Dogs and Shoes

Snakes on a Plane

Just kidding!

I am no lightweight snake-o-phobe, and there was no fucking way I was going to see "Snakes on a Plane." In fact, 10 years ago, having blacked out more than once on the streets of New York after seeing people wearing snakes around their necks, I joined a study at Columbia Presbyterian to get six free sessions of desensitization therapy. It helped, but it didn't make the fear go away.

So I was plenty pleased when Tony found some other people with whom to see the movie last night, while I had a lovely dinner at Terzo with a new friend. This morning, I got the full rundown on "Snakes." T loved it. Apparently, the film was a tour de force of corniness, plus there was no stingy amount of gratuitous nudity. Other than hundreds of attack snakes pouring out of every vent and hole on screen, what's not to like?

Anyway, Tony wants me to make it known that he doesn't think his car is a piece of crap, as I do.

In other news, go Yanks!

Dryer Run

Earlier this summer, I realized that--hello!--our electric dryer is a big energy suck. So I bought a drying rack at Bed, Bath & Beyond for $9.99, and I've been air-drying about a quarter of our laundry. I've also been combining more loads.

Jury is still out on whether this change will cut our PG&E bills. And I'll probably never know how to account for the energy that went into creating, shipping and buying the drying rack (which was made in China under who-knows-what labor conditions). Bottom line: this may be little more than a feel-good action.

Wanted: 48+ MPG

When I was in high school, I had an '84 diesel Ford Escort that got 48 MPG around town. My 20th reunion is coming up this fall, and in the intervening years, I've had 11 cars (all used). None got better than 35 MPG. Worse, I'm having a hard time finding a car to buy today that would beat the Escort for fuel efficiency.

And lord knows, I need a new car. When I moved to California in January '05, I thought I'd be here for just six months. So I bought an '89 Camry on Craigslist for $1000 and congratulated myself on the thrifty purchase (which gets up to 34 MPG, btw). I wound up staying out here, and in month seven, the car started dying. We're now in month 20. I still have the Camry; it's still dying. This week alone, the slave cylinder on the clutch plotzed ($139.50 and an 18-hour inconvenience), and the ignition lock siezed up ($160, 3+ hours).

I have access to my boyfriend's '95 Jetta, which is a piece of crap. It's also smeared with bike grease and dog fur inside. And we have a '98 Dodge Caravan that his dad gave us earlier this year. Before the transmission on the minivan blew about four months ago, it got 19 MPG, making it an unattractive option despite it's rocking sound system (his dad is a studio engineer). It's now rusting over in our driveway, still insured, a testament to indecisiveness.

That's three shitty cars clogging our driveway. I commute 50-miles in each direction at least three times a week, so the fact that our fleet does not include a single reliable, fuel-efficient car is a daily drain.

About two months ago, I nearly bought a Scion Xb. It gets 34 MPG on the highway, and it was in my price range (under $15K). But then I got all bent out of shape that 20 years ago, I had a car that got 48 MPG without breaking a sweat. Not to mention that the Camry gets 34 already. So I considered spending more to get a hybrid, but Consumer Reports' tests show that only the Honda Insight, which is a two-seater and is being discontinued, would push beyond 48 MPG (to 51). And anyway, hybrids achieve their max efficiency around town; I'm all about highway driving.

So I've been stalling, waiting for clean diesels or some act of god to present me with a reasonable choice. But with the Camry aging in dog years, I've got to make a decision soon. Next up: researching biodiesels.

The Al Gore Movie

Tony and I just saw the Al Gore Movie, officially known as "An Inconvenient Truth," and I was blown away. That guy rocks a slide presentation! I happen to be editing a book on PowerPoint, and I'm wondering if I can get Al to write the foreword for us.

Actually, in the movie, Al uses Keynote, the Apple version of PowerPoint (he's on the Apple board of directors). And the credits list not one, but two Apple-supplied Keynote advisors, not to mention a boatload of animators and other techies who provided the stunning effects for the presentation Al gives during the movie. Come to think of it, the slide show--which is the central element of the movie--may have had more people credited than the film itself. Still, Al did a terrific job of giving the presentation before a live audience, and as our book counsels, he uses the slides to support himself rather than the other way around.

