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Friday, June 27th, 2008

🦋 Ticklish Robots

WALL-E was a really good movie, and I encourage you to go see it. (I'm not much of a movie reviewer so I'm not going to spend a lot of time explaining why I think you should see it -- just want to add my voice to the chorus of recommendations I think you're going to be seeing over the next few weeks.) This is head and shoulders above anything else Pixar has done.

It seemed to me like a really well-thought-out movie, very close to internally consistent -- the logic it adhered to was of course cartoon logic rather than real-world, but it was well-enough developed that I could really put myself in the movie's world, feel for its characters, feel the urgency of its problems and solutions.

In a bit of irony (an annoying bit of irony, it must be said), this movie about robots competently assuming human functions was screened by a robot projectionist who was not up to the task -- in a climactic moment he broke down and had to be serviced by human staff.

Seems like Sylvia is not yet ready to stay up late for a movie -- she did fine through the end of the film but once we got home it was like an hour past her bed time, and she had real trouble getting back into her routine.

There was a charming short cartoon before the feature, about a magician in a battle of wills with his rabbit. I'm confused about the credits, which included a "Lighting" credit -- I'm trying to figure out what that means in CGI animation.

posted evening of June 27th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June 23rd, 2008

🦋 New words

Sylvia and I were studying the ChinesePod lesson called "I'm Bored" (wǒ wú liáo) tonight -- her pick; she thinks it will be very useful to be able to say she's bored in another language. She got hooked on the assonance between wú liáo and ululate, another recently acquired word. Cute.

posted evening of June 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

🦋 Milestones

Sylvia is getting bigger and more independent... Yesterday evening she and Kaydi (who spent the night at our house) walked without adult accompaniment to the playground, a distance of about ¾ mile and which involves crossing several minor streets and one moderately busy one. This is (I believe) Sylvia's first time taking such a walk without a grown-up. They wanted to take Pixie along but we will see about that next time. They met some young kids there named Dahlia and Shay, and claimed to be 10-year-olds.

This morning Sylvia discovered my name could be shortened to "Germ", and that I should be from "Germany". Great... Took a walk to town with girls and dog, for to buy bagels.

posted morning of June 22nd, 2008: Respond

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

🦋 Inspiring

I find it really inspiring to read, in the preface to McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk (which arrived in today's post, hooray!), that McGaha was able to acquire a working reading knowledge of Turkish in about six months time. (Past the age of 60!) Granted he was living in Istanbul at the time and learning Turkish was his primary activity; still it's enough to make me think I should really work at language learning, that it will not be fruitless if I apply myself.

Sylvia and I just took a ChinesePod lesson about "My Dog" (wǒ de xiǎo gǒu, a phrase Sylvia knew well from class) and learned how to tell Pixie to "come here" (guò lai) and "sit down" (zuò xia).

posted evening of June 21st, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

🦋 ChinesePod

When I initially checked it out, ChinesePod was not working with Firefox, so I had been using clunky Explorer to load the lessons; but as of right now I can use Firefox, which is way faster and less error-prone.

(Note: for looking up Chinese words, I have found Pristine Lexicon most useful.)

posted evening of June 18th, 2008: Respond

Monday, June 16th, 2008

🦋 At the movies

Sylvia did pretty well with watching Monsieur Verdoux last night, paying attention to the plot and the characters, giving indications she understood what was going on. She lost interest about a half hour before the end of the movie though. (It is 2 hours long.)

Before the feature there was a preview for Encounters at the End of the World; Sylvia asked if that was what I had seen the other night and said she wanted to see it, but at home, "So we could make it softer."

posted morning of June 16th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June 9th, 2008

🦋 Blackout

So I left work early today, to watch Sylvia auditioning for next year's Overture Strings, and to file away the folders of music I've had in the back of my car since YOEC's spring concert a few weeks ago. Arrived at South Orange Middle School, only to find the school and the rest of town dark -- a fire at a transformer station in West Orange shut down several towns around here.

Well Ellen, Sylvia and I escaped the heat by driving over to Springfield, which still had power and by lucky coincidence, has the only public library around here that's open well into the evening. We chilled out, I read the first chapter of Nixonland and confirmed that I want to read the rest of it. Got back home just as the power came on.

So the site was down for a while this afternoon but it looks like no data was lost. And here we are.

posted evening of June 9th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, June 6th, 2008

🦋 The Red Hat

Thanks, Shelley! Shelley came along to Sylvia's dance recital last month (Sylvia is a student at Lydia Johnson Dance) and took a lot of pictures, which she gave to Ellen today -- I've uploaded them to our family album.

Sylvia's dance was with two other girls (all of them wore baseball caps for the dance) -- the three of them choreographed the moves together.

posted evening of June 6th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, May 31st, 2008

🦋 Ashokan Farewell

Today, for International Children's Day, Gladney has organized a talent show at the Chinese consulate in Manhattan. Sylvia and I are going to be playing "Ashokan Farewell", which she learned in in Overture Strings this term. Fingers crossed! I think it will go well, we've been practicing it a lot over the last few days.

Inspired by Apostropher and by Dave B., I have put together a mix tape of music that makes me feel happy. It's uploading right now, I probably won't get a chance to link it until we get back from our performance. So come back this evening to listen!

...The performance went very well indeed! We both made our entrances correctly (and I just want to point out that this was Sylvia's first experience with arranging -- she worked out who would play what part where) -- played in tune and kept time and all. Here's a photo:

posted morning of May 31st, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, May 25th, 2008

🦋 Another Narnia movie

Sylvia and I saw Prince Caspian tonight -- we enjoyed it and I would recommend it to people who are fans of the books. I don't think I'd recommend it as a movie to somebody who is not predisposed to like it; I guess my reaction to it was a little bit like Ebert's reaction to the latest Indiana Jones movie.

Good things: the talking animals, great; Trumpkin, great; the beautiful scenery and handsome actors were candy for my eyes. The camera work in the opening sequence was really startlingly good. Not so good: There wasn't really anything to distinguish this movie as a different film from the previous one -- where the two books are quite distinct from one another. A lot of the battle footage in particular, which made up a huge proporiton of the film, seemed like it could easily just have been lifted out of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Sylvia had a good time identifying the differences between the movie and the book, which I guess means the movie was faithful enough to the book, for them to stand out.

posted evening of May 25th, 2008: 2 responses
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