Happy New Year!

Lady Di's been feeding me a little too well this Holiday Season. Cherry pie with a crisp buttery crust. Yum! Oh, yeah, and my daughter, Caroline, made us some lovely chocolate macaroon cookies (Diane got a couple of 'em, but you gotta know I did most of the damage). Now, what to do about the four or five pounds I've packed on...

Anyway, I hope everyone's New Year is fun and safe.

Some Times You Feel Like a Nut; Sometimes You Don't.

You remember that old commercial for Mounds and Almond Joy candybars? Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't? No? Well, I do. It was like that for the denizens of 590 Otis Road last week. Among the movies we viewed over the Christmas holiday were "The King's Speech" and "Little Fockers". Both films feature Academy Award winning actors, but it's pretty unlikely you'd confuse them with each other.

"The King's Speech" is a much-ballyhoo'd critic's darling. Critically acclaimed, sure; but it's also entertaining and emotionally satisfying. "The King's Speech" follows the personal struggles of the man who would become King George VI. Colin Firth plays the stammering George brilliantly. George is pushed by his wife, played by Helena Bonham Carter, to seek the help of an untitled Australian-born speech therapist, played by Geoffrey Rush. Rush turns in an Oscar-worthy performance as a frustrated actor turned speech coach, Lionel Logue, but it's Helena Bonham Carter's work as George's wife that I enjoyed the most (but then again, she makes any movie she's in better: "Fight Club" was the Brad Pitt/Edward Norton show, but without Carter's foil it'd've been a lot less; Beatrix LeStrange in the Harry Potter movies would've been a good role for anybody, but she owns it now).

And what's a movie about British Royalty without an exploration of class differences? Interesting juxtaposition between George's need to consort with commoner Logue for the good of the Empire; and that of his brother, "David"- briefly King Edward- who abdicated in order to experience connubial bliss as husband to twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson. This is a wonderful movie. It's a history movie that plays like a sports movie: Will George be able to set aside his fears to lead his people at the on-set of World War II? Will he learn to love himself and to be and have a friend? Will be able to get through the most important speech of his life? When George greets his wife at the end of the movie, you can almost hear Rocky shouting "Adrian!" into the crowd at the end of his title fight. As we walked out of the lovely Terrace Theater in Charleston, Lady Di heard a fellow theater-goer opine, "That's the best movie I've seen in five years".

Which brings me to the other movie I saw over the weekend...

"Little Fockers" is the third installment in the Ben Stiller/Robert DeNiro "Focker" franchise. I didn't expect much, and I wasn't disappointed. Projectile vomiting, crotch jokes and broad humor are generally a hit with audiences, if generally not with critics. I'm not sure The Three Stooges ever won an Oscar, but I'd bet you money that more people know Curley's laugh than the name of
Citizen Kane's sled. You don't go to McDonald's looking for Roast Duck with an orange glaze, do you? During our visit to the Boro's lone movie theater, one lady howled with laughter during "Little Fockers". I saw her talking to her husband as we all exited the movie. "Well, I kind of enjoyed that", she noted, with a look of embarrassment. Me, too (just don't tell anybody).

Merry Christmas!

Culture Club.

I'm not in any book clubs; Lady Di is in one, though, and I get to feed on the crumbs under their table. She buys the books from Walterboro's Downtown Books, reads 'em (mostly), and discusses them over coffee or wine. When she's done with the selections, I get my grubby little mitts on 'em. Lately they've been on a curious cultures kick: Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larson; The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, and Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian are all good glances into different ways of life.

I didn't want to read "Three Cups of Tea". Pakistan and Afghanistan are really a long way away, and they're filled with Muslims, for cryin' out loud! But the book is really good. American Greg Mortenson started out as a mountain climber, but his failed mission to scale the second tallest mountain in the world, K2, in Western Himalayan range in Northern Pakistan changed his life. The book, well told by David Oliver Relin, is part biography, part adventure story, part sociology treatise, and part travelogue, seasoned with a pinch of philosophy and great deal of human compassion. It turns out that girls, even Muslim girls, are treasures, and deserve a basic education. It turns out that a lot of villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan don't have even basic buildings for schools and no money to pay teachers. Mortenson makes a compelling case that private, moderate, people (whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or whatever) had better build and support schools, or folks with more extremist views will. It also turns out that Mortenson is a pretty amazing guy.


