Thursday Soaps

Fast Moving Construction

Yesterday started out to be a quiet day until I met up with my old buddies from the road paving crew.  They’ve moved to the main street I use to get to work (see Green Tunnels post) and this caused a twenty minute detour through even more back roads to get to work.  Since it’s only a thirty minute commute to begin with I thought twenty minutes was a bit harsh.  My boss and I took a ride down to the construction site and got a tour of the rapidly moving project.  I got to wear a safety vest and hard hat so I felt very official (almost as cool as my son).  It reminded me how much I do not miss wearing a helmet (possibly the worst thing about the being in the infantry – but I digress).  One of my subordinates here had been having trouble with some of his employees and the union got involved so I called them all into my office for a meeting.  It really boiled down to a situation roughly analogous to a bad Spanish soap opera.  All people involved in the situation are union members but they don’t like each other and were pursuing petty little vendettas.  The union officers exaggerated everything out of context and only further inflamed a bad situation.  After talking everybody back down to earth I pointed out the supervisors were not meeting the standards we had clearly set out for them and the reason we wanted to replace them with non-union managers in the first place.  The union officers felt betrayed because they had fought hard to retain the positions and now the people holding the positions were stabbing them in the back (like I said – soap opera).  I agreed to call all of the offending employees into my office next week to read them the riot act (again) and lecture them on leadership, so I’ll have to come up with something on that.  I did tell the union officers that the meeting would be documented as evidence the union members were not fulfilling the standards we had all agreed to.  An indication of how far we have come is that the union officials agreed with me.  It seems that for the first time in the four years I’ve worked here that management and the union are actually working together to solve problems – kind of the way things are supposed to be.  The day was rescued when I returned home and my wife and I had had long phone conversations with both the son and daughter.  The daughter was recovering from some sort of stomach flu but luckily had the redoubtable son in law around (at last) to assist in her recovery.  Our son was able to spare a few minutes from his busy life while walking to get some pizza with the M.E.G. after a futile volleyball game.  For those of you worrying about the fate of Buddy after his failed attempt to open a new passageway in my wife favorite (and expensive) living room couch – he’s wormed his way into our hearts much too deeply to risk Gator-Thor treatment (story for another day).  Buddy even received a special invite from my sister to the Saturday party in Rhode Island we are headed to – life of a rock star indeed.

Inside the Construction Zone

Looking 16 Kinds of Official

Buddy Descending

The New Buddy Barriers
Couch with the Hidden Tunnel in the Background

Buddy the Wonder Pooch AKA “Pendejo” continues his descent into insanity.  Now all it takes is a simple rain storm to send him off the deep end – it doesn’t even require thunder.  Yesterday it was raining lightly when I got up and Buddy as his usual chipper self – incredibly glad to see me as always.  We went out to get the newspaper and Buddy made his normal frantic and futile charge after the front yard squirrels.  He seemed fine with the rain and cheerfully followed me back up after properly chastising the gray banes of his existence.  After I left for work he apparently lost his mind because my wife woke from a sound sleep to a disturbance downstairs.  When she went down to investigate she found Buddy actively trying to burrow into her very expensive living room couch. To say she was apoplectic would give apoplexy a bad name.  As soon as she appeared Buddy calmed down immediately. She erected some barriers to thwart any future designs Buddy had on finding the tunnel hidden in the couch, and then turned on the TV really loud in the kitchen before returning to bed.  This seemed to work fine as Buddy got through the rest of the rain without causing any further damage.  I’ve got a weird dog.  Last night, for our date, my wife and I went to see Hit and Run, which was mediocre at best.  This is the first clear miss for Bradley Cooper, whom I normally like a lot, but he missed by a lot.  He played the bad guy, a white guy with dreadlocks and a penchant for dogs.  If you saw the preview for this movie you saw all of the funny parts.  I don’t know quite what to make of Dax Shepard, the lead actor.  He’s a pretty good actor but he was also involved in the writing and producing of this bomb so he doesn’t get a pass.  This seemed like another vanity piece where the producers got a bunch of friends together and they ad libbed a lot of the dialogue.  This works when you have really funny people doing it but that wasn’t the case here.  Bell the lead actress played a non-violent conflict resolution expert who was involved with a bunch of criminals so they had a great premise, they just didn’t follow through with it.  It was completely disjointed where some plot lines just weren’t relevant, needed, or even followed through with.  A clear miss, don’t go see this movie, unless of course you are a fan of grotesque, senior citizen frontal nudity.

