Recent Posts

• July 04, 2025

  I Accidentally Adopted a Baby Raccoon

  I got this app on my phone to identify birds, and it was all cool and fun until it became clear that there are precisely three birds in my general area: Sparrow, American Robin and Northern Cardinal. (Side: cardinals are cool and I think they’re great. Fat little red bastards). Yesterday morning I heard a new bird, and grabbed my phone to see what it was. Sparrow? That sounds nothing like a sparrow. This app is bullshit. Cornell will hear about this. I gave up and went back to work until I heard Jones going ballistic out front, and the bird noise getting louder and louder. Shit, he’s trying to kill it. I burst out the door, grabbed him and hurled him inside, and discovered that the bird app had not identified the noise because it was in fact a very distressed baby raccoon.

• June 28, 2025

  Klute

  Wow I somehow went more than a full month without watching a single movie. I don’t know if that’s ever happened before, save for times when I was going from Cambodian hostel to Burmese temple complex. Klute is one of those movies I was vaguely aware of as being good (Jane Fonda won the Oscar for it) but knew almost nothing beyond that. Donald Sutherland is the title character, despite not really being the protagonist or the subject of the story. He’s not even curator of the Jebediah Springfield museum.

• May 18, 2025

  The Long Goodbye

  The Robert Altman journey continues. This time Elliot Gould is Philip Marlowe, Raymon Chandler’s private detective, who lives on the top of some kind of tower with a collection of mostly nude women across the bridge in the next one. Marlowe spends the first ten minutes of the movie trying, and failing, to feed his cat; first by putting together some unholy concoction that the cat - correctly - bashes off the countertop, and then by changing the label on a can to try and fool the cat into believing he’s eating his preferred brand. It does not work. Marlowe being outsmarted by a cat gives us a good anchor of what we should expect when his friend comes up the lift and asks for a lift to Mexico. Soon after, the police arrive and say that he’s murdered his wife.

• April 26, 2025

  Boston Marathon 2025

  Training Highlights

• April 18, 2025

  Jeanne Dielman

  Or, because the full title would be too big up there, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The BFI, by way of Sight and Sound magazine, does a poll every ten years of the best movies ever made, and in 2022 it voted this as the best movie ever made. I would consider myself a person who has seen a reasonable amount of movies, and have certainly heard of even more, but my reaction here was Jeanne Who? I had somehow missed ever hearing a mention of the best film in existence and I had seen Jaws: The Revenge at least twice.