Randy’s Blog

Last month there was a lunar eclipse that reached totality around 1:30am central time. Since the forecast called for clear skies, I decided it was worth it to wake up in the early hours and take a look.

That was my plan, at least. That evening, the OU men's basketball team played a late game. It came down to the last few seconds, and OU lost in spectacular fashion. It was another gut-punch loss in a season full of them. When it was over, I realized I wasn't going to fall asleep any time soon, so I might as well stay up until the eclipse.

Coincidentally, the two books I was reading at the time were both moon-related:

I read a bit of both books while waiting for 1:30am to roll around. Every so often I peeked outside to see how the eclipse was progressing. Finally, totality arrived and I stood on the deck for 20 or 30 minutes, shivering a bit in my pajamas and jacket, and taking in the view. I tried taking pictures with my phone, but they didn't turn out great. These were the two best ones I got:

It was kind of awesome to be out there in the middle of the night, gazing up at a blood-red moon. I enjoyed it, and reminded myself to always check out a lunar eclipse when given the opportunity. I was very tired the next day, but it was worth it!

Now about those books:

The Moons At Your Door is a collection of weird/supernatural fiction short stories, which as you might imagine is highly relevant to my interests. It has stories from a few authors I'm familiar with (Algernon Blackwood, for example) and some I'm not, which is very exciting. I'm slowly working my way through the book.

Our Moon is an epic nonfiction book covering every aspect of the moon you can think of. There was much I learned, including how the ingredients for life on Earth developed because of the moon (thanks to the tides) and how fish crawled out of the sea because of the moon (again, tides). Also, the moon helps keep Earth's climate stable; without it, Jupiter and Saturn's gravity would cause wild swings in the Earth's tilt. In short, not only is Earth in the goldilocks zone of distance from the Sun, but it also has a goldilocks moon. I used to think the universe was teeming with life: if life can form here, it can form anywhere. This book has really made me question that belief. Life may be far more rare than I'd ever considered before.

That's a sobering thought to ponder while gazing up at the moon.

A couple of months ago, I was scrolling through articles on my phone, as one does, and came across this headline:

The Secret Ingredient for Making Movie Theater Popcorn at Home

As I clicked on it, I said to Wendy: "I'm going to learn the secret ingredient for making movie theater popcorn!" She immediately replied "It's almost certainly Flavacol." I was disappointed because 1) it turned out she was right, 2) she spoiled the surprise, and 3) we have Flavacol, and I tried it and didn't like it. Oh well.

Then I saw the next headline:

The British Way to Make Hot Chocolate 10x Better

As I clicked on it, I said "Okay, smarty pants, what's the British way to make hot chocolate 10 times better?" I could tell she didn't know this one. She made a couple of guesses but they were wrong. Ha! I'd stumped her! Finally, she said "I don't know. Earl grey tea."

Reader, I am here to tell you she was right.

I couldn't believe it. She couldn't, either. She said she just guessed something ridiculous, but then added that thinking about it further, she thought the floral notes of the tea would pair well with the chocolate, which is exactly what the article said. She was right again. I was dismayed.

At any rate, having never heard of Earl Grey Hot Chocolate, I decided I should try it at some point.

About a week later, I got an email from Twinings (see my recent Twinings post) about National Hot Chocolate Day. It included a timely recipe for "Earl Grey Lavendar Hot Chocolate", so one night I gave it a try.

The recipe called for using white chocolate chips, but we didn't have any, so I used the bittersweet chocolate chips we had. To be honest, it wasn't very good. The next time I went to the store I bought white chocolate chips and tried again. This time it was actually very good! I would definitely make it again.

Here's the full recipe in case you're interested:

If you try it, let me know what you think!

This morning we visited the Fox River Grove Memorial Library for the first time. Without a doubt, it wins the prize for best posters, which were displayed throughout the building. Here's the proof:

Also, at a different library we encountered this factoid about comic books, which is kind of awesome:

Keep reading!

