Randy’s Blog

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!

In the early 1990s, during the time I was reading comics, Marvel launched a title featuring a new superhero named Darkhawk. 

He's really Chris Powell, a teenage kid who finds a mysterious amulet in an abandoned amusement park. Just by holding the amulet and wishing, he can transform into Darkhawk, a powerful being with all kinds of super abilities. With another wish, he can transform back into his teenage self. I bought a few of the early issues at the time and really liked it. Due to my meager funds, however, I couldn't afford to continue buying it, so I gradually lost interest in the hero. But I always remembered how great those few issues were, and how cool Darkhawk was.

A few years ago, Marvel announced a new Marvel Unlimited service. For $70 a year, you can read digital versions of over 17,000 Marvel titles using their mobile app. I signed up, and reading Marvel comics quickly became the main reason I used my tablet. (A 10" tablet is roughly the same size as a comic book.) One of the first things I looked for was Darkhawk, but it was not available. 17,000 titles is a lot, but it's nowhere near the number of comics Marvel has published in its long history. I easily found other exciting comics to read, though, so the service was (and still is) a great value.

Once again, time passed, and all thoughts of Darkhawk subsided. But that all changed late last year, on the night of November 7th. That night I had a dream I went to a comic book store and found nearly every issue of Darkhawk, including the annuals. I bought them all. The total was $39, and I had $40 in my dream wallet. I was stoked!

When I woke up the next morning, I checked Marvel Unlimited first thing, to see if Darkhawk was available (they add a few dozen comics to it every week; some new issues, some old issues), but it wasn't. So I searched the internet for any Darkhawk news, and I almost couldn't believe it, but I found some! A couple of days before my dream, Marvel issued a press release and buried at the very bottom was a note that Darkhawk would be added to the Marvel Unlimited library later that very month! Just like in the dream, I was stoked.

I didn't have to wait long. About a week later, on November 13th, Darkhawk was added. I eagerly jumped in and read them, and they were just as good as I remembered. But soon I discovered a problem: only the first 9 issues had been added, and the Darkhawk series ran for 50! This was a bummer. It had taken several years for the first 9 issues to make their way to Marvel Unlimited. I had a feeling it would be several more years for the remaining issues to do the same.

I felt defeated, but still somehow stubbornly attached to the idea of reading every issue of Darkhawk. So I traveled to a local comic book store and combed through their entire back issue selection: the high-value back issue bin, the one-dollar back issue bin, even the fifty-cent back issue bin. When I left the store, I had five new Darkhawk issues. My entire set of Darkhawk comics, including the ones I bought in the '90s, now included these:

• 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 25, 34, 36, 44

At this point I realized how futile it would be to track down all the Darkhawk issues at comic book stores. It would take forever! But how else could it be done? I visited a few internet-based comic book stores, and saw that I could search for each issue, select what condition I wanted it in (mint, near mint, very fine, fine, etc), add it to my cart, and repeat for the next issue, but for some reason that didn't feel like the best solution. So for a few days, I was stumped.

Finally, the light bulb turned on inside my head.

The answer was ebay!!

I searched through ebay's listings and discovered the mother lode: someone was selling the entire run of Darkhawk: issues 1-50 plus all 3 annuals, just like in my dream. It was not $39 like my dream, but it was just slightly over $1 per issue, which seemed quite reasonable. I bought it, and 3 days later a big box of comics was delivered to our front porch.

Over the next couple of weeks, I read the entire series. It had obviously been canceled after issue 50, so I was expecting the writing to get really bad in the latter half of the series, thus leading to the cancellation. It really didn't, though. The entire series was written by the same writer, Danny Fingeroth, and while he made some changes to the character in the latter half that I didn't like, the issues were always surprisingly well written. Sometimes when the writing in comics is bad, it feels like a chore to keep reading, but that never happened with Darkhawk. It always kept me engaged and interested in what happened next.

What I really enjoyed about the series was how much Chris Powell struggled both in his personal life and as a superhero. His father, a police officer, disappears after taking bribes from a mobster. His mother, a lawyer, is prosecuting the same mobster, and dealing with threats and assassination attempts. Chris tries to use his Darkhawk identity as "an edge against crime" to try to find his father and protect his mother, all while keeping his identity secret and trying to help raise his younger twin brothers.

