Mary Poppins

A couple months ago we happened to pull up a You Tube video that was a sing-along segment from the Disney movie Mary Poppins for Tyler to watch.  It was the segment of the chalk painting sequence where Bert (Dick van Dyke) dances with the penquins.  Tyler was enthralled, and wanted to watch it over and over again.  Soon enough we were pulling up other sing-along segments from Poppins, and his interest incresed each time.  About three weeks ago Laura purchased the DVD so that we could watch it any time, and over the course of these last three weeks, Mary Poppins has ruled our house.  This has caused me to realize several things:

1. My son is awesome.  Ok, wait, he was already awesome, and I already knew that, but this just reaffirms the fact.  He literally bounces off the couch and starts dancing to this movie, especially to Step In Time.  It's kind of like XBOX Kinect or Wii Fit where you attempt to copy the motions of the characters on your TV.  Can you image that?  This is what Tyler does; he studies what the dancers are doing and tries to do it as well, the sommersaults, the high knees, the birdie arm flaps.  It is hilarious and energizing and so much fun to do with him.
2. I wish I could dance.  Did I mention that it is so much fun to try and copy the dances with Tyler?  I find it invigorating!  And it just looks so cool!  Plus, if I could do the stunts they do, I'd clearly be in better shape than I am.
3. Julie Andrews is pretty attractive.  I never noticed this before, probably because I was like 10 or 15 the last time I watched this movie, but watching it now I realize she is good looking.  And she can sing and dance, so she's got that going for her.
4. This is a really wholesome, refreshing movie.  This statement makes me sound 85, conservative, and churchy, but I mean it.  Solid plot, no raunch, no nauseating camera shakes or edits, everybody is honest and understandable, there is singing, there is dancing, there is unexplained magic; the film is entertaining and enjoyable without any hint of being fake or gimicky.  It's just good fun.
5. I want to become a writer.  I want to write the prequel story of how Mary Poppins becomes who she is.  But there is a problem with this.  My interest in doing this stems from having seen Batman Begins.  The hell I say?  I'll explain below ...

Batman Begins, at least for me, gave a legitimate, probable, honest start to Bruce Wayne and Batman.  His utility belt and Bat-suit weren't cheesy science fiction anymore, they were products of his Wayne Industries' military / defense production line that Bruce turned into tools for crime fighting.  The characters became real and the back stories started to make sense.

After watching Mary Poppins a million times over the last few weeks, I find myself wishing I could lend a Batman Begins-style backstory to the origins of Mary Poppins.  How did she become a nanny?  Is she really magic?  Why does she hang out on a cloud waiting for the wind to take her to her next job?  How does she already know Bert and Uncle Albert?  How is it she understands the dog?  (Baxter, you know I don't speak Spanish!)  Has she had similar experiences with other children whose parents were ignoring them?

But I imagine you can see the disconnect here.  Anything a writer could do to make the backstory / prequel interesting might detract from all of it being happy-go-lucky Disney style.  Apparently the P.L. Travers book that created the Poppins character painted her as somewhat more mean (I should probably read those books, maybe all of this has already been done?), so who knows, maybe she had a terrible past and became a nany to escape all of it?  See, I'm not a writer, so I don't know where to go with it.  I dream in orthoganal and isometric views, hydraulics, circuits, and mechanisms, not character backstory development.  But that hasn't stopped me from lately feeling like it would be a fun thing to do.

Anyway, there you go.

Rex Babin

It saddens me to no end to say that a friend of mine, Rex Babin, editorial cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee and fantastic rower, died today of cancer after battling it for over a year. I met him through rowing and quickly found him to be passionate, entertaining, insightful, comedic, welcoming and wonderful person. I admired him in so many ways, and his family was ever welcoming and warm to mine. This is one of those cases where a person who rails against the system to make the world a better place has left the earth way, way to goddamn soon. I can't describe how much the rowing community (at least our little corner of it in West Sacramento) will miss him, and I can't even imagine the scope of the loss in the eyes of his wife and son.

Farewell Rex.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sacbee/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=156775426

http://dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2012/03/30/sac-bee-cartoonist-rex-babin-dies-of-cancer/?tw_p=twt

pants

I have no butt (because I am a white male and I don't lift weights), but I have reasonably big thighs (because I am a rower and occasionally pretend to be a runner or cyclist). These two facts combined mean that no regular pair of jeans will everywhere fit correctly. Most of my pants are baggy and look silly on me, as is the typical requirement for non-movie star men (not than I am really concerned with appearance). But lately I've been really disliking the bagginess, and since I have only purchased one or two pairs of jeans in the last, oh, four or five years, I decided it was time to pants up.

So here I sit at work in a new pair of Levi's 501s, and as I should have expected, they don't fit right. The butt fit is snug (I'm now exemplifying to the world the fact that I have no butt), but the thighs are WAY TOO TIGHT, and I really should take my phone our of my pocket so that my pants don't break it in half. What is the right solution? Why don't pants fit me?

On the other hand, in a world where unemployment is high, people are dying while fighting for democracy, two friends are waging war with cancer, another fighting CF, and starvation happens at all, pants that don't fit right really doesn't even qualify as something to bitch about. I guess everything is relative. Oh well, it sounded like a funny topic in my mind.