Seattle, WA

From the sundial in Kite Hill in Gas Works Park, Lake Union

 

House boats on Lake Union

Tasting Flights

David selected a “flight” of Pinot Noir wines to sample at the Salish Lodge last night. I wasn’t sure what a tasting “flight” was, or how to translate it into French.

I learned that a “flight” is a term used to describe a selection of wines – usually a couple of glasses – chosen for comparison or tasting. David’s “flight” included four different Pinot Noirs, each from a different region and from a different year.  My sniff test aligned with D’s taste test: we preferred the one from France and didn’t care for the youngest.

As for the French translation, I found a reference to "palette de vins" but I think "assortiment de degustation" works better.

Edward Hopper at SAM

It’s a good thing Edward Hopper wasn’t at the Seattle Art Museum commenting on what inspired his artwork. I visited the show last Wednesday and found myself taken aback by the colors and the details in some of the paintings. Each painting drew me into the environment of some random person in a room, on a train, or porch and had me wondering what inspired the artist to choose that subject or that setting. And since the artist isn’t there to provide commentary, I was free to extract whatever I wanted from the painting.

On display were roughly 10 Hopper paintings, some of which I recognized from reproductions. Compartment C, Car 293 was particularly fascinating. Long-distance train travel is supposed to be romantic and reflective and relaxing, yet this woman is absorbed in what looks like computer printouts instead of admiring the unobstructed view outside her large window. Perhaps she’s on her way to a funeral or waiting for her partner to get back from the restroom. Maybe all that green in the train car that’s getting to her.

Lake Wenatchee en Hiver

 

Spam

Gmail is so busy-looking and uattractive. I logged on last night to do my quarterly check-in and junk-mail purge and remembered how much I hated the interface:  Sponsored ads and emails, headings and mail folders are strewn about the screen like the restaurant menus and cards for locksmiths that solicitors used to toss haphazardly on my front stoop and under my door back in New York. Thank goodness for Outlook.

I never expect to find any emails in Gmail that didn’t make it to my Outlook account but it never hurts to check in every now and then just to be sure. And it never hurts to go over the mails that were filtered out as spam.

The Spam folder contained some 649 pieces of unsolicited ads disguised as emails. Here’s a sampling:

· Sparkle Fink and Trinidad Mercado are both proposing significant savings on my purchase of two or more knockoff watches. Delete.

· Enrique Witherspoon wants me to try Oprah’s new acai berry diet. Delete.

· Hollis Starnes is selling Adobe Photoshop and other software. Delete.

· Bunny Dunes wants me to by prescription drugs from Canada’s #1 pharmacy. Bunny Dunes?

· Our long-time friend Mark sent us baby pictures some three months earlier and I never saw them.

I wish I could confidently click on “select all” and then delete everything in my Spam folder but that might mean accidently deleting a link to precious baby pictures from a friend or a silly joke forwarded by my sister and which may or may not make me laugh. Occasionally, legitimate pieces of mail get filtered out as spam and I’d hate to delete it inadvertently, along with the ads for Viagra and Rolex watches. So instead, I skim through lines and lines of emails from bogus people urging me to weight; buy wholesale drugs, purchase MBAs or “masteer” degrees; buy bling-bling replica Swiss watches and “wear the cloths you always dream.”

I can’t get away from unsolicited advertising. And no medium is off limits. I get text messages on my cell phone for services I don’t need or random information I don’t want to receive through text messaging. While relatively infrequent, cell phone spam is particularly annoying because (1) it announces itself with a friendly beep, which commands my immediate attention; (2) I never expect text messages to be anything but a greeting from a friend; and (3) I never know whether I am being charged for the unsolicited information and text messages add up quickly.

Even the mailbox is still a threat. When I go to get the mail in the evenings, I have to wade through piles of supermarket circulars, real estate flyers, coupon booklets and car insurance ads that look a lot like bills. For the most part, these are innocuous: I get to keep track of what’s on sale at the local supermarkets and occasionally discover a few useful coupons. But when there is so much paper that I have trouble opening my mailbox or I risk accidently throwing out an important bill along with a pile of coupons for tires and pizza, it can weigh on your nerves.

At least we don’t have a front lawn.

Rainy Afternoon in Seattle

 

 

Religulous

David loved “Religulous,” Bill Maher’s documentary about the evils of collective faith. The title combines “religion” and “ridiculous” and for the most part sums up how Bill Maher feels about religion. 

I felt a bit let down but that doesn’t mean the documentary wasn’t good. David pointed out – and I was intrigued by – lots of interesting points Bill raised. And some parts were funny. It wasn’t what I was expecting and I guess that blindsided me.

Here’s what bugged me: Bill maintains that organized faith has been responsible for many evils and mass destruction yet one of the first groups of people he “interviews” is a harmless group of truckers worshiping in a Truckers’ Chapel in North Carolina. He seemed more interested in preaching his own beliefs, summing up people’s faiths for them, and showing the viewers how dim-witted religious people are rather than listening to what they had to say. Not that funny. I thought about the messages that could be bringing these people together in worship and it probably had little to do with talking snakes. The truckers, like a lot of his other interviewees, were no match for Bill’s wit and I started to wonder whether he was more interested in mocking them than getting any meaningful answers. I got little pleasure from sitting through an interview that was neither thought-provoking nor entertaining.

