Point Made

 Here, on the bluff looking out over the Inland Sea (Lake Michigan), The ground was covered with a fresh coat of snow this last Thursday. After consideration of the conditions and with an abundance of caution, social plans were canceled and rescheduled.  It's not that the snow removal wasn't executed with typical midwestern promptness and efficiency. It was, but there's the urban parking problem. How do you clear the streets of snow when what you're really doing is creating drifts that block the parked cars that line the streets. Yes, the road is navigatable if you can get over that drift to get to the road.  One of the fallacies of this dilemma is alternate side parking. The theory is that if everyone parked on one side of the street, the plow would push the snow up over the curb. Then if everyone moved to the cleaned side, the plow could finish the job a day or two later. Viola! Clean streets. The dream here is that the street parking capacity. under normal circumstan...

Streaming on HBO Max, Empire of Light. I read a commentary on this film in the online version of The Guardian. Two words, Olivia Coleman, sent me to my HBO Max streaming link and putting the film on My List. Going back to the column, I learned that Sam Mendes wrote and directed the film as his homage to movies. This ensured it would go to the top of said list.  There seem to be more films where a woman of a certain age gets to entertain a younger man in a serious sexual relationship. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande; with  two more words that sell me on a film, Emma Thompson comes to mind. In Empire of Light , we follow Mendes as he explores the magic of movies and the plight of two lovers during the nineteen sixties. One is a tragically mentally challenged woman, and the other is her younger lover, a black man.  Through the characters Mendes is telling us, we have evolved on some issues. But in many ways, nothing has changed. Women who think differently are still crazy. So m...

 Latest Artwork      Immigrant 9 x 12 Pastel Reference: A photograph of a man who came from Samoa and spent two years in an Australian camp for people waiting for an entry visa.  Woman With A Red Scarf 12 x 9 Pastel Snow Removal As we watch the temperatures slide down into single digits and the snow accumulation pile up, I get the impression that any groundhog ignorant enough to poke his head out cannot be a trustworthy predictor of weather. Dessert: Apple Pie with rum, walnuts, raisins, a dutch crumb topping, and a caramel sauce swizzle. Need I say more? Movie Women Talking is a film based on an actual event in Bolivia. The script was made from a book by the same name, written by Miriam Toews. The film opens with a massive rape rampage carried out by members of a religious cult on their own women. The women of this group gather in a barn to decide if they will leave the cult and risk finding their place in heaven or stay and submit to the men that raped t...

 Jeaane Kornkven sent me a fascinating timeline of the history of global temperature. One lighthearted notation caught my eye. My goodness, Poppa Jeff has been busy. The Whale   The Oriental Theater If you watch the trailer, you might think that the title references the main character, Charlie, a six-hundred-pound recluse.e This fellow teaches high school students,  via Zoom, how to write. He accomplishes this by blanking his on-screen square so his students are distracted by his appearance. His story is complex and slowly revealed through his interfacing with three characters, his caregiver, his daughter, his ex-wife, and the memory of his late lover. The film, based on a stage play written by Samual D. Hunter, is the story of a man who is lost in grief and turns to the family he abandoned to be with the love of his life to find a reason to live. Only In Theaters Shown to members of Milwaukee Film as their monthly free film benefit. This documentary is about the side of ...

 This is the time of the year when the sun rises late and sets early. Persistent overcast gray skies lengthen the period of darkness. The damp, cold air enhances the dour mood.  You can scarf down all the vitamin D you can afford, but unless you take gummy vitamins, there's no benefit you can discern with anything but your taste buds.  Take heart, mates. The sun is rising earlier. The sun is setting later. Soon we will hear the death rattle in the throat of the winter of 2023. Look for it sometime in early March, with a predicted period of relief from the dark day malaise until June. Then we celebrate the 180 days of possible good weather in Wisconsin. Recent Art Work The Lakefront Inspired by a photo by James Rowen 9 x 12 Gouache Woman Protestor In Iran 12 x 16 Pastel Cardinal In The Snow 12 x 16 Pastel  

Like a Bill Bryson travelog, some things are more enjoyable if taken in small doses. I urge the consumer to take a sip at a time rather than gorging.  A friend and pun monster, Susan Rhode, messaged me this link to the contest results, where entrants try to write the worst opening sentence to a story. There are numerous categories, including the one that started it all, "It was a dark and stormy night..." Do yourself a  favor. When you start reading a category, do not read the next entry until you have quit laughing at the one you've just read. Do not read more than one category per day. And if you're like me, who always puts a humorous quote at the bottom of my emails, save this link. There is a lot to work with here. https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2022?fbclid=IwAR2aqcBmyVrJtxHcQ-AJPXv8g5SXngNCwONugYnTB35zy7uvSldRP9qCeCg On My Easel Prey For Me Pastel 9 x 12 Paper Film Review  Short And Sweet, I Promise. Going to the Avalon theater is a wonderful experience all by its...

 ...or is winter, as we old folk remember, just plain dead? If damp leaves are blocking the storm drains, your boots are covered with mud instead of snow, and I'm dreaming of a brown Christmas is worming through your consciousness, if these things make you think of winter, then you may be too young to understand.  Not too many years ago, the standard winter in Wisconsin was like what you're reading about in Buffalo, New York. Where inches of snow are falling upon already fallen feet of snow. There were drifts the plow trucks clearing the streets left in our driveways that took hours to dismantle. We lost cars in drifts, and there was enough material to build an army of snowmen. Temperatures were so cold that you felt good about some obscure town in northern Minnesota that was always colder than our fair state. This is the place Howard Cossel on Monday Night Football named the 'Frozen Tundra.' Milwaukee was home to the National Bowling Association because it was the only...