Puttering in the Study

Grayson had a good day at school

  See!

Jamie and Grayson watching "Miss Congeniality"

This afternoon Jamie and Grayson watched Miss Congeniality in the purple room.  Jamie and I like the movie, and Grayson likes it because it's got the "strong lady."  He now wants to dress like an FBI agent because of Sandra Bullock.  Hopefully after watching this he won't want to dress like a beauty contestant.

By the way, he's really not asleep - he's just clowning around.  He doesn't wear shirts to sleep in any longer because he's a "grownup" now - just pajama pants.  Haven't been able to convince Jamie he's right about that.

DVD Recorder/VCR

The addition of DVD/VCR players around the house continues.  Yesterday we got a RCA DRC 8295 combination DVD/VCR player/recorder at Wal-Mart to replace the one in the den (which is hooked up to the TiVo unit).  Reason was that with the small memory (30 hours or so) on the TiVo unit, combined with the VCR's inflexibility (because the remote is broken) we can't get recorded programs off the TiVo and onto tape to free up space, so we really needed a DVD recorder.  In addition, because the DVD/VCR in the movie room won't play tapes (for some reason the projector isn't getting the signal from the VCR part of the unit) we can't play tapes in the movie room - have to be on DVD.  And it's better if we can record my history (or Battlestar Galactica) programs to DVD, so I can watch them in the movie room, because my study TV is so small I really can't see things very well on it, so I don't actually ever watch the programs I record.

This had the side benefit of letting us move the old DVD/VDR, which plays just fine, into the twins' room, where we paired it with Grayon's old TV/VCR, which we stopped using after the VCR broke.  But it still make a  perfectly acceptable TV for another player, and the look on the twins' faces when they saw that they could play Thomas in their room (instead of having to go to Grayson's) was priceless. 

I just started trying to record programs to DVD-RW discks, and will try DVD+R disks next.  Hopefully I can start offloading the seven hours of BG I have so far for the second season.  I have already ordered the first season, so I may have a BG marathon when it comes in next month and I have ten hours of the second season as well.  The old big screen TV in the den (which will be ten years old in January) is just not a real good unit to watch anything serious on.

Alexander - Oliver Stone

Watched the theatrical release DVD last night (as opposed to the director's cut) and didn't think much of it.  There are some nice visuals, and the acting (Colin Farrell in particular) is quite good, but the story is chopped up strangely, with the plot essentially dead-ending when Alexander is disinherited and exiled by his father at 19, after which the narrator skips ahead six years to when Alexander has (a) become king; and (b) conquered the known world except the Persian Empire.  Seriously.  While the action inexplicably comes back late in the movie to cover how he became king after his father's murder, it never explains how he got back in his father's good graces.

The battle scenes are uniformly (no pun intended) confusing, and the longer the movie drags out the more you come to agree with his soldiers that it's time to go home.  Farrell does a good job of showing Alexander's change from a soft youth to an increasingly disturbed ruler.  One thing I thought was missing was his transformation from whining (disinherited) heir to the throne to ruler of most of the known world, which - literally - takes place in one scene, with only Anthony Hopkins' narration for a fig leaf.  A flshback later helps show the transformation, but it isn't nearly enough. 

Angelina Jolie does an outstanding job as the ultimate stage mother, but her effectiveness is hurt by the movie's refusal to age her at all until Alexander's death (at age 33).  She is last shown when he was 25, granted, but still, her body and face don't change a line from about age 5 for the next 20 years.  By that time she's necessarily in her early forties in an era when that was late middle age at best, and she should have been at least somewhat leathery, wrinkled, and tubby, if for no reason to make clear that she and her son aren't the same age in the key scene after Philip's death where she pushes him to be king.  And it would have helped show her living through her son because clearly her day in the limelight was over.  Frankly, in an era before bras, but after the advent of gravity, her breasts simply aren't believable at that point.  Although I certainly did try.  And it's a shame because she nailed that role - the crazier her character became the better she was, but her beauty increasingly works against her because you figure they has to be some plot-related reason why she's still this beautiful.  And there isn't.

Flwed movie, and the visuals (which is often what I';m interested in) aren't even that great.  The battle scenes are all-too-obviously speeded up at times, and while there's a lot of blood and gore, I think Troy looked better and was clearer.  And by comparison to the Lord of the Rings - well, there is no comparison.  It was clearer and looked more realistic (believe it or not).  The best scenes are the pagenatry of entering Babylon, which were good, and the incredible vistas in the mountains of Afghanistan when Alexander pursued the remnants of the Persian Empire, and searched for the "outer sea", but instead ran into what I guess were the Himalayas.  One thing the movie did do was make me understand what he was trying to do - he was searching for the end of the world where the sea ended the continent, so he's know he'd conquered all there was to the east, and could sail back.  Whether that's true or not I don't know, but it made sense.

Grayson's kindergarten class photo

I finally found Grayson's kindergarten class pgoto, i.e. last year, and got a frame for it for his room.  But I thought I'd post it as well so everyone could see what we're dealing with.  Grayson is at bottom left.

