Randy’s Blog

The next day was Sunday, the day before the eclipse. We packed up our things in Wichita and headed north to Kearney, Nebraska. Google Maps said the fastest route was to take the back roads, so that's what we did. We had no idea how busy the roads would be, given the dire predictions of "hurricane-evacuation level traffic". Fortunately, there was absolutely no traffic at all. We drove through very pretty parts of Kansas I'd never seen before. For lunch, we stopped at a park in Osborne, KS and had a picnic, thanks to a cooler we borrowed from Bill and Beth that we filled with food and frozen water bottles. We also filled up with gas every chance we got, because, again, dire predictions.

We made it to our hotel in Kearney without any problems and filled the car up with gas as soon as we got there (that was one of the tasks on my to-do list). Apparently everyone else had the same idea; the gas station was packed and we had to wait in line, but only for a few minutes.

When we checked in to our hotel, Wendy asked if they were completely booked, and to our surprise, they said no, there were still a few rooms left. They gave us a free gift bag of eclipse-related items, including two eclipse glasses. They were also giving out free moon pies, so we took a couple. After we got settled into our room, we worked on completing another task on my to-do list: scouting out the roads to Ravenna.

Our hotel was directly in the path of totality, so if nothing else, we could just step outside and experience 1m 50s of totality. But I had planned a second option: if we drove 40 minutes north to the town of Ravenna, we could get 2m 35s of totality, which is only 7 seconds shy of the maximum totality possible. Ravenna was planning a big eclipse-watching event at two high school baseball fields, and were selling tickets for $10 per person. I had purchased tickets for us online a few weeks prior.

So we drove to Ravenna and located the baseball fields. This turned out to be a great idea for two reasons:

1. We learned the main roads to Ravenna went through the downtown area and had some busy and tricky traffic intersections. Now we knew we should try to find an easier route.
2. Ravenna was having a festival at the baseball fields that day. We were hoping to gauge how big the crowd would be for the eclipse by how big the crowd was at the festival:

As you can see, there were a good 10-20 people there. We were amused and relieved. There wouldn't be an apocalyptic number of people. It was just a small town; there would probably be small-town-sized crowds at the event. We headed back to our hotel, but via a different, and much easier, route. The trip had been worthwhile.

Back at our hotel room, I focused my attention on something completely unproductive: worrying about the weather! It still wasn't looking great; the weather forecast now called for, at best, 50% cloud cover throughout the state of Nebraska. It was all coming down to a coin toss, essentially. Not great odds. I did consider whether we should drive to Wyoming, which would have improved our odds, but we had no place to stay once we got there, and it would mean a 7-hour drive there and a 7-hour drive back, if traffic was perfect. So we stayed put.

When we bought supplies at the grocery store in Kansas, I bought a bag of Hershey's kisses and a bag of Andes chocolate mints. I told myself they would either be celebratory sweets, or morsels of misery. It was now the night before the eclipse. We didn't know if we would be able to see it. Uncertainty loomed large, and I had already begun mentally preparing myself for disappointment. I opened my bag of morsels and started eating...

My interest in this year's total solar eclipse started in the spring of last year, when I joined a local astronomy group that meets monthly. At each meeting someone would usually say something about the upcoming eclipse. So that put it on my radar. 

Also, for years I've read an astronomy magazine called StarDate:

One of the issues last year mentioned a soon-to-be-published book called Sun Moon Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets. I put the book on my birthday wish list that year, and Wendy got it for me. The book was great, and ultimately it was the thing that convinced me I should try to go see this year's eclipse.

Fortunately I read the book about a year in advance, so I was still able to find available hotel rooms. Based on historical models of cloud cover, western Nebraska looked like an ideal spot, with typically sunny days in late August. I aimed for a hotel in the North Platte area, but didn't find any reasonably priced rooms, so I wound up reserving a room in Kearney, which is in central Nebraska. We reserved a room for 2 nights, planning to arrive the day before the eclipse and leave the day after. With that done, I just had to wait an entire year.

