Ticks!

 Apparently, ticks used only to be much of an issue in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan but they have been migrating southward (presumably they'll meet the chiggers/noseeums migrating Northward and with luck, they'll fight each other) for the past decade or so, and this year is particularly bad for them.  I can confirm, because I have never seen one in Michigan before this year, but a week or so ago I found one on my leg when walking in Indian Springs Metropark (which, oddly enough, has a gravel path with no long grass) and then, even more disturbingly, I was woken up on Saturday and Sunday morning by one of the little buggers running around on me in bed.  Or at least I think that's what happened.  I took both of them and flushed them down the toilet, and now nobody will believe that I didn't dream it.  I remember Basil getting ticks from running around at Arne, and he seemed none the worse for it, but what's threatening about the ones in Michigan is that they can give you Lyme Disease, which is no fun.  Now I'm super paranoid all the time about things crawling on me...  Fortunately both Frederick and I are (a) not particularly hirsute, and (b) have fair hair, so it's harder for the things to hide on us.  But I'm probably going to give myself a buzzcut just in case.

Film review: The Railway Children (1970)

 

This, of course, was a childhood favorite of everyone from my generation (or at least the sensitive types who went on to form indie bands in the 80s) and as it's leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month I wanted to catch it.  I gave Jami the choice of this or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which I have somehow never seen, also leaving) which I thought gave her a range of options.  She was not enthused about either but this was the lesser of two evils, apparently.  I am happy to report that it remains completely charming, and that now I am over my childhood crush on Jenny Agutter I can appreciate that she was a remarkable child (well, she was 18, and alas (given that she's playing someone around 15 at a guess) looks it) actor.  She manages to be completely sincere and totally convincing, and at the same time underplays things wonderfully.  Somehow she can say dialogue that includes words like "horrid" and "Mummy" and not be cringeworthy.  I found that I didn't remember all that much about it, apart from a couple of key scenes (using the petticoats as flags to stop the train so it doesn't hit a landslide, the boy having an accident when running in the train tunnel).  It also became apparent how episodic it is: the source book must be a series of self-contained chapter stories, as this is how the film is.  I'd somehow forgotten the father being arrested at the beginning of the film, the event that upends their comfortable middle-class life, 

presaging a visit from a very disagreeable aunt from India, followed by the dismissal of one nice maid and one harridan and then decamping to the wilds of Yorkshire (to a house that is supposed to be a huge step down but of course would probably sell for a couple of million today).  And of course I didn't know that the beloved father was played by the man who would later play one of the most sinister figures ever in children's television...  Anyway, here are the major events of the film, once they get to Yorkshire.  The mother, who supports the family by writing stories (was this a self-reference by E. Nesbit?), falls sick and the children worry about starving, so they recruit help from the nice old gentleman who's been waving to them every day from one of the trains, 

and he sends them a hamper, which enrages the normally mild-mannered mother (showing a horror of charity mirrored by Bernard Cribbins's Perks later), the trees on the hill by the track start to move apparently magically, but in fact because of a landslide, and the children save the train as described above (before Agutter's Bobbie faints), 

a man arrives on a train while the children are waiting for their mother to return, and collapses, and nobody can understand him, although he speaks some French, and then it is discovered he is a famous Russian dissident writer who has escaped Siberia and is trying to find the wife and children that preceded him to England.  He is nursed back to health 

and the same kindly old gentleman finds the family for him.  The children watch a paperchase that leads the local grammar school boys through a train tunnel, only the last boy doesn't come out, and the children (who have to cower against the sides of the tunnel as the train goes through) find that he has broken a leg, and he is nursed back to health.  It turns out (small world!) that he is the kindly gentleman's grandson!  He eventually leaves, and Bobbie runs after the train while the other two comment that "she'll have to marry him now."  Bobbie has a birthday.  The children discover that Bert Perks, the man who looks after the small local station, has a birthday coming up but that he never celebrates his birthday, so they go round the village collecting presents for him, along with notes from the townspeople (except Pone shopowner who says he "hates the man") saying how they respect and appreciate him, but it backfires (at first) because he thinks it's charity and that everyone in the town thinks he's poor.  But once Bobbie reads out the notes 