Anyway, as you know, "An Inconvenient Truth" explains the crisis of global warming and calls on us to take responsibility for reversing what is already a deadly trend. Going in, I was a bit skeptical that the movie would be a shrill sermon preaching to the choir (of which I'm already a member). But Al makes his points simply and clearly, with none of the dogmatism of, say, Michael Moore. And while the message is frightening, Al also gives hope, illustrating the impact of both personal and political change. Tony and I left the theater energized to save energy (or, more accurately, reduce our CO2 emissions).

Lately, Tony's been needling me to revive this blog and to start blogging about alternative energy (a strong interest of mine), too. And I've been needling him to turn off the fucking lights when he leaves a room. So we hit a relationship goldmine when we agreed that we'd do more to save energy, and I'd blog it. Consider yourself notified: This site is now poised to become a movie review blog/household energy report. A match as delicious as peanut butter and chocolate.

OK, so here's a quick inventory of our energy use (I'll provide more analysis of the positives and negatives in future posts):

- My commute is a CO2 slaughter. I drive about 400 miles a week, in a car that is 17 years old. It passes CA smog inspection, but I'll tell you this: its fumes don't smell nice.

- Since I moved to this coast, I've been flying a lot. About four short or medium RTs a year and six cross-country.

- We have far more than our fair share of appliances and electronic devices that are always on. From the sofa alone, I can see eight things that suck energy almost all the time (two laptops, and Airport connector, DVD player, cable box/DVR, GameCube, Xbox, telephone; the tv might have some stealth thing, too, that drains electricity around the clock). We have eight more rooms, each with multiple electric items.

- In the winter, we like lighting fires in the fireplace.

- Our house is mostly uninsulated.

+ We have mostly compact flourescent bulbs around the house.

+ Tony works from home most days = no commute.

+ We don't have central air conditioning.

+ We don't use the heat a lot, and when we do, we keep it pretty low.

+ We buy a lot of locally grown food.

+ We recycle (I'm kind of obsessive about it, actually), and we buy recycled-paper products when feasible.

+ We have solar panels on the roof that we believe heat our water at least some of the time.

Places we can improve our energy use in the short- or medium-term:

+ Find out what the deal is with the hot water heating system and perhaps boost use of solar panels.

+ I've been planning to buy a new car. This is a whole saga, and I'll save it for another post.

+ I recently read a story in Make about installing a wind turbine on your roof to provide household power. Why not?

+ We can plant trees around the yard.

+ We can offset our CO2 load.

We're going to try to reduce our energy bill (on the assumption that it's a reflection of our CO2 emissions, though we need to learn more about this). I'll write another post to analyze our bills so far.

Meantime, here are my ratings of "An Inconvenient Truth" on a scale of 1 - 10:

* Shoes: 0. But the movie does make me wonder which contributes less to global warming: the production of leather shoes or synthetic shoes.

* Dogs: 1. Al talks about having had a dog as a child, making him seem like a dog guy. None appears in the film.

* Poker: 0. But continuing to ignore global warming is a huge gamble against the odds.

* Cell phones: 3. Al uses his Treo during the movie; no phones rang in the theater. (In the downtown Mill Valley theater, an usher usually chirps up before each movie, reminding you to turn off your phone. They blew it off for this screening, so I'd say we got lucky that I remembered to silence mine.)

* Do things blow up? 7. Glaciers collapse spectacularly and at an alarming rate. Tony reminds me that there was also some footage of a nuclear bomb detonating.

If you haven't seen "An Inconvenient Truth" yet, emit some carbon dioxide and get yourself to a theater. (If you want to read more about the movie, my friends Marc and Judy have posted thought-provoking reviews.)  Then tune in next time for an energy-saving update.

 

Matinee Idle

Teen movies rule.

Actually, they're often pretty crappy. But when they're good, and you're in the right mood, they can really hit the spot. On Saturday, to celebrate having sent my book to the printer, and to reinaugurate this Website, my friend Amy L. and I spent the afternoon planted in the sticky seats at the 68th Street Sonyplex. In a feat of reverse engineering, we acted like adults gone wild and absorbed both Mean Girls and 13 Going on 30.

Mean Girls, our first flick, surprised us by being better than we'd expected. Though witty and winningly acted, the story requires practically no explanation beyond its title: It's about high school girls who are mean to each other. Incidentally, all the people in the movie breathe, too.

Although the film flags in the middle (it's based on a self-help book), and it's predictable (it's a teen movie), Mean Girls perfectly balances genuinely funny material with overly broad comedy about things I experienced as a teenager. What's not to like?

