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Randomhoodnessiditydom

Tuesday, February 9, 2010
The Rings: Part Two
So, since my sweetie got me an engagement ring, what did I get her? I knew going in that there were certain things I wanted in her ring: I wanted a solitaire: a single stone, because she's one of a kind. I wanted a really high quality stone, because, at least as far as I'm concerned, she's perfect, so I wanted her stone to be as close to perfect as I could manage. I was okay with going for a relatively small stone, because she is not ostentatious at all. I wanted to get a really prime stone first, and then get it set, because most of the jewellers around here try to dazzle customers so much with the setting that they don't notice that they're getting an inferior stone. Also, I was toying with the notion of going for something other than the traditional yellow gold and a diamond. Julie hinted that she would prefer white gold, or silver, or something. (It wasn't until much later that I learned that her original rings were... you guessed it... yellow gold, and a lot of little stones. So even before I got the ring, I was going just about as far opposite from what had happened before as it was possible to do, and she really liked that.) As I was looking for a ring design, I happened across a web site for a company which makes rings out of titanium instead of gold, silver, or platinum. That intrigued me, because titanium is used in making supersonic planes, jet engines, and spaceships, so it's a thoroughly geeky metal, and therefore appropriate coming from me. It's also stronger than silver or gold, so her rings should last for years without wear. But then, I saw a design that I completely fell in love with. It's called the Electra, and you can see it here, the way it looked when I first saw it: I have looked at many other designs since, but none of them have matched this one for its simple elegance. To me, this design just cries out Julie's name. So, then I needed to source a stone. I looked at the diamonds available locally, but all I was offered were visibly flawed stones over half a carat, when I was looking for a better quality, but smaller, stone. In the end, I had to explore alternate stones. Moissanite had a certain appeal, since it's even harder than diamond, and occurs naturally only in meteorite craters. So that would have been totally geeky. However, I was afraid that people would consider it a "fake diamond", rather than a gemstone in its own right, and besides, natural moissanite is almost impossible to come by. Emeralds, rubies, and some other stones have lovely colours, but when I did the research, I was dismayed to find out how fragile they are. I didn't want my sweetie's stone to fracture if she bumped into something, so I needed something harder. As it happens, her favourite colour is blue. Sapphires come in blue, and they are the next hardest gemstone after diamonds. And when I found out that sapphire is also a symbol for faithfulness, well, that sealed the deal. So then, I had to find a source for a sapphire. None of the local jewellers that I tried deal in sapphires at all. Some of them were willing to special order a sapphire for me, but none of their suppliers deal in natural sapphires. (Sapphires are often heat-treated to improve the colour, but since my sweetie is a natural beauty, an artificially enhanced stone just doesn't seem appropriate for her.) So, I did a web search for natural sapphires, and found a company named, imaginatively enough, The Natural Sapphire Company, so I looked through what they had in stock. Many of the stones are so light in colour that they look washed out, like white stones with a hint of blue. I didn't want the blue colour to look accidental, but quite deliberate, so I was leaning towards the darker stones. But then, I saw this gorgeous stone, flawless, with such amazing colour that it was like it was singing Julie's name. So of course I had to order it. Then, I made a quick trip to visit a bunch of friends and family, which just happened to include a stop to drop off the stone at the workshop which was making the ring. It was supposed to be ready in 3-5 days, so I scheduled a trip down to see my sweetie, and arranged to have the ring shipped to her, just in case it took longer to make than planned. That way, I had ten days from the time the ring was supposed to be delivered, as a safety margin. So, my plans seemed to be coming together nicely...
Mood: busy 12:56 - 0 Comments

Tuesday, January 19, 2010
The Rings: Part One
Okay, so we knew going in that we were going to have a weird and wonderful relationship. (I provide the weird part, and my sweetie provides the wonderful part.) One of the things which has characterised our relationship from the start is a willingness to do things differently than "normal" couples do. (Just ask her what I gave her for Valentine's Day last year.) One thing which I wanted to do was get a "practise ring", to wear on my ring finger. Why? Because I wanted to get used to having something on that finger. (I haven't worn any jewellery besides a watch since the day in grade 12 when I put on my grandfather's signet ring and my high school ring at the same time and felt like Nebuchadnezzar.) What I emphatically didn't want to do was fiddle with my wedding band. Why? What's the first thing guys do in movies or on TV when they're planning to cheat on their wives? They take off their wedding band. I didn't want to fiddle with it, for fear that my sweetie would see me doing with it, and fear that I was having second thoughts. (Well, that is second thoughts of some kind other than, "I was right the first time. She's wonderful, and I love her, and thank You, God, for putting her in my life." ) So, she bought me a practise ring. But now that her engagement ring has arrived, I just call it my engagement ring. That seems to be simpler to explain. And to people who say, "guys don't wear engagement rings!", my answer is, "This one does."
Mood: loved 12:00 - 0 Comments