Terrible

Cold War Childhood

www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wA8z94MXo9M#!

I ran across the attached You Tube video the other day and it brought back a lot of memories about growing up in the 1960s where nuclear war with the Soviet Union was viewed as a real possibility.  One of the toughest things to describe to kids today and certainly my own children is what it was like to grow up in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War.  It’s simply something they’ve, thankfully, never had to face.  By the time Reagan and Gorbachev drove a stake in the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the US in the 1980s it had evolved to a much less of a staring over the abyss kind of thing.  The Soviet-US confrontation dominated our lives as we seemed to compete with them on every level after emerging from WW2 as the two true super-powers.  The confrontation took place around the world where a nation friendly to the US would have their traditional rival country allied with the Soviets.  The only vestige remaining of this is North and South Korea.  People were actually shot trying to move from East Berlin to West Berlin.  Whenever I visit my hometown, my friend’s house is literally right next to the elementary school and I can see the windows of the classroom where I attended second grade.  I never fail to point this out to my children which never fails to produce the eye rolling, “There he goes again!” reaction to my nostalgic ruminations. One of my clearest memories of second grade were the air raid drills when all the kids were trained to move quickly to the interior hall way and told to brace against the wall and shield our eyes against the nuclear flash.  I can remember wondering at the time whether school kids in the Soviet Union were doing the same thing.  The town regularly tested the air raid siren and civil defense shelters were clearly marked throughout every city and town.   This sounds scary and I can imagine the hue and cry nowadays about the deleterious effect these measures would have on the psyche of our young.  I don’t think I was scarred by the experience – it was just how it was.  I don’t think we were any tougher back then but I think our parents were.  They had just gone through the cataclysm of World War 2 and were dealing with the very real possibility of a nuclear war.  I remember asking my father why the Soviets would bomb Keene and he bluntly said it was because we had a ball bearing plant that made a good target.  He didn’t seem to worry that we could look out our living room window and see that plant, so I didn’t.   I guess there is no good way to explain to kids of this day what is was like and maybe that’s a good thing.  I’m glad my kids grew up in a world free of this type of fear, hopefully their generation can build the elusive lasting peace so many have yearned and died for. 

Thankfully we Avoided This

 

 

Confessing Happiness

It's Done!
But Will it Survive?

The best news yesterday was a late night phone call my wife and I received from our son announcing his return to the US from his big Mediterranean adventure with the Most Excellent Girlfriend.  He sounded tired but also incredibly happy/content and that made us incredibly happy/content.  I did learn yesterday that climbing a mountain, even a small one, on Saturday definitely impacts on my ability to run on Monday.  I felt really old when I started out but everything was working about halfway through it.  I had to park my car at the end of the street and hike about a ¼ mile to the house when I got back from work because they were finally finishing off the road paving project.  I walked up the side of the road and could feel the heat emanating from the freshly laid road way.  Luckily it had cooled enough near my house that I was able to cross the road without melting the bottom of my shoes.  They didn’t do anything with that portion I’m concerned will wash out with a heavy rain so we’ll see, today, because I drove through a deluge on my way to work.  It does look and feel great driving over.  I'll have to remember this feeling next spring when we see what kind of damage (Frost heaves anyone?)a New England winter has inflicted.  I finished off The First Confessor by Terry Goodkind yesterday.  He wrote the Sword of Truth fantasy series which I truly enjoyed and this latest book was about some of the major historical figures thousands of years earlier than the time of that series.  Goodkind does an amazing job writing action scenes but he gets caught up in explaining the ins and outs of magic as if the these rules really existed which can get tedious at times.  It’s something he obviously enjoys doing but it can be wearing on a reader, at least this one.  He is so good at creating epic characters that you really care about but I was tempted to skip over parts when he would launch into another of his polemics about magic.  Interestingly, Goodkind self-published this novel initially only in the e-book format.  He apparently has had trouble with the strictures and editing of publishers in the past.  The success of his earlier works provided him with the financial wherewithal to publish this himself.  I applaud his audacity but I think he missed the editors a little bit as this book was not as crisp or focused as his earlier works.  Still it was a good read and I enjoyed learning the back story of Magda Searus, Barraccus, and Merritt.  These were epic characters from the series that the reader heretofore only knew through reputation.  Today I will begin my next foray into the wacky world of Chuck Pahlaniuk.  I think I’m ready.  Of course, is anyone every truly ready for Pahlaniuk.

