Happy Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day to each and every one of the Moms out there. When you’ve been fortunate enough to have a great Mom, you know just how important and influential mothers can be. Enjoy your day–you’ve earned it!

Idea Deprivation

When I was a kid, our family had the Monopoly game and played it regularly. (I preferred the race car token, but I also liked the shoe, the iron, and the little dog.) It was a fun game for my brother and sisters and me and a good way to while away a cold, rainy day.

Now I read that Hollywood is trying to make Monopoly into a movie. In fact, it has been working on the board game as a film property for more than a decade. The big news recently is that the same people who made the Barbie movie have signed on to the production team.

I had one reaction to the news that Monopoly might be made into a film: why?

The answer seems to be twofold, according to the Hollywood Reporter article linked above. First, a statement by the Barbie production company explained: “Like all of the best IP, this game has resonated worldwide for generations.”

In other words, Monopoly is a known commodity, and the movie can capitalize (Monopoly pun intended) on the fact that millions of people have played and enjoyed the game.

Second, another member of the production group referred to Monopoly as an “historic piece of popular culture” and added: “As one of the most iconic games in the world, Monopoly provides an incredible platform for storytelling opportunities.”

In other words, producers won’t have to work very hard, because the concept, at least some of the characters, and the basic story lines are sketched out already. With a simple script set in Atlantic City, a story involving the guy with the old-fashioned moustache wearing the top hat and at least one character’s trip to a jail, and the right actors, the moviemakers hope that they can pass Go and collect $200 from a family of four.

I’ve previously bemoaned the lack of creative energy in Hollywood, with its endless output of superhero movies, CGI-laden action movies, exhausted “franchises,” and ill-advised remakes of classic films of the past–but a Monopoly movie reaches a new low. Can’t anyone in the film industry do anything fresh and original any more?.

42

Today we celebrate our 42nd wedding anniversary. On April 3, 1982, on a cold and blustery day in Vermilion, Ohio, we were married–and the rest is history.

42 is a pretty important number, as numbers go. Any baseball fan will tell you that it is the immortal Jackie Robinson’s number–which is why there is a movie named, simply, “42.” It’s a number that therefore has come to signify a step toward equality, fairness, and opportunity and a stand against bigotry, prejudice, and oppression.

Fans of the Douglas Adams novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy also attach great significance to the number 42. In that book, the supercomputer Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to determine the answer to the “Great Question” of “Life, the Universe and Everyhing” and the answer is, simply, “42.” You can get a sense of the broad impact of Adams’ book by a simple test: if you ask many search engines “what is the answer to everything?” you’ll undoubtedly see references to “42.”

Because of that reference and a long-standing math puzzle first posed in 1954, “42” has become a touchstone number for math geeks. Math geeks also will tell you that 42 is a pronic number, because it is the product of two consecutive integers (6 x 7) and a Harshad number, because it is divisible by the sum of its digits (4 + 2 = 6). 42 is a significant number in chemistry, religion, and ancient cultures, too.

It’s nice to know that this anniversary marks such a significant number, because 42 has obviously been an important number for us. We will happily celebrate that number today.

Green Plastic Grass

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates the occasion!

Easter morning is a time of tradition in most families, including ours. When the day arrives your thoughts naturally turn to the Easters of your childhood when–only after church, naturally–it was time for the Easter basket hunt, when hyped-up kids went tearing around the house in their best Sunday clothes searching for their particular flimsy, brightly colored Easter basket, enticed by the prospect of gorging themselves on Easter candy.

Of course, the hunting wasn’t over when you found your basket. That’s because the basket inevitably was filled with fluorescent green plastic grass that served as a convenient hiding place for a little foil-wrapped chocolate egg or a random jelly bean. If you wanted to be sure that you had found every last bit of Easter candy in the basket–and you surely did–the preferred approach was to remove the main hunk and orphaned strands of fake grass, shake the grass a few times to be sure that you had removed every candy item, and put it on the floor. At our house, this left the floor of the family room coated with a layer of green plastic strands.

