Tag Archives: Movies

Quest for Fire

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Patrick and his King Salmon that he caught, cleaned and cooked

“Quest for Fire” is a 1981 film that depicts Paleolithic Europe, 80,000 years ago, its plot surrounds the struggle for control of fire by early humans. “Quest for Fire” is a film that I’m sure anthropologists love to hate and since the movie is based upon a 1911 novel, you can be sure that it is totally up on the latest research. In the movie’s sex scenes, humanity’s evolution is encapsulated by the transition from one sexual position to another. I’m sure Ron Perlman is proud to have this film on his IMDb resume. 😉

I raise this topic because I’ve recently read L.V. Anderson’s Slate article, Who Mastered Fire? This article dubs mastery of fire as both the first and greatest intellectual property claim known to mankind. It goes on to claim that mastery of fire alone is what defines us as human and separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The crux of this article is that scientists can’t agree on whether people mastered fire 1.8 million years ago or only 12,000 years ago. The question left unresolved is whether humans proved their humanity almost two million years ago or only a couple of thousand years before the dawn of civilization.

This article distinguishes between opportunistic use of fire and the ability to spontaneously create fire. The movie “Quest for Fire” also made this distinction. The protagonist tribe is only capable of harvesting natural fire, like from lighting strikes, because they don’t know how to make it themselves. They eventually meet a more advanced tribe who have mastered this technology and learn from them.

Mastery of fire provided mankind several benefits. It provided both a source of warmth and protection from predators, but most importantly is allowed for cooking. Cooking our food made the food taste better, more nutritious and more digestible. Scientists say that the invention of cooking has led to the development of our enlarged brains. The calories once spent digesting raw food could with cooking, be redirected to feed our brains.

I think that this Paleolithic pedigree manifests itself in modern life with the foodies movement. Once people learn how to perform a task, then it soon becomes a competition to see who can do it better. This is what modern cooking is all about. You see this on TV in show after show. I also see it at work among some of my co-workers.

I work with a lot of people who enjoy food preparation. They like to cook, but more than that they revel in the entire process of food creation. Whether it is growing, hunting, brewing or what have you they collectively run the gambit. I’m just pleased that they occasionally bring some of the fruits of their labors into the office to share. Burp!

Mark’s Dirty Movie

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The Three Rules of Plumbing

  1. Sh!t flows downhill
  2. Never chew your fingernails
  3. Payday’s on Friday

Mark’s Dirty Movie

Earlier this week, we got some bad news. Following advice from the city inspector, we hired a local plumbing company to TV camera our interior sewer line. The owner lives on our street. The inspector had TV camera the exterior portion of the sewer line and the only bad thing he had found was that Roto-Rooter had not done a very good job, when they had cleaned out the main line last month. This observation only served to foster false hope. The new plumber found several large holes in the cast iron, beneath our basement.

They are formulating a bid and we’ll seek others too, but the long and the short of it is that we’ll soon be throwing a whole lot of money down the drain, literally. Our house is seventy-five years old and so are the pipes below it. We’ve wrestled with them over the years, but now it is time to send them to the bench and bring in some relief. How did that baseball metaphor sneak in here? Work could commence as early as a week from tomorrow. Starting on a Monday, it will be done by Friday, with only a brief interruption in service. We were promised a lot of smell though. I hope that it will be warm enough to open the windows. In the picture and the movie, upper right is down and lower left is up. Don’t forget to say hello to the spider in the video. The three rules will never be more true than here.

Da News, the LA Edition

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Dan has been texting us photos of his construction project. All of the wallboard is up now. There is still mudding, painting and doors to do, then it should be done. He plans on getting the doors from one of Habitat’s ReStore outlets. After he texted us the pictures, he sent us the following text:

I just landed a commission to build
a coffee table, a dining table and a matching bench!

Sometimes texting does not have the bandwidth necessary for meaningful communication, so I called Dan. I caught him waking back from lunch with Annie. They went their separate ways and I got to speak with Dan.

A friend’s mother, an investment banker commissioned the work. She just closed on a LA property that to her is an investment property. She lives out-of-town and will only use it while visiting LA. Dan got upfront money for materials. He plans on finishing this project by the end of November. Afterword, Dan has a gallery lined up to sell future product. The gallery will take a 40% cut, but also plans to jack up the price by 44%. So, Dan will actually realize a ~4% net raise.

With all of this going on, he is also helping his classmate and friend, Amanda. She also graduated last May from CalArts, in theatrical costume design. That’s right folks, Dan is cutting and sewing. He also plans on helping with costume design. By Dan’s estimation, Amanda is the most successful of all of his classmates. She recently participated in a movie project staring Natalie Portman and that hunky guy from the Twilight series, Taylor Lautner.

The Salted Carmel Gabfest

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Anne’s Maple Leaf and Purple Jellyfish

It has become impossible not to notice that Mother Nature has switched off her summer furnace. After weeks and weeks of unbearable heat, things have cooled to the point that there is almost a certain crispness in the air. To put things in the ‘Starkest’ way, “winter is coming”. I mention this as preamble, before I pivot to my larger story.

