A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

  Image by  My pictures are CC0. When doing composting:  from  Pixabay   Hi, there. Well, here we are on Tuesday, September 29, 2020. It’s mid-afternoon here as I write this; I’m composing this blog post during my enforced “airplane mode” period, so by the time you read this it will be late afternoon in my small, depressing, and lonely corner of Florida. As you can guess from the post’s title, it’s a gloomy, rainy early autumn day here. According to the weather app on my smartphone, the current conditions indicate a light but steady rain, and the temperature is 77 ˚ F. With humidity at 93% and the wind blowing from the southwest at 11 MPH, the feels-like temperature is 77 ˚ F. I have lived all of my life in places where it rains heavily at this time of year. Mostly the Miami area, but I have lived for extended periods in Bogota, which tends to be rainy and chilly at least during the local wet season. I also spent three months, or almost three months, in ...

A screenshot of my Blu-ray.com Collection Page (A-C). Notice that It: Chapter Two is in the "Ordered" category. Hi, there, Constant Reader, and welcome to another edition of Bloggin' On, my blog-within-a-blog where I write stuff that doesn't fall neatly into the usual categories of reviews or socio-political commentary. It's Thursday, December 12, which for most of us means that Christmas is only 13 days away.  (Have you finished your holiday shopping yet? I have!) Here it's still morning in my little corner of Florida; it's almost nine o'clock as I sit here tap-tap-tapping away on my keyboard. Right now, it's also quite cloudy and cool; the current temperature is 67℉ (20℃) and the sky (at least from what I can see through my writing room's window) is a leaden shade of gray.  According to my PC's Weather app, the high temperature is expected to reach 77℉ (25℃), and it looks like a cold front might be passing through this weekend; it w...

It's been almost four years since I last saw East Wind Lake. (Picture by the author) Hello and welcome once again to another edition of Odds and Ends, my blog-within-a-blog where I step out of my usual role of entertainment writer and sometime political commentator. It's Saturday, November 23, and (as you can tell from the post's headline) it's the weekend before Thanksgiving. Right now, the temperature in my corner of Florida is 77℉ (25℃) under mostly sunny skies, which is nice because it's not too hot nor too chilly. The forecast low is expected to be 61℉ (16℃), but since I'll be indoors, I won't feel that slight nip in the night air. I'm a bit tired - not to mention somewhat out of sorts - today. I went to bed late last night after trying to watch The Empire Strikes Back (the 2011 Blu-ray edition) with my significant other. We didn't see much of it; we both fell asleep well before the film reached its midpoint. I think that waking up ear...

Apollo 11 mission insignia. I was six years old when American astronauts landed on the Moon half a century ago.  Earlier this week, I watched director Todd Douglas Miller's 2019 documentary Apollo 11, a 93-minute "direct cinema" account of the first Apollo Project manned mission to land on the Moon. I thought it was a good way to begin commemorating the 50th Anniversary of one of the most significant human achievements in history, even though in some ways it left me feeling more than a little sad. Fifty years ago today, Apollo 11 was still four days away from its liftoff. American astronauts had orbited the Moon twice already by then; Apollo 8 was the first manned flight to orbit the Moon in December of 1968, while Apollo 10 (May 18-26, 1969) was a dress rehearsal in which the Command Service Module and the Lunar Module flew with three astronauts in the F mission that tested the equipment and maneuvers necessary for a successful lunar landing. But the G mission (the...

Looking back at my mother's life, it's amazing how fickle Fate can be. I don't write often about my mom; sometimes I feel as if my heart will break if I even think about her too much. But she was the only parent I really had; my father died in a plane crash not too long before my second birthday, so Mom raised me pretty much on her own. But if I don't write about her and share my memories, she'll probably live on only in the memories of a few people. Mom was an amazingly resilient and adventurous person. After her first marriage failed and she got an annulment from the Catholic Church (there was no divorce in Colombia in the early 1950s), she decided that moving back in with my grandparents and raising my older half-sister as a spinster widow was not for her. Defying convention and my grandparents' wishes, she got a job as a flight attendant in Colombia's flag airline, Avianca. It was not easy for her. My granduncle Bernardo (my grandmother's...

Hi, there, Constant Reader. It's now 3:29 p.m. EST in Miami, Florida. The current temperature is a summery 86 degrees Fahrenheit under cloudy skies. With humidity at 54% and a south-southwesterly breeze blowing at 10 mph (with gusts of up to 30 mph), the feels-like temperature is 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Even though I don't particularly want to, I have the air conditioner on, It's that hot. Worse still, a cold front is on its way to South Florida. It passed through Tampa earlier today and caused heavy rains and high winds, and we can expect at least some showers and stiff breezes here tonight. Hopefully that's all we'll get; last night WPLG, the local ABC affiliate, posted a weather forecast on Facebook that included the possibility of strong thunderstorms and even tornadoes. Luckily, the front is still dozens of miles away from here and my computer's AccuWeather app says no precipitation is expected within the next two hours. Late yesterday evening I went fo...

If you are a regular visitor to my blog, you've probably noticed that as of late most of the entries are movie reviews, some of them which are complete and others which are essentially "teasers" which contain links to the original versions at Epinions.  Over the past few months, that's all that I've really been doing; I've written a few "op-ed" columns about Trayvon Martin and the civil war in Syria, but not much else which can be called original blog content. If this disappoints some (or all) of you, I apologize. I started this blog last year with every intention of providing a variety of entries that weren't limited to movie reviews and/or the creative process. I wanted to explore all kinds of topics which may be of interest to a diverse audience, and that is still my hope, because I want this blog to, as the Vulcans say on Star Trek, "live long and prosper." However, I must point out that this is possibly one of the lowest points...