Category: MJ Monday

Movie: Zero Hour!

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My husband is a movie addict. He loves TCM. Every once in a while he finds a gem he knows I’ll like. Such was the case with Zero Hour!

It turns out that Zero Hour! (1957, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell and Sterling Hayden) is the original version of Airplane! While it is commonly assumed that Airplane! spoofs the disaster film genre, particularly the Airport series, parts of the script are verbatim from Zero Hour!  (Paramount owned Zero Hour! so it was  all perfectly legal.)

“Our survival hinges on one thing – finding someone who not only can fly this plane, but didn’t have fish for dinner.”

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.”

Yet Zero Hour! is not a comedy. It was a completely serious film.

If you get a chance to see it, you should.

 

Lookin’ Out My Backdoor

I love sitting on my patio. So many things happen in my tiny urban backyard. There’s a rabbit (or a series of bunnies) who has visited for years. The variety of birds is astounding. I love when I catch a glimpse of cardinals. Of course there is a contingent of squirrels. One of my neighbors leaves peanuts out for them. I find peanut shells on my sidewalk, half-buried in the tomato pot, and littering the basil.

I have parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme (if you’re of a certain age, I’ll bet you sang along with that), basil. spearmint, peppermint, chives, lemon balm, and oregano.  The wisteria and iris have bloomed and gone, as has the azalea and peonies, but the daylilies are waiting to burst into blossom.

One of the things I love to watch are the butterflies. Once in a while, I will see a monarch flitting around, but mostly I have white-winged butterflies. They have a small black dot on their wings. They may be cabbage butterflies. I usually see two, but sometimes there are more. They return year after year, although I’m sure they are not the same ones. Maybe I have generations.

Here’s the thing. They flutter around and interact with each other. The poet in me sometimes views their movements as dancing. The cynic, however, wonders if they are not in fact battling each other.

The Mommy Files: Yum Yums

Friday nights at our house have always been pizza night. After a long work week, it is nice not to have to think about what I’m going to cook for supper.  When the Chromos were young, I did cook. Every night. Except Friday.

We go through phases with our pizza toppings. TV likes green peppers and mushrooms, two things I cannot abide. I like Italian sausage, something he considers extremely unhealthy. Two things we’ve always agreed on are black olives and onions. So for a while, our weekly pizza was topped with onions.

Y-Chromo was old enough to eat a slice on his own, but I had to cut up X-Chromos pizza into tiny pieces for her to handle.  “Yum yum,” she would say. And thus began what would be come a weekly game.

X-Chromo would reach over to my plate and pluck the onions off my slice. “Hey!” I would chide her. “What do you think you’re doing? Those are my onions.”

She would smile and reply, “Yum yums!”

It became a weekly game.

Movie: Moneyball

Let me begin by saying I am not a Brad Pitt fan. I mean, I don’t hate him or anything (I don’t know him). I’m merely indifferent to him.  That said, I did like him in Moneyball.

Moneyball is a baseball movie. But there’s a great underlying message in the film.

Baseball is a game of numbers. Statistics. The ones that seem to matter most are the batting average (i.e. number of hits per at bat percentage) for hitters and for pitchers, the  earned run average (number of runs scored against a pitcher in every  nine innings pitched). Batters need a high batting average, pitchers a low ERA.

Moneyball  is based on a true story of a numbers geek who convinced a team’s general manger working with a shoe string budget  to assemble a competitive team by looking at undervalued stats. The film shows the viewer that baseball is more than home runs and strike outs, that a flashy performance is nice, but slow and steady can also get the job done. Strategy counts as much as luck.

You don’t need to be a superstar to be successful.

 

A Book Review: The Kiss Quotient

Image credit: tieury / 123RF Stock Photo

I had read about Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient in a couple of different places, so I decided to check it out. I’m so glad I did.

I read some nasty reviews, comparing the book to 50 Shades. The people who wrote those reviews are ignorant. They saw the sex part and immediately made assumptions that  distorted their perceptions. Shame on them. The premise of 50 Shades was sex. The motivations in 50 Shades were sex. Not so in The Kiss Quotient.

Stella, the heroine, is motivated to overcome the issues her autism creates with dating so she can have a somewhat normal relationship with a man, get married, and provide her parents with the grandchildren they want. She knows she has problems. The logical solution is to hire someone to teach her.

Michael is willing to do just about anything to help pay for his mother’s medical bills. That includes becoming a paid escort. Which is how Stella found him and hired him to help her learn to be in a relationship–the dating, the touching, the intimacy.

Her autism creates many awkward or embarrassing situations, especially with Michael’s Vietnamese family.  The way Stella’s brain functions only adds to the hurt and misunderstandings about their cultural differences.

I loved this book so much.