A time for us all to grow up!

Photo from 2007

My son called and asked how many times in a lifetime a person can be an “empty nester”?

I’m on my second time around, with my youngest daughter off to Ryerson University yesterday and my older daughter back to Montreal (McGill) this morning.

In spite of my daughter’s laughter at my maudlin behavior, I did not shed tears yesterday, even if it was on purpose. I am truly glad to see them off on a dream. It had become a tedious journey by this point, and I’d seem so many of these that I am in a hurry to see the rest of the story.

I am not trying to rush history, I just am anxious to see the developments.

The Ryerson staff was fantastic in their ability to help us all through the moving in process. There were 980 students moving in on a Sunday in downtown Toronto and it took a huge amount of help to get us all in. There were a ton of very helpful police there to keep the traffic moving. My daughter has a beautiful apartment she’s sharing with three others and I was very pleased.

My wife and daughter on their way to Montreal today to get her back to her place so she can be available to help with freshman orientation to the university. Hopefully my wife will get a day to see a museum and do some shopping before she returns.

Max, our dog, and I, will try on empty nesting together. He may have the hardest time with this out of all of us. He’s had us all here all summer and this time it may not be explainable.

My youngest and two of her new roommates sat around last night showing each other their dog photos on their phones and there were tears to be spent.

Time for us all to grow up!

 

 

3rd Rock in my Head

3rd Rock from the Sun was a sitcom that aired from 1996 to 2001 on NBC. The show was about four extraterrestrials that were on an expedition to Earth, which they consider to be a very insignificant planet. The extraterrestrials pose as a human family in order to observe the behavior of human beings.

As many intelligent people know, aliens are all around us. This is a story of a band of four such explorers. In order to blend in, they have assumed human form. This is the High Commander (Dick Solomon). He has assembled an elite team of experts: A decorated military officer (Sally Solomoon), a seasoned intelligence specialist (Tommy Solomon) and, well, they had an extra seat (Harry Solomon).

The premise of the show revolves around an extraterrestrial research expedition attempting to live as a normal human family in the fictional city of Rutherford, Ohio, said to be 52 miles outside of Cleveland, where they live in a loft apartment. Humor was principally derived from the aliens' attempts to study human society and, because of their living as humans themselves while on Earth, to understand the human condition. In later episodes, they became more accustomed to Earth and often became more interested in their human lives than in their mission.

Dick Solomoon (John Lithgoow), the High Commander and leader of the expedition, is the family provider, and takes a position as a physics professor at Pendleton State University. Information officer Tommyy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has been given the body of a teenager and is forced to enroll in high school (later college), leaving security officer Sallyy (Kristen Johnston) and communications officer Harry (French Stewart) to spend their lives as thirty somethings hanging out at home and bouncing through short-term jobs.

The family often communicates with their off-world (and usually unseen) boss, the Big Giant Head (William Shatner). His orders are received through Harry, who unexpectedly (and often in inconvenient circumstances) stands up, his arms stiff (acting as the antenna), and proclaims: "Incoming message from the Big Giant Head.

This show is on most nights in syndication, and I often end up watching it at very odd hours.

Last week I was watching at about 3:30 a.m. and realized I was now an actor and a part of the show. We were in the Solomon’s living room and my line was to be delivered to Dick, but I used his real name, John.

It took a minute for us all to realize I’d made a mistake and everyone laughed.

I soon realized I must be sleeping, as I was not really in any sitcom.

I was awake quite quickly and found out that 3^rd Rock ended at 4:00 a.m., and now it was 4:15 and perhaps I should go back to bed.

I did.

Cowboys and Aliens

Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford star in this preposterous epic which I loved and hated simultaneously. It is grim and it is stupid but it was full of adventure and depression.The cowboys are dour and hard, the aliens are mean and bad things, and it all seems fascinating. This is an unloved film for sure, but since it’s been on the Movie Channel this month I’ve taken a shine to it.

The Old West, where a lone cowboy (Daniel Craig) leads an uprising against a terror from beyond our world. 1873 Arizona Territory, a stranger with no memory of his past stumbles into the hard desert town of Absolution. The only hint to his history is a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. What he discovers is that the people of Absolution don't welcome strangers, and nobody makes a move on its streets unless ordered to do so by the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). It's a town that lives in fear. But Absolution is about to experience fear it can scarcely comprehend as the desolate city is attacked by marauders from the sky. Screaming down with breathtaking velocity and blinding lights to abduct the helpless one by one, these monsters challenge everything the residents have ever known. Now, the stranger they rejected is their only hope for salvation. As this gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he's been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against the alien force. With the help of the elusive traveler Ella (Olivia Wilde), he pulls together a posse comprised of former opponents-townsfolk, Dolarhyde and his boys, outlaws and Apache warriors-all in danger of annihilation. United against a common enemy, they will prepare for an epic showdown for survival. ( Written by Universal Pictures)

The hardest part of this movie to swallow is the part that amazes me most. I realized through this movie that I believe in the popular culture version of the space alien. Clearly to me, aliens can only exist as Ancient Aliens (space creatures in prehistoric times), building pyramids etc., and our own post-Roswell aliens, coming to earth since the 50’s. It was simply too hard to imagine aliens here in 1872.

Definitely a worth see, not a hot property, but an interesting film with really good actors and dumb scenes.

Wikipedia says:

 Cowboys & Aliens is a 2011 American science fiction Western film directed by Jon Favreauand starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde. The film is based on the 2006 graphic novel of the same name created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. The main plot revolves around an amnesiac outlaw (Craig), a wealthy cattleman (Ford), and a mysterious traveler (Wilde) who must ally to save a group of townspeople abducted by aliens. Steven Spielberg served as executive producer.

