A Portrait of Willow, 28 September 2026

Song of the day, 27 September 2026

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was a highlight of the Iron Maiden show earlier this week. So much so that I've put a hold on a copy of the poem at the library.

Sadly a nice audience recording of it that night has been pulled from the Youtubes so this will have to suffice.

I dare sport thus with bread

With the cooler weather I have been doing more cooking inside. Last night I made chili and einkorn bread.

The chili turned out well. I think I'll add more coriander next time. I used a couple freshly picked serranoes from my plant which is still bearing fruit despite the change of season.

I tried my hand at einkorn brot because my ladyfriend has a mild allergy to normal American wheat. During our trip in the UK, she ate bread and pastry shells aplenty without getting the joint pain that she experiences eating the same things here. I figured I'd try to find a flour to make tasty things that wouldn't cause her any discomfort.

The bread machine recipe at the jovial website gave a custom bread machine cycle to accommodate the grain's weak gluten bonds. Apparently the typical third rise would break them and make for a deflated loaf. My machine being a more basic model, I used the Dough cycle which, I believe, allows for a final manual proofing outside the bread machine. Feeling like the Dr. Frankenstein of bakers, I threw the resulting dough into a loaf pan to see how it would turn out. Not bad.

Not, perhaps, the most aesthetically pleasing loaf but it tasted good.

I am told that a well-buttered slice drizzled with honey was a fine way to break a fast. So far no aches.

Cheese!

Willow has now annexed the undershelf of the coffee table

Willow investigates my tea

Dad's not here! Who shall feed me?!

Song of the day, 25 September 2026

I've been listening to a lot of post-Jon Anderson Yes lately and becoming familiar with Oliver Wakeman's playing which, along with his singing, is on full display here.

Happy Autumn!

The autumnal equinox around these parts is tonight around 7 or 8, I believe, but it feels like fall now with the outside temp in the mid-50s and a smattering of trees having begun to change color. Fresh apples are to be had everywhere and welcome corn from last month too. I believe that I have mulling spices on hand so mulled cider is not far off. And pumpkin pie as well. Ooh! Can't forget Pan de Muerto.

Happy autumn!

In Between Days (Go see some art!)

The significant other of a friend of mine has some of her paintings on display at the Overture Center. Her exhibit is called "In Between Days" and is in the Rotunda Gallery. Learn more about her work at her website and head down to the OC for some fine art.

Song of the day, 22 September 2026

Up the irons! This afternoon some friends and I head south to see Iron Maiden. It'll be my first time and I am hoping for at least one tune from Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, the album that got me into them.

Willow wishes you all a happy autumn 2026

This tomato stands alone

While my serrano plant proved to be quite fecund, my tomato plant produced only a few fruit and only one proved to be edible.

Just a little one a bit larger than a golf ball. But it's pretty, no? It ended up on a cheeseburger and was sweet and juicy and delicious.

Well, a lesson learned for next year when I'll hopefully have a better crop.

The first batch of cookies of the new baking season

It's been a while since I've baked any cookies so surely this means summer is over. Well, in a couple days it shall be. Still, the weather has been cool enough to fire up the oven and I made a batch of maple cookies.

A whole cup of maple sugar went into them along with a dose of maple extract. The recipe, from King Arthur's mega-cookie cookbook, calls for rolling the dough in sugar before baking and then glazing them afterwards. This seemed to be overkill to me so I made unadorned cookies. They are quite tasty, in my humble opinion, and will be going to my stepson's place where he and his father will enjoy them.

Willow focusing

Turn on, tune in, drop out: Hot Spot

I read a very brief blurb about this movie and thought it sounded like a fun anti-AI romp. Whew boy, was I mistaken.