(and says that she's never felt so rotten in her life, given his outburst, he of course softens, and all is well.  It ends with him getting birthday nookie from his wife (if you don't believe me, watch the film!).  Bert donating magazines and newspapers to the children and Bobbie finding out where her father is from the article on the front page of the newspaper wrapping the bundle (serving five years on accusations of spying!) And of course, the denouement of the film, which I also remembered, of Bobbie somehow getting an intuition that something was about to happen and going to the station and her father emerging from the steam on the platform.  If your eyes don't moisten at that (I'm looking at you, Jami!) then you are hard-hearted indeed.
As I said, Agutter is marvelous, although she looks too old.  Ironically (I know that's not the right word, but you know what I mean), her supposedly younger sister Phyllis is played by Sally Thomsett, who was actually 20 at the time (and apparently had to be forbidden from driving around, smoking and snogging her boyfriend while filming), even though she really could pass for 11.  Rounding out the siblings is Peter, who is perfectly fine, although he also looks a couple of years older than he should.  Given that the children are very child-like, seriously believing in magic and the like and playing very young games, the fact that they look like an assortment of teens rather strains credulity.  However, their performances are unaffected enough that they can get away with it for the most part.  And the adults are a set of old pros, although the village doctor does come across a bit pervy with the way he treats Bobbie, which perhaps wouldn't seem as odd if she were pre-pubescent instead of pushing 20.  Still, as I said, charming.  And it may be the best thing Bernard Cribbins has done, as he reins in his occasional treacliness/mugging and underplays it nicely.  I can't imagine it being made today - for one thing, apart from the whole father-in-the-slammer subplot, the incidents are pretty small-stakes, at least, for today's youth, and for another, it is very leisurely paced (I can hear Jami snorting at that adverb), which bothered me not a jot, but then again, I am very biased.

Film review: Gun Crazy (1950)

Well, Jami didn't like this one but I'm feeling more generous to it.  It's definitely a B-movie, and the dialogue is pretty atrocious for the most part, but the female lead is a very striking (Welsh-born!) femme fatale, and some of the camera angles are very innovative, with some scenes being positively breathtaking for that era and budget.  (And although the script doesn't seem much to write home about, it was written by blacklisted writer Dalton "Roman Holiday/Spartacus" Trumbo.)

The film opens with a teenager, Bart (a young Russ Tamblyn), ogling a revolver in a shop window in the rain before smashing the window and running off, only to slip on the rainy street and the gun slides to the feet of a cop.  Cut to court, where his older sister, who raised him, is arguing to the judge that he's a good kid, just obsessed with guns.  His two buddies, one of whom is the son of the town sheriff (and who will grow up to replace him), argue that, although he's a crack shot, he wouldn't harm a fly (at least, since the incident his sister recounts of him shooting a chick in the farmyard and bursting into tears) - refusing to shoot a mountain lion for the bounty when the three of them were out camping.  However, the judge is unconvinced, and sends him off to reform school.  Cut to about five or six years later and the now young man (John Dall) comes back to town.  His two buddies and his sister (who now has two children) are overjoyed to see him.  After reform school he went off to the army but got bored of teaching shooting and wants to get a job with Remington or some gun-maker demonstrating the product.  Eager to re-live their youth, the buddies invite him out to the carny that's just rolled into town.  It is there that he meets the real reason to watch this movie - Peggy Cummins as Annie Laurie Starr, who is the Annie Oakley of this particular carnie.  After some very dangerous demonstrations of her markwomanship with a very game assistant, she challenges someone from the audience to put up $50 to win $500 if he beats her.  Well, after some sexy gunplay, Laurie misses one match on a crown of matches on Bart's head, while he gets them all.  

