Da Docter

Netflix has finally gotten the Doctor Who series 1 boxed set, it's now at the top of my rental queue which means maybe this weekend I'll have the first disk.

Ritalin Saves

After reading this, I'm happy they didn't have Ritalin when I was a kid. On the other hand, why did I not become a rich and famous genius, after such a creative childhood?

Bad Pun deJour

Enron head dies of a heart attack. God doesn't like a bad Lay.

Review: Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Yeah, I know it's a chick flick, but I give it 4.5 stars. It would have been 5 stars if the choice of background music had been more consistently clever and if a couple of rough patches in the editing had been smoothed out. The director was just a tad too eager to make every scene transition Artistic and Meaningful. Sometimes it's better to just cut to the next scene.

Acting is top-notch. I am an Amber Tamblyn fan from way back. In fact I was a Russ Tamblyn fan from childhood and was happy to see his daughter inherited some talent. The story is about four teenaged girls who are Friends Since Birth who are about to go their separate ways for the summer. They are out shopping and find a miraculous pair of jeans which fits each one of them perfectly. They make a pact to stay in touch all summer by wearing the jeans for a week and then sending them to the next person. While the film focuses on the person with the jeans, it also sets up what's happening with the others.

The other friends are played by Alexis Bledel, who is ethereal and waif-like; Blake Lively who plays the beautiful blonde athlete who can get any guy she wants, and America Ferrera, the token chubby chick. Coming in to steal the show is the obligatory child star, played forcefully by Jenna Boyd. None of the girls are drop-dead gorgeous, which helps. The chemistry between them is amazing.

Cinematography is mostly excellent, with no obnoxious tricks but also no blow-you-away wide shots. The director could have used a little more imagination -especially since 1/4 of the show was shot in the Greek isles and another 1/4 on the Baja peninsula.

Audio was poor - and America and Alexis tended to mumble, so I had to turn on subtitles. Locations and sets were great, make-up was so good I didn't even notice it.

The stories were very real, and very fantasy at the same time. Lots of tear-jerk moments, but well done. The message is Friendship. It's a powerful message, which this movie delivers by express courier.

Inter-cropping

Inter-cropping
Originally uploaded by how3ird.

More photos on Flickr - this one is dear to me not for the green or the beauty or the perspective, but for a more selfish reason. My second year in the Peace Corps, 1976-77, my job was to make slide-tape shows to teach rubber tree smallholders (owners of small plantations) how to grow other crops between the rows of juvenile rubber trees while they waited out the 7 years for the rubber trees to start to produce.

More than that, Malaysia had just developed a new strain which would produce 10 times as much as what was currently being harvested. The Thai government was giving away free seedlings to any farmer who would commit to digging up 1/8 of his plantation per year, and re-plant their entire holding with the new strain over an 8-year period. So they would have some cash coming in, we were teaching them inter-cropping, planting other crops in the spaces between the trees. Rubber trees have the be grown far apart so their big canopies don't collide when they are mature.

We would go to provincial fairs and play the slide shows for anyone who was interested. My boss was an advertising genius - we set up a TV and a videotape player and started our presentation by playing the 15-round Ali heavyweight fight. That would gather a crowd - Thais are enormous boxing fans - and at the end of each round we would play a couple of minutes of the slide show.

I guess it worked, because 30 years later, here's a scene which could have been right out of my photo set.