Since we are now separating parents from children when refugees arrive at the border, these famous refugees should make us think.
Nativity Scene at U.S. – Mexico Border
Month: December 2020
Ukelele Virtuoso Hawai’ian Taimane Gardner
Can you imagine a rendition of Stairway to Heaven played on a Ukelele?
I am sure you can’t. Neither could I.
Listen to Taimane Gardner and you’ll never look at your ukelele the same way again.
Great Conjunction
Trisha just came home from the grocery store with a picture of the Great Conjunction made with her phone from her car window – and a sliver of the moon below it. We have watched the planets approach each other every night in the last few days at 5:30pm. They are visible from our back yard.
Movie Review: The Life Ahead
Madame Rosa (Sofia Loren at age 85!) is an Auschwitz survivor who lives somewhere in a seaside city in Italy and runs a business taking care of the children of prostitutes. She reluctantly takes in a 12-year-old Muslim African orphan at the begging of her doctor, who is also the counselor for the Social Services Department that takes care of street kids.
Momo (Ibrahima Gueye) is from Senegal, and is streetwise beyond his age. He robs strangers in the market, and he is a drug dealer under the wings of an adult gang lord. At first, as one would expect, he does not fit into Madame Rosa’s household, with the other kids who live there, and with the adults around him.
But Momo is smart and resourceful, and quickly he turns from victim to protector as he learns the hard lessons of life earlier than a 12-year-old should. As quickly as he calls Madama Rosa’s world his home and family, it starts crumbling around him.
The Life Ahead is in Italian with English subtitles. The director, Edoardo Ponti, is Sofia Loren’s son. The movie was made for Netflix during the 2020 pandemic.
The Life Ahead is completely carried by the two lead actors, Sofia Loren with her powerful presence, and the amazing talent of Ibrahima Gueye.
Here in America we are so inundated with our Hollywood movie formula, we’re not used to hearing other languages and exotic sound tracks, playing in locales that look foreign to us. The challenges of a 12-year-old black orphan from Senegal on the streets of a city in Italy are beyond our everyday comprehension. The movie may not present a culture clash for viewers in Italy, but in our American living rooms, they give us powerful jolts of realities we can’t even comprehend.
After the credits started rolling, I was mesmerized. I listened to the music until it was all done.
I owed it that.
Book Review: Agent of Time – by Nathan Van Coops
It’s 1985 in St. Petersburg, Florida. Rookie Special Agent Stella York is one of the first female FBI agents, and she does not have the support of her peers or her superiors. Yet, the case she is put on is completely baffling.
Two dead men are found in a van that crashed into a power pole, yet the power pole does not show any damage, while the van is totaled. The van is a GMC model nobody has ever heard of in 1985. Furthermore, the license plate expiration sticker shows “10.”
One of the dead men’s fingerprints are an exact match with those of a prison guard at a local prison – which is impossible. Then, during a chase on I-275 North, she witnesses the gory death of a suspect in a car accident, yet, she runs into him very much alive a day later. Nothing makes sense, until one of the witnesses opens up to her and tells her that she’s dealing with time travelers. From the chronological point of view, events seem to happen out of order.
Agent York is losing all her professional credibility when she approaches her superiors with her theory.
Agent of Time plays in Nathan Van Coops’ universe of the In Times Like These, a series of books I have read. See the reviews here:
More specifically, Agent of Time plays within the In Times Like These story. I have read prequels to successful books before, and they are usually entertaining, because I know the world that comes after the prequel ends. But I have never read a book that plays “within the original story.”
If you have read the hugely famous Harry Potter series of books, you will understand what “Muggles” are. In Harry Potter, the action takes place among people who are involved in magic: wizards, sorcerers, and the like. Everyone knows that magic is real, and understands its rules. Muggles are the regular people, like you and I, who do not have magical talents and in almost all cases do not believe in magic and do not know it’s going on all around us – well – at least in the Harry Potter universe.
In Nathan Van Coops’ books, the action takes place among people who routinely travel in time. They take it for granted, and they use it creatively. But the rest of us, the time-Muggles, have no idea time travel is possible, it’s happening, and it’s routine for some people. Agent of Time plays parallel to the story of In Times Like These, but it is told from the point of view of time-Muggles like Stella York. What would it look like if there were time travelers amongst us, doing their things, and what would it be like if there were time traveling criminals?
You don’t need to have read In Times Like These to understand Agent of Time, but you will enjoy it MUCH more if you have. I would recommend that you read In Times Like These first, then read Agent of Time, and you’ll have the best experience.