A few months before the eclipse, we made our flight reservations. We decided to fly to Wichita so we could spend a few days visiting Wendy's parents. Then we could drive north 4.5 hours to Kearney for the eclipse. Afterwards, we'd drive back to Wichita for another quick visit, and then catch a flight home.

In the weeks leading up to our trip, I made lots of lists, trying to plan for any eventuality:

• What if there was no cell phone service? No problem, I downloaded offline maps on both of our phones. 
• What if I lost the paper maps that showed the exact time and path of totality? No problem, I took photos of the maps as a backup. 
• What if it was cloudy? I collected links to weather forecasts of cities in the path of totality all across Nebraska, even into Wyoming and Kansas.
• What if the airline somehow managed to lose our suitcase on a direct flight? No problem, I packed half of our eclipse glasses in our carry-on.

I had a list of things to pack before we left our house, a list of things to pack before we left Wichita to head to Kearney, and a list of things to do once we arrived in Kearney. I was determined to be PREPARED!

Finally, the day of our trip arrived. We packed everything up and got ready to drive to O'Hare. When we turned on the car, the song Total Eclipse of the Heart was playing on the radio! What an auspicious sign, we said!

Our drive to O'Hare and flight to Wichita was remarkably stress free. We picked up our rental car (a Toyota Camry), and headed to Bill and Beth's house, with a quick stop at a grocery store to buy some supplies we'd need for our trip north (I had a list of what we needed, naturally). Finally, we got to their house. I'd forgotten how peaceful and quiet it is there, and how beautiful the night sky is! I went outside to star gaze each night we were there. 

The next day was Saturday, and we decided to visit the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS. Somehow, despite visiting the Wichita area dozens of times, I'd never been there before. It's a fantastic space museum, with all kinds of space artifacts. According to its Wikipedia page, it "houses the largest collection of Russian space artifacts outside of Moscow, and a collection of US space artifacts second only to the National Air and Space Museum." It was really a fantastic museum. A few notable things:

• There's a beautiful SR-71 Blackbird hanging from the ceiling in the lobby. At first I thought it was a life-size replica, but later learned that no, it's a real plane that's been flown.
• There was a plaque towards the beginning that said there were 65 years between the Wright brother's first flight and humans landing on the moon. I was amazed by that! How did we make so much progress in such a short time, I wondered.
• The next exhibit answered my question. War is how we made so much progress. The museum had a German V-1 and V-2 rocket on display, with lots of fascinating and sobering stories about them. It said the V-2 rocket was one of mankind's greatest technological leaps, and we wouldn't have gotten to the moon without it.

We were at the museum for probably 3 hours, and there was more information than I could process in that time. I started to run out of steam by the end. It was a very cool place, and I'll have to go back at some point.

The whole time we were visiting Wendy's parents, I kept a close eye on the weather forecasts for the eclipse. And I was heartbroken with what I found. It was not looking good. The forecast called for cloudy skies over the entire state of Nebraska. I found an online forum of amateur astronomers, some of whom were also storm chasers, and I read their comments and followed the weather links they posted. I learned that the local branches of the National Weather Service publish not just the weather forecast, but a meteorological discussion of the forecast. Hastings, NE was the closest branch to Kearney. I read their weather discussions, and my hopes hung on their every word. At one point, the meteorologist wrote:

Although all hope is not lost, to be quite honest, I'm becoming concerned about the possibility of seeing the eclipse in central Nebraska.

Several months ago I watched a news program on the FNX TV station (FNX stands for First Nations Experience. It's the Native American PBS channel that I wrote about here). It had a segment on Indian mounds in southern Wisconsin. These are mounds of earth built by the Woodland Indians between 500 BC and 1200 AD. They were used for rituals, and were often built in the shape of animals. There used to be lots and lots of them, but most have been destroyed; the few that remain have been designated historical sites.

Then, a few weeks before my birthday, I encountered the topic of Indian mounds again. This time it was an article by Gregory Little, who's written several books on the topic. The article mentioned some of the major mounds in the U.S., including Cahokia in southern Illinois and the Serpent Mound in southern Ohio.

