Best Films of 2018

I have a friend (he knows who he is) who, every year, sends me a New Year's Day greeting that includes his lists of favourite books, movies, trips, etc., of the old year. I wanted to be ready for him, so I started keeping track of the movies I saw during the year.

For the first time, his NYD card didn't include his top movie of the year.

Still, I had this long list of movies I'd seen, along with a rating I'd given each (one to five stars), so I thought I'd publish it here, for no particular reason. I know it's out of date, but I don't care.

Five-Star Movies:
None

Four-Star Movies:
The Greatest Showman  
Crazy Rich Asians
The Green Book
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society
Blindspotting

Three-Star Movies:
Hostiles
Game Night
Red Sparrow
Ready Player One
Leave No Trace
The Spy Who Dumped Me
Mile 22
Juliet, Naked
Bad Times at the El Royale
22 July
Widows
Hunter Killer

Two-Star Movies:
Black Panther
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Call Me By Your Name
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Equalizer 2
Mission Impossible: Fallout
The Old Man and the Gun
Bohemian Rhapsody
Sweet Land

One-Star Movies:
Tomb Raider
Rampage
I Feel Pretty
Blockers
Deadpool 2
Life of the Party
Uncle Drew
Ant Man and the Wasp
Skyscraper
Johnny English Strikes Again
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

In posting this, I find that I have absolutely no memory of some of these movies; others are recalled to mind just by seeing the title. I should probably lower or raise the score based on how memorable the movies are, but some of them I remember only how very bad they were.

Narcissism's Great Leap Forward

And the Golden Microphone goes to...

Danielle Slaton, former US international soccer player, commenting on the performance of the Women's World Cup's host team in its match against Nigeria, in the 65th minute:

"It looks right now like France couldn't 

hit water if they fell out of a boat."

The French did manage to get a win by a single goal on their second chance at a penalty kick, after the first attempt went wide. (They got a do-over because the Nigerian keeper stepped off the line a few inches just before the first kick was taken. I object to that outcome because (1) the French penalty-kicker did not approach the ball at a steady pace, but slowed her last step, practically guaranteeing that the keeper -- who naturally would have anticipated the timing of the kick from the kicker's first few steps -- would move when the ball would have been kicked had the kicker maintained the pace she'd established; and (2) since the kick went wide of the goal, the keeper's coming off the line had no effect on the play. In a world free of nitpicking video review, the infraction by the keeper would rightly have been waved off as insignificant.)

Danielle Slayton (Fox Soccer)

Don't Believe It

I got talked into trying SpectrumMobile service. The biggest selling point for me was that it piggybacks on Verizon's network, promising the same excellent quality service for about a fourth of the price.

It ain't so.

Spectrum Mobile shipped me two new LG phones, with software that made it fairly easy to transfer info from our old phones to the new ones. Service here in town was not noticeably different.

Then I went on a trip to Florida. Once I passed out of the city, I had, essentially, no service of any kind. I had no phone signal almost the entire way. Occasionally I would have one or two bars, in cities like Houston and New Orleans -- not enough, I learned, to actually make a call. For data, I could get no 4G signal, and usually couldn't even get a 3G signal. Mostly I had no signal whatsoever, though occasionally I'd have a 1G signal. Which is very close to no signal whatsoever.

As I got almost to Tampa I finally had enough of a signal to enable me to use GPS navigation to my hotel ... sort of. At critical moments it would cut out, so I would hear instructions such as "In one mile." That's it, just "In one mile." Not very helpful. (And I still had no phone signal.)

While I was in Tampa I had spotty SMS service. For example, I could send a text from Row M at Raymond James Stadium, but not from Row F. (My seat was in Row F.) I would try to send texts from all over town, but usually got the message "Text not sent; tap message to try again." Sometimes it'd go through on the second try; sometimes it'd go through twice. Usually it didn't go through at all.

