Things That Crawl in the Night

Neo-Noir tour de force .. Poster courtesy of Wikipedia

by Trebor Snillor
THE LATEST

I’m at Arboretum Starbucks in Lakewood.. I can only assume that Knox Street Starbucks wants fewer customers – they took out most of their tables and all their comfortable seating. They were aiming at something with that remodel, I know not what. Since my last blog entry, my 1995 GE Washer expired on me. I’m now getting used to a new Whirlpool “high efficiency” machine that makes weird shushing noises. It does get the clothes clean with less water and detergent – guess I’ll get used to it. I’m also enjoying a new Cuisinart Extreme Brew coffee maker. My house is becoming the everything-new house but not necessarily because I want it to.

This hot, baking summer is approaching its end – can’t say I’ll miss the heat and dryness. Bring on Labor Day and Halloween.

NIGHTCRAWLER

Yesterday, I watched a neo-noir thriller from 2014. The film, Nightcrawler, was a low budget independent film that flew under the radar of Oscar or Golden Globes. It is nonetheless one of the best movies I’ve seen in many months. I was on the edge of my seat for all 117 minutes of this remarkable movie. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a videographer, Lois Bloom, who hawks footage of accidents and shootings to a local TV news station. Rene Russo plays the morally ambiguous Station Manager who encourages Lois to take ever greater risks in capturing footage that is grisly, authentic and news-grabbing. Lois is also morally compromised in his single-minded drive to succeed as the King of Gruesome Footage.

There are so many things to like about this film.. Gyllenhaal lost 30 pounds for this role. He morphs into a slender, polyester weasel with a frightening hypnotic stare. He pursues a relationship with Russo, a woman old enough to be his mother. The air between them is erotically charged although in fact they never even kiss on screen. The overall movie made me think of Postman Always Rings Twice with the romance-fueled evil doings. First-time director Dan Gilroy had camera angles of a seedy, steamy otherworldly Los Angeles that made me think of Blue Velvet.

One review that I read said that the movie is darkly comic. I never laughed at any of the proceedings although in retrospect it is funny. It’s also a serious indictment against the news industry if any measure of it is true. Lastly, I will warn you away from this movie if you like to see justice prevail in the end. The ending of this movie is as shocking and duplicitous as the proceedings leading up to it. It’s almost an allegory for life – not just the news industry. We have to hope that Karma will catch up to them later. If you have two hours to watch pure evil unfold, catch Nightcrawler on Netflix.

STARBUCKS REDUX

This Starbucks is nice and new -- gets a pretty decent crowd of people. I'm in a nice window seat with a 180 degree view. For some reason this new Starbucks could afford tables the other one could not. Bloggers of the world unite -- we must be accommodated with good lighting and confortable seating.

© 2015 Snillor Productions

Taking on Windows 10

The Zen of Windows 10 .. Poster courtesy of Wikipedia

by Trebor Snillor
THIS WEEKEND

This has been my weekend of household mishaps. My Mr. Coffee got clogged and overflowed frothy dark coffee all over my new kitchen. In a separate event, I spilled bleach on my expensive green bath rug, ruining it. I now have a new, “true white” rug which has accumulated two big size 11 footprints in the 1st two hours of use.

My front yard has 3 large dead spots despite the new sprinkler system. The harsh August sun has scorched it mercilessly. I doubled down on the water but probably too late.

WINDOWS 10

Enough of my home travails. Let’s talk about the new Windows 10 which debuted on July 29th. I went ahead and converted my devices to 10 – couldn’t resist the appeal of something new and free. As one of the relatively few people who used and liked Windows 8.1, I’m not as awestruck by Windows 10 as some reviewers. It basically restores the desktop mode as a default interface and corrals all the tiles over to the windows menu key. If you truly want all tiles all the time (i.e. Mobile interface) you can specify that in a special setting.

It does a few other things you may or may not love. It replaces Internet Explorer with Edge. All I can make of Edge is that it seems like a simplified, dumbed-down Explorer. It’s less configurable and it does annoying things when I right-click a page or try to print my bank statement. Explorer is still available on your C drive as a fallback and you’ll probably be falling back.

