Cute Kid Pix July 2019

At one of the hotels on our vacation, my youngest decided to be a bridge inbetween two beds. He was good at it for short periods of time.

Fastest bridge construction ever!

Collapse!

In addition to the amusement park, the Mall of America had a massive display on monarch butterflies. And a cool fountain.

Mothra-sized monarch

A lot more

A half-and-half fountain seen from above

The local library had a story time themed around bugs. The word of the day was "crawlies." For the craft, we put a spider together with its web.

Getting ready to glue

Attaching the string to the spider

Coloring the web

Finished product

The prescholar had two lollipops for dessert one night. He had both of them at once!

yummy!

He reminds me of me in my younger days.

A classic from 2012

I was summoned for jury duty in July but was not selected to be one of the jurors in the first case that day. We rejects reported back to the jury waiting room. The jury coordinator told us the other litigants had settled without a trial so we didn't need to go through another jury selection process. We were free for the rest of the day.

Howard County Courthouse

Nearby is the old jail built in 1851. It was a stop along the Underground Railroad, though not a stop anyone wanted to stop at. It was built in part to confine captured slaves fleeing north.

The old jail

Other side

Underground Railroad information

The kids did some front yard work, trimming the front bushes. They are available for reasonable rates.

A cut above

Another fun story time at the library had "ocean" and the word of the week. The craft was very easy and very fun.

Gluing on components

Coloring the components

Finished product

I was happy to win a promo card for Sagrada, a fun dice game that we love. The Family Gamers had a contest and sent it to me right away. So awesome!

Promo and congratulations letter!

Food on the Fourth of July Trip

We did our usual mixture of eating out and eating at home on our Minnesota trip. On the way home from a day trip to North Dakota, we stopped at Pike and Pint Grill, a nice restaurant in Alexandria, Minnesota. They focus on local craft beers and unusual dishes. I tried out a flight of beers that was delicious.

Yummy beers

The best was the Dark Side Vanilla Porter from Empyrean Brewing Company in Lincoln, Nebraska (so "local craft" has a fairly wide locality).

For my meal, I had the State Fair Burger, which has fried onions and cheese curds on it! Oh, and the bun is a pretzel bun. It was quite a treat though I am sure just as unhealthy as the food you get at a state fair.

State Fair Burger!

I had an egg bake at the Rendezvous Cafe in Isanti, Minnesota, along with a nice chai latte. It came with a rhubarb sauce and little slice of berry bread. What a great second breakfast.

Egg bake with extras

We had an egg bake later at a friend's house that was even more delightful. No pictures, though.

We also had an awesome Ice Cream Sandwich with a dark beer at Black Sheep Pizza in Minnesota, again without any pictures taken. I gotta start slacking off.

Book Review: The Night Witches by G. Ennis et al.

The Night Witches written by Garth Ennis, penciled by Russ Braun, colored by Tony Avina, and lettered by Simon Bowland

Anna Kharkova is a new recruit to a newly formed aerial unit in the Soviet Union during World War II. The unit is all female and will be flying night missions against the Nazi invaders. They fly bi-planes, which are hopelessly out of date. On their first night raid, the Germans hear them coming and are ready to fire flak before the planes are even near the target. Anna tries cutting the engines a few kilometers out and coasting in. The strategy works much better. The unit gets a reputation among the Germans as the Nacht Hexen or Night Witches.

She works her way up to flying with other men and training a new set of female recruits. Eventually her plane is shot down, leading to capture behind enemy lines. She's shipped off to a POW camp. When the camp is liberated, she is taken back to the Motherland where she's accused of being a traitor. She made no effort to escape, which apparently is considered a betrayal of the motherland. She is shipped off to Siberia where she finally does her "patriotic" duty and escapes the prison camp.

While the story is interesting, there are a lot of odd elements. For some reason, the German baddies use a lot of British colloquialisms--is that supposed to make them seem more bad? The story starts out very pro-Soviet (which is understandable in the story context) and then turns completely against the Communist government. One or two side plots are thrown in that don't really advance the story.

For an unusual and forgotten topic, this has surprisingly average execution.

Slightly recommended.

Mill City Museum, Minneapolis

We love kid-friendly museums and were happy to discover Mill City Museum in Minneapolis. The museum is built in the ruins of Washburn A Mill, part of the group that would be eventually known as General Mills. The first building was constructed in 1874, but an 1878 explosion destroyed it. Washburn A was rebuilt in 1880. The mill became part of General Mills in 1928 and stayed open until 1965.  A fire gutted the abandoned building in 1991. In 2003 the museum opened.

