Hogbacks

Following the mountain bike trail in Pontiac Lake State Park.

Still chipping away at the woodpile in the drive

Because we had a fair amount left over from the previous year, and November and December were ridiculously mild, we might have enough to last us through this Winter AND the next.

I recommend Murderbot

Bread time

Every other day I have to make a new loaf of my patented (not really) wheat-and-grain-free bread. Six different flours!

Found a hunter's blind out in the woods

New hat (thanks Granny!)

Snowing, for only about the second or third time this Winter

Clambering around Holly Rec

MRI, and more importantly, Westborn Market!

I had an MRI scheduled today, somewhere in the Detroit area (a place called "Berkley" near Detroit Zoo, to be precise). Here's the place:

It was a pokey little place. Here I am taking all my metalic objects and putting them in a locker (which meant, sadly, I couldn't get a selfie of me in the MRI machine - probably just as well as the radiation might have fried the phone). Weirdly, once I was ready, they took me out back and raised me up to the MRI on one of those hydraulic lifts that you find on the back of big moving vans, because, indeed, the MRI machine appeared to be in a shipping container...

After what seemed like hours of alternating car alarm noises with EDM noises and then dentist drill noises, I was done, and could explore something I'd seen just next door as I arrived - a fancy grocery store. Little did I know HOW fancy! Good thing we don't live any nearer or it would bankrupt us.

Film review: Black Widow (1954)

 No, not the Marvel character.  (And not really a Black Widow of any kind, despite the pre-credit sequence explaining that this is a name for women who kill their husbands.  Unless... well, you decide.) This was billed as a rare color Noir on the Criterion Channel, but it's much more of an old-fashioned Agatha Christie number.  In fact, "old fashioned" is the appropriate adjective all-round: all the stars (except for the young woman at the center, who looks absolutely nothing like the woman in the foreground of the poster) are a bit past their prime.  Most notable is Ginger Rogers, playing a venerable stage actress with one of those dowdy 50's haircuts 

(which the young woman has too, surprisingly), but also Gene Tierney, criminally underused as the wife of our protagonist, a very bulgy-eyed, middle-aged looking Van Heflin.  Rounding out the stars-of-yesteryear is George Raft, playing the most gangster-looking cop you'll ever see.

Quick summary: young (19) orphan Nancy "Nanny" Ordway arrives from Savannah, Georgia to stay with her uncle, a fairly successful stage actor, and make her way in the big city.  She turns out to have a real knack for self-promotion (in the lingo of the film, a "purpose girl"), and quickly hooks up with a rich, arty brother and sister.  The brother falls hard for her, and while she professes to love him back, her eyes are roving.  She meets our hero, famous theater director Peter Denver at a party thrown by Roger's Lottie Marin (in the apartment directly above his own), 

a party he has been commanded to attend by his wife Iris as she boarded a plane to go and stay with her sick mother.  He invites her out to dinner, reassuring the skeptical Lottie that he has no amorous interest in the girl, who has professed to be a writer.  And in fact he tells Iris all about the meal on the phone later.  However, it seems that Nanny has become obsessed with Peter, a fact that seems to have escaped him, even as he lets her use his apartment to write in during the day while he's out.  Finally, after weeks of her mother's illness, Iris returns, and they both enter the apartment - only to find that Nanny has not cleared out as promised.  In fact - she's dangling from a rope in the bathroom!  A stick figure picture of a hanged person is found on a sheet of paper with her favorite quotation (something about the mystery of death and love) from Salome (an opera she has been playing incessantly), just like the stick figures she has been drawing on notes to Peter.  Already things look awkward for Peter, 

but they get a lot more awkward when the sister of the couple she had been staying with testifies to Raft that Nanny had told her about an affair between Peter and herself, 

and then it is discovered not just that Nanny was pregnant when she died, but that she was throttled first and then strung up.  Iris leaves again and Peter has to go on the lam to clear his name before the cops catch up with him.  Who did kill Nanny?  Whose baby was it?  If Peter wasn't her lover, why did Nanny lie?  Can we trust Peter?

It's certainly never boring, and there's some wonderful barbed dialog (particularly from Rogers' character, who is deliciously against type for her), but there is one key role that I think is badly miscast.  A Cesar Romero type would've been much better.  See if you agree - you'll know who I mean.  Kind of an odd, jokey ending, too.

Time for the Prius to get serviced

My car's headlight bulbs have burned out a while ago, which wouldn't be so bad in the Summer, but I'm driving in the dark every morning when I get up to teach. I have had to choose between sidelights (too dim, probably get a ticket) or my brights (which, apparently, are different bulbs), and have chosen the latter, to the evident annoyance of most people coming the other way. They seem to have fixed the lights, but now when I turn them on, my instrument panel disappears. Let's hope I can get an appoinment quicker than the three weeks that the last one took...

