Wacky Wednesday: Things that I love about the Castle of Cagliostro

I’ve loved this movie for years. Fans of Lupin III complain that it’s not really a Lupin movie, and I agree. It’s a Miyazaki movie through and through (“To the autogyro!” is not something often heard outside of Miyazaki's works.)

Where we differ is in what this means to us. The Lupin, or “Wolf”, if you like, is not the lecherous, aggressive, ruthless Lupin of Monkey Punch’s manga. He’s goofy, almost what I’d call gormless (mostly because modern life doesn’t afford me many opportunities to use gormless in a conversation, and it’s a great word) at times, and noble, nearly chivalrous. I’d go so far to call them two different characters, rather than two different interpretations of a character. But I consider that a feature, not a bug. There have been many versions of the characters, and this is the one who doesn’t fit with the rest, yet this is the definitive Lupin for Western audiences.

The stuff I love:

I love that there is a website devoted the gifs of scenes from Miyaki movies, and I’m going to use as many as I can in this post!

Lupin, by way of Miyazaki: As above.

Fujiko: More than anyone else in the movie, Fujiko strikes me as the kind of character a tabletop gamer would create. Her checklist for going undercover in a castle?

• One dress, red
• Clark Kent glasses
• Remember to put hair in a bun
• Camouflage leotard
• Submachinegun
• Half a dozen grenades
• Hang glider.

Like Lupin, this interpretation of the character has next to nothing in common with Monkey Punch’s omnisexual backstabbing sexpot, but she’s a lot of fun.

Goeman and Jigen: Until I saw it in print, I assumed it was spelled Goyaman.

His presence is odd if you don’t know his backstory. Why did Wolf just send for this Edo-era wandering samurai? It’s never really explained within the movie. He's just there, with bugger all any kind of explanation.

Jigen is great too, and the Superman villain the Hat looks just like him, for some reason.

Inspector Zenigata: For the longest time, tvtropes’ entry for what they now blandly call the Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist was known as “The Zenigata”.

Zenigata is a great sounding word. I like the character, and he gets one of my favorite moments in the movie, where he "accidentally" finds the counterfeit money, and looks directly into the camera and says that he was only looking for Wolf when he stumbled across this, completely by accident "Can you believe it?!"

This is the kind of adversary I really enjoy. He's sincere, and he's good at his job, (Lupin is just so much better.)and he's the perfect foil for Lupin.

Interestingly, he’s apparently the decedent of another fictional detective, Zenigata Heiji, who defeated his enemies by throwing coins, the zeni of his name. Two things here.

• I love this Phillip Joe Farmer idea of drawing connections between different fictional worlds.
• I immediately thought of the old video games Black Tiger, and forgotten world, where you could collect “Zenny” to buy powerups. I assumed Capcom had made up a fictional currency and carried it across its games as an inside joke. However, in light of this, I assume it’s drawn from an old Japanese word. How cool is that?

Interpol: If you didn’t grow up a geek in the 80s, you wouldn’t understand, but it seemed like Interpol was everywhere. Chun Li was an Interpol agent. If you needed someone with global law enforcement powers for your globe-trotting series, bam, make them an Interpol agent. Of course, the real Interpol is primarily an agency that coordinates between different law enforcement agencies across the world, and has no actual enforcement powers on its own,

Justice, like lightning: We watched the movie on BluRay, with the Streamline dub and the song and signs option for subtitles. There’s a scene where Zenigata has been pulled off the investigation into the Count, and Fujiko calls him in his apartment to tip him off that Lupin is still active in the country, and his orders to capture Lupin still stand. There is a poster or a framed print in the background with a Japanese character on it, and the subtitle informed me that it was the kanji for “justice”.

Clarice: My daughter loved this movie. I asked her which character she liked best and she said she couldn't decide, because “Clarice is a princess, and even though she's not used to fighting, she attacks the Count to protect Lupin, but Fujiko is ‘purely, insanely awesome’, and she's a ‘secret agent’.”

That observation makes me like Clarice more, and I’m happy that Lily has the empathy to understand that something that’s easy for one person may not be easy for another.

Miyazaki is generally pretty great about writing female characters (q.v. anything he’s ever written) but I don’t know if he hadn’t quite gotten there yet, or if, more likely, the movie was mostly about Lupin, and there wasn’t room to make Clarice more awesome than she already was.

Also, I think every adult in the room said “Hello, Clarice” in a Hannibal Lecter voice at least once over the course of the movie, but we shouldn't hold that against her.

And finally, how awesome is it that an anime from the 1970s passes the Bechdel test?

"Akogare no Paris: From wikipedia: Cagliostro, the country and setting, is depicted in meticulous detail and unconstrained by limitations of architecture, geography and culture, which can be described as "Akogare no Paris:" (Paris of our dreams), which is a fantastical view of Europe through Eastern eyes.

The Count: Fetch me my most FEARSOME ascot. If there were ever to be a live action movie, he would be played by Donald Trump. His hair is enormous!

The Car Chase:  It’s long been reported that Steven Spielberg called the car chase at the beginning of the movie the best car chase he had ever seen, and while it now appears this quote is apocryphal, it’s still a pretty darn great scene.

Score and soundtrack: I love the soundtrack, I love the score. Both are extremely good at accenting the mood of the piece.

So many set pieces that work so well: I was hoping there would be a gif of this. One of my favorite shots from any movie.

"...as if the way one fell down mattered"
""When the fall is all there is, it matters."

Healing and hating school

Lily continues to heal, hate school and occasionally say some really weird things.

We were sitting around playing Legos, and within fifteen minutes she chopped up a lego person to hide the body ("How very Fargo of you"), immured another ("How very Cask of Amontillado of you") and ripped the heart out of another, ("How very Mola Ram of you") And she really is the sweetest little kid and very gentle around living things, but man, I would not want to be one of her Lego people.

