Entry 718: Back From Vacay

We arrived in DC, back from a trip to the shores of Puget Sound, late Thursday night. It was a great trip. We got to spend a lot of time with family, both sides, so that was wonderful. S's cousin's son, who grew up in Federal Way, about 25 minutes from where I grew up, is getting married in India in the near future, so there was a big stateside engagement ceremony for him and his bride-to-be that we attended. And then there were several other less formal related events throughout our trip that we also attended. We stayed with my parents, however, and they live within a three-mile radius of the rest of my immediate family, so we got a full mix of both sides. It was terrific, although the downside is that I did not get as much time with my old chums as I would have liked. We stayed one night in Seattle with our friends JW and YW, and then I went up by myself for an afternoon, mainly to hang out with my pal JY, and then that was pretty much it. Oh, I also got to briefly see an old buddy RV, whom I hadn't seen in like ten years, so that was cool.

Anyway, the engagement ceremony was very cool. It was at a Hindu temple,* and there was food and pageantry, and everybody was dressed up in Indian garb or nice western clothes. The ceremony itself was a bit slow, as religious things often are, and I have to confess that I half-slept through a lot of it. In my defense, I was sitting on the carpet, almost lying down, in one of those low-rider beach-chair thingies, and there was a lot of melodic, almost hypnotic, chanting going on, so it was damn near impossible for me to keep my eyes open. At least I wasn't on Twitter the entire time like the guy sitting next to me. 

*I think it was a Hindu temple, at least. It was some sort of Indian place of worship. The guru who preaches there is advertised as having a "gold medal in astrology," which made my dad and me chuckle.

I've been to several weddings for people younger than me -- my little brother, younger cousins, and what have you -- but I believe this is my first wedding/engagement ceremony for somebody a full generation below me. I'm now at the stage in life where the kids of people roughly my age are getting married. S's cousin's son is in his late twenties, and a few of his friends came out for the ceremony, so, I spent some time hanging out with a small group of late-twenty-somethings. In my head, I'm perpetually 32, so this felt pretty natural to me at first, but then at some point it dawned on me that I was an oldster to them -- not like an old oldster but definitely not of their age cohort. To bond with them, I had to whip out the big guns. I clocked them as a very erudite, slightly nerdy crowd (doctors and lawyers), so I started humblebragging about my crossword puzzle construction.* It totally worked -- completely broke the ice. Everybody was properly impressed, and one woman even asked if she could get a picture with me to send to her mom who solves the NYT puzzle religiously. I said yes, of course.

*This is actually very unlike me. I don't talk about that that much. I'm not being modest. I just usually don't even think about it. It only came up this time because somebody mentioned Wordle, and so I showed everybody my pic with the Wordle editor.

The one pall over the festivities was the absence of my in-laws. They were supposed to come out, but my father-in-law is not in great health at the moment, so they couldn't make it. He's in stable condition, and he can function and live a mostly normal life and all that, but he's been having some issues. His feet were really swollen last time we were visiting because he had some sort of blood disorder that took a long time to diagnose, and he eventually had to spend a few days in the hospital. Then he fell somehow* on the sidewalk while out for his daily walk and got all cut up. So, he and my mother-in-law decided, prudently, I'd say, that a cross-country flight was not in the cards. Just moving through airport security and getting to the gate would be an ordeal, and if something went wrong, being in a 500-mph missile 35,000 feet above Arkansas would not be the greatest place to be.

*It's unknown whether he accidentally tripped, as people of all ages do, or he collapsed because his 82-year-old body betrayed him at that moment, or some combination thereof.

We're dropping off the kids at a week-long sleep-away camp tomorrow afternoon, and S and I thought we were going to have some time to ourselves. But instead we are flying to Tampa on Monday to visit S's parents. They could use some help with logistics -- appointments and such. S's sister went a few weeks ago, so now we are going next week. I don't mind. It's usually pretty chill down there, and not having kids is a vacation in and of itself, no matter where you are. Plus, it's the 4th of July next Thursday, and S and I are planning a day trip to the beach then. Also, not to be morbid, but we might be in the visit-while-we-can stage of things with S's father -- we might not be; he could fully recover from his current maladies and live another 15 years, relatively healthily and happily -- but we might be. That's one of the problems with this stage: You never know for sure when it will start or if it already has.

Thankfully, we don't seem to have entered this stage yet with my parents. By all appearances, they are doing very well. They're relatively mobile physically and still quite sharp mentally. They don't "act really old" yet, if that makes sense. And it probably does make sense, because we all just witnessed the exact opposite of what I mean, in Joe Biden in his debate performance. I didn't watch it live, and I've only seen a few clips, but they were beyond depressing. I don't know where we go from here -- I guess, I think he should drop out of the race -- but we should probably all get ready for another four years of "Tangerine Idi Amin" in the White House. I mean, I'd vote for Joe Biden over Trump, if Biden was 182 years old and only existed in hologram form, but, judging by the polls, I'm not most people.