Time at a Premium

Dammit!

Yesterday was tough because we had to put our daughter and son in law back on the train to New York City.  It always seems like their visits end too quickly and that was certainly the case this weekend.  We definitely accomplished a lot but their visits always leave me wanting more; they are that much fun to be a round.  There is a certain light around the house when they or my son are present for a weekend.  I can remember visiting my maternal grandmother’s house for a week every summer and not wanting to come home because she made me feel so special.  I had that same feeling this past weekend.  They have their own, extremely full, lives in New York and they go through a lot in getting to New Haven via the public transit system so I really appreciate it when they make the effort to lift my spirits as only they can.  I’m left with the craving to stop time for a couple of weeks so we can each get off the whirlwind of our normal lives and just spend that time together. (Note to self:  get to work on time interruption machine)  There always seems to be a bunch of things we hoped to accomplish over the weekend that get consumed by other, competing demands on our time.  After a somewhat wild ride to the train station (full into the John P. Madbastard mode) where some of the Connecticut traffic laws may have been slightly fractured, my daughter and son in law had an hour to wait for the train and seemed a little bit pleased with that.  They had already scoped out a place to hang out for the hour and I got the impression they were looking forward to it a little bit.  He’s a touring musician and they a have a roommate in the NYC apartment so I think they really look forward to the rare alone times they can grab.  Knowing that they were going to have some of that uncommon commodity took away a little bit of the profound melancholy of having to leave them, but not a lot.  Before they left we did take the time to check out a movie, Premium Rush, at the fabulously located local Cinemagic Theater.  This was a film about New York City bike messengers that my daughter wanted to see because of the NYC setting and Joseph Gordon Leavitt.  Leavitt has turned into a really good actor and he handles the action of this movie with aplomb.  The bad guy is Michael Shannon who does creepy really well.  The love interest is Dania Ramirez who was the only thing watchable in the last couple seasons of Entourage and continues to be extremely interesting in this (I have a well documented weakness for Latinas).  I asked my daughter if the wild bicycle riding shown in the movie was accurate.  She said that she had never seen anything like that but that you learn in NYC to look out when crossing streets not only for cars but also for the seemingly possessed bike messengers as well.  I really enjoyed the movie which had us jumping in our seats with all the near misses as the bikes careened through the streets of Manhattan.  The real premium was the time we got to spend with two very special people before they had to careen back to Manhattan themselves.

Good Flick

Semi Perfect Day

The Crew Just Before Heading Up

My Friend Also Joined Us!

