"Modern Life Is Full of Small Indignities"
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You could battle the tiny frustrations of daily life and lose. Or, you could enjoy the peace and quiet of America’s national parks, which are free on April 20.
Recent
Cram It! Game of Thrones
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"CRAM IT: GAME OF THRONES" ON YOUTUBE
Cram It provides humorous, fast-paced summaries of lengthy film and TV franchises, so you can dive right into the latest edition without going all the way back to the beginning or forgetting anything crucial. One of the newest videos is a catch-up on all seven seasons of Game of Thrones in advance of Sunday’s Season 8 premiere on HBO. If you’ve never watched or have short-term memory loss like me, you can jam through all seven action-packed seasons of the show in around 52 minutes. Or you could just go into it Sunday night like Jon Snow and know nothing:
3 Recent Netflix Movies :: Viewing Verdicts
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The Highwaymen
Verdict: A Road Trip Worth Taking
The Highwaymen starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as the real life men tasked with ending Bonnie & Clyde’s reign of terror in the 1930’s is as fine a Netflix original movie as any they’ve released so far or as fine a movie I’ve seen in a while period. It’s not a superhero movie. Not a sequel, a reboot or a remake. It’s finely acted and the movie moves at a slower pace most jump cut editors and movie studios don’t allow these days for fear they’ll lose the audience’s two-second attention spans. I really enjoyed the hell out of this movie.
Triple Frontier
Verdict: In The Jungle (with half a good) Book
Who doesn’t love a good heist movie? Triple Frontier sees an all-star cast of Special Forces operatives (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund and Pedro Pascal) reunite to plan a heist in a sparsely populated multi-border zone of South America. Loved the set up, the fast pace, the planning, and the heist. Oh man, the heist. In a secluded estate deep in the jungle, on a time-clock, in the rain…get the money, kill the kingpin and get out before the family gets home from church. The tension and build up to all of this was simply terrific…and then it seemed the writers decided to consult the screenplay and movie plot handbook 101 as the predictable blueprint for the rest of the movie. I even found myself bumping the 10-second fast forward button repeatedly just to get to the end. Not since Dead Poets Society have I been so entertained by the first half of a movie and so utterly bored by the second. I know that’s blasphemy, but to this day Dead Poet’s is the only movie I’ve ever left early. Luckily for me this time, I had a remote control.
The Dirt
Verdict: Painful Theatre
I had low expectations when I hit play on this Mötley Crüe biopic and it didn’t even live up to those. Bad acting and making bad behavior worse by somehow making it boring dooms this heavy metal head scratcher to a horribly predictable VH1 Behind The Music episode. The Dirt even breaks the fourth wall just so it can tell viewers some of the things you are about to see didn’t actually happen. Do yourself a favor and don’t hit the play button.
Dario Crisman "Reflection of You"
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Dario Crisman is a self-taught pianist and composer. Music has for him the task of expressing his feelings and above all the search for an aesthetic, creative and formal balance. “Reflection Of You” is from his solo piano album "Oltre" out now via Blue Spiral Records or on Spotify.
Amazing World of Google
/Decoding the language of flowers has been a decades-long challenge. But that changes today. Thanks to great advancements in artificial intelligence, Google Assistant on phones and Google Home is now able to understand tulips, allowing translation between Tulipish and dozens of human languages.
Muckefuck & Apfelschorle
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I’m always fascinated by things other cultures just assume are normal and take for granted as being universally normal. Americans tend to think anything existing outside of U.S. culture as weird but never stop to think, maybe other cultures think exactly the same way and we’re the weird ones. But after reading this list of 10 UNUSUAL DRINKS GERMANS THINK ARE ABSOLUTELY NORMAL…I’m pretty sure the Germans really are the strange ones. Sauerkraut juice? C’mon.
The Accidental Humorist
/“This is a unique kind of emptiness.”
Bored? Take The Proust Questionnaire
/Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature. Here is the basic Proust Questionnaire.
1.__What is your idea of perfect happiness?
2.__What is your greatest fear?
3.__What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
4.__What is the trait you most deplore in others?