We instituted an earlier bedtime and it's really working out. I don't think I'm giving away any secrets by saying that I'm Lily's favorite, but I hope someday that she'll come to understand that Jen was the driving force for every bit of progress in her childhood. She pushed to get rid of the pacifier and the bottle and the crib, and now for a more consistent bedtime, and each time, I didn't think Lily was ready, but one thing that makes our marriage work is that we support each other even if we're not sure the other is right.  Jen and I have time to decompress after she goes to sleep, plus she's up earlier and in a better mood,

We're also varying bedtime activities. Lately, Lily's wanted to play with her dolls. She's got a bunch of different stories she likes to play out, such as "Baby Trouble" (where the boy dolls try to impress the girl dolls, but are thwarted when babies start acting up) or when Scott Pilgrim tries to trick Glinda the Good Witch into marrying him, and when that fails, makes her fall asleep by singing "Teenager in Love". I'm sure most of you reading this surely played the same games when you were kids.

She's still enjoying Webkinz. Sometimes I'll play the scrabble game to earn some more money for her so she can buy some more stuff in game. I was happy that it let me spell "Herpes".

We still read comic books at bedtime, but not as much. I was looking at this cover of Scooby Doo, and I was thinking, even though it was the same formula every week, they really did have some memorable designs.

We watched Muppets from Space for our Wacky Wednesday, and Lily really dug it. I had picked her up that Wednesday, and as we were driving home, she asked about watching Danny Phantom. I rather like the show, but Jen doesn't, and it probably isn't age appropriate when you get right down to it. Lily suggested that we vote on it and she asked me to vote on her side. I think it's just adorable that she thinks our house is a democracy.

Fortunately, Jen was on the ball and she had Muppets ready to go. I hadn't seen this one, but all the Muppet movies are pretty entertaining. (I'm quite looking forward to the upcoming film!) There were elements that she didn't like, but overall, it was a hit for the whole family.

My daughter, the nerd

After something of a rough start with dinner, we had a really pleasant Wacky Wednesday. Our movie was High School Musical, a film for which I actually have some amount of affection. We first saw it when Lily was just a little baby and she grooved the music back then. We recently assembled a mix CD for her, and let her pick out the songs. It was an eclectic mix drawing on Mary Poppins, the Sound of Music, Belle & Sebastian, the Nightmare Before Christmas and High School Musical. She really likes the finale, "We're all in this together".

She was just a tiny baby the last time she saw the movie, so she wasn't that familiar with the songs that aren't on her mix CD. One of them was "Stick to the stuff you know" where the various peer groups caution their members not to engage in activities that clash with the perception of the groups.

We were trying to tell Lily that this is bad advice; that it's okay to like lots of different things. The example I gave is that it's okay to like princesses and super heroes. And Lily said, "Oh, I like lots of different superheroes. I like Ben 10 and Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad and Batman and Supergirl and Robin and Brainy." And I realized that she had become a nerd without me even realizing it.

It reminded me of something Sarah Vowell had mentioned, and which I quoted in this blog post.

Geeks tend to be focused on very narrow fields of endeavor. The modern geek has been generally dismissed by society because their passions are viewed as trivial by those people who ‘see the big picture.’ Geeks understand that the big picture is pixilated and their high level of contribution in small areas grows the picture. They don’t need to see what everyone else is doing to make their part better. Being a nerd, which is to say going to far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant.

You repeat Lily's statement to somebody not interested in superheroes and what they hear is "I like some superhero and some superhero and some superhero and some superhero and some superhero and some superhero and some superhero." There are no meaningful distinctions between the different characters for someone outside the subculture.

We finished watching the movie and progressed on to bedtime (the bedtime story happened to be Sesame Street and not superheroes, doubtless to Jen's relief)

She was really sweet this morning too. I was sitting at the computer and she pressed on her gate and started to say “Mommy, daddy, I’m-“ and the gate swung open and she said, “oh, that was easy.”

Then she came over the computer and said, “Can I make a superhero?” We had done this once before. City of Heroes has a zillion options to make a character. You can choose all these different capes and pants and everything, and can color them each individually. So Lily really enjoyed that. We spent maybe 15 minutes doing that. I took a screenshot of the result. That’s Violet Rose Petal and that swoosh you see next to her is the sneezing powder she throws.  That’s a nice costume, but, boy, those colors are a little…garish.

Note to self: Have Lily tested for color blindness next time we head to the pediatrician’s office.

She followed me out to the car as she often does and "surprised" me with a hug and a kiss. I realized that I forgot the cap that I use to keep the sun out of my eyes and she ran back in and got it, then signed "I love you" to me in sign language, twice.

Adventures of a Self-Rescuing Princess

Sometimes, in a fit of pique that only a four-year-old can muster, Lily will tell Jen or me, "You're annoying me!" And here's my little secret. I annoy her on purpose in the morning.

She is such a deep sleeper that it's hard to get her up in the morning. So I'll turn on the light in her room when I enter, or sit down next to her bed and say something deliberately provocative. She's enough like me (or I'm enough like a four-year-old) that she's unable leave a false statement uncorrected, so she'll rise up, more often than not to announce, "You're wrong and let me tell you why!"

She was wearing her froggy footsie pajamas last night and because we had been watching super hero cartoons for Wacky Wednesday, I asked her if she was Frog Girl.

Her eyes opened and her smile lit up and she declared that she was Hopping Kid, and her power was to "hop on the bad guy's face to distract them."

And I'm happy that she's hoppy. I don't want to be a dad who forces his interests on his kid, but I would like to show her the stuff I like and tell her why I like it, and it's always wonderful when she likes it too. Princesses are fine, but she's been making a lot of "I can't do this, because that's for boys" type comments, and I'm happy that she likes the girl superheroes who fight right up there with the boys, because if she must be a princess, then let her be the self-rescuing kind.

So, before she got dressed, we had a superhero adventure with her dolls and stuffed animals. Hopping Kid teamed up with Super Bear (Who knew that Baby Bear was a part time superhero?) to defeat "Granny Cat" who had kidnapped Saturn Girl and "Brainiac 2525" (Lily had a little trouble remembering the number behind the name).

They managed the rescue so quickly that we had time to stage another kidnapping and rescue. This time, "Flying Mermaid with a Giant Head" had kidnapped Flower Queen and it was up to her daughter Wonder Butterfly, to save her. A giant Scott Pilgrim tried to save them, but he only messed things up by sitting on top of the prison and sealing it tighter.