The green plastic strands, like the tinsel used to decorate Christmas trees, were not easy to clean up after the frantic chocolate consumption was over. The strands nestled deep in shag carpeting and hid behind chair and sofa legs. At least the strands weren’t charged with static electricity, as tinsel was, but like tinsel the fake plastic grass was not vacuum cleaner-friendly. It typically would get wound around the rolling brush at the vacuum’s intake vent, causing the vacuum to stop picking up debris and overheat and requiring you to carefully extricate each green plastic strand.

Why green plastic grass, and not real grass–or no grass at all? Who knows? The ’60s and ’70s were the height of the plastic era. If future generations ever excavate American landfills, looking for evidence of what life was like in the days gone by, they’ll no doubt find lots of that green plastic grass, and wonder what in the world it was.

Taking Away The Keys

When should older people stop driving? It’s a question the elderly and their kids can struggle with, because there is often disagreement between the older person and the younger members of the family about whether continued driving poses a risk for the driver, their passengers, and others who might happen to be out on the roads at the time. The last thing anyone should want in their golden years is a driving accident where they, or others, are seriously injured, or worse, because they really shouldn’t have been behind the wheel.

The AARP says the average age for people to give up driving is 75. I’m skeptical of that statistic, because I’ve seen members of my own family drive for years after their 75th birthday. In fact, my grandfather drove well into his 90s, and even got his driver’s license renewed after his 90th birthday. He had a big grin on his face in that driver’s license photo because, like many seniors, he associated continued driving with independence.

So, what do you do when you’ve noticed a decline in the driving skills of an elderly relative? It can be a source of controversy and discord in families, as the senior insists that their driving capabilities are just fine, whereas their kids have noticed dings on the car, declining eyesight, close calls, and other indications that the driving days should end. Part of the problem in my view is not only that the older driver might not want to admit that they are declining, but that due to hearing and eyesight issues they may not have actually noticed that they just ran a stop sign or heard the horn honking when they did so.

This article suggests ways to address the decision to take the keys away from the elderly family member. One of them is an “advance directive for driving,” where the senior agrees that a younger family member can make the call on their driving capability. That sounds good in concept, but I’ve heard of instances where the senior has given that directive–and then resisted giving up the car when the younger person says its time to do so. Other options listed in the article include calling a family meeting, asking the senior’s doctor to give her or his opinion, or even ratting grandma out to the DMV. None of those options seem particularly good to me.

I enjoy driving, and I’m looking forward to retirement road trips in the future–but I sure hope that if my skills decline to the point where I’m a danger on the road, I’ll be willing to hand over the keys and acknowledge that my driving days are over.

Spring Cleaning

It’s not quite spring . . . yet . . . but the weather has warmed up a bit over the last few days, and this morning I felt the urge to do something productive. That meant a little spring cleaning was in order.

I started by opening the windows and letting in some fresh air to replace the stale air that had been trapped inside for months. I stripped the beds and washed the bedding, then assembled the big three of the cleaning world—Windex, granite cleaner, and paper towels—and tackled the countertops, stovetop, and refrigerator and its shelves. In the bathroom, I let those industrious scrubbing bubble work their magic, cleaned the mirror, and wiped down the bathtub and tile work. Then I turned to the living room, cleaned the tables, straightened the clutter, and wiped some winter dust from the TV screen. After that, I emptied the wastebaskets and recycling bin.

The last step was sweeping and vacuuming. I like that best and save it for last because it demands care and precision, to try to remove every last crumb, piece of lint, and speck of dirt. Of course, that’s not possible, but I like the smell of a freshly vacuumed carpet, anyway. It’s a nice capstone to a spring cleaning exercise.

In fact, in addition to the scent of flowers, that’s what spring smells like to me: vacuumed carpet, lemon Pledge, and a whiff of ammonia.

15 Years Of Blogging

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the first post on the Webner House blog, which occurred on February 1, 2009. What began as a Christmas present from Richard in 2008 has become a daily habit and part of my standard morning wake-up routine. I have to admit that it’s been a lot of fun and somewhat fascinating, too.

According to our WordPress platform, which has proven to be easy to use and reliable, during those 15 years the blog has published 10,147 posts, collected 727,626 views, welcomed 291,005 visitors, received 6,808 comments, and garnered 4,850 subscribers. The maps provided by WordPress show that Webner House posts have been viewed by people located in countries around the world. That’s what sticking around for 15 years and producing at least one post a day will do for you. 