The only time the cellphone worked reliably was when I was connected to the wi-fi network at my hotel. That's not acceptable. The fundamental purpose of a cellphone is to have access to help should something bad happen, like if the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, or if you're using GPS to get somewhere. If there's a wireless network available, there's probably someone with a working telephone within a hundred yards.

I tried calling Spectrum Mobile while in Tampa, to see if there was something they could do about the pisspoor quality of service. I couldn't get a signal for long enough to get past the first item on their call menu. And by then I had decided that this was not a service I wished to continue with. It was worse than when I had T-Mobile, years ago.

So when I got back home I called Spectrum to tell them I wanted to discontinue the service and send the phone back. They tried to tell me there was a $35 per-phone restocking fee, but I told them I wasn't going to pay that because I'd been told when I signed up for the service that there was a 30-day risk-free trial period, and that if I didn't like it all I had to do was send the phones back. When I threatened to find myself a new internet-and-cable provider, the woman on the phone finally told me I could take the phones to the local Spectrum store.

I looked the Spectrum store location up on the Internet. It's just off the Interstate, about 6 miles from my house. So this morning I went there to return the phones. The guy there told me that he couldn't take the phones, because that location was a Spectrum Cable store and they don't handle the mobile side of the business. He played on his computer for a while and then told me that I could take the phones to Fed-Ex and they would ship them back to the location they need to get to. "They'll be able to print the label there," he said, apparently reading it off his computer screen.

So I went to Fed-Ex. They couldn't print a label because they didn't know where the phones were supposed to go.  So: back to the Spectrum store to find out where the Spectrum Mobile store was. Then I went there and they insisted they couldn't take the phones back because they had been shipped to me, and not bought in the store. (Is this crazy?) But they couldn't tell me where to ship them. So I started making a loud fuss about wanting to get rid of these phones and get rid of their crappy cellphone service, and they swung into action. A guy comes out from the back and says he will get me the address of where to send the phones. He got on the phone and called the same people I'd been on the phone with for an hour the previous evening, and got put on hold. While he was on hold, though, the Fed-Ex guy came in with some boxes that had the address on them, so he copied the address down. Upshot is, I ended up paying about $12 to send those damn phones back. Good riddance.

I understand that Spectrum Mobile is presently available only to Spectrum cable customers. I've been pretty happy with my cable service, but now I'm having second thoughts about that, too. If their new mobile business represents the kind of service I can expect going forward, I'd better start looking at alternatives.

Stooping to Murder

If Donald Trump pulls U.S. troops out of Syria so that troops of our ally Turkey can march in unobstructed and slaughter the fighters of our Kurdish allies, it will be the greatest betrayal perpetrated by the United States in its history: a betrayal not only of the Kurdish fighters who have done so much of our dirty work in both Syria and Iraq, but of our most cherished beliefs about ourselves. We will never live down the deserved shame that we will earn.

2018: Bellingham & Glacier Trip

The pictures from the trip out to Washington & Montana have actually been up in the Cloud for a while now, but I never got around to putting up a blog post. I'm doing that now.

Horton, Who-Hearer

The Cat in the Hat

Carly shows the Wolf how it's done

the Tooth Fairy

a big flamingo checks out Carly

We started the journey with a side-trip to Abilene, to see the city's wonderful collection of sculptures around the downtown area. Along the railroad tracks that delineate the city-center's southern edge, there's a garden of statues representing characters from Dr Seuss, along with a few others; and at the convention center, a few blocks north, is a children's literature sculpture garden. And there are a few other statues scattered around between those two spots. Even though I don't know a number of the stories represented (having been a child back before the printing press was truly established), I enjoyed them all.

for scale, note the passing 18-wheeler

While we were in Colorado, where Carly would spend her vacation partly at Rancho Mojón and partly at Golden Pound, I took a day-trip up to Nebraska, where my sister is working in a clinic. Along the way, I stopped to see a fairly extreme example of religious fervour, in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming: a collection of statues, including a gigantic one of the Virgin Mary.










