People take pictures of each other

[austin_dern]

We got up early Sunday afternoon and chatted with my parents, who weren't put off that we had missed bunny_hugger's birthday altogether with our late night in Brooklyn. I think my mother was glad to see her so soon, really; the last time bunny_hugger visited it was something like four days before either saw the other. They had a birthday card for her, too, and only hoped that we'd be in early enough in the evening to have cake. We planned to; if nothing else, I needed to be at work awfully in the morning.

But what to do? At bunny_hugger's suggestion, we looked up movie times for Puss In Boots; there were showings at the theater near the Freehold Raceway Mall which would give us time to get something to eat and maybe ride the carousel there. We were not expecting a fantastic film, but we were tolerably entertained by G-Force when we saw it together, and sometimes good things happen from seeing a movie without expectations.

For lunch, or breakfast, or whatever you want to call it, we went to our traditional diner. It was oddly our only chance to go somewhere local-to-me to eat for the day, so we missed the Jersey Mike's stop. You know how traditions will be. At the diner we had each other, plus lunch, to enjoy, at all this was heightened that much more by the placemat coupons being printed with an odd set of minor printing errors. Some were the usual sorts of spelling glitches that appear in locally-produced, minimally-edited copy. But about a centimeter-wide column seemed to be double-printed with a bad offset, at least for most of the advertisements. We also discovered that the placemat printer advertised its services with a hotmail address. A hotmail address with a number in it, at that. (The number was, apparently, the date of the company's founding, but even so.)

We had enough time before the movie to wander the mall, a bit anyway, and we got a ride this time on the upper level of the double-decker carousel. Unfortunately we couldn't find a pair of mounts beside each other, and as the ride started while bunny_hugger had a horse I just hopped into a free swing. It rocked only a little on its own, probably the result of the rotation rather than any driven motion, but I was able to ride watching bunny_hugger all the time.

For the official anecdotes over all this, there was as we tried to buy our tickets a weirdly intricate problem for the lady in front of us. Apparently she was owed two dollars in change, and asked if she could just have a ticket to use at a later date. The rides are two dollars; the tickets are those standard-issue Office Depot-purchased raffle-style paper tickets, with no date marked on them, so I couldn't figure out why they couldn't just give her an untorn ticket. This was apparently against the rules, but the cashier couldn't figure a way to say that, so the debate ended up stuck on ``why can't I have a ticket?'' and ``you can't'', until the woman gave up and took her two dollars instead.

The other was that as we got off the ride I noticed a crumpled-up loyalty card with five out of ten rides punched. The only other person near enough for it to have come from said it wasn't his, so, I was left with the question, what to do about this card, halfway to being worth a free ride. I set it on the top of a shelf where fast-food trays get returned. Maybe someone found a place for it.

We had a bit of time to wander the mall, too, and in one of the ``girly costume jewelry'' class stores --- this one looked a bit upscale from Claire's, but not too much so --- bunny_hugger spotted an owl-pendant necklace. I'm glad to say that when I saw it I realized she'd like it quite a bit, and after thinking it over she did buy it. I may be slow but I'm starting to learn her taste. We also wandered through a ``brainy toys'' type store, one of those shops with the very expensive toys meant to be intellectual puzzles and all of which seem to be complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles made of wood. You know the kind. Toys you look at in the ``brainy toys'' store but never buy, and which turn up from vague relatives who know you're smart but have no idea what to get you.

I had mentioned that the Borders anchor store location was turned into a Halloween Costumes shop for the holiday, but that I didn't know what was there now. We didn't have time to investigate (it turns out to have turned into a ``Smart Toys'' for kids store), but ruled out a Christmas Stuff store because there's a Christmas Trees Shop elsewhere in the greater mall metropolitan region. (It's not connected to the mall, but is in a free-standing block with parking lots which abut the mall's circling road.) We did discover that since my last visit just before my class started the pet shop had closed down, and now I don't know where to go so I can stare at guinea pigs who always seem to be either judgemental or bored and napping hamsters.