Nice One, Pilgrim

We decided that only the horn of a space unicorn could free Flower Queen, but when we tried to pry it open, we learned that the unicorn pillow pet playing the role of the space unicorn was in fact only a pillow pet. I hate it when that happens!

Pictured: Not a Space Unicorn

She's eventually rescued and we have this exchange.

Me (as Flower Queen) : Thank you for rescuing me.

Lily (Wonder Butterfly): You’re welcome.

Me: As a reward, you can have candy for dinner tonight.

Lily: I don’t need a reward. I’m just happy you’re safe.

And that made me happy too.

Often when we have a little extra time, I'll walk outside to my car and after I've gotten halfway there, Lily will run out and give me my hug and kiss and say something sweet. "Bye! I hope you have a great day at work!"

As she was walking back to the house, she found a dandelion, so she picked it up and gave it to me so I could blow the seeds off. “I hope that all the flowers blossom so that mommy will be happy!”

She really is sweet. The night before, we watched three episodes of the Legion of Super Heroes, which I'll get to in a minute and baked some cookies. One of the episodes reminded me of the fable of Stone Soup and we told it to Lily. (Also, in looking it up just now, I see that there is actually a system for classifying folk tales, and I think that's awesome.) After that, we went upstairs to see if we could find a copy of Tom Chapin's Stone Soup song and also Homemade Lemonade, which is another really cute song. Jen and Lily jumped on the bed together while listening to it.

All in all, a very nice night.

And if anyone cares about the episodes of the Legion of Superheroes that we watched, here they are:

Phantom: While lollygagging in the Superman museum, Superman accidentally releases an evil twin from the Phantom Zone, who goes on a rampage. He was kind of creepy looking so Lily didn't like this episode, but I did. It was like Superman's smackdown of Darkseid from the finale of the Justice League, and about three times as long. I also liked how they continued to strike a balance between Superman being vastly more powerful than the rest of the Legionnaires, but still allowing them to challenge him in their chosen arenas.

Best moment: Brainiac 5 taking some hidden kryptonite out of a hidden safe, only to learn it is ineffective against this ersatz Kryptonian, who promptly steals it for use against Superman.

An unpleasant surprise

Champions: Lightning Lad is competing in the dodecathlon and assassins are trying to kill Phantom Girl's mom, the President of the United Planets. Superman and Phantom Girl provide security while Lightning Lad competes against his older brother, who is cheating in order to win. Lily was saying "I think he's evil," and I was saying, "I don't know if he's a bad guy or just a cheater. We'll have to watch to find out."  (He was just a cheater and at the end Lily very graciously said, "Oh, I guess you were right.") This episode had two iconic Legionnaires, Ultra Boy and Matter Eater Lad as contestants in the games and not Legion members and they team up with the rest of the heroes to stop the bad guys at the end. Another fun episode.

Best moment: Phantom Girl making her Clark Kent face.

Superman is not amused

Lightning Storm: At the beginning of the episode, Superman is being strangled by a space squid, so of course they dispatch Triplicate Girl to rescue him, which goes about like you'd expect.

Still a sucky superhero, but three Mirrors of Venus as a symbol is inspired

Lightning Lad is invited to join a team of "cooler" heroes, and while it's hard to imagine a team cooler than the Legion, there it is. Also, we get a cameo from certain members of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, an organization composed of superpeople with powers too lame even for the Legion. Members include Chlorophyll Kid (who makes plants grow really quickly), Color Kid (who changes the color of things), Double Header (who has two heads and no powers),  Infectious Lass (uncontrollably infects people around her with various diseases, including "gender-reversal germs"), and Stone Boy (who turns into an immobile stone statue). They get their own episode later in the series, and I can't wait for it. This wasn't the strongest in the series, but I'm happy that we watched it out of order, (Lily requested one with Bouncing Boy in it) because it features Lightning Lad's brother, who has gone from a jerk to a full on villain. 

Best moment: The Legion of Substitute Heroes, natch

The best and brightest of the Subs

The Repeating Game

We watched Toy Story 3 for our Wacky Wednesday. What a spectacular movie.  The only thing that could make it better would be a cameo from Totoro. Hey, there he is! Perfect movie!

Jen's doing a program tonight, and she happened to unearth an astronomy program I put together for an old project in college. I'm pleased she kept it around and it's actually pretty decent.

Lily and I played the repeating game. I had to repeat what she said, so of course, the first thing out of her mouth was "Batman rocks! Superman poops!" and I repeated through gritted teeth, "Batman rocks. Superman poops."

"Batman's the best superhero."

*sigh*

"Batman's the best superhero."

"I love daddy."

I asked her if I could substitute Lily for daddy, but she said no, so I said  "I love daddy."

Then she said "I love myself and my whole family!" and I was very happy to repeat that.

A short post with a picture

We watched Scooby Doo and the Loch Ness Monster. Every Scooby Doo adventure is pretty much the same as every other one, but this outing gave the guest actors a chance to break out their outlandish Scottish accents.

So, when we went down to breakfast this morning, Lily grabbed her Superboy action figure and a big plastic shamrock and said "I'm going to pretend that I'm a supervillain and I'm celebrating Saint Patrick's Day by tying up Superman to a giant chunk of kryptonite shaped like a shamrock." Jen is raising a very strange child. She was pretending her oreo was a supervillain last night.

I didn't really have enough material for a blog post, and I was thinking about how I could stretch out this post when my mp3 player decided it wanted to set  itself to random play, which it sometimes does if the headphones are jostled in just the right way. I've got over 12 GB of stuff on there, so it's an insane mix. I decided to let it play to see what I'd get. Here are the first thirty tracks I got.

