Stratovania

Since we were married on Leap Day, Beth and I celebrated our anniversary on the first of this month, and went to the orchid show at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

The orchid part was all indoors, much of it in a simulated tropical environment. I can say I didn't know that much about orchids, but there are a lot of different kinds, in many different colors.

Also in the conservatory was a cactus that looked like a bunch of snakes, although snakes usually aren't that scary.

The rest of the garden was, not surprisingly, pretty chilly, and not a lot was blooming. We did, however, take a tram ride around the place. I also thought that this rock looked like it would have an item inside or under it.

Maybe if Link were there. The NYBG is bigger than the one in Brooklyn, but not as big as Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. It contains the last vestige of the forest that once covered much of the area. Afterwards, we went to eat at the Olive Garden. The last few times I've been there, I've gotten rigatoni with five-cheese marinara sauce and sausage.

This past weekend was the Monster-Mania Convention in Cherry Hill, and while we were on the way there, we stopped at a kitschy candy store called Rocket Fizz.

Maybe this woman made her family disappear.
Tavie had taken some pictures there, and Beth found out that there was one in Marlton.

There's a lot of interesting stuff, including the kind of potato chips my teacher gave out in elementary school and a bunch of socks with brand logos, including Diet Coke, Bubble Yum, Swedish Fish, and Froot Loops.

None of those were anything I felt strongly enough about to want to wear on my feet, although I do drink a fair amount of Diet Coke, and I used to eat Swedish Fish in high school and college. They also had a lot of weird themed sodas, including a Monkees banana nut flavor that we bought, as well as tributes to Ritchie Valens, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and...Fidel Castro?

Beth also picked up a Zagnut bar, Jimmie Stix, and some Dutch licorice cats for her mom. I ended up getting a blueberry muffin Kit Kat, a little Pac-Man machine with some kind of candy that I haven't checked out yet, and a deck of Wizard of Oz playing cards with no candy involved at all. I had a pack of cards like those before, except with those it was just one picture on the backs, and here it looks like there are other images from the movies on the card faces.

I did notice a few items that appeared to be pro-Trump, although they had stuff that made fun of him as well. I remember, a few years ago, passing a souvenir shop in Manhattan that had both MAGA and Black Lives Matter hats. I guess that's what you could call mercenary merchandising.

As for the convention itself, I've noticed a gradual decline in the number and length of events that are free with admission, like question-and-answer panels and film introductions by people involved with them. There are still a few, though. The first one on Saturday was with Amie Donald, who played the titular robot girl in M3GAN, but didn't do the voice.

She has a New Zealand accent, and I'm not sure how well that would have worked for the character. Then came Adrienne Barbeau, followed by Brooke Smith, the woman who rubbed the lotion on her skin in Silence of the Lambs.
There were two bigger panels in the evening, the first featuring final girls from the Friday the 13th series, with Adrienne King, Amy Steel, Kimberly Beck, and Melanie Kinnaman.

And the one for the Terrifier films had several people on the production side as well as the actors.

Before it started, Leah Voysey sang the relentlessly catchy Clown Cafe song, with Elliott Fullam accompanying her on guitar.

David Howard Thornton, who played Art the Clown, did a pantomime of killing someone.

I also bought some Mario-related pictures from Dallas Pritchard of Studio 327.


On Sunday night, we got home in time for Beth to watch the Oscars, while I sort of half-watched them. As usual, I hadn't seen most of the movies that had been nominated for anything. We did see Elvis and Tar, and Turning Red was in the animated category. I do think I should probably see Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I'm sure I'll see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever at some point, although I'm behind on the Marvel movies. From the online comments I've seen about the ceremony, yeah, a fat suit probably shouldn't be winning any makeup awards; a commercial for The Little Mermaid during the broadcast is weird, but the whole thing is kind of a commercial anyway, so whatever; and Warner Bros. taking credit for movies they bought the rights to but didn't make seems rather similar to Elon Musk paying to call himself the founder of Tesla. I have no issue with Florence Pugh's outfit, though.

I guess I think she's just generally cute, though. It's weird how Janelle Monae's dress looked red on stage, but pretty bright orange elsewhere.

It stands out a lot more when the orangeness is obvious. And speaking of unusual colors, I have to give props to The Rock.


I haven't gone to the movies that much recently, but Beth was talking about wanting to see Scream 6, and there's the Mario movie coming up. From what I've seen in the trailers, it almost looks like they're throwing in too many references, although we don't know that everything there will be included, or will be particularly important even if it is. I guess it's just kind of weird to me because, from what I understand, it's loosely an adaptation of the original Super Mario Bros., yet they're including stuff that wasn't introduced into the series until decades after that. Then again, I'm pretty sure that, even if the movie is really successful, they're not going to make one based on each and every Mario game. I mostly like the designs, although Peach's head and eyes look kind of disproportionate to the rest of her.

