Spring 2022 Middle School Concerts

My eldest was selected to play with the Middle School Gifted and Talented Wind Ensemble for Howard County. Originally, they were scheduled to practice over several nights and weekends but Covid concerns consolidated the plan.

Ready for action!

The practice was condensed into one Friday night and six hours on Saturday before performing on Saturday night at 7 p.m.! The group did a great job. 

The first piece was "Cajun Folk Songs" arranged by Frank Ticheli.

The second piece was "And The Grass Sings in the Meadows" by Travis Cross.

The third piece was "Selections from Dear Evan Hansen" by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, arranged by Michael Brown.

The final selection was "Danse Bohemian" by Randall Standridge. This was the ensemble's favorite of the night.

His Jazz Band (an after school group led by the teacher) performed "Fat Burger" at another concert. And he had another outfit.

At home

At the concert

His middle school Wind Ensemble had a performance as well, including this first piece performed by him and four friends. It's an arrangement of Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies."

The rest of the Wind Ensemble took the stage and performed their first piece, "Chasing Sunlight" by Cait Nishimura.

They played "Music from Pirates of the Caribbean" next.

"Tripwire" is a composition that made the players think of a spy film.

The final piece was "Queen Onstage," a compilation of Another One Bites The Dust, We Will Rock You, and We Are the Champions.

The concert was a lot of fun for all involved.

Sacramental Spring 2022

This Spring (2022 as I write), our family celebrated the reception of three sacraments! Our youngest received First Confession and First Holy Communion. Confession was about two months ago and Communion was in May. We all dressed up for the occasion. 

Us

With Granny and Grandpa

I didn't take any pictures in church but someone did snag a shot of our son at prayer.

Praying by a window

Happily, the church had a photographer come in and I snagged some pictures from his collection.

Receiving from Father Christian

Close up

Back at home we celebrated with extended family by working on a favorite hobby...making cookies!

Cousin, Aunt, and Uncle

First Communion-themed cookies

A banner he made at First Communion retreat

The other big sacrament was my oldest receiving Confirmation. He was asked to be a reader at the Mass, which involved practice beforehand and an excellent job on the day.

The wide shot

Practicing

Practice on the day

Again, I didn't take photos during the Mass but had access to the church photographer's collection.

The actual reading

The liturgical gang

Our church is in the Washington Archdiocese and one of the auxiliary bishops, Mario Dorsonville, came. He did a question-and-answer with the confirmandi, saying that if the young men and women did not know the answers, he would ask their sponsors. The sponsor perked up at this! My son fielded the few questions that came his way quite well.

Checking that they are ready

Being confirmed

It was a blessed event. We had another get together at our house but didn't make cookies or anything like that. It was a Wednesday night so we ordered in Chinese and had some cupcakes that we made earlier in the day. A good time was had by all.

Book Review: Witchfinder Vol. 4 by M. Mignola et al.

Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder Volume 4: City of the Dead story by Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson, art by Ben Stenbeck, colors by Michelle Madsen, and letters by Clem Robins

Edward Grey stumbles upon another supernatural mystery as the workers digging out the London Underground find an ancient subterranean temple. Grey isn't the only one interested...the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra, a group that blends scientific understand and occult knowledge, also investigates. They offer to work together but Grey is extremely mistrustful (they are mostly villainous). When workers from a cemetery disappear, Grey comes into conflict with a big vampiric villain from the larger Hellboy narrative. With the London police doing their usual waffling, Grey may have to work with the Brotherhood after all.

The story moves at a good pace and has lots of atmospheric art. The underground scenes and the graveyards have implicit spookiness that artist Stenbeck enhances with his style. A good job all around.

Highly recommended--this may be the best Edward Grey story I've read.