I cannot remember a day after which I felt more content than yesterday.  My wife and I journeyed up to New Hampshire with my daughter and son in law along with Buddy.  My daughter, cat person that she is, endured the entire trip of Buddy breath with fair to middling calm.  We arrived at my Keene friend’s house much to the consternation of the neighborhood cat that did not seem to welcome Buddy’s arrival with a lot of pleasure.  The cat did acknowledge my daughter – obviously recognizing her non-affiliation with the black coated terror.  We headed out to climb Mount Monadnock and both my Keene friend and my wife joined us this time.  My wife has a couple of ruptured disks in her neck so she has always shied away from the climb.  This time she decided to give it a shot because I think she felt she missed out on the fun with which we described earlier climbs.  I kept a close eye on her but she did fine.  Just before starting the climb I discovered that I had left my wallet back at home.  This is something I never do and was kind of jarring for me; another indication I’m getting old.  It was a perfect New England summer day as we started the climb around 2 in the afternoon.  Because of the late start we met more people coming down than we did going up.  My friend and I brought up the rear as the young uns’ set their own pace up the hill.  My wife surprised all of us by getting far out front at times.  I could clearly hear my heart beating really fast during a couple of the really steep segments.  In the funniest moment of the climb, we were nearing the summit when my wife ran into a friend of hers from Rhode Island.  It was one of those humorous situations where you don’t expect to run into anyone you know and it takes a couple of seconds to recognize each other.  As I said earlier, my wife actually led the climb up the hill for most of the time.  She flagged a little near the top and thought about stopping short of the peak and waiting for us to come down until I promised to help her up and she finished with a lot of flair.  She was nervous about the whole effort but when we reached the top she was bubbling over in excitement.  I was so proud of her.  As we lounged around the top of the mountain she started doing yoga exercises – still haven’t figured that out.  It was an extremely fun day, especially since I was sharing it with some of the most important people in my life.  I remarked to my daughter and son in law, who made the climb with me last year, that there was a lot more noise this year.  My wife, if nothing else, was a constant source of commentary which helped pass the time going up and down the mountain.  Coming down the mountain was a little tougher on the middle aged joints and both my wife and friend turned ankles near the top of the mountain which I’m sure made their descent a little painful but they rangered on.  I think we all felt a quiet sense of accomplishment when we reached the bottom and headed back for some quick showers at my friend’s house.  My daughter’s hunger pain militated against the planned reconnaissance of the Elm City Brewery so we headed over to Margarita’s where we lucked into an outdoors table.  We were all a little worn out but that seemed to fuel the evening and we truly enjoyed a great time with each other as we watched the denizens of Keene wander past.  My friend ably attempted to fulfill his role as my filter when I started waxing on about my approval of the re-emergence of short shorts for many of the college age beauties walking by as well as our waitress or commenting on some nearby idiotic looking adolescent skateboarders trying to look like urban gang members.  It was just such a fun evening and I felt in “the zone” of total contentment.  The night ended watching the new look Red Sox for a bit and then a late night ride through the darkened New England roads to get home.  In a summer of really fun days this was the best so far.  The only thing that was missing was our son.  He and the M.E.G. are hopefully winging their way home today from their Mediterranean getaway.  I may not let my daughter and son in law leave – it’s just too much fun when they’re around.

The Wife and I in the Rock Chair

Two Really Cool People

My Wife Takes Point on the Way Up

Those Cool People Just Above the Tree Line

Mother and Daughter

Friend and Wife

My Wife Finds a Friend on the Mountain

Success - At the Top of the Mountain

The Crew on Top

Yoga Exercises - Why?

Quick - Pick Out the One With the Most Energy

On the Way Down

Seemed Like A Long Descent

At the Bottom

Perfect End for the Day

 

Blockbuster Friday

They're Here!