Mill City Museum entrance

After a quick snack in the cafe (we walked the mile or two from our hotel and had worked up an appetite), we explored the exhibits. The first room was the Rail Corridor with a boxcar from back in 1879. This part of the building was where flour was loaded for shipment across the country.

Rail car 1320

Barrels inside the car

The museum gallery had all sorts of advertisements from the history of the company.

Dough boy stuff

Make your baby healthy!

Malto-Meal sounds lame, but what about Cheerios?

Book tie-in, not movie tie-in

The many faces of Betty Crocker!

Some of the activities were interactive. My youngest and I designed cereal box covers with reusable stickers.

Making an attractive cover

Our brands

A lady was at another station teaching us how wheat was ground into flour, including the various grades of flour (from coarse to fine). My son even ground some!

A personal grinder

Working on his own

Sifting the ground wheat

My turn!

The Flour Tower was an elevator ride to the top of the eight-story mill. Along the way, the elevator stopped and riders heard and saw some of the history of this mill and milling in Minneapolis.

Equipment on the way

The ride ended at the top with an observation deck overlooking the Mississippi River and St. Anthony Falls. There's also a view down to the Ruin Courtyard, which hosts concerts in July and August.

Two happy boys

The mill ruin courtyard

View of the observation deck

View from the observation deck

Looking a little more to the south

The museum had a water lab with some wet and fun experiments. One table had visitors blocking a column of water to see how water pressure can build up.

Under pressure

Another table demonstrated how the local mills used water power. Lots of different mills (including logging mills) used the might Mississippi to power their plants.

Water power demo

Placing mills along the river

The museum had a lot of vintage furnishings from the time, including this stove.

Coal-powered stove

The Baking Lab had visitors see how the flour was used in cooking. They also offered samples of baked goods, so naturally I didn't take any pictures since it was hard enough choosing which was the best piece of cake to take.

We enjoyed the museum and recommend it to visitors.

The Sequel Was Better? Star Wars Eps. I & II

The Sequel Was Better? is a series of reviews looking at famous movies with sequels that are considered, rightly or wrongly, to be better than the original movies. Typically, sequels are a step down in quality, acting, and/or production value. But not always. This is the first of the series, which will be listed here.

People were really excited in 1999 when George Lucas released the first new Star Wars theatrical movie since The Return of the Jedi in 1983. He promised a new trilogy explaining Darth Vader's back story as Anakin Skywalker--how he fell from a talented Jedi to an infamous Sith Lord.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace starts with the Trade Federation blockading the planet Naboo. The blockade's justification is dubious at best. There's some sort of taxation rights issue that the movie mentions. Happily the story doesn't get into that detail, just uses it as an excuse for escalating tension between the good guys and the bad guys. To force an end to the conflict, the Supreme Chancellor (Terence Stamp) sends a pair of Jedi, Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) to negotiate a settlement. The Trade Federation guys panic. They contact their secret backer, Darth Sidious, who tells them to kill the Jedi and send their droid army to take over the planet and force the queen to sign a favorable treaty. Naturally, the Jedi are not killed. They stow away with the droid army descending to the planet. They wind up with the local intelligent amphibian Jar-Jar Binks, who leads them to the underwater Gungan city he calls home. The Gungans aren't interested in helping the Jedi with their problems and send them packing with Jar-Jar (who is amazingly klutzy and incompetent) to the surface-dwelling humans on Naboo. The Jedi manage to save the queen and get her off planet, though their ship is damaged in the escape. They have to stop off on Tatooine, a small backwater not involved with the Trade Federation. They meet Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), a slave to a junk trader who has the parts they need to fix the ship. Anakin has incredible talent and abilities. The Jedi use Anakin to get what they need but also take Anakin because he is so strong in the Force that the Jedi Council should know, and probably train, the boy. Anakin is smitten with the queen's handmaid, Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman). More politics and action ensue as the Naboo conflict is settled and Anakin starts his journey to become a Jedi.

The film has lots of problems. The droid army is basically a massive group of stick-figure robots. Squads of these droids are easily wiped out by the two Jedi. The climatic land battle is between these droids and the Gungans (who haven't been imprisoned like the Naboo people have). The Gungans' main armaments are energy balls that they hurl with slings or catapults. The battle between the droids and the Gungans is cartoonish at best.

Part of the problem here is Jar-Jar Binks, who for some reason has been promoted to general in the Gungan army in spite of his clumsiness and incompetence. He shows no leadership and the opposite of fighting skills, as he accidentally knocks out battle droids with a gun stuck on his foot. He also accidentally drops a big container of energy balls that roll into the droids, who apparently can't dodge anything. Jar-Jar was clearly added to the story as a cute comic relief character, but the jokes with him don't work well and his comedy accent is both hard to understand and hard to laugh at. Jar-Jar is a rightly reviled character in the Star Wars universe.