Talkin' philosophy

 

This is me interviewing the incredibly nice Jeff McMahan, currently of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for my series of interviews.  He was definitely a "catch" (a lot of "name" philosophers don't even bother to respond to my interview request emails) and a real pleasure to talk to.  An all-round good egg!  Now we have to do the transcript...

Guardianship

 I'm kicking myself for not taking a screen capture of our Zoom court date today.  That said, that's probably illegal for all sorts of reasons, so maybe it's not so bad.  Anyway, allow me to explain:

The court date took place this morning and involved me, Jami, Frederick, Thomas and our (and Frederick's) doctor Tejal Joseph, along with the judge and a couple of lawyers (one, actually in court with the judge, who was representing Frederick's interests - to avoid any Britney Spears shenanigans, and the other, on Zoom with us, who represented us), that granted us joint guardianship of Frederick.  This had to be done for various reasons (if he's in an accident, we can make medical decisions for him, which technically we haven't been able to do since his 18th birthday), but it also means we can proceed with trying to get Social Security for him.

The judge was VERY nice (and overlooked a couple of missing items that would have been impossible for us to get - like detailed school reports), and that's been hanging over our heads for a LONG time.  (Jami was "getting sick" in the bathroom literally minutes before the court session started.  This is one occasion when I am VERY thankful for the pandemic - doing that in court would have been SO much more of a palaver.)

Jami expands:

The judge wasn't so soft on our lawyer.  Maybe Simon didn't pick up on that, but the judge basically told the lawyer that the lawyer fucked up royally (our case rested on a medical generalist--which is all our insurance covers--rather than a psychological specialist--which would have cost thousands to visit and we would have had to pay at LEAST $1000 to attend the court process today) and the judge told her in no uncertain terms that such a fuck up would never appear in HER court again.

The application form asks for a "medical expert."  The lawyer knew that meant "psychologist" when the disability in question is cognitive/intellectual.  However, she preferred to read it literally and allow us to rely on our general physician, who has treated all of us and appeared in court today for no fee at all, just because she wants this to work for Frederick.  And though our GP is perfectly capable of asserting as a medical expert that Frederick is incapable of living independently, the court really would have been happier (i's dotted, t's crossed kind of a thing) if she had had a PhD in psychology, not medicine.

The judge said, "I won't put the family through the process again, but...." which means she COULD have put us through the process but wants us to believe she is just too damn KIND not to.  But if the lawyer tries that move again with the next family, they will not be so lucky.

I've seen this sort of power play between judges and lawyers discussed in my law classes often.  Some lawyers want to get close to a judge and so require their clients jump through all the hoops--that keeps the lawyers on good terms with the judges and so the lawyers win more cases, though their clients end up hating them/the process.  But, from the lawyer's point of view, that's no loss because those people are unlikely to be clients ever again.  Other lawyers view judges as the enemy and their clients as someone they will fight to the end for--that's the lawyer we had.  (I didn't know that when I hired her, but it became pretty clear after I met with her a few times--she's really anti-judge/pro-client.)  Those lawyers see every judge's rule as an obstacle to destroy, not work around.  These clients love their lawyers and will go back for repeat business---which we will, because the next stage is setting up a special needs trust fund which is DEFINITELY not something someone should attempt on their own.

What I have learned from 28 months of law school: Hire a lawyer; never attempt DIY.

 

Tejal added background on the judge: I’ve worked with judge Barkey in the past. I was over the moon that she was the one handling Frederick’s case. She truly is a gift to the county!!

 

[I second that.  So... phew!]

 

 

This time the ice was see-through

Finally I've plucked up the courage to have us walk across Big Seven Lake, which takes the longest to freeze, but slightly alarmingly, there were large patches of clear ice (as well as opaque, which Frederick MUCH preferred). Check it out.

The ice is finally 100% safe for walking (Holly Recreational Area)

Up in the 30s, mountain bike trails on the way to Holly

You can tell the temperature by my hat. If it's a woolly one, it's probably 40s. These Carhartt hats are finer weave and keep the wind out of your ears down into the low 30s. Below that I need fleece-lined hats (or to keep my hood up).

My computer setup next to the fire

We will take down the tree eventually...

