Mildred's Mess

No Excuses

Nothing bothered Mildred as much as people who started apologizing and making excuses when no one had accused them of anything. "What are they so afraid of?", she wondered. "Do I look that mean?"

Sent from my iPod

Snookie who?

Mildred quickly got tired of being sneered at by younger women who imagined they looked like Snookie. "What's so great about her?", Mildred wondered. "At least I'm real."

District 9

We saw it a couple of months ago. I thought it would be the usual earth people vs aliens cowboy style shoot 'em up.  It was all of that to the max, but it was also complex, subtle, and had a couple of  layers of meaning. It starts when an alien space ship is stranded on earth. The aliens are terrifyingly different, violent and strange. They're intelligent, but savage at the same time. They're near death, having been trapped on their ship without food or power. The humans (near Johannesburg, South Africa) do what they can to help them and then contain them in a combination refugee/POW camp, where conditions are horrible. Things there seethe, fester, and boil over. It's that scary situation when one part of the population is being brutalized to the point where you expect them to  butcher their oppressors. 

 

Somewhere in the movie our perspective of the aliens changes. We start to see them as people who are desperate and oppressed, hoping to get some help so they can go home. They don't want what the humans have, they want their own lives back. 

It was filmed in Soweto, an area of Johannesburg where the black South African residents were forced out and their homes bulldozed during the time of apartheid. This gives it an authenticity it wouldn't have on a created set.  It was filmed in a documentary style that's also very effective. The shacks and shanties are real, the junk piled all over is real, the wreckage is real. The prejudice and misery were very real. There's a level where this movie is about apartheid,  about fear and ignorance, and the traps we make for ourselves out of our hate.  This is the best kind of science fiction, the one that asks questions about who we are and how we treat each other and where we're going.

Here's a link to the official site. District 9  You can see the trailer and play around and click on things.

To make things less scary here's a picture of Pretty Mimi. Ahhh, all better. That movie scared me 10 ways. 

 

Detergent Thieves

I heard a new story on the radio this morning. The police busted some criminals. When they searched their place they found all kinds of cocaine and big bottles of Tide detergent. People had stolen it from stores and then traded it to them for drugs. The crooks  were going to sell the detergent on the black market. Sounds stupid, but have you seen how much they charge for Tide? Only the most hard core brand junkies must be buying it.  Brand junkies, or rich people. Tide's manufacturers are going to put electronic tags on the bottles to keep people from stealing it. I just looked up the real story and here it is. Thieves rolling tide... Pretty strange.  I hope they were clean thieves.

And here's a picture I stole from a Facebook post. Have a good Thursday, the weekend isn't too far away.  

 

 PS I've been thinking about this post all day at work.  It fits right in with the current recession, using laundry soap as money.  Sometimes I  imagine a post apocalyptic world where people would be trading tools , scrap lumber, machine parts, shoes, food or other basic necessities for other goods. I can think of a lot of things to use instead of money, but Tide wasn't one of them. I guess we haven't made it to the apocalypse yet since we still have washing machines and electricity to run them.

 

Moebius

One of our favorite cartoonists died last Saturday. Tom and I  first saw Jean Giraud's work in Heavy Metal Magazine back in the late 70s when he did The Incal. His beautiful drawings and mysterious stories stayed with us, and we bought and read everything we could find of his.

 

 

I love his style, his perfect detail, and the way he made imaginary worlds come to life.

 

He did the production design for the movie The 5th Element. It's one of our all time favorites. His great aliens, the costumes, and the crazy but consistent look of the world are part of why we love it so much.

 

I feel his loss personally,  as a magical part of my life that's  past and gone.

 

Icarus

Here he is falling into the sea. You can barely make out some legs sticking out of the water in the  lower right hand corner. I love the ploughman and the shepherd, the imaginary landscape, and the ordinary people  doing their jobs.  Off in the corner is a great tragedy and no one is noticing it.  I don't know if it's meant to be ironic, or if it's just the way life is. 

 

 

 

W. H. Auden wrote about it.

 

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.   

Birds at the Huntington Library

The desert garden is full of birds. It seems safe there. They can nest in the thorny plants and nothing large will want to mess with them.  There are only visitors there a few hours a day, the rest of the time it's probably pretty quiet except for gardeners and staff. It's the bird's little kingdom. If you sit and listen where ever you are you'll hear tons of birds. I think they secretly rule the world.

This tree was full of parrots. They were tearing the petals off the flowers and dropping them on the ground. At the same time there were about 500 hummingbirds trying to drink nectar from the same flowers. It was insane, and very loud.  Tom thinks they were doing it to mess with the hummingbirds. Hahaha. These parrots are different than the ones that fly through our neighborhood.  The usual birds have red on their heads. These are smaller and have yellow on their wings.

 

 

We saw these mysterious birds when we were there a few weeks ago. I looked them up, it's a Red Whiskered Bulbul. They're a similar size and shape as our mountain blue jays, but different.  We don't see them in our neighborhood, and we live within 5 miles of the place.

 

 

 These little guys are goldfinches. I've seen some that are almost green, but none like these. There are many different kinds of finches in our area.

 

 

I wish I had a picture of the hummingbird who flew straight down out of the sun from about a mile up. He must have been doing 90 miles an hour. You could hear the doppler effect as he zoomed down squeaking his tiny squeak. He came within 2 feet of the ground, they suddenly changed direction and shot straight back up again. I wanted to take his picture, but he was too fast for me. Those hummingbirds are all crazy.

Credits: The photos were taken by Tom and are lovelier than anything I can ever take. You can look up local Southern California birds here. Wild Birds of Southern California Photo Gallery He's got lots of pictures of just about everything that lives near him including neighborhood cats. There are very pretty photos on this site. Southern California Birds