Shortly after writing my post a couple of months ago on Stanley Kubrick, I realized it was time to read The Stanley Kubrick Archives:

This is a massive, coffee-table sized book that weighs in at over 7 pounds and has over 500 pages. It barely fits on our bookshelves. Wendy bought this for me years ago, but I had never read it. Now the time was right.

The first third of the book was completely wordless, instead offering a bunch of images from each of Kubrick's movies. Flipping through these pages was like watching the movies all over again. The last two-thirds of the book had a chapter for each movie, featuring all kinds of information: interviews, quotes, reviews, behind-the-scenes photos, and never-before-seen notes from Kubrick's archives. I read every word and studied every photo and loved all of it. The book was spectacular.

It took a couple of weeks to finish reading it, and during that time I had all kinds of weird Kubrick coincidences:

One night I decided to watch the movie The Big Clock (1948). It had nothing to do with Kubrick; I watched it because I saw people online talking about how good it was. During the final scene, I suddenly realized one of the actors in it (George Macready) played one of the main characters in Kubrick's movie Paths of Glory. Even weirder, the next chapter I was about to read in The Stanley Kubrick Archives was Paths of Glory!

Another night I decided to do a word search puzzle. I opened the puzzle book to a random puzzle and the theme was "Ancient Rome". One of the words I had to find was Spartacus. Weirdly, the next chapter I was about to read in The Stanley Kubrick Archives was Spartacus!

One day I had to run a quick errand. I was in the car for maybe a total of 5 minutes. During that time, the DJ on the radio station started talking about Kubrick's movie of Lolita. When was the last time you heard a DJ talking about a Kubrick movie? And I just happened to hear it during the few minutes I listened to the radio that day?!

In the chapter on 2001: A Space Odyssey, there was an interview where Kubrick quoted Frank B. Salisbury, a plant scientist who believed if a planet contained vegetation, it was logical to assume it would have creatures that feed on it. Weirdly, I had just read an article about Frank B. Salisbury and how he helped to popularize UFO legends in Utah, and eventually ran afoul of the FBI.

While reading the chapter on Full Metal Jacket, I learned that the "Hello Vietnam" song in the opening scene was written by Tom T. Hall. I had just learned about Tom T. Hall about a month prior, after hearing a sweet song on the radio called "I Love" which I'd never heard before. Wendy's parents were visiting at the time, and when I described the song, Bill immediately replied it was by Tom T. Hall.

Finally, shortly after finishing the book, our local library announced that they now offered free access to the Kanopy movie-streaming service. When I signed up and looked at what movies Kanopy offered, I discovered they had Fear and Desire, the first feature-length movie Kubrick ever made, and the only one which I'd never seen. I think Kubrick tried to block distribution of it for a while, since it was such an amateurish work. I watched it, and while it was an amateurish work, it was still much better than I expected. And with that, I had seen every Kubrick movie.

That was a lot of coincidences!

For my birthday this year I asked for, and received, a variety pack of Twinings tea. I picked Twinings because it was the largest variety pack I could find at the time; it had 48 different kinds of tea!

A couple of weeks ago I finished the last one. I took some notes as I went along so I could remember what I liked best. I am not a tea expert by any stretch of the imagination, but here are my favorites:

• Earl Grey. I know Captain Picard liked this ("Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.") but I guess I had never tried it before. It's good!
• French Vanilla Chai. Not too surprising that I liked this; it's as delicious as it sounds.
• Pure Rooibus Red Tea. I had never heard of this before, but it was good. Has lots of antioxidants, apparently.
  
• Honeybush, Mandarin & Orange. I had never heard of honeybush, either, but this combination is pretty good.
  
• Camomile, Honey & Vanilla. This is also as delicious as it sounds.
  
• English Breakfast. This tastes good and provides a nice dose of caffeine for the morning.
  

There were other teas I liked, but the ones above I liked enough to order more of, and they just arrived this morning:

All of this reminds me of my blog post about the popcorn variety pack I tried back in 2020 (it feels like much, much longer ago!). I still mostly eat the red popcorn that I liked so much from that experience. 