Agent of Time is a short book of only 137 pages. It was free on Amazon. I literally read the whole thing in one day, yesterday. The author probably was in a rush to get it out, because it fell kind of short. The ending was somewhat abrupt, probably setting us up for the next Stella York story, the time-Muggle. But it’s a good addition to the series, and Van Coops is still, in my opinion, one of the strongest writers in the genre.
Book Review: The Evening and the Morning – by Ken Follett
It is the year 997 in England, the end of the Dark Ages. The people live in wooden houses and use primitive tools.
Edgar is an eighteen-year-old youth, the son of a boatbuilder. During a Viking raid, his village is destroyed, his father is killed, and his mother and brothers have to move to a new village and start from scratch, trying to survive.
Ragna is the daughter of a Norman nobleman who falls in love with Wilwulf, the ealdorman (you’ll have to look that up here) of Shiring. She moves to England to marry him, but she has no idea what the customs are in her new world. Quickly her life is all but destroyed.
Aldred is a young monk who wants to turn his monastery into a center of learning and culture. This is in the time when copies of books were written by hand, and when books where hugely expensive and impossible to own.
Wynston is the bishop of Shiring, a cunning, brutal man who will stop at nothing, including fratricide, to get what he wants, more power and more riches.
The lives of these four people are interlinked and connected as we watch them struggle for survival, for love and lust, for power and for enlightenment. But in the end, the story is too simple, the plot predictable, and the characters are one-dimensional and not believable.
I bought this book without bothering to first download the preview to see if I’d like it, based completely on the reputation and caliber of the author. I have read the “Kingsbridge Trilogy” starting with Pillars of the Earth, one of the best historical novel I have ever read. The Evening and the Morning is the fourth book of the Kingsbridge series, written as a prequel to Pillars. It plays about a hundred years before Pillars, when the little hamlet that will once become Kingsbridge consists of just a few hovels in the middle of nowhere.
I have no idea why the title of the book is The Evening and the Morning. Surely, Follett could have spent a little more time thinking of a better title. The book is over 900 pages long and it takes patience to read. I was hoping I’d get more history out of the experience, but I really didn’t. The story is a love story, a tale of utter evil and brutishness, power and abuse, sex (too much of it) and melodrama. Disney could have written the story, and it could have played anywhere and at any time. It just turns out it played in the decade between the years 997 and 1007, during the reign of King Ethelred II.
The Evening and the Morning is a nice attempt at a historical novel that describes life during the Dark Ages, or better, the end of the Dark Ages, but it misses a lot of opportunities. Edgar, one of the protagonists, could have been shown as an old man, jumping forward closer to the 1100 period, where Pillars starts. As it turns out, I learned more about the history of that period in England browsing wikipidia.org for Ethelred, the term “ealdorman,” the Viking raids, and court life during that period than I learned from reading The Evening and the Morning.
Follett is a great writer, and this book leaves me with the feeling that he just wanted to write something quickly and without much imagination to make some money from his loyal followers. The book really doesn’t have anything to do with the Kingsbridge stories, other than it plays 100 years before John Builder first sets foot into the town of Kingsbridge is search of a job.
That’s when it gets exciting. You will not miss anything if you skip The Evening and the Morning.
Foreign Children Really Didn’t Matter
Here is a Dr. Seuss Political Cartoon from 1941:
And the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones…
But those were Foreign Children and it really didn’t matter.
80 years later, we’re stealing children from their parents, putting them in cages. But this time the Wolf isn’t Adolf.
Movie Review: Free State of Jones (2016)
Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey) is a farmer in Mississippi during the Civil War. Rather than being a soldier in the Confederate Army, he chooses to be a medic, because he thinks that actually helps people. When his nephew is drafted and he asks for his help, he tries to save him to no avail. When his nephew dies in battle, a chain of events forces him to desert. He find refuge in the swamp with a group of runaway slaves. Safely hidden away, they gradually attract other deserters and farmers who have no interest in upholding a system that keeps the rights of rich people to own slaves. They secede from the Confederacy and form the Free State of Jones in the swamps of Jones County, Mississippi.
Their actions change local politics during and after the war, and have an impact far into the 20th century.
Free State of Jones is a hard movie to watch, as the cruelty against black slaves in the history of America is brought to the forefront. Racism still persists today in 2020 and watching this movie today illustrates the massive injustice that was and is being perpetrated in the name of race in the United States.
Dumbing Down of America: Covid Does Not Exist
There are people, actually quite a lot of people, in this country, and in other countries, who still don’t believe that the Corona Virus exists. Our own President Trump seems to still tell people today that the virus was somehow created to “hurt his re-election.” Yes, as of December 7, there are 67 million people all over the world infected by this disease, and 1.5 million have died, of which 283,000, or 17 percent of all of them, died in the United States. – all just to make Trump look bad. That truly is a world-wide conspiracy the likes of which we have never seen before.