Taking Lives

Jamie and I watched this movie this afternoon during the twins' nap - I think it's the first movie we've gotten to sit down in the movie room!  Good serial killer murder mystery - we enjoyed it very much.

Dinner at OS2

Last night Jamie and I had dinner at OS2 (formerly Venue 105) in downtown Marshall.  We noticed that yesterday was the first night the new restaurant was open, and thought it was a good excuse to get a babysitter.  We actually turned onto North Washington to go downtown for dinner - can't recall ever actually using the gateway to downtown Marshall for that before, and I remarked to Jamie "how many generations back do you suppose we'd have to go since anyone in either of our families went to downtown Marshall on a Friday night for dinner?"

The owner of the Oxford Street Restaurant and Pub chai n, Denny Phillips, took over the resturant after the first operator, which had been running it as Venue 105, with the oyster bar Brophy's next door, closed down a few weeks ago.  Marshall is the first of a proposed new concept of resturants in similar markets in our area - hence the new title "OS2".

My principal observation is that it isn't Venue, and it isn't "fine" dining - which is a good thing.  As fancy as Venue was, and as much as I liked the fine dining aspect (I don't recall the problems with inconsistent food or rising prices that others had) it was too refined for the local palate.  The new menu is less expensive (the owner says his goal is for a couple to be able to have dinner for $25), and much plainer, meaning a good selection of largely familiar appetizers, three kinds of chicken, a couple of steaks, chops, seafood and a couple of pasta dishes.  Fairly simple and familiar fare - there's nothing that you can't figure out immediately what it's going to taste like.  As for pricing, a ribeye is $12.95 and a filet is $19.95, and they're available with a salad and baked potato.  Creative it isn't - familiar and good it is. 

Jamie and I split a fried dill pickles appetizer, which was outstanding, and she had beef medallions while I had the filet with baked potato. The filet wasn't exactly what I was expecting - it was thinner and wider than filets I'm used to, but it was cooked perfectly and couldn't have tasted better.  (Apparently this guy knows how to cook steaks).  We had glasses of Messina Hof wine (chardonnay and cabernet) from their temporarily limited wine cellar, and both were good, their Aggie background notwithstanding.  I made the mistake of ordering cheesecake for dessert, and after fighting Jamie off so I could eat practically the whole thing I walked out painfully overstuffed - it was the real deal, thick as a brick and thoroughly chilled.

As I said, the menu is ordinary, but exceptionally well-done, and hits the local taste buds perfectly.  There are not many locals that like fancy foodie-type cuisine, as we do, but many that would like a good steak or seafood or pasta, maybe with a glass of wine, on a white tablecloth, at a reasonable price.  The menu is something that they recognize and know they'll enjoy, and for the restaurant to succeed, that's crucial.  Most of the people locally with the money to eats out like food that caters to their tastes, and this does.  Regrettably, there wasn't a local demand suficient for the more exploratory cuisine that Venue had - I expect there will be for OS2.  In a perfect world we could have both - but in Marshall Texas we can, for the moment, have one, but not the other.  But it's a great deal better than not having either, which is where we were until recently. 

The Lexington Goes Down - A.A. Hoehling

After reading Stanley Johnston's Queen of the Flattops, the was a disappointment.  Hoehling's book was written in 1971, and was based on numerous interviews with survivors.  The problem is that he is too true to the survivors' accounts, using quoted language in virtually every (short) paragraph, many times when it isn't necessary.  For example, he tells us that so and so said to "break out the sandwiches."  Did that really need to be in quotes?  And every person identified is given his nickname in quotes, further breaking up the flow.  I found myself wishing for Walter Lord to come in and fold two or three paragraphs together into a good narrative, as he did so well in Incredible Victory.  Also, the story kept jumping from ship to ship in the task force, and I frequently found myself lost, not sure what deck I was on.  I will say this for the book, though - he told the story of the men going down the side into the water, with the ship drifting down on them, well - that's isn't something that Johnston did, or Lord covered in Incredible Victory with the similar scene of the abandonment of the Yorktown.  He painted good word pictures of the very different abandonment of the Lexington, and gave me a visual picture of the scene that I didn't have before.

Oddly, Hoehling doesn't always write like this.  I read his 1974 The Franklin Comes Home, which is essentially the same story three years later with a happy ending, and the writing style is quite different, and fixes the things that bothered me above.  But as it is, this book was a disappointment.  I'm glad someone got these stories down while the survivors were still alive.  But I wish the story had been told a little more artfully.

Parker, Grayson & Collin

Just thought I'd post this photo we had made this spring of Parker, Grayson and Collin.  Awfully cute, aren't they?

Grayson's space shuttle

Yesterday Grayson and I worked on his space shuttle made out of the contents of a box from Levenger (cardboard and styrofoam sheets).  Here he is posing in the shuttle under construction, with the control panel and engine not yet installed, but the wings and tail in place.