The blurb wasn't technically wrong about anything, it just omitted a whole lot. Such as the furry slugs that everyone keeps. But I am getting ahead of things here. It had a setting that drew a bit from Soylent Green and Pete Townshend's Lifehouse. The world suffers from draught and a mega AI computer, The Head, is keeping humanity alive. A murder occurs at an immigration facility where outcasts who refuse to "plug into" the computer's neural network of human consciousness are being detained. Things then get weird as the cop doing the murder investigation, amongst other things, slowly uncovers a plot to take down our AI overlord.

Water is scarce in this world with The Head rationing it out and, in general, running the lives of humanity. This scenario a real 70s dystopian feel to it and it's paired with a 1980s look. The mohawk perm threw me off temporarily but I eventually recognized Andrzej Konopka, a Polish actor whom I'd seen in a few movies and TV shows such as The Border, Pakt, and Colors of Evil: Red. He took on strong Zaphod Beeblebrox vibes when his hard boiled investigator, Djonny, donned that zippy one-piece overall outfit. And just when you were getting used to that vintage sci-fi look, he changes into a kilt with a bedazzled sporran that acts as a holster. The costume department surely had a blast working on this movie.

The cars were all autonomous and it seemed that the prop master had unearthed a cache of 40-year-old Mazdas. I flashed back to Hobo With a Shotgun and its fleet of K Cars upon seeing them.

Anyway, our investigator goes to the immigration facility and gets paired with a woman whose ears would make Galadriel jealous. I do not recall any attempt at an explanation as to why she has elven ears nor do I recall seeing anyone else with them.

So you've got a murder investigation going on. Djonny hones in on Rana, played by Noomi Rapace. When he's not sleuthing, Djonny can be found at home with his son Zen who sleeps with one of those aforementioned furry slugs. At one point, his wife, Ayka, goes to a club and sings which apparently temporarily disconnects her from the neural network and she loses contact with the AI. This leads to bleeding from her right nipple which, in turn, leads to a mastectomy, only they remove her left breast. A scene with Ayka removing her clothes and writhing around her kitchen floor follows.

 

If all this sounds bizarre, it was. Jan somehow can transform himself into a tiger which leads me to believe that while The Head is a real megacomputer in the story, the characters themselves are living in a world created by it. Or was the tiger just a metaphor for an interior state? Jan discovers that Rana isn't wired into The Head and she pays the ultimate price. In the end it is Jan's wife, Ayka, that is revealed to be the rebel mastermind. Furious, Jan once again transforms into a tiger and attacks Ayka, killing her.

 

A mighty strange tale, I found it to be intriguing. The more surreal plot elements were confusing but made me contemplate exactly what I was watching rather than my mind simply moving onto the next bit of story. A bit of Phildickian techno dystopia here, a dash of Cronenberg there, and maybe a dose of Lynchian dreamlike surreality, Hot Spot had a unique sense of fun about it.

A Salt & Vinegar Miscellany XXII: Clumping Action

It has been almost 3 years since I've run into salt & vinegar pumpkin seeds so I was looking forward to these Premium Orchard Oven Roasted Salt & Vinegar Pumpkin Seeds. My last batch were by Top Fox from Illinois while these hail from California.

The first difference between the two was obvious from the outset: these still have the shell on. So instead of the green of the seed itself, these are tan. Some of what I assume are salt crystals are visible here with some having clumps of the stuff on them. The aroma is pumpkin seed with a hint of vinegar tang.

Taking several at once, I tasted an earthy-roasty pumpkin seed flavor, what I think of as a normal level of saltiness, and a near homeopathic sourness. However, I discovered that those seeds with the crystalline clumps were not endowed with extra salt so much as extra vinegar seasoning. These were highly tasty.

These seeds could use more vinegar tanginess but, if you get one of those seasoning clumps, you're in like Flynn. Plus they're high in fiber.

A Salt & Vinegar Miscellany XXI: That's good Bass (Pro Shops pork rinds)

England is a rainy place and the forecast for our vacation in Manchester was for plenty of precipitation. Thusly I decided to buy some waterproof footgear. I figured Cabela's would be the place to find such shoes. When did Cabela's in Sun Prairie become a Bass Pro Shop? Has it always been so?