Wendy suggested going for a hike on Thanksgiving morning. I thought that was a splendid idea. We picked a trail we'd never been to before, the High Point Conservation Area, which has the highest elevation in the county, and, to be nerdly specific, has "the highest glaciated point in Illinois at 1,189’ above sea level".

It was a nice hike, although cold. The wind chill was in the upper teens. We saw and heard several flocks of sandhill cranes which was fun.

A couple years ago, my nephew Max asked me what the funniest thing I'd ever seen or heard was. That's a tough question to answer on the spot. I thought for a minute, and then told him about the time years ago when Wendy and I went to see a Steven Wright performance in person. He's the comedian known for his wacky hair, monotone voice, and deadpan delivery of one-liners. There was one line I remember that nearly brought the house down, and I repeated it to Max:

"I have a theory. The end of the cold war is what started global warming."

Max replied that it was pretty funny.

Another time I talked to Max, he asked what funny things our cats (who are named Chili and Jalapeno) had done recently. I told him a few things, which made him laugh. In the spirit of funny things, here are some of our funny cat stories:

• When they were kittens, sometimes they would spot each other across the room. Then they would both crouch down, wiggle their butt, run full speed at each other, and jump into the air with their front paws spread wide in a mock attack. One time one of them landed in a trash can!
• One time I had just gotten home from the grocery store and we were putting away groceries. Chili came up and started sniffing around. I noticed he got his head through the handle of one of the empty plastic bags, so I reached down to untangle him. He moved out of the way, though, and realized the plastic bag had followed him, which made him scared. That caused him to start running away, but the plastic bag still followed him, and soon he was sprinting around the house in a panic! Fortunately he soon ran into a bedroom, and I went in and shut the door so he couldn't get out. Finally, he stopped behind a dresser and I pulled the plastic bag off of him. He was one scared cat! Ever since then, when I bring home the groceries, he's nowhere to be seen.
• One time Jalapeno got his head stuck in an empty Kleenex box! It was sitting on the coffee table, and he poked his head inside to take a look. Then he raised his head up and the Kleenex box raised up, too! He started backing up, then fell off the coffee table, then kept backing up on the floor. We ran over, got the box off his head, and momentarily set it on the coffee table, at which point he jumped up and started sniffing the box again! We quickly threw the empty box away.
• Both cats know they're not supposed to be on the dining room table. Earlier this year, Chili was on the table, so I pointed at him and firmly said "DOWN!" He immediately laid down on the table. Nice try, but not exactly what I meant!
• Once, when they were smaller, I was in the bathroom when Jalapeno poked his head out from under the sink. I said "Hey, I didn't know you were in here", at which point Chili stuck his head out from behind the shower curtain. I thought I was alone!

I've kept thinking about Max's original question: What is the funniest thing I've ever seen or heard?

Eventually, I figured out the answer. For me, the funniest thing is the video from the 2001 spring training season, when a bird flew right in front of a fastball thrown by pitcher Randy Johnson:

First of all, that poor bird! I feel bad for it. At least it died quickly. But that explosion of feathers! The stunned reaction of the players and the crowd! Also, what are the odds of that happening?! And the fact that it happened to Randy Johnson, who was known for his blazing fastballs, is oddly perfect. The bird never stood a chance.

Every so often I remember this video and start laughing out loud.

I did a bit of research and found an interview with several ornithologists about this bizarre event. Here's what I learned:

• The bird was a mourning dove.
• Randy Johnson didn't find the event funny immediately afterwards, but eventually made peace with it. He now owns a photography business whose logo is a dead bird:

• A bird getting hit by a pitch has happened once in the minor leagues as well. It was in 2014; the bird was a swallow and the event was not nearly as dramatic.
• By some calculations, the odds of this happening over a 20 year span are 1 in 12 million for the majors, or 1 in 50 million for majors and minors combined.
• PETA supposedly considered filing charges against Johnson for animal cruelty but never did.
• The event is somewhat reminiscent of the time Fabio was hit in the face by a goose while riding a roller coaster (the goose died). However, Fabio claims the amusement park spread the story of a goose hitting him to avoid liability; he says the goose hit a video camera, and a fragment of the camera hit his nose.

