Puttering in the Study

Grayson & Jamie at Scout Camp

Today Jamie and Grayson got back from "Mom & Me" cub scout camp at Camp Pirtle (where I went to summer camp in 1976).  They went down yesterday and spent the night in a tent (no, seriously), did all kinds of neat activities, including crafts, shooting, and archery, and seem to have had a great time.  A highlight was on the way to supper Saturday evening, when they saw a bald eagle.  The pictures are all uploaded to the Pack 239 photo album, and selected ones are in the family album as well.

A special salute goes out to Jamie.  The day before spending the night with Grayson in a tent in the middle of the woods she was in the lap of luxury at a spa in Napa Valley, picking wines based on whether they were aged in French or American oak.  High maintenance she may be, but she's undeniably versatile. 

Kingdom of Heaven - Ridley Scott

Watched this two weeks ago, and listend to it again yesterday while staining the study ladder.  Good movie, I thought.  Good visuals, solid acting, and a good story - I remembered the evacuation of Jerusalem from my recent Byzantine readings, so I guessed the ending before it happened.  I watched the extras last night and they kept referring to the story as being mostly true, so I got curious and read the relevant chapter of Runciman's History of the Crusades (you have to love having a library where you have that book - in a three volume Folio edition, no less - available to check a few facts now and then.)  Sure enough, the first paragraph of the chapter laid out the basic story with all the characters - the leper king of Jerusalem, Baldwin, his sister and her husband from hell, and the war-mongering nobleman, and the the crucial Battle of Hattin that led to the reconquest of Jerusalem by the Saracen leader Saladin (who, according to both the book and history was pretty much the epitome of an honorable king, in sharp contrast to the Christian crusaders he faced).  The surprise was that Orlando Bloom's character, Balian of Ibelin was there as well, and most of what he did in the movie he really did, including the role he played at the siege of Jerusalem.  Now what they left out was that he wasn't a nobleman's illegitimate son who steps into the role of leader - he was a mature man with a family and the only reason he was at Jerusalem was that he had a pass from Saladin to get his wife and children out.  Problem was that the people needed a leader and wouldn't let him leave, so he had to ask Saladin basically to default on the pass and resume warfare again him.  Always a class act, Saladin not only agreed - he gave Balian's family an escort out of the city to safety, and reportedly wept to see the end of such a noble line when they passed through his camp.  Of course this is the same guy that, when he discovered that a young noble's wedding feast was going on in a castle he was besieging, gave orders not to bombard the tower in which the newly married couple was staying.

All in all, a good movie, and a very interesting visualization of the Crusades.  My one complaint was that it did seem that they were ratcheting things up a bit for the sake of appearances - perhaps to avoid looking shabby by comparison to The Lord of the Rings.  I don't think Jerusalem was quite that built up (it looked suspiciously like Babylon in Alexander), and I'm pretty sure that Calvary was never at the top of a prominent hill - in fact by 1183 or so it has been cut down to an outcrop of rock within a church for about 800 years.  Thus while I liked the all-night vigil Balian makes on it when he arrives in Jerusalem before burying his wife's cross on it, it wasn't quite historically correct.  But the budget probably didn't include a set for the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and it would have been confusing and hardly romantic for him to make a vigil in the chapel in the church.

But I did enjoy the movie, and was pleasantly surprised at how well it told the true story.  I also liked the characters' discovery of the value of having a truce in a place like Jerusalem, where all faiths had the ability to go to their places of worship, their respect for one another, and their struggle against fanatics who wanted war.  The Templars' "God wills it!" cry in favor of war and shouts of "Blasphemy!" when told that the crusaders would likely lose such a war were painfully familiar.

Library cards for Collin & Parker

Took Collin and Parker to the library yesterday to get their cards and first books.  It took a while to get their pictures taken, but they loved it, loved the little house they could sit and read in, and picked out their own books, which we read last night.

