Archives

Jul092009

A Little Pick-Me-Up

After last night’s grim entry, I figure we could use something a little more uplifting this morning. At least I could. So here’s a music video I’ve be meaning to post for a few days, a nifty version of one of my favorite songs, the old Leiber and Stoller chestnut “Stand by Me” as recorded by Jon Bon Jovi and an Iranian singer named Andy Madadian. I first spotted this over on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, but it’s been making its way around the Interwebs, and I’m proud to do my part to spread it farther. There’s an intro on the clip by producer Don Was that explains what it’s all about; you can also listen to an NPR interview with Andy that gives a little more background.

And now for the music:

As Don Was says, the song isn’t available for sale anywhere, but if you like it, you can download a free MP3 here. I like it a lot myself; I’m frankly astounded by the flexibility of this song, how it can be performed in Farsi of all things and yet still work as well as when Ben E. King laid down the original version all the way back in 1961. They don’t call them classics for nothing, kids.

Hope we’re all feeling better now…

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Jul082009

And Then There Was One

Ever since she was a little girl, my mom wanted to own a horse ranch with a white board fence. Life, of course, doesn’t work out the way we imagine it will when we’re young — that’s a truth I’ve been struggling with myself lately — but she did manage to get an approximation of her dream, at least. There’ve always been horses around the Bennion Compound, even before I came along. When I was a kid, she dabbled a little with breeding her mares. (I learned the facts of life by watching three foals enter the world, and one, sadly, that didn’t quite make it.) And yes, she even got her white board fence, across the front of a hay pasture she and Dad bought from one of the neighbors. It wasn’t Southfork by any means, but it was pretty good for our circumstances.

At its largest point, our little herd numbered five head, three of which were papered Arabians. But that was long ago, and time and entropy have taken their toll. This morning, my parents had to make the difficult decision to have one of Mom’s two remaining horses put down. Her registered name was Misty Dawn, a derivation of her mother’s name — Desert Mist, or more familiarly, Misty — and her sire’s, Dantu (that’s pronounced Dawn-Too, for the record). But we’ve always just called her Dawn, naturally.

Continue Reading…

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Jul062009

Blarg… Mondays…

Have you ever experienced one of those early morning moments when you’re lightly dozing but conscious enough to realize that, somehow, during the night, everything about your environment has become magically perfect? The house is at just the right temperature and ambient light level; the sheets have been washed enough times to have achieved optimal softness, and they’re draping around you wonderfully, neither constricting nor exposing anything; and even the pillow — that accursed crap pillow you’ve never managed to beat into quite the right shape — has morphed into something that actually cradles your head instead of twisting it off on some awkward angle that leaves your neck stiff and achy all freaking day. It’s at those moments that you feel most restful and content. Even better, you know that if you let yourself drop back into full sleep, you’ll easily go for two more hours and awake fully refreshed for the first time in days or even weeks…

And then that damn cheap alarm clock starts up with its insistent, shrill beeping and you know it’s not going to stop bugging you no matter how many times you hit the snooze button and now your bladder is calling for attention, too, and you’ve got to get up because it’s Monday and you’ve got to get to the office and start the whole Sisyphean struggle all over again and the whole time you really want nothing more than to sleep and maybe do some blogging sometime after lunch…

I hate Mondays.

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Jul012009

So Where’s Bennion, Anyway?

I’ve had a couple inquiries from Loyal Readers as to my whereabouts and condition; apparently, the lack of tributes for the plethora of recently departed celebrities (which, as you all know, are usually like catnip for your humble host) has them worried about me. Your concern is much appreciated, folks, but rest assured that I’m alive and doing fine… mostly. I seem to have entered into another of those periods when I’m insanely busy at work, constantly chasing around on the weekends, and too damn exhausted in the evenings to accomplish anything more thought-intensive than shoveling food in the general direction of my mouth. This has been the pattern of my life for several years now — somehow, I’ve managed to land myself in an industry that booms in the summertime, right when most people are finding ways to take it easy — but I still haven’t gotten used to it, and I honestly don’t think I ever will. I’m easily distracted and inclined toward procrastination at the best of times, and when things get like this… well, blogging isn’t the only thing I haven’t managed to keep up with. And I’m feeling pretty damn frustrated about it, too. This isn’t how I used to imagine my life was going to be. It was supposed to look a lot more like this:

Space babe with a cocktail

Glamorous space babes offering me cocktails while I pursue galactic adventures aboard my somewhat phallic-looking rocketship? Yeah, wouldn’t that be lovely… anyhow, I’m taking a mental-health day tomorrow, and among all the other items on my to-do list, I hope to get a couple of those tributes written. Keep your fingers crossed for me…

(Incidentally, more images like the one above can be found here. If you’re into this sort of thing. Which obviously, I am.)

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Jun252009

A Quick PSA

Just a note for any local readers who may be looking for something interesting to do this weekend: a pair of World War II-era bomber planes are going to be in the area, on display and open to the public for tours. It’s the same pair I’ve written about before, the B-24 and B-17 that are owned and operated by The Collings Foundation out of Stow, Massachusetts. As an added bonus this year, they’ve brought along a “little friend” — a P-51 fighter, just like the ones that used to escort the bombers on their missions over Europe 65 years ago.

