Sometimes you need to take your eye OFF the ball

Cropped view of full picture

I saw a funny story in Time Magazine about a fan who wanted to get a picture of a movie star he spotted while on vacation.

A father, on vacation with his family in Montauk, NY (at the far end of Long Island), recognized Matthew Broderick when he and his family stopped for snacks in a small store. He asked to get a picture of Mr. Broderick with his daughter. The only problem was Matthew Broderick had a friend with him who was in the picture, too. So, the father motioned for the friend to move out of the way. He was still in the picture so the father kept motioning for him to move further out of the picture. But finally, the friend could move no more so the father thought he would just crop the picture to only include his daughter and Matthew Broderick.

The full picture with Matthew's friend

As he was walking back to the car, his family was shouting to him about his mistake and what was he thinking? The full, uncropped picture is on the left. Matthew Broderick's friend, Jerry Seinfeld, is on the right! It's funny how you can miss a lot when you're focused on one thing. Not that getting a picture with Mathew Broderick wasn't a great thing to do but what about missing another terrific (or more specifically Super Terrific Happy) picture in the process? Sometimes you need to take your eye off the ball to see what is happening in the wide view.

The full picture is from the Twitter account @HonoredSpirit and can be found at this link.

Another nice thing about writing - part 2

I just thought of another comeback. Isn't this nice? You have as long as you want if you are doing the writing of the conversation.

So, in this one, a Nasty Looking Person has seen you looking in their direction. Maybe they were talking too loudly. Maybe they were saying something stupid. Maybe they were just making a fuss about something. Whatever it is, they have gotten your attention and you have looked their way. You haven't said anything but they take offense at your looking their way and Nasty Looking Person looks your way and ...

Nasty Looking Person (in a nasty voice): "What are you looking at?"

Our Hero: "Not much."

Another nice thing about writing

About six years ago, I wrote about a nice aspect of writing which is that you can win all the arguments. You can make conversations go the way you want them to go. I wrote a rather lame example - because I'm not a very good writer. But that doesn't stop me from writing! How else can you get better at something than to keep going and attempting to better?

So, here's a short example of what you can do if you're writing. It's never too late to write a comeback. Remember the Seinfeld episode when George Costanza can't think of a comeback to someone who insulted him until it's too late? Well, if you're writing the story, it's never too late. So here's my imagined conversation. An Obnoxious Person and Our Hero are having an argument and things start to get heated:

Obnoxious Person: "Don't get smart with me!"

Our Hero: "Well, one of us needs to be smart about this."

What do you think? Should I send this to Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld? Maybe they would consider bring back the series if they had such a great starter for an episode.

My mother would have been 93 today but...

As I've mentioned before, my mother died in 2016. The picture to the right is from July, 2003. This is one of the happiest times I can remember for her. We had adopted our daughter just a few months before this and this was my mother's first visit with her. She loved her grandchildren so much.

But I'm going to tell a funny little story about my mother. She always felt embarrassed about this but she also couldn't help laughing when she told it. And then she'd feel guilty right after laughing.

One day, she was driving through our town, off in the distance, she saw one of my cousins and a couple of his friends walking along the road. She wanted to say hello to them but they didn't seem to notice her as she waved so she drove closer to the side of the road. She must have been looking at them and not at what was in the road. Just as she got the closest to them, she beeped so they would look toward her and just then, she ran through a large water puddle and splashed them with a lot of water. She hadn't seen the puddle because she was focused on my cousin and his friends. They were surprised and she felt horrible. My cousin now says he doesn't remember this so it doesn't seem to have done any lasting damage to him.

The Last Jedi was terrific

I thought Star Wars: The Last Jedi was one of the best movies of the series. I know there are a lot of die-hard Star Wars fans who don't like many parts of the movie. But I really liked that I was fooled so many times by the story. I thought I had things figured out but was pleasantly surprised by what happened.