1. Random song off the Robotech soundtrack
2. Random song off the Robotech score
3. Human Wheels by John Mellancamp
4. A track of Patton Oswalt's stand up Werewolfs and Lollipops
5. A song by Anamanaguchi off the Scott Pilgrim video game soundtrack
6. Everything's Alright by Kimya Dawson
7. Waterloo Sunset by Robyn Hitchcock
8. Ramona (Acoustic) off the Scott Pilgrim versus the World movie sountrack
9. Side 3 of to Die in Italbar (I skipped this one)
10. We hate you, please die by Crash and the Boys off the Scott Pilgrim versus the World movie sountrack
11. This American Life #199: House on Loon Lake (skipped)
12. A remix of Transylvania Concubine by Raspuntina
13. Here comes Science by They Might Be Giants
14. Way Down the Line by the Offspring
15. Bookends by Simon & Garfunkle
16. Death to All Hipsters off the Scott Pilgrim versus the World movie score
17. Seeing Other People by Belle & Sebastian
18. Remember that I Love you by Kimya Dawson
19. Like Rasputin by Amy Rigby
20. He's Not a Boy by the Like
21. Human Wheels again
22. Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie by Belle & Sebastian
23. This is Halloween off the Nightmare before Christmas Soundtrack
24. Oh Maria! by Seawolf (excellent song)
25. Outtakes from the Popful Mail video game
26. San Francisco by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes (I'm surprised that it took this long to get to a song by this band, considering I've got just about everything they released on my player)
    
27. Part one Damnation Alley audiobook (skipped)
28. Endless World off the Dragon Quest Symphonic Suite (by the London Philharmonic!)
29. W*O*L*D by Harry Chapin
30. Somehow a Frog Finds a Pond by Lunch Money
    

Just a brief amount of random stuff

As the title say, just a brief amount of random stuff.

I love listening to college radio. REM got their start on college stations thirty years ago and I heard a song from their newest album just the other day. I also caught Strange Names by Steve Forbert. It's a song about the strange names of New Jersey towns. As a Jersey native I found it pretty funny.

(If you're reading this on Facebook, you have to click on to "See original post" to see the embedded video.)

This article had an amusing look at the ratio of Republican presidential candidates to ex-wives and the family values party doesn't come out looking too good.  I couldn't help but imagine Milton from Office Space mumbling: "The ratio of people to cake is too big."

We watched The Love Bug, the first of the Herbie movies for our latest Wacky Wednesday, but Lily didn't dig it because it didn't have any princesses. I think her ideal movie would be if Batman teamed up with Scooby Doo and Belle to rescue some princesses.

I'm very disappointed that she's a Batman fan. It's because she likes his costume. She'll say "Batman rules!" and I''ll say "No, Superman rules!" Right now we've got the disc with "World's Finest" episodes where Batman and Superman team up, so we'll see how she likes that.

She's also a huge fan of Tiny Titans. We got a copy at a birthday party a couple months ago, and she just fell in love with it. That's all she ever wants for her bedtime stories anymore, which kind of annoys Jen.

She was very sweet at bed time the other night. Sometimes Jen or I will lay with her as she's falling asleep and she was just sleepily telling me "I love Mommy and Daddy more than anyone in the whole world."

Ignore your teeth and they'll go away

I had a dentist appointment on Thursday afternoon. I like my dentist office, and dentists in general. Not that I spend a lot of time thinking about them one way or the other, but when I do, it's generally positive.

I work more than an hour away from where I live, but the dentists office is less than a mile away (Google maps said 2.0 miles, but since I made it in eight minutes without hustling and I am not, as far as I know, Usain Bolt, I think they gave me a more meandering route than I actually took.)

The office is perpetually understaffed, and I had an hour wait, but that's okay, because they had The Electric Company ("Heeeyyyy youuuuu guysssssss!") on in the lobby!  I didn't know they still made that! (Aha! Some quick Googling shows it was revived in 2009!) I used to love that show and I'd been thinking about it and other shows, because I'm always on the lookout for worthwhile stuff to show to Lily.

So after that wait, I got in the chair and did all the things one does at the dentist. After a while he came to me and said "Your teeth are in great shape-"

"Yes!"

"-except for that suppurating abscess. We'd remove the tooth, but your blood pressure is too high."

High blood pressure certainty runs in my family, and while I do walk a couple miles every day, I'm under crazy stress at work (magnified by a commute that not infrequently stretches out to 90 minutes) and my diet is just a ball of sugar, salt and fat squeezed into a ball, and I'm older than I've ever been. (And now I'm even older.)  I should take better care of myself, but this job has been grinding me down for a long time. 

Lily, for instance. There's a good reason for taking care of myself.

Even at four, Lily has has an extremely fine distinction between real and make-believe. That's great, but sometimes, I feel that she's missing out on part of the sense of wonder of being a kid. So I was happy that Jen told me the story about a missing lovey, Baby Bear.

Baby Bear is her little pink bear that goes everywhere with her. Other favorites come and go, but Baby Bear is eternal. (Though it's more reincarnation than immortality, as we've located a source of Baby Bears online and we try to keep a spare sandbagged in my sock drawer in case of emergency.)

We couldn't find our first Baby Bear and the other had already been left behind elsewhere, so Lily had to go Bearless into her day. Once we all got home and started looking again around bedtime, Jen shook out Lily's blue blanket, just as she had in the morning, and Baby Bear fell out on to the floor.

Lily's eyes got huge, and she said "They really do come to life!" When we asked her what she meant, she said that she was thinking of the Toy Story movies, where the toys scurry around on their own when they're not being observed, and they might cling to the back of a blanket as it's being shaken out. I thought that was really cute.

I came home from work on Tuesday night in a pretty good mood and realized as soon as I came through the back door that I had forgotten my phone. So I said that and opened the door to go back out to retrieve it when Lily said "Can I come? I have long sleeves on!" and I said yeah and we both went out to grab my phone. As I opened the door, she saw the little Scott and Romona plushies I'd had sitting at my desk at work for the past couple weeks, but which I recently brought home.

"Are those for me?!" she gushed, and what was I supposed to say, no, those are daddy's dolls? So she fell in love with them, and we've played with them every night since. At first they were siblings and Baby Bear was their mother. Then Baby Bear became Romona's adopted mom (she was raised by bears) and Scott became the boy who pesters her all the time. Baby Bear bites him on the heiney when he looks away and Romona yells "hi-ya" like Miss Piggy and karate chops him all the time. We watched Scooby Doo for our Wacky Wednesday movie, and Romona (played by Lily)  offered commentary for Scott (played by me). I was asking easy questions to allow to provide some chance for her to segue into exposition. I asked "What's Halloween?" and I think she was role-playing Romona when she huffed and said don't you know anything?"

