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bad Chinese food good movie
Monday, December 25 2017
I'm not with Donald J. Trump and Fox News on the importance of saying "Merry Christmas!" as a means of marginalizing religious minorities to somehow Make America Great Again, but I still appreciate Christmas for its role (entirely secular in my case) as the most special of all special occasions. God really went all out this year and gave us a nice several-inch snowfall. It was deep enough to be pretty but not so deep as to prevent driving to a Chinese restaurant or movie theater.
This morning our yearly Christmas morning ritual happened partially inside Neville's recuperation fort, and it followed the usual pattern. Gretchen made a french press of coffee (which wasn't quite enough, so I later made a second one), and we took turns taking things out of our respective "stockings" (just socks from our sock baskets). This was, I believe, only the second year now that I also made stockings for Gretchen. I didn't have much loot for her aside from a coupon representing the Swatch I'd ordered for her, "Irish wheat" beer, that painting I'd made of Clarence, and a goofy fidget spinner that takes advantage of image persistence to display unchangeable canned messages decided by someone in Chinese factory. Gretchen got me all the usual stuff: multiple tiny canvases, a flask of Paul Masson brandy, cans of various nuts (especially, this year, flavored almonds), and a few novelties, such as a battery-powered string of LEDs. There were also special treats for the dogs, such as a bowl of Amy's Lentil Soup that Gretchen had been unable to eat yesterday or the day before.
With the recuperation fort and the fire and a coffee buzz on a deliberately-lowered caffeine tolerance, I was feeling pretty good. Gretchen decided to play an old Puccini recording (on vinyl), which wasn't entirely to my liking but seemed to suit the mood.
Meanwhile, I had a number of ideas for how to visualize a set of date-based data on a calendar that I was eager to turn into code. If for every record falling on a day performs some operation on the color of that calendar day's cell background (say, darkening it by some amount), then the number of records for a day will be demonstrated by how dark the color for that cell is. That way aggregate data can be shown in the calendar visualization without being explicitly calculated in the underlying recordset. (Similar effects can be achieved in Google Maps by overlaying colored shapes having smallish values for the alpha channel.)
On a lark, Gretchen decided to call my childhood friend Nathan in Charlottesville. We happened to catch him with his mother and father there and evidently some wine had been drunk because they were having what sounded like a genuinely merry Christmas. Nathan's mother almost started crying when she heard my voice; she hadn't heard it in years. Later Nathan and Janine's kid Afton got on and did a faux British accent that was making his grandmother (who actually has a high-end Georgia accent) really proud. But it was actually more of an Australian accent.
For Jewish Christmas, the plan was to get Chinese food at Kingston Wok (near the Burlington Coat Factory building and Staples just south of where Route 199 crosses 9W) and then see the movie The Shape of Water at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck. We arrived at Kingston Wok only minutes before a strangely-early 7:00pm cutoff and ordered dumplings, an udon noodle dish, and a some sort of vegetables with tofu. The dumplings were an immediate disappointment; the noodle containing it was too thick and chewy, the stuff inside it was watery and flavorless, and the sauce (the only other real component) had no flavor and required lots of additional soy sauce. When the came out, the entrees were also a big disappointment. The noodles were too sweet and had little other flavor, and the vegetables with tofu were greasy and flavorless (and the tofu itself was insipid and slimy). Overall, the meal was one of the worst Chinese dinners I've had in a long time. It's possible they were busy, it was late in the day, and they were just phoning it in. But that didn't keep us from telling each other we would never come back. It had been so bad that I hadn't been able to eat much of it, but I nevertheless insisted on getting it to go. It might be flavorless and greasy, but the dogs will love it. Both Gretchen and I felt discomfort in our guts on our drive across the Hudson to the second component of our Jewish Christmas festivities.
At Upstate Films, Gretchen knew the guy selling tickets and they chatted some about his latest project: doing something about the drunk Bard students causing mayhem in Tivoli (a problem aggravated by the existence of a student-only bus that runs from Tivoli to the Bard campus at 2:00am on the weekends. It turned out that ticket selling is only one of this gentleman's talents. He is also the elected mayor of Tivoli and, Gretchen told me later, an artist who specializes in hyperrealistic landscape scenes from the greater Tivoli area.
The Shape of Water explores the romance between a mute cleaning lady in a top-secret government ærospace lab, the multitalented amphibious humanoid recovered from South America, and various heroes and villains along the way (the story was supposedly modeled on `Creature from the Black Lagoon. The film is more magical realist than science fiction, though it is full of many Spielbergian tropes. The characters themselves (with the possible exception of a Russian spy) are not particularly complicated; good guys are heroes and bad guys are villains and the poor freaky creature just wants to be left alone and not cut into pieces for dubious science. The story it tells is a fairly simple melodrama, and there are so many ways it could've gone wrong. But somehow it threaded the needle and made for a delightful (and visually beautiful) cinematic experience. You'll have to suspend your disbelief about how much load the joists supporting the floor over a movie theater can bear, but that's a fairly minor quibble.
We returned home to find Neville's cone of shame (without Neville in it) lying in the snow outside the pet door. Clearly something undesired had happened with Neville's post-surgery recuperation. We went inside and there was Neville and Ramona, standing there wagging their tails and smiling happily. Neville was walking on his legs without any difficulty; if he'd exceeded the prescribed dose of leg exercise, it wasn't apparent. We eventually determined that Neville had managed to escape by pushing part some of the chairs comprising the barricade. They're secured to some extent by bungee cords, but those can stretch. And one of the chairs could be pushed out like a hinged door. It's still a bit of a mystery how he managed to get through the pet door while wearing his cone of shame, though it must've been in the process of coming off by that point (it's a new-fangled design secured by velcro). Happily, Neville didn't appear to have taken advantage of his missing hardware to chew much on his stitches.
I'd drunk a cup of coffee during the film at the theater, and perhaps this was one of the reasons I had such difficulty falling asleep tonight. I stayed up late drinking first a beer and then sipping whiskey while watching junky material on YouTube (things like "Redneck Fails" and "America's Dumbest Criminals"). That's all good American content, though most of the car crash and "Hold My Beer" material is Russian.
When I finally did manage to fall asleep, it was something like 6:00am (and still entirely dark outside).
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