Category: Uncategorized

Last year I got a membership to the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Of course they have all kinds of plants there and right now they have a collection of living sculptures scattered throughout that were kind of neat to go looking for. But they also have a plot of pitcher plants that were just really cool. There are different kinds, but they all looked pretty neat.

Continue reading “Pitcher Plants”

On my website I publish movie reviews I write. I started writing these on the Macintosh User Group bulletin board in the 1990’s and eventually started saving them, and then eventually published them to my website. While I had written reviews earlier than 1998, I only saved what I wrote from 1998 onward, so my website only goes back to that year. Because I write reviews whenever I watch a movie (not just new releases, but older movies too), I often will go ahead and write a review for pre-1998 movies as well, with no way of publishing them, but keeping them in my Access database where all of the reviews live. When I joined the Disney Movie Club, I wrote reviews of a lot of the older Disney animated features that I was buying, but my list of rankings couldn’t link to those reviews since they were not on the web.
Continue reading “The Movie Review Vault”

Just in the last couple of days my irises started blooming. I took this picture today.I love all the different things going on with irises: the spiky yellow caterpillars, the weird map markings, and that some petals go up and some go down.

I haven’t done much with the Flashlight Wiki lately, but a couple of other users have made some changes, which is a good sign maybe. My long time web host A Small Orange, which was a local company at one time, has changed hands a couple of times and has finally gone up on their price from $50 per year to $86. That is more than I want to pay, so I looked around for better options and found HostGator which you could get a really good introductory deal on by committing to 3 years of service for only $3.95 per month for their baby plan, which is pretty much unlimited shared hosting. Then before I could make up my mind, the website offered a better rate of $3.48 per month, so I took it.
Continue reading “Moving the Wiki”

Going way, way back, I used to write up a review of the Oscars ceremony on a movie discussion group. My friend Royce from that group started a movie discussion group on Facebook and he remembers me writing those and asks if I will post about it. Since I watch the broadcast every year, it isn’t that hard to write something up, so I am putting the one I wrote this year here. I thought I had posted more of these on the blog, but the only one I found was from 2005 when Chris Rock hosted.

This year’s Oscar was not one full of surprises. FiveThirtyEight made 8 predictions and got 7 correct, barely missing on Best Documentary, which even today after seeing who won, I could not name. They do not try to predict Best Screenplay, but if they did I am sure they would weigh the Writers Guild awards as a heavy predictor, and this year, in fact, Oscar awarded the same two movies as the Writers Guild. So as far as the competition goes, yawn. And they brought back Jimmy Kimmel to guarantee the maximum possible predictability.

What was different this year, was getting lectured by almost every woman on stage. I know they are mad, but I did nothing wrong. I even believe in diversity and inclusion and all of that, so why do I need to be continually hit over the head with it? They also had a couple of short tribute pieces dedicated to basically the same thing. Three women took stage and introduced a segment like that, but what I did not realize was that they were three of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers. So maybe a little bit of hidden poignancy there.
Continue reading “Oscars Review”