The project began development in 1997, when Universal Pictures and DreamWorks bought film rights to a concept pitched by Rosenberg, former president at Malibu Comics, which he described as a graphic novel in development. After the graphic novel was published in 2006, development on the film was begun again, and Favreau signed on as director in September 2009. On a budget of $163 million, filming for Cowboys & Aliens began in June 2010, in New Mexico and California. Despite studio pressure to release the film in 3-D, Favreau chose to film traditionally and in anamorphic format (widescreen picture on standard 35 mm film) to further a "classic movie feel". Measures were taken to maintain a serious Western element despite the film's "inherently comic" title and premise. The film's aliens were designed to be "cool and captivating", with some details, such as a fungus that grows on their wounds, created to depict the creatures as frontiersmen facing adversity in an unfamiliar place.

Cowboys & Aliens premiered at the2011 San Diego Comic-Con and was released theatrically in the United States and Canada on July 29, 2011. The film, though having grossed its budget back, is considered to be a financial disappointment, taking $174.8 million in box office receipts on a $163 million budget. Cowboys & Aliens received mixed reviews, with critics generally praising its acting but critical of its blend of the Western and science fiction genres.

Leon was here!

Last night it was turning colder finally, and it had rained for most of the day. The Festival of Friends was on and the closing act for Saturday evening was Leon Russell!  We were amazed! It was free and it was within 15 minutes of our house.

My wife had seen Leon Russell at the Concert for Bangladesh on Sunday, 1 August 1971, playing to 40,000 people. and not since! She loves his music, and we spent some time yesterday with a record player and vinyl listening to old albums.

The weather reports had scared away most of the potential customers, so with close by parking, free buses from the city and a free concert, it was still a small audience. We were able to stand easily within 30 feet of the stage.

It was the 70’s all over again! There were “Grateful Dead” dancing women on my left, a lineup of elderly dancers on my right and a few crazed women dancers in front of me, and Leon and the unnamed band did an hour of nonstop rock and blues.

Our shoes are mud caked as are the cuffs of my jeans, but that was hardly a price to pay. I was able to park within a five minute walk and sit for the earlier hour in the beer garden, which looked more like a refugee camp, but the old dirty wooden chairs did give some relief from standing for an extra hour in the mud while the the Spin Doctors played.

Who ever thought I’d ever get a chance to see Leon Russell again! It was a trip back in time.

Added this morning from a friend in New Jersey:

In 1971 Leon Russell was on the same bill with Elton John at Painters Mill outside of Baltimore. Elton John was the opening act.  It was a great show and afterwards I went to a party at the guy’s townhouse. Leon Russell was there. A lot of drugs were going around, and at the time I was done with drugs myself. I’m walking through a doorway, like living room to kitchen, and Leon’s coming through the door at the same time. He offers me a toke on a joint he’s smoking, but I wave him off. He says, “Don’t get high?”. And like the asshole I am known to be from time to time, I said, “Only on life”.

 That’s my Leon Russell story.

Taking My Life Into My Hands

I probably wrote about this one before, but when the weather gets warm I think about those times in which I risked life and limb so I could go out and have a good time.

My friend Jerry had a Lambretta motor scooter, probably a 150 or 175 cc variety, and the year would have been somewhere at the end of the 50’s, and maybe even 1960. The motor scooter was a few years old but it was in good condition.

The drinking laws in Maryland were quite simple, you had to be 21 years old to drink anywhere in the state, but, if you went to Washington D.C., some 40 miles away from Baltimore, you could drink beer and wine at 18! This changed our lives and probably ended a few of them as well.

We were not quite 18, of course, but we could easily come up with fake ID’s proving we were over 18. They were simpler to prove than 21.

The fact that this all promoted drinking and driving was never considered by the folks in charge at the time, or at least I don’t remember this ever coming up. MADD had not yet been invented and drinking and driving was probably considered a contact sport.

When we put these two items together, easy drinking and Jerry’s motor scooter, we had a deadly cocktail to swallow!

One of the nice things about going to Washington for a night out was that we were able to bring dates with fake ID’s and have dancing and drinking, night club experiences, at a very young age. However, these were car oriented, not scooters.

A night of just drinking was easy to do on the scooter. So, off we’d go, at 60 mph down the Baltimore Washington Expressway in the dark, with two of us on one little scooter. Our best rides were ones with little traffic, and the worst were ones with trucks and buses. One has no idea how much wake there is when passed by a bus going 70 mph when you’re on one small scooter.

As we got later into the fall the weather got colder and the ride became more dangerous, especially if it decided to rain after we arrived, and we had to drive home inebriated in a rain.

These were all insane ideas, and one should never have survived. When I last saw Jerry last year he was fine, and none of us can understand why we're all still here.

It was nice to know I was good for something...

The sound of frustration could be heard in my wife’s phone message. The phone was not working at home (she was on her cell) and there seemed to be nothing she could do. The internet and cable worked but the phone, also through Cogeco, was dead. My daughter had moved stuff around last night as she upgraded her new computer operating system and of course, although she was sure she’d done nothing, she had screwed up the system.

I told my wife to call Cogeco and explain what had happened and see if they could tell what was wrong over the line. The next call, seeming even more frustrated, told me they could come out in a week, sometime next Wednesday between noon and five and see what had happened. They were sure a line had died or something had been pulled out of the wall, all of which I knew was crap!

I went home, screamed at my daughter for a bit out of sheer frustration, but got her to help me move some wires around and in three plugs, repaired the damage.

We called Cogeco and cancelled the appointment, and I moved the correct phones to the correct places. My daughter had screwed it all up by using the phone modem and not the wireless/wired modem and nothing would be good until the right plugs went back to the right places.

The nice thing was that my wife told me I better not ever die because no one knows how to fix anything around there except me. Although she found out my secret, it was nice to know I was good for something!