Sunday

Weather Station

Marian gave me a weather station for Christmas.

You can see it next to the bird feeder mounted on the tripod.

The transmitter is connected to the wind and rain sensors and their data transmitted wirelessly to the display inside the house. The only problem with the system is that a PC connection requires a serial connection and my laptop doesn’t have a serial port. I bought a serial-to-USB bridge but it doesn’t appear to be working correctly. I’ll keep tinkering with it. But it is way cool.

The Actual Weather

Looking at my readout it is currently 60.9 degrees (winter in Florida) and we had about half an inch of rain today. But the new year has been largely dry. Already we are more than an inch down. Hopefully the rain today will begin to diminish our long-lasting rain deficit. We continue to remain warmer than normal. 2007 was one of our warmer years and too dry — down 6 inches from our yearly average. Seven mornings below freezing so far (we average 15 mornings below 32 each year) and two days in January so far when highs didn’t get out of the 40’s. But not enough of those to even get us back to average temps.

Movies We’ve Seen

Quite a few, actually, since I last wrote about them.

This weekend we saw The Orphanage. The previews have featured Guillermo Del Toro as a draw but he was a producer rather than the director. The director is unknown in the U.S., directing movies with only European distribution before this. The reviews emphasized the director’s competence but unwillingness to move beyond standard horror movie tropes. Sure enough, the movie is sometimes scary but the director uses conventional ways to scare his viewers: loud noises, narrow perspectives suddenly changed to reveal danger, dark and narrow passages, closeups of Geraldine Chaplin who, apparently, is a mainstay in Spanish movies. She speaks fluent French and Spanish and has had long-term affairs with several Spanish directors. Quite an interesting life.

We thought that National Treasure:Book of Secrets would be a satisfying sequel but we didn’t expect this movie to be as funny and entertaining as it was. Fast-moving, full of laughs and interesting Hollywood plot-twists, good acting and well-shot scenery, the time flew by and we left laughing at remembered scenes. Hardly memorable and never rising above its thoroughly commercial roots, this movie nevertheless is the promise of pure entertainment that Hollywood always promises but only occasionally delivers.

This movie hit all the right notes from the moment Charlie Wilson’s War starts. Mike Nichols is back in his old form we saw in The Birdcage, Carnal Knowledge, The Graduate, and Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf. Tom Hanks seems able to play any role and is absolutely the venal congressman he plays here. Julia Roberts plays an exaggeration of her earlier roles, and Philip Seymour Hoffman just couldn’t have been better. The movie is both funny and serious, and its