There are now nurses who work in intensive care units who say that patients lash out a them because they think Covid does not exist – yet they are dying of it. There are countless people who ridicule others for wearing masks, because they somehow take their “freedom” away. Do they realize that it costs $20,000 on average for a day in the ICU, and if you need a ventilator, which is required for about 36% of ICU occupants, the cost is about $40,000 a day.
I just bought a set of new, high-end cloth masks for $9.95 each. They are very comfortable. Maybe I have impaired my own “freedom,” but I am doing what I can to prevent going to the hospital and owe them a fortune – if I survive.
Denying the reality of this disease is truly bizarre behavior for rational human beings. Fortunately this illness really does follow Darwin’s theory and those that are stupid enough to ignore it are more likely to die and “clean the genepool” for the rest of us.
Can you tell I am exasperated?
Movie Review: 41
41 is a pretty bad movie title for an amateur movie. You have to actually watch it to understand what it is.
Aidan is a college student to seems to go through the motions in his life without a lot of enthusiasm. One morning, after class, somebody that looks like himself, walks up to him and tells him not to go to the Heathscape Hotel.
Of course, that’s like somebody telling you not to think of a yellow elephant. So Aiden ends up going to the Heathscape Hotel and through a few strange events discovers that in room 41 (hence the title of the movie) in the bathroom, there is a time-portal. All he has to do is pull back the linoleum in the corner of the bathroom, climb into the hole for a moment, pull himself back out, and he arrives – yesterday.
Since it’s yesterday, he can now leave the room, if he makes it past any potential occupants in the hotel room itself, walk downstairs and find himself. After all, he should remember what he did yesterday, and then find himself. However, if there is somebody in the room and he can’t leave the bathroom – no problem – just climb back under the floor for a second, come back out yesterday again, which, of course, is now the day before yesterday of the original day.
By going back in time, he is trying to prevent the death of his girlfriend in a gruesome car accident while he was driving, but he does not seem to succeed.
41 is actually a pretty good time travel story, albeit with one plot problem: If you can only travel back, you create another copy of yourself every time you do it, and you really never come back to the present. This conundrum isn’t solved in this movie, but it has a pretty neat twist at the end that makes it a worthwhile story, so much so, that you’ll be tempted to want to watch it again to make sure what you saw was what actually happened.
The acting is poor, the production is skimpy, and the plot is full of major holes, but there is one hole in a bathroom in room 41 that makes it all worthwhile.
How to View the Great Conjunction on December 21, 2020
Here is an excellent video that teaches us all about the upcoming Great Conjunction on December 21, 2020.
Movie Review: Alistair1918
It’s 2015 in Los Angeles. Poppy (Annie K. McVey) and her film crew are working on a documentary of homelessness in Los Angeles. As they walk the streets and parks where homeless people abound, they get approached by a man in an antique woolen brown uniform who speaks with an English accent. His name is Alistair (Guy Birtwhistle). He asks for their help. He is quick, in a nonchalant way, to tell his story: The last thing he remembers was being in the trenches in World War I in 1918, when a grenade hit. He flew through the air, and ended up landing on top of a shipping container in an industrial section of Los Angeles. He’s been here for a month and literally learned to live off the land, mostly by trapping squirrels in the park, which he roasts and eats.
He has a wife and a life in 1918, and he wants to get back. The film crew has a hard time believing him, and for the most part think he is a mentally ill person with a fantastic imagination. Only Poppy wants to believe him. She starts taking him in and tries to help him on his journey back.
Alistair1918 is a simple time travel story with an unlikely and far-fetched plot. But it works. Alistair acts like a man catapulted 100 years into the future, although he picks up modern skills astonishingly quickly. He seems to teach himself typing and learning how to use a computer and the Internet in record time. Cameras seem to come naturally to him. He is an excellent map reader and he seems to be able to figure calculations on the movement of worm holes (which are needed for time travel) very quickly. While the time travel technology is somewhat hokey, it works in this movie. The ending is surprisingly satisfying.
This is definitely a low-budget film, and as such quite successful. It was completed in 2015. Guy Birtwhistle wrote and produced the movie, and also starred as the male lead, Alistair. Annie K. McVey directed the movie, and also starred as the female lead, Poppy. With only a handful other actors, and very simple scenery, I would say Alistair 1918 is a successful, quirky, but enjoyable time travel movie.