And if this post was depressing enough already, I've now surely crossed the Rubicon. Let's end on a high note with some beautiful pictures.

Until next time...   

 

[Every time I go to UP, I take at least one pic of Chambers Bay]

 

[One of my children on a rope bridge at a playground in the Seattle Center]

 

[Drawbridge near the Ballard Locks]

 

[Mount Rainier from the Point Defiance Zoo]

 

[Mount Rainier from a street near my parents' house]

Entry 717: Curb Your Connections

Leaving for vacation tomorrow, and I'm already in a vacay kinda mind. So, for this post, I'm going to do a special edition of Hollywood Connections: Curb Your Enthusiasm only. The show recently ended, for good, which has made me especially nostalgic for older episodes, so I've been watching clips of them on YouTube, and in so doing, I frequently see an actor I now recognize from something, whom I didn't recognize when I first saw the episode because they weren't yet in the thing I recognize them from. Does that make sense? If not, you'll catch on quickly, nevertheless.

10. Ed O'Ross: Six Feet Under

He plays the mom's boyfriend on Six Feet Under, and he plays the deli owner who lets Larry change the sandwich named after him. (Originally, Larry's sandwich was something he thought was gross -- white fish and capers or something like that -- which of course greatly perturbed him, especially considering his nemesis Ted Danson's sandwich was something delicious.) On Six Feet Under, O'Ross is Russian, and on Curb, he also has some sort of accent (generic Eastern European?), but, if Wikipedia is to believed, he's just a plain old American Caucasian. It says he was an amateur boxing champion and also played minor league baseball. That's pretty cool.

9. Steve Coogan: Night at the Museum

Reading this guy's Wikipedia page, he seems pretty famous across the pond, but he's not very well-know in the States (at least he wasn't by me). S and the kids watched Night at the Museum some time ago, and I popped my head in for a bit, and then a few days later, I came across this bad therapist Curb clip.

8. Maggie Wheeler: Friends

I didn't realize it until relatively recently, but Chandler's girlfriend on Friends, Janice, was in an episode of Curb. She's the LOL-sayer in this very funny scene from arguably the funniest episode in Curb history (that would be way too hot to run today). 

7. Kaitlyn Devers: Booksmart

I love her in Booksmart, one of my favorite comedies ever, so I was delighted when I realized she was the girl having the period in a Curb episode. I question the verisimilitude of the clip, but it's still pure comedy gold.

6. Skyler Gisondo: Booksmart

Speaking of Booksmart, the guy who plays Jared in that movie was also in an episode of Curb.

5. Bob Odenkirk: Breaking Bad

Now, of course, Bob Odenkirk is a huge name actor. But back when he was on Curb, he wasn't nearly as well-known as is today. He was still kinda famous because he was on Mr. Show, but if you didn't watch that show (which I didn't), you probably didn't know who he was. I remembered his character on Curb very well (Gil Bang), but I didn't realize it was Bob Odenkirk playing him until I rewatched the scene years later, after I had seen a few seasons of Breaking Bad. 

4. Sam Richardson: I Think You Should Leave

I love I Think You Should Leave, and Sam Richardson is a big reason why. He's also hilarious in this scene. As somebody who is very white and has conceived children with somebody who is very brown, I've had a version of this conversation before. It's not actually that awkward and contentious, however. And gun to my head, I would go a little darker--you don't have to worry as much about sunscreen.

3. Mindy Kaling: The Office

Yes, she was once on Curb, as Richard Lewis' assistant. As an aside, I've been rewatching The Office with the kids. I forgot how great that series is. Mindy Kaling as Kelly Kapoor is hysterical, and she's probably, like, the sixth funniest person on the show. 

2. Marissa Jaret Winokur: American Beauty

I showed this clip to Lil' S1 recently, and it was driving me crazy that I couldn't place the actress in it. Then it hit me like a shot: She's the fast food worker in American Beauty when Lester catches his wife cheating on him! I haven't seen that movie in over 20 years, so that was a sweet a-ha moment.

1. Brett Gelman: Stranger Things

He's Murray from Stranger Things; he's the awful brother-in-law in Fleabag; and he's the pig parker in Curb. Great actor, by the way -- he plays the kinda-sleazy, kinda-charismatic dude brilliantly.

Alright, that's all I got.

Until next time...

Entry 716: A Small Post About A Normal-Size Post

It was a really busy weekend, this one, and I now realize I've run out of time to do a legit post. I'll try to get one up Thursday or Friday of next week. Actually, that will work out decently because we are leaving next Saturday to visit family, and I won't be able to put up anything then either, so this way I can do one normal-sized post right before I go.