I guess it's not the first time she's been depicted with a strangely large head for her body, though.

I have an ultrasound coming up on Thursday, and the cats have to go to the vet on Friday. And I'm not entirely sure how we're going to work out our summer plans, since Beth and I both have things we want to do in California in July, but in different parts of the month. For now, here's a picture of Reagan as a bat.

Happy Solstice, Yule, or whatever you want to call it! We've had our Christmas tree up for a while now, and I posted pictures of it elsewhere online, but not here. It's smaller than last year's, but I see that as a good thing. Much easier to carry in and out of the building. I always feel kind of bad that there's no point in putting ornaments on the back of the tree, because it just seems so uneven. The orange pterodactyl is new for this year.

They had several kinds of colorful dinosaurs like that at Target. (And yes, I know a pterosaur is not really a dinosaur.) Whenever we get a tree, Wally likes to sit underneath it, while Reagan ignores it.


I suppose the first pre-Christmas activity I should mention is seeing the Nutcracker ballet at Lincoln Center on the last day of November. We were off to the side in the back of the third circle, and had an obstructed view, but it was still enjoyable. I'm really not familiar enough with ballet to give details, but I usually appreciate the mice and the kids coming out from Mother Ginger's skirt.

The Thursday after that, we saw the Kevin Geeks Out Christmas Special at Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park. There's always a list of the performers on the website after the show, but I always forget who did what. I know Camila Jones discussed Christmas movies, and how any film with a scene taking place on or around Christmas could technically count in that category. She also questioned a line from White Christmas about mixing fairy tales with buttermilk and liverwurst, and was confused as to what it actually means. There was a bit about the animated New Kids on the Block Christmas special, which involves Donny befriending a kid who turns out to be dead. Someone else did a multimedia bit about her mother rather passive-aggressively showing her the decorations at her house. There were also talks on Furbys and It's a Wonderful Life. And there was an updated video presentation of Santa Doesn't Need Your Help. Kevin hosted two games, the Santa suit one and Ott or Not, the goal of the latter being to guess whether a film was rated better or worse than a very early movie of a guy named James Ott sneezing. I actually won the Santa suit one a few years ago, and every other time was eliminated very quickly. It's mostly all luck, even if you have a photographic memory for celebrities in Santa suits, as there are always some pretty obscure choices.


Last Thursday, we went to Lightscape at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We were there last year, but I think they expanded it a bit this time. Sadly for us, it was cold and rainy that day, and the way the lights were positioned in the dark in some places made it hard to see. I liked the flowers and birds made of lights.

The next day was a concert by the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra, with a good mix of holiday classics. And yesterday, we saw the tree in Rockefeller Center, and stopped at the nearby Nintendo store.

Make more than one trip, Luigi!
It was really crowded, and they didn't have anything that particularly interested me. I noticed a lot of sticker books, and the Pikachus in wedding dresses were cute. Bowser Jr. was apparently trying to blend in with them.

Even though I've lived in New York City for almost eight years, I still kind of feel like a tourist in that area.

Halloween is over, but I still have some spooky stuff to write about. Last Saturday, Beth and I went to Deno's Wonder Wheel Park on Coney Island, as it was the last weekend in the year the rides were running. We went on the Wonder Wheel, the Spook-A-Rama, and the Phoenix, the last of which is a small, slow roller coaster. They did have some Halloween decorations up, including a building entrance shaped like a zombie head.

I also always enjoy when rides have murals with seemingly random things in them. Like, this was what was in the back of the bumper car enclosure.

I get the cars and the car model, but a football player, Captain America, and the Statue of Liberty? If it's a patriotic thing, then why does the Statue look like she's been injured?