She's got a mint in her mouth, which is why her cheek looks like that. Her smile is normally much cuter.

Scooby Doo, Valentine's Day and the Catcher in the Rye

Jen's Valentine's Day present came in the mail on Thursday. I showed it to Lily right before her bedtime story. She loved it. She put it on and posed for the mirror in her "Princess Pose" which she learned from Belle at Disney World. She's such a diva.

I put it back in the box and stowed it away and Lily said, "I have an idea! I'll tell mommy that you're throwing out a candy box." She's alarmingly adept at coming up with plausible cover stories.

(Sadly, Lily had a more interesting Valentine's Day than we did. She had a party at her school. Jen and I did Jack Squat.)

Later on in the kitchen Jen was telling me a funny story, and she started laughing a little at her own story and the way her laughter mingled with her words reminded me of Lily, who is sometimes so overcome with amusement at her own story that she'll react the same way. Of course Jen must have done it first, but adults laugh at their own stories much more rarely than kids do, so I never noticed it as a trait of Jen's until Lily had done it all the time. Strange what kids teach us about ourselves.

For our Wacky Wednesday movie, Jen and Lily and I were watching a Scooby Doo movie where Fred was going to be a councilor at the camp he attended as a kid, and I commented "Yay! It's the real Fred! He's wearing his ascot!" because some of the more recent character designs have him scarfless and in a striped shirt.

Lily asked "What's an ascot?" and I explained "It's that scarf he's wearing" and then on the TV the person in charge of camp exclaims "I'd recognize that ascot anywhere! C'mere, Freddie!" and Jen and I cracked up.

I got A Pup named Scooby Doo for Lily and it came on Monday. I thought she'd like it, but she asked for a Scooby Doo movie she'd already seen a thousand times after watching two episodes. She said she prefers Fred's hair as a grown up. I don't even know how to begin to make sense of that.

Later on, I was discussing Beatle's songs with a friend (specifically the fact that Fiona Apple's cover of Across the Universe is better than the original) and I got to wondering when Mark David Chapman (John Lennon's assassin) had died. I discovered four interesting things.

1. He's still alive
2. He's kept largely sequestered from the rest of the population for his own safety, which as Jen pointed out, is kind of bullshit, because it's really pretty unlikely that somebody now imprisoned in Attica going to be a big enough Beatles fan to recognize him and start something.
3. He's still married and
4. He gets one 42-hour conjugal visit a year from his wife. 

When I related this to my friend, he observed, "Sadly, he's probably had sex more recently than I have" to which I replied "Here's a map to Ringo Starr's house. I think you know what to do next."

Catching up on Josh's exciting life!

So it's been pretty nasty here weatherwise. I logged in to check weather.com for our local updates and the top three stories were:

Dangerous storm strikes   | Crippling ice threat   | Update: Travel nightmare 

We let Lily pick the movie for the most recent Wacky Wednesday. She wanted to see something we hadn't seen before, so I turned on the PS3 and opened the Netflix app. She told me "Type in 'Movies we haven't seen before.'" and I explained that it didn't work like that.

She wanted a My Little Pony movie, but there were none available for streaming, so we poked around until we found the next closest thing, Rainbow Bright and the Star Stealer.

Holy shit. I haven't seen this many rainbows since Robot Unicorn Attack.  Between the animation and the rainbow legwarmers, it is the quintessence of the 80s animated movie.

I looked up the plot on Wikipedia because I couldn't be bothered to pay attention to it.

Rainbow takes the mission to find Orin and later learns that Spectra is dimming as the result of a massive net being woven around the surface. The net is being made so that a selfish princess, known only as the "Dark Princess," can steal Spectra, "the greatest diamond in all the universe," for herself, and tow it back to her world with her massive spaceship. The native Sprites of Spectra, enslaved by Glitterbots under the Princess's control, are being forced to weave the net.

Heh. Glitterbots.

(When I asked Lily what was happening in the movie, she gave me an account that mapped pretty closely to that summary. On one hand, I'm glad that she's capable of following and relating things in such detail. On the other, I'm disappointed that she's wasting her time on that kind of shit.) My friend Jen has observed that there aren't a lot of good genre works for girls; that the female characters tend to be cast in inconsequential roles. I'll agree with that, and expand her observation to say that shows written for girls are written by adult men who really have no idea what girls really like.

On Friday, we went to the local Y, where they were having a "Flick and Float", where they project a movie on the far wall while you watch from inside the pool. It's a cool concept, but they couldn't dim the lights, presumably for safety reasons, so the image was of very low quality. That's okay, because Lily was all about the swimming. At first she was extremely clingy and very afraid of us letting go, but when she saw that the vest would buoy her, she was having a lot of fun swimming all over the place. She wasn't paying attention to where her legs were going and must have kicked me in the crotch about ten times. (America's Funniest Home Videos has the footage.)

Our nephew slept over. We spent four hours downloading Dead Nation and about fifteen minutes playing it before deciding it was just no fun. He just played Fallout after that.

Jen and I went to Olive Garden on Superbowl night. It was just about empty. The only people there were us and that guy from the protests in Egypt with the bread taped to his head.

Give me liberty or give me unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks!

During the week, Lily did a very cute job decorating a Valentine's Day card. We were working on dinner and we didn't even know she had the sharpie until we saw what she had written on the card. I was impressed that she has the "L" pointing in the right direction, because that's something that little kids usually screw up.

LOVE

Lily was telling us about a pet dragon. While she thought it would be a bad idea to have one ("He would burn me every time he breathed!"), she said that if she did have one, she would name him Bernie (or perhaps Burny).

We lost phone and internet access at work for five hours on Tuesday. The IT guy, when trying to straighten things out and presumably believing there was no on within earshot, exclaimed "This place is a black hole of shit!"

There are some days that I agree with him. I call them "weekdays".