My wife and I negotiated through amazingly (at least for Connecticut which is the sun source of totally inept highway construction planning but I digress) easy traffic to the big event of the day – picking up my daughter and son in law in New Haven.  We even reconnoitered a new rest stop off the I-84 HOV lane when I proved less than predictable in the rest stop arena.  I will not embarrass any of my co-travelers except to say that my daughter is now a huge fan of a certain Mobil station.  I am the proud owner of a brand new watch (see photo) that was the product of my wife doing battle with Macy’s.  She returned to Macy’s yesterday with the refund she earned the day before and spent it on a non-Bulova watch – a Citizen eco-drive.  My son in law was impressed saying the watch doesn’t need batteries and is powered by solar regeneration.  I felt extremely cool – thanks to the wife.  We stopped at Zorba’s on the way home, of course, and caught up with each other over the mystical pizza which always restores my soul in an almost medical fashion.  I think it has more to do with the company than the pizza but it always works.  We can home to watch a very flat Patriots preseason game while my wife checked out Facebook.  She mentioned that my sister had posted something about the Red Sox being involved in a huge trade so I quickly changed channels and learned the still not final trade details.  The Red Sox seem to be trading three of their superstars, Josh Becket, Carl Crawford, and Adrian Gonzalez for prospects.  This represents a monumental change of direction for the Sox and I applaud their audacity.  This season is lost and the club house of this team just didn’t seem to get it.  The Red Sox and New England share a bond that spans generations but this team seemed content with mediocrity.  We’ve been cursed with mediocre Red Sox teams over the decades but for the most part they understood that their rabid fans (guilty) could excuse mediocrity if they only cared and gave us their best effort.  Beckett was an unapologetic shadow of his former self who let himself get out of shape and was going through the motions after signing his huge contract – he needed to go.  Gonzalez was the typical southern Californian who never connected with the New England fan base.  Immensely talented but maybe all those years in San Diego robbed him of the edge needed to compete against the hated Yankees.  Crawford was a victim of bad luck health wise and being thrust into a club house with a routine already set.  Coming from the outside I always thought he felt powerless to impose a more professional attitude and suffered in silence.  I’ll miss Crawford a lot, especially if he gets healthy.  I’ll miss Gonzalez’ bat and defense but not his attitude.  I won’t miss Beckett even a little bit as he is leaving town one step ahead of a very uncomfortable trip on a rail adorned with tar and feathers.  Today should be a lot of fun as we are heading up to New Hampshire to conquer the forbidding mountain fastness of Mount Monadnock.  I am certain I will have to also show the Elm City Brewery to my son in law, something of a beer connoisseur that guy, because that’s just how we roll. (I think I used that phrase correctly?)

Good Bye

My New Solar Powered Watch
Apparently Buddy Approved

Phoning it In

No Kids - It Wasn't This Bad!

People of my generation can really look back and marvel at the progress of technology over the course of our lives.  Nowhere is that more evident than with the telephone.  When I was young our family had what was called a “party line” which involved actually sharing a phone line with someone else – can you imagine that nowadays?  Phone numbers back then actually started with letters, EL2-0299 was ours.  Of course all numbers had to be dialed in and during my teenage years we thought a push button phone was about as cool as you could get.  All phone communications went through AT&T which enjoyed a government approved monopoly to provide phone service to all Americans.  Long distance calls were expensive and rationed appropriately in a family watching costs.  International calling was something truly exotic.  I can remember while stationed in Panama having to go to the local post office to call back to the US and my mother to inform her I was getting married.  In 1984 AT&T was broken up and that, more than anything else seems to have fueled the breathtaking leap forward in technology as competition fueled better and better service.  My mother bemoaned the fact that AT&T was being broken up but I think history will show it was a catalyst of spectacular change for the better.  My wife can now sit down and video chat with her family in Panama for free, no post office required.  Dial phones are museum pieces and even push button phone are archaic.  Most young people do not even have a telephone wired into the house and long distance charges are a thing of the past for the most part.  I cannot remember the last time I actually dialed the number for a friend since most of these are stored in the phone.  My grandparents were around for the invention of the telephone, I can only imagine their wonder at the globe spanning telephone technology available to us.  It’s fun to imagine what it will be like in just a few decades further into the future. 