In the evening, we saw Weird Al at Carnegie Hall, with Emo Philips opening. This was the first time I'd ever been there, and I didn't even practice, just took the subway. It was the same kind of tour as the last time we saw him, with Al and his band playing mostly his original songs. They pulled out a few unexpected ones, like "Velvet Elvis" and "Good Old Days." When introducing "One More Minute," Al talked about how they performed it on network TV back in 1986, and the network insisted on censoring the line "I'd rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue," which already doesn't make sense, but then they made it much worse by just bleeping the word "tongue." "Skipper Dan" is based on a time when the guide on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland mentioned his failed acting career, but Beth wondered after the show that it might have been awkward for Weird Al to just go on rides without being hassled. Maybe he went in disguise. For "Nature Trail to Hell," an appropriate choice for Halloween, he did the organ part on a midi accordion. Both "Craigslist" and "Albuquerque" were extended, the former including a long bit of free-form nonsense in the part about his being on a phone call with his mother. I know there was something about the snakes rising up, a phrase Al has used before. "Albuquerque" not only had more kinds of doughnuts and the band playing the beginning of the song again after the part about the narrator losing his train of thought, but also an apology for using the word "hermaphrodite." He said that, in that context, it was just a medical term. While Al generally manages to avoid problematic humor, he does have a tendency to use some mildly offensive words presumably just because they sound silly, particularly "midget" and "albino." And in the song, a later line refers to the hermaphroditic person as a man. "Dare to Be Stupid" was performed with a lounge arrangement. For the encore, there was a cover of "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," then a mostly-acoustic medley of "Amish Paradise," "Smells Like Nirvana," "White & Nerdy," "Word Crimes," and "Yoda," the latter including the chant. This is the best of the pictures I was able to take from our seats in the back row.


We visited Tavie and Sean on Sunday, and watched some Halloween stuff, or actually rewatched it in my case. You can see my thoughts on revisits to The Halloween That Almost Wasn't and Return to Oz here. After that, we looked at a house in Flatbush that really went all out on Halloween decorations (well, I guess the owner went all out, not the house itself, although you never know during the spooky season).

We didn't do much on actual Halloween, aside from watch a few other things. We voted yesterday, and today we saw The Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic Theatre.

It's closing soon, so Beth bought tickets for it. She saw it before years ago, but I've only seen the 2004 movie version, although I did hear my dad's CD of selections from it a lot as a kid. It's a very impressive show, complete with a lot of lighting tricks and pyrotechnics. Although it wasn't really intentional that we saw it on Halloween week, I guess it's sort of appropriate, even if the version of the Phantom in the musical is much less monstrous in appearance than in other takes on the character. He's presumably somewhat supernatural as well, although I guess that's kind of ambiguous. A lot of his tricks are based on mechanics and stealth, but he did curse Carlotta. Or maybe that was psychosomatic. Still, if he has the ability to control minds to some extent, maybe Christine wasn't entirely in control of herself when she went down into the sewer with him. Otherwise, she comes across as kind of absurdly naive. I've heard, probably mostly from Beth, that there's a certain contingent who think Christine should have gotten into a relationship with the Phantom and who don't like Raoul. What did Raoul even do, aside from being upper class? She compared it to people who hate Cosette in Les Miserables, although it's not like Eponine was a serial killer. I remember reading a quote from Terry Pratchett, who wrote the Discworld equivalent of the story in Maskerade, that the message of the musical is that you can get away with murder if you're charming. I might have to read the original book; I understand it's not very long. If I do, I'll probably do a bit of comparison and contrast.

Speaking of spooky music, there's one short piece that I've heard over and over again in different contexts, but never knew what it was called or the original source. For instance, I remember hearing it in elementary school music class with the lyrics "We are here to scare you-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo." Anyway, it's called "Mysterioso Pizzicato," and it was originally used in silent film scores as a theme for villains. I thought of it recently because I was looking up the music to Wizards & Warriors, which uses it as the boss theme.

On the last Friday in September, we did a Halloween event, which was the haunted stuff at Creamy Acres that we do every year. It's a hayride plus a few walkthroughs, and they insist that you do the hayride first, even though that would probably make for a better cool-down.

See?
I didn't notice any major changes since last time, but it's not like I commit all this to memory. I did think about how, within the context of the fantasy, haunted hayrides are kind of weird. You're riding in this wagon, and the driver insists on constantly stopping where scary things can threaten you and sometimes climb on with you. Is the driver supposed to be in on it, or do they not even enter into the fiction? It's also worth noting that most of the hayrides I've been on in recent years didn't have any hay. The one in Delaware last year was an exception, but that one was during the day and not haunted. When we were in the gift shop, there were three cats just kind of hanging around. They didn't seem to be particularly bothered by all the strange people, although they did run if someone got too close.

A buff-colored cat was sitting on a box that was pretty much the same color he was.


I already wrote about the Oz event I saw at the Groliers Club a week ago, so I'll skip ahead to Thursday, and the Kevin Geeks Out at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg. I have to say the one in Prospect Park is easier for me to get to. This was the Spooky Spectacular, so presentations were horror-themed.

