Reading, writing, viewing, and exercising

Hidden Figures ~ the movie

I went to the Theater room in my building on Friday to see this 2016 film on the big-screen TV.  It's about African American female mathematicians who worked at NASA during the Space Race.  It starts during World War II and moves through the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Space Race.  It's the interwoven story of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, who were four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes.

A Novel Idea ~ Betsy, Diane, and a cat named Clawdia

What has ended, and what is beginning for our protagonist?  You readers suggested maybe one job ends and another begins.  However, I'm retired and can see possibilities in that direction.  So-o-o, here's my idea:  Betsy's boss plans to transfer her to another city.  Yes, it would be a promotion, but Betsy has a new grandchild here, in THIS town.  She wants to watch this child grow up.  What to do?  Betsy up and quits her job.  How?  By taking retirement at 62.  Yep, she just turned 62 a few weeks ago, so that's a possibility.  But think about the money, her friends suggest.  She could get more Social Security if she retires at a later age.  Is Diane one of those friends, or does she agree with Betsy?

What are Betsy's goals now, and what would she risk losing if she is unable to meet those goals?  For one thing, she must consider the money.  Is Social Security enough?  Or will she need to figure out another source of income?

Reading ~ eh, not so much

It seems I've been busier blogging and walking than reading this week.  Yes, I've been out there walking around the block, dodging the road work that's tearing up the street out my window by crossing the street and going around Walgreen's on the other sidewalk.  I've been taking Donna's old Rollator, even though it is not really tall enough for me.  Why?  Because it's uphill to the other end of the block I circle.  By having the Rollator with a seat, I can lock the brakes and rest before coming "down" the hill towards home.  I usually stop to rest near a green shady place where I can enjoy the plants and flowers at the condos there.  The good part is that my iPhone shows I've been getting in thousands of steps more when I walk around the long block, which is actually MORE than a single block as there are side roads when I'm going one direction and coming around and back.

Gone The Next ~ by Ben Rehder, 2012, mystery, 286 pages

Meet Roy Ballard, a freelance videographer with a knack for catching insurance cheats.  He's working a routine case, complete with hours of tedious surveillance, when he sees something that shakes him to the core.  There, with the subject, is a little blond girl wearing a pink top and denim shorts — the same outfit worn by Tracy Turner, a six-year-old abducted the day before.  When the police are skeptical of Ballard's report — and with his history, who can blame them? — it's the beginning of the most important case of his life.

I looked in Donna's Kindle and found she had given this book FIVE STARS, so maybe I'll read it next.  It is almost (but not quite) as good as being able to ask her if she liked a book.  It really is interesting to have her Kindle, as well as my own, to say the least.

Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

"83 Days" ~ FREE movie ~ right now

83 Days is an award-winning short film about George Stinney, Jr. (October 21, 1929 – June 16, 1944), an African American child who was convicted of murdering two white girls, ages 7 and 11, in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina.  The proceeding was later vacated as an unfair trial,  He was executed by electric chair on June 16, 1944.  They released this award-winning short film to the public worldwide for free at 6:30pm EST, today, exactly 76 years to the day and time that he was electrocuted.  The pictures above are from a much shorter YouTube clip.

This isn't taught in our history classes, so here's another YouTube video from 2019.  This one includes an interview with the man who was his cellmate when he was taken away to be electrocuted.  Maybe we can learn a little bit more of our history.

Return to Me ~ a movie

Movie on DVD

"I think it was from about the year 2000?  It doesn't feel 20 years old and yet . . . at the same time, it does.  For those who haven't seen it, Return to Me is about a young woman who receives a heart transplant from a car accident victim, then falls in love with the heart donor's widower.  It made me sob a couple times, but mostly happy tears." — reviewed a couple of weeks ago by Nancy the Bookfool

I watch very few movies, but this intrigued me when I read her review and got it from my library.  Yes, this one did come out in the year 2000, and I now know the places Nancy probably sobbed.  I especially noticed the animals, who seemed so tuned in to things:

• The gorilla who placed his hands on the glass with the woman who now had the heart of the woman who trained him earlier in the movie.
• The big dog who kept waiting at the door for the woman he loved, the heart donor who had died after an accident.