The film's plot is a little convoluted, though knowledge of the previous three films make some things clear. The fake danger of the title is the contrived trade conflict that will put Naboo's Senator Palpatine (Ian McDermid) into the role of Supreme Chancellor. Palpatine is the name of the evil emperor in the other movies, so obviously he's the big bad guy. The need to go to Tatooine is a forced connection to Anakin Skywalker who we know from the other films is fated to become Darth Vader. The way young Anakin is portrayed is too innocent and silly. He's brilliant at fixing or building things (he's even making C-3PO at home to help is mom) but none of his work is fully finished or fully functional. He wants to help the Jedi and seems quite selfless. Then he leaves his mom behind and is a tagalong with the Jedi. He winds up in a fighter at the end of the film. Despite his technical skills, he can't quite figure out how to fly the fighter, and yet, like Jar-Jar, stumbles into doing the right things to win the space battle above Naboo. He's both competent and incompetent using the same skills. He's far too nice to imagine that he would turn into Darth Vader without a lot of character arc taking him to the Dark Side of the Force.

In addition to the convoluted plot and characterizations, the script also has some really terrible dialogue. Check out these samples:

• "There's always a bigger fish," says Qui-Gon when the fish that's eating their ship gets eaten by a bigger fish. The same gag happens about a minute later (i.e., a bigger fish eats a smaller fish menacing the Jedi's ship) with out the repetition of the line or even a little mugging for the camera by Qui-Gon, which you'd expect.
• "How wude," or any (make that every) other quote by Jar-Jar Binks.
• "Yippee!" or any other cute little boy shouts by Anakin Skywalker (really, this kid is going to turn into Darth Vader?).

The dialogue wouldn't be so bad if the acting wasn't also sub-par. Ewan McGregor as young Obi-Wan Kenobi does a good job, but many other good actors seem to be phoning in their performances. Samuel L. Jackson is on the Jedi Council but his performance is so flat that he just seems like Samuel L. Jackson reading lines off a teleprompter. To be honest, he didn't have much to work with. Maybe the Jedi are supposed to have a zen-like detachment, but most of the Jedi just looked tuned out.

The one good point in the movie is the secondary villain, Darth Sidious's henchman Darth Maul. He looks scary (he has demon-like horns and red/black skin) and is a talented light saber fighter. The best sequence in the film is the final light saber battle between Maul and the combo of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan. Too bad it's intercut with the Gugan/droid battle and Anakin's mostly-passive flight into the orbit battle.

The movie is never boring but it is pretty terrible, especially compared to the first three films.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones starts with Senator Padme Amidala (who was really the queen in Episode I, not the handmaid, they just used a double to keep her safe; also, the queen is elected on Naboo and Padme was replaced?) going to the Republic's capital to fight the formation of a Grand Republican Army. It's ten years after the events of Episode I. The senator's ship is blown up after they land, but luckily Amidala was again using a double so she survived. The Jedi are concerned about the assassination attempt and assign Obi-Wan and Anakin (now played by Hayden Christiansen) as her bodyguard. Anakin has spent the last ten years thinking about nothing but his love for Padme and is super-awkward whenever they are together. The Jedi foil another assassination attempt (which includes the first car chase ever in a Star Wars movie). Obi-Wan is assigned to find the assassin while Anakin is assigned to escort Padme back to Naboo where they will hide out until the danger is over. The constant time together causes a lot more romantic tension for Anakin and Amidala. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan discovers a clone army that was secretly ordered by a long-dead Jedi. The clones are all copies of Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison) who has a son Boba. Fett is also a bounty hunter and Obi-Wan suspects him of being the assassin. Obi-Wan follows Fett, who goes to the world building the droid armies for the Trade Federation (apparently that Federation wasn't disbanded after their defeat ten years earlier). The Federation is joined by several other systems who want to separate from the Republic. They are led by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee), an ex-Jedi who was also involved in creating the clone army. Obi-Wan is captured. Padme and Anakin come to rescue him and are also captured. Dooku has them executed by chaining the up and letting brute animals attack them. That doesn't work and soon enough more Jedi show up, along with the clone army, to save the day. Another massive end-of-movie battle ensues.

This film also has a lot of problems. Again the plot is a bit all over the place. Fett and Dooku seem to keep shifting which side they are on. Anakin and Padme, in addition to having awkward romantic conversations, also have awkward political conversations that mostly seem designed to show Anakin falling into corruption.