It started with a supercut of scenes from the Nightmare on Elm Street films involving Freddy Krueger's tongue. Kevin Maher and Joe Dator, who had collaborated on the book Santa Doesn't Need Your Help, did sort of a follow-up with a story of Dracula getting testicular cancer. Other presentations included Adam Howard on what media scared him as a kid, Gwendolyn Baily on how to enjoy Halloween when you have mental illness, Tenebrous Kate on foreign adaptations of Dracula, an animated horror short from Wally Chung involving elk and trolls in the mountains, Twiggs Gorey on Latin horror figures, and a burlesque routine by Persé Fanny based on It. The Kindest Cut was a Halloween episode of Walker: Texas Ranger, and Kevin pointed out afterwards that the pentagram they kept showing in it looked a lot like the Texas Ranger badge.

This weekend, we went to two different amusement parks, Knoebels in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, and Dorney Park in Allentown. We did that same two-day trip last year, but this was the first time we went to either for the Halloween season. Most parks come up with their own name for the fall activities; Knoebels used Hallo-Fun and Dorney Halloween Haunt. I thought about how it seems pretty common nowadays to parse the name of the holiday as "hallo" and "ween," when it derives from "hallow evening." But Beth said "Hallow-Fun" would make it sound too religious, and it's not like it really matters anyway.

Before we went to the park, we stopped at a nearby coffee shop in a converted church, which was surprisingly twee for an area with so much Republican propaganda.

They had a little museum and a music store, although the latter was closed that day.

Knoebels was surprisingly crowded, and Beth said she overheard someone say they'd been there over sixty times and hardly ever seen it like that. There was a really long line for the train, which had Halloween decorations set up, mostly a lot of skeletons. We rode on it once in the daytime and once at night, so I do have pictures, but not of everything being lit up.

The thing is, aside from that ride, it seemed like the lines were mostly shorter after dark. The Phoenix, the last thing we rode, also had some spooky stuff in its tunnel, which had a jack o' lantern face on its mouth as well. They have a ride called the Cosmotron, and their mascot is named Kosmo, so why isn't the ride name spelled with a K? I guess that's just a coincidence. I did think it worth noting that, both last year and on Saturday, they played Justin Bieber while the ride was running. The carousel had a mix of spooky songs for the band organ, but it seemed pretty short, as we kept hearing "Purple People Eater" over and over again.


At Dorney, we rode most of the rides they had, skipping a few that were basically just the same as at other parks, and still left about an hour before they closed.

We rode Possessed, the roller coaster that goes back and forth along two tracks, for the first time. There's a pirate ship outside the ride, but I don't know that the ride itself is pirate themed.

The lines in the daytime were very short, and while it got more crowded at night due to the haunted attractions, it still wasn't that bad. There were a few areas that had fog and employees in costumes, but they also closed a few of the rides that had been running earlier. Dorney is a small park that kind of seems bigger than it is because it has so many dead ends and paths that don't just go straight through like you might expect. That was even worse with the haunted areas set up along some of the paths. I think it was also the first time I'd seen a Ferris Wheel with seatbelts. I wonder if something happened on it in the recent past.

Last Thursday, we went to Playland, an amusement park in Westchester County, New York. It's owned by the county, but it's been under new management for a few years, and they got rid of quite a few rides since the last time we were there. To be fair, they also added some, but it often seemed like a downward trade, and some of the newer ones weren't even running that day. It was already a small park, and now there's even less there. We ended up riding most things twice. One of the recent ones, Catch'n Air, is pretty rough and doesn't really do that much, so while it's new, it doesn't feel like a modern ride. The one with the motorcycles that you can raise into the air is pretty cool, although very small.

And why would they keep the Music Express but get rid of the similar but superior Thunder Bolt? I'm sure they had their reasons, but I don't know what they are. There used to be two different dark rides, Zombie Castle and the Flying Witch, really close to each other, and both were so generic that I couldn't have told you what was in which. Only Zombie Castle is there now, and they blurred out some zombie woman painted on the wall behind where you get on.

I really have no idea why, but fortunately I was able to find a picture I took years ago, so you can see what it looked like before.

The most entertaining thing about this ride is the use of old, scratchy voice samples. Another kind of cheesy ride is Ye Old Mill, where you ride a boat through caverns inhabited by gnomes and trolls.

I do think it used to splash you with water towards the end and now it doesn't, but that's probably for the better.

The Derby Racer is a favorite of mine, although I remember it going faster. Whether that's nostalgia or actually true, I couldn't say for sure; but I have to wonder if someone decided a ride with no harnesses or anything running at that speed was unsafe. It was also the first time we rode the Go-Karts or the Bumper Cars, and some people are weirdly competitive on stuff like that.

I feel I should also mention that one of the horses on the Carousel had lost its tail.

I hope Owl doesn't use it as a doorbell. It rained on and off during the day, and the cool part about that was a very visible rainbow. We actually first saw it from the Dragon Coaster, but couldn't take pictures until afterwards.

Speaking of dragons, it seems like the park is now downplaying Coaster, their dragon mascot. He's still there, as on the one sign I shared here, but not as much as he was before.