Instead of the $500 Laurie offers him her ring, but he politely declines it, but does take her offer of a job with the carnie.  Although he accepts, her boss, "Packie" (who looks like Joseph Cotton gone to seed) is none-too-pleased at the evident animal magnetism between his two star shooters, because he regards Laurie as his girl.  And he's got something he can hold over her, too - apparently she killed a man in Louisville!  Nonetheless, of course they run off together, and after some idyllic sightseeing, they're out of cash and Laurie starts needling Bart to try her scheme of becoming stickup artists.  Well, of course he caves, especially after her speech about intending to live a little, and needing a man who has guts (while pulling on her stockings in her bathrobe)

but not after she marries him at a desert chapel.  Initially you get the impression she's just playing along because he's a useful stooge, but it's not long before we're in full-blown amour fou territory, and you see the inspiration for Bonnie and Clyde.  It would take too long to describe their various jobs (a notable one of which involves Laurie hitchhiking only to steal some poor sap's car at gunpoint, a car they then use to rob a bank in town.  This robbery is very strikingly shot, with the camera in the back seat of the car the whole time, and real driving, not the usual sitting still in front of a back-projection) but eventually the law is closing in and they decide to do one last job to set them up to retire.  And they will split up and go their separate ways for a few months before reuniting in "Miami or New Orleans, or somewhere like that".  The job actually requires a good deal of preparation - Laurie embeds herself as a secretary at the Armour meatpacking plant, while Bart is a delivery man.  Then one day he claims the boss has asked to have choice cuts of meat delivered to his office for a barbeque, and Laurie comes with him claiming to be trying to stop him, and, once they are both in the boss's office, they rob the place.  As they're running out, the head secretary trips the alarm and... Laurie turns and shoots her and the boss,

although she denies she hit them to Bart.  It's only later that he discovers (although he forgives her).  

But that's after a key scene where their fate is sealed by their unbreakable bond: they escape in one car and arrive out of town to where their other car is stored.  They say inadequate goodbyes and he climbs into the other car and they drive off in opposite directions...only to turn around, he to abandon his car and climb into hers, and off they go together.  If they were better actors (particularly him - Jami was incredulous that he was one of the Leopold & Loeb avatars in Hitchock's Rope) this would be an amazingly affecting scene - iconic, even.  Anyway, they make it into LA, but Packie has named them and the noose is tightening.  On the night before they are to be smuggled across the border, cops find them by tracing the banknotes from the Armour job and they have to jump the train back to the only place they know someone will hide them - Bart's old town, where his sister still lives.  But his old buddies work out something's amiss when the sister keeps her blinds down and tells the neighborhood kids that her kids can't play because they're ill, and everything culminates in a misty swamp up in the mountains where he once refused to shoot that mountain lion.  But will the buddies be gunned down by the truly "Gun Crazy" Laurie?  Watch it and see.  As I said, I look on it more kindly than Jami, and it has a legendary reputation, which parts of it certainly deserve.  (But then again, so does Detour, and that one's charms largely escaped me.  I guess when it comes to noirs, there's a certain level of acting competence I regard as a minimum prerequisite.)

Still, the heist scene is great, and the ending is pretty perfect, too.

Film review: The Hustler (1961)

 Did you know that this was written by the same guy who wrote not just The Man Who Fell to Earth but also The Queen's Gambit?  Talk about range!  Although, having said that, according to Wikipedia, his son said that he (Walter Tevis) was the anti-hero of all of his works.  The Man Who Fell to Earth is supposed to reflect how he felt when he moved as a boy from cosmopolitan San Francisco to Kentucky.  And the main character of The Hustler, Fast Eddie Felsen (Paul Newman) comes from Oakland, and a pivotal event happens in Louisville.  Add to that that Tevis was at the University of Iowa for a while and Felsen has the two showdowns with Jackie Gleason's Minnesota Fats in a pool hall in Ames, and you get the impression he took "write what you know" seriously.  Tevis was late following his family to Kentucky because he was in hospital with heart problems from which he never really recovered, and for which he was given phenobarbitol (like the main character in The Queen's Gambit) which he blamed for his later alcoholism, like Piper Laurie's Sarah in this film (whose scarring childhood affliction was polio).  Also, Tevis himself hustled pool as a young man, so...

The film opens with Fast Eddie and his partner/manager Charlie on the road, claiming to be businessmen.  We watch Charlie "beat" Eddie at pool as Eddie appears to get drunker and drunker.  Finally Eddie insists that Charlie bet him money that he can make a trick shot again that Charlie claims he made by luck before, and Charlie refusing because Eddie was drunk.  Of course, gullible rubes in the bar step in and we see how a pool hustler makes his money.  In fact, Eddie and Charlie are not on the way to a convention, but to the Ames pool hall in search of Minnesota Fats.  They arrive before him and Eddie looks around and boasts that he will make $10K before the night is out.  Well, after initially being told that Fats hasn't lost in ten years, and being soundly beaten for the first few games, Eddie turns it around and after a marathon 25 hour drinking and pool-playing session, is up $18K.  