Judgment of Paris: California v. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine

Picked this up in the Grgich Hills winery in Napa this week after the staff told us the story of Grgich's wine winning the Paris tasting in 1976, and that really jump-starting the Napa Valley wine industry.  Told by the only reporter present, this is supposedly the true story of the legendary Paris Tasting of 1976 -- a blind tasting where French judges shocked the industry by choosing unknown California wines over France's best -- and its revolutionary impact on the world of wine.

The Gallery of Regrettable Food - James Lileks

Got this in the (outstanding) gift shop for the Culinary Institute of America's Rutherford campus in Napa shortly before dinner in the CIA's Greystone restaurant Wednesday night.  It's a hilarious look at the recipes and photography of the cokking from the 1950's.  Just flipping through I ran across the section on Jell-O desserts and was hooked.  I annoyed Jamie the way I was laughing out loud at it waiting for our table at dinner.  Haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

How To Raise A Gentleman - Kay West

Bought this in the store at Brix (a restaurant) in Napa night before last as we were having the final dinner of our Napa Valley trip, and read it on the way home yesterday.  Useful advice on how to raise boys, from manners to parenting tips.  Virtually nothing I didn't already know, but perhaps a lot I hadn't thought about.  Good practice thinking through issues before they ever come up.  Also learned that "yes sir" and "yes ma'am" are a Southern thing.  I didn't know that.

Grayson and his space shuttle

Grayson built a space shuttle at Lowe's a few weeks ago (the paitn scheme is his - we painted it while I was working on another model).  I finally got around to getting a picture of him with it.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers

This is one of the best pieces of writing I have read in a while.  My favorite part was the introduction, including the inside cover and guide on reading the book, which is the first example of an American writers using the madcap style of, say, Douglas Adams, Jasper Fforde and, well, Monty Python.  It was laugh out loud funny, as were other parts of the book.  Basically, this is the Hitchhiker's Guide to Losing Both Parents From Cancer and Raising Your Younger Brother.  I'm not joking.  If you've read Hitchhiker's, you'll understand exactly what this book is about.

The book itself is a mainly-true memoir of Eggers' parents' death from cancer and his experiences raising his younger brother and running a magazine in San Francisco.  The amazing thing to me is that Eggers succeeds in presenting an essentially objective view of his subjective existence - he can show the silly and shortsighted things he does as what they are, which are - well, silly and shortsighted.  It's also refreshing to see him explain what he was doing with the magazine he was publishing at the time, which was essentially knock everything simply because it was popular.  It's really funny that he can lay out their "we're the youth who are going to change the world" belief without taking it as seriously as they no doubt did at the time.  The scenes where people step out of character in ordre to help him move his story along or tell some back story are really, really funny.  The writing style is all over the place, with daydreams and fantasies spilling out all over the place, but that's precisely how your mind works at that age - it's just that no one has written that down before.  It's uber-realism - not attempting to translate how the mind works into an artifical first or third person writing style, as we're accustomed to.  Where others writers would simply say that a person was confused, or a mass of memories or thoughts rushed through their head as they watched X happen, he actually takes you on the ride.  I would expect the writing to tone down as he ages simply because your brain doesn't take you on quite as wild rides on a daily basis.  But, again, maybe that's just because I went to law school.

Basically, it's just a really well-told story of somebody doing things that don't make a lot of sense.  That it's the author that was doing them - and can still tell the story this dispassionately - is amazing.  Somebody ought to make a movie out of this.

One last thing.  About the title - when I was a freshman at ETSU doing a lot of writing for New Center for Learning classes I had a friend (Darrell Bean) who wrote like this - inconoclastic and wild and crazy titles (but without the self-awareness Eggers has - Darrell was simply posing and assuming an antiestablishment persona as most of us did at that age).  I copied the titles, so I have a little fondness for weird titles like this.  The title is appropriate for the style but it is also, as numerous reviewers have noted, damn neear to truth in advertising.  This is a really great book.