The other thing we did that's worth writing about was to see Tim Heidecker at the Bell House on Monday night.

His show had two parts, the first being a stand-up routine that he did in character as an angry but clueless right-winger, yelling at the sound guy, fumbling with props, mispronouncing simple names, and saying Justin Trudeau was worse than Hitler. He also did some pretty clever wordplay. After that came his set with the Very Good Band, and while he still made jokes and some of the songs were on the comical side, most of it was pretty straight country-tinged rock.

Vic Berger, the guy whose video edits will forever make me associate Donald Trump with airhorns, played keyboard and some guitar. Tim also did a solo bit where he covered Bob Dylan's 1981 song about Lenny Bruce, and made fun of how lazy the lyrics were.

While in Gowanus, I noticed a picture on a wall of Nefertiti, and a drawing of the Tower Tarot card on the sidewalk

It's way more concrete than most fortunes.

After OzCon and our visit with Stephanie, we checked in at the hotel in Anaheim. It's one of those ones that isn't on Disney property, but has an arrangement with the park, including transportation as part of the price. It also included a breakfast buffet, including a station where a cook made omelettes and waffles.

Even Beth liked it, and she's normally against typical breakfast foods. Driving around the Los Angeles area is kind of fascinating because of how so many entertainment media are based there, so you come across a lot of place names that you've heard in movies and TV, but were largely meaningless to someone growing up in Pennsylvania. We did a lot of freeway driving during the time we were there, and it's too bad they had to destroy Toontown to build that. We also drove by the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank when we went with Stephanie to a coffee shop near there.

Considering how spread out Walt Disney World is, it's kind of fascinating that Disneyland is relatively small, and there's an IHOP right across the street from the entrance with a sign forbidding parking for Disney.


The first thing we rode on at the park was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, although we did the walkthrough of Sleeping Beauty's Castle before that.

A lot of the stuff we were most interested in was in Fantasyland. The Mr. Toad ride is one that seems to get mentioned quite a lot. I remember one Simpsons episode with something called "Mr. Frog's Mild Ride," maybe not a great joke but one that stuck with me.

The ride itself runs along a curving track with scenes from The Wind in the Willows, and ends up in Hell.

I guess that's the moral message, that if you drive recklessly and try to outrun the cops, you'll be eternally damned. Was this ride the inspiration for Grand Theft Auto? Other rides in the area had the same basic theme of riding through scenes from an animated movie.

Snow White's Enchanted Wish, Pinocchio's Daring Journey, and Peter Pan's Flight are all right in there together, although we ended up not riding that last one until Wednesday. They all give some sense of the story while you're waiting in line, and I found it strange that the Snow White one didn't even mention the Queen trying to kill her. The poison apple is part of the ride, but the part with the huntsman is glossed over.

The Casey Jr. Circus Train and Storybook Land Canal Boats are right next to each other, and go past a lot of the same stuff, largely miniature versions of places from movies.

When I first saw Monstro, I figured it must be part of the Pinocchio ride, but it's actually the beginning of the boat ride.

The Matterhorn was another one that's exclusive to Disneyland, and that was fun. The theming reminded me of the Germany section of Busch Gardens in Virginia.

I know the real Matterhorn is in Switzerland, but it's close enough for jazz. Or polka. Or theme parks. Apparently the Yeti on the ride is named Harold, and the one at Expedition Everest in Disney World is Betty. Hmm, that's my dad and Beth's mom.

Next, we rode Alice in Wonderland, and had some dinner at the Red Rose Taverne. Beth had a cheeseburger, and I had pepperoni and cheese flatbread. (Is there really a difference between that and pizza?)

After dinner, we rode Indiana Jones Adventure and Pirates of the Caribbean. I'm not sure why it was necessary to add Jack Sparrow to the ride, but I've only seen the first one of those movies. I liked the film pretty well, but there's something to be said for preserving the original layout. And Johnny Depp is rather problematic these days. Then we unsuccessfully tried to get a spot for the Main Street Electrical Parade. Fortunately, there was another one later that night.

The parade has been running on and off since 1972, and still has the relentlessly cheerful yet somehow a bit unsettling electronic music. They Might Be Giants did a cover of it, and it's so well suited to them.

I noticed that the floats included both Goofy and Dopey driving trains.

Also, there were several that had heroes and villains hanging out together. I saw Colin Ayres at the ice cream shop before the parade; he and a few other OzCon attendees were also visiting the park that day, but I didn't run into anyone else I knew. Our last stop before leaving the park was Tomorrowland, where we rode the Astro Orbiter (okay, that one was actually before the parade), Autopia, and Space Mountain.