Charlie wants to leave, but Eddie knows the code of the pool players, according to which the game is only over when Fats says it is (because it's his home turf, apparently), and while Eddie is exhausted, Fats splashes water on his face and is fresh as a daisy.  After FORTY STRAIGHT HOURS, Eddie is out of cash and just slumps on the floor.  

Yet, he wakes up before Charlie the next day and sneaks out, intending to take the bus out of town.  But he is distracted when he sees Piper Laurie sitting in the bus station cafe.  She claims to be waiting for her bus, but later walks out (having paid for his coffee) after he dozes off.  But then he meets her at a bar later, and while she resists his charms at first, he is soon living with her.  She claims to be taking classes at the university two days a week, and is a bit of a lush, although that's not why she limps.  (At first she says that's because she was in a car wreck.)  They are fairly happy, though, when Charlie shows up.  Charlie wants Eddie to go back on the road with him and it emerges that he has some thousands set aside, which he says he'll give Eddie if they get the team back together.  Eddie is enraged, though, because he thinks he could have got back into it with Minnesota Fats if Charlie had let him bet that money, and he cuts ties with Charlie.

At this point, he crosses paths again with George C. Scott's Bert Gordon, who was Fats's money man, and who, it emerges, is basically the local gang boss.  He offers to be Eddie's new manager, but insists on such an exorbitant cut that Eddie refuses.  Bert cautions Eddie that one day he'll walk into the wrong pool hall, and whaddaya know, very soon Eddie gets exposed as a pool shark and a gang break his thumbs.  He goes crawling back to Sarah and again, their life is good.  

She loves nursing him and stays off the booze and is able to write again.  (Another reference to Tevis's actual life - when he had money he drank, and when he drank, he didn't write.  There are long dry patches after both Hustler and MWFtE, and he only became prolific when he quit drinking in the 80's.)  But eventually, the thumbs heal and Eddie feels he has to make some money, and he goes back to Bert, and the seeds of doom are planted.  He plots a match between Eddie an eccentric Kentucky millionaire with his own table in his mansion (based on a friend of Tevis's who taught him pool) and off they go, only Sarah insists on coming too, because she doesn't think Eddie will return otherwise.

Well, the Kentucky Millionaire is a tricky customer: he's actually a billiards expert and insists Eddie play that, which he never has before.  It takes some heavy losses before he gets in the groove, but you know he comes out on top.  But he decides to walk back to the hotel, where Sarah has been taken after making a scene of herself at the mansion party, and Bert gets there first and gives Sarah some money to go home, claiming it's from Eddie.  We don't know whether or not she believes him but we see her argue with him then go to his room and... let's just say something happens that was a long time coming, and that drives an irreparable wedge between Eddie and Bert.

Then, some time later, Bert is back in the Ames pool hall with Fats and Eddie walks in.  

And we get the showdown.  Which is satisfying.  Now, there's a message in this film, but it's not too heavy handed.  I'm assuming the film was pretty shocking for its time: Sarah is blunt about her sexual history and about hers and Eddie's sex life.  

And it definitely does not feel like a product of the 50's, although there is a cool jazzy score.  And Newman starts out a bit over the top for my tastes, but as the film goes on he becomes more taciturn and lets his eyes do a lot more of the acting, and he won me over.  Basically, this film is too cool for school - very existential.  Apparently Jackie Gleason really could play pool at a pro level, so Newman practiced for months to be able to look as good as he does.  But the pool is beside the point: it's about making a living from your art without letting the money consume you, and doing it on your terms, however that might bite you in the ass.  Gleason is great but is not the bad guy.  That's Scott, and he's great too, of course.