So that's what I've got. What is the funniest thing you've ever seen or heard?

Stanley Kubrick has long been one of my favorite film directors. I first became aware of him in my teens, after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on the OETA Movie Club one Saturday night (OETA is the Oklahoma PBS channel). When the star child appeared in the final scene of the movie, I knew I had seen something tremendous. The credits listed Stanley Kubrick as the director, and I remember thinking I wanted to learn more about him. Gradually, I watched all of his movies.

Kubrick died suddenly while I was in college; I still vividly remember one of my friends coming to my room to break the news. His final film, Eyes Wide Shut, was completed shortly before his death, and is the only one of his movies that I saw in theaters during its initial release.

I mention all of this because in the past few months I've come across several articles about Kubrick, for a variety of reasons:

• It's the 25th anniversary of the release of Eyes Wide Shut
• A short documentary was recently release about the making of The Shining
• A new biography of Kubrick was released this year

There were several tidbits in the articles that I found fascinating.

The first article, found at The Film Stage, is an interview with a Brazilian director who talked about seeing Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket in a theater on opening day. It was full of very loud, obnoxious teenagers who had just gotten out of school and didn't care what movie they saw. They were so loud that no one could hear the trailers, and they didn't shut up as the movie was starting. But then as the first scene began:

we begin to see those soldiers losing their hair along with the music and the whole place just calmed down. Just the image of those men losing their hair is so mysterious and enigmatic and everybody kind of shut up... It was completely silent until the end of the film. I never forgot that. The film kind of hypnotized everyone in a way that I have rarely seen. It was really crazy and it says a lot about who Stanley Kubrick was as a filmmaker.

I didn't remember the first scene, so I looked it up and found it on YouTube:

I think he's right. There is something hypnotic about all the recruits having their heads shaved. I liked Full Metal Jacket, but it is a powerful movie, with some scenes that messed me up. 

The other article, titled Spaces Between The Stars, is a review of the new biography. There are a couple of things I found interesting:

For a long time, Kubrick wanted to make a movie about the Holocaust. When he was discussing the idea with a screenwriter, the screenwriter suggested that Schindler's List surely fulfilled the need for a Holocaust movie. Kubrick surprisingly replied that he did not think Schindler's List was about the Holocaust, saying:

The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about six hundred people who don’t.

A sobering response.

One final point:

Early in his career, Kubrick directed the hit movie Spartacus, although he was frustrated by the experience because he didn't have full creative control. While filming a movie much later in his career, Kubrick was spending an inordinate amount of time adjusting a camera, causing the extras to get annoyed. One extra muttered in annoyance, followed by another. Kubrick got angry and demanded to know who had spoken:

One of the men said, ‘I am Spartacus,’ another fell in, ‘I am Spartacus,’ and so it went, an act of organised resistance, a homage and parody of a moment he had shot from a different crane.

I suppose you won't get how funny that is if you haven't seen Spartacus. Here's the scene it's referencing:

Several weeks ago it was Friday the 13th, and we had quite a day. I jotted down notes right afterwards to turn into a blog post; it took me a bit longer than I anticipated to write this. So, here goes:

In a way, our Friday the 13th really started a few days prior. Wednesday evening, the water company notified us that our neighborhood was under a boil order. Apparently a chlorine pump failed, and once it was fixed, they needed two straight days of passing water tests before the boil order could be lifted. That likely meant Saturday. Bummer.

Friday got off to an early start. We were woken up at 6am by loud yowling and hissing sounds from the cats. I first thought they were in a massive fight. We got up and hurried downstairs. Both cats were below the basement window and in a very agitated state with puffy tails. I decided they probably were not fighting with each other, but guessed they were reacting to a neighborhood black cat who had been walking through our backyard every so often in recent weeks. We couldn't see anything out the window, though. The cats calmed down after a minute or two, so Wendy and I went back to bed. Right when I finally got back to sleep my alarm went off. Ugh.