Scary Princesses

So, I was talking with Lily about what movie we should watch for our Wacky Wednesday and she said, "What about that movie with the scary princesses?" and I said, "What movie with the scary princesses?" and she replied, "When we were on the computer, I saw a movie of Ariel with hairy seashells and a skeleton face. Can we watch that movie tonight?"

I told her that I didn't remember that movie. (Because if I had seen it, I would certainly be seeing it every time I closed my eyes!) and I asked if she meant the movie where the girl plays the piano with the boy, (Corpse Bride) but no, she repeated the thing about undead Ariel, this time with the added detail of a green (presumably decomposing) tail. I have no idea where she saw this. I remember somebody put a a slideshow on youtube of scary princesses, but we didn't watch that one. I said that I didn't remember that movie and she said, "That's okay. Just go to the computer and type in 'scary princesses'". Sheesh.

She only likes two segments of Fantasia. One is the Pastoral Symphony with the cute little baby Cupids and Pegasui and centaurs all frolicking around. The other is Night on Bald Mountain where Chernabog summons from these horrifying ghosts to make war against the living. I'd say this would give her nightmares, but she already has nightmares. The one the other night involved the ears falling off her stuffed bear and someone sewing bunny ears on in their place. The horror! Zombies and monsters she can handle, but don't lay a finger on her Baby Bear!

Indian and Angelina

Jen wanted me to call this post “Indian and Angelina” and since she so seldom takes any interest in my blog, I decided to got with it. Jen made some curry dishes for us to enjoy while we watched our Wacky Wednesday movie, one of the Angelina Ballerina collections, which I didn't really dig, but which Lily watched twice because it was so short and cooking ran long.

Not a whole lot of excitement at home lately, which is why it's mostly been book reviews.

We had a nice New Year's Eve, with pretty much the same lineup as last year. Me, Jen, Lily, Jen's mom, my Grammy, our nephew. We watched movies, Chris played games, everybody ate junk and Lily conked out fifteen minutes before the ball dropped. (We had canceled our cable but found a stream of the ball dropping online.)

I was proud of Lily for a couple reasons over this past week. One is that she said Superman is her favorite superhero. Yay! Superman rocks. She didn't want to read Kingdom Come with me, though. Pity. It's a beautiful book. Maybe when she's older.

I'll cover it in more detail some day soon, but there are some elements I really enjoy in the story, chiefly among them the idea that it's possible for anyone to learn from his or her mistakes and to move beyond them.  I didn't really get the extent of Magog's redemption until I read that article above and looked for the actions described.

But back to Lily and superheroes. She told me that if she were a superhero, her name would be "Super Princess Lily" and her powers would be "saving people" and "bringing them back to life if they die". This death thing is getting out of hand. Jen told me yesterday that she got through a day with Lily without telling her that two people were dead. I didn't think that was all that remarkable, because I often manage to get through the day without telling her that two people were dead until she told me that Lily had started asking questions about Michael Jackson after recognizing one of his songs. (I don't know which I find more impressive, the fact that she was able to place the song or the fact that she actually used the word "recognized".) Jen managed to deflect both the questions about Michael Jackson and her cookie recipe from her great-grandmother. So, go Jen!

The other reason I was proud of Lily is that she said, "Daddy, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but your bathroom is very messy and you should clean it up a little."

I'm pleased, not because she thinks my bathroom is messy, but how she could phrase that in a respectful fashion that nonetheless makes her meaning clear. For kids, and some adults, that's not always easy.  It reminds me of the time the Autistic Robot gave me something for a quick review. I worked on it in MS Word's editing mode, and was surprised to find that I made 112 changes when I was done. I can offer criticism, and I can be nice, but I can seldom do both at once without great effort. I'm pleased to see that that this seems to come more easily to Lily. I'm proud of the kid she's becoming.

I'm less pleased about other things. I was finishing up a reading of the Little Mermaid and Jen was in the room listening to us. I mentioned that Eric and Ariel only dated for three days before they got married. So we asked her how long people should date before they got married. Lily thought about it for a moment and said "One or two days."

Then she went on to tell us that she loves two boys in her class and she will marry one of them after dating them for the appropriate wooing period of up to two days. They each dance funny and don't get many time outs and sometimes they pull their eyelids down to look like monsters.

By staggering coincidence, that's exactly what I'm looking for in a future son-in-law!

Wacky Wednesday: Monsters, Inc.

We had a rather nice Wacky Wednesday this week. Lily was very well-behaved. She had been talking about Monsters & Aliens for the past couple days to Jen, who was unable to get the name of the movie out of her, but only mentioned it in front of me yesterday morning, which wasn't enough time to get the movie from Netflix. Lily described the Netflix process in detail, calling the company by name. We talk about it in front of her, but I was just surprised (and not entirely pleased) by her level of brand awareness.

We wound up streaming Monsters, Inc. We had watched it previously, but quite a while ago. It's a great movie. I love Pixar. I'm glad our movie didn't have any aliens in it, because Lily has been strangely anxious about them.

Lily: Was Oma's mommy kidnapped by aliens?
Jen: Uh, no.
Lily: Then how did she die? Did she die because she got really old?
Jen: Uh, yes.

She assured Jen in that very earnest way little kids have, "Don't worry mommy. I'd *never* let aliens take you away."

On Thursday we had pizza with my Grammy where she spent the whole meal bitching that my younger brother didn't call her about some chair. Afterward, I read Cinderella to Lily. Jen had picked up a copy of the Brothers Grimm version by accident from the library and I was censoring it as I went.

We got to the part where the wicked stepmother tells the one stepsister to cut off her own toe so her foot will fit in the slipper. I didn't know that Jen had neglected to edit this part when she had read it the previous night so I was just like, "The sister tried on the slipper but her foot didn't fit."

Lily: You didn't read the part where she cuts off her toe!
Me: I think reading that would make me sad.
Lily: But that's my favorite part!
Me: (Expression of horrified disbelief)

I assume that she's just being a typical four-year-old here with a desire that a book should read as written and it's just a manifestation of a little kid's desire for familiarity and not some kind of hidden bloodlust. At least, that's what I'm hoping.