Film review: The Hot Rock (1972)

After struggling with running the laptop through our TV (at first easy but then our "smart" TV ran updates and now nothing is easy) I have finally bought a Roku stick and can now watch the Criterion Channel directly through the TV.  This may not mean anything to you, but trust me, it's a big deal!  Added to that that we have switched from unreliable AT&T to endorsed-by-Jami's-lawschool-Zoom-classmates Xfinity (owned by the evil Comcast, but you can't avoid evil), and we were able to have a glitch-free pleasant film-viewing experience.  But what about the film, you say?  Well, it's the kind of film they seemed to churn out in the 70's, and usually featuring either Warren Beatty or, in this case, the other pretty-boy, Robert Redford.  It's funny, though, because although it also features George Segal (and in fact, is part of a George Segal assortment, him having just died and all) and Zero Mostel as a late-arriving bad guy, the rest of the cast is completely unknown to me, including the two gangmates of Redford's Dortmunder (the brains, seen being released from prison at the beginning of the film, as the warden almost fondly chides him that he's bound to be back) and Segal's Kelp (the self-doubting lock expert, married to Dortmunder's sister).  Ron Leibman and Paul Sand, anybody?  

Anyway, it slides by at an easy pace, and almost the main pleasure is immersing oneself in 70's New York.  

That's not quite fair: the film does seem a bit forced to begin with, as we learn that Kelp has a job lined up (big surprise) for Dortmunder, one that involves stealing a priceless diamond from a museum at the behest of a professor (Moses Gunn) from one of the two (fictional) African countries that have been fighting over it for time immemorial.  

They will need Liebman's Murch, the driver and Sand's Greenberg, the explosives expert.  All goes well, with Murch and Greenberg creating a diversion outside the museum while Dortmunder and Kelp work on the case (later joined by Greenberg), but although self-doubting Kelp manages the locks, 

somehow he gets trapped inside long enough for all the guards to come back in from outside and almost catch Dortmunder and Kelp, and actually catch Greenberg - who has the jewel!  So he swallows it just before they find him.  He then makes contact with the rest of them through his lawyer, Zero Mostel, who turns out to be his father, letting them know he'll give them the jewel if they bust him out of prison.  So this becomes their next gig.  And, of course, they manage it, but then Greenberg reveals he doesn't have the jewel on him - he "passed" it while still in the jail they took him to in the precinct house he was taken to after the museum.  So this becomes their next gig (you see how it goes).  And each time Kelp takes a list of materiel to Gunn's increasingly outraged Dr. Amusa.  It was a truck for the second job, it's a helicopter for the third... which comes up empty.  The jewel is gone from Greenberg's hiding place.  And the only person he'd told about it was his lawyer/dad...  You can probably see where this is going.  As I said, it's a slow amble to begin with, but with each failed job it ratchets up the tension a little and it has an excellent ending.  "Afghanistan banana stand."

 

RIP Jane

 

 I just got word that my friend from college, Jane Hatfield, has died.  This was expected: she was told in January that she had two or three months left, and apparently she has had a couple of moments in the past month or two when her family thought she had gone, so it's a testament to her that she lasted this long.  We'd more or less lost touch but then I heard a couple of years ago through mutual friends that she'd been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and I reached out.  Then I had a conference in Ireland so I made sure that I was able to visit her in London (as documented here).  She was recovering from her first batch of chemo and was just growing back her hair.  Later that year she married her partner, Gali, with whom she has a son (Saul) and a daughter (Alma).  

 

But the cancer recurred - she tried chemo again, but then got the diagnosis this year.

Jane and I met when we were part of a group of eight (I think - it's been a long time) starting PPE at St. Anne's College, Oxford in October 1986. We gravitated to each other, I think, because we both felt a bit like frauds.  I was only doing PPE because I'd been planning to apply to do English, but got 5/10 on a paper in English the week before the deadline, so hastily changed it to something I couldn't be expected to know about (because nobody did Politics, Economics, and certainly not Philosophy for A-Level).  And as a Maths-phobe, Jane was particularly wary of the Economics portion - in fact, both of us failed our Economics prelims (the exams at the end of the first year that you have to pass or you won't be allowed to stay for the remaining two years).  Somehow we both squeaked through on the second attempt, but we sort of went our separate ways after that - she went to live in an all-female house on the other side of Oxford, while I stayed in college accommodation (scared of going massively into debt), and as she was focusing on Politics and I on Philosophy, I don't think we took any of the same classes, or sat in the same tutorials any more.  Our paths certainly crossed - at Anti-Apartheid meetings, at parties at "The Hippy House" she lived in, much closer, in year three, and when I borrowed her Amstrad because my applications to American graduate school had to be typed and I didn't have a word processor (I plugged the printer in when it was turned on and it fried it (design flaw!) so I had to quickly pay to get it fixed, but Jane was very nice about it.)