Movie Review: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) directed by Sam Raimi

Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) has been having horrible dreams where he is fleeing with a teenage girl (Xochitl Gomez), fighting a large, seemingly undefeatable demon while trying to acquire a book of power. Strange wakes up to his own nightmare--his beloved Doctor Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) is getting married to another guy. Strange goes to the wedding anyway and has an awkward time. During the high-rise reception, a fight break out in the streets below. It's a large, Avenger-class fight with vehicles flying through the air. Strange goes down to help and discovers a demon attacking the girl from his dreams. Wong (Benedict Wong) shows up and helps fight off the demon. They go off with the girl who claims she's from another universe. She says Strange's dream actually happened. She has the ability to travel between universes and, as proof, shows them the dead body of the Doctor Strange from her universe. She does not really have control over her powers and the demons are being summoned by someone who wants her powers. She's reluctant to trust this Doctor Strange since the one from her universe would have stolen her powers to keep them from the demon. Strange goes to recruit Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) to help protect the girl and fight the magical demons since Wanda has great magical powers. Things get worse from there.

Like most Marvel movies, the story moves at a swift pace and has tons of action and dramatic moments (and special effects). Unlike most Marvel movies, director Sam Raimi shows his style in the film. The storyline has many horror elements that Raimi is able to capitalize on (though the movie never really becomes a full-on horror). Magic never looked more occult in the Marvel universe. Many of the scenes of peril have a sharper edge. The traveling through different universes also showcases Raimi's creativity as does some transitions and other visual elements. And, of course, Bruce Campbell has a cameo. I am a huge fan of Raimi (who is most famous for directing the Tobey Maguire Spider-man films and the Evil Dead trilogy) so I was very happy with the film. It blends the best of typical Marvel films with the best of Raimi's distinctive style.

The movie also grapples with some larger issues. First, other people ask Strange if he is happy. Instinctively he replies yes but on reflection, he realizes a lot of things that would satisfy him are out of reach (like Christine) because of his powers and the subsequent responsibilities he has. Saving the world is not as satisfying for him either. These reflections lead into the other theme: Is Strange really a hero? The Stranges from other universes make reckless and/or selfish decisions that cause more problems than they fix. This Strange has a history of wanting to be in control and to "go it alone" which has had mixed results. The film doesn't explicitly resolve the issue. Strange is still a work in progress.

This movie is definitely a step up from the original Doctor Strange film and advances a lot of stuff in the larger Marvel cinematic storyline (which includes the series content from Disney+).

Recommended, highly for Raimi fans.

Book Review: The Heart of Newman ed. by Erich Przywara, S.J.

The Heart of Newman: A Synthesis Arranged by Erich Przywara, S.J., with a forward by Joseph Pearce

This anthology of longer quotes from the writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman covers the wide swath of his career, including selections from sermons and more formal writings. The writings are grouped in thematic sets, covering topics like faith, God and His various relations to us, our relationship to this fallen world and to the next world. Most selections are only a page or two and all contain some nice insights or ideas.

Newman's writing style is very down-to-earth. He communicates ideas, even difficult ones, with a clarity and simplicity that does not have the Victorian stuffiness you'd expect from a British theologian from the mid- to late-1800s. His work is very easy to read and still has a richness that calls the reader to a deeper understanding of the faith. The individual selections are short enough to make this a good daily devotional (though that's not the way it is written), letting the reader spend some quality time with a great thinker and a holy Christian.

Highly recommended.

Sample Text:

The real love of man must depend on practice, and therefore, must begin by exercising itself on our friends around us, otherwise it will have no existence. By trying to love our relations and friends, by submitting to their wishes, though contrary to our own, by bearing with the their infirmities, by overcoming their occasional waywardness by kindness, by dwelling on their excellences, and trying to copy them, thus it is that we form in our hearts that root of charity, which, though small at first, may, like the mustard seed, at last even overshadow the earth. [p. 254]

TV Review: EXHUMED: A History of Zombies (2020)

EXHUMED: A History of Zombies (2020) directed by David Schulte

The PBS-sponsored show Monstrum had a series of three episodes about zombies that have been put together as a 50 minute documentary on Kanopy. I was intrigued enough to watch it. Doctor Emily Zarka is an English professor at Arizona State University who hosts the series about various folkloric monsters. 

This documentary traces how the concept of zombies came to America, starting with the African spiritualism that came to Haiti via the slave trade. In the New World, the slaves' native spirituality embraced an overlay of Catholicism (to make it seem less suspect) and became known as Vodou. After the slave revolt in the early 1800s, several people (slave owners, ex-slaves, and slaves) moved to New Orleans where the practice morphed into Voodoo the term more commonly known in American pop culture. Of course, pop culture vastly oversimplified and sensationalized Voodoo, looking only to the dark parts of the practice, including rituals to make the dead into mindless slaves. The show then looks at early Hollywood films that were inspired by the descriptions found in William Seabrook and Zora Neale Hurston. The films definitely went in their own directions with the concept. 

The biggest cultural shift was with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead which inspired a new wave of zombie films in the 1970s and 1980s more focused on gore, horror, and (sometimes accidental) social commentary. A later revival happened in the late 1990s with the Resident Evil video games that introduced apocalyptic settings where survivors struggled to exist in a world overrun by zombies created through chemical accidents or other scientific causes (often by sinister companies or rogue elements of governments). Zombies became a staple of pop culture in the new millennium, spawning ongoing stories, comedies, and an endless variety of zombie types, from sympathetic to horrific.

The show starts with an interpretation of zombies as an expression of fears around slavery. The Haitian slaves wanted to preserve their identity. A minor element of West African religious practices is stealing souls from people to use them as mindless workers. The show stays with that interpretation throughout, giving only occasional nods to other ideas (like fear of world-wide diseases). The show ends with a look at Jordan Peele's Get Out as a zombie/slave allegory. The terrible treatment of Africans brought forcibly to the Western hemisphere is important to remember and is a seminal facet of zombie lore.

I felt like the narrow focus on racism became a crippling lens that leaves out other issues and even deeper issues around zombies. Other issues include the fear of a horrible afterlife, the transformation of loved ones into something unrecognizable and horrible (a rotting corpse is bad enough; a reanimated one is worse), and the worry over medical research and weapons research that may get out of control. The deeper issues are the loss of free will and human dignity. The only thing worse than living a life of a slave is having to live it eternally as a mindless corpse. A lot of the early Hollywood films feature someone trying to take over a woman who is otherwise unreachable, denying her free will and the respect she should deserve as a fellow human being. The lack of human dignity works both ways--the zombies treat human as merely food and the humans treat zombies as monsters only to be destroyed (or maybe exploited like a government looking to weaponize zombies or like white liberals seeking immortality in Get Out). While this show is good as far as it goes, there's a lot more that can be said about zombies.

Recommended--even with my want for more, I still learned a lot and enjoyed the show.

I found this on Kanopy but it is also available from PBS's website and on YouTube.

Geocaching May 2022

On the second day of May we found two geocaches at the Patapsco Valley State Park. We initially went to find a virtual cache near the entrance but we didn't see any parking right in front. We drove further in, hoping to find parking nearby. We did not. The first parking lot did have a mystery cache starting with at the edge of the lot. We decided to work out the puzzle (taking numbers from an informational sign to find new coordinates) and made the short walk to the actual cache for FYC - Patapsco State Park.

Playing around after making the find

One side of the informational sign

We hiked around for a bit and then headed back out of the park. We stopped next to the entrance building and took our picture for the Latrobe's Folly virtual cache. As a virtual cache, there's no box or log to find out in the wild. Typically, cachers have to email some information about a detail in the area or take a picture at the area to prove they made the find. We did both for this cache. 

The caches's name is a reference to the Thomas Viaduct designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe II and named after Philip Thomas, first president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. When the bridge was built in the 1830s, people thought it couldn't possibly support its own weight, let alone the trains that were meant to cross it. Time has proven Latrobe right since it is still used for train traffic (with much heavier modern trains) almost 200 years later. We lucked out and a train came by while we were there!