I write about random things that are on my mind, which might be travel, science, TV shows, modern life, memories, food, sports, or just about anything else. One of the surprising things about writing blog posts is that you never know what might interest people. Our most viewed post in recent years, for example, was this one about the Mr. Green Jeans character on Captain Kangaroo, which has been checked out by thousands of people since it was published on September 20, 2022. Why has it been of more interest than other posts? Beats me–but I’m glad people seem to like it, and seem to like our humble little family blog.

 

Resolution Kept

Well, we met one resolution at least. We finished the 1,000-piece puzzle of van Gogh’s The Starry Night on the first day of the new year, with a few hours to spare. 

As always happens with puzzles, it was tough sledding for a while, as we proceeded piece by painstaking piece, but at some point we hit a critical mass, and the last 50 pieces flew into place in a frenzy of puzzle-making.

If only my resolution to lose weight was as easy to keep!

Our First Resolution

Happy New Year! We hope the new year is one of happiness, fulfillment, peace, and contentment for everyone.

Speaking of which, our first resolution for 2024 is to finish this 1000-piece puzzle of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night by tonight. Like many New Year’s resolutions, it is potentially achievable, but will be a significant challenge.

I really like this painting and van Gogh’s artwork generally, but did he really have to use so much blue paint?

The TV Year In Review

We’ve reached the point in the year where we’re seeing the retrospective, “what happened in 2023” stories. One of the traditional year-end articles identifies the most-watched prime-time TV shows of the year. That’s always of interest to me, as kind of a measuring stick of popular American culture and also how familiar–or, more accurately, unfamiliar–I am with mainstream TV viewing.

The Variety article on the most-watched prime-time TV broadcasts of 2023 has some clear messages. First, the National Football League is a mainstream TV powerhouse. Fourteen of the top fifteen most-watched TV broadcasts of the year were NFL games, with the Super Bowl, of course, topping the list. The NFL also was responsible for nearly half of the top 100 broadcasts, with 45 NFL games making the list. The NFL’s dominance in the year-long list is particular striking when you consider that the NFL season encompasses less than half of the calendar year. 

In short, there’s a reason why the NFL continues to spread out from its traditional Sunday afternoon setting to now feature broadcasts on Sunday night, Monday night, Thursday night, and increasingly Saturday night. I’m sure the networks and streaming services would be thrilled if the NFL scheduled a prime-time game for every night of the week, and stretched the season out even longer.

Second, it’s pretty clear that many of the people who watch a primate-time NFL game on TV are going to watch other TV shows that night, too, after the game has ended. Many of the standard, series-type TV shows that made the list did so because they were strategically positioned to air following an NFL game broadcast. If you want someone to see your show, you’ll therefore want to beg the network to put it right behind a prime-time NFL game on the schedule–and then hope your storyline and characters grab the football game holdovers so they might watch your creation again without an NFL lead-in. 

And finally, the list confirms my increasing lack of contact with network TV. I’ll watch some NFL broadcasts, for sure, but I’ve never seen, and frankly have no interest in watching, most of the series whose episodes made the top 100 list–shows like NCIS, Bluebloods, Accused, Fire Country, FBI, Chicago Fire, Young Sheldon, or Next Level Chef. I didn’t watch the Oscar or the Grammy broadcasts, either. In fact, I would bet that in 2023 I watched less network TV than I have in years . . . and perhaps ever. It’s a far cry from a ’60s childhood where most evenings were spent camped in front of the TV, switching channels and watching whatever CBS, NBC, and ABC chose to broadcast that night. 

Missing Montana

Richard brought along this nifty, vintage U.S. map puzzle that he picked up at an estate sale in Austin, to give us a post-present-opening Christmas activity. It’s a brightly colored wooden effort, with little icons that purport to identify different features of the individual states. Ohio, for example, has a tire positioned near Akron, and Iowa has an ear of corn, a pig, and a steer’s head. Our puzzle-making family attacked the challenge with relish, only to realize at the end of the puzzle process that we were missing a piece: Montana.

