Another Countdown

Surprise! I can make another post.

Last year’s “Best Films I Watched” list went over pretty well, I think. I mean, “That I Watched” is a pretty big qualifier, especially when I, either by accident or deliberately, missed out on some pretty big-name affairs. Big names from the summer like Avengers: Endgame or even the December darlings like Uncut Gems or Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women are getting left by the wayside here, though I have no doubt I’m going to try to seek those movies out once I find the time.

Disclaimers out of the way, let’s get it started!

One Of Those Coinky-Dinks

Hey everyone,

This is going to end up sounding like another excuse post (because it is), but it turns out there are fifty-three Tuesdays in 2019, not the standard fifty-two, so between that, an itinerary that'll probably keep me away from being able to update this blog next Tuesday, and, well, a host of other things I'm not really interested in going into here, I figure next week would be as good enough as any for a break week. So that's exciting! Or it's a new kind of exciting anyway. A different kind than the promise of one post a week.

It's entirely possible that the way things are planned out and how I've been operating this blog, I might get the itch to post some sort of update next week anyway. That's also a possibility. I just don't want people to be expecting something late if the deadline rolls around and there's nothing new on the front page. But hey, the week after that, it'll be a new year! Isn't that something to look forward to?

Best wishes this holiday season, and I'll see you all when I see you,

-F

From Road Trip To Plane Flight

Planes are entirely different beasts compared to cars. I know I wrote something like this last year but it bears repeating, especially when I’ve experienced two particularly long trips of both varieties in the past few weeks. The lack of a view of the outside speeding by on a plane for example, unless you’re lucky or quick or both, is of particular note and only serves to exacerbate just how long you’re expected to be in one spot. And even when you can look out the window, at thirty-thousand feet, there’s not much else to see besides clouds.

Cars also have the option of stopping, while planes do not. And sure, not every place along the interstate is particularly interesting, but it’s the stopping that matters. Maybe more important than that, though, is the starting. Packing either way is the same, but there’s a lot more hassle in the act of getting onto an airplane.

I guess that’s the trade-off? Like, planes go quicker, but there’s also this feeling that I’m just accepting how air travel is these days. Which is often- well, there’s a reason comedians make quick jokes about it. So it’s not quite “unacceptable,” but it’s not the greatest. And outside of dedicated road-trip comedies, there isn’t the same amount of angst built in to travel by car.

But that also could be just a bias for the thing that’s been around longer. People have traveled for as long as there have been people, and (from my uneducated viewpoint) the jump from walking to horse to car seems like a natural progression. Flying, on the other hand, despite the mythologization of flying cars in media, just doesn’t fit that progression.

I am, of course, overlooking buses, which people do angst about on occasion. I will say I don’t personally have too much experience with the long-distance bus side of travel so I don’t know if that’s a better comparison or not. But I’ll close by wondering if there’s a way to find the best aspects of all three (or more?) and combine them into a new form of travel that’s much easier to appreciate. It’s certainly nice to imagine, at the very least. I can also imagine, though, that new mode just getting added to the pile of options, and the rest of the world just driving or flying along.

-F

A Joke

Hey everyone,

I'm a little late, but just after Thanksgiving trips are all the Christmas trips and my plans are no exception. There are enough things I still need to do that today's post is basically just this update, but I did want to at least leave a quick joke to justify posting at all or something like that.

*Ahem*

A pony walks into a bar. The bartender immediately recognized the pony and says, "Hey, aren't you Bubbles the Singing Pony? Why don't you give us a song?"

The pony shakes their head and says "No, sorry, I'm a little hoarse."

Thank you, see you next week.

-F

A Bit Of A Shill

This seems like something at least some people who read this would enjoy: I’ve recently been following a miniseries done by Canadian sketch comedy troupe LoadingReadyRun called Road Quest. What it is is basically having six of their members going on a road trip across British Columbia together in a style reminiscent of Top Gear and though of course it was scaled down to a more reasonable budget, there’s clearly a lot of heart that’s been put into it.

What I especially like is that it’s clear all the participants are actually friends with each other, like, when Top Gear’s hosts sniped at each other over walkie-talkies, you could occasionally sense some actual malice behind it (to my ears, at least). And maybe it’s my own projections onto the lives of each on-screen personality, but that’s not really there in Road Quest. Sure, there are moments of unfamiliarity -- a few of the duos admit that they never truly interacted with each other before the trip -- but that adds its own layer of charm to the proceedings as we, the viewers, watch that relationship grow over the course of ten days.

I don’t want to leave out the cinematography, either. There are several beautiful drone shots throughout the series that really emphasize the landscapes that these teams come across. But those you’ll have to see for yourself.

I’ve put a link to the first episode below. There are twelve planned episodes -- they’re up to Episode Seven now -- with a new one posted every Monday. I really hope you all enjoy it as much as I have; I wouldn’t share it if I didn’t love it.

-F

Road Tripping

I’ve ridden my fair share of long car rides and am about to go on another one. I don’t really have any advice, or super secret tech, though. Like, ten hours in a car is still ten hours in a car no matter how you look at it. But at the same time, it almost becomes like a sort of ritual? “Here are the things I’ll do in the car,” I say to myself every time, and some of those things even come true!

I’m also relatively young -- maybe that’s part of it. I can stand being in a car for hours on end while the world just passes by me. I’m also rarely the one driving. I can offer, and I have offered, but I frequently get turned down. So it really is just an exercise in staying in one seat for a while and the relatively young bones certainly do help.

There has also been an uptick in things to do. Books were always an option if one isn’t the type to get motion sick but various handheld devices can make the hours whiz by. And there’s always the hope for more sleep. Or the notes I have to read from various writing workshops. Or composing something wholly new. Any of these can pass an hour or two.

And other people? It depends on the people, I guess. But if you don’t want to deal with them, well, that’s what headphones are for, right?

-F

Fragments

When picking topics to write about on this blog, I find myself tending towards already having an expanded enough take to get at least the first few paragraphs down. Unfortunately, this leaves some topics doomed to fall through the cracks. What I thought I’d do this week is just throw out three of these not-completely-formed ideas just to give an idea of what I tend to think about. And who knows? Maybe I’ll come back to one of these in the future.

There’s a lot of online discourse about how some adaptations and remakes shouldn’t be made. For the former, there’s generally some sort of “unmakeable” label attached, like Watchmen (until 2009) or the philosophy of Alan Watts (until the video game Everything), and for the latter, people tend to ask, well, what’s wrong with the original? But in both cases, like the parentheticals already implied, aren’t there enough counterexamples to shut down these arguments? I even wrote about the two Suspiria movies on this very blog and talked at length about how they could be considered companions to each other.

After years in the foodservice industry, I came to the realization that restaurants very rarely operate at one hundred percent of their capability. Especially the chains and fast-food places. It’s a meme, for example, that the McDonald’s ice cream machine is always broken. It’s the same where I work. Sometimes the problems are more hidden, like, nobody needs to know that the ice machine gets in moods where it just won’t make ice, but sometimes you just need to tell customers, “There were actual bones in the meatballs so you can’t have any. No, I don’t know when we’re getting more” (for the record, that particular problem has since been resolved).

I just talked to someone who didn’t have a snow brush for their car. Who doesn’t have a snow brush? I wondered how they were going to get home in the blizzard that was going on at the time if I hadn’t been there with mine. But their car was newer, so maybe they just hadn’t gotten one yet?

-F