Me and Gru

 

A strange thing happened to me last night. I wound up watching the computer-animated kids movie Minions: The Rise of Gru, all by myself, alone, in a 500-seat movie theater blasting the film at 120 decibels.

How did I get here, I wondered, stretching out and reclining in my seat.

Well, a little backstory.

My daughters are separated by four years, born in 2004 and 2008. The oldest, known as Little One in these pages, graduated from high school in May and is now about six weeks in to her college education. She lives on a campus about a 40 minute drive from my home. Far enough but not too far. She’s been home three times, but we expect the times we see her to shrink in frequency as she makes new friends at her school and stays more and more weekends there.

All fine and good. We encourage her social development as well as her intellectual, physical, and spiritual. It does, however, have a negative impact. Her younger sister, just starting to navigate the hell that is high school as a lowly freshman, misses her terribly and facetimes her just about every night.

Now, Patch, as my youngest is known here, keeps herself busy. She has a couple of challenging AP classes. She also works two part time jobs: She referees U10 soccer games (boys and girls) on Saturdays, generally 11:30-3, and she is becoming a more and more in-demand baby sitter. I think she’s pulled down something like $400 since the end of summer doing these things.

So she’s busy, but she’s lonely. She does make friends easily, but finds so many of her classmates flakey. There’s a girl a few blocks away that she hangs with, maybe every other weekend, and they go thrifting, go to the mall, things like that. But she misses the constant constant of her life, her big sister.

I have been consciously trying to bridge this gap in her life. I’m her study buddy for algebra and biology. We plan on walking together evenings when the thermometer dips below 80. We started a new tradition: Thursday night movies, her choice. And what she chose to begin with is the animated series Despicable Me and its sequels, as kind of a comforting bit of nostalgia from her younger years.

Which I found I enjoy. I’m a big Steve Carrell fan, and I like the whole Bond supervillain aspect of the films. We both chuckle at the minions. I bought her a stuffed “Bob the Minion” for her birthday two weeks ago. We sat in the upstairs apartment of our home watching Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, Despicable Me 3, and our favorite, Minions. Last week we settled back and prepared to watch the final installment to date, Minions: The Rise of Gru.

To our horror it was not available to rent! On all these damn apps I have on my TV – Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Hulu, you name it, none streamed this film for rent. Sure, being a 2022 release, you could buy it for $20. But I don’t like buying these streaming movies, because unless you have a physical item in your hand, you don’t really own it. So we exclusively rent the flicks we watch.

Patch was heartbroken. Instead we decided to start on the next sequence of films, her Halloween animated series selections, and we watched Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride. But the unfinished minion business sat heavy on her heart.

The Mrs., not ever wanting anything to sit heavy on her daughter’s heart, did some research, and she located a theater twelve miles away that was still showing the film. She immediately bought tickets for Patch and me for our next Thursday night movie night, which was yesterday.

So she was excited all day. I was working at home, all caught up as the month ended, and she was studying all day for Friday tests. I made us some scrambled eggs for dinner and then we headed off. Found the theater with plenty of time to spare. These theaters today! There was a bar in the lobby, and in the theater itself the big fat chairs reclined, a big red button on each you could press for food service.

Anyway, since Minions: The Rise of Gru was released nearly three months ago, July 1, we didn’t expect a packed theater. However, once we walked in and went to our center seats, we realized that we were absolutely alone! I did a quick calculation – 25 rows with 20 seats in a row – and realized that we had a 500-seat theater to ourselves. So exclusive! Never had this happen to me before, and I’ve been to at least a hundred movies in my life. We kicked back, made bad loud jokes, booed most of the trailers, and then settled in to the main event.

Halfway through, Patch had to use the rest rooms. So she took off, leaving me there in the cavernous darkness, assaulted by the A.D.D.-tinged visuals and booming sound effects. To be honest, she left during the funniest part of the film. I was laughing out loud.

I realized what a crazy, strange world I live in. I would never, ever, ever have told you a few weeks ago that I’d be by myself (even if for only ten minutes), alone in a movie theater, riveted to a movie screen and giggling with childlike innocence.

