Another of my favo

       Another holiday week, and another patch of poorly-regulated chaos. Trying to dispatch those formal obligations that keep the lights on and food in the kitchen, while trying to come to some sense of a campaign plan for Christmas itself. Or, maybe you were much better organized. If I live long enough I'll learn to do that, rather than learn just enough to regret my cyclical lack of preparation -- again and again.       By the time this posts, it'll be the 25th, and such preparations as we've made will be a fait accompli - pretty much just the way it is. I hope this finds you as well and safe as you can manage, and with some happy thoughts for the day. Thoughts for tomorrow will likely be next week's theme. Today... let's not rush.       Today's a time to try to bask in the glow of the day based on one's plans and level of responsibility in them. I'll be doing food prep all morning, as we'll be having a Thanksgiving redux today. Tur

 Happy Thursday everyone!  If anyone is celebrating one of the winter holidays, I hope you're having or have had a good one as we close out this garbage fire of a year.  So let's get to the finds I've run across recently! John Dos Passos seems to have fallen out of the general consciousness these days, but from what I've read of his work I sincerely think he should be held up higher than his contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.  I've always meant to read his magnum opus, the U.S.A  trilogy, which is apparently a sprawling epic covering the USA in the middle of WWI and the attendant social changes (and hey, a pandemic).  This is the middle book in the trilogy, so now I just need to get the other two. ____________________ Have I ever read any Cheever?  Hell no!  Should I have?  Probably!  Hence why I grabbed this massive  paperback (seriously, it is almost 900 pages) and you could definitely use it as a doorstop.  This is the kind of thing I&#

                                                                Earth from Apollo 8, Christmas Eve 1968   I’ll get to the Apollo 8 thing, but it will take a minute… My younger son was born on December 20 and on Christmas Eve we were still in the hospital. In those days, mothers and babies stayed about a week after the birth to make sure everyone was OK. My baby was not OK; he had jaundice caused by a high bilirubin count caused in turn by a blood incompatibility. Research and practice eventually provided the causes and treatments for his conditions, but back then it was cause for deep concern. We were waiting for lab results to tell us if he would need a complete blood exchange to prevent damage to his brain. So -it was Christmas Eve and there was a flu epidemic. It was two moms to a room then, and my roommate’s husband, thrilled to have a son and not a daughter (!), had come to visit while running a high fever. To say that I was anxious about all of the above is to understate my sta

Starting a new blog series today, dedicated to this concept: l etting go of books that might use up more of the time on your life clock than would really be a good investment. With literally millions of books in this world of ours, why not choose the ones that you'll truly enjoy, or always remember, or learn from, or be inspired by?   We begin this post, as all future posts will begin, with a suggestion for a book to skip.  I'm starting this first post int he series with a book which was the gold standard for have-to-read when I was young. If a person on the street was asked, back in the day, to name a famous literary work, the answer would often have been Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace .  Reasons to skip: It's too long. At nearly 600,000 words, it would take every minute (no lunch breaks) of a 40-hour work week to get from the first page to the last.  Unless you are a whiz with Russian names, you are going to get Bolkonsky mixed up with Drubetskoy, you know you are. And c