What to say about Jane?  She somehow managed to be a cross between an Earth Mother and Dorothy Parker.  She had a very warm aura that drew people to her, but she could say the nastiest things, usually followed by a little giggle to let you know that she knew how shitty what she just said was, but that she enjoyed saying it anyway.  But because she was so committed to the forces of good in the world, she could get away with it.  She was CEO of a Breast Cancer non-profit (and got to meet David Cameron when he was Prime Minister!  And was so committed to the goals of the organization that she forced herself to be nice to him!) when she had to stop working.  (And that's just the tip of the iceberg - much more detailed in this nice obituary from a colleague of hers, and also Gali's obituary of Jane in the Guardian.)  She talked as if she was the laziest person in the world but was in fact incredibly hard-working and laser-focused.  I wish I'd stayed in touch more, really, but our lives diverged after that first year of shared anxiety and imposter syndrome.  It's desperately sad that she leaves two young children, but it's wonderful that she found someone with whom she could finally settled down and have children, and I know Gali will never regret for a moment that Jane was her life-partner.  

Here are some pictures that uploaded in a stupid order, and that are hard to re-organize, so I'll just try to place them with comments underneath.

First some scans of photos I had.  The top two above are taken the day somebody finished all their finals.  Our circle made a pact that everyone had to gather for each one's last exam, and meet them on the way out of the building (lots of people did this - it was packed) laden down with alcohol, and occasionally flowers.  The first one above and the first two below are my last day - it was glorious.  I don't know about the middle one above, but I think those are Jane's ankles on the left (and she probably took the top one, which features Anabel and Philip Noden, who had a knack of getting in every picture).  The bottom one above is Ben, Philip N (see?) and Jane at Glastonbury 1989.  Scorchingly hot, it was, although it got chilly at night, so Philip and I both bought cheap acrylic sweaters at a vendor - I believe he is modeling his there.

Jane can be seen above right crossing the road after meeting me after my finals (and probably giving me that Guinness), smoking on a punt in the central one, and enjoying the bracing air of Filey on a Philosophy Retreat (don't ask) in the last one.  Now for some photos I didn't take from back then, shared just before the 2019 visit:

Jane and her two Philips - Shaw (now working for the NIH) and Philip N (again!).

Jane with Ben again, being Political somewhere, as was her wont.

Flashforward to the late 20-teens, and I think this is before her diagnosis, being Political again.

First chemo, before I saw her in 2019:

Then, my visit in June of 2019.  Here's me with Philip, 30 years on from Glastonbury:

All PPE-ers, Jane, Philip (who was actually the year after us, but would've been in our year if he hadn't deferred to work in a bank), Anabel (now a lawyer and consequently much more assertive than back in the old days) and yours truly.  You can see Jane's hair just growing back.

Getting off the Thames tour boat:

Lunch:

At Philip and Emma's (no, not the Emma that he was with at Oxford, the Emma who was with my friend Mark - please try to keep up) - who live just round the corner from Jane and Gali's house.

And here are some shots from the wedding:

 

What a lovely family. Fuck cancer, as Jane said repeatedly.

Film review: Cooties (2014)

