Category Archives: doing it wrong

I’ve started a wonderful post about things I like to cook except I was interrupted before I could finish and now I’ve got work to do so, hopefully, I can finish up tonight.

Meanwhile, three quick updates.

1. I believe my archive problems could be fixed by a quick blogger republish. Except every time I hit the republish button (home, office, various browsers and times of day), I get a hanging screen followed by an error. Will investigate further someday.

2. Remember those banking calls I was avoiding? Turned out worse than I imagined. Will not bore you except to say, it is my opinion that you avoid doing business with Washington Mutual Financial Services. They’re yucky.

3. I want to do handmade pasta for Thanksgiving but do not possess a pasta machine and didn’t want to buy one until I tried it once. I sent out a call in the office thinking among all these women, someone would have one. No, no and no. I inquired in the lunchroom and Kent (resident forester guy) found one in his attic. Score!

Photos: Downtown Portland last spring when I was walking back from the doctor’s office and have nothing to do with this post.

(If you believe in it, it doesn’t exist, if you don’t believe in it, it does.) The show let out by 9:20pm which was perfect. We weren’t the oldest people there. Other than old people there were young people and, of course, the requisite hipsters: the guy with the goofy knit hat with huge earflaps and lined with fur (what are those hats called?) which he wore during the entire show, the good looking jock type who walked up the aisle using his outside voice and big arm gestures to make sure we were all looking at him (I assured him we were) and the drunk loud can’t-stop-talking chick also with the flapping arms who manages to find us and position herself near us at every event we attend. I can’t stand this girl.

We must have done something terrible in a past life to be continually punished like this. Please girl, leave us alone. Tell us how we can appease you.

The beer line was long. Upstairs was the faint smell of Otto’s jacket. The show was not sold out but well attended. About 5 minutes before curtain an endless stream of people came in and went to the front looking for seats. Why?

I don’t know how to review a comedy show. There were two other comics on the bill with Demetri and they were all funny. The middle guy did a riff about losing your cellphone and not having any of your phone numbers and feeling alone. I’m probably the only person in America who writes all my phone numbers down, on paper, and then dials them in when I use the cellphone. I am by no means suggesting that this is an intelligent thing to do.

Demetri was hilarious and looks like he’s about 12 years old. He played guitar, harmonica, little bells on the floor that you hit with your foot, tambourine and keyboard. Usually two or three at a time.

I’d love to sit here and make this post better but I have a few moments and I’m going to deal with that banking thing I was whining about yesterday.

When I was a kid, my Mom was a school teacher and for my birthday parties we would get to watch movies. This was way, way, way before the days of VCRs and DVDs and DVRs and a pretty big forking deal.

She would bring home a film projector and we’d have to pick a movie and there weren’t ten trillion choices so we’d get some variation of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, I remember something with bears, or my favorite: Paddle to the Sea.

Wikipedia tells me that Paddle to the Sea was a 1941 children’s book by a Canadian writer named Holling C. Holling. (It’s a cool name but what were his parents thinking?)

The movie was made in 1966 and is about a boy who carves this Indian in a canoe and then after all his hard work, runs out to the front yard and lets it go in a stream. The movie follows the Indian canoe as it travels into bigger and bigger water. Being that I was a kid, I didn’t really get that the journey started in Canada and went through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic ocean.

I must have seen it at least a half dozen times because we also watched it at school. I still have vivid memories of the images of this film. The little canoe bobbing along next to ginormous ships. I would love to see it now and you can buy it from the National Film Board of Canada. I’m guessing demand is low as the only format is VHS.

Another movie that we watched at my birthday party and also at school at least once a year, every year, for-freaking-ever that I did not like was The Red Balloon. Omigod, I HATED that movie. Every time I had to watch it I’d come home from school and whine to my Mom. I can barely remember what I hated so much except I think it pissed me off that there was no dialogue and why was that dumb kid pointlessly chasing around this stupid red balloon?

Yesterday boingboing linked to the movie online I accidentally clicked on it and even just the opening credits made me mad. Ug, that music.

I also never liked the Great Pumpkin and I would link to it but the last two times I opened the imdb page, it crashed my browser. I think my problem with these stories was the futility factor. Linus stayed out in the pumpkin patch all night long: for nothing. That French kid had nothing better to do chase around a balloon that had a short expiration date. For proper literary scope, I should probably include a third example, but nothing is coming right now and this was intended to be a phoned in entry rather than an exhaustive study of my early cinematic experiences so I’m coming to a screeching halt right here.