Catchy Name Needed

I'm "of a certain age," as they say - which is to say, middle-aged. I'm a little over 50, and what that means for this purpose is that I remember the Bond movies of the 60s, but not clearly. By the time I was old enough to have more than a vague idea of what the Bond movies were all about, Bond was into the Roger Moore era, and he just never really appealed to me. Plus I thought those over-the-top plots of that era were stupid. So to sum up, I've just never been a huge Bond fan, and Rob - who is a little younger than me, just under 50 - doesn't like the Bond movies at all, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. (I don't know if the age thing makes any difference whatsoever - but it might, a bit. The two-and-a-half year age difference between us is nothing when you're 50, but back when we were kids, it was a lot. I don't remember the Sean Connery movies well, from back then, but I imagine I remember them better than he does! Although actually I doubt that either one of us were allowed to see them in the theater, if it came right down to it.) But anyway, I was intrigued enough by the reactions I was seeing on Twitter that I basically dragged him in with me to see Skyfall, and the fact is, we both enjoyed it. It's well-made, and it's really not a "traditional" Bond movie at all in a lot of ways, which for us is more of an advantage than not.

I didn't really read the reviews before we went, because I figure it's better in most cases if you can manage not to be spoiled. I read reviews of movies I'm not sure if I want to see, not the ones that I do. Skyfall would normally have been one of "unsure" ones, except for the aforementioned Twitter mini-reviews, which mostly were entirely non-spoilery things like "AWESOME!!" It was the sheer volume of those that caught my eye - nearly everybody on my Twitter list had things like that to say about it. So I decided I wanted to go, and I told Rob that if he would go with me to Skyfall on Thanksgiving Day that I would go with him to Lincoln on Sunday. (Which was not exactly a compromise, quite honestly, since I wanted to see that too. But it was enough to get him to cooperate, anyway!) I didn't read reviews of Lincoln, either, and I didn't actually realize what it's about - I think I expected more of a general Lincoln biopic than it actually was. But I like politics, and that's really what it was about, so I enjoyed it.

Now I am a little bit of a Civil War buff. Back in the early 90s when the Ken Burns thing came out, and then the Gettysburg movie, I got interested enough to wade through all three of the Shelby Foote books - which I highly recommend, if you're interested, but you need to be really interested. (A far lesser bar, if you're interested but not interested enough to put yourself in for a couple of thousand pages, is Foote's Shiloh novel. Or even better, the Michael Shaara novel that Gettysburg was based on, The Killer Angels. They are both extremely readable, without requiring any particular knowledge of the subject.) Then after Foote, I read an awful lot of other Civil War books as well - I actually considered going back to school to study this stuff, at one point. The only real tangible evidence of all my acquired knowledge is this little mini-summary of the first part of the war, which I still think is pretty good for something I wrote off the top of my head one night. (The reason there's no part 2 was largely because the war in 1863 gets a lot more complicated and got beyond the scope of what I could write without doing research.) So all this is by way of saying that I know a lot about Lincoln, in general. But I honestly didn't know much about the fight to pass the 13th amendment, and I enjoyed it. (I know, I keep saying that. But I did.) I don't know how much you'll enjoy this movie if this is not a subject that interests you, but it's another well-made movie, and the packed house we saw it with seemed to really enjoy it, too. And they surely can't all be Civil War buffs.

From nonelvis :

1. Stop talking about politics for a moment or two.
2. Post a reasonably-sized picture in your LJ, NOT under a cut tag, of something pleasant, such as an adorable kitten, or a fluffy white cloud, or a bottle of booze. Something that has NOTHING TO DO WITH POLITICS.
3. Include these instructions, and share the love.




I think I posted this one last year sometime, but I don't care, because I like it. And, kittens! And also because I posted about my grandma yesterday and that made me all nostalgic again.

My grandma's name was Maedelle. I am not completely sure if it was originally Mae Dell, and it just got squished together over the years, or if they named her that from the beginning. That name definitely belongs to that East Texas school of double names, in any case, which has mostly vanished nowadays. (I always remember that for years she had a hairdresser, a woman, whose name was Cecil Rae.)

Maedelle was a bit of a character. When she died, in 2000 - age 89 - my cousin Pat wrote a piece for the local paper detailing some of her eccentricities. One was their house, which rambled all over - you had to go down a few stairs, for example, to get to what Grandma called the "sleeping porch" - which may have originally been a regular porch, but by the time I became old enough to remember had been enclosed. Come to think of it, I'm sure it was originally outside, because I remember that for a long time there were still windows on the inside. My grandfather was (a) very low-key and (b) adored her, and so he pretty much let her do whatever she wanted. Later the porch my sister and I are standing on here also got enclosed, as an add-on to the kitchen.

She loved to cook. She was a great cook, in a very country, fried-food-heavy sort of way. At my grandparents' house, the big meal of the day was what they called dinner and which was at what most people nowadays would call lunchtime. I remember "the men" coming home at noon for dinner - I guess it must have been the men who worked for Papa selling tractors. Then Grandma put the leftovers in the oven where they stayed all afternoon (yeah, I know, botulism and all that, but I don't remember anybody ever getting sick) until they were warmed up again for supper.

I suppose the meals when we were there were probably bigger than usual, but what I remember was that there was always a helluva lot of food. More than one meat, several vegetables, rolls, dessert. Usually there was this thing called "congealed salad" which I always hated, but which was jello mixed with whipped cream or sour cream and fruit or nuts and then refrigerated until it, well, congealed. And, oh yeah, cakes and pies and cookies, always. She always left batter in the bottom of the bowl for us when she made cakes. And I still can't see a chocolate meringue pie without thinking of her, to this day.