The folks there are smart and ensure that the area within a 20' radius of the check out is awash in junk food and snacks. My recent excursion there yielded two salt & vinegar snacks. The first was a bag of Uncle Buck's Salt & Vinegar Fried Pork Rinds.

They were a light-medium brown in color with some darker spots. Their surfaces were bubbled and cratered as pork rinds are. The aroma in the bag was mainly of fried pork but I caught a trace of vinegar tang in there too.

The skins had a light crunchiness to them and a delectable pork taste. Salt seems to have been applied with a light touch while the vinegar, fumaric and citric acids were given an even lighter touch.

Tasty pork rinds that needed a fair bit more vinegar sourness.

Coming soon, 19 September 2026: Acme. Ac‑you!

The copyright is 2023 for Coyote vs. Acme and this is because, although it was completed then, Warner Bros. shitcanned it in favor of a tax break. But, as also noted in the credits, fans agitated for its release and this resulted in it being sold to another distributor. Now it's finally in theaters.

Wile E. Coyote in his never-ending pursuit of Road Runner yet again sees Acme products backfire on him resulting in injury and humiliation. He sees a TV ad for the cartoon injury law firm Avery, Jones & Maltese and he travels to Albuquerque to enlist their services. We learn that the lawyer he approaches, Kevin Avery, is keen on yet another simple settlement for his animated client but Coyote rejects this and forces Avery to file a much larger suit alleging long, sustained malfeasance on the part of Acme Corporation which is the world's largest company. Their lawyer, Buddy Crane, offers a modest settlement but Coyote refuses.

I should mention that the movies opens with an animated Peter Lorre smuggling evidence of Acme's wrongdoing out of the building he works at before trying to effect an escape. He fails and his hand is forced: he jumps down one of those round, black holes that you can roll up like a map and is cast seemingly into oblivion.

Fate forces Avery's hand and he takes on Coyote's case. Hijinks ensue.

John Cena's chiseled face and muscular body make him a perfect evil lawyer for Acme and foil for the dumpy, out of shape Avery. The only thing missing was a scene where he asks someone "Do you like Huey Lewis and The News?" Tweety Bird works for Acme and Crane confronts him after Tweety's plan to capture Road Runner fails. Their exchange was laugh out loud funny.

Tweety: "I tawt I taw."

Buddy: "You tink you taw? I don’t pay you to tink you taw, I pay you to taw."

Tweety: "I did! I did taw!"

Buddy: "What did you taw? What did you tee?"

Coyote has a hidden motive and, just like in the Looney Toons of old, he also has a warehouse full of gadgets and tools with him wherever he goes. And things backfire on him constantly.

The interplay between live action and animated characters was wonderful and I was happy to see so many Looney Toons characters involved, even if only in a brief cameo. 

Daffy Duck is in a home for the insane and he is played much like his earliest incarnation in the late 1930s - nutty with a predilection to manically bounce around. The movie is at once reverential to the original Looney Toons but also keen to bring the characters into the 21st century. Foghorn Leghorn is Acme's CEO which is just perfect for the blustery bird with the big ego. When he is being arrested, he asserts that he is a cage-free rooster.

I laughed aloud several times during Coyote vs. Acme and just had a blast.

Seen before my screening of Coyote vs. Acme.

Coming soon, 13 September 2026

Seen before a screening of Hope at Marcus Point.

I found Hope to be a lot of fun and enjoyed how it confounded my expectations.

It begins with a fairly lengthy introduction in which a group of Korean rednecks who were going out hunting find a mauled cow in the middle of the road near the Korean Demilitarized Zone which, we are warned, has many minefields. The cousin of one of them, Ko Sung-ki, happens to be the chief of police of Hope Harbor and he is brought in to examine the bovine tragedy. Everyone reckons the incident to be strange since the animal wasn't eaten at all, just clawed to death.