The overall result is that while we had started out with enough time to make a leisurely visit of the mall, we were cutting it relatively close in getting to the actual theater, elsewhere in the greater mall metropolitan region. Even then we might not have been too badly off if there hadn't been a long line at the theater, with agonizingly slow-moving cashiers. When it looked like a second cashier opened up, about half the line, including us, went over to that, only to be ineffectually scolded by one of the ushers. Apparently there was just supposed to be the single line and he didn't want any splitting of it, and the second register was just opened up to help out. But he then asked if we had been waiting on the first line, and sure we had, which got him to say that was fine, then, we could stay. He just didn't want people not waiting long enough.

Puss In Boots was showing in two- and three-dimensional showings, and I'd picked an airing in 3-D because I misunderstood bunny_hugger's preferences. She wasn't wearing her contact lenses and expected wearing the polarized glasses over her regular glasses would produce a lousy viewing experience. But that wasn't a problem, for this film. And there was some good use of three-dimensionality in the film, too: in a few scenes the frame subdivides to show simultaneous action, in a very circa-1970-hey-did-you-see-Woodstock-the-movie way. In three dimensions, with the different subpanels having different depths of field, the framing provided by the black areas make everything pop into better and more interesting action.

Puss In Boots, you'll recall, we entered with low expectations since we remembered being disappointed with Shrek 2 and couldn't even work up the energy to bother with Shrek 3 and weren't sure how far that series had gone. But the movie double-crossed us by telling an honestly interesting story which avoided the ``I named a pop culture thing, isn't that as good as a joke?'' trap. The story got a little too convoluted --- the last act, as required, involved enough twists that I don't think anyone's motives hang together --- but it was certainly interesting enough, and with its Vaguely Mexican Or Spanish setting and the huge landscapes required made use of three-dimensional movies' great strength, showing the depth of view. (The movie makes a few references to Spain, which makes no sense, since it doesn't need to be set anywhere particular, and I can't read the geographic details as anything besides the Mexican/Southwest desert.) Satisfying work.

We did return home at a reasonable hour for even my parents, and shared cake, of a kind. See, the traditional cake for birthdays around our family has been ice cream cake, for reasons now lost to memory. I'd mentioned getting one on my birthday and bunny_hugger was a little envious as she never had them for her early-November birthday and didn't remember exactly when she last had an ice cream cake. So, we'd picked up one and had it 'Happy Birthday' inscribed. The only slight disappointment was the ice cream shop lacked the technology or skill to put icing roses on, but that's all right. We sang her happy birthday and shared that, as well as some petit-fours left over from the neighbor's birthday party which had also been the previous day.

And I had a couple gifts for bunny_hugger. A video game, for one --- Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Platinum, for the Mac, which yes, she gave me for my birthday, but now we can trade roller coasters when we have the time to design them. And a book as well, Arthur C Clarke's World Of Strange Powers, an early-80s compendium based on a British TV show documenting various bits of paranormal nonsense. bunny_hugger used to read books like this when she was young; I did too, and we loved them even as we didn't believe them. This had the general range of nonsense topics that doesn't seem to be published anymore, or at least not with the same modest efforts toward pointing out that yeah, this is all a bunch of nonsense.

It's based on a TV show for which Clarke mostly lent his name, although he included a few essays in which he talks about the paranormal and what's known and isn't, and he rates various paranormal phenomena in his estimate from +5 (nearly certain, even if not proved yet) to -3 (-4 being absolutely impossible, a condition he claims humans can't actually know). Putting the asymmetry to the side, the next eyebrow-raising thing is that Clarke lists a lot of stuff as ridiculously plausible --- maledictions, I think, got a +4 rating, barely less plausible than firewalking, which I would have thought was demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt what with it being easily demonstrable physically and obviously plausible theoretically. (Not that there's anything supernatural about it, just, it's a thing people can actually do.) Life after death? Precognition? Psychokinesis?