The Phone I Grew Up With

My wife was not going to take the Bulova watch problem lying down.  She took all the paperwork back to Macy’s where she bought the watch and confronted them with the evidence.  One of the sales clerks there was the person who told her that we had to send it back to Bulova and that proved useless (see earlier blog entry).  When she saw the same clerk yesterday she refused to talk with him and waited for a supervisor who admitted the other clerk had serious customer service issues (which begs the question why he continues in the position but that’s Macy’s problem to solve).  The supervisor immediately admitted they owed us a refund for the watch and took care of it with profuse apologies.  My wife is going back today with the refund and a 25% discount card Macy’s sent her to get me a new watch – I don’t think it will be a Bulova.  I am so very proud of her for not just sitting back and accepting that we had done everything that could be done.  It’s also testimony to her increasing self-confidence because she’s always been a little reticent to push issues (except with me, of course) in English which is not her native language.  Kudos to Macy’s for their responsible reaction but you really do need to move that one guy back to the loading dock.  Construction on the road out front continued.  They paved around the storm drain (see picture).  I’m no engineer but it seems they should have paved the gully all the way up the hill because the first heavy rain will undercut everything they’ve done.   Hopefully that’s part of the finishing off phase.  If not they’ll have to come back and fix it again.  The best news is that today I get to drive through Connecticut again during rush hour.  Those of you who read this blog regularly know there is only one thing that can make me do that happily – I’m going to be picking up my daughter and son in law for a weekend visit home – color me extremely psyched.

The Latest Addition - Notice the Problem Waiting to Happen
Hope It Doesn't Rain

These Guys!!!!!
Connecticut Motivation

Expended

Raging Dudes!

Yesterday was the day for my weekly date night so I chose not to run in the afternoon.  I decided my wife deserved a date who wasn’t trying to cover up the after affects of a summer three mile run with a healthy does of Old Spice.  In reality I’m noticing that one of the other “benefits” of getting older is that I’m feeling the toll exercise takes on my body much more than it used to.  I’m getting a little sorer after running and it doesn’t go away as quickly as it used to.  I have to keep exercising if I want to continue to eat the food that I do and to “occasionally” have a smidgen of beer.  The running itself is not a problem although I do wonder if people seeing me run think like I used to which is, “Why is that old guy still out there trying to run?”  I’m going to keep doing it as long as I can but I wish it didn’t cost so much.  The swimming is much easier but leaves me a lot more tired.  The other night there were some younger people in the pool who I actually had to struggle a little to beat so maybe I need to back off that tendency.  I get frustrated with myself when I notice that it takes me longer to stand up or walk down the stairs or do just about anything.  I guess we’re getting back to raging against the dying of the light kind of stuff that got me started on this blog in the first place.  It’s just tough to have been in pretty good shape my entire life and to have to slowly (if ever according to my wife) accept that I can’t do some the things physically that I used to perform with ease.   Just have to keep raging, I guess.  This melancholy mindset is a perfect lead in to the movie we saw last night, Expendables 2, which as so much fun.  I love it when a movie doesn’t take itself too seriously and this one certainly didn’t.  It was a lot of fun to see all of these 80’s action heroes easing through the paces and poking fun at themselves at the same time.   Anytime Dolph Lundgren shows the most emotional depth of any of the actors you know you should stay near the surface in watching a movie, I mean we’re talking the governator (another welcome return) here not Olivier.  The plot didn’t make a lot of sense but it was just the vehicle to get to the action scenes and allow these old war horses another day in the sun which they seize and have a great deal of fun with.  The scene where Chuck Norris appears was worth the price of admission in itself.  There were also a lot of really subtle insertions of bits as well as the blatantly obvious ones from the movies that made the action stars who they are.  This movie didn’t try to be anything more than what it was, an excessive, over the top, action packed extravaganza that critics will hate but action movie fans (myself) will revel in.  I guess I’m not the only one raging.

Retractions

Manholes Up!

