It’s been a bit quiet here. By “here” I mean on the blog; where I actually am has been busy as all hell. The last month has been a bit of a whirlwind of the kids starting school, birthdays (I’m even older!), traveling for work, getting super sick from the virus I brought home as a souvenir, and spending whole days in implementation meetings. Not much time for doing anything interesting, much less writing about it. That said, I do have a political theory post nearly done and a backlog of blacksmithing (blacklog? does that work? blackslog?) that will be a post or two. Now that I have a half hour or so I just want to touch on some little odds and ends that probably don’t deserve their own posts.
Local Government!
I was down with plague during the last supervisors meeting, so I tried to dial in on the Zoom call. Then I fell asleep at my desk. As it turns out, they voted to reject all the bids. There’s a recording out there I haven’t watched yet, in part because it was literally the last item on the agenda so there’s about three hours ahead of it, but I am told it is kind of funny because the bids were just stupid. One was for the company my family uses, and the price per house for the township was 150% what they charge now. Hooray! So much for better negotiating position for single buyers, I guess.
Another interesting point that was mentioned to me was that the smaller bidding companies, not the larger one whose failure was the stated motivation for all this, both had representatives that told the township their time line was ridiculous, and that if their bids were accepted they would really struggle to acquire the trucks and workers to make the start date three months hence. That’s about what I would expect, and I still don’t understand what the supervisors were thinking with that short of a turn around time. Again, it seems like not only did they have no idea what they are doing, they didn’t bother to talk to the possible bidders to see what sort of time horizon was reasonable.
Still, I am glad we get to keep choosing our own providers, and not paying 50% more for the same service.
Old Things, New to Me!
Remember when things were good? Like books, or movies? Turns out they made a whole bunch of them, and I hadn’t seen them all!
The Scarlet Pimpernel (book)
Now, I had seen the movie before, and the other movie, and I think still yet another movie. Never read the book till last month, though, and I was quite pleasantly surprised! It actually was quite different from the movies (as I remember them, at least.) Written by a women who really knew how to write a strong woman without falling into the trap of the “strong female lead” in modern work. That is, writing a smart, capable woman who isn’t just a man with shaved legs and a pinafore. Really a great story, albeit a little hard to talk about without spoiling it. Normally I wouldn’t be worried about spoiling a century plus old book that has had a handful of movies made about it, but just in case it is obscure enough to be new to you, I don’t want to ruin it. It’s free (public domain) on Amazon, also rather short, not more than an evening or two, so I recommend checking it out!
Assault on Precinct 13 (movie)
This old John Carpenter film was a nice surprise1. I was flipping through the movie sections of some free tv app (I spend more time doing that than watching movies) and came across this one. It came out rather before my time, certainly before I would be allowed to watch it, but I remembered the name being mentioned by Red Letter Media or some such and so I fired it up.
Man, what a breath of fresh air it was!
The story was simple but effective: a handful of police, civilians and inmates are stuck defending themselves inside a shuttered police precinct building against a gang single mindedly seeking revenge against one of the civilians2. The characters are well developed and feel more real than anything I have seen in a long time. I actually cared about what was going on and the decisions they were making, and didn’t have to turn my brain off at all. It is a little slow to get going, and I did find myself saying “Where the hell is this part going?” at the beginning, but prematurely, as it ends up making sense fairly quick. The slow start pays off, as when things get going I was invested.
All told, definitely recommend this one. Enjoyable, even fun, but with some serious themes and emotional weight that all make for a satisfying time.
Plague Dogs (movie)
James Herriot, the marvelous author of “All Creatures, Great and Small” among other books, wrote in the introduction to “Dog Stories” to the effect that all our relationships with dogs invariably end in great sadness. The same seems to be true of all of our books and movies featuring dogs; I can think of only one story that doesn’t end in feeling miserably sad3.
Plague Dogs does not buck the trend.
Indeed, it apparently saw that trend and replied “Hold my kibble.”
The story follows two dogs, Snitter4 the terrier5 and Rowlf the labrador (not the Muppet), who escape from an animal testing lab in Middle Nowhere, Britain, and have to survive in the fells (empty sheep grazing land) while avoiding recapture by the “white coats”. Needless to say, it doesn’t go well.
That all seems very simple, but the movie is really pretty brilliantly done. Without getting into spoilers, the dogs have very well developed personalities, and their responses to their new freedom, how they deal with their individual trauma, their goals and how they approach challenges are more natural and convincing than any human character I have seen written in the past few years. And make no mistake, these are dogs, not humans in dog suits. The writers do an excellent job writing from the dogs’ perspective, with a dog’s understanding and grasp of the world that adds to the emotional heartbreak. Anyone who has lived with dogs will instantly get them.
All that could easily make this an extremely miserable movie to watch. I spent the last hour or so of the movie progressively getting more misty eyed and bracing for the inevitable bad end. Somehow, despite being very much a tragedy, the movie is so well put together, the characters so compelling, that it was a good experience. Plague Dogs never dips into melancholy, nor tawdry, maudlin emotional manipulation. You know where this is going, the dogs know where this is going, yet there is always that bit of hope that keeps you attached, wanting to keep going to the very end.
It is quite brilliant, really. Just, maybe don’t watch it with someone you would be embarrassed to cry in front of.
Anyway, that’s what I have time for for now. Some new stuff in the works, a little more deep and thinky. Still, I am happy to be able to recommend a book and two good movies, which to me have been a nice little bright spot in a world I increasingly find produces very little artistic merit. Things were once good, and might well be again.
No go cry at an animated movie about dogs.
Apparently there is a newer version with Ethan Hawk and Lawrence Fishburne, because of course there is. Nothing new is ever made now, not when something old and good can be copied…
Needless to say I am referring to the older one here.
Honestly, the gang might as well be zombies, but whatever, it works.
Milo and Otis. Good movie if you have little kids: cute, and doesn’t make you want to kill yourself.
I can only assume this name is less obvious to rudely mispronounce in British…
Played by John Hurt! I love John Hurt!