I am a fan of the multitude of Slate podcasts. The only problem is that I am not a good fan. I don’t use iTunes to download their episodes. Me bad, let’s move on. These talk shows all follow the same basic format that I’ll call Slate’s rule of three. Each podcast involves three participants, covers three topics, has only two commercial breaks (but this is inching up to three) and is finished with each participant making an endorsement, cocktail chatter, what have you. It is a couple of these recommendations that I want to share here. I would like to share an endorsement from Slate’s Cultural Gabfest, another very recent cocktail chatter from Slate’s Political Gabfest and a recommendation of my own. The Slate rule of three is preserved.

The first endorsement comes from Cultural Gabfest’s Dana Stevens. Her pick was Jessica Oreck’s Mysteries of Vernacular, a project of animated shorts, each one exploring the etymology of one word for each letter of the alphabet. So far, only eight letters have been produced using Oreck’s stop motion animation technique. This leaves plenty of room for growth. Check out ‘P’ for Pants.

The second cocktail chatter harkens back to this post’s preamble. This week’s Political Gabfest’s David Plotz chattered about the Weather Channel’s plan to start naming winter storms. We’re all use to the National Weather Service naming hurricanes. Who could forget Katrina? In past winters we had Snowmageddon, Snowzilla, Snowpocalypse, all names that we can now retire. Instead of NWS first name picks like Andrew, Camille and more recently Isaac, the Weather Channel plans on selecting names from mythology, ancient history, and yoga. Examples for this winter include the following:

  • Athena: The Greek goddess of wisdom, courage, inspirations, justice and mathematics.
  • Brutus: Roman Senator and assassin of Julius Caesar.
  • Gandolf: An 1896 fantasy character in a medieval country (not to be confused with Tolkien’s Gandalf).
  • Iago: Enemy of Othello in Shakespeare’s play, Othello.
  • Q: The Broadway Express subway line in NYC.
  • Rocky: A single mountain in the Rockies (Not to be confused with the movie by the same name).
  • Yogi: People who do yoga (Bear or Berra?).

My recommendation is for Starbuck’s new Salted Carmel Hot Chocolate. I’m so glad that this little blog operates at such a low-level that it will slip beneath the radar of Slate’s intelligentsia. This is not because I am recommending a Starbuck’s product, but because I’ve only tasted it in their sample size. In Grande sizing it could end up tasting like their pumpkin spiced latté, tasting too much of pumpkin spice by the end. Maybe I should do more research? Nah, I think that I’ll just crowd source this one.

Iron Sky

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Nazi Punks F-Off T-Shirt

Hitler visits a lunatic asylum, where the patients all dutifully perform the German greeting. Suddenly, Hitler sees one man whose arm is not raised. “Why don’t you greet me the same way as everyone else,” he hisses at the man. The man says: “My Führer, I’m an orderly. I’m not crazy!”

Even in the stratosphere of political correctness there is one political group that it is still safe to beat down, the Nazis. I must confess a certain fascination about the Nazis. You just have to love to hate them. I’ve read all of Alan Furst’s WW II era spy novels and I am currently reading, City of Women. This is David R. Gillham’s first novel, which Furst has dubbed, “Extraordinary”. It is set in 1943 Berlin, it tells the story of one woman in a city where all the men have shipped off to war. It is like a Furst novels, in the way that it catches the mood of this period.

The true Aryan is as blond as Hitler, as slim as Göring and as tall as Goebbels.

I watched Iron Sky last night. This indie film won praise earlier this year at its debut Berlin film festival. I’ve been anxiously awaiting it US arrival since I first heard of it and saw its trailer and first four minutes. It is a campy film based upon the following high concept:

In the last moments of World War II, a secret Nazi space program evaded destruction by making a daring escape to the Moon. In the intervening 70 years they have re-colonized, re-armed with devastating new weapons and silently plotted their revenge.

It is a dark comedy. For an Indie film the special effects are quite good. It has real Sci-Fi chops. It makes fun of the Nazis, but more pointedly makes sport of the Tea Party movement. It is set in 2018, in the middle of a ‘Sarah Palin’ administration. The only good news here is that apparently Obama got his second term and the ‘Palin’ character is only in the first two years of her first term. I watched it online at Amazon, so it should be available elsewhere.

Hitler and Göring are standing atop the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners’ faces. So Göring says: “Why don’t you jump?”

The jokes interspersed among my text are authentic WW II German jokes. A Berlin woman was put to death for telling the immediately preceding one. I wish that I could reference the article where I found these jokes from, but in my haste to create this post I lost the author’s name.

The pictured T-shirt was photographed in the AC/DC exhibit at the EMP Museum, Seattle. It was worn by Krist Novoselic, 1984. Matt Lukin of the Melvins made this shirt, referencing the anti-fascist/racist Dead Kennedys’ song.

If Hitler, Göring and Goebbels were on a ship in a storm and the ship would sink, who would be saved? Answer: Germany.

Scrabble

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EEEEEEE

Anne is a great fan of the board game, Scrabble. Me not so much. This is probably because she is much better at it than I am. This probably, because she is a much better speller than I am. In more recent years though, she has met her match in nephew Rey. I still feel that I am that someone who is about to lose an “i”.

Life is like a game of scrabble. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an “i”.

Anne and I first saw The Big Snit in theaters. It was part of a Saint Louis film festival, at the Tivoli. It was a Canadian Film Board production. “Stop shaking your eyes!”

Scrabble Champ by LaMuff is a bit of Techno fluff. I promised Cheech of Depth of Real Photography that I would post this song. Posting it shows that I can get out of my NPR comfort zone. I’m not sure that the word scores add up as well as they scan.