What’s the plan for the tree?

I’m walking out the door for a day of playing Settlers of Catan (I know you are jealous) and I see that my neighbor has people doing work on his parking strip.  They’ve pulled out all the bamboo and have hacked off several branches from the Flowering Plum.  I figure they are just doing a rough cut for a rather aggressive pruning job and go on my way.

But when I look out the window the next morning, I find that the work appears to be complete, for there is mulch spread all over the parking strip, yet the tree has been hacked to bits, and still left standing.

What the hell is going on?  I hate flowering plums.  We have one in front of our house too. They were planted along the street when the Max line went in and you can see two on the other side of the street in this picture.   I think they are ugly trees, save for the four days in the spring when they are blooming.  I’ve wanted to replace ours with something more pleasing to the eye since the day we moved in. But I haven’t because it would ruin the uniformity.

However, I would never just chop it back like this and leave it.  It’s ugly.  Either take the tree all the way out, or trim it properly. 

Three sentence movie reviews: The World’s End.

I enjoy a few things about Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright films: they tend to combine genres in new and exciting ways; they are incredibly silly while also being a bit moving; and mostly I enjoy them because they are funny all the way through.  I saw the preview for this movie upwards of five times, so I was very familiar with those funny bits, and yet there were still more funny bits sustaining the entire length of the film.*

Cost:  $4.00 (though I spent another $5.00 for Kombucha on tap)
Where watched:  The Academy Theater (first time!) with Matt.

*One would expect this in a comedy, but it’s rather rare, actually.  Most follow the pattern of a bit of funny sprinkled here and there held together with vast swaths of not-funny.  It’s the worst when they’ve exhausted all the funny parts in the previews.

Copy editor needed. STAT!

Hey Oregonian.  Maybe you could put some money towards better proofreading?

24/7 is something entirely different than the improper fraction of 24/7, which I can’t recreate in this blog, but which is in the text above.  24/7 means “all the time” namely 24 hours a day, 7 days per week.  24/7 means 3 and 3/7 of something.

(And yes, this blog could use a copy editor too.  But this blog is not a major news organization.)

Bigger stand-alone Opinion page. And yet.

The separate Opinion section in the Sunday Oregonian disappeared some time ago.  It morphed into part of the Metro page.  With the brave new world of lesser service masquerading as still the same level of newspaper, one of the things the Oregonian is counting in the “improvement!” column is the return of a separate Opinion section.  I was pretty happy too.  Although now that I read it, I have this problem.

There are more editorials, but nearly all of them continue on a different page.  This is massively annoying.  I expect it in the normal paper, it was always par for the course.  However, it used to be that the Opinion page had each Opinion piece on one page.  I read the paper one page at a time.  It’s the reality of where I read the paper (on the train and while eating my lunch at work) and even more than the regular news, I resent having to retain in my head where the argument was going until I get to the back page of the paper.

Surely you can work your magic and get all the words on the same page.

Three sentence movie reviews: This is the End.

And after marinating in a rare two hours of all-women-being-awesome-on-film, it’s kind of head-shaking that not 24 hours later I was, by choice,* watching a complete and total boy-humor movie.  And this movie is packed with boy humor encompassing pretty much every boy-movie cliche:  poop, weed, masturbation, extraneous gore, urine, romance, alien invasions, random big action sequences, well-hung demons, and flirting with being a bad-ass.  For something that was designed to make you think that a bunch of pot-head, 20-something name actors wrote this while they were high, it was pretty top-notch, managing to pack a whole lot in to a tightly-scripted movie that had me gasping for breath through my laughter several times.**

Cost: free due to birthday present.
Where watched:  Laurelhurst.  With Matt

*I picked it as the movie Matt would take me to for my birthday.  Really.
**Seriously, if you are tuned into the boy humor, this movie is FUNNY.  I can recommend it.

 (ahem.  Also Channing Tatum has a tiny bit part in it.)

Three sentence movie reviews: The Help

About three-quarters of the way through this movie the thing I was enjoying most about the film finally became clear to me.  I love that this was entirely a film about women, so much so that there were really no men present.*  Those fabulous actresses, so often relegated to the girlfriend/whore role,** just got to sink their teeth in and do some damn fine acting.***

Cost:  free from library.
Where watched: at home.

*In nearly every other book-to-movie transitions the fleshed-out female character is shunted aside for the men to take center stage.  I’m looking at you, Gone Baby, Gone.  Here, the men, much more present in the book, were almost completely eliminated.

**And yes, the black women were stuck being the maids AGAIN.  So frustrating!  I’m holding out for a future where we not only have many movies with fully-developed female characters as a matter of course, but also movies where the people of color don’t have to disappear into the standard tropes of servant/cannon fodder/magical guides for the white people.

***Bryce Dallas Howard was something of a marvel.  “Who is that woman playing Hilly?” I kept wondering.  And then was aghast it was she, who I had always kind of written off.

End of City Center 12?

When looking up movies I was given the message that “no data exists.”  Does that mean they are closing?  Lately, I’ve been wondering how much longer they can go on, as they never seem to have a crowd there.  But is this the end?
Update from the future.  No!  On 11/15, you will check and they will have movies listed.  The City Center Stadium 12 lives on!  Phew!