 

The rednecks, er, hunters, head to the farm where the cow is from while the chief constable, Ko Bum-seok, goes back to town only to find a monster ravaging the town and slaughtering the population. He joins with others who have taken up arms but even their high powered rifles are powerless against the creature. Just when things look bad in a terminal way, another police officer, the lovely Im Sung-ae, appears with a grenade launcher that helps matters. For my part, I had those mines in mind and figured the beast would stray into a minefield and meet its end. But no. Instead it is hit by a large tanker truck and killed. This was a long scene and director Na Hong-jin did the right thing by not showing us the creature until he needed to. It was pure kinetic fun with Bum-seok being frustrated at every turn yet surviving his encounters with the creature. Oh, the lady officer's frustrated cussin' was funny.

 

It was also noteworthy that the editor let the scene in town play out before cutting to the hunters arriving at the farm and finding it having been laid waste. They eventually discover a spaceship in the woods and we come to understand that the creature was an alien. This is reinforced by a grotesque, but funny, scene in which a scientist resorts to a chainsaw to autopsy the dead creature that ran roughshod in Hope Harbor. Our peace officer heroes encounter another hunter, Yang-bae, who claims to have killed one of the aliens. Upon further examination, it was an immature alien that he killed which leads Bum-seok to conclude that this was the child of the alien that had killed so many in town - it was out looking for its child.

 

Our fellow humans converge on the woods where they encounter more aliens who are also impervious to bullets. Out of nowhere a new group of hunters appear on horseback. They seemed to know about the aliens and to be out for some extraterrestrial blood sport. Huh? The aliens kill everyone save our ragtag group of police officers and friends.

 

There's another long scene in which one of the aliens chases someone on horseback as the other survivors race away next to him in a police car. Sung-ae launches more grenades as Bum-seok attempts to get the man on the horse to jump from his equestrian perch onto the car.

 

If the appearance of those hunters on horseback was surprising, then the sight of an enormous spaceship emerging from the clouds all aflame and crashing into a mountain was downright astonishing. The aliens recognize it and the movie ends with them having a confab on their next moves.

 

For me, Hope was just a blast. Laced with plenty of thrills, chills, and spills, I appreciated that scenes were allowed to play out without constant intercutting to allow us to keep tabs on characters in a wholly different location. Seeing from the get-go that these aliens, the mature ones, that is, are impervious to bullets had me wondering if humanity would come up with a clever solution or if all hope was lost, so to speak. Sung-ae had some funny dialogue while the motley group of characters were all distinctive and had me rooting for them until the very end. The stuff that came out of left field may have left me pondering things but they never detracted from the fun.

 

I am glad to see that it remains in theaters here in Madison.

 

Trailers:

 

 

 

 

Finally something I'd go see.

 

 

While this is playing next month at Cinematheque, I will be at Gamehole Con when it screens. So I hope that it actually plays at a Marcus theater instead of being tantalized by a trailer only for the film to never hit a commercial screen in Madison.

 

Willow is all curled up snug and warm in her doughnut

The M***********g Girl On the M***********g Train

I recall when the film adaptation of The Girl On the Train came out and found my interest piqued. Not enough to go see it but enough to put the story on my to-read list. Here we are 10 years later and I've finally read the source novel by Paula Hawkins.

I began it in our hotel room in Manchester after I'd finished a history of the city we were visiting. Reading a little each night before bed added up and I polished it off on the flight home across the Atlantic. Although nearly 400 pages, it seemed to go by quickly. I think this is due to a combination of narrow pages and Hawkins' plainspoken, straightforward prose style.

The story centers around Rachel Watson, a woman in her early 30s, who takes the train in to London every weekday. The train usually stops at a certain junction or spot near the home of a couple that she names Jess and Jason. From the comfort/remove of the train car, our voyeuristic protagonist fantasizes about their personalities and lives as she sips a can of premixed gin & tonic or a spot of wine.