Until then, please enjoy "Robbery" by Juice WRLD. I was turned onto this by my 8-year-old son, of all people. I kinda dig it. I thought it was a song by some hot new artist, but I looked him up on Wikipedia, and he actually died five years ago. His story is probably not the best one for a third grader to absorb, but I'm guessing a lot of it doesn't sink in through the music. I mean, when I was that age, I had every rap on the Beastie Boys' License to Ill memorized and had almost no idea what any of it actually meant. Why would you want girls two at a time? For what?

Until next time...

Entry 715: President Felon

The big news this week, of course, is that former (and perhaps future) president Donald Trump was found guilty of... something. Few people can name the exact charges, I suspect, but they do know it was a felony, and that he was found guilty by a jury of his peers. I'm not even totally sure if I could tell you the exact charges, and I've been following the case somewhat closely. I think it's misdemeanor fraud -- falsifying business documents -- that got elevated to a felony because it was in service of another crime, a campaign finance violation. It went down as such... Trump paid Michael Cohen a bunch of money to kill the Stormy Daniels story, but he documented it as a fee for legal services, which it wasn't, so that's the misdemeanor fraud. However, when Trump paid Cohen, he was actually repaying him. Cohen initially fronted the money, $130K, to the Trump campaign, which was a campaign finance law as Cohen could only legally contribute $2,700, as an individual. This latter crime bumped up the fraud to a felony. I hope I got that right.

Laid out this way, it does seem pretty contrived and ticky-tack, which is why even many Trump haters did not like this case. Trump is a criminal, to be sure, but his real crime has nothing to do with hush-money payments to an adult film actress -- it's conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.* I mean, he is on tape asking the AG of Georgia to "find" him more votes, for Pete's sake. That Fulton County RICO case is really the one we need to go forward. Unfortunately, however, it's on pause as an appeals court reviews an appeal by Trump's team of a judge's decision to allow Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the case. Willis is alleged to have had (and, let's be honest, almost certainly did have) a romance with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, creating the appearance of a conflict of interest, even though Wade formally withdrew from the case.   

*There is also the classified documents case, which is also more serious and straightforward than the New York case. Unfortunately, Trump got a very amenable (to him) judge in that case -- one he appointed -- who appears intent on delaying it until after the election.

As an aside, Fani Willis is a major part of the first episode of a new, really good podcast called Reflector. She's been prosecuting rappers like Young Thug on RICO charges and using their lyrics against them. This is controversial, as it's not clear if the lyrics are boasts about real-life crimes or statements of artistic fiction. I tend to agree with Willis that such lyrics are fair game -- why shouldn't they be? -- and she comes off as pretty badass, overall. I just wish she had better judgement and assigned somebody other than the guy she was shtupping to one of highest-stakes criminal cases in American history.

So, back to Trump, yeah, I do understand the people who say the New York case against him was weak and politically motivated. It was undoubtedly both those things. I mean, Alvin Bragg basically ran his reelection campaign on the promise to prosecute Trump. With that said, it was still 100% a legitimate case within our criminal justice system. Proper procedure was followed. Both sides presented their cases, and a jury of 12 people (signed off on by Trump's defense team, I might add) found is favor of the prosecution. That's how it goes. That's how our courts work and how they are designed to work. Yes, New York is a reliably blue city, but Biden "only" won it 76%-23% in 2020, which means we would expect, by random chance, three of the 12 jurors to be Trump voters. It was a unanimous decision against him.

Would Trump have been convicted if he wasn't Trump? Maybe not, but he is Trump, so what difference does it make? The point is: Regardless of what anybody thought going into the trial, he got his day in court, he got a fair hearing before a jury of his peers, and he lost. He has nobody to blame but himself, even though we all know he will blame everybody but himself. Also, he might win on appeal. That’s part of the system, too.

The big question everybody is wondering now is, What effect will this have in November? But it's not something anybody can answer with any certitude. I'm very wary of anybody making grand predictions about this election. Trump was definitively leading in the polls in the swing states before this verdict dropped, and I don't expect things to change drastically. However, things don't need to change drastically to tip the odds in Biden's favor, and, most importantly, we still have five months to go and things change in five months. Nate Cohn,* whom I trust as much as anybody to provide disinterested fact-based analysis, has two recent articles on the topic I found interesting.** It's weird, I feel like we're kinda in the reverse situation of 2016, in which much of the media and the public was reading the polling data as if it was a foregone conclusion that Clinton would win, and the smart analysts were saying, Hold on, now, this thing is actually much closer than people think. We can only hope this reverse analogy extends all the way to the end.

*By the way, have you ever noticed how much Nate Cohn looks like a young Mo Rocca? Probably not because most people have never heard of either of these guys.

**One salient point in the articles is that Trump has likely benefited a great deal from being out of the spotlight -- few people were even paying attention to this trial -- while the focus has been primarily on Biden's problems with inflation, the border, the war in Gaza, etc. What this verdict could do, if nothing else, is remind voters of how sick we all were of Trump (and from Covid) four years ago.

Well, I think I've spilled enough virtual ink on this topic for now. Until next time...