5.__Which living person do you most admire?
6.__What is your greatest extravagance?
7.__What is your current state of mind?
8.__What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
9.__On what occasion do you lie?
10.__What do you most dislike about your appearance?
11.__Which living person do you most despise?
12.__What is the quality you most like in a man?
13.__What is the quality you most like in a woman?
14.__Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
15.__What or who is the greatest love of your life?
16.__When and where were you happiest?
17.__Which talent would you most like to have?
18.__If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
19.__What do you consider your greatest achievement?
20.__If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
21.__Where would you most like to live?
22.__What is your most treasured possession?
23.__What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
24.__What is your favorite occupation?
25.__What is your most marked characteristic?
26.__What do you most value in your friends?
27.__Who are your favorite writers?
28.__Who is your hero of fiction?
29.__Which historical figure do you most identify with?
30.__Who are your heroes in real life?
31.__What are your favorite names?
32.__What is it that you most dislike?
33.__What is your greatest regret?
34.__How would you like to die?
35.__What is your motto?
Björk :: "Natural State"
/“In my most natural state, I’ll be introverted for say, six days in a row, and then on the seventh day I’ll become very extroverted... Then I’ll have to go back inside myself... It’s something I can’t really control. It’s a bit like the ocean and the tides.”
On Generosity :: Three Wishes
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“A fight is going on inside me,” said an old man to his son. “It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. The same fight is going on inside you.” The son thought about it for a minute and then asked, “Which wolf will win?” The old man replied simply, “The one you feed.” — Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life
We don’t focus on generosity in our culture these days. Kids are exposed to sarcasm, cynicism and snark to a much larger degree. Snark sells. But generosity, giving of yourself more than is necessary or expected, will be remembered. A sarcastic comment or cynical act will be forgotten tomorrow. An act of generosity will be a significant marker and memory in someone’s life forever. I wish for my kids to be funny and weird and at times, sarcastic. But above all, I want to instill in them an altruistic spirit of generosity. Like Ruby:
“Like that’s all they wanted. And I really decided that I needed to do something.”
Some generous links:
Want to raise generous kids? Here’s how.
Cup O' Coffee and the Sunday Paper
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Hoping you’re having a loungy, lazy Sunday. Here’s a few of the articles I read this past week I liked quite a bit.
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On Likability by Lacy M. Johnson - This one says a lot about what’s wrong with our society.
My daughter comes home from school at least once a week and announces to me that no one likes her. She has done something that is too weird, or bold, or has said a thing with which others disagree. She has had to sit alone during lunch or play alone during recess. She even sat on the buddy bench, she tells me, and no one came.
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This man won't go into a nursing home. He'll spend his 'golden age' at the Holiday Inn by Kristin Lam USA Today -
While the average nursing home costs $188 per day, Robison wrote that reservations at the hotel chain cost $59.23 per night with both a long-term stay and senior discount. Factor in free breakfast and happy hour and Robison calculated that would leave $128.77 a day for food and entertainment.
Not to mention, Robison said Holiday Inns offer a spa, swimming pool, workout room, laundry room and a lounge. Of course, complimentary shampoo, soap, toothpaste and razors will rack up savings, too.
Securing a room at the right nursing home may take months, but Robison said reservations for quality customer service can be made now.
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What happens when you get off Facebook for four weeks? Stanford researchers found out by Kurt Wagner, Recode - Definitely one “I Liked” and shared with my “Friends”
How much would you need to be paid to give up your Facebook account for four weeks?
That was the question a group of researchers from Stanford asked thousands of Facebook users last year in an effort to better understand how the social network affected issues such as political polarization and mental well-being.
The study — which paid some users to abandon Facebook and encouraged others to give it up by using just their self-control — found that cutting Facebook out of your life has a number of consequences. Many of them are positive.
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“Come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing, and the preacher whose name is Love — shall intercede for us!”
Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert by Maria Popova - Uplifting and crushingly sad.
Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest — an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior. Throughout the poet’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Woman in the World.”
Additional Long Reads
Nine-Nine!
/Noice!