His attempts at being a superhero are extremely amateurish. In one of my favorite scenes, he fights a group of villains when Daredevil shows up to help him out. Darkhawk yells "Daredevil! Wow!", which prompts Daredevil to think to himself: "Wow? This Darkhawk character is new!" Over the course of the series, Chris' increasingly erratic schedule gets him kicked out of his house and suspended from school, so he has to find a cheap apartment and get a job with flexible hours. Throughout the series he often wonders if he's doing the right thing.

I'd never heard of the writer, Danny Fingeroth, before, so after I finished the series, I looked him up. He was a long-time writer and editor for the various Spider-Man comics, which made sense, since Darkhawk always seemed to fight a Spider-Man villain.

In the past decade or so, instead of writing comics he's been analyzing comics, such as his book, Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society, and this 2004 article in the L.A. Times about Spider-Man (the "regular-guy superhero").

He was even featured in a 2009 article in the Philosophy Now magazine:

I was pleased to see several references to Darkhawk in the article, including one about how he "agonizes about the rightness of his decisions". It refers to issue #18, where a group of villains is trying to kidnap a Russian scientist. Darkhawk, trying to protect him, takes action that accidentally causes the scientist's death. On the last page, Darkhawk thinks:

All I've ever wanted to do with the [amulet's] power was the right thing... That all I had to do was want to do the right thing -- and the right thing would get done. With no harm to anyone but the bad guys... Am I -- despite my good intentions -- a worse menace than those I fight?!

I'm sure this is all much more than you ever wanted to know about a superhero you didn't even know existed in the first place. So, in honor of Stan Lee, and without further ado:

'Nuff said!

You may recall last year I was excited about OU’s run through the NCAA tournament, resulting in a Final Four appearance. The team was led by senior Buddy Hield, who won several national player of the year awards, and was picked #6 in the NBA Draft by the New Orleans Pelicans. He grew up in the Bahamas, was an exciting player to watch, and seemed like a great guy, too. Genuine and full of enthusiasm.

So ever since the NBA season started, I had January 14th circled on my calendar. That was the day the Pelicans would come to Chicago to play the Bulls. I told myself if Buddy was getting playing time as a rookie, I would consider going. Well, he was getting playing time, a good 10-20 minutes per game, and he had made the starting lineup. He had also been getting better each month, and was named the Western Conference Rookie of the Month for December. All of this meant I decided to go to the game.

I checked nbatickets.com and found some surprisingly decent seats (3rd level, at center court, on the 2nd row) that weren’t too expensive. It probably helped that the Pelicans aren’t a good team. I bought the tickets, printed them out, and made our plans. On Saturday, we took the train to Chicago and then an Uber to the United Center. This was the first time we’d used Uber, and I think it was both cheaper and easier than getting a taxi.

This was also the first time I’d been to an NBA game. Here’s what went down:

The game started at 4pm, with gates opening at 2:30. We got there a few minutes before gates opened, and there were already a lot of people in line. Thankfully we didn’t have to wait long, and getting through the gates went quickly.

We walked around the arena for a bit and got to see the Bulls’ trophy case:

Then we found our seats and were fairly pleased with the view. We had seats at the end of the aisle, which was convenient.

There were lots of championship banners for the Bulls and Blackhawks, who also play in the United Center.

I spotted Joel Meyers, the play-by-play announcer for the Pelicans. I’ve watched him announce Big 12 football games on Fox in the past. He has a great voice, and is an excellent announcer. I really enjoy his commentary. When the NBA season started, I bought NBA League Pass so I could watch all the Pelicans games, and I was thrilled to see he was now calling games for them.

Buddy makes his first appearance! He's on the sideline in the hoodie.

Buddy then proceeds to make lots of 3 pointers during warm-ups:

A giant remote-controlled Bulls blimp flew around the stadium several times:

The announcement of the starting lineup for the Bulls was quite a dramatic event:

The Pelicans win the tip!

I was surprised how little of the game you could hear. There was music playing a fair amount of time, and we were far away from the court to begin with. I could hear the squeaks of sneakers, but it was hard to hear the whistle at times. And you couldn’t hear the ball bouncing on the court, or clanging off the rim. But still, it was fun to watch and experience. There was all kinds of entertainment going on during stoppages, so it never got boring.

Unfortunately, Buddy had one of his worst games in a while. He only scored 2 points and got 2 rebounds in 12 minutes of play. So that was disappointing. No one really expected the Pelicans to win, and they didn’t, but they did make a game of it. Dwayne Wade came through for the Bulls, though, hitting several clutch shots in the 4th quarter.