I believe I'd first heard of Autopia in the NES game Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, which my family rented once back in the day. Space Mountain was different from the one at Disney World.


Next time, we have a California Adventure!

I suppose I should start this post with last Saturday, when I attended a Zoom event for the International Wizard of Oz Club, based on the women of Oz. There was a lot of discussion of Ozma, and it came up how she was a trans icon. The thing is, how I mostly understand gender is that it's a case of how the individual identifies, regardless of what traits or sex organs they may have. Ozma is, quite literally, a girl trapped in a boy's body, but there's no indication in The Marvelous Land of Oz that Tip sees himself as anything but a boy. He tells Glinda he'd rather stay a boy, and Glinda tells him he has to go back to being a girl because it's what she was assigned at birth. I'm not saying Ozma can't be considered trans, just that there are some differences there. As someone mentioned, though, Tip largely wants to stay a boy because he thinks girls can't have adventures, even though he's familiar with Dorothy. Maybe Glinda wants a girl on the throne of Oz not just because she doesn't approve of transformation, but as part of a grander plan. As silly and stereotypically girly as Jinjur is, she's rebelling against a patriarchal society in the Emerald City. Glinda, on the other hand, is a woman who rules a country and keeps an all-female army who are implied to be the most powerful fighting force in the land. She's basically creating a matriarchy while also restoring the old royal line. Of course, all four major countries of Oz had female rulers until recently, although two of them were tyrants. L. Frank Baum definitely seems to have been receptive to the idea that gender is largely a social construct. Chick the Cherub was never assigned a gender as they weren't raised by parents, and is what we might now call non-binary. There was some mention of the two-spirit concept in Native American culture.

I probably wouldn't have watched the Oscars at all if Beth hadn't put them on, but I did end up seeing part of the ceremony. We all know what the main takeaway ended up being, but honestly I think it was only a big deal because the whole thing is usually just so rote and pompous, so the audience welcomes anything out of the ordinary. I'm not saying it's boring, just somewhat disturbingly indulgent. My friend Becca mentioned how Chris Rock directed Good Hair, about Black women's issues with hair, so he really should have known better than to make a joke about a Black woman's hair situation. Even if he didn't know she had alopecia, appearance-based jokes like that are generally punching down. I've also seen the argument that Jada Pinkett-Smith was perfectly able to defend herself, and Will Smith slapping Rock out of some sense of defending her honor is pretty misogynistic. I don't blame him for being pissed off, but I'm sure that's hardly the first occasion of an offensive joke made in a totally casual manner. In the long run, I think calling him out would have been much more effective than hitting him. But that wouldn't have immediately become a template for a whole bunch of memes.


On Tuesday, Beth and I went to see Sparks at the Town Hall. She's been obsessed with them recently, and this was actually her third show in four days, but I only went to the one. While she's the bigger fan, I do enjoy what I know of their music. It's often funny, absurd, and nerdy; and the music tends to be upbeat with a sense of urgency. They started with "So May We Start" from the movie Annette. The brothers are interesting to watch on stage. Russell, who's always the lead singer, dances around very energetically, and he's seventy-three now. He has an impressive singing range, too. Ron, who writes most of the songs, sits at his keyboard for most of the show, looking straight ahead and somewhat aloof.

He did do his signature arm-swinging dance during "The Number One Song in Heaven," and spoken-word bits in "Shopping Mall of Love" and "Suburban Homeboy."

Beth was talking about the latter song recently, and how it's interesting that it came out around the same time as Ben Folds's "Rockin' the Suburbs," and they're both about white suburbanites pretending to be gangsta. That said, they're different kinds of suburban white pretenders, young angry boys in Ben's song and upper-class WASP-y adults in Sparks'. One of the lyrics is "We've got that old-school mentality, Oxford and Cambridge mentality." Anyway, it was a very enjoyable show. Our next musical event is a performance by the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra on Sunday, a very different sort of experience.

This weekend, we visited Beth's mom and uncle in New Jersey, then my family in Pennsylvania. We hadn't seen each other since before Christmas, so we gave them the gifts we'd gotten for them, except my sister's present hadn't come yet. For my nephew, I found a cute-looking board game and a Tyrannosaurus that eats Play-Doh and belches. Kind of gross, but little kids love that kind of thing. And my mom seemed to like the wren-shaped planter I bought at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We got an Olive Garden gift card from my sister, and my mom gave us some food. So did Beth's mom, for that matter. Someone had also found my old Garfield hand puppet, although he needs to be cleaned.

Beth recognized it as an early design, since his eyes don't overlap.