 This was a fun, dumb horror-comedy that got strangely panned on Rotten Tomatoes.  Granted, I would never be tempted to watch it again (partly because it doesn't end at all really, other than cutting to the credits - it's as if it was meant to be the pilot for a series or something) but it entertained us for an hour and a half, and really, what more can you ask?  Perhaps I wouldn't be so sanguine about it if it had a worse cast, but Elijah Wood is a very natural and sympathetic main character and people like Rainn Wilson and Jack McBrayer, as well as the (as Jami put it rather unkindly) cut-rate Kristen Bell knock-off Alison Pill all managed to elevate proceedings above simple disposable B-movie fare.  I didn't like Leigh Whannell the actor (he plays the socially disordered science teacher) but he wrote an enjoyable-enough script.  (He has lately gained respectability for the most recent "#MeToo" inspired The Invisible Man, but at the time was coming off Saw and Insidious, neither of which I am in a hurry to watch.  The main complaints about this one from the critics were that it was neither comedic enough nor horrific enough, but is too much of the latter for children, but not enough for adults.  I think it more likely that they found the premise - zombified children eating their teachers, who are forced to mow the little darlings down - too squeam-inducing.  Maybe - I am leery of ever watching notorious '70s Spanish exploitation film Who Can Kill a Child? for that reason - but it's all played so cartoonishly, it's hard to get upset.  There is some gore (particularly as the outbreak first unfolds), but it's a lot like that in Shaun of the Dead - surprisingly splattery for a comedy, but a comedy none-the-less.  Actually, the most upsetting part of the film is the opening credits, which depict a chicken's journey from factory farm to extruded pink slime, which is then made into McNuggets.  I can't help but wonder if this disgusting and all-too-realistic sequence (involving maggots, along with the cruelty) made few friends for the film among "the money people".  This, of course, is the source of the outbreak, because the nuggets end up being served in the cafeteria of the school (in the small shitty town of Fort Chicken) that our hero, hapless failed horror-writer Clint (you can probably imagine what happens when he sloppily writes his name on the board in capitals when introducing himself to the class) is substitute-teaching in.  When he pulls up to school in his very battered Prius (looks like the 2008 model I had which ended in a mutual suicide pact with a deer) he is pinned in when a giant truck (with a wide rear wheel base - a phrase that becomes a running not-hilarious joke) pulls in next to him and the gym teacher Wade (Rainn Wilson) swaggers out of it.  On exiting through the trunk, Clint finds that somebody has already written "Suck a cock" (this is foreshadowing for later in the film, and there's a reason it says "cock" instead of dick) in the dust on the back window.  He works out the culprit very quickly into his first class - it is Patriot (yes, that's his name - this film is not subtle - it also features a teacher who inveighs about Illinois's lack of concealed carry (probably rectified since then) and restrictions on preaching the gospel to elementary school students), a royal asshole of a kid (first seen exchanging "Fuck you!"s with his mother on the way into school) who has been held back, and who reveals he's watching porn on the cellphone he's not supposed to have (the acting principal has already taken away Clint's phone because he says it's a school policy - this will of course be a problem when the shit hits the fan, and it's a neat way of avoiding a common plot problem for contemporary films).  Anyway, guess who's the first victim of the girl who "turns" as a result of eating the infected nuggets?  

(He tries to bully her by pulling on her ponytail but it comes off with a bloody chunk of scalp attached.)  Clint takes the savagely-bitten Patriot to the school nurse, so he is the only infected child inside the school when the real outbreak happens 

(another policy of the soon-dispatched acting principal 

is locking the children outside during recess) which means that he is able to let all the others in (only after Wade has had to sprint across the playground, 

having been outside shooting baskets and not noticing the outbreak).  Anyway, substitute school for mall and children for adults and you've got a Dawn of the Dead knockoff with occasionally funny dialogue and seasoned sitcom performers.  What's not to like?  Oh yes, the lack of an ending.  But I figure if you've made it that far and you care that the film fails to end properly, it must have done a good job.  Oh yes - it turns out the cause is bacteria, and it only affects the pre-pubescent.  So adults, and even adolescents can (as Clint does) get bitten, it's just that you want to avoid being entirely eaten.  And our plucky group of teachers manages to escape the school (after several not-exactly-original scenes of crawling around in the ducts) and get to the neighboring town (motto: "At least we're not Fort Chicken") only to discover that it's a full-blown pandemic (timely, eh?)  And...?

Frederick turns 18!

 Amazingly, Frederick turned 18 Sunday!  Emily, Greg, Ava and Alanah stopped by to say hello, drop off presents, shoot a confetti gun and to run around inside the duck quad.

Frederick was very tired, having had a bad night's rest the night before, but I think he was still thrilled to get some company (it's been a lonely past 15 months for him!) and, best of all, to see Emily again.

Ava is holding a Stitch stuffy, one of Frederick's favorite characters from the movie Lilo & Stitch.

I think Frederick is hoping no one will notice if he slips into the car with Emily.

The 18 years have slipped by so quickly!

Spring in Michigan, March, April, May