Tina Fey--Saturday Night Live senior writer, Weekend Update co-host, and all-around hottie--wrote the screenplay. In addition, she plays a fetching, sarcastic math teacher in the movie. Which is a very nice foil to the fetching, earnest Lindsay Lohan in the lead. I also thought Tim Meadows, as the school principal, was hilarious.

Here's how Mean Girls scored on a scale of 1 - 10 in my categories of analysis:

* Shoes: 3. Unmemorable. Which is extra-disappointing because in the great tradition of teen movies, Mean Girls puts a lot of emphasis on the (sluttly) clothes. Are teenagers really allowed to dress like that?

* Dogs: 2. One brief, gross scene with a Chihuahua. I blocked it out and only remembered it when Amy reminded me afterward.

But making up for that was the male lead, who looked and acted exactly like a low-key yellow Lab. In fact, his role and his appearance were so generic, I'm sure the filmmakers could have digitally excised the equivalent performance from any old teen flick (Freaky Friday, Clueless, Sixteen Candles) and just inserted the footage here. I mean, you've seen one strenuously confused pair of dark brown eyes, you've seen 'em all.

* Cell phones: 10/10. Abused neither in the movie nor the theater.

* Do things blow up? 0. Linsday Lohan vomits at one point, but that's not really the same thing.

* Poker: 0. Strip poker would've been an obvious scene in this movie. Probably, they filmed it and then cut it because it was just too clichéd.

The soundtrack for Mean Girls is notable. Among other piquant choices, it includes The Donnas recent remix of Billy Idol's 1981 "Dancing with Myself." Like "Crimson and Clover," the Tommy James song later resung by Joan Jett, this revamped version of an oldie takes on new meaning when sung by a chick. I've been humming it for three days straight now.

After Mean Girls, we took a 15-minute break for lunch, and then settled back into the cinemuck to wait for 13 Going on 30. For a while, the only other person in our row was an older, disheveled, paunchy man slouched in his seat and looking for all the world like the bad guy in The Lovely Bones. I was comforted--delighted, even--when the row filled in with a clutch of teenage....boys. I'm still not sure what to make of them. Were they at the theater to see Kill Bill Vol 2 and they couldn't get in? Were they doing a school project on movies filmed in New York? Were they scouting Jennifer Garner for their fantasies? Whatever. They were young. An early scene in the movie--which begins in 1987--shows a video of Rick Springfield, the very sight of which made me laugh so hard, I almost gagged. The boys looked at me dumbly.

And that's part of the limited charm of 13 Going on 30. It's ostensibly for tweens, but the teen years in the movie are set when today's adults were adolescents, giving 30-something parents a short trip down impaired memory lane, while their kids wonder who that guy singing "Thriller" is. Other than the wink-wink nudge-nudge cultural references, the movie has little going for it but Garner's spirited performance (she plays a woman who wakes up one day at 30, with her last memory at 13 wishing she were older). Big, with Tom Hanks, was the same movie, better written. But 13 Going on 30 isn't bad; it's just not interesting.

Here's how 13 Going on 30 scored on a scale of 1 - 10 in my categories of analysis:

* Shoes: 4. The clothes are cute, though. Garner plays a magazine editor, and she wears some suitably snazzy outfits.

* Dogs: 6. At first, I couldn't remember there having been any canine action in the movie. But then I thought, "This is the kind of movie that probably has some scene in which a big old Saint Bernard grabs an ice cream cone out of Garner's grasp." And then I remembered: that's exactly what happens, but I think it was an Irish Setter.

* Cell phones: 7/10. The film includes a funny-esqe joke about ring tones. Nobody fielded any calls in the theater during the flick.

* Do things blow up? 0. No, they just go awry.

* Poker: 0. Nah. There is a brief discussion of Battleship, however.

During a weepy scene at the end of the movie, I swear I heard one of the boys next to us let out a sob. Or, come to think of it, maybe it was the pedophile on the end of the row. But it doesn't really matter because I felt positively redeemed after a full day of sitting on my ass, eating candy, and humming along to vintage pop tunes. The news from Iraq may be devastating, and the attitude out of Washington worse. Meantime, your apartment may be messier than a tumbled Baghdad palace. But with the right frame of mind and few hours to spare, you can escape it all. Teen movies rule.

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