When it came time for my birthday last month, I wanted to do something fun and unique. So, based on the events above, I decided to explore the mounds in southern Wisconsin. I searched online until I found a review (here) of the Wisconsin mounds that were worth checking out. Of the 4 it recommended, 2 were only a short drive away! And according to Google Maps, we'd drive by another mounds site on the way to those two.

So on a sunny Saturday after my birthday, we packed a cooler with food (crackers, egg salad, pimento cheese, and sugar snap peas) and drove north.

Effigy Mounds Preserve in Whitewater, WI

This was our first stop. It was a small forested area right next to a subdivision. The mounds weren't very big, and were somewhat hard to make out among the vegetation, but I think this was my favorite of our stops. There was no one else there, and the area was beautiful and peaceful. There were markers next to each mound with more information. And there were signs from the Ho-Chunk tribe saying this is a sacred place, and to "Please respect this area as you would your place of worship."

A couple interesting things I learned from the markers:

• Some of the mounds were aligned with celestial events, like the rising of a star or constellation on a certain day. One in particular was oriented to Polaris, the North Star.
• The soil used to make the mounds is not from the area. It was carried there in baskets, from other sacred sites.

The only downside to these mounds was the mosquitoes. Fortunately, I put on bug spray before going in, so it wasn't too bad. Wendy didn't, though, and she fled to the car shortly after we started the trail.

Aztalan State Park

Our second stop had the fewest, but by far the most impressive, mounds. Since it was part of the Wisconsin State Park system, we had to pay an $11 out-of-state fee, which seemed excessive. But I suppose it is for a good cause.

The first thing we did was find a picnic table and eat lunch (the egg salad was delicious!). The whole area was wide open, and there was a nice breeze. Afterwards we walked all along the trails, and climbed to the top of the mounds. There was also a large, reconstructed log fence, which apparently had shielded the public from religious ceremonies.

One of the small mounds nearby, which was excavated long ago, contained a female skeleton with many ornate beads and shells. It was dubbed the "Princess Burial Mound". For a while, the skeleton and beads were on display at the Milwaukee Public Museum, but apparently the exhibit was taken down due to sensitivity over Native American burial rights. I've read that some Native Americans have demanded the remains be re-buried at Aztalan.

Koshkonong Mounds

This was our third and final stop. There were a dozen or so small mounds in the shape of various animals, although most of the shapes didn't look much like an animal, to be honest. The brochure did say that the best way to view the mounds is from above. Just like our first stop, there was a sign from the Ho-Chunk tribe saying this is an ancient burial and religious site, and to please respect it as you would your place of worship.

Unfortunately, this was the least enjoyable of our stops. The mosquitoes were out in full force, despite our bug spray, and we were getting tired. We took a quick hike along the trail, snapped a few pictures, and decided to call it a day.

That was our mounds-exploration trip. Overall, it was a decent way to spend a beautiful day. I would consider visiting mounds further north in Wisconsin, but definitely not during mosquito season!

Last year, on the day before my birthday, an article appeared in my RSS reader about a new book by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke that had just been published. It was called More Encounters with Star People: Urban American Indians Tell Their Stories. I was elated with the news! I had been looking forward to anything new from her for months on end. And all of a sudden, there it was, almost like a birthday present for me.

I ordered the book right then, and read it as soon as it arrived. As usual, there were some wild stories that gave me a lot to think about. I knew I would write a blog post on it, but for some reason it's taken me an entire year to do so.

To recap, Ardy Sixkiller Clarke is a retired professor from Montana State University. Over the past several decades, she's collected stories from American Indians about their encounters with star people (aka aliens/extraterrestrials). In 2012, she published her first book on the topic, Encounters with Star People: Untold Stories of American Indians, which I wrote about at length here. It focused on interviews with American Indians on reservations. In 2014, her second book was published, Sky People: Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Mesoamerica (which I briefly mentioned in this post). That book saw her fulfill a lifelong dream of traveling through Central America, following in the footsteps of the 19th century explorers Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. Along the way, she interviewed Mayans who'd had experiences with star people. Her third book, which is the topic of this blog post, was published last year (2016) and focused on interviews with American Indians who'd left the reservation.

I love her books for a variety of reasons:

• You get a glimpse into the lives of indigenous people. In the latest book, you get a sense of the challenges people face when they leave the reservation for modern society. They walk in two worlds, not quite belonging to either one.
• The stories of the star people. How do people react when confronted with a star person? What do the star people say? What does the experiencer say? What did they learn?
• Reading about Ardy's adventures. She has a number of serendipitous events, like when her car breaks down in New Mexico, and the mechanic who fixes it is an Indian that not only has read her books and recognizes her, but has his own story of UFO sightings to share. A fair number of her interviews happen like that, purely by chance.

The main thing from this book that stuck with me the past year is just how far behind humans are from the star people. For example, in one story, a star person said that verbal communication is not very common in the universe, and is actually a sign of how primitive humans are. That really shocked me, even though nearly everyone who communicates with a star person reports it happens telepathically. Another star person said that where he comes from, they do what's best for the species, whereas humans do what's best for the individual. He said humans have the cure for disease and old age, as well as forms of energy that would eliminate the need for fossil fuels, but these are not released because it's not profitable for those in power. Sadly, this did not shock me.

I'll share two stories in particular that have also stuck with me. The first comes from a doctor in Oklahoma, who is from the Southern Cheyenne tribe. He said he hit a deer one night as he was driving home from the hospital. When he got out of the car, the deer transformed into a star person! They stood on the side of the road, communicating telepathically. The star person said he wasn't hurt; he had healed himself with his mind, something humans would eventually learn to do (and that a few humans could already do, but they were scorned by the medical profession). The star person went on to say:

• In the grand scheme of things, Earth is not that important. No one wants to invade it. There are far too many habitable planets that don't have intelligent life that would be easier to colonize.
• His species does colonize uninhabited planets and have taken humans who were willing to leave Earth to those planets to help colonize them.
• He was aware of a species that was abducting humans. They have been encouraged to stop, but there is nothing his species can do to stop them. There are many other intelligent species that are unhappy with the attention human abductions have brought to space travelers, because their goal is to explore and study without changing the culture.

The other story is so wild it's difficult to believe. The story played out over 3 years. It started at a conference honoring Indian women leaders, where Ardy was approached by a woman who was a widow with a 14 year old daughter. She believed her daughter would be taken by the star people at the age of 17 to help colonize a planet inhabited only by human females. The star people had learned that human males always bring violence and greed with them, so they were trying a female-only colonization as an experiment. The mother was terrified of losing her daughter, and refused to seek counseling, so Ardy kept in touch with her by calling her weekly and visiting her periodically.  

A couple of years later, when the daughter was 16, Ardy visited them. The woman revealed she was now allowed to join her daughter on the new planet, and as a result had become vegetarian, like her daughter, since the only food source would be plants. Then, a few months later, the mother and daughter vanished. Their phone stopped working. The house was donated to charity. Someone else was at the mother's job, saying the woman left and didn't leave a forwarding address. Ardy said she couldn't get the woman out of her mind for months. Every time the phone rang, she thought it would be her, but it never was. She even visited the family's ancestral village, but no one knew where they were. Now, Ardy says, she looks at the stars and wonders if there really could be a woman-only planet, and whether or not it would be a happy place.

In a way, I was slightly disappointed in the book. While the stories were fascinating, there was much more fear among the urban Indians. The reservation Indians from her first book had more positive interactions with the star people. I'm not sure why that is.

Some critics have questioned how Ardy can encounter so many people with stories of UFOs and star people (she says she's interviewed more than 1500 individuals). Her answer to that is simple: she asks.

I have never seen a UFO or encountered a star person. For anyone reading this post, have you?

A few Fridays ago, I went to a presentation about solar eclipses, given by a lady who works at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. She talked about the history of eclipses, and about the total solar eclipse later this summer. She had several really good tips for people going to see it, some of which I hadn't considered. Things like:

• Expect hurricane evacuation level traffic
• Bring toilet paper (and food and water and medicine)
• Don't expect the internet to work

Those three things really drove home how crazy it might get in the path of totality, and made me very glad I went to the presentation. Forewarned is forearmed!

When talking about the history of eclipses, she mentioned how Edmund Halley (of Halley's Comet fame) started one of the earliest "citizen science" programs that we know of. Prior to a total solar eclipse in 1715, which passed over England, he asked the public to record the exact time totality began and ended, and send him the results. He used the data to better calculate the moon's exact position, which made future eclipse predictions much more accurate. Cool stuff.

That was on a Friday night. The next morning I took Wendy's car in for an oil change, and for what turned out to be fairly expensive repairs. To pass the time, I brought along a gigantic book on data analysis that I've (very) slowly been working my way through the past few months. I got to a chapter on survival analysis, which I learned predates statistics by nearly 2 centuries. The topic originated in a paper published by the Royal Society of London in 1693. It was written by, of all people, Edmund Halley! And it had a most excellent title:

An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind, drawn from curious Tables of the Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw, with an Attempt to ascertain the Price of Annuities upon Lives

If you're interested, the paper is available online.

The only reason I knew Edmund Halley's name in the first place is because of Halley's Comet. And yet, in the span of just over 12 hours, I encountered 2 references to him that had nothing to do with the comet!

At some point last year I came across an article on the New Yorker's website called Weeding the Worst Library Books. It interviews two Michigan librarians who created a popular blog called Awful Library Books, which features old and outdated library books that should be removed ("weeded"). One of the books featured on their blog, and mentioned in the New Yorker article, is this:

I don't know about you, but when I saw this cover, I laughed out loud! It is so ridiculous, it takes the cake in just about every possible way. It's not just a book about sasquatch, it's about psychic sasquatch! And not just any ordinary, run-of-the-mill psychic sasquatch, but psychic sasquatch connected to UFOs!!!

It was so ridiculous I knew I had to have it. So I asked for it for my birthday last year, and Wendy bought it for me. I knew it would be awful, I was just hoping it would be hilariously awful.

Well, I finally got around to reading it a couple of weeks ago. And to my incredible surprise, the joke is on me! Instead of being a hilariously awful book, it turned out to be a fascinating and intelligently-written one! It's authored by an anthropologist, Jack Lapseritis, who's spent much of his life investigating sasquatch reports, and was finally forced to accept what many people have reported, and what he eventually experienced himself: telepathic communication with sasquatch creatures! And in a number of cases, UFOs were observed at the same time as the sasquatch!

To say that I was stunned by this book would be an understatement. I have never been interested in sasquatch before; I've always thought "So there's a big ape deep in the remote wilderness that's eluded researchers. Big deal!" But this book has opened up an entirely new area of research. After reading it, I've subscribed to blogs of other sasquatch researchers, and noticed a few of them have come to similar conclusions as Lapseritis: sasquatch, UFOs, and the paranormal are all intertwined. How interesting!

Here are a few points made in The Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection:

• At the time the book was written (late 1990s), the author had interviewed 76 people who reported some level of telepathic contact with sasquatch, and/or observed sasquatch and UFOs at the same time.
• He claims sasquatch are extremely psychic, and can read people's minds, which makes them so elusive. They know who's coming and why.
• They are inter-dimensional beings, who can shift in and out of our reality, which is why their footprints suddenly disappear, or why no footprints are observed when they're seen walking over muddy ground.
• The sasquatch are people with their own culture, who want to be left alone. They are not animals to be hunted and killed. (Apparently this makes some Bigfoot hunters angry, since their goal is to kill a sasquatch and bring in the corpse as proof of their existence.)
• Sometimes they're seen being picked up or dropped off by UFOs.

There's much more in the book, of course; that's just a small sample. One other interesting point: the preface is written by R. Leo Sprinkle, a counseling psychologist. He's worked with clients who have had sasquatch/UFO encounters and says his clients were not crazy people; they just needed help dealing with experiences they couldn't explain. He also urges scientists to take the study of the paranormal seriously, and mentions the Society for Scientific Exploration as one such example. I was thrilled to see the SSE mentioned, because I joined that society way back in this blog post, when I discovered their journal, the JSE!

Finally, getting back to the Awful Library blog, I was pleased to see that not everyone thought Psychic Sasquatch was the type of book to be weeded. In their blog post on the book, a librarian comments:

As hokey as this book is, I’d keep it in my library unless the condition was awful. There’s a huge audience for Bigfoot in my community, and one of the most well-attended programs we’ve had was from a group of Bigfoot ‘researchers’!

Lately I've been encountering references to UFOs in unexpected places. Here's a roundup of them:

Fargo, Season 2

Wendy and I recently watched season 2 of the TV show Fargo. It was a fictional tale set in 1979 about ordinary people caught up in a turf war between the Kansas City mafia and the North Dakota mafia. Weirdly, there was a UFO subplot throughout the season: they kept appearing at critical moments in the story. Several episodes hinted that some of the main characters were being abducted by aliens. Nothing about the UFOs was ever explained. It was left, as in life, a complete mystery.

New York Times

The New York Times recently ran an article with the headline "People Are Seeing U.F.O.s Everywhere, and This Book Proves It". It's about a married couple that recently published a book called UFO Sightings Desk Reference. They gathered statistics of UFO sightings collected by two organizations (MUFON and NUFORC), and created a 371-page book full of charts, graphs, and tables that break down the data by geography, time, and shape of UFO. There's no narrative in the book, just data. The article also linked to their blog, New York Skies, where they discuss some of the patterns they've uncovered during their research.

Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos

Eventually I plan to write a blog post about Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) and the over 14,000 psychic readings he gave during his life, and how they've been thoroughly documented and cataloged, and how he became known as "the sleeping prophet" and "the father of holistic medicine" and "America's greatest psychic", and how some of his predictions are still coming true today. But, this is not that blog post. 

Instead, I will mention that I recently read the book Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos, written by astronomer James Mullaney. He explores what the Edgar Cayce readings say about our universe. I was very pleased to learn that Mullaney is a highly qualified astronomer: he was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society of London, helped contribute to Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series, and has written for, and served as editor of, Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines.

I was even more pleased when I read the preface of Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos. Mullaney writes that with his scientific background, he was skeptical of the Edgar Cayce material, just like he was skeptical of UFOs. However, he says:

I came to realize that such a formal background can also in many situations blind a person to the deeper realities lying behind nature. With further study of both the Cayce material and the UFO phenomenon, I soon lost all skepticism about either of them!

Atlantis Author

Last month I went to a presentation given by an author who's written a number of books about lost civilizations, such as Atlantis. During the Q&A at the end, I asked if he was working on any new books. He said yes, he'd just finished one, and it was on a topic he never thought he would write about: UFOs!

I had the day off on Friday, which was forecast to be in the mid-70s, so I hit the bike trail for the first time this year. I actually had a chance to go for a bike ride in February -- there was a day in the mid-60s -- but it was the day after my trip to Chicago for the Nintendo Switch event, and I just didn't have the energy. So I seized the opportunity on Friday.  And I dressed for success, too! I wore my padded shorts, thin socks, a bit of sunscreen, a bike helmet, and my Camelbak, which was full of water. Plus there was a snack bar tucked away in my saddle bag.

I started in Glacial Park and rode the Prairie Trail north to the Wisconsin state line. It was 11.6 miles round-trip. This was my idea of "taking it easy", but now I know better. That was way too long of a ride to start the season! I was exhausted when I got home. So, note to future Randy: start the season with a 5 or 6 mile ride instead.

As they say on the inter-webs, "pics or it didn't happen":

You can tell in a couple of the photos that there was a prescribed burn happening that day. I was worried the rest area just across the state line would be covered in smoke, but fortunately it wasn't. The wind directed it away from there.

There was one spot on the trail where you could hear a chorus of frogs singing away. I stopped on the way back just to listen to them for a while. They were very loud.

Ride stats:

• 11.6 miles
• 1 hour, 19 minutes

For the record, my season total for last year was 84.4 miles.

A couple months ago I subscribed to a new movie streaming service called FilmStruck. It has all kinds of classic and critically-acclaimed movies, including the Criterion collection, indie films and foreign films, along with bonus material like hosted introductions and short interviews. It's basically like Netflix for film lovers. It wasn't available on any devices I owned, so I used my credit card reward points to buy an Amazon Fire TV player just so I could watch FilmStruck. And it's been worth it! 

There's also a FilmStruck blog at http://streamline.filmstruck.com/. Several times a week they write about a movie in their collection and provide all kinds of interesting background information. This has been required reading for me; I've discovered films I would otherwise have never heard about.

I've watched over a dozen movies so far. Here are some of the best:

Dodsworth (1936)

This was the first movie I watched on FilmStruck, and I have yet to see anything better. I was shocked that a movie made in the 1930s could be this good. The FilmStruck blog wrote about it on New Year's Eve, framing it as a film about new beginnings. It's about a rich businessman who sells his business and retires. He and his wife travel to Europe to see the world, but her insecurity about growing old starts to drive them apart. I've seen the movie described as "a mature and intelligent marital drama" and I think that sums it up. The acting by everyone is incredible, and the cinematography in some scenes was so good I still think about it. Dodsworth was directed by William Wyler, who I'd never heard of, but he is apparently one of Hollywood's greatest directors. I've seen several people refer to his film The Best Years of Our Lives as being a masterpiece, but I have yet to watch it. (It won Best Picture in 1947, beating out It's a Wonderful Life.)

World on a Wire (1973)

I found this movie just by browsing the FilmStruck catalog. It's a made-for-TV German movie and is basically The Matrix, about 25 years before The Matrix was made. Instead of focusing on people in the matrix, it focuses on the people who created it. They simulate their society inside a computer and use it to predict consumer trends and election results. The movie has been described as "gloriously paranoid" and I think that is an understatement. Everyone is being watched by someone else. And the cinematography is on steroids! The camera never seems to stop panning, zooming, tracking, or circling. And mirrors are everywhere! Nearly every scene has one and you constantly see reflections and reflections within reflections within reflections! It's crazy, but I loved it. There are lots of Kubrick references throughout the movie, too.

It seemed odd that this was a made-for-TV movie, but one of the bonus interviews explained that in Germany in 1973 there were a grand total of 2 TV channels: channel 1 and channel 2. By making it for TV, they had a much larger audience than they would if it was released in theaters. TV viewers also got more excited about multi-night movies ("television events"), so World on a Wire is split into two 2-hour parts. It has a rather glacial pace as a result. Still, I enjoyed the movie, and the more I thought about it afterwards, the more I liked it.

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

This is the one movie I've seen so far that I like as much as Dodsworth. Two friends meet for dinner at the beginning of the movie. They eat dinner, they talk, and they leave. That's the whole movie! It's just a 2-hour dinner conversation between two friends! I was highly skeptical that this would be good, but I read that Roger Ebert ranked it as one of the best movies of the year, so I gave it a try. While watching it I realized that it all boils down to storytelling. They're just two guys telling stories about their lives. There's no reason their stories couldn't be just as fascinating as any other movie. 

Andre is played by Andre Gregory. His friend is Wallace, played by Wallace Shawn (instantly recognizable as the "Inconceivable!" guy from The Princess Bride). Andre does most of the talking, and shares the real-life experiences of Andre Gregory, the actor. He's had a very unusual life with a number of strange experiences (one of which borders on the supernatural). Wallace is the more down-to-earth guy who's led a normal life and is skeptical of some of Andre's beliefs. The film is fascinating, and makes the point that most people go through life asleep. I would like to watch this again sometime.

I learned about My Dinner with Andre on the FilmStruck blog. I hadn't heard of it before, but apparently it's a well-known movie. The blog post pointed out that The Simpsons once poked fun at it, when an episode showed a kid playing a My Dinner with Andre video game. Ha!

Finally, a few honorable mentions:

* The Baron of Arizona (1950) - Vincent Price stars in a non-horror role. It's based on the nearly unbelievable true story of a man in the late 1800's who spent years creating fake land grant documents in an attempt to con the U.S. government into believing he owned all the land in Arizona. And he nearly succeeded!

* To Be or Not to Be (1942) - A very dark comedy about Polish actors who get mixed up with a Nazi spy. The jokes about concentration camps were in shockingly poor taste, but the movie is now considered a comedy masterpiece. It has one of the funniest lines I've heard in a movie in a long time.

* Gaslight (1944) - A man marries a woman (Ingrid Bergman) and slowly drives her mad in an effort to uncover her family secrets. A young Angela Lansbury plays their maid, and both she and Ingrid won Oscars for their performances. The term gaslighting originated from this movie.

I will of course let you know if I encounter any movies better than Dodsworth!

Last Saturday I went down to Chicago to preview Nintendo's new video game console, the Switch, which comes out on March 3rd. It was an invitation-only event letting people try out a bunch of games on the console. I got the invitation via email back in January (just a week after we went to Chicago for a Bulls game). Nintendo claimed they invited me because I was "a loyal user".

Well, flattery will get you everywhere, so I graciously accepted the invite. Wendy planned to come with me, since I had 2 tickets, but she had to go to Kansas at the last minute, which meant I was by myself for the event.

When last Saturday arrived, I took the train to Chicago. To pass the time, I brought my Nintendo 3DS and played Dragon Quest VII. It's an RPG game that can take over 100 hours to complete -- by far the longest video game I've ever attempted! With an hour and a half train ride each way, it easily kept me occupied.

When I got to Chicago, I had a quick lunch at the train station (a vegetarian banh mi sandwich from Saigon Sisters) and got an Uber ride to the event. I was scheduled for the 2:30-5:30 event, but I got there around 2, after reading it was best to arrive early. The line was already well established by then:

At 2:30 they shuffled us all inside, checked our tickets, and had a countdown to the start of the event. And then it began! There were booths set up for a bunch of Switch games, and you could just walk up and play a game. Some booths were more elaborate than others. I played a round of Mario Kart at this fancy booth, but I did poorly, coming in 8th place:

There were lots of games to try. I didn't even try to play them all.

If you were so inclined, you could go up onto the main stage and play games in front of the crowd. Here are two people playing "1-2 Switch", which has a bunch of mini-games:

The main reason I was there, though, was to play the new Zelda game, Breath of the Wild:

Everybody was there to play Zelda, though, so they had a process in place: get a ticket for specific time slot, and once your time arrived, you got to play a 20-minute demo. I had about an hour to kill before my time slot, so I played a handful of games, like the aforementioned Mario Kart, Disgaea (which was new to me), Super Bomberman R (also new to me), and Street Fighter 2 (I got my butt kicked by some random dude).

Eventually I got my 20 minutes of Zelda. There was a Nintendo rep who guided me through the demo and told me about things I could do. It was fun, but playing a new game, with a new controller, with someone watching over my shoulder and giving me tips, in a loud and crazy room was total sensory overload! The 20 minutes went by in a flash.

I played a couple other games afterward, but then decided I was done. I was getting hungry at this point, so I got an Uber ride to Native Foods (the vegan restaurant we went to after the Bulls game) and had dinner. Then I walked back to the train station, hopped on a train, and continued playing Dragon Quest VII.

The event was fun, and I'm glad I went. I will buy a Switch so I can play the new Zelda, but I'm not planning on running out and buying it on day one. I think I'll finish Dragon Quest first!