Such is the state of my existence halfway through my sixth decade of life.

 

Book Review: The Ghost from the Grand Banks

 

© 1990 by Arthur C. Clarke

 

MAJOR SPOILERS!

 

I have mixed feelings towards Arthur C. Clarke. As a third-grader, I fondly remember buying 2001: A Space Odyssey from the Bookmobile for a few dollars and being absolutely in love with it. I vividly recall the first time I watched the Kubrick version, late at night by myself one summer night early sometime in high school. But since then, it’s been a mixed bag. Liked some short stories, dislike others. Didn’t like Childhood’s End, but kinda liked Fountains of Paradise. And still have a love-hate relationship with his Rama books.

So why the ambivalence?

Bottom line, for me at least, is his characters. They all have nondescript names, nondescript personalities, and nonexistent story arcs. I could not name a single character from the Rama books. I know of 2001’s Astronauts Poole and Bowman, but that’s from the movie. And of Childhood’s End, the only characters I remember are the demonesque aliens, and though I don’t recall their names, I know that they were at least interesting to a logophile like myself.

I will grant that he sprinkles his books with excellent ideas. That’s the main reason I’ll read them. In the case of The Ghost of the Grand Banks, the technology proposed deals with raising the Titanic from the ocean floor in the far-flung future of 2012. Now, the Titanic sits at the bottom of the North Atlantic in two halves (in an area called, obviously enough, the Grand Banks), as we all saw in the Cameron movie. One group of scientist entrepreneurs in the novel wants to raise their half by injecting billions and billions of water-resistant microspheres into the ship and lifting it with the additional aid of thirty 10,000-ton strength cables. Hmm. Interesting

Even more interesting is the idea of a second group of characters to raise their half: using the latest in electromagnetic superconducting cooling technology, they’ll bring the near-freezing water around the Titanic to just below freezing, cold enough to where a massive block of ice will form around the hull at the bottom of the sea. Ice cubes in a glass of water rise to the surface. So, as is stated in the novel, an iceberg sunk the Titanic, and another will lift her. Definitely intriguing.

But Clarke doesn’t really explore the technology. You don’t see it developed, or being installed around the sunken vessel. You don’t sweat out bugs and problems. There’s no tension, no uncertainty, no insight. It’s like I read an article about it in Scientific American (that is, before the magazine tanked into utter and insipid wokeness).

So what do we get?

Well, and here’s the big spoiler: The Titanic doesn’t get raised. The deus ex machina of all seafaring science fiction movies and books, the superstorm, comes into play. Only it’s not a hurricane but an underwater earthquake that causes a landslide buries the Titanic forever, hours before she is to leave her ocean floor grave.

Blech.

It is, however, redeemed in the epilogue: a couple million years in the future, long after man has left the solar system, as the rings of Saturn dim and Mercury is an over-mined shell of itself, an alien probe floats in and orbits Earth. Soon into its study of this third planet, it scans a mass of strange metal, a metallic alloy not normally found in nature, buried deep inside a mountain, and it decides further investigation is needed. Care to venture what that metal in the mountain is?

The epilogue increased my grade of The Ghost of the Grand Banks from a C to a B-minus.

Other Good:

- References to Project Jennifer in the opening pages.

- References to Raise the Titanic! by Clive Cussler, one of the earliest non-children’s book I read as a kid.

- A very brief primer on the mathematical oddity known as the Mandelbrot Set.

Other Bad:

- Tired cliché of the brilliant female mathematician.

- Really tired cliché of the brilliant mathematician daughter of the brilliant female mathematician.

- The actual Titanic was only the subject of 20 or 30 pages; the rest of the novel circled around five or six one-dimensional characters.

- Two main characters die with zero emotional impact

- Censoring old films by digitally editing out any references to cigarette smoking seen as an unequivocal good.

And we’re teased that the Mandelbrot Set will play a pivotal role in the book! It doesn’t (save for a minor, peripheral, weird way), but do yourself a favor and go to Youtube and watch a video on it. I did, and I think I’m not too obsessed. Really. Not obsessed at all.

