Wonderful World
So that was winter, I guess.
We were released early from work on Friday because of freezing road conditions. When I left at about 3:15, I drove through the most wonderful blizzard. The snowflakes were large, I could hear them when they hit my jacket, and they were numerous. However, they never quite made it to the ground. In parts of Houston, the snow did actually accumulate for a while, but not up here. By about 3:45 it was all over and though it was cold overnight, I don’t think we got the severe hard freeze they were anticipating, and today it’s back up in the 60s and rainy. It was cause for excitement, but that’s probably it for us as far as real winter goes.
Yesterday was a lost day. I woke up with a stomach virus that took the wind out of my sails most of the day. I don’t get sick very often, and this was mild as far as these things go, but I had no appetite and no ability to focus on anything other than football games, which means I got no writing work done.
I was glad to see the young couple that had done so well throughout the entire race pull it out for a victory at the end of The Amazing Race. I thought they were screwed when they went to the wrong casino and ended up arriving at the roadblock in third place, but they focused on the task (counting out $1 million in chips) and beat the teams who had a head start. Frustration and bickering was the downfall of the other two teams.
We watched an advance screening of Wonderful World, starring Matthew Broderick, this weekend. He plays a former Raffi-like children’s entertainer who became disillusioned with the music business and the world in general, dropped out, got divorced and took up a mundane job copyediting for some un-named firm, shares a small flat with Ebu, a Senegalese man. His young daughter hides when he goes to pick her up for his regular visitation because he’s such a buzz kill. He spends most of his time smoking weed and haranguing the unfairness of it all. When Ebu goes into a diabetic coma, he meets the man’s sister and, through her, learns that he’s pretty much an asshole and the world isn’t a terrible place all the time. Thus begins his path back to the real (wonderful) world.
We also watched Nothing Like the Holidays, standard holiday fair about a dysfunctional, bickering family getting together for what might be their last Christmas together because their mother (Elizabeth Pena) has just dropped the bombshell that she’s divorcing their father (Alfred Molina) because he’s been cheating on her. It’s a big, bawdy, Puerto Rican family with the usual issues and the obligatory outsider (Debra Messing) and a Shane-like tree that provides some comic relief. The putative affair turns out to have a different explanation, of course, and there are other conflicts that find resolution, though not always in the idyllic way of seasonal films.
I’m reading Pirate Latitudes, the new, posthumous Crichton novel. The completed manuscript was found on his hard drive, but there’s been no indication from the publisher when it was completed. Since it’s a period novel, there are no clues in the text as to when it might have been written either. No pirates with cutting edge nanoparticle sails or anything like that. I also finished Part 1 of Don Quixote, so I decided to take a break with some pirates before getting back to the knights-errant.
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