The action scenes were riveting and as we saw with other recent movies of the series, you couldn't be sure that everyone you've been rooting for will make it out alive. I liked that the main characters did not make flawless and correct decisions all the time. This movie seemed the most real to me. All the other movies in the series have this inevitable quality to them. There will be twists and turns but in the end, all the lead characters will make the right decisions and everything will turn out OK. It doesn't here. Even heroes are scared. Even the wisest make bad decisions from time to time.

One pivotal scene made a big impression on me. While Luke had chosen an extremely remote and hard-to-find world for his self-imposed exile, it wasn't a completely random choice. There is a Jedi temple there. The first Jedi temple containing the original, ancient texts of the Jedi Order. And Luke, after an agonizing realization, is about to destroy them. And the ghost of Yoda comes along and Luke expects him to stop him - but he doesn't! Yoda actually burns them saying no one reads them anymore anyway. They know what they said. Just keeping them around in the isolated location does nothing. It's a courageous decision but it's not like keeping those texts around help the Jedi Order. They were down to the their last two already and by the end end of the movie, they are down to their last Jedi.

We had to get a new car

Our car was hit by another car a week or so ago. It wasn't our fault and no one was hurt but our car was pretty badly damaged. You can see it in the picture to the right. We could still use the car but the passenger door was hard to close and we worried that it might not stay closed. So, we were looking forward to having the insurance company inspect it so we could get it fixed quickly. But, instead, the insurance adjuster said that due to our car's age (12 years) and number of miles (over 170,000), it wasn't worth repairing and totaled it. We would have to turn in the car and get what they said it was worth. But the amount they gave us would not have allowed us to get a car that was comparable to what we had. So, we decided to bite the bullet and just get a newer car on our own.
It doesn't seem fair that we could be going along fine with an old car that ran well. It certainly had its problems and was costing more to repair but the problems were familiar and it was manageable. Now, out of the blue, we are forced to take a lot of time filling out reports, taking time to look for which new cars were available that we could afford, visiting places with cars, trying them out, comparing what we saw, bargaining for a fair price and going through the hassle of changing everything over to a new car.

We have gotten used to the room we had in the van but we found that there was no way we could afford a van of a decent age and in any kind of decent shape. So, something like a cross-over or SUV was more what we'd need to get. We still couldn't afford a new cross-over or SUV but we finally found this 2015 Ford Escape that you can see in the picture to the left. Moving from a 2005 vehicle to a 2015 vehicle was quite an eye opener. All the cars we looked at had video screens on the dashboard. They all had back-up cameras. They all had a lot of nice standard features. Even though we bought an older car with the least amount of features as we could afford, we feel like we've moved up in the world. Now, if we can just make the payments!

Why are the old shows better than the new ones?

Well, my title is provocative and it's not necessarily true. Not all the old shows were better. There were a lot of bad ones but we tend to forget those. We only remember the good ones. And to consider a new show better, we have an accumulating list of really great shows for it to compete against. I like to read Earl Pomerantz's blog Just Thinking... and he brought up this point and I wrote an answer. I'll copy it below but I think I missed a few ideas so maybe I'll write some more about that in another post here. But for now, here is what I wrote:

Another thing about saying older movies and shows (and many other things) are better than recent attempts: Remember that each new entertainment or event must "compete" with a growing list of things that happened before. So, it gets harder and harder to be the best or the most memorable.

I thought about this during the recent cold spell when the weather man said it is harder to set new records in certain situations (like coldest high temperature) because of the accumulating range of temperatures in the past. Of course, we're doing our best to keep setting new high temperatures which leads to another thought on this whole "the older versions are better" idea. If humans can make new heat records by ignoring the past, we should be able to improve stories, movies and music by studying the past, learning from them and improving them.

So, maybe that's what helps make it harder to improving our movies, too. Fewer people are willing to study the past to learn what was done well and where the mistakes were made. How many musicians study the masters before going on with their own attempts? How many writers study the old stories and fables before writing their own? With film and TV, it's easier. The records are more clear and there is less history. And you're only going to see "the best movie ever" less often because it's still competing with The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad and the Odyssey, The Bible and I Love Lucy.

Our 24th Anniversary

Getting back into writing my blog is more difficult than I thought. Not only do you have to remember to write, you have to remember how to write! Getting your thoughts into print is a skill and it is easy to get out of practice. And when something is hard (or harder than it used to be), it is hard to get started. Also, when you know something is going to take a lot of time, it is difficult to allow yourself the time to do it.

All of that is a preamble to why this article is late. My wife and I have been married for 24 years. We were married on January 8, 1994 and I am writing this on January 10, 2018. But I am post-dating it to January 8 because that is day what this is about. The sad part is, this should be an easy post to write but I'm spending more time thinking about it and writing excuses than I am writing about our anniversary.

Not only is this post late but my gift to my wife will be late, too. We did shop for and buy a new ring for her but it needs to be resized and it won't be ready for a couple of weeks. I should have started earlier. I did get her a nice card and a small rose bush (to be planted in the spring) on time. But I'm not going to be adding the picture of the rose bush until even later!

We had a nice day. We went to our favorite Chinese buffet restaurant and got a great meal. Our kids came with us and enjoyed themselves, too. So January 8, 2018 was a nice day. And even two days later, I'm still feeling happy about it. And 24 years after marrying my wife, I'm even happier now than I was then - and I was very happy then. I highly recommend getting married if you find the right person to marry.

{Edit - I was going to add a picture of the miniature rose bush I bought my Sweetie for our anniversary but then I saw she had this picture from our wedding on her Facebook page. So, that's what you see here. It had snowed pretty heavily on the days before our wedding and a lot of people weren't able to make it. We ended up asking people at the last minute if they wanted to come to the reception due to so many people not being able to make it.]

Murder on the Orient Express was OK

I love trains. I love mysteries. I really like all of the actors and actresses in this movie. I should have really enjoyed Murder on the Orient Express but I only liked it. I knew how it was going to end (from seeing the 1974 version) but I've enjoyed other movies where I knew the ending so I figured that was no reason to not go. My family wanted to see it and I went with them.

The train was beautiful. The cinematography was wonderful. And there was an opening sequence (similar to the James Bond movies) that was really fun. I liked recognizing all the well-know actors and actresses as they entered but they just didn't seem to have any chemistry - with ANY of the other actors. I think I could have enjoyed this if some of the characters worked well together but it just seemed like each one was determined not to look less than the other characters so they didn't interact in a menacing or helpful or endearing way. They just said their lines and moved on. Johnny Depp was the biggest disappointment. He acted like a tough guy who was not tough at all. I wouldn't have been afraid of him and if I'm not scared, no one is scared.

Action scenes were added to try to make this more thrilling and I liked the idea of the train being stopped by an avalanche. If I would have just thought that there was real menace there, I might have bought into it but no one seemed like they really wanted to be the bad guy. Maybe they'll make another version sooner than 43 more years (I'll be 109 - maybe) and it will take a LOT more to get me excited about it then.

Let's make this a better year

I let myself get rattled by other events in 2017 and stopped updating this blog in January last year. I'm proposing to make a fresh start and write every few days this year.

I've learned a lot over the last year. I've seen a few good movies. I've read a few good books. I've grown in my journey to emulate Jesus Christ and the Spirit has given me insights into my failings, my strengths and what I should be doing. I've grown as a software engineer and I truly think I'm better at my job than I've ever been. I continue using the Java programming language for most of my work but I continue to learn and use Python and last year I found I will need to learn C# for one important project. I have some interesting projects to work on this coming year and, perhaps, I can write about what I learn (without being too specific and getting fired). There have been some terrific sermon series at our church this year and maybe I can write about some of those.

That's it for now. It's going to take some time to get back in the habit of writing here. I am very out-of-practice and it's surprising, to me, how much harder it is to put my thoughts into words now. Just like how my piano playing has declined because of my lack of practice. That's another thing I hope to do more this year. There is a chance for an open performance at a local library later this year and I'm going to try to work on a really nice arrangement of I'm Beginning to See the Light to perform there.