I’m at Starbucks (of course) and clicking on the Wi-Fi symbol failed to display any networks, even my iPhone hotspot. This is probably a training issue – Bill Gates could set me on the right path in 3 seconds if he were looking over my shoulder.

Windows Update has been removed as an option. Windows 10 handles your updates quietly in the background. That’s fine for a computer that is in sleep mode or continuously connected. Am wondering how it will function on my devices that are shut down for days or weeks at a time. There are some things you’ll like almost for certain. It has clean, simple icons that reminds me a bit of iOS8 on the iPhone. It’s pulled movies and TV shows into the Windows Store – giving an iTunes-like experience without the confusion of iTunes. It has Xbox as an app and gives you nearly an Xbox experience for the price of a tablet.

Overall my impression is favorable – I figure I’ll navigate the issues I’ve described. I skipped the training video being the impatient creature that I am.

DEEP THOUGHTS

I’m on the other side of a thin divider from two young men having a heart-to-heart talk. The thin wood slats are not a sound barrier. I’m getting an ear load about Christian divorce counseling and revenge credit card spending. I’m going to terminate this blog entry so that I can give these gents back their privacy. If you have the option of a Windows 10 upgrade – my advice is … Go for it! 

© 2015 Snillor Productions

Whigs and Squirrels

Squirrels making strides .. Poster courtesy of Wikipedia

by Trebor Snillor
Today is hotter than Hades – both of the nearby Starbucks are full to capacity with people drinking iced coffees, escaping the heat. I’ve now landed at the Highland Park Whole Foods. I’m drinking an Allegro ice coffee flavored with almond milk and Truvia.

SQUIRRELS

Before I launch into today’s topic, I have to comment on the squirrel situation. I have two nice bird feeders in my back yard.. in previous years they attracted sparrows, cardinals and blue jays. Nary a bird comes by anymore – the squirrels have taken over. I guess squirrels have to eat too.

My newest feeder is called the “squirrel stumper”. It has a metal grill surrounding the cylindrical body. The squirrels are not stumped by it at all. They can hang upside down on the grill and eat out of the dispenser tray. They even appear to have figured out how to remove the screw top. It’s eerie – can a rodent be that smart?

There is a cable that runs from a telephone pole in my alley, past the hackberry tree (with feeders) over to my house. It runs about two feet above the feeder and a foot or two to the right of it. Yesterday that cable was hooked under a short tree branch next to the feeder. It’s as if the squirrels engineered a bridge directly to the feeder. They weighed it down and swung it over. Those little brown bastards! Little, brown, innovative bastards at that.

WHIGS

If squirrels are smart, Republicans are showing signs of devolution. Never mind Donald Trump; he’s amusing but he’s not the main GOP issue right now. The main issue with the GOP is immigration – a topic which succeeds in splitting the GOP right down the middle. Companies like Walmart and Gemcraft Homes benefit highly from immigrant laborers with their reduced wages. Wealthy stakeholders (who trend Republican) embrace the immigrants. Populist middle class Republicans are angry with immigration and even hostile toward Latinos in general. They abhor immigration and it’s a central theme of theirs. These two groups cannot live in the same domicile for long – history even has a precedent dating back to the 1850’s.

Our man Abraham Lincoln was a Whig in the 1850’s. Whigs were a conservative, pro-business party but they were riven by the issue of slavery. President Millard Fillmore was a slavery apologist and the anti-slave Whigs could not tolerate his re-nomination. It’s a rare case in history where a party name, “Whig” came to have a nasty connotation to its own members. It could signify a slave-freeing Lincoln or a slave-justifying Fillmore. By 1856, the Whigs were destroyed as a party. The anti-slavery Whigs founded the new Republican Party and the pro-slave group glommed to a failed “American” Party. They next gravitated over to a Democratic Party that had a stretchier (albeit hypocritical) view of humans owning humans.

I have trouble imagining anyone who his young, female, gay or minority voting for the GOP. The party is a fossilized, ossified vessel of Old White Man ideas. I typically think that third parties are a bad move – but I can actually see a 3rd Party now supplanting the GOP with fiscal conservatism that accompanies a sensitivity for human and animal rights. It would be in some ways a sequel of the Whigs in 1856.

© 2015 Snillor Productions