Wednesday, January 13, 2010
How we deal with the separation
Needless to say, my sweetie and I spend a lot of time talking online, since we can't talk in person. (Thank God for VOIP, or I would be broker than Bob Crachit.) One of the things I do is read to her. Recently, I read her In His Steps (which I blogged about in March, 2008), and she loved it. I hoped she would, of course, because it's a great book. But I didn't anticipate that we would be able to spend so much time discussing the implications of following Jesus, using concrete (if fictional) examples. It turned out to be a great way to explore our values, and I'm happy to report that Julie's values are every bit as excellent as I had come to expect from her. I never would have thought of In His Steps as material for marriage preparation, but that's what it turned out to be.
Mood: loved 12:18 - 0 Comments

Thursday, January 7, 2010
The times, they are a'changing
The last year brought incredible change to my life, and this year promises to be even more eventful, so I'm changing my blog, too. From now until the actual event, I'm planning to blog about the hopes, joys, trials, and tribulations of making a cross-border marriage happen. I have a few thoughts brewing away (mostly along the lines of how wonderful my fiancée is, and how our respective mean old governments are conspiring to keep us apart), but of course at this point, I don't know exactly how the process is going to turn out (well, except for the obvious point that my sweetie and I are bound and determined that we will be together, somewhere, somehow). But if you have little tolerance for mush (or complaining), be assured my other blogs (on MySpace and Reality Free Canada) will not include this kind of content.
Mood: loved 12:02 - 0 Comments

Monday, January 4, 2010
A Christmas Carol (2000)
I caught this version on the telly this year.It's very dark, and the story has been changed considerably, but it's an intelligent and sensitive updating of the story. Unfortunately, this version hasn't been released on DVD, but if YouTube has the other seven parts to go with this one, then you should be able to watch the whole thing, with breaks about every ten minutes. In this version, Scrooge is a modern-day loan shark, sucking the life out of the residents of a block of council flats (what people around here delicately refer to as "low income housing" ) in return for money to buy themselves a few sad little luxuries. Marley appears more than once, and his message is broken up into several parts, but I think this is necessary in a modern setting. No modern day thug, such as Scrooge is portrayed as, would sit still for the kind of sermonising that Marley gets away with in the original. Other things have changed, too, but I'll leave them for you to discover. Suffice it to say that I find this version a worthy addition to the ranks of what has probably been the most frequently filmed story ever.
Mood: impressed 12:37 - 0 Comments

Saturday, January 2, 2010

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

The Muppet Christmas Carol
Jim Henson Productions, 1992
NTSC DVD (Region 1) [Amazon.com/Amazon.ca]
PAL DVD (Region 2) [Amazon.co.uk]

As much as I love the Muppets, I have to admit that not everybody can work with them. I've seen great performers flounder and sink as guest stars on The Muppet Show, apparently because they couldn't handle the weirdosity and bizarritude. There's an old saying among actors: "Never work with kids or animals." That has to go double for puppets, who have all the cuteness of kids and animals rolled into one felt-covered package. However, some performers can work with the Muppets, and even steal the scenes back from them. You have to admire anybody who can appear on the same screen as the Muppets and still grab your attention. Michael Caine turns in a stellar performance as Ebenezer Scrooge, playing the character absolutely straight, even when surrounded by muppetational mayhem, and compels your attention. There really ought to be an award for performers who can do that.

Note: If you, like I, permanently swore off Muppet movies after the crushing disappointment that was The Great Muppet Caper, or Muppets Take Manhattan, I should let you know that this film is evidence that the Muppets eventually got their groove back. I only found it while flicking channels one night, and I was delighted to see that the silliness, originality, and fun of the first movie was back.

Mood: silly
12:49 - 0 Comments

Thursday, December 31, 2009

An American Christmas Carol (1979)

An American Christmas Carol
20th Century Fox, 1947
NTSC DVD (Region 1) [Amazon.com/Amazon.ca]

Oh, I had all kinds of reasons for thinking that this flick was a Bad Idea. For one thing, generally, when a classic is "updated", the updated version loses a great deal in the translation. For another thing, with Henry Winkler playing the character analogous to Ebenzer Scrooge, well... back in those happy days, I think it was understandable to think that having the Fonz play the central character would have been more of a stretch than he was capable of carrying off.