The plots in Stieg Larson's "Girl" series, feature lots of suspense and action, and conspiracies and subplots galore. Kind of like a Swedish John Grisham, but with less smart-ass dialogue. It makes the "different cultures" list because the sensibility in many of the Swedish relationships in those novels just feel different from American ones: John McEnroe's American hot-tempered tennis star versus the cool resolve of Bjorn Borg.


Sherman Alexie's "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" (with art by Ellen Forney) was an insightful, personal, and very readable novel about Arnold "Junior" Spirit. Arnold is a kid raised in a loving, but highly dysfunctional, home on Wellpinit, an Indian Reservation in Washington state. He struggles in that community, and in Reardan, the nearby white community where he ultimately attends school, but that the struggle is what molds us. As Arnold observes:

"(My friend Gordy) tutored me and challenged me, but he made me realize that hard work- that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task- is joyous.

In Wellpinit, I was a freak because I loved books.

In Reardan, I was a joyous freak."

It's a novel, but it feels true. Was it Chief Seattle who said, "I don't know if it happened or not, but I know it's true"?


When Lady Di suggested I read "The Help", I'd categorized it as "chick-lit", and only reluctantly cracked the cover. Author Kathryn Stockett presents the stories from the viewpoints of several different protagonists in pre-Civil Rights Act Mississippi: Aibileen and Minnie are African-American maids- "The Help"- to aspiring writer, "Miss Skeeter", and mean-spirited Hilly, and Skeeter's other white bridge-club friends. I was just born the year this novel is set. The schools my brother and I attended in Florida were segregated until about sixth grade (fifth grade for my brother), though our pee-wee football teams were not. I remember Rosa, my grandmother's maid, and Kathleen, my mom's maid, as people that cared about me and my brother. It never occurred to me to wonder what their lives were like. In spite of myself, I came to care about the characters in "The Help", and felt a modicum of satisfaction at the emotional payoff at the end of the book.

Leaf Me Alone.

On the first day of Christmas, I'm pretty sure the pear tree in which the partridge perched wasn't a Callery Pear Tree. Sure, Callery Pears are pretty. But if the pear tree that that present presenting personage was a Callery, said dude better've gotten his lady a decent yard-guy to go with it, because those trees are messy. Big time.


I think I moved ten or twelve wagon loads of those stupid leaves. Times like these, I remember the words of an interesting old bloke who owns a jewelry store downtown: "I got no use for anything deciduous". Amen, brother. Amen.

Watts Going On.

Not counting outside porch-lights, flood lights, and in-door appliance lights, our residence contains 66 lightbulbs. That's a lot of lightbulbs. Most of the bulbs in the house are standard, garden variety incandescent bulbs. Compact Florescent Lightbulbs (CFLs) use considerably fewer watts of energy to produce a comparable number of "lumens". It only takes 13 watts for a CFL to produce 825 lumens of light, which is about equal in brightness to the 850 lumens produced by a standard 60 watt incandescent lightbulb- less than a third of the energy to produce the same amount of light (I had to look this stuff up in Wikipedia. Hey, I'm no math-wiz like my friend Sarah's daughter, Kendall!).

Lady Di has been striving, of late, to render 590 Otis Road a "greener" space, so we used a $25.00 Lowe's giftcard we'd gotten to purchase some CFLs. So far, we've replaced about a quarter of the incandescent bulbs in the house. Why not more? Well, CFLs cost about five times as much. The energy savings will let us recoup that expense eventually, but five bucks a bulb is still a lot of cabbage.

...and they're not that pretty, yet, either. No point in having a nice chandelier if you have to pack it with ugly bulbs! Still, the technology's improving. You can get CFLs to use with dimmer switches now, so it can't be too much longer before they can make them attractive enough to display at dinner parties.

Santa, You Sleigh Me, Too.

Among some old Christmas decorations that I consigned to the wastebin was this brutal relic. Apparently, some intrepid "Twilight" extra wanted to make sure the undead got their share of toys, and put the bite on the fat man. If a wooden stake is what you need to kill a vampire, then I guess the only way to kill a vampiric Kris Kringle would be with a Kringle kris, like the one at left. Well, that's what it looks like, anyway.