Then we went up to Bellingham, Washington, for a soccer tournament, and a little hiking at Whatcom Falls, Mount Baker and Stimpson Preserve.

at Whatcom Falls Park

Stimpson Family Nature Preserve

snow field, Mt Baker

some random waterfall

Picture Lake

 After the tournament, we drove east to Glacier National Park, making stops at places along the way.

another random waterfall

Kootenai swinging bridge

Kootenai Falls

At Glacier, we spent a couple of nights in one of the old lodges built by the railroad to coax visitors to become customers, and the day between exploring Going to the Sun Road.

view from The Loop

400' waterfall

Jackson Creek

Goose Island

Jackson glacier

 

Construction of that road was an engineering marvel, back when it was built. It's the park's only through route, and it's where everybody goes. It wasn't as crowded as I'd feared, but there were a lot of people.

Next time I go to the park, I'll visit one of the other areas, north or south of Going to the Sun. (By then, there probably won't be any glaciers left, but I'm sure the park will still be there, and worth seeing again. Even though, as I write this, I see that the Going to the Sun Road is currently closed because of wildfires.)

There are lots more pictures from the trip; if Google is to be believe, you can see them by clicking on this link.

Enjoy.

Link to Pictures

2018 Condo Trip

I was going to write a nice old-fashioned blog post detailing all the stuff we did on this year's Condo Week trip to Surfside Beach, South Carolina, but now, two days afterwards, I can't remember when we did the things we did. So I'll just post the pictures I took and let anyone interested look through them.

Old Sheldon Church, Yemassee, South Carolina

The pictures are here.

The 2018 Florida Trip

My friend Marty was pissed off about something; I forget what, but he decided that the way to deal with it was to go lose himself in Ft Lauderdale for a while. Then he got over it (by pricing hotels) and decided not to go. But it put me in mind of the fact that I hadn't been to Key West in more than 3 decades. And there were seven counties in Florida that I'd never been to. So I decided to go to Key West for a few days, and then Lauderdale, and along the way I figured I could drive through those seven counties in the uninteresting parts of Florida.

Then I priced hotels in Key West and Lauderdale, and decided that New Orleans was a better place to be. But there were still those seven counties....

upscale yard art

So Marty flew down to New Orleans, and we made a quick drive around Florida, then came back to what has become our preferred ground.

baby gators

We started by taking in the high-end yard art at the US Sports Academy, in Daphne, Alabama. Then we drove on to Florida's highest waterfall (73 feet high; but it falls into a sinkhole about 65 feet deep, which makes it less impressive than it sounds), and through Liberty County, which has nothing to recommend it, and on down to Gainesville, in Alachua County. We spent the night somewhere around there -- I don't recall where -- and continued south until we hit the handful of really dull counties that help keep the Atlantic Ocean out of the Gulf of Mexico. We went to an overpriced drive-through alligator sanctuary before going through such dull spots as Glades and Hardee and Highlands and Okeechobee counties.

On the way back up, we passed by the Ste Anne Shrine, near Lake Wales, Florida. This is identified on Roadside America as a mostly-destroyed remnant torn down by "an unsympathetic Catholic Church." That's not true. The pictures on that web site are of a lakeside altar that once honoured St Christopher (who is no longer considered a saint), and apparently people just assumed the rest of the false story. The shrine to Ste Anne is about 100 yards east of there, in the woods off the road, and in fact is to be the site for a sunrise mass on Easter Sunday, according to one of the locals who's lived there for more than 30 years.

the remnant of the St Christopher
altar

Ste Anne's Shrine

So nice to have gotten that straight.

After that: New Orleans, where we've done nothing but party since arriving. We had outstanding meals at Alfonso's in Faubourg Marigny and St Charles Tavern and Ruby Slipper (which now has a location right on Canal Street, so we didn't have to schlepp all the way to Mid-City); and we did a street-car tour that included the Riverfront and City Park, plus a ride along Rampart street, so now I've been on all four lines in town. I feel so accomplished.