For all of you dying for an update on the road construction, come on you know who you are, there was some progress yesterday.  I was talking with a neighbor who said the paving company had forgotten to mark where manhole covers were and had paved over all of them with their base coat of asphalt.  I thought the ride had been unbelievably smooth on the new road and now I know why.  Yesterday they were out cutting into the newly paved surface and raising all the manholes up.  I think that was probably the plan all along but it made for a comedic conversation.  Hopefully they’re getting near to completion.  I have folded on my conviction to give up on the daily newspaper.  I missed my daily reading, most of all for the local news which is harder to come by on the internets without digging and who wants to dig.  Buddy is ecstatic because he now gets to re-impose his will on the early morning squirrel population in the front yard as well as any joggers when we go out for the paper. I guess I am a fossil but I think it points out something that will be lost in the next generation who won’t read newspapers.  Maybe they’ll be better diggers.  In other retractions I have to withdraw my earlier comments about the effectiveness of Bulova.  I now know why it didn’t cost me anything for the watch repair, they didn’t do anything.  While we were out dancing on Saturday night I noticed the watch was fogging up again and Sunday morning there was actually water condensed on the inside of the watch face.  Apparently they just ran the watch through whatever ineffective test they use and pronounced it fixed and never even opened it up to see all the moisture present.  You may have noticed that I have added labels to the blog entries.  I went back and added them to all the blog entries because I was having trouble going back and finding things as it has grown in size.  I found some really bad spelling and grammatical errors as well during my review; although I’m sure I didn’t catch all of them (my apologies).  My daughter should be proud that I even figured out how to add the labels to the design of the main page without asking for her help.  I think she is currently dumbfounded but I had a very good teacher.  I had a nice conversation with her last night and she revealed some distressing health news about the father of one of the Curbside gals and someone my wife and I consider a friend.  Our hopes and prayers are with this family as I am sure the good fight back to full health is going on right now in Michigan.

Great Scott

I was a little shocked yesterday that we’ve lost one of my favorite movie directors, Tony Scott.  It’s kind of strange but I feel like I’ve lost a friend even though we never met.  Although his brother Ridley Scott is the more famous of the two I’ve always liked Tony a lot better because I always thought he understood movie audiences (us) better.  You knew going into a Scott action flick you were going on a thrill ride with a heart.  He left us somewhat dramatically, jumping from a bridge in Los Angeles.  I’ve never condoned or even understood suicide and I’ll defer judgment until I learn more.  I’ve heard unsubstantiated rumors that he had inoperable brain cancer but his demons were his own and I’ll leave it at that.  My thoughts are with his family who hopefully understand more than we deserve to, my prayers are with them.  As I went down the list of his movies I was astounded by the quality and how many of these movies were amongst my favorites.  Although he is best known for Top Gun, that film is not even in his top ten for me .  Here are my five favorite Tonty Scott films.  One of the best movies ever made, True Romance, is usually credited to the writer, Quentin Tarantino, but Scott directed it and it was his vision up on the screen.  In Man on Fire, Scott elicited what I believe to be Denzel Washington’s best screen performance as Creasy, and that’s saying a lot.  The Last Boy Scout allowed Bruce Willis to move beyond just the action personae although he certainly delivered that as well.  In Enemy of the State, a superb suspense/action film, he got Will Smith to believe enough in himself as an actor that he held his own with Gene Hackman, no small task.  Finally Revenge is amongst Costner’s absolutely best performances.  The scenes between him and Anthony Quinn just crackle.  All of these movies had superb action but allowed you into the minds of the heroes/heroines enough to understand their motivation.  That’s not easy but Scott accomplished it in all of his movies.  The world, especially that part consigned to movie geeks such as myself, is a lot poorer today; diminished.

