Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Lucinda is getting better at pinball. She knows the basic strategy for playing our machine, and she’s learning to catch the ball on the flippers to set up the two essential shots.

The basic plan for playing “Future Spa” involves getting the letters to spell ‘FUTURE SPA”, Each letter is worth 2,000 bonus, and you can get up to 42,000 bonus. And the four inline targets multiply the bonus up to 6x. So there are two essential shots to learn:

• The left-flipper shot to the rollover for adding letters;
• The right-flipper shot for the bonus multiplier targets.

And she’s starting to learn how to do the Slap Save.

We’re having some fun with this.

And Lucinda set a new personal record this evening with a score of 386,430 points. She was quite pleased.

This afternoon, we all went over to West Hollywood to see “What Would Jesus Buy?” at the Sunset 5. I think that this may be the first time we’ve taken Lucinda to see and art-house movie, and it turned out to be quite a little adventure.

The film follows Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping when he and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir go on a nationwide tour to try to stop the commercialization of Christmas and to raise awareness of the costs of our consumer culture. They visited the Mall of America, Disneyland, and lots of places in between, preaching the gospel of anti-consumerism. It was hilarious.

For a special treat, the director was there to answer questions after the film. The film was produced by Morgan Spurlock, who did “Supersize Me”, and this film is done in a similar style, with Reverend Billy and the choir doing guerilla ‘interventions’ at big-box stores and malls. He uses his bullhorn to preach of the coming ‘Shopocalypse’. They also performed exorcisms of credit cards to drive out the demons of debt. Overall, it was a fun time, even though Lucinda was the only child in the audience.

For the day after Thanksgiving, we headed down to see Grandpa in San Diego. The plan was to go visit, take him to lunch at Prado, and then go see the Midway aircraft carrier museum.

The lunch at Prado was nice. We also got to see our friend Laura there. She manages the place, and it appears that she never leaves there. I guess that’s just how it is to manage a big restaurant. But the food was good, and the presentation was first-rate.

The Midway was interesting. Its active days spanned from the end of World War II through the Vietnam War. They had a lot of the older airplanes on display on the hangar deck. They also had several flight simulators on the hangar deck, and they were selling rides in them. Maybe next time we’ll have to try them.

Up on the flight deck they had newer airplanes on display. The A4 reminded me of the time when I was working in San Diego and one of them crashed down the street from my office. We heard it go by and could tell by the sound that something was wrong. We all ran to the windows in time to see the plume of smoke and the pilot drifting down on his parachute. It still amazes me that he was able to aim the plane for the parking lot between two office buildings before he ejected.

There were also exhibits about taking off and landing on the carrier. They had retired pilots giving talks to explain how the process worked. It was pretty interesting, and it’s really amazing that they are able to make it look (relatively) easy.

Overall, it was a fun day.

I also got a new sign for the Animal Crossings Gallery.

Today was the big Thanksgiving feast. Where we over-eat even more than usual. As always, I’m the cook, so I got up early and got started.

The two test pies I’d made recently worked out well. I was prepared this time. For last-minute advice on making the crust, I consulted The Teen Guide to Homemaking. This is a 1950s-era home economics textbook that I have. It’s a classic, and it has a lot of good information about basic cooking techniques. It also has good information about making lots of things from scratch. So I made the crust, filled it, and baked it. And it was good.

I also made a whole bunch of other stuff. Green-bean casserole, but not with the canned mushroom soup. The goop was made from scratch with cream, fresh mushrooms, etc. Also, brussels sprouts with garlic and pancetta. And cornbread stuffing made from homemade cornbread. It was all good. As evidence, I present the smiling faces of everyone who was there.

On Friday night, we went out to Santa Monica to the opening reception for “Plays Well With Others”, which is a collaborative art show with Sharon Kagan, Leslie Yagar, and Lana Shuttleworth. Lana was the artist who did the “Cone Migration” show that we saw recently.

This new show is a single large piece in the gallery. It’s a poppy field suspended from the ceiling, with poppies made from dyed coffee filters, pieces of traffic cones, and crocheted yarn. And we got to meet the artists, which was a fun time. I’d been looking forward to meeting Lana, since I participated in the Cone Migration. And in the photo, be sure to check out her purse made from traffic cones.

It was a fun evening.

Yet another weird toy. It’s the Pig Splat Ball. Lucinda saw this in a catalog and just had to have it. So we ordered it. Now there are 12 of them in a box, so everywhere we look, there are sticky vinyl pigs stuck to every flat surface. And I’m trying to remember how life was even possible before the invention of such marvelous things.

Here’s some of the 7.5 pounds of candy that Lucinda got on Halloween. Sort of like the traditional cornucopia, but not quite. But quite appropriate to modern American culture. Yikes.

Here’s the report from Halloween night. Lucinda went out with Cathy and some of the other kids from our neighborhood, while I stayed home and handed out candy. I set up my telescope in the front yard and let the kids look a Jupiter and also Comet Holmes. The comet was a special treat, since I’m usually kind of hard up for something interesting to look at if Jupiter or Saturn isn’t up.

Overall it was a good evening. Lucinda came home with 7.5 pounds (3.4 kg) of candy, which we all considered to be a good haul.

We got new carpet today. After 12 years in this house, the carpet was pretty well worn out. We went looking at the beginning of the summer, and nothing really impressed us. But then we saw a sample of leopard-print carpet. That one spoke to us. Everyone who knows us will say something like, “Stan and Cathy got leopard carpet? Yeah, that fits.” And Lucinda likes it, too. You know what they say about the fruit and the tree.

So here it is, in all its glory.

Our afternoon art adventure was a trip out to Culver City to Bandini Art to see the “Cone Migration” show. This show is all art made from traffic cones. Lana Shuttleworth placed cones all over Los Angeles and let them get beat up by traffic. Then she collected them and made art out of them. It’s an interesting idea, and the art she made was very nice.

It’s also an interactive art in a way. They had a pile of cones in front of the gallery, and visitors are encouraged to take one and ‘release it’ somewhere. So of course, we had to do this. I thought it would make for an interesting piece of performance art to take the cone along on a bike ride and place it somewhere. When we were leaving, we picked out a cone to take along.

Since we were out on the West Side, I wanted to go see the Museum of Jurassic Technology. This is sort of an art project museum on Venice Blvd. It’s kind of like entering the world of “Eraserhead“, which I thought was amusing, but Cathy found somewhat disturbing. It’s filled with lots of strange things, including an entire room devoted to memorializing the dogs of the Soviet Space program. They had large oil portraits of the dogs, including a special shrine for Laika with a little candle and a quote from Tsiolkovsky.

We all enjoyed the cone exhibit. And I liked the Jurassic Technology. It was all very deeply weird, but I like stuff like that.