Patch gets an A for effort picking this out for me. While the review sounds a tad too overtly negative, it was a page turner and I did finish it in a couple of days without putting it down. I just think of it as a wasted opportunity. What magnum opus could someone produce, someone like, say, Neal Stephenson, with Clarke’s notes for this book!

YMMV.

A Proustian Exercise

 

As a young man I struggled once to claim my earliest memories, and after more than a little bit of thought, I arrived at two. Interestingly, they do not involve people. They are primarily visual and interior. And they happened a long, long time ago. By my reckoning the Beatles had just broken up. Nixon was still unfamiliar with the word, “Watergate.” We were at Half Time of the Vietnam War. The AFL had just merged with the NFL.

In the first memory, which I think is the oldest, I am lying in a crib looking up at the night sky and I see a bright shooting star flashing overhead. Long, slow, with sparkling contrails. That’s my initial feeling, but it is plausible I am a toddler on the balcony of the apartment my parents rented and I could have been watching fireworks.

In the second, I am leaning against the bottom part of a wooden fence, the kind made by laying horizontal beams into slots in the horizontal posts, and before me is a massive field of wheat grain, blowing gently yet very sublimely in the wind. It’s a gray day and this field seems to stretch onwards forever, the ground undulating as it fades into the distance. I recall myself fascinated with this scene. But it could have only been three- or four-year-old me at the fence enclosing our small, weed-infested backyard at same apartment complex.

I dunno.

Anyway, there is a famous French writer name of Marcel Proust. Famous in literary circles, that is. He is primarily known for writing a multi-volume “biography” entitled In Search of Lost Time, in some translations. The style of these books was very unique up to that point: extremely centered on self, on his feelings and impressions, very, very focused on minutiae in a grasping attempt to get at something beyond normal, everyday experience. Something kind of like all of us being sleepers sleeping through life, and such a Proustian examination is meant to create a change in our consciousness of experience.

Or something like that. I’m far from being an expert on Proust. More of a novice’s novice.

I do know he spends inordinate amounts of time and pages on simple, singular experiences. Ten or twelve pages on how he sleeps opens the first volume. Then, later on, he devotes another eight or ten on trying to get a kiss from his mother as a young boy before bed. A hyperslow approach to reality that is at complete odds with current, contemporary, twenty-first century life. (And that appeals oh so much to me.)

Anyway, I thought it would be an interesting idea to try to apply such a Proustian approach to these two early memories. Really, really delve into them: what was I seeing, thinking, feeling? Why sight, but no sound? What were the pinpoint details that have eluded me this past half century? What is the meaning behind – and beyond – these memories? Why them? What was the feel of the wood of that fence? What was the temperature of the air? Why did I believe I was lying in a crib? Was that firework – or meteor – so bright and so yellow and so close to me I felt that I could reach up and touch it? And by all this, come to excavate what they have done to me and for me, stretching out an echoing across the decades, me as an adult?

I’m thinking this would be a good warm-up to my Grand Project. I beginning outlines after compiling pages and pages of notes and plan on starting writing January 1st (to follow a similar pattern to the first book I wrote). If anything good comes from it, who knows? I might publish an excerpt from it here at the Hopper.

Birthday Haul 2022

 

I’m really a simple man. For years, whenever someone asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I had a stock reply: “A book or a CD or a DVD.” And it was true, and it was valid for many, many birthdays. However, from what I understand, technology has moved on. There are these things nowadays called streaming and iTunes, so two-thirds of my stock reply is obsolete.

No matter, no mind. I’m a traditionalist. And my girls understand that and cater to it. I am a wealthy man because of it.

That being said, I had a decent haul this birthday. Hopper, get to it! I know you’re asking. Okay, I will. Here goes:

First, I got some cash, with instructions. One was to “buy myself a chicken parm hero.” No hesitation there. And the other was to pick myself up a work of classic lit. More on that later.