The problem with that is that Anakin looks already corrupted at the start of the film. He's an apprentice to Obi-Wan but constantly talks back to him and defies him. His love for Padme really seems like stalker-obssession, not romantic self-giving. He's full of arrogance and pride. What happened to the little kid from the last movie? A big character arc jump must have happened between films though it isn't really explained. He begins the film as an annoying teen-aged brat. Then Padme rebuffs his romantic overtures and his mom is killed by the Sand People, so he has plenty of reason to be angrier and angrier. Padme eventually gives in to her own feelings for Anakin and they kiss just before they go to be executed.

This script also has a lot of clunky dialogue:

• "You're asking me to be rational. That is something I know I cannot do," says Anakin to Padme when she tries to break up with him. 
• "One day, I will become the greatest Jedi ever. I will even learn how to stop people from dying." Anakin gets maybe half of that.
• "This is such a drag," says C-3PO as R2-D2 drags his head back to his body. C-3PO has a lot of other bad one-liners. He's taken over the bad joke job from Jar-Jar in the first episode. At least the droid doesn't have an annoying and incoherent accent.

The acting definitely improves in this film. Samuel Jackson has a lot more to do and does a good job. Natalie Portman also has a bigger range of things to do and comes off pretty well. Christopher Lee is great as Dooku, with the smarmy coolness you want in a manipulative villain. Hayden Christensen is struggles in the role, though I think his challenge is just as much problems with the script as anything else.

So is the sequel better? Let's look at some points of comparison.

• SCRIPT--both scripts have some bad dialogue and a convoluted plot, but Episode II is a bit better on this count. Making Jar-Jar's role much smaller in the sequel was bound to pay huge dividends.
• ACTING--the weaker script for Episode I makes a tougher job for the actors, who generally do better in Episode II. Dooku is a more interesting villain than Darth Maul just because he has schemes and plans. Maul is just a supreme lightsaber fighter--Dooku can fight and can pass himself off as a reasonable guy trying to do the right thing (he's the classic "villain who is a hero in his own eyes").
• ADVANCES THE STORY/MYTHOLOGY--Episode II makes the big jump where Anakin is falling/has fallen to the Dark Side, though as I have said it seems like something happened in between episodes. The Padme/Anakin romance moves from awkward-age gap to incompatible-job gap, which works better for romantic tension. The movie does just about drop midi-chlorians and Jar-Jar Binks, so that's a positive move, right? 
• SPECIAL EFFECTS--Both films suffer from looking twenty years old. Some shots definitely look computer-generated. This is a problem for both films in about equal portions.
• THE BIG FINALE--Episode I's ending fight is only one-third awesome (the lightsaber fight), two-thirds sucky (Gungans vs. battle droids and Anakin vs. his fighter's controls). Episode II has a much better battle with lots of Jedi (some of whom are killed) against stronger battle droids. When the clone army shows up, there's an even bigger battle. The lightsaber fight with Dooku at the end is a mixed bag. Dooku has some great skills but when Yoda shows up to fight him, Yoda has to hop around like a frog to fight his much taller opponent. It looks pretty silly to me. Still, the ending was about one-half awesome, so a definite improvement.

I definitely think Episode II is superior to Episode I. I own II on DVD, though I did buy it from a bargain bin of previously-viewed DVDs. I'm certain I had plenty of opportunities to buy Episode I but never did.

And I just want to make clear: Since I think Episode II is a better movie than Episode I, that doesn't mean I think Episode II is a good movie. It really isn't though it does have more entertainment value.

Book Review: Lent by Jo Walton

Lent by Jo Walton

Dominican Girolamo Savonarola lives in late 15th century Florence. He has the gift to see demons who haunt places and the even greater gift to drive them out. He's also a powerful preacher who inspires the Florentine people to live holier lives. He's successful in the spiritual life. He also sees the future and has influence over political situations. He averts a sack of Florence by Charles VIII of France and becomes a key player in the local government. He works hard to make Florence into another Ark like Noah's, saving the people inside from the corruption outside. He wants to save souls but his biggest challenge is saving his own. He is plagued by pride, though he is soon to discover a much bigger problem with saving his soul.

That discovery is surprising and intriguing. I don't want to spoil it for those who don't know because it is a very unexpected twist in the narrative. The story deals with some fascinating issues as Girolamo tries repeatedly to save Florence and himself. Free will, prayer for others, political expediency, and care for others all come into play as the story progresses. The twist is, theologically, new territory and a little too incredible. If a reader can accept the twist in its strangeness (this is a work of fiction, after all), the story plays out really well. The ending is not surprising but the trip there is fascinating and rewarding.

The book is quite interesting and makes good fodder for discussion. It's coming to A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast at the end of July 2019.

Highly recommended.