The final score was 107-99, Bulls. During the 4th quarter, Chick-fil-A ran a “Fowl Shot” promotion: if the Pelicans missed two consecutive free throws during the 4th, everyone in attendance would get a free chicken sandwich!

It was funny just how intense and loud the crowd got when the Pelicans shot a free throw. They really wanted that free chicken sandwich! But they were denied; the Pelicans made their free throws. The vegetarian part of me was secretly pleased.

After the game ended, we stayed in our seats for a while to let the crowd disperse. I noticed Buddy walk over and talk to Denzel Valentine, who plays for the Bulls. He’s also a rookie, and also won a few national player of the year awards last year.

When we left the United Center, it was time for dinner. I’d researched vegetarian options ahead of time, and we decided on a place called Native Foods Cafe. It was too far to walk, so we got another Uber ride.

The restaurant turned out to be really good! It’s actually a vegan restaurant, which means everything on their menu is plant-based. No dairy, eggs, or meat. Everything we had was delicious, and that included an oatmeal creme pie and a peanut butter parfait for dessert! It was so good that now I want to go back to Chicago so we can eat there again.

After dinner, since we were only a mile away, we walked back to the train station and eventually caught a train back home.

The whole trip was a lot of fun, with a lot of new adventures.

It's been a while since I've written about my Big 12 Sports river. It's still there, churning away, updating every hour or so with all the latest headlines about all things Big 12. I still check it daily. Most days I just skim the headlines to get a sense of what's going on. Sometimes a story will jump out at me, and I'll click the headline to read the story. And once in a great while, a story is so interesting that I'll send it to Wendy.

When I created the river (way back here and here), it occurred to me I didn't have any way to monitor the various RSS feeds that are used to pull the headlines. If something stopped working, I would never know, unless I actively went looking for problems. At the time, I decided to let the issue slide. It was a lot of work to create the river, and I was ready to take a break from working on it.

A few months ago, as the college football season was getting into full swing, I noticed I wasn't getting as many headlines as I had in previous seasons. So one weekend I decided to write a program to help me monitor problems. What I came up with was a program that sends me an email once a week, summarizing the daily number of posts from each RSS feed for the previous week. It looks like this:

I also added another table, which shows the most recent response code from each website's server:

Between the two tables, I can get a quick sense of what's going on. And having it emailed to me each week means I don't have to do anything! Just a quick glance at the email each week tells me if anything's wrong.

After creating this program, and running it for the first time, it was clear several things were wrong. After a bit of investigation I learned some things had changed in the 2 years since I created the river:

• In West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette and the Charleston Daily Mail newspapers merged into the Charleston Gazette-Mail. For me, this meant 2 RSS feeds were combined into 1 new feed.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette seems to have stopped covering West Virginia sports entirely.
• The Austin American-Statesman seems to have dropped support for RSS feeds. This was mildly disappointing, but I'm not too sad that there are fewer Texas stories in the river.
• Five or six other websites changed the URL for their RSS feed, probably because they redesigned their website.

I fixed all of these issues and immediately noticed a lot more content in the river. It felt much better, like it had when I first created it.

Writing this program paid off the very next week, when I got my first automated weekly email. I immediately noticed two things:

The Topeka Capital-Journal had returned a "404 - Not Found" status for its Kansas and K-State feeds, and no posts had been recorded for either since the previous Tuesday. When I investigated the cause, I discovered the newspaper had changed the URL for both feeds the previous week. I updated the river with the new URLs, and everything was back to working.

I was extremely pleased that my new monitoring program paid off so quickly! 

So I think the lesson here is that many times, writing software is not enough. It helps to write software that monitors your software, and makes it almost effortless to keep tabs on how things are working.

I wrote about Leonard Cohen's new album, You Want It Darker, in a recent post. Just a few weeks after the album was released, he passed away at the age of 82. It wasn't too much of a surprise; he'd said his health was declining. But it was still a shock to see the headlines announcing his death. 

I'm so glad he was able to finish his last album. It's really good! It's my favorite of the albums he released this decade. I've embedded a couple of songs from it below. It was hard to limit myself to just two!

Note that if you're reading this via email, you may have to open this post in a browser to see them.

If I Didn't Have Your Love

On the Level

I hope you enjoy them as much I do!

It worked!

This morning I got an email like this:

Subject: Little Debbie Notifier: Cherry Cordials
Message:
Miles Store Name Address
0.66 Jewel 4222 Elm St Mchenry, IL 60050
7.11 Jewel 2401 Route 12 Spring Grove, IL 60081

Just like last time, they were not with the other Little Debbie snacks, but down the frozen food aisle in a special display of holiday treats.

