Fact vs. myth. Reality vs. fantasy. Vengeance or forgiveness. Sunny spring or snowy nor’easter. The first weekend in March is the time for the shiny node of Los Angeles to parade its sun and glitz to the world, a perfect contrast to the blizzards of the northeast and a stark reminder of the unreality of the movie world. It’s Uncle Oscar’s birthday!
That unreality was pushed even further by the triumph of this year– the Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. The win has prompted some heated debate in the household. We all liked the movie when we saw it, and my 20-year-old daughter was particularly delighted as she’s been a del Toro fan since Hellboy. My wife said it really made her think about how they took the “fish out of water” idea and explored it from so many angles. But then, she wrote a short story called “Fish out of Water,” so I guess she oughta know.
Shape of Water cartoon courtesy of Los Angeles Magazine
Best Picture?
Despite what I am about to say, The Shape of Water is an excellent movie, interesting, sophisticated, innovative in its way, and worthy of an award. This award? Well, I don’t know. This is the second year in a row where a fantasy has been close to the top prize, and between La La Land and this movie, I am wondering if there’s a new category of adult fantasy that’s started some sort of trend. Continue reading “Fantasy and Reality: Oscars 2018”
Carnitas: Pork Shoulder in an orange-cinnamon broth at the Kaj household
In February, though it’s sunny here in northern California, the wind blows down from Alaska and it’s deceptively cold. The dim sun is still low on the horizon and hazy, not the true sun punch that we’ll get in a few months. We wimpy west-coasters need hot food as well as anyone else in the winter. It’s taken me decades, but I have finally learned how to coax magic out of the crock pot, and this seems a good time to share a recipe or two, maybe to brag a little about my carnitas.
Lest I get too full of my own self, I will point out that we have had a lot crock pot failures in this house, so expertise has been hard won. I have made a lot of dried out pork loin and undercooked stew. So I will share what I have learned about equipment and the perils of misunderstanding collagen.
The Context of the Carnitas
The local mice also seem to know that it’s cold. We’ve had a decades-long battle with them, fiddling with traps and bait to figure out how to make them go away without having to cope with hairy details. They’re a reminder that the lovely suburban woods stretching outside our backyard, with the impudent turkeys and sneaky deer, only seem bucolic. Once critters invade the garage and nest in your car– chewing through brake cables to cause damage that was breathtakingly expensive but fortunately covered by insurance–well, it takes a shine off the bucolous, that’s for sure. Continue reading “Adventures in Carnitas”
Congratulations to our latest Olympic medalists! I have to provide one more shout out to the amazing athletes, who provided an outstanding sixteen days of competition and success for Team USA, from Red Gerard’s and Jamie Anderson’s acrobatics in snowboarding to John Shuster and the curling team’s miracurlllll. Other memorable moments the women’s cross-country ski relay team who picked up the first gold medal in USA cross-country skiing EVER — Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall.
Jessica Diggins and Kikkan Randall winning the gold medal in the women’s team sprint cross-country skiing relay. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)
And, of course, the women’s hockey team finally getting that elusive gold medal in hockey (again!) through a hard-fought battle in regulation time. (What about the men’s team? Didn’t crack the semi-finals. Oh, because they’re not professionals? How much do the women get paid to play again? OK, moving on…)
Just one more time here is the list of all the U.S. medal winners, courtesy of Wikipedia:
List of Team USA Medalists in Pyeongchang 2018
Medal Count Analysis–Bogus and Real
Since it’s the Olympics and there are, well, numbers, then I can’t resist commenting on the data behind the tag line I keep hearing from the media: the US had its worst showing in medal performance since Nagano. Medal count summaries tend to be gobbledygook anyway, as I mentioned in a previous essay, but this offhand dismissal of the athlete’s accomplishments is particularly heinous hornswaggle.
While the 28 medals achieved was lower than in recent Games, that is out of context. Here’s a chart of all the U.S. winter medal results since the 1924 Games in Chamonix:
Notice that in 1988 Nagano and prior years, the U.S. was barely in double digits, and, in fact, was barely cracking the low teens. When all the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events were added, starting in Salt Lake City, the U.S. medal counts started to double and triple. The phenomenal medal total for Team USA in Pyeongchang is nearly twice the average prior to 1998. So, it’s not as if this 28 medals is some tiny number.
Also, our high numbers in recent games were partly due to those new extreme sports and due to the “home court” advantage of Salt Lake City and Vancouver. If you take those new sports out of the totals, our Pyeongchang result were better than many of those prior years and in line with the strong showings since 1992. In other words, those medals in curling, cross-country, and bobsled really are in line with prior Games.
I can’t wait to see a new generation of curlers and cross-country skiiers come through in Beijing 2022, inspired by the John Shusters and Kikkan Randalls of these Games. U-S-A Slay all day!