Even if you’re not into airplanes per se, I urge you to take advantage of this rare opportunity to see three functioning pieces of an increasingly distant moment in history. Take your children, if you’ve got them, and help them understand that history isn’t just a list of dates in some dry-as-dust textbook, that it’s composed of real events that happened to real, breathing people. Nothing makes that point more strongly, in my opinion, than something like an ancient airplane that still flies and smells of oil and exhaust and hot metal, something that still lives. When you’re around objects like that, it’s easier to imagine what our grandparents — or great-grandparents, I suppose, for the kids today — experienced and felt and accomplished. You can sense the past in ways you just don’t get from a book or a sterile specimen sitting behind velvet ropes in a museum somewhere. I find it exhilarating, myself.

Speaking of exhilarating, if you can afford it, you really must look into booking a flight experience. My dad and I went for a ride in the B-24 a few years ago, and it was one of the flat-out coolest things we’ve ever done. I can’t gush enough about it. It was also a great bonding moment for a couple of grown men who often can’t find anything to talk about, if that gives you any ideas.

But if the flight experience is beyond your means, at least go for the walkthrough tour. The Wings of Freedom tour will be stopping at the Heber City airport tomorrow through Sunday, and then will appear at Provo’s municipal airport on Monday and Tuesday. I understand the walkthroughs will be offered from 1000 to 1700 hours (that’s 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., for you civilian types). In the meantime, you can click that photo up there at the top and be treated to a ridiculously huge view that’s almost — but not quite — as good as seeing the real thing…

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Jun252009

In Memoriam: Sam Weller

It’s been a busy, busy week here in the Proofreader’s Cave, and I haven’t had the time to even think about blogging, let alone actually do any (very frustrating, especially with today’s pair of celebrity deaths — one expected, the other shockingly not — practically screaming for my attention). But I would like to briefly note the passing on Tuesday of one of Salt Lake’s leading citizens, Sam Weller, whose eponymous Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore has long been the literary epicenter of the city. Sam didn’t actually found the store, but he did change its name when he took it over from his father in 1946. In a painfully ironic twist, he was forced to retire 12 years ago — leaving the store in the capable hands of his own son, Tony — after losing his eyesight. That’s always struck me as an impossibly sad fate for a bookseller, and just a little too uncomfortably close to that old Twilight Zone episode that starred Burgess Meredith. You remember, the one called “Time Enough at Last,” the one where the bookworm survives a nuclear war and looks forward to finally catching up on his reading now that there’s no one around to bug him, but then he drops his spectacles and they shatter, leaving him blind as a bat. Ugh…
Anyhow, you can read more about Sam’s life and his store here. He was 88 years old. I have more to say about my own experiences with Sam Weller’s Zion Books, but it’ll have to wait. Like Burgess Meredith pre-apocalypto, I simply haven’t the time right now…

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Jun252009

Quote of the Week

Courtesy of Lileks:

People! It takes all kinds to make a world. I just wish sometimes they’d go off and make one of their own.

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Jun202009

Barsoom Update

Speaking of Pixar, you may recall my enthusiasm a while back at the news that Pixar — the one movie studio these days that’s consistently turning out genuine movies, as opposed to unsatisfying exercises in spectacle and marketing — is developing a trilogy based on the pulp-tastic “Martian tales” of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Well, I’ve been accumulating little tidbits of news about the project for the past several months, and it’s time to perform an infodump for any of my readers who may be interested. The last item should be particularly exciting for my fellow Utahns, if that’s any incentive to click through…

Continue Reading…

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Jun192009

Further Evidence of the Utter Awesomeness of Pixar

It’s a sentimental story to be sure, almost too cinematic to be believed. But sometimes life really is like a movie, and in the immortal words of Kermit the Frog, sometimes we do get to write our own ending.

In this case, the protagonist is a ten-year-old girl named Colby who was dying of a rare and vicious form of cancer. The ending she wanted was simple enough: she wanted to live long enough to see the new Pixar movie Up. But by the time the movie opened, she was too ill to go out to the theater. So a family friend started cold-calling Pixar and Disney, hoping she could somehow make the little girl’s wish happen before it was too late. She finally managed to reach an actual human at Pixar and explain her situation. And the very next day, a Pixar employee was knocking at Colby’s front door with a DVD of Up — it’s still running in theaters, remember — and a sack of related swag.

It was Colby’s last day on Earth; she died seven hours after the movie ended. As fate would have it, she couldn’t even open her eyes to actually see what was on the screen. But she could hear it, and her mom described the images to her.
I hope it made her happy. I can think of worse ways to spend your final day.

The article I linked above is worth reading in its entirety, by the way. If you can get through it without tearing up, you’re not human.

Hat tip to Jaquandor for bringing this to my attention…

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Jun182009

There Are Times When I Really Wish I Lived in LA…

Yeah, sure, the City of Angels suffers from atrocious traffic, smoggy air, and a surplus of shallow, pretty people — and this is different from Salt Lake how? — but for a TV and movie lover like myself, the place also offers endless amusements that my home town simply can’t compete with. Like, for instance, a classic movie theater running a triple-feature of 1970s-vintage Battlestar Galactica movies this Saturday.

Darth Mojo has the details, but, in a nutshell, Universal Studios once tried to recoup some of the costs of the original Galactica by releasing several theatrical movies that were composed of edited episodes from the series and its bastard stepchild, Galactica 1980 (I shudder just typing those words…). According to Mojo, this will be the first time all three of these movies have been shown on the big screen in this country. Damn, how I’d like to be there! If nothing else, it’d just be cool to see in person that awesome Cylon graphic on the gorgeous old marquee shown above.

The theater that’s hosting this triple-threat, American Cinematheque’s Aero in Santa Monica, apparently shows mostly classic films; browsing over its current schedule, I think I’d probably be spending a lot of time there if I lived in the area…

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