I am very happy to admit that I was wrong. The writing was certainly adept, depression Era Concord is a suitable stand-in for Dickensian London, and Winkler's performance is admirable. (In fact, the scene in which he reveals his solution for the Tiny Tim analogue is still one of my favourite scenes of all time.)

My only grump is that Winkler's Scrooge analogue was named Benedict Slade. Why is it that characters named Slade in the movies are always the bad guy? First, there was Evil Roy Slade, and now this.

Mood: nostalgic
11:07 - 0 Comments

Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Pointing in the right direction
Since I am planning to move to a place where most of the houses are at least a hundred years old, and the wiring is frequently old and inadequate, I've been thinking how the place we eventually end up will likely need to be rewired with properly grounded plugs so the surge protectors will work. But hey, while we're at it, why not wire the place up with Ethernet cables, so we can have Internet phones or radios wherever we want them? For that matter, why not go even further, and wire up some of the jacks with USB ports, for things like charging up digital cameras and MP3 players, or even running some of those innumerable USB-powered widgets you see popping up on the geek sites these days: a warmer for my mug of tea, a toaster for my sweetie's breakfast... you get the idea. As it happens, a site called Instructables is already on the ball, with a set of instructions for turning a standard power outlet into an in-wall USB charger. Now, I personally would want to add the USB outlets into the wall without giving up the existing plugs, and I'd prefer to have a project like this approved by an electrical inspector, but I suspect that this idea is pointing in the right direction. Who knows? Before too long, there may be kits to do this kind of job available at Home Hardware or Lowe's. (Thanks to PC World for bringing this to my attention.)
Mood: ambitious 12:27 - 0 Comments

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Miracle on 34th Street
20th Century Fox, 1947
NTSC DVD (Region 1) [Amazon.com/Amazon.ca]
PAL DVD (Region 2) [Amazon.co.uk]

There are at least three versions of Miracle on 34th Street, and all of them feature excellent performances. In this version, Edmund Gwenn is spot on as Kris, and Natalie Wood is delightful as Susan, and even actors who only get a single scene (like the posties deciding to deliver all the letters to Santa in the dead letter office to the courthouse) turn in performances which are both believeable and hilarious.

However, with each progressive remake, the plot gets watered down. (If they remake it again, I expect that the judge will end up letting Kris Kringle go just because "he's a nice old man with whiskers." ) The original version is the one where it is made most explicit that pretty much everybody in the movie (except for Kris and Susan) end up doing unselfish things for selfish reasons, and that's the whole point of the story: the miracle of the title is that, for once, people's selfishness is used to produce good ends. As each remake added changes to the plot to "improve" it, it got farther and farther from that delightful central premise.

If you just can't bring yourself to watch a movie in black and white, many DVD versions allow you to choose between the black and white original or a colourised version.

Mood: delighted
09:42 - 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Scrooge (1951)

I've decided to use the time between Christmas and Epiphany (January 6^th, the traditional date on which the wise men arrived in Bethlehem) to discuss my favourites out of the films which generally get broadcast during the Christmas season.

Scrooge
1951
PAL DVD (Region 2) [Amazon.co.uk]
NTSC DVD (Region 1) [Amazon.ca/Amazon.com]

Scrooge is not the first film version of Charles Dickens' classic story A Christmas Carol to be filmed (according to IMDB.com, it's the 15th), but it's long been considered the definitive version. Alastair Sim gives a terrific performance as Ebenezer Scrooge, and the rest of the case is equally strong, right down to people who only had a couple of lines. (Compare that to contemporary films, where the quality of the performance tends to drop off sharply once you get past the core characters.)

I won't rehash the plot (after all, if you have just arrived from another planet, you have more important things to catch up on than old movies), but the secret to any portrayal of this story is that Scrooge must be believeable, both at the beginning of the story, when we seem him as a bitter, miserly curmudgeon, and at the end, once he has been transformed into the incarnation of benevolence and goodwill. The reason many attempts to tell this story fail is that the audience either can't buy the miserly Scrooge, or they can't believe that he has truly changed. (Or, sometimes, the audience simply can't believe either version.) In this version, you absolutely believe both the "before" Scrooge and the "after" Scrooge.

Mood: curmudgeonly
11:01 - 0 Comments