Yeah, it was a good movie, and I'm glad I got it.  Thanks, Nancy, for the recommendation.  Plot description:

Who knew that when he ordered the special, he'd get the dish of his life?  It's about a widower and a waitress who meet and fall in love.  This romantic comedy will make your spirits soar.  It took a lot of coaxing to get Bob, a recently widowed architect, to go on a blind date at a quirky Irish-Italian eatery.  Once there, he's smitten instantly — not with his date, but with the sharp-witted waitress, Grace.  As their relationship blossoms, everything seems to be going great, until an unblievable truth is revealed — one that could easily break both their hearts for good.

Bob gave her this bicycle, and I loved how the bike itself later played a funny role in the story.

A busy week

Melissa's last exercise class at the Crown Center before moving with her family to another town was last Wednesday.  I went straight from my gentle chair yoga class to this one, so I was really feeling it by the end, when the staff had a going-away party for her.  I don't think I can call it a retirement party, not for this mother of two pre-schoolers.

ELECTION NIGHT (tonight)

Clawdia wanting to go visit Donna, 2016

I took Clawdia with me back down to the Theater Room, where Donna and I had been watching election returns for about three hours.  She checked out the Theater Room, jumped into a front chair, stood as tall as possible with her paws on the back of the chair, and sniffed the room.  She'd already seen the "good" security guy standing by the door I'd closed, after asking if he was allergic to cats, so after jumping from that chair to the chair beside it, she considered jumping way over to the chair against the wall, decided against it, but had apparently found what she'd been looking for:

"Where's my carrier?????"

She jumped in the chair beside the one where I'd put the carrier, stood on the arm of the chair to smell her blue carrier (just to be sure, you know), jumped over and went into her very own carrier, perfectly telling me, "I wanna go HOME, please!  Now!"  That adventure was a little bit too much, even for Clawdia.

MOVIES and BOOKS

Last Tuesday, Donna and Sharon (who lives on my floor) and I went to Powell Hall to hear Lisa Genova in the Speaker Series.  I saw the Still Alice movie in 2015 (based on her 2007 book of the same title) and considered it the best movie I saw that year.

Saturday, I saw the movie Moonstruck, starring Cher, Nicholas Cage, and Olympia Dukakis.

I'm currently reading Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver, 2018, fiction (New Jersey).  I finished reading A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult, 2018, fiction set in Mississippi and rated it 8/10.

Oh, my!

Oh, my! Post one little article by Gloria Steinem and my blog goes from "G-rated" to "R-rated," just like that!



Here are the bad words: prick (7x), dead (3x), pain (2x), corpse (1x). I must have shocked all of you, too, because no one has commented on "Prick Flicks" or suggested a single film for the category. Hey, all it takes is blood and gore and violence and smash-'em-up-wrecks to become the opposite of a chick flick.

Do you want to see what color my rating was before it turned as red as a stop sign? Click HERE.

Prick flicks

I like this definition, that chick flicks are more about "how people live instead of how they die." Do you agree? Let's talk about it.

In Defense of the 'Chick Flick'
By Gloria Steinem, Women's Media Center
Published on July 7, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/56219/

Here's a modest proposal to the young man on the plane from Los Angeles to Seattle who said of the movie that most passengers -- male and female -- voted to watch: "I don't watch chick flicks!"

So what exactly is a "chick flick?" I think you and I could probably agree that it has more dialogue than special effects, more relationships than violence, and relies for its suspense on how people live instead of how they die.

I'm not challenging your choice; I'm just questioning the term that encourages it. After all, if you think back to your school days, much of what you were assigned as great literature could have been dismissed as "chick lit." Indeed, the books you read probably only survived because they were written by famous guys.

Think about it: If Anna Karenina had been written by Leah Tolstoy, or The Scarlet Letter by Nancy Hawthorne, or Madame Bovary by Greta Flaubert, or A Doll's House by Henrietta Ibsen, or The Glass Menagerie by (a female) Tennessee Williams, would they have been hailed as universal? Suppose Shakespeare had really been The Dark Lady some people supposed. I bet most of her plays and all of her sonnets would have been dismissed as some Elizabethan version of ye olde "chick lit," only to be resurrected centuries later by stubborn feminist scholars.

