Month: July 2018

Lydster: Hammering aluminum foil balls shiny?

It explains the how of the phenomenon, if not the why.

This spring, the Daughter was in the kitchen, took some aluminum foil, crumpled it up into a ball, and started hammering it until it became shiny.

For some of you “with it” folks, you would have understood what she was doing. My wife and I, on the other hand, were totally puzzled. Now the Daughter EXPECTED her mother NOT to know about what trendy things that going on in the world.

She was surprised and disappointed, though, that her father had no idea why she was pounding a foil ball. Because I was busy/tired, I didn’t even try to find out for well over a month.

One day while I was watching one of those four-minute vlogbrothers videos, there was, on the sidebar, a 2015 TEDx Indianapolis video Paper towns and why learning is awesome by vlogbrother/author John Green.

“Some of us learn best in the classroom and some of us … well, we don’t. But we still love to learn, to find out new things about the world and challenge our minds. We just need to find the right place to do it, and the right community to learn with.”

Somehow, it finally occurred to me that I could – [shock] – search “aluminum ball polishing” on YouTube. There are 17,300 videos, some with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of hits.

Mirror-Polished Japanese Foil Ball Challenge Crushed in a Hydraulic Press-What’s Inside? has over 18 million views. The article People in Japan Are Polishing Ordinary Aluminum Foil Balls Into Shiny Orbs explains the how of the phenomenon, if not the why. Still, I have learned something else new from my daughter. I’m not sure of its applicability.

Except that there’s something to be said for web searching. I don’t do it much without a specific purpose. Also, now that I DO know why the Daughter was hammering aluminum, I’m tentatively back in her good graces on the “cool dad” meter. It could change tomorrow, though, and it probably will.

Movie review: Sorry To Bother You

Steve Bissette described Sorry To Bother You as a “brilliant, ramshackle dystopian sf-comedy”

Sorry to bother youI’ve been trying, and failing, to figure out how to describe Sorry To Bother You, written and directed by Boots Riley in his feature film debut. When I was telling a colleague about it, I made the the sign and sound of my head exploding.

In a hyperbolic version of Oakland, CA, black telemarketer Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is working the phones. He and his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), a performance artist, are living in the garage of his uncle Sergio (Terry Crews), who is in serious arrears on the mortgage.

Thanks to advice from co-worker Langston (Danny Glover), Cash discovers the key to professional success and enters the secret world of “powercalling” that means big bucks. But where will he stand when his friends and co-workers such as Salvador (Jermaine Fowler), Squeeze (Steven Yeun), and Cassius’ girlfriend Detroit organize in protest of corporate oppression?

Sorry To Bother You also stars Armie Hammer and Omari Hardwick as guys behind that golden elevator, and Rosario Dawson, Patton Oswalt and David Cross, whom you only hear.

My friend Steve Bissette, who thought it was one of the best films of the year, described it as a “brilliant, ramshackle dystopian sf-comedy” that is “inventive, raucous, antic, and candidly bleak.” It was at times LOL funny. Yet it also felt like only a somewhat exaggerated state of the downside of American capitalism.

Critic Michael Phillips calls it “a provocative, serious, ridiculous, screwy concoction about whiteface, cultural code-switching, African-American identities and twisted new forms of wage slavery, beyond previously known ethical limits.” A couple other critics mentioned Mel Brooks, and I can relate to that sensibility here as well.

Ultimately, there is no way to explain this film further without massive spoilers. Sorry To Bother You is rated R for “pervasive language, some strong sexual content, graphic nudity, and drug use,” most of which made sense in the arc of story line. I liked it a great deal.

A bit of trivia: “The movie was filmed in Oakland, California during the summer of 2017 concurrently with Blindspotting (2018).”

C is for color, or the lack thereof

I got interested in the issue of skin color – well, always.

I’m finding this a little weird. Because of my skin color, some of the Daughter’s friends don’t believe I am black, or African-American if you prefer (I don’t), so they don’t think she’s part black.

Her first set of friends are first- or second-generation sub-Saharan Africans, so I sort of get that. But I’ve been getting the same message from her American black and even American white buddies.

In fact, we were all at a play at her school this spring, the fourth iteration of Lion King I’ve ever seen. My wife and I were sitting a dozen rows behind the Daughter and her friends. At the intermission, she and one of her friends came back to where I was seated. She specifically pointed to my hand, pointing out the variated skin tone. “See, he’s darker there. He just has this skin condition.”

As I’ve noted before, the condition is called vitiligo. Incidentally, Chuck linked to Why you don’t say what you shouldn’t say to people who look “different”, including those with vitiligo far more severe than mine. Also see vitiligo queen and Artist Creates Dolls With Vitiligo.

When I was diagnosed with it, I was extremely cautious about going outside, so paranoid about developing skin cancer. I was much paler than I am now. In fact, there were black and white pictures of me from 2010-2015 and I do not recognize myself.

My forehead is somewhat darker, but, as you may be able to see, the top of my head is still lighter, and thus much more vulnerable to sunburn or worse.

I got interested in the issue of skin color – well, always. My mom was very fair, my father much darker, and her family was not pleased when they were courting, I’ve been told. Colorism does exist in many cultures.

