.JPG "Not the Queen song")
I think I only had to mow the lawn two or three times all last summer because of the drought. I mowed a week ago Saturday before the rains came and I had to do the same thing again this weekend. In Dandelion Wine, one character marks the start of summer with the sound of the first lawn mower and bemoans a suggestion from a friend that he install a revolutionary new grass that grows to the proper length and stops. I’ve heard people complaining that the future promised jetpacks and where are they, but give me that promised grass and I’ll be a happy camper.
There’s no sign of drought this summer, though. It rained on Friday evening, Saturday afternoon, Sunday morning and again on Sunday afternoon, with good chances of precipitation all this week. Officially we’ve had only trace rain in July, but the monitoring station must be under an overhang somewhere because we got at least half an inch, if not more, over the past three days. No complaints from me. It keeps the temperatures down in the eighties most of the time. If only it didn’t make the grass grow…
Through the magic of Twitter, I had a brief interchange with CNN’s Ali Velshi this morning. He tweeted that gas prices were up for the seventh straight week, with a 1/10 of a cent per gallon increase this week. I responded that I found it hard to take seriously an increase from $3.381 per gallon to $3.382 per gallon. He responded, saying “The trend is the important part,” to which I said, “It depends on how you want to spin the story. Another person might say that after six weeks of increases, gas prices were essentially unchanged in the past week,” which is a different story altogether. He didn’t reply, so I guess I won that argument. Dazzled him with my logical brilliance. (Heh.)
We watched The Magic of Belle Isle on Friday night, the new movie starring Morgan Freeman and Virginia Madsen, directed by Rob Reiner. Freeman plays a writer of westerns who stopped after his wife died. He’s in a wheelchair (the reason why is only revealed late in the movie) and drinking heavily. His nephew sets him up with a rental house for the summer where his main task is to look after the dog (original name Ringo but Freeman insists his new name is Spot). Madsen is the divorcing single mom of three lively and precocious daughters next door. The kids are about 5, 10 and 15. The middle one queries him about how to write stories and the younger one provides the inspiration. It’s a charming, low-stress, low-risk film with lots of feel-good stuff and some aw shucks moments. Plus some interesting thoughts on what writing is all about. Is there a romance between Freeman and Madsen? Couldn’t tell you. Perhaps.
On Saturday we watched the French film My Afternoons with Marguerite, starring Gerard Depardieu as a guy whose mother resented him and his teacher ridiculed him, partly because of his size. He’s not stupid—just poorly educated and suffering from an immense case of low self esteem. He gardens and does odd jobs around town and gets along with some people. His mother is demented, although it appears that her grip on sanity was never very firm. He has no idea who his father was, which casts him adrift. He has a cute, considerably younger girlfriend who adores him. She drives a metro bus, which is a neat detail that means absolutely nothing to the story. Depardieu meets a 95-year-old Flemish woman in the park and they strike up a friendship. She reads to him. Camus at first and then on to other things. Depardieu is a very good listener, absorbing it all and trying to integrate these stories into his personality, but his friends are quick to make fun of him for putting on airs. But he persists. Another charming, low-risk film with some nice moments. Marguerite is played by 97-year-old Gisèle Casadesus and she’s a bit like a Jessica Tandy character or an older Frances Sternhagen. It turns out to be a quirky kind of love story, in a way.
I’m a little over halfway through The Honest Look by Jennifer Rohn and thoroughly enjoying it. The author is a protein scientist—a field with which I have a more than passing familiarity. Her protagonist, Claire, is a 25-year-old new Ph. D. who gets a position running a brand new gizmo that can measure protein-protein binding interactions at a pharmaceutical company in Amsterdam. The company is a one-trick pony. Their Alzheimer’s drug is scheduled to go into human clinical trials in a year. Claire discovers something that might threaten the company’s future. It’s a bit like a Michael Crichton book, except it has really good characters (something Crichton never mastered). As someone who spent a couple of years overseas fresh out of university, I identify with Claire’s sense of alienation in a foreign country. The difficulty in getting to know people both in the community at large and within the company, where she is resented because her expertise in this new gadget has gotten her a much-coveted position. There are some interesting romantic angles and a decent outsider’s look at the Dutch culture. Lots of science, too, and real science from someone who understands it.
