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Today Mom declared that she had finally tired of our single Halloween decoration, so I moved it outside into the seasonally-appropriate shamrock patch.

Rot in peace, uncarved 2023 pumpkin.

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One of the drawbacks of having no hair left is that there's no cushion to protect your scalp when you climb a stepladder to replace insulation that has fallen from the ceiling joist in your studio and you smash your head against the corner of a dangling two-by-four you installed to hold canvas stretchers. It could happen to anyone.

It hurt. A lot. And the worst part was that I did it while I was home alone, so I had to clean and dress the hole in the top of my head myself. I'd show you a selfie picture of the damage, but Mom always says, "No one wants to see your injuries."

So instead, here's a picture of yesterday's sunset on my street.

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For reasons I won't go into (mainly: vanity), I've recently been re-reading old blog posts. What stands out the most to me is not how damn clever I am (I already knew that) but how I have a real problem typing the word "it's" when I mean "its" and vice versa.

For the record, "its" (no apostrophe) is the possessive form of the traditional gender-neutral singular pronoun, used to demonstrate ownership, as in:

The battle station is heavily shielded and carries a firepower greater than half the star fleet. Its defenses are designed around a direct large-scale assault.

Meanwhile, "it's" (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of the unpossessive, laissez-faire "it" and the present tense third-person singular being verb "is," as in:

The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port.

As you can see, despite the its/it's pair being one of the most common confusions in the world of English grammar, I obviously know they're two different words, and I know how they should be used in a sentence (and I've known ever since Star Wars). So why do I so often type one when I mean the other? Is it a birth defect? A mental illness? Keyboard gremlins? I wish I had a better answer than "I'm too lazy to proofread my own posts," but here we are.

Now let's blow this thing and go home.

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6/2317. Time Bomb Y2K (2023)
This documentary has no commentary or interviews, just clips of footage taken from original sources as the world marched toward a potential disaster on January 1, 2000. The clip selection (perhaps out of necessity) tends towards typically overblown media sensationalism, and the end result is like leaving a cup of history out in the sun and reviewing it later after the sane parts had evaporated out. A history reduction! Its fever pitch doesn't quite match my memories of the era, but that would admittedly make for less entertaining television.

7/2318. This Place Rules (2022)
Another documentary of a different sort as journalist Andrew Callaghan records himself traveling around the country attending Trump rallies in the weeks leading to January 6, 2021. Unlike Jordan Klepper's similar pieces for The Daily Show, Callaghan's point of view isn't as obvious, sometimes seeming more empathetic and sometimes entirely apathetic. At times, this feels a bit like an art piece, and as with all things in Trump World, it's hard to ascertain how much is truth and how much is performative. If nothing else, it's an interesting artifact of its era.

8/2319. Thriller 40 (2023)
There are plenty of interviews in this documentary celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller album. There's a lot of talk about how Thriller and the artistic genius behind it changed the world of music and entertainment for the better but very little discussion about the controversial legacy of Jackson himself. Maybe that's the way it should be; it just felt a little hollow looking backwards at what I (and all the interviewees) know to be in Jackson's future.

9/2320. The Liquidator (1965)
This spy action/comedy, with a theme performed by my favorite James Bond theme-songstress, Shirley Bassey, features Rod Taylor as a British secret agent with a license to kill... who hires other people to kill for him, which is a smaller part of the plot than you'd expect. In fact, the story is a bit of a meandering hot mess as it struggles to exploit a niche that other James Bond rip-offs hadn't yet. Honestly, I don't know that I would have made it all the way through if it wasn't for the prominent role of given to Jill St. John, my favorite Bond Girl.

Which is not to say that the movie is entirely stupid. It's hard to read in the image above, but "Refreshes you best" was indeed Coke's international slogan in 1959. Here is also cleverly serves here as a visual double entendre for the sexual proclivities of our hero, who works in a diner called the Bird Cage where he stalks attractive (and willing) young women -- a fact that is entirely relevant to the third act twist. Oh, well. They can't all be Diamonds Are Forever.

10/2321. The Tale of Zatoichi (1962)
The Internet tells me that the blind ronin Zatoichi was an incredibly popular action hero in Japan. I don't see why (no pun intended), but the film, the first of many for the character, isn't exactly bad as it is a little slow and dull. But maybe it was better than whatever else Japanese audiences were being offered in 1962. Maybe it took some time for Dr. No to cross the Pacific. (The fifth Bond film, Japanese-set You Only Live Twice, wouldn't arrive in theaters until 1967. By then, there had already been 14 Zatoichi films!)

More to come.

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With football season over, one of the things I've been listening to while walking the dogs is the "Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers" podcast in which brothers Seth and Josh Meyers talk to their many, many celebrity friends about (surprise, surprise) trips they've taken with their families.

Yes, I have been very dismissive of podcasts in the past. And yes, I concede that listening to people I don't know talk about their fancy globetrotting is not always quite as endearing as they might think it is. But sometimes I need something in my ears between Louis' rabid barking at passing joggers, and this fits that bill.

Anyway, the point here isn't an endorsement of podcasting (or your judgement of my pastimes), but that I wanted to mention that apparently I have more in common with Seth Meyers than I previously realized.¹

By way of explaining why his family calls him "Soofie," he mentioned that as a bookish youth in the 1980s, he frequently dressed in Ocean Pacific apparel when it was at the zenith of its popularity. Seth is only very slightly older than I am, so he was probably wearing OP t-shirts and board shorts in Connecticut about the same time I was in Georgia. I don't know what excuse Seth had for dressing like a fashion victim, but my attire came from my aunt, whom I believe worked sales for OP at the Atlanta Apparel Mart and had samples to spare.

As a result of Seth's beach bum wardrobe, it seems his Yankee friends called nicknamed him "Surfie" (eventually mangled into "Soofie"). Meanwhile, I was saddled with the Mayberry-eque "Opie." On what I am sure is a completely unrelated note, Seth appears to still talk to his childhood friends whereas I definitely do not.

And now, three-and-a-half decades removed from that childhood trauma, Seth's a famous comedian with his own talk show and podcast. And I have a blog! We're like twins!²

¹ The Venn diagram intersection between us previously contained only "Caucasian American male," which, frankly, isn't all that exclusionary.

² Of the Schwarzenegger / DeVito variety; I believe they're called "infernal" twins.

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Happy Valentine's Day!

Footnote 1: Yes, this will eventually be displayed by the mailbox in the front yard, but it's pretty obvious that Oscar's native habitat is among the junk piles in my messy, messy studio.

Footnote 2: I started this piece back in April 2023 and have only just now finished it. While Oscar's fuzz did take a long time, most of that delay was because I was working too hard in 2023. Blech. I promise not to do that again.

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