Pandemic blog 44: white Christmas

Just above freezing today, a light snow falling. I took a walk down to Wingra Park, reading He Knew He Was Right, one of the funny parts where a hapless clergyman attempts vainly to not get married (I know that describes a lot of Trollope but the joke lands every time.) The near shore of Lake Wingra was a hockey rink for parents and their kids, on the last day of the long Christmas weekend. Last night, as the holiday requires, we ordered Chinese delivery from Ichiban (in Madison, for reasons lost to history, Szechuan restaurants have Japanese names) and watched the new Pixar movie, Soul. There are very few movies all four of us are willing to sit down and watch in full; I think this year it was just Soul and American Pickle, so I guess we only like to watch sappy movies about hapless comic figures who return from apparent death. The kids and I agree that cumin lamb should be one of those Chinese dishes on the permanent shortlist of American menu standards, like kung pao chicken and ma po tofu and beef lo mein; why isn’t it? Is it hard to make?

Eighth Grade

Saw this with CJ.  Good movie.  If you’re wondering, can you see this with your adolescent, definitely yes.  If you’re wondering, will my adolescent have a deep conversation with me afterwards about the challenges of growing up, well, that’s not really CJ’s style but good luck with it!

My favorite thing about Eighth Grade is the way it captures the adolescent challenge seeing other human beings as actual people, like oneself, with their own interior lives.  Other people, for Kayla, are still mostly instruments, things to do something with, or things from which to get a response.  Or maybe she’s just at the moment of learning that other people are not just that?  Very good the way she records Olivia’s name in her phone as “Olivia High School” — other people are roles, they fit in slots — the crush, the shadow, the rival.  Olivia, older, engages with Kayla’s real self in a way that Kayla isn’t yet ready to reciprocate.

But why did she have to say at the end that high school was going to be cool, except math?  Come on, teen movie, be better.

 

I guess Caffe 608 was in trouble

Eight years after I wondered whether the arthouse cinema / cafe in Hilldale could really make a go of it, Sundance 608 is getting bought out by AMC.  I have really come to like this weird little sort-of-arthouse and hope it doesn’t change too much under new management.  It’s a sign of my age, I guess, that I still think of “movie at the mall” as an entertainment option I want to exist.  It’s my Lindy Hop, my vaudeville, my Show of Shows.

Mark Metcalf

Have you ever heard of this guy?  I hadn’t.  Or thought I hadn’t.  But: he was Niedermeyer in Animal House

and the dad in Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” video

and the Master, the Big Bad of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1.

That’s a hell of a career! Plus: he lived in suburban Milwaukee until three years ago! And he used to go out with Glenn Close and Carrie Fisher! OK. Now I’ve heard of Mark Metcalf and so have you.

My Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath number is 11

I am pleased to report that I have an Erdös-Bacon-Sabbath number.

My Erdös number is 3; has been for a while, probably always will be.  I wrote a paper with Mike Bennett and Nathan Ng about solutions to A^4 + B^2 = C^p; Mike wrote with Florian Luca; Luca wrote with Erdös.

A while back, I shot a scene for the movie Gifted.  I’m not on the IMDB page yet, but I play against type as “Professor.”  Also in this movie is Octavia Spencer, who was in Beauty Shop (2005) with Kevin Bacon.  So my Bacon number is 2.

That gives me an Erdös-Bacon number of 5; already pretty high on the leaderboard!

Of course it then fell to me to figure out whether I have a Sabbath number.  Here’s the best chain I could make.

I once played guitar on “What Goes On” with my friend Jay Michaelson‘s band, The Swains, at Brownies.

Jay performed with Ezra Lipp “sometime in 2000,” he reports.

Lipp has played with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes.

From here we use the Six Degrees of Black Sabbath tool, written by Paul Lamere at EchoNest (now part of the Spotify empire.)

The Black Crowes backed up Jimmy Page at a concert in 1999.

Page played with David Coverdale in Coverdale.Page.

David Coverdale was in Deep Purple with Glenn Hughes of Black Sabbath.

So my Sabbath number is 6, and my Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath number is 11.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Devil math!

The Chinese edition of How Not To Be Wrong, published by CITAC and translated by Xiaorui Hu, comes out in a couple of weeks.

The Chinese title is

魔鬼数学

or

“Mo gui shu xue”

which means “Devil mathematics”!  Are they saying I’m evil?  Apparently not.  My Chinese informants tell me that in this context “Mo gui” should be read as “magical/powerful and to some extent to be feared” but not necessarily evil.

One thing I learned from researching this is that the Mogwai from Gremlins are just transliterated “Mo gui”!  So don’t let my book get wet, and definitely don’t read it after midnight.

Boyhood: one more note

I thought of one more small thing, concerning the last scene.

Notes on Boyhood

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is certainly the best movie I’ve seen this year, likely the best movie I’ll see this year.  But I don’t see a lot of movies.  After the spoiler bar, some notes on this one.  I meant to write this right after I saw it, but got busy, so no doubt I’ve forgotten some of what I meant to say and gotten other things wrong.

I hate bad buts and I cannot lie

From today’s New York Times:

Scarlett Johansson gainfully posed in underwear and spiked heels for Esquire’s cover last year after the magazine named her the “sexiest woman alive.” But a French novelist’s fictional depiction of a look-alike so angered the film star that she sued the best-selling author for defamation.

The inappropriate “but” is one of the sneakiest rhetorical tricks there is.  It presents the second sentence as somehow contrasting with the first.  It isn’t.  Scarlett Johansson agreed to be photographed mostly undressed; does that make it strange or incongruous or hypocritical that she doesn’t want to be lied about in print?  It does not.  To be honest, I can’t think of any explanation other than weird retrograde sexism for writing the lede this way.  “She got paid for looking all sexy, so who is she to complain that she was defamed?”  Patricia Cohen of the New York Times, I’m awarding you an

Jordan and the Dream of Rogen

The other night I dreamed I was going into a coffeeshop and Seth Rogen was sitting at an outside table eating a salad.  He was wearing a jeans jacket and his skin was sort of bad.  I have always admired Rogen’s work so I screwed up my courage, went up to his table and said

“Are you…”

And he said, “Yes, I am… having the chef’s salad.  You should try it, it’s great.”

And I sort of stood there and goggled and then he was like, “Yeah, no, yes, I’m Seth Rogen.”

I feel proud of my unconscious mind for producing what I actually consider a reasonably Seth Rogen-style gag!