Film review: Vivacious Lady (1938)

 An early-ish film from George Stevens, although he was already famous enough by the outbreak of WWII to be one of the five big-name directors of "Five Came Back" fame.  We know him most recently because of The More The Merrier (one of my faves of last year) which, like this one, features the ever-reliable Charles Coburn, although he is a bit wasted as a stick-in-the-mud in this one (well, he usually starts out that way, but melts pretty quickly, but his melt is put off until just before the closing credits in this one). It's a fairly early one for James Stewart, whom, you notice, gets second-billing to the true star, Ginger Rogers, and was only cast on her insistence, because she was dating him at the time.  This might explain their fairly sizzling chemistry, in a movie that, while chaste on the surface, has a veritable maelstrom of hormones churning just below.  Rogers' comedic role in this has a lot in common with her role in Billy Wilder's The Major and The Minor, without that one's quease-inducing almost-pederasty, and she reminded me of a proto-Lucille Ball on more than one occasion.

Here's the basic plot: the film begins with Jimmy Stewart's botany professor Peter Morgan arriving in New York from his home town of New Sharon, Indiana, to find and bring home his wastrel cousin Keith, whom he finds, sozzled, at a table in a nightclub, waiting to see the woman he's fallen in love with perform her song number.  This, of course, turns out to be Ginger Rogers' Francey, with whom Peter is immediately smitten, and as Keith is hiding from Peter in the hopes that he'll give up trying to bring him home, he and Francey leave the nightclub (because, according to her, the food there is awful) for a night on the town.  

By the time Keith is on the train back to New Sharon with Peter, Peter is bringing along his new wife.  The trouble is, Daddy (Coburn, natch), who, like his father before him, is chancellor of the august University of New Sharon, is unlikely to be enthused.  A further wrinkle is that there is a woman waiting at the station with Pops who thinks (more because of Pater's encouragement than Peter's) that she is the future Mrs. Gordon.  This is Frances Mercer's Helen, and you can just tell that she and Francey are to come to blows before the film is out.  But in the meantime, Francey goes home with Keith, who, if you remember, was the one who first lusted after her, an arrangement that Peter is not thrilled with.  The rest of the film is the two of them sneaking around trying to enjoy some marital nookie without tipping off the parents, as Peter tries to pluck up courage to break it to them.  An additional complication is the fact that Peter's mother Martha (Beulah Bondi, another reliable performer whom we'd seen before in Remember The Night) has a heart condition that makes her faint at the least sign of familial discord.  One particularly stressful incident is the prom 

(apparently this university has a prom) where Keith, Peter and Francey turn up together (and Francey only gets let in when Peter claims her as a student of his), Peter hoping to get to dance with her, but Helen has other ideas.  It is here that the Francey-Helen fight breaks out and scuttles Peter's plans to introduce Francey.  

(Apparently Rogers' famously insured legs had to be well padded for the fight scene.)  To prevent Martha seeing what was going on, Keith (who is a great sport, even buying a wedding cake for the couple and giving each one of them their respective model spouse to sleep with as they are kept apart) 

has to quickly cut in and dance her away.  After a night where they try to canoodle in a boat house only to find it completely overrun already with student couples, just about everything goes wrong for our couple.  Eventually Peter does break it to Pops, but is still too scared to break it to mother, who has retired to her bed.  But Helen does, and Martha decides to check Francey (who is staying in an all-female boarding house, whose prissy concierge provides great comic relief) out for herself.  Amazingly, they get on like a house on fire, and it emerges that not all is as it seems with Martha.  But Pops still forbids it and threatens Peter with the sack if he doesn't straighten out.  Things go from bad to worse as Martha walks out on father, while father takes a wealthy donor to witness Peter lecturing just after an already sozzled Keith has informed him that Francey is about to board a train back to New York.  Peter's great plan to solve everything involves getting drunk for the first time ever.  Will it succeed, or will two generations of Morgans be left spouseless?

Overall, although the pace is a little leisurely, and one's patience is tested by Peter's dithering and by contrived misunderstandings of the sort that I have made clear I detest, the performers are all tip-top (Stewart is not as mannered or saintly as he would later become) and the undercurrent of sexual frustration is positively titillating.  

But the title is positively meaningless, a fairly common phenomenon for films of that era it seems.

Big Seven Lake

Metamora-Hadley

New workout (doctor's recommendation)

Carman Ainsworth, etc.

Today I have to get up EVEN EARLIER and drive to Carman-Ainsworth High School on the other side of Flint. Here I am outside it at about 7:30 AM:

And here I am in the classroom after class at about 9. (I took off my mask after everyone had left the class).

And here are Frederick (who had a busy morning in Ann Arbor, getting all kinds of tests done (apparently he has SPECTACULAR eyesight) and me, risking our first ice walk of the winter. We emerged unscathed...