Of Princesses and Parties

Zelazny blogging will return shortly, but I did promise my friend Eric a post about his party, so here it is. While we were there, Eric asked me if I was going to blog about it. Duh. I blog about everything. Ever since I moved to a pseudonymous open blog, I talk about certain things in less detail, but yeah, I still blog about everything.

On Monday night, I took Lily to a party while Jen made falafels for her luncheon. The party was for Eric's son and Batman-themed. They had Batman water, Batman plates, Batman napkins and they even had a Batcave, though I docked them significant points for the absence of a giant penny.

Lily was wearing her Princess costume and asked me to put a set of fairy wings on her. She stressed to people that she wasn't actually a fairy princess; she was just dressed as one. Though apparently she was still magical since she turned me into a jellybean at one point.

Lily was afraid of the Joker on the napkins. (Though I don't know why. The Joker is a tool.)

Lily: Daddy, this witch is scary.
Me: Okay, I'll get you a new napkin. (Turns around, flips napkin upside down so that she'd just see the bats against a skyline)
Lily: (Peers critically at me) You didn't get me a new napkin. You just flipped that one over.

Now there's no way she could have seen that, so I assume she deduced it. That kid is too sharp.

But it was a pretty great party. Gift bags had candy and comic books (ours was an issue of Tiny Titans) Lily wanted to play with me and Eric more than she did with the other kids, which is not a trait I'm sure I want to encourage or not, but we did have fun. Eric pushed her on the swing and then I would bend over to pick something up and then she'd stick out her legs and kick me in the heinie. She would laugh and laugh, and she does have such a wonderful laugh when she's happy.

When she was telling Jen about that later that night, she was laughing so much that she could barely get the story out. After she finished, she said to me, "That story cracked me up. That means it made me laugh really hard!"

Tuesday was pretty quiet and then for the next day we watched Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue and again, our Wacky Wednesday movie was pretty good, particularly with the animation and the water effects. I'm kind of pleased they didn't half-ass it, and they certainly could have gotten away with it, because if Lily is any indication of the target audience, they'll watch anything with fairies in it, no matter how lousy it is.

It was about a little girl who catches Tinkerbell and becomes her friend. I asked Lily what she would do if she caught a fairy, but the fairy wanted to go home. She said, "I'd be sad, but I would give her my princess shoe so she'd have a home and then she would remember me."

Lily didn't want to join us on the couch because she was wearing her wings again, but we had a good time regardless. Also, I happen to like Mae Whitman and Kristin Chenoweth (and I do spend an inordinate amount of time blogging about women with funny voices but that's neither here nor there.)

The movie is about a little nine-year old girl whose scientist father is so focused on his work that he doesn't have time for her. When she meets Tinkerbell, she befriends her and Tink helps her put together a scientific journal about faeries. There's some kid-level of tension, but nothing serious and daddy and daughter are nicely reconciled at the end. I'm a sucker for movies that have good dads.

When we were done, Lily threw her arms around my neck and said "Oh, I love happy endings!"

She was kind of naughty during bed time, and when I picked her up off the bed in the room adjacent to hers our we're using as a guest bed, she got really upset. She said that she just wanted to tire herself out, but I thought that it would only serve to get her more wound up, so I grabbed her and shut the door. Things went downhill from there, and she got more upset than I've ever seen her.

She threw herself on the bed and covered up with her blanket and hugged her lamb and kept crying and saying things like "I'm going right to bed. No stories, no kiss goodnight, no holding hands. I was bad all day. I broke my own heart!"

She felt so guilty. I felt terrible. After a good forty minutes, I calmed her down, and convinced her that she was only a little bad at the end of the day. She was happy then, so I asked her how she had felt earlier. I was expecting something like sad, or perhaps "really sad". Instead she said "I felt like I was alone in the playground without mommy and daddy, and it was dark and cold and scary and and there were birds flying overhead and there are spiders and spiderwebs, and I'm all by myself."

I thought she was going to start quoting Return of the King. "No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades."

She's going to be a poet or a drama queen, or maybe both.

I asked her how she felt now that she was happier. She smiled her wonderful smile and said "Now it's sunny and mommy and daddy are with me, we're in a field where we can pick any flowers we want and Lamby is here and she is so happy that she turned into a real lamb!"

That's more like it. We may not win all our fights, but we win the ones that matter.

I see dead farmers

I usually damn with faint praise the movies we watch on Wacky Wednesday with "not as terrible as I would have expected" but Barbie as Rapunzel was almost...good. The production values were pretty decent, plus it had Angelica Huston as the wicked stepmother. (Naturally) She had really long hair and while she was imprisoned in a tower, she didn't let down her hair to let anyone climb up.

I was kind of hanging out downstairs and Lily held up one of her Little People toys and said, "Daddy, let's pretend that the farmer's dead."

Christ.

I just kind of mumbled something along the lines of "Oh, pretending that would make me sad," but man, dude.

Other than that, she's been very sweet lately. We had a nice time breaking out the Halloween decorations and Lily helped out by holding the chair whenever we were standing on it and giving us helpful advice like telling us to make the house, "Scary, but not TOO scary, because little kids might be trick or treating and we don't want to scare them."

I was talking to Jen about how I'll spend much more effort on blog posts where I'm reviewing something I don't like and she interrupted me to say "Do you think that makes you unusual?"

Well, kinda.

I asked Lily if I was unusual and she said "No, mommy's unusual!" because she's in that contrarian phase.

I happened to see Ted Allen on TV, and I spent fifteen minutes bitching about how I wanted to stab him as we were taking the air conditioner out of the window for the season.

Jen: Stop talking about stabbing Tim Allen.
Me: Ted Allen!
Jen: Whatever. Just stab him and pretend he's the other guy.
Me: No, you know why?
Jen: *sigh* Why?
Me: Because the time I'm spending stabbing Tim Allen, I could be using to stab Ted Allen! (Pause. Wave to elderly neighbor.) Oh, here there neighbor. Didn't see you standing there.