The Mrs. gave me a gift card to my favorite store of all, Half Price Books. Knowing my frugality and the price ranges of the types of books I like, I can probably score anywhere from three to eight items. Since I have about ten books in the immediate On Deck Circle, I’m going to table this gift card until November. Who knows what literary fields Hopper will be roaming then?

Little One bought me two CDs – “for your car.” Yes, I understand new cars no longer have CD players; everything is through yer phone, even when driving in the car. But I drive a 2015 Accord, perhaps one of the last models with such an audio device. For the longest time I kept a CD of Beethoven’s symphonies 5-8 in the car “in Case of Emergency,” but I haven’t listened to it in ages. Now I can replace it with Little One’s gifts: Live Rust by Neil Young and The Who’s Greatest Hits. Was a big fan of Neil’s before he became obnoxiously political, and even saw him perform live from the front row ten or fifteen feet away. And I’ve been an on-again, off-again fan of The Who since high school.

Patch, a confirmed lover of gift-giving like her mom, outdid herself this year. First, she promised to supply me with two protein smoothies to take to work this week. A great, tasty way to start the day at the office! Then, she promised that she would “give the Hobbit a go.” Wow! After begging my progeny every two or three months for the past six or seven years to read Tolkien, could she final rise to the challenge? We’ll see.

She also bought me a pair of socks. Socks that say “Book Nerd.” Thank You, Patch. But more importantly, she found a book for me to read. She’s been fascinated with the Titanic for a long time, and over the summer I found a magazine devoted entirely to the doomed ship and bought it for her while she was away on vacation, leaving it as a pleasant surprise on her desk. Well, she found a 1990 paperback written by Arthur C. Clark entitled Ghosts from the Grand Banks. Its main plotline deals with … raising the Titanic, using high-tech tech stuff. I immediately bumped it to the front of the On Deck Circle, and as of today I’m about 60 pages in.

As for that suggestion earlier to buy some classic literature, I decided to venture into the Bucket List, and after much consideration, landed on Lincoln: The War Years, by Carl Sandberg. I’ve been wanting to read this for at least a decade, but no library I knew carried it, and it was too pricey for me to splurge on it. That is, before birthday money.

And that’s it. That’s all I want, and all I need, for a birthday. My immediately family, a nice home-cooked dinner, some cheesecake, and some reading material.

Thank you all, guys! It was a wonderful day!

 

Birthday Weekend 2022

 

Well, I am pleasantly exhausted. Another Hopper birthday has come and gone.

For the past fourteen years, however, my birthday has been eclipsed by Patch’s. Hers is the day before mine, and traditionally (and at my request) the focus of the dual birthday celebrations have always been on her. This year’s was no exception.

Patch’s birthday fell on Friday. Sadly, she had to attend school. But happily, the Mrs. was able to pick up her older sister at college and bring her home for the weekend. So we had a full nuclear family in attendance for the festivities.

Me, I worked some extra hours so I could get out early on Friday. While the wife was gathering up the no-so-little little ones, I clocked out of work, tidied up the house, ran a few quick errands, picked up a last minute gift, got home and showered. As a family we drove down to Dallas for dinner – Patch wanted a ramen noodle place, and that’s where the best ramen noodle place happens to be located. We ate a delicious meal in an authentic Asian restaurant (the bar had the TV flatscreens glued to the NASA channel). I did my admirable best against a menu of which I had no idea what to expect, it being basically anglicized Chinese. But whatever I wound up having, it was fantastic. As was everyone else’s.

We motored back home for Patch to open her gifts. Everything seemed to be a hit, and it was mostly makeup and skin care, some shoes, some Hello Kitty paraphernalia. I got her a Bob the Minion stuffed doll, because she and I’ve been bonding over the Minion movies on Thursday nights, a favorite animated series from her youth. We broke out cake pops for dessert and then watched one of her favorite shows together as a family.

Saturday was my birthday. I started it off with the mowing of the lawn. Not a tradition, and not something I was honestly looking forward to, but the two-week mow cycle fell on my birthday and, well, I’m an admitted slave to routine. Besides, Patch was refereeing some morning soccer games and Little One, the collegian, was sleeping until 11. “Dad,” she said, and she might have been serious, “try to mow as quietly as possible.”