This was the first such email I've gotten since around February, when cherry cordials went out of stock in my area. They're only available for a limited time during the holiday season, and they're delicious!

If you want to find out if they're available near you, you can search for Little Debbie snacks here.

The funny thing is that 2 nights ago I dreamed I found cherry cordials in a grocery store! My subconscious must have been tuned in to the local Little Debbie supplier.

Even if we hadn't watched Game 7 of the World Series, we would have known what happened. Around midnight on Wednesday, people started setting off fireworks in our neighborhood. That was true for pretty much every neighborhood, based on similar reports of coworkers. Evanston, IL actually set off their emergency sirens when the Cubs won.

We've been watching the Cubs throughout the postseason. It was crazy and historic to see them win. I can't imagine what lifelong Cubs fans must feel.

Dave Winer, the guy who invented blogs and has been blogging since the mid-90s, is a Mets fan. He blogged yesterday about trying to figure out if he's ever experienced anything close to what lifelong Cubs fans must be feeling. He decided he probably has, and created this:

If you made a list of all the things that could happen to increase the drama of the Cubs winning the World Series, many of them actually happened:

• Falling behind 3 games to 1
• Rallying to force a game 7
  
• Playing game 7 on the road
  
• Blowing a big lead late
  
• Going into extra innings
  
• Having a rain delay
  
• Allowing the other team to score in the bottom of the 10th
  

It's craziness. The parade was today and there were a lot fewer people at work than normal.

I can't imagine what Cleveland fans are feeling, either, but I can't help but think: thank goodness they won the NBA title this year. Otherwise, they would have lost the NBA Finals and a World Series in the same year, and their championship drought for any major sport would have continued.

Anyway, go Cubs!

Wendy and I have been big fans of Leonard Cohen, a Canadian poet/singer/songwriter, since our Colorado days, when Wendy first heard of him. He released a new album on Friday, You Want It Darker, at the age of 82! We've been looking forward to it since it was announced a couple months ago. This is his 3rd album this decade, which is an impressive feat. One of my coworkers said Cohen is a big inspiration to him on what you can accomplish later in life.

I think we started with a "Best of" Cohen album when we lived in Colorado, and then got a "More Best of" album. Over the years we've slowly collected all of his albums, and realized he has so many incredible songs, there's no way a "Best of" compilation can do justice to his work.

To go along with the new album, the New Yorker published a really long and interesting profile of him last week: Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker.

I almost never hear his songs on the radio. They tend to be deep meditations on love, death and religion, so they're not like typical mainstream music. Odds are, though, you've heard a cover of one his songs, Hallelujah:

During a book sale this summer, I picked up a copy of a graphic novel called The Sign of the Black Rock:

It looked like it was for kids, but I said what the heck and bought it anyway. I like graphic novels, and it was only a quarter, so I had nothing to lose. Recently I got around to reading it, figuring it would be a quick read and I could toss it in the donation pile when I was done.

But when I was done, I didn't want to get rid of it! It was really good. The art was great, the writing was even better, and the flow of action from panel to panel was superb. I've read a lot of graphic novels over the years, and there are lots of mediocre ones out there. When I come across a great one, it really sticks out.

So instead of getting rid of it, I looked up more about it, and about the author. It was the second of seven books in the Three Thieves series, written and drawn by Scott Chantler. I'd never heard of it before, but as luck would have it, the seventh book was just published this month! I collected the rest of the series and read them all in order, start to finish:

They are all excellent. The series is an "all-ages fantasy adventure" and has won several awards. I was most impressed with how well written it was. He put a lot of work into it!

I discovered his blog recently, and subscribed to it. What's interesting is that he's written about how he markets all of his work more like a book than a comic or graphic novel. As he puts it, he uses "content rather than form as a point of entry for people." He starts by making sure he creates a story that appeals to everyone, and then he attends writer's groups and book festivals and talks about his work. He sells more at book festivals than he does at comic conventions. Because of this approach, he gets fan mail from 80-year-olds.

There are a couple of other graphic novels he's written. One is called Two Generals, and is "about World War II, honouring a deceased relative, and personal family history." It was nominated for a bunch of awards. The other is called Northwest Passage, but oddly I couldn't find much about it on his website despite it also being nominated for awards. I haven't read either of these, but plan on checking them out soon.

Not bad for what looked like a kid's book at first glance!