Rachel's fabulation is an escape from her life which lies in ruins. She and her husband, Tom, tried to have children but Rachel proved to be barren. Turning to the bottle for relief drove them apart and Tom sought comfort in the arms (and legs) of another woman, Anna. After their divorce, Tom kept the house while Rachel moved in with a friend, Cathy. Despite this, Rachel still longs for Tom and calls him at least semi-regularly, much to Anna's annoyance.

A couple months previously, Rachel was fired from her job. Afraid to tell Cathy and her mother, she keeps up appearances by traveling to the city where she wanders, works a bit on her CV, and continues her relationship with the bottle.

It turns out that Jess and Jason are really Megan and Scott and that their house is just down the street from Rachel and Tom's former home. While Tom had meant to sell the house, he ended up keeping it and having his new bride and mother to his child, Anna, move in. Thusly, the train rides provide Rachel ample opportunity to ruminate on her failed marriage and relitigate episodes from it which are, perhaps, best forgotten.

In fairly quick succession, three events transpire. First is that Rachel spies Megan from the train kissing someone who isn't her husband; second Rachel has an episode in which she gets very drunk and blacks out, remembering only tiny fragments of that night; and lastly Megan goes missing only to turn up dead. Did the unknown man Rachel saw kissing Megan do the dastardly deed? Or perhaps a jealous husband avenged the wrong done to him...?

The plot unfolds by alternating chapters narrated by the women here. Rachel's are given pride of place but Anna and Megan's are important as well. Rachel is a drunk with low self-esteem due, in part, to being overweight - a stark contract to the svelte Emily Blunt who plays Rachel in the film adaptation and she is a highly unreliable narrator. Anna's stories demonstrate just how much of a pest Rachel has been and fills in details that Rachel leaves out. We get to know Megan as a very troubled soul and not the carefree stunning blonde that is Jess.

Rachel is like a tipsy Miss Marple. We learn of her failures and foibles but come to understand that she is really a well-intentioned person. She goes to the police to let them know that she'd seen Megan kissing another man but they see her as a troubled soul and don't take her particularly seriously. Feeling terrible for Scott, she contacts him to let him know his wife was having an affair. There are a myriad of these kinds of encounters. Is Rachel helping? Or hindering?

Many times Rachel admits that she shouldn't do X but goes and does it anyway and this reader just rolled his eyes. I had a hard time enjoying Rachel as a character as she is just so pathetic. Witnessing someone so tethered to a past that is unrecoverable, someone who engages in so much self-sabotage is uncomfortable. (I wonder if a thin and beautiful Emily Blunt is more empathetic.) Thankfully the chapters featuring Anna and Megan take the edge off.

The lives (and a death) of all three women are intertwined and I liked how Hawkins wove them together. This is one of those rare books for me where the inner lives of women are put front and center and I enjoyed the mix of vulnerability and strength in each of the characters. The male characters, by contrast, don't come off well here. Scott comes across as tragic, hurt figure for much of the tale but he eventually resorts to violence. Tom is portrayed as something of a victim for most of the book but we come to know that he is truly evil by the end. Mac is deceitful and abandons the woman he impregnated. That he dies of an overdose seemed an excessive addition that merely served to further slander an already unlikeable man.

There were definitely times when I felt I was reading the book just because I wanted to know who killed Megan. But, by the end, I was enjoying getting to know the women characters and how their lives were entangled and what secrets they were hiding. The Girl On the Train reminded me that we all keep secrets and that sadness often lies behind smiling faces, that happy couples are sometimes not all that happy.

Forgiveness is a motif here as is its limits. Who deserves forgiveness and when? Do you have to solve a murder to earn it? The failure of two marriages and the revelation of another doing poorly hit a bit close to home. It's not that these fictional matrimonies were analogous to mine in any detail, it was more the martial conflict that brought back bad memories. This makes me wonder if and when I will ever be able to be confronted by marital conflict and not have flashbacks.

In the end, The Girl On the Train was a good read. Not great, perhaps, but certainly one that captured my attention with its mix of mystery and probing into the lives of all-too flawed characters.