The night before that, we watched The Sparks Brothers, a documentary on the band Sparks, which Beth has recently gotten interested in. She's recently gotten music by them and by Harry Nilsson, both of whom Neko Case covered on her 2009 album. She covered Robyn Hitchcock on the one after that, and I'm a fan of his, but Beth doesn't care for him. Anyway, Sparks is a band that's been around since the early seventies, but I'm mostly unfamiliar with them, and their music seems like something I would like. Beth has noted some similarity to They Might Be Giants, especially with Ron being the more introverted, esoteric one, sort of like John Linnell. I've never known Linnell to have a Hitler mustache, though. They've also worked in a lot of styles, used synthesizers quite a bit, and their lyrics are funny without totally veering into novelty stuff. Weird Al appeared in the documentary, and his "Virus Alert" was a Sparks style parody, although I didn't know that when I first heard it. His earlier song "I Remember Larry" was done in the style of Hilly Michaels' solo work, and he drummed for Sparks in the 70s. I just haven't had the opportunity to listen to music like I used to. I've started listening to a few podcasts recently, and those are even more difficult to find the occasion to listen to, as they require more attention.

I feel like I haven't accomplished much recently, and I mean in terms of stuff I do for fun. I haven't been writing anything except blog posts, and even in terms of video games I've mostly been playing ongoing ones (Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Sims 4), so there's no real progress. I did make it to Shangri-Spa in Paper Mario: The Origami King, and having Kamek as an ally is pretty cool.

On a whim, I started making notes on Ozian family trees, basing them on whatever references I could find, including some pretty obscure ones. Joe Bongiorno's Lost Histories from the Royal Librarian of Oz gives family relations for some of the early rulers in Oz, both ones from the books and newly invented ones. I actually read something the other day about how it's common for fantasy writers to do too much worldbuilding as opposed to actual stories, and I'm not even inventing my own fantasy world.

I think I've already mentioned that my work has gone back to being fully in the office, and there's no indication that they'll bring back remote work despite the increase in COVID cases. I'm probably not as worried about that as I should be, but I do think that, practically, the government in general has stopped even pretending to care about health issues. Dr. Fauci even admitted that the CDC reduced necessary quarantine time because it was hurting business, even though you can't have business if everyone is sick. The only real concession is that we still have to wear masks, which is a good idea if we're required to go to public buildings, but wouldn't it be easier if it weren't necessary to do that so often? Wearing a mask in public was a lot less of a hassle when it was only for an hour or so per week. But when I say that, I still went grocery shopping back when there was a stay-at-home order (really more of a stay-at-home suggestion), and the employees there still had to go in to work and wear masks. No one really seems to be enforcing social distancing anymore, and that probably should be a thing even when there's no pandemic. That said, I never much liked the term; it comes across to me (and probably nobody else) as kind of pretentious. I've seen some people online insist that Biden isn't doing any better than Trump was at fighting Coronavirus; apparently these people forget that the last president insisted it was a hoax and/or a Chinese plot. But it is true that Biden is part of the same system that works to maintain the status quo. While Democrats are better than Republicans in this respect, it still doesn't seem to be a major priority for them; it's more "Let's get things back to normal" than "Let's make sure we're better equipped to handle such things in the future." The news I see suggests the government is more worried about inflation and supply chain issues, even though those things have to be exacerbated, if not outright caused, by much of the workforce getting sick and/or dying. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the anti-science crowd that tries to insist masks and vaccines don't work, but there need to be societal solutions as well as individual ones. It's like, there are definitely reasons to be suspicious of authority, but telling people to take basic safety precautions are not among them. Putting business over health is such a reason, but as far as I can tell, nobody is even trying to hide that.

I guess I should write about some of the holiday-related things we've done recently, since there have been several. We have our Christmas tree set up and decorated, although we weren't able to figure out how to get the star on top.

Wally likes to sit underneath it, and usually doesn't mess with it, although he did knock a few ornaments off at one point, and at another time I caught him and Reagan fighting under it. Don't they know about peace on Earth?


Last Sunday, Beth and I went with Tavie and Ade to see John Waters at City Winery, which is now way out on the docks in the Hudson River. He did a lot of the same bits as at shows in previous years, but also some new stuff, including some material related to the pandemic. I had a flatbread pizza while there, with pepperoni, sweet sausage, and hot honey. Then, on Wednesday and Thursday, we went to two different garden events, Lightscape at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and GLOW and the train show at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. The former was along a well-marked, linear path, which was convenient. Tavie, Sean, and her aunt went with us on that one.

Despite the capital letters, I didn't see any gorgeous ladies wrestling at the other garden. No average-looking ladies wrestling either, for that matter. I believe this was the first time the BBG did an event like this, and the second for the NYBG. The latter was a little more confusing because there were a few different routes, but still not all that many of them.

