Yesterday was a weird day. If you looked carefully at the mental map I made of Mickey’s head the other day, you realize that Uncle Slappy’s Big Box of Weirdness occupies a key position in the top center. I had a traffic accident in the parking lot of Long Middle School yesterday morning, banging bumpers with a lady named Vilma. The sun was in my eyes, and she started to go, then suddenly stopped for no reason I could see. No damage was done to anything but my pride. My wife put her parents, Tatang and Inang, on an airplane yesterday bound for the Philippine Islands, going home for a visit. Afterwards, my wife was feeling mortal, betting me that she was going to die before me even though I have the head start of six incurable diseases and surviving cancer once already. There are no symptoms for her impending heart attack, so I will probably win that bet. But the point is, it was a weird time yesterday to stumble weirdly over a weird and wacky movie on Netflix called Moonrise Kingdom. It is a Romeo and Juliet sort of story about two twelve-year-olds who fall in love at first sight, and though their families try to keep them apart, they end up together. Thankfully it is not a Shakespearian Tragedy where everybody dies at the end, though Sam is struck by lightning and the big storm nearly drowns all the boy scouts. It is more like a Shakespearian Comedy where everybody gets married at the end, though the twelve-year-olds don’t get married at the end… rather, they are married by the middle.
Wes Anderson is the genius director behind movies like;
None of which I have seen, but now have to watch ALL of them sooner or later. Kinda like the mad quest to see every Tim Burton movie ever made. I am one of the few idiots out there who think Dark Shadows was a truly wonderful movie, and along with Edward Scissor-hands, one of the finest things Johnny Depp has ever done.
In Moonrise Kingdom Anderson uses tracking shots at the beginning that shift quickly from one room to the next in a way that invokes an old-time slide show. The story is set in 1965 in Maine, and is filled with all kinds of iconic references to things we 60’s kids all vividly recall.
The movie also tells the love story of Sam and Suzy with a painter’s sense of iconic pictures that focus you on important plot points and themes.
And there are numerous quotable bits that make the movie what we teachers refer to as a text-rich environment, complete with phony kids’ books and maps and notes.
The all-star cast is pretty good, too.
This is now one of my new favorite movies. It is a happy-ending-type fairy tale with no fairies in it. It is full of ineffectual and incompetent adults who have rules of behavior like grown-ups and motivations like goofy kids… just like real life. The plot is driven by the notion that anything you do in life is a mistake, and mistakes have consequences, but you have to do them anyway because, well… that’s life.
Am I telling you that you should watch this movie too? Well, you should… but, no. I am simply gushing about this quirky movie because I like it, and yesterday was a very weird day.
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
Catch a Falling Star 
Stuff That Works
What makes people visit your blog and maybe even click “like”? I should tell you up front, I have no idea how best to navigate the crazy internet. I want to. I have a book to promote. I have ideas and experiences to share. I am a writer and I would like to make something more than excessive heartache out of being one. But how you actually go about it is still a mystery.
I know what I surf the internet for. I like artwork, especially original artwork. That is why I try to post as much of my own stuff as I can. I am an amateur artist, self-taught with a little bit of college art classes, contact with real artists, and a lot of TV Bob Ross. I surf to find other artists whose stuff catches my eye. I post about artists like Loish, Maxfield Parrish, Paul Detlafsen, and Norman Rockwell. I go to sites like DeviantArt (Example at this link) and follow artists like James Brown and Shannon Maer on Facebook. I help promote their work by sharing as often as I can. Do I worry about copyright violation with my artwork? No. I am long past the point of making a profitable career as an artist. I like having people see my work and if someone decides to claim they are the artist instead of me, I have the real originals and even some pictures of work in progress. The Big Eyes thing will not happen to me.
So sharing pictures seems to matter. I got lots of hits from the monster picture post because I used a lot of monster-movie images that people normally search for on the internet. Pictures of pretty girls work too. It doesn’t seem to matter if I drew them or if they are a picture of a relative, those pictures pull people in too.
Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.
Yes, I do believe I have just intimated that Minnie Mouse is my niece, a daughter of my sister-in-law. Lying is part of blogging. You have to put spin on things and make people understand the things they want to understand more than you need them to see what is really true in the empirical sense.
Being able to put the words “nude” or “naked” in titles or in the tags brings in more views too. Those words get lots of hits on search engines and some of the people who visit my blog looking for that actually read what’s posted. Just because an idea is a little bit naughty, it doesn’t mean only perverts and bad people respond to it.
This is a picture of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. It is NOT a picture of me.
And it doesn’t hurt to be a little funny now and then. Humor is something I look for in the posts of others. I try to be funny in my posts too… though whether they are hah-hah funny or merely eeuw! funny is debatable. Much of my humor is only intended to raise a smirk or half a smile. I am most satisfied when I make you think, “heh, that’s right, isn’t it.”
This is Millis, not me. He was an actual rabbit that was turned humanoid by a scientist’s experiment with alien technology.
So why is this post called Stuff That Works if, as I am claiming, I really don’t know anything about how blogging works? I may have been a little less than truthful when I made claims. Or maybe I was claiming with a little bit of “tongue in cheek”? I hope I have demonstrated that I do know how. The thing I have yet to wrestle with is WHY. So now I have to get busy and work on that.
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