Howin the world did the prior owner lose Montana? After all, it’s the fourth largest state in the country, by square miles, just behind California. I could see misplacing one of the tinier states, like Delaware, or Rhode Island, or Vermont–but you’d think Montana would be easily findable on any carpet or floor.

That suggests two scenarios for the missing Montana–it fell through a vent and was lost in the bowels of its prior house, or a dog got to it. Even with the missing Montana, however, it is still a cool puzzle

Merry Christmas From Marana

Merry Christmas to everyone from Marana, Arizona. 

May your cacti be merry and bright!

A Christmas Movie With An Impact

You can argue for hours about the best Christmas movie ever made. It’s A Wonderful Life, or A Christmas Story, or one of the versions of A Christmas Carol, or White Christmas, or Christmas Vacation, or Elf, or one of many other candidates–the debate will rage forever. You can even argue about whether a movie is properly classified as a Christmas movie. ; I’m one of those who thinks that Die Hard is, in fact, a Christmas movie, and we should all put a Twinkie for John McClain on that plate of cookies we’ll be leaving for Santa tonight.

But when it comes to which Christmas movie had the biggest impact on our household, that’s an easy call: it’s Home Alone. Kevin McCallister’s battle to protect his house against the “Wet Bandits,” and his befriending the old salt-spreading guy in the neighborhood in the process, was a film that we watched countless times after it went to video. Our kids were fascinated by the traps Kevin set for the greedy, stupid robbers, and for a time you really had to watch your step around our home to avoid stumbling into would-be trap experiments.

Home Alone remains a holiday favorite, featured on many Christmas movie marathons, and I think the film still holds up as a funny, feel-good Christmas movie. But it’s also got a really good underlying message. It’s a scary scenario, of course, but little Kevin refused to be a frightened victim when he found he was inadvertently left alone by his harried parents. He drew upon his resources and showed inventiveness, toughness, self-reliance, and a willingness to venture out of his comfort zone, and learned a lot about himself in the process–in addition to catching the bad guys. 

You never know what shapes a person, and how much is genetic versus experience–but in retrospect I’d say those hours repeatedly watching Home Alone decades ago were time well spent. If kids understand that they can stand up for themselves, that’s a long step in the direction of emotional adulthood. It’s a small price to pay for being wary of traps. 

The End Of The Baking Road

Yesterday I finished with the last bit of cookie preparation–traditionally, it’s icing the sugar cookies, and making an unholy mess of sprinkles and icing drips in the process–and then boxed them up. In our household, Kish is the Cookie Tin Procurement Officer, and she did an excellent job this year in finding the containers shown above. I am then charged with distributing the finished baked goods among the tins that we’ll be delivering to friends, family, and neighbors.

The cookie distribution process requires some forethought. You want to make sure that you put the heavier cookies on the bottom, and then try to fill in gaps as you stack up the cookies. This year, I made some sequilhos, along with the perennial fudge and Dutch spice cookies to act as gap fillers, and they served their intended purpose admirably. You also want to make sure that the different kinds of cookies are evenly allocated, and I like to put the iced sugar cookies on top, so that the recipients get a nice dash of color when they open their deliveries.

No job is officially over until the clean-up is concluded, and I’ve now washed and put away the bowls, mixers, ingredients, cookie cutters, cookie trays, and baking dishes, and wiped down the countertops. With that, I’m done with the cookie baking process for 2023, and can fully focus on the upcoming holidays. For the next few days, though, I’m going to have to focus on getting some exercise to burn off the cookie intake calories. 

The Indispensable Ally

This baking season, as is the case every baking season, I thank my lucky stars for buying my trusty Kitchen-Aid heavy duty stand-up mixer years ago. It’s like having an extra pair of hands—a pair that doesn’t feel fatigued by constant blending and is always at the ready to tackle another bowl of King Arthur Flour, butter, and eggs. And while the faithful mixer is doing its crucial work, I’m freed to shuttle loaded cookie sheets into the oven and prepare the ingredients for the next batch.

My lovely wife often says I’m like a machine during the baking days. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but I’m so very glad I’ve got this particular machine in my corner.