It had tunnels you could walk through, and an ice scupltor who was making a reindeer when we saw him.

The train show has been going on for longer, and it features model trains running around buildings, many of them models of actual historical buildings. According to the introductory film, they were made out of natural materials.

Neither garden really had a lot related to specific holidays, aside from a few Christmas trees. I bought a gingerbread man (well, I guess I don't know for sure it's a man) at the second one, and...it was all right, but not as good as I remembered them being. Not sure if that's due to a change in my taste or just the recipe they used.


On Saturday, we went to a party at Ade's house in Montclair, and then returned to Brooklyn for a holiday concert by the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra at St. Ann's Church.

This was part of the same series as the one we saw for Halloween. Works in the set included "Joy to the World," "White Christmas," God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," "Silent Night," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah, and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," as well as a few medleys. And today, we went to Sheepshead Bay to see a film version of The Nutcracker performed by the Bolshoi Ballet.

It was choreographed by Yuri Grigorovich, with Margarita Shrainer as Marie and Semyon Chudin as the Nutcracker Prince. Marius Petipa was credited with ideas for the Grigorovich version, and I understand his family name is French for "iron foot," kind of weird for a ballet dancer. It makes me think of Pittypat the Rabbit from L. Frank Baum's John Dough and the Cherub.

I saw the Nutcracker Ballet at a college years ago, and Beth and I recently watched the 1993 film with Macaulay Culkin, which had George Ballanchine's choreography. I'm not really that knowledgeable  about dance as an art form, but I did notice this gave a more significant role to Marie and the Prince, who were sidelined in the second act in other performances. After the movie, we ate at the Roll N Roaster. Beth had a roast beef sandwich, and I had some fried shrimp. They have a special deal where, if you spend forty dollars, they give you a small pizza for free. The pizza only costs five dollars on its own, but we were trying to add items until we were able to get a free one. Beth compared it to The Price Is Right. It's the sort of pizza that's essentially a cracker with cheese and sauce, but for what it cost, I can't complain.

We don't have any other official events planned before Christmas, although we do plan to look at lights in the area sometime this week. You may recall that we saw the Radio City Christmas Spectacular before Thanksgiving, and I guess it's good we went then, because they've since canceled the remaining shows due to increases in COVID cases. I'm tempted to blame it on people who refuse to get vaccinated, but I haven't actually researched it, and don't plan to. I really prefer not to think about the pandemic when possible, which I realize is kind of a luxury. That's not to say that I don't take basic precautions, which you pretty much have to do in New York. It's always weird when I go to other places and there's way more lax about such things. The movie theater today required masks in the lobby, but not in the theater, as long as there wasn't a big crowd. I'll occasionally come across discussions about whether entertainment should address the pandemic, and I saw an interview with a Simpsons writer that said the show didn't even try to mention it. The thing is, I think dealing with tragedy through entertainment can be very effective. A lot of funny media came out of the Cold War, for instance. I guess I just have trouble finding anything humorous or even all that interesting about sickness; it's a slow, dreary, tedious sort of tragedy instead of an exciting one. But hey, it's all subjective.

We didn't do anything Halloween-related this past weekend aside from watching a movie, but we did see two Monkees shows, part of their Farewell Tour, in Atlantic City on Saturday and Manhattan on Sunday. They were largely the same, except the first show was quite a bit shorter. Casino shows are usually shorter, probably in hopes that people will gamble afterwards, even though I don't think they're any cheaper. Casinos are always pretty difficult to navigate, which makes me a little uncomfortable. Is it easier to find the exit if you can assure them you don't have any money? Beth's mom and cousin Marji went to the first one with us, but it was just Beth and me in our party for the second. Both shows had signs saying photography wasn't allowed, but neither of them really looked like they were enforcing that. Still, I mostly avoided taking pictures, aside from two blurry ones in Manhattan. The casino said they would be checking vaccination cards, but they didn't, and didn't require masks either. Mike Nesmith just sang and didn't play guitar (or anything else), while Micky Dolenz just played some simple percussion in addition to singing. At the second show, after intermission, Micky sang "Porpoise Song" and Mike "While I Cry," each without the other. While it was largely just one song after another, along with a few pretty standard bits of banter, they did discuss a few of them a bit. Mike talked about how someone who worked on the TV show wrote "The Door Into Summer" based on a Robert Heinlein story, which none of the Monkees had read (at least at the time). He also explained that "Tapioca Tundra" was one he started writing after a show in Hawaii, based on how it didn't really feel like it was him on stage, and how creative work ends up belonging more to the audience than the creator. That's a pretty surreal song, so I found even that bit of insight into the meaning interesting.