I checked the trail cam in the morning to see if it held any clues to what the cats saw. The only videos I found were of a deer walking through our yard early in the morning, but not at the moment the cats had freaked out.

The rest of the morning was fairly unremarkable, except for the fact that I was very tired.

At lunchtime, I dropped one of our cars off at the dealer for its routine maintenance. Wendy picked me up and we drove home.

As soon as we got home, a plumber texted that he was on the way. We had scheduled him to come by to fix a tiny leak in a valve before it became a bigger issue. He arrived, shut off water to the house, replaced the valve, and turned the water back on. It took about an hour, and then he left.

Right after he left, Wendy left to get her covid and flu shots. While she was gone, the dealer called to say our car was ready.

A few minutes later, I was completely startled by the sound of the faucet on the outside of our house being turned on, and water flowing through the pipes. "Who on earth is doing that?!" I thought. I looked out the front window and saw a guy from the water company, with a bunch of water-testing equipment spread out on our porch. I went out and chatted with him for a few minutes. He was testing the chlorine samples in 5 houses around the neighborhood, and had chosen our house because it was near a fire hydrant. In his first test, the chlorine level was too low, so he was letting water run from the faucet for a few minutes before he tested again. That was all well and good, but it would have been nice if he'd given me a heads up first.

As we finished our conversation, Wendy got home from getting her vaccines. We immediately got in the car and drove to the dealer to pick up the other car. By the time we got home the water company guy and his testing equipment were gone.

A little bit later, we heard yowling, hissing, and a thud from the basement. We went downstairs and found Chili on the window sill hissing at the neighborhood black cat in the backyard. I went outside and chased the black cat away. That's surely what spooked the cats that morning. I also made the connection at this point between a black cat and Friday the 13th.

After a while, I heard the sound of our outside faucet being turned on again. The water company guy was back. This time he was also flushing the hydrant near our house. A hose snaked from the hydrant and across our driveway, where a truly huge stream of water sprayed into our yard.

At this point it's now late afternoon and it's been a crazy day. We decided to hit the easy button and order pizza for dinner. For the first time in a long time, Dominos actually delivered our pizza on time, which was very welcome.

Right before the pizza was delivered, we got an automated call from the water company. Was the boil order finally lifted? Nope. There'd been a water main break and now we would have no water for the next 12 hours. Oh, and this extended the length of the boil order, too. Ha! That's. just. great.

Ugh.

After dinner, I looked out the window and was surprised to see a van in our driveway. We had momentarily forgotten that our farm CSA vegetables were being delivered on Friday instead of the normal Sunday. We got the vegetables and packed them into the fridge.

We then went for a walk around the neighborhood. We saw a bunch of water streaming out from the bottom of our neighbor's driveway. The water flowed into a ditch, down the hill a few houses, across a pipe under the road, and poured out into the pond. Yep, that was the water main break.

The evening was actually fairly relaxing. Around 9pm, though, we started to hear the sound of heavy machinery. I went outside and saw 5 or 6 big trucks dropping off construction equipment, like a backhoe. They were about to start repairing the water leak.

What a crazy day it had been! When we went to bed, we could still hear the sound of heavy machinery in the distance.

Around 5:30am Saturday morning, I woke up again to the sound of cats yowling and hissing. I ignored it and went back to sleep. We didn't have a chance to sleep in, though, because at 8am one of the cats knocked the phone handset off a shelf in the office, which hit the cable modem, knocking it off the desk, and sent the handset careening to the other side of the room. What a ruckus! There was no point in trying to get back to sleep after that.

This time the trail cam did record the black cat right at the moment the cats were hissing at it:

Thankfully the water main had been fixed by this point and we now had water. I heard from a neighbor that the construction crew worked throughout the night and finished up at 6am.

The boil order was finally, finally, finally lifted Monday morning.

An egret hanging out by the pond:

A turtle crawling through our backyard:

A family of raccoons running through our backyard:

Two frogs that I very rudely startled: