Friday 5: Accessory to cinema

Allelu, allelu, allelu, alleluia; praise ye the lord. I’m caught up with work for the first time in nearly a year. I’m not joking. Of course, this was made possible by my boss not giving me anything new until I could finish all the old, which I’m grateful for. I did get a couple of short-notice proposals to work on, but I handled them quickly, so my caught-up status is now two whole workdays old.

I’ve been sleeping better, almost surely as a result.

Wednesday night I felt so good about it I braved Costco for the first time in 16 months. Loaded up on non-perishables and some stuff for the hurricane kit. I dropped kind of a ridiculous amount of money and of course I forgot batteries. Batteries were one of the main reasons I went to Costco. Ugh.

So I went back Thursday night. 8:00 in the evening both nights. It closes at 8:30. And it wasn’t crazy or especially scary. Anyway I’m in pretty good shape heading into hurricane season, better prepared than I’ve ever been.

My coworker who works on Kauai was on island Friday evening, so I went to dinner with her and a few others. My first dining-out experience since mid-August when I went into self-imposed second lockdown (Lockdown 2: Subhumanoid Meltdown). We went to Olive Garden because the coworker’s staying in the Ala Moana Hotel. The meal was aight but the company was nice. It was good to sit down with humans and have a meal and just be together. And Ala Moana wasn’t as crazy as I expected for Friday night.

If you have Netflix and haven’t seen Cooking with Paris, I recommend the heck out of it. Entertaining. Silly. Funny. And surprisingly clever.

I also watched the Arsenio Hall standup special, which was okay. And one of the Tig Notaro specials. It was great. Tig’s comedy is something else. I’m going to watch her other thing and possibly write a short essay on how she does what she does.

Betcha can’t wait for that.

Friday 5: Accessory to Cinema, from here.

1. What’s your favorite weapon in a movie?
   I actually have a top ten. Posted to Hawaii Threads in January 2008. As I considered my answers last night before peeking at my list, I decided I’m taking all firearms off the list. The last thing I care to do these days is contribute to fetishizing guns. So here’s my list with firearms redacted: (10) The Nude Bomb from The Nude Bomb, that ridiculous wonderful Get Smart movie. (9) Harry Potter’s wand. This would be much higher if the wands in the films were like their descriptions in the novels. (8) Bruce Lee’s hands and feet. (7) Go-Go Yubari’s meteor hammer in Kill Bill Part 1. (6) Wolverine’s Adamantium claws in the X-Men and Wolverine films. (5) redacted. (4) Jason Voorhees’s machete. (3) redacted. (2) Darth Maul’s light sabre bo staff in Star Wars Episode 1. (1) Indiana Jones’s whip.
2. What’s your favorite car in a movie?
   So many great movie cars. My answer today is the Audi RSQ, a fictional car in Will Smith’s I, Robot. Spheres for wheels.
3. What’s your favorite cat or dog in a movie?
   I decided when I wrote these questions I wasn’t going with animated dogs, disqualifying Rowlf in the Muppets movies, Snoopy in the Peanuts movies, Perdita and Pongo in 101 Dalmations, and Gromit in the Wallace and Gromit films. So I’m going way off the board and taking Brutus, the Great Dane in Disney’s The Ugly Dachshund.
4. Who’s your favorite sidekick in a movie?
   Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter movies. Samwise Gamgee in the Lord of the Rings films next.
5. What’s your favorite painting or sculpture in a movie?
   “Love isn’t love without a violin-playing goat.” Julia Roberts, talking about La Mariée by Marc Chagall in Notting Hill. Chagall is my favorite. Second place is probably A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Pointillism, baby.