At noon we picked up our stolen-and-retrieved Honda CRV! Seems okay, with no real damage to the body or the engine. Then we returned the rental car, and then the ladies were off for some “thrifting” (i.e., last minute gift shopping for me) while I was free for the afternoon. I picked up some lunch and had a quick Facetime chat with a buddy from New Jersey, then headed home to my temporary Fortress of Solitude.

Over the past four years I’ve been granted the birthday wish of watching a science fiction movie distraction-free on my birthday. It started with The Day the Earth Stood Still, and was followed by Dune, Forbidden Planet, and, last year, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This year I felt something different was in order, and I selected a World War II flick, the three-hour ordeal known as The Longest Day. I had watched snippets as a kid and tried to get through it maybe fifteen years ago, but only made it a third of the way in. This time, over a sumptuous meal of buffalo wings, I watched it in its entirety and enjoyed it, genuinely touched at a few scenes.

Little One and her mom made me a perfect, juicy steak with asparagus and mashed potatoes later for dinner, then I opened my presents. They truly outdid themselves! I’ll discuss my birthday haul tomorrow. Afterwards, we had some cheesecake (well, I did, the girls not being fans of any cuisine that combines the word “cheese” with “cake”), and watched some more TV as a family. One thing we’ve been into off-and-on over the past two years is Dateline with Keith Morrison. These true-crime shows appeal to my oldest, Little One, as does that incredibly lined face of its white-haired host. The ladies all went to bed and I worked my way through a George R. R. Martin longish short story in my reading chair under the lamp for an hour or so.

Started Sunday off with a nice long walk to burn off those chicken wings, steak, asparagus, mashed potatoes, and cheesecake. We all went to Church, then Patch had her mom drive her and her friends out to the mall while I drove Little One back to college. After her laundry was finished, of course.

All in all, a great Birthday Weekend!

Grade: A+

Words of Wisdom

  

Don’t think I posted this here before; I was going through some notes, miscellanea, and saved stuff in an old folder and found these words of wisdom. Whose lips they originated from I know not, but these pearls deserve to be blown to the wind, cast wide and far to the ends of the earth. Indeed, they probably have, since the aged ol’ gadfly gadded about those craggy, olive-treed ravines fifty decades before the Savior.

 

The Law of Individuality:

 

“Always remember you are unique. Just like everyone else.”

 

The Law of Concern for Fellow Man:

 

“Make it idiot proof and someone will build a better idiot.”

 

And the Law of Averages, applied to Mankind:

 

“The average man is just a little bit below average.”

 

That is all. Now I need to clock in eight hours of work, then it’s the Hopper family weekend of birthday bashes! Scores to follow on Monday!

 

Bee Nerds

 

I’m pleasantly meandering my way through a science fiction anthology I picked up from the local library, The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF, and each tale wows me in some little way. True, most have a doomsday vibe, but others often have little nuggets of weird awesomeness that blow me away and give me interesting bits of ephemera to tease out.

Like this one, from “The Bees of Knowledge,” written by Barrington J. Bayley, an SF author whom I have never read:

 

… the Bees are much interested in mathematics, but theirs is of a type that not even he would be able to understand (any more than I could, except intuitively when I was in the grip of the trance). What would he have made, with his obsession with numbers, of the Bees’ theorem that there is a highest positive integer! To human mathematicians this would make no sense. The Bees accomplish it by arranging all numbers radially on six spokes, centered about the number One. They then place on the spokes of this great wheel certain number series which are claimed to contain the essence of numbers and which go spiraling through it, diverging and converging in a winding dance. All these series meet at last in a single immense number. This, according to the theorem, is the opposite pole of the system of positive integers, of which One is the other pole, and is referred to as Hyper-One. This is the end of numbers as we know them. Hyper-One then serves as One for a number system of a higher order.

 

Hyper-One! I love that. This will be forever filed away in my memory as the Theorem of Hyper-One.

“The Bees of Knowledge” is a gentle, weird tale with more than a bit of existential horror tucked in. The “he” mentioned at the beginning of the above excerpt is a man-sized Fly who understands mathematical processes at least up to exponentiation.