Indeed, as long men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world -- and women aren't taken seriously when writing about themselves much less about men or male affairs -- the list of Great Authors will be more about power than about talent.

Still, I know this is not your problem. Instead, let me appeal to your self-interest as well as your sense of fairness: If the "chick flick" label helps you to avoid the movies you don't like, why is there no label to guide you to the ones you do like?

Just as there are "novelists" and then "women novelists," there are "movies" and then "chick flicks." Whoever is in power takes over the noun -- and the norm -- while the less powerful get an adjective. Thus, we read about "African American doctors" but not "European American doctors," "Hispanic leaders" but not "Anglo leaders," "gay soldiers" but not "heterosexual soldiers," and so on.

That's also why you're left with only half a guide. As usual, bias punishes everyone. Therefore I propose, as the opposite of "chick flick" and an adjective of your very own, "prick flick." Not only will it serve film critics well, but its variants will add to the literary lexicon. For example, "prick lit" could characterize a lot of fiction, from Philip Roth to Bret Easton Ellis and beyond. "True prick" could guide readers to their preferred non-fiction, from the classics of Freud to the populist works of socio-biologists and even Rush Limbaugh.

Most of all, the simple label "prick flick" could lead you easily and quickly through the thicket of televised, downloaded and theatrical releases to such attractions as:

All the movies that glorify World War II. From classics with John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, those master actors who conveyed heroism without ever leaving the back lot, to Spielberg's "Band of Brothers," in which the hero would rather die than be rescued, Hollywood has probably spent more on making movies about the war than this country spent on fighting it. After all, World War II was the last war in which this country was clearly right. Without frequent exposure to it, how are we to believe we still are?

All the movies that glorify Vietnam, bloody regional wars, and the war on terrorism. These may not be as much fun to watch -- you probably are aware that we aren't the winners here -- but they allow you to enjoy mass mayhem in, say, South Asia or Africa or the Middle East that justifies whatever this country might do.

All the movies that portray violence against women, preferably beautiful, sexy, half-naked women. These feature chainsaws and house parties for teenage guys, serial killers and sadistic rapists for ordinary male adults, plus cleverly plotted humiliations and deaths of powerful women for the well-educated misogynist.

All the movies that insist female human beings are the only animals on earth that seek out and even enjoy their own pain. From glamorized versions of prostitution to such complex plots as "Boxing Helena," a man's dream of amputating all a rebellious woman's limbs -- and then she falls in love with him -- these provide self-justification and how-to manuals for sadists.

As you can see, one simple label could guide you through diversity, and help other viewers to practice avoidance.

But if you really think about it, I'm hope-a-holic enough to think you might like to watch a chick flick after all.
__________
Gloria Steinem travels widely as a feminist activist, organizer, writer and lecturer. She co-founded New York Magazine and Ms. Magazine where continues to serve as a consulting editor. She has been published in many magazines and newspapers here and in other countries, and is also a frequent guest commentator on radio and television.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/56219/
__________
Wikipedia has this list of chick flicks:

Agnes of God
Always
A Walk to Remember
As Good as It Gets
Beaches
Because I Said So
Before Sunrise
Before Sunset
The Bridges of Madison County
Crossroads
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
50 First Dates
Flashdance
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Fried Green Tomatoes
Girl, Interrupted
Heathers
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
Love Actually
Mermaids
Moonstruck
The Notebook
Notting Hill
An Officer and a Gentleman
Pretty Woman
A Room with a View
Sleepless in Seattle
Steel Magnolias
Terms of Endearment
Thelma & Louise
Titanic
Under the Tuscan Sun
Waiting to Exhale
When Harry Met Sally
Working Girl
You've Got Mail

What films would you nominate for the prick flick category?
__________
Here's how Word Spy defines the category:
http://www.wordspy.com/words/chickflick.asp