Month: December 2022

Avatar Fever

Sena and I just watched the original Avatar movie on TV last night. The new sequel just opened: “Avatar: Totally Under Water Without Snorkel or Scuba.”

I can’t recall when we actually saw the original Avatar, although it was probably not long after it was released in 2009. The CGI effects are still mesmerizing.

Sena found a YouTube with a demo showing how the action sequences were made, which pitted Sam Worthington (who played Jake Sully) against what looked like a rubber dragon yanked around by a few guys while other actors played their parts, all of them wearing what looked like ping pong balls and green dots.

It doesn’t take any of the magic away from the finished product, believe it or not.

However, I’m not totally sold on the avatar concept. I get it that Jake’s consciousness jockeyed back and forth between his human and Pandora bodies. But I can’t pin a specific inconsistency on any particular scene in the movie suggesting sometimes Jake was conscious and interacting during the day on the spaceship during the times when he should have been conscious learning how to be one of The People.

You know, when Jake’s conscious in the spaceship and out of the incubator (so to speak), his blue guy avatar should become limp and lifeless out in the Pandora Forest, maybe at the exact time when Neytiri (ultimately his main squeeze, and played by Zoe Saldana) is trying to teach him how to juggle deadly 3-headed zebra-striped iguanas, whose main diet consists of a certain male Na’vi body part involved in reproduction. This is why many of them look like they have Peyronie’s disease. This is available only in the Director’s cut, of course.

I was astounded by the relative difference in stature between the Na’vi and humans. For example, Jake’s main rival for Neytiri’s affection is a guy named Tsu’tey (played by Laz Alonso) who looks like a shrimpy, homely nerd next to his Pandora comrades. But when he’s on the airborne military transport toward the latter part of the movie, he’s several feet taller than the human soldiers and he tosses them around like garbage bags.

I wasn’t clear on why the head scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver), smokes cigarettes. What’s up with that? Her line early in the movie when they are all in their avatar bodies, some of them for the first time: “Don’t play with that, it’ll make you go blind.” Is that supposed to let the audience know that the Na’vi males have penises? Or do I just have a dirty mind?

Sena read an on-line source that the James Cameron, who wrote, directed, co-produced, and co-edited Avatar, called the main bad guy, Colonel Miles Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang) in the film a “motherf***er.” I guess he’s been reincarnated in the sequel. Evil never dies.

But Good always triumphs in the end-we hope.

Bending Amaryllis Staked, Sort of…

This morning we noticed that the Amaryllis was bent almost 90 degrees. We found a zip tie and used an old wooden spoon to stake it. Sure, it looks like amateurs did it-because amateurs did it. But the alternative is to cut the stem and sacrifice the blooms, which are still vibrant.

Amaryllis Star of Christmas

Well, I think all of the blossoms that are going to blow have blown on our Amaryllis, Star of Holland. There are 4 of them. They’re huge and glorious!

I didn’t know how it would turn out at first. It started off as just a little green stub. It soared to about 18 inches and then pushed out flowers in every direction.

It grew a lot quicker than I thought. I doubted it would bloom before Christmas. Now I’m not sure it’ll last until Christmas.

We do have a backup Poinsettia. And today, Sena just added a Zygocactus. I gather it’s a Christmas cactus.

Music creative commons attribution for video music:

Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100189

Artist: http://incompetech.com/

Is That Patty on Our Sasquatch Cribbage Board?

Sena wondered if anybody ever talks about female Sasquatch creatures. That reminded me that our Sasquatch cribbage board has an image of Bigfoot that looks familiar. I looked up the Patterson-Gimlin video on YouTube. The creature caught on video has been called Patty.

If you compare Patty in the video with the image carved into our cribbage board, there’s a resemblance. At least I think there is. At one point in the video, when Patty looks back at the camera, it looks very much like the carving—at least to me.

Scrub to about 54 seconds into the video and also at 1 minute and 28 seconds.

Announcements!

Today, I almost got a 29-hand playing cribbage with Sena. Almost is kind of like a fish story about the one that got away. I got dealt a Jack of hearts, and 3 fives, the heart, club, and diamond. If the Jack of heart had been in my hand and the 5 of hearts had been the starter card, and the other 5 in my hand had been the spade, I could have been a lucky guy, indeed. As it was, the hand was worth only 20 points. You can get better hands without all those fives, frankly. But it was still exciting. We both won a game and I finally won best two out of three. That’s rare.

There are definitely going to be 4 blossoms on the Amaryllis. They will make a great-looking bouquet. By the way, Sena has been to stores where the bulb kits are sold—some of the plants burst right through the boxes! That means you don’t have to do much to get them to grow—my kind of houseplant.

I’m Running on a Tight Schedule

Because I’m running on a tight schedule today, I’ll have to write this holiday flower-oriented post with lightning speed. There could be minor mistakes and you’ll just have to live with them.

First, we need to talk about the meaning of the usual Christmas holiday flowers. One of them is the Amaryllis, about which I’ve already given the important details in a previous post.

The other flower is the poinsettia, properly pronounced “flower.” Sena brought one home yesterday and it’s a beauty. The lore surrounding this holiday favorite is a bit convoluted. An angel ordered a peasant woman named Maria to gather roadside weeds. Maria was a little hard of hearing and thought the angel said “weed,” so she dug up a lot of marijuana growing wild in the ditches.

She took them to a little church, where the members of the congregation and the preacher lit them up with a little fire at the altar. The smoke got a little thick and everybody got a little confused and really hungry. They giggled a lot and their eyes burned a little, making everything look like it had a reddish color, including the “weeds.” Somebody knocked over the altar, spilling them all over the floor, which everybody swore they could feel through their shoes.

The poinsettia was known by the Aztecs who originally called it “Cuetlaxochitl,” which means “flower you can feel through your shoes, dude!”

There’s another version of the origin of the name of poinsettia. Some botanist in South Carolina named Poinsett (get that, har!) called it the “Mexican flame thrower,” probably because there was a legend in Mexico that extraterrestrials brought a plant with them that shot fire from its flowers, scorching all of the weed for miles.

Anyway, I think that’s how the history goes.