And the Bees are ten-foot sized insects that inhabit the planet Handrea, upon which our narrator crash lands, the sole survivor in a malfunctioning life pod from an interstellar passenger ship which unexpectedly explodes. He’s seized and taken by these curious Bees to their hive, which must be something of the size of the Great Pyramid hunched atop Grand Central Station, and spends the rest of his life there. Where does he stand? What he can do to survive, and how can he communicate to these oddly intelligent Bees? We wind up very metaphysical and surreal by story’s end.

Like I stated earlier, I have never read Bayley before (nor had I heard of him). But a quick web search reveals a body of work consisting of at least 16 novels and 87 short stories stretching over a half century (1954 to 2008). His name goes on the Acquisitions List and I will definitely pick up more of his writings should I come across them in my used book store travels.

Hyper-One!

Four Days in November

  

Ever since me and my buddies hopped in a car to motor off to the movie theaters three decades ago I’ve had an on-again, off-again fascination with the JFK assassination. Or maybe that movie we motored off to see was Oliver Stone’s The Doors and not Oliver Stone’s JFK. In any event, I did see the Stone movie in theaters, and that was the first time I really encountered all the conspiracy conculabula clouding the demise of our 35th president.

I was hooked.

I have since, however, been convinced to a viewpoint about 175 degrees contrary to Mr. Stone’s.

Still, I revisit the assassination every couple of years.

Since moving to Texas fourteen months ago, to a town a half-hour north of those momentous events of November 1963, I’ve delved into it a few times. For instance, I’ve been to Dealey Plaza three times. I read an ancient New York Times compendium of Warren Commission testimonies I’ve had on the shelves forever. The Mrs. bought me tickets on Father’s Day for the Sixth Floor Museum at the Texas School Book Depository later this fall. And now I found Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days in November at a nearby bookstore and cracked it open this weekend.

After reading a half-dozen or so conspiracy books (from the respectable Six Seconds in Dallas to the literary Oswald’s Tale to the insane, off-the-wall Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy) I weeded myself from the fringe with Gerald Posner’s Case Closed and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History. Both these latter books just made more damn sense to me than any of the conspiracy books I read or shows and movies I watched.

Posner’s book was a crisp and concise debunking of much of the myths and exaggerations of the assassination. Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History does the same, only in much, much more depth and detail. His book is at least four times as lengthy as Posner’s. He examines everything – not a Stone is unturned. As I recall, having read the book nearly a decade ago, it was so damn heavy I found that after I read one hundred page section, I was convinced of the Lone Gunman Theory and realized I needn’t strain my bracchioradiali and read any more.

Now Four Days in November sits in my hands. The back cover states it’s “drawn from Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a monumental and historic account of the event and all the conspiracy theories it spawned.” It may well indeed be. Four Days is a moment-by-moment breakdown, in ten or twenty minute intervals, of the actions of all the principle players in the events that occurred that November in Dallas in 1963.

I started last night and am already nearly 50 pages in. About a tenth done.

It won’t change my mind one way or the other (probably will solidify the Lone Gunman Theory in my mind from about a 95 to 97 percent probability). But it will refresh my memories of the long strange cast of characters which I will come into contact again this Fall during my visit to the TSBD Sixth Floor Museum.

For the record, though I’ve purchased 12 or 15 books on the assassination, I’ve only read a handful of those and gave most of them away to the V.A. when we moved down to Texas. Most of what I know of the assassination I learned online at a variety of websites. There’s lots of cyber rabbit holes to fall down into; trust me, I’ve fallen down my share over the years.

Anyway, after Four Days in Dallas, I plan on hitting WW2 again, hard. I have a books on submarine warfare, the Battle of Kursk, high-end strategy on why the Allies won, and a compendium of mini-biographies of the major military personalities of the war. I’m also working my way through an omnibus of 1976’s best SF short stories and, after that, will throw my hat in the ring and take a swing at one of Terry Goodkind’s mega-opuses of fantasy as a first-time reader.