I'm trying to be the person who spends more time talking about things that I like than bitching about things I don't. And I was noticing that my reviews about the books I liked were longer, but the ones I wrote about books I didn't especially like were shorter but took me longer to write. I'm not sure what it says about me.

Movies without bad guys

So, once a week , we have our Wacky Wednesday, where we have breakfast food for dinner, Lily takes an early bath and gets into jammies and then we all sit down on the couch to watch a movie together. We had 101 Dalmatians from Netflix and when I reminded Lily that's what we'd be watching, she said she wanted "Something without a bad guy."

I looked at Jen and she looked at me and said "Totoro it is," and that's what we'll watch tonight, but we're running out of movies, so I'm sending out the call for suggestions.

Lily's favorites include Mary Poppins and the Sound of Music, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and Ponyo. (She watched most of Nausicaa too, and didn't get bothered until the Ohmu started going into the acid lake at the end). We've seen almost everything by Pixar and most of the Disney Princess movies. She likes Kim Possible, but Jen feels it's not really age appropriate, so I think we'll wait a while before we put that in regular rotation and she likes Strawberry Shortcake, and Dora the Explorer but Jen and I will flip out if we have to watch that again.

So, suggestions? We'd prefer something that can be streamed through Netflix, but that's not a deal breaker. Also high on the list is something that adults can tolerate (or preferably, enjoy).

Josh's clearinghouse

Time to make a post by jamming together the random stuff that never coalesced into discrete posts of their own. The scrapple school of blogging theory, as it were.

Work is tense lately. For the fifth time this quarter, we've had a lengthy meeting about a new process or technology that will revolutionize the way we do business, followed by a much shorter meeting where the idea is quietly abandoned.

I was unfriended by someone on Facebook. That happens from time to time. I log off with 160 friends and log back in with 159. Then I try to do the process of elimination thing to figure out who dropped me. Just when I have it figured out, a nagging voice says, "Maybe he dropped you before and you just didn't notice."

My Grammy stopped by to give us a vegetable tray out of the blue(as has no doubt happened to all of you reading this) and while she was there, Lily threw me a beaded necklace. I said, "Thanks. I feel like I'm at Mardi Gras" and my Grammy absolutely cracked up. I was expecting it to go right over her head, but on reflection, it's not like Mardi Gras is an obscure phenomenon, and she wasn't always old.

When I was putting Lily to bed, she asked "What's Mister Tim to me? Is he my grandpa?" I tried explaining that he wasn't part of our family, but that made her very said. She said that he should marry Grammy Kathy, and then he could be part of our family.

And you know, I don't even know how this thing got to be a running joke around here, but even Lily's getting into it. I wonder if I'll have to call him dad.

Speaking of running gags, Karen loves giraffes.

When Jen and I go married, our wedding invitations had a pair of frogs dressed up like a bride and a groom. For YEARS, my family thought this meant Jen loved frogs (she doesn't. She started off neutral on frogs, merely thinking that the image on the invites was cute, and slowly grew to dislike them as the years went on and the gifts mounted) and would buy her every tacky frog knickknack they came across. It is now my mission in life to convince people that Karen loves giraffes. At the very least, it will become one of the running gags of my blog, right up there with my mom kisses all my friends, House is stupid (he is) and Firefly sucks (it does).

We watched Pooh's Heffalump Movie this Wacky Wednesday. Lily got really into it. Jen cried at the end. The whole thing reminds me of a Belle & Sebastian song.

Oh, I'll settle down with some old story
About a boy who's just like me
Thought there was love in everything and everyone
You're so naive!
After a while they always get it
They always reach a sorry end
Still it was worth it as I turned the pages solemnly, and then
With a winning smile, the boy
With naivety succeeds
At the final moment, I cried
I always cry at endings

Lily's still young enough to be surprised by a happy ending and Jen's there to cry at them. What's my job? I dunno. Hold the box of tissues? I could do worse than that.

Grave of the Fireflies

No, not the heartbreaking animated movie of starvation in postwar Japan. Maybe a more accurate title would be "Some graves and some fireflies." But where's the poetry in that?

We went hunting for fireflies in the local cemetery again. Lily got so excited. She asked me to take a picture in her firefly catching outfit. Her wish is my command.


She's picky as only little kids can be about her costume. It had to be this shirt with the glow in the dark dragonflies, this pair of shorts, these little black dress shoes, these hair clips, that hair band and of course her butterfly catching net.

The cemetery is nice. (But then again, I'm partial to cemeteries). It's a fine and private place (as it were) that's ostensibly still open for business, but seems to have seen its heyday during the Spanish American war. I think the most recent year of death I've seen on a tombstone was from the 1970s.

(I wasn't kidding about the Spanish-American war. It's a running joke between Jen and me that there seems to be a disproportionate percentage of veterans from that war buried in this cemetery)

Lily had a blast. She was running everywhere waving her net, completely heedless of where she was going. I thought she was going to run after a firefly and wind up with a bruise that read "Flynn" or "McDermott" on her face. Jen summed it up exactly, "A lot of days the parenting gig is not what we imagined. THIS however, is EXACTLY what being a parent should be like every day." I took a little video of it on my phone. It's pretty dark, and I was going to edit it to improve it, but apparently my phone films in a format my freebie movie editing program can't handle. So just fiddle with the gamma on your monitor if you're going to watch it.

While we're on the subject of bugs and videos, our Wacky Wednesday movie was A Bug's Life, which was fairly good. Pixar films are generally pretty awesome (except for Cars, which was fucking dreadful) , but this seemed somehow incomplete. It was almost like "Proto-Pixar", as if they were still refining the tropes that would come to characterize their movies, even though it came after Toy Story, which is as Pixarish as movie as there ever was. I wish it were a little more little kid friendly. It seemed every few minutes, one bug or another was saying kill this or die that, and we didn't want to set Lily off. She seemed more or less oblivious to that, though. She liked it. Her favorite characters were the pillbugs. She really likes pillbugs (aka Roly Poly) . She had a couple in a little container, which she brought inside the house to show me. Then she promptly dropped it and spilled them all out. I think we got all of them, but at night I have nightmares of Ohmu growing in my walls.

Bonus! Names for pillbugs by region