Ramblings
Below are some of my rants. They are just for fun. If you feel they are offensive, the best thing to do is to not read them.
It’s Nothing to Pemberly
Pride and Prejudice is a book a real men are not supposed to appreciate. But, I appreciate it, nevertheless. I also enjoy the 1995 version with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, which is the only version worth spending much time with… but I digress. In the opening scene, Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcey are looking at an estate from a hilltop. Bingley says, “Oh, it’s nothing to Pemberley, I know, but I must settle somewhere. Have I your approval?” Later, when Elizabeth is visiting Pemberley, the house keeper takes her to a...
read moreTruck Signs Give Us Important Information
The movie, Cast Away , staring Tom Hanks is a bit of a sleeper. A FedEx guy is stranded on an island and spends part of his time talking to a soccer ball. The end is even more disappointing as he delivers, personally, one package he rescued. No one is home, but he meets a pretty woman at the end of the lane after the delivery. You think, hey, maybe this poor sap will get a small break and meet someone nice. Not so much. It is sort of a movie you can cast away. Ha ha. As we drive about in our motor home, we notice things like signs on trucks....
read moreWhat Font?
Steve Jobs died, today. Most know I am typing on a Mac. I started with a PC Jr. and had my mother buy a PC. The original PC running DOS. There were some amazing programs around that allowed you to play some simple games and do rudimentary word processing. There were also some cool things called databases and spreadsheets. Lotus 1-2-3, if you remember. If you hooked it up correctly, the word processor would spit out pages on a dot matrix printer that looked a little like it was written on a typewriter, but messier. Schools took to...
read moreCafeteria Bottlenecks
The movie Home Alone has a scene when Kevin is sitting in a chair eating ice cream covered with all sorts of junk food. He yells, “Guys, I’m eating junk and watching rubbish! You better come out and stop me!” Of course he is home alone so so one stops him. I always thought that his parents had not spent a lot of time stopping him before, but that is just me. My mother was an official ’50s mother. She cooked supper for us every night. She didn’t ask me what I wanted. She didn’t ask me if I wanted...
read moreSchool Cafeteria Design
California has a strange plan for designing schools. My brother-in-law, Carl, had the right idea years ago. The state should have ten schools designed and the plans on file. No new architect for each building. But, that is not the case. I won’t try your patience with discussing the fact that new schools no longer have covered walkways between wings because the covered walkways would count in the square footage of the school. Nor will I frustrate you with the fact that Alpha was built with the kindergarten classes the furthest from...
read moreSitting on Our Bench
In the movie, Notting Hill, there is a bench in a garden with an inscription: “For June who loved this garden, from Joseph who always sat beside her.” We have a bench and we like to sit on it. I don’t think we are at always yet, as we have just arrived, but it is a lovely garden. We have apples. They are not really ripe, but like most impatient folks, we have sampled a few. They are not quite ready. Deer are not quite as discriminating and they are ready for harvest . Well, they don’t do much harvesting but...
read moreApples at Graestone
My favorite Robert Frost poem is “After Apple Picking”. It is a wonderful poem in which Frost, just as he drifts off to sleep, has all the images of picking apples running through his mind. I know there are all sorts of analyses in which loftier folks than I think it is about a man who is old and dying, thinking of his life. I sort of doubt it, as Frost wrote this when he was fairly young. I like to think of it as the feeling we get when we have done something all day and then try to get to sleep; sort of like feeling the bed...
read moreThe Gate
In the movie, The Milagro Beanfield War, directed by Robert Redford, Amarante is an ancient old man with thick glasses. In his first scene, he wakes up in his long johns, hacks and coughs and staggers to an old mirror. He looks at himself and says, “Thank you God for giving me another day.” Later, when he leaves for town, he walks out to his gate, which has no fence remaining on either side. Undaunted, Amarante opens the gate, walks through and closes it behind him. I love Amarante. Later, Jose Mondragon is talking to him and we get...
read moreSome Things I Ponder While Driving
Gore Vidal’s Lincoln is a great movie/mini series. Sam Waterston studied dialect for weeks and is a fantastic Lincoln and Mary Tyler Moore is a wonderful Mary Todd Lincoln. Vidal did fine research, including using John Hay’s diary. Both the book and the movie set Lincoln in a most interesting light… far from the unflinching Lincoln we were taught about in school. This Lincoln has nightmare, insomnia and suffers from severe constipation. At one point in the movie several men are with the president, in the “war...
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