And what’s Bill saying about me? Does having faith mean that I don’t have enough of a brain to apply a different logic to my political and economic decisions? He seems convinced that if you believe god, you are innately incapable of thinking rationally about anything. Sheesh.

In other interviews, he didn’t let the interviewee finish sentences. It was as if he really didn’t care about their answers if what they had to say wouldn’t lead to them putting their feet in their mouths. And it’s not that I cared to hear from most of these people either. But why not just cut their interviews from the documentary and sum up their silly arguments for them, since that’s what he seemed to be doing anyway?

Surely he could have found more scholars of religion – people he might have invited on his show – to sum up some of their arguments for the viewers who wanted answers. Why spend so much time on the minority who interpret scriptures literally?

David keeps pointing out to me that it’s supposed to be a comedy and pointed out that the title of the film was translated into French as "Riligolo," a combination of religion and funny. And some scenes were amusing, like when we pretended to be a scientologist preaching to a crowd in a London park. But mocking a guy who thinks he’s the anti-Christ and Jesus reincarnated? Why bother.

The second half of the film was more interesting than the first. Ultimately though, I didn’t feel like the film was going anywhere. I would have been satisfied just listening to Bill sum up his views without the distraction of mocking interviews or the interspersed Hollywood religious footage. The sequel will be way more interesting, I’m sure.

Burger Nights

I have added a new menu item to burger nights: salmon burgers with pesto. It is inspired by a delicious salmon dinner recipe I got from one of my Giada Delaurentis cookbooks.

Ingredients

whole wheat bread – toasted

pesto

Salmon steak

tomato slices

Cook or grill salmon steak to your liking. Place on whole-wheat toast smeared with pesto. Add tomato.

Last night I served this with red leaf lettuce salad with vinaigrette. I’m the only one who ate one of these; everyone else opted for the burger-burgers. But that’s fine. I loved it.

Rendition

Rendition was a much more engrossing film than I was expecting. I am glad that I didn’t return the DVD without watching, as I was planning to do.

It’s about an Egyptian-born chemical scientist who is arrested at a U.S. airport following a terrorist bombing in North Africa; transferred from the U.S. to a North African prison with no legal or judicial oversight; and interrogated, without legal protection, about his alleged terrorist connection. After unbearable torture, the scientist ends up confessing to a crime he didn’t commit.

The film explores arbitrary detention and the questionable interrogation techniques the U.S. government uses to extract sensitive information: we need answers in a post September 11 world and will accept the torture of one innocent man to save the lives of thousands. Torture, the film shows, is counterproductive method of obtaining any information.

The Strangers

I never, never read reviews or solicit feedback about a horror movie I have decided to see. Inevitably, the description will sound like a dozen other horror films I have already seen and my interest will start to wane long before the DVD arrives in the mail.

I put The Strangers on our Netflix movie queue a few months ago and didn’t think much about the horror movie until it arrived in the mail last week and I blackmailed David into sitting through it with me Friday evening. I didn’t expect much but I wanted to see it nonetheless. Every time I sit down to watch a horror movie, I still yearn for that rare gem of a horror movie that delivers a couple of good scares – preferably from supernatural presence – and has me on the edge of my seat. The Strangers was not that film. Although watchable, it succeeded at delivering one measely scare and and a couple of horror movie clichés.

It starts off with one of those forewarnings that the film is “based on true events.” I never know if this is supposed to heighten or downplay the fear factor in horror movies since the connection between the so-called true events and the events in these movies are always so slim.

In the film, a young couple spends the night in a secluded vacation home. Around 4 A.M., a creepy woman knocks on the door looking for someone who doesn’t live there. Pretty soon, the young couple is being stalked and terrorized by some masked figures that who through time and space with supernatural swiftness. They know the property better than the rightful occupants and keep popping up in different places.

The film reminded us so much of a French horror film we saw recently, Them (Ils), that halfway through David and I both wondered whether The Strangers was a less sophisticated remake. In Them, a young French couple inhabiting an isolated, run-down mansion house in Romania is stalked and terrorized by intruders. Someone or something is moving through the gigantic house and the surrounding woods with such swiftness and familiarity that we, the viewers, are unsure whether it is are supernatural force trying to oust the foreigners from the house, or just local degenerates who torture people for no particular reason. The Strangers didn’t come even close to being as suspenseful or nerve-wracking as Them.

One aspect The Strangers that I thought was successfully unnerving was the old record player that kept playing the old music from another time. It made the house and its contents seem as if it belonged to someone else from another time, which was frightening. Maybe, I thought, the original occupants had come back to reclaim what was theirs. But The Strangers wasn’t that deep.  I felt cheated by the explanation at the end. It’s as if the writers had to come up with some plot twist at the end that would stun viewers and explain everything but it didn’t make any sense.