The Folly and the Freight Train

Cute Children

On Cinco de Mayo, I found a hillside cache called Spring Snow Day. The vegetation is starting to get thick on this one, it may not be accessible in a month. Also, the lid was tricky to pry off. I had to experiment to get it open.

In there somewhere?

Filling in another day on the calendar, I went to a local park and ride for a park and cache--Miss Meshell. The container was cool and in an obvious spot.

View from the cache

After an unsuccessful search, the cache owner of From Early Times sent me a hint and a recommendation of an adjustment to the coordinates. The cache is a multi-cache at a historic church in Columbia, Maryland. I read some numbers off a sign and did the proper math to get the final location. The find was easy after that.

View from the cache, no spoiler here

The "Old Brick" church

Orange Flowers is located next to a restaurant. I managed to get there before the lunch rush to make the find without a lot of people curious about what I was doing.

Not the front of the Denny's

The Silver and Black Cache... is another of those ellipses caches that are in my area. Gorman Road has a bend with a small parking area and a spot for the cache. It was easy to find, even with the one lane road currently there. 

A nice spot

Another park and grab is Rt. 1 - Leap Day. It filled another day on my calendar, even if it was no where near February 29.

Another across-the-street photo!

No Overnight Parking is just where it say...well a little behind in the trees.

Like it says on the sign

My daughter and I found Kung Foo Panda behind a dojo. The cache container was quite awesome. It was also suspended on some fishing line high in the air! We had to reel him down, sign the log, and then reel him back up.

Hanging out behind the dojo!

In an office park, I found The Big Necessity, which is near a water treatment plant. I didn't see the conversion of used water into fresh water but I trust that they do a good job.

No water being treated...except by the ground, I guess

Nearby (but found on the next day to fill in the calendar) is Picture Perfect! This cache is right by railroad tracks and the cache hider encourages people to take a photo with a train in the background. I arrived and a train was there! A short train...by the time I was in position and my phone was ready for my close-up, the caboose had passed.

Or maybe I took a picture of the Emperor's New Train?

I had a massive day of caching with Grandpa (though he managed to dodge being in the photos). We were returning a rented lawn mower and found MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU GEOCACHERS across the street from the hardware store and STOP and grab a cache at the nearby Chick-fil-A (we did get strawberry shakes). 

It is Christmas-y at ground zero

View from Chick-fil-A (sort of)

Grandpa was ready for more so we went to a trail with three geocaches along the path. Treehanger was near a playground and Grandpa made the find before me. Swaggy was a bit of a bushwhack from the paved trail but a fun discovery. Bicyclist's Nightmare but not really IDK was much closer to the trail and was the 599th cache for the Dancing Gophers (our geocaching name).

Plenty of spots to hang from

Not sure if this was cache #2 or #3 since I came up short one picture!

We decided to go for the 600th cache on the same expedition. I picked Simpsonville Mill which is near the Robinson Nature Center. The cache is located near the remains of the Simpsonville Mill which dates back to the late 1700s. The nearby Middle Patuxent River supplied power. The area had a small town around the mill. A roadway was built over the mill site but they managed to preserve the ruins.

Mill structure

Me at 600

601 was a mystery cache called V-Day Quickie and was placed on Valentine's Day just to have a cache placed on that day. I was glad it was a quick find because the day was very rainy.

View from the cache

The next day I found RAKMD14:pay for a stranger's coffee. The RAKMD series is Random Acts of Kindness, based on a series the cache owner saw in California. These caches are the Maryland version. Columbia, Maryland, has dozens of caches from this series. Who knew there were that many acts of kindness? But back to the cache--I saw an animal's hole that looked really big right next to the cache hide. Hopefully other searchers do not try to look in there.

Enough vegetation cover to qualify as Adam West's Batcave

It was exciting to break into the 600s since I broke into the 500s back in August. More to come next month!