Really, reading over the essay, and allowing for Clarke wanting to live up to the generous spirit in the quote he cribbed from (I think) Philip Wrigley and his advertising dollars, that about half the book was nonsense but unfortunately he didn't know which half, Clarke comes across as surprisingly crank-prone considering how hard he was getting in his science fiction at the time. Granted, he started out with the normal set of science fiction writer assumptions of nonsense (faster-than-light travel, telepathy, psychokinesis, et al) and shed them one by one until he finally was left pretty much just believing in cold fusion, but it's startling to realize that a person so generally rational was that cranky that late in his career.

It wasn't as superlative a day as Saturday had been; what could be? But it was a lovely and quiet counterpoint to the long day in New York City. And if we had to go to bed early, to be awake Monday morning, well, we would at least have the start of Monday.

Trivia: X-15 pilot Mike Adams's wife and mother happened to visit the mission control room on 15 November 1967, the day Adams's X-15 spun (at hypersonic speeds) and crashed. Source: At The Edge Of Space: The X-15 Flight Program, Milton T Thompson.

Currently Reading: A Great Day In Cooperstown: The Improbable Birth Of Baseball's Hall Of Fame, Jim Reisler.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I assumed Puss in Boots was partly a Zorro pastiche and so the setting was meant to be some fairy tale equivalent of Spanish-colonial America.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The preponderance of the setting is definitely Spanish-Colonial or Mexican Fairy-Tale land. It's ... now I don't remember exactly but there were references to actual Spanish cities, which made for a distracting localization.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

the very expensive toys meant to be intellectual puzzles and all of which seem to be complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles made of wood.

I had a fair number of such puzzles as a child, but mine were all made from brightly-coloured plastic, as pleasing to look at as to play with. Last winter I decided I wanted a few for desktop toys, and it was disconcerting to find everything made of hardwood instead of plastic. I did finally manage to find a nice Soma Cube in aquamarine (mine used to be red) and a couple interlocking things made of lucite sheet apparently cut with a waterjet. Wood really does seem to be the dominant material for puzzles these days.

I'm left to wonder if it's only an aesthetic shift, or if such toys aren't as popular as they once were, and so are being made in a kind of cottage industry way out of wood, instead of being mass produced from plastic.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'd be inclined to put it down as an aesthetic shift. That and that polished and well-sanded and substantial-feeling wood can give the impression of being worth more, and that lets the price go up to absurd without looking impossibly absurd.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

We also discovered that the placemat printer advertised its services with a hotmail address

It's amazing that Hotmail seems like an antiquated notion, and yet, "According to comScore (August 2010) Windows Live Hotmail is the world's largest web-based email service with nearly 364 million users. Second and third are Yahoo! Mail (280 million) and Gmail (191 million)." --Wikipedia.

Sounds like a nice day. I'm vaguely pondering Puss In Boots at some point, that or The Muppets will likely be my movie of the season.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised to hear of so many Hotmail users, and admit wondering what fraction of that is spam-trap accounts and accounts opened in 1997 and fallow since the millennium. (Of course, I believe I have a Lycos account hanging around here somewhere.) In any case it's still the Baltic and Mediterranean to Google Mail's Park Place.

Puss In Boots wouldn't be a mistake. But I am really hoping that The Muppets doesn't turn out to be a disappointment.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Oh, I used to have an Excite account and never went to Hotmail myself.. but remember that you and I are not the average internet user; we're using Livejournal and talk on a MU*, and so do a lot of our friends, and that skews our perspective.

That said I like Gmail quite well, but I suspect Hotmail is probably pretty damn good, but not being something I use.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, we aren't average, no, but I doubt we're appreciably far outside the average, apart maybe from having a couple more years than Everybody In The World. We have our social media stuff, our relatively fixed web pages, our blogs, our real-time interactions, our asynchronous interactions, and I would b surprised if the profile of kind of stuff we do on the Internet is very different from anyone else's.

Anyway, I think it probably is as safe to make cheap jokes about Hotmail as it is to make them about the comic strip Marvin.