And when Roseanne Barr made an offensive tweet about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, Barr’s defense was that she didn’t know Jarrett was black. Her racial identification was well-reported, but also obvious to my eye.

Of course, race in America has been complicated in what is now the United States only for about four centuries. This is interesting to me: They considered themselves white, but DNA tests told a more complex story.

For ABC Wednesday

Sister Leslie is home, having a birthday

Leslie’s tribe of friends had wanted the feeding tube gone much earlier.

Sister LeslieI had this post about my sister Leslie converting to Roman Catholicism this year pretty well constructed in my mind. It’d have been how it was surprising it was – she did it as a secret from virtually everyone – but how it was fine by me.

Then she had this serious bicycle accident on June 4. To recap, she had been on vacation the previous month in Europe seeing her daughter Rebecca Jade sing on a cruise, but also spending a few days in Copenhagen, Denmark on her own.

She went back to San Diego and decided to start riding her bicycle partway to work. Since she is a safety official, she thought she ought to wear a helmet, so she bought one on June 1; wearing it almost certainly saved her life.

While I was in San Diego July 9-14, her friend Cathy managed to recover Leslie’s stuff that had been in storage at the first hospital she went to, Scripps Mercy. The distinct smell of dried blood remained on the helmet even days after being aired out. She’s keeping it, certainly not to wear again but possibly as a prop, along with her mangled bike, about the importance of bicycle safety.

Sister Leslie was semi-liberated from the SECOND hospital, Kaiser Permanente, on July 4, but she had a hospital bed in her bedroom at home because she still had a feeding tube attached. She was getting 1500 calories via it every night, but we – Leslie, her wonderful friend Leilani, the nutritionist, and i – agreed to start cutting back incrementally.

My primary task while I was out there was to get her from the bed, where she was not comfortable enough to sleep through the night, to a reclining chair. I became moderately competent at detaching and reattaching the “food” line when she needed to walk around.

I went to a couple of her doctors’ visits, notably to a heck and neck guy who removed the eight screws that had aligned her teeth to her jaw but were no longer necessary. Remember the worst pain you ever had at the dentist? Double that and add another 30%. That’s what the removal of the metal appeared to feel like, despite six shots of Novocaine, and I was in the room when it happened.

The good news is that, absent the metallic taste and feel in her mouth, she was more inclined to eat on her own. Then the feeding tube was removed on June 20. Leslie’s tribe of friends had wanted it gone much earlier, and I understood their feelings. I said, and she agreed, that it made her LOOK sick.

A couple of her friends asked me if her cognitive ability had been hampered. She took a test, and not only did she ace it, she explained the flaws in the testing instrument: “If Jill is taking off from her stockbroker job to raise the kids, what money are they living on?”

One of the words she’s had trouble remembering was “morphine,” which she was on during her first two weeks in hospital. It was probably just as well, as she had four broken ribs, but it really disoriented her. Except for that period, she was unfailing polite to everyone.

Given how she appeared in photos a month and a half ago, I note that she looks pretty darn good, i.e., more like herself. She has this little Harry Potter scar, and another hidden by her glasses.

The primary concern now is her left, dominant hand, which is still wrapped. Her friends need to exercise her fingers, lest they atrophy. She also likes lotion, especially between the fingers.

I’ve known sister Leslie longer than any living person and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to help her a little, even though I never did figure out all that long-term disability paperwork.

Movie review: Hearts Beat Loud

Will “We Are Not A Band,” Sam’s declaration, become, well, a band?

Hearts Beat LoudWhen the family went to see Hearts Beat Loud at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, I felt that the relationship between Frank, a widowed Brooklyn father (Nick Offerman) and his daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons) felt real, genuine. The departed mother figure is not forgotten even as they both negotiate changes in their lives.

Sam is getting ready to study pre-med on the opposite coast. Frank decides that’s just the right time for them to start a band, even as he gets ready to close his record store. The girl IS a talented singer-songwriter, and they’d jammed in the past, but that was strictly recreational.

Moreover, though Sam has started a new romance, this does not alter her plans to move away and find her own way. Frank secretly tries to keep the musical dream alive. Will “We Are Not A Band,” Sam’s declaration, become, well, a band? The film is a bit sentimental without being schmaltzy.

The director and co-writer is Brett Haley, whose worst reviewed film, the Hero (2017) was still 78% positive. I couldn’t help but wondering why Hearts Beat Loud reviewed far worse with audiences (72% positive) than with critics (90% positive). I have a theory, but it’s a bit of a spoiler.

I also resonated with the cause of of death of the mother which resonated in my life far more than it might have a couple months earlier.

The movie also stars Ted Danson as a bartender who is nothing like Sam Malone on the TV show Cheers; Toni Collette as the landlord at Frank’s store, and maybe more; Sasha Lane; and Blythe Danner as Frank’s mom. Danner also starred in Haley’s I’ll See You in My Dreams (2015), which I saw at the Spectrum, naturally, and mostly liked.

The Rogerebert.com page calls Hearts Beat Loud “warm and intimate.” I’ll accept that assessment.

Ramblin' with Roger
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