His Resume:

His Best Work

Wired for Green

Buddy Cruising - One Happy Wonder Pooch

Yesterday was a heavy recovery day for both the wife and I as we were feeling little aches and pains from the dancing on Saturday night.  We both considered the pain a small price to pay for the experience.  Sunday also saw Buddy’s rendezvous with his bath day, something he truly hates.  He normally comes immediately when I call but yesterday he saw me heading outside with the tell tale towels and he disappeared for parts unknown.  He tried hiding in the weeds in the far back yard but I eventually found him and dragged him to the bathing area.  I rewarded his stalwart performance with a car ride.  We recently purchased a seat cover for my wife’s car to protect it from Buddy’s omnipresent hair donations and I bought a second one for my car.  We tested it yesterday with Buddy finally able to get his head out the window and feel the breeze for a ride through some back roads.  I’m not sure if it was adequate recompense in Buddy’s eyes for the indignity of the bath but he seemed almost intoxicated by the experience.  I’m going to try and make it a regular routine for us.  I finally finished watching the series The Wire over the weekend which was emotionally exhausting.  99 per cent of the characters in the series had deep and an almost scary level of personality flaws but it was riveting drama.  I’m not sure anybody would choose to live in Baltimore after seeing this and I don’t think I’ll even be comfortable flying over the city.  The film makers are deeply pessimistic about human nature and I didn’t like the fact that the lying reporter survived (I was hoping he would meet Omar in a dark alley).  I can now get back to watching Criminal Minds where the serial killers will seem almost childlike after the Baltimore drug gangs.  My wife also decided we should go see The Odd Life of Timothy Green late last night (so cool having a nearby movie theater now).  It was light as a feather Disney stuff that really seemed more like one of the old Disney TV shows than a real movie but it had a superb cast.  It was a little jarring to see Joel Edgerton play a sensitive father/husband after his turn in Warrior.  The child actors, especially CJ Adams in the lead and supporting actress Odeya Rush were fantastic.  I think we’ll be hearing a lot from both of these young actors.  My wife loved the movie which left her drenched in tears.  It was certainly a departure from the Wire.

The Earlier Indignity

Checking Out his New Seat Cover

I Might Even Miss Some ofThem

Disney Sweetness - On to The Expendables!

Oh What A Night!

My Devastating Date Last Night

Yesterday was a really quiet day for the most part until our date last night.  My wife and I met with other members of the Worcester Chapter of the Panamanian Mafia for dinner and dancing in Worcester.  We went to a place called Maxwell Silverman’s which is located right in the middle of Worcester.  The people we joined are so much fun and we arrived early enough that we were able to enjoy their lively conversation before the music started.  We had a great waitress who actually had the best line of the night.  One of our friends is a real jokester and was telling a slightly off color joke involving being able to carry 24 apples in your hands.  He tried this on the waitress who quickly turned it right back on him by saying, “You know what they say about guys with big hands, don’t you?”  My friend hesitantly agreed while the rest of us were checking out the size of our hands.  She quickly said, “They can carry 24 apples.”  This was a lot funnier last night because of the context but she showed she was really sharp at the expense of our friend who thought he was being that himself.  The food was fantastic and I scored an impressively sized piece of prime rib.  My wife looked devastatingly beautiful last night and brought no less than three pairs of shoes in case she needed to modify footwear during the dancing.  I stuck with one pair.  I really like Silverman’s, one of those old New England factories that have been reinvented as a restaurant.  The crowd last night was age appropriate for us as was the music.  There was a DJ with a truly shocking amount of hair and a smoke machine.  I was not sold on the smoke machine until his lasers started up and you could see them cutting through the smoke which was kind of cool.  My wife and I rarely left the dance floor and I was soon sweating bullets trying to keep up with her frantic pace.  Well, in reality, my wife never left the dance floor.  I took a couple of breaks to perform such mundane tasks as paying the sharp waitress.  Last night was one of those all too rare nights when everything seem to come together for an extraordinary time, great friends, superb dancing (well, at least by my wife), and an exhaustingly contented evening by the time it was over.  My wife and I were transported, at least for one night, back to our youth when we would dance the night away.  At the end of the night, all the other friends had left and we were reluctant to leave because it had been such a good time.   

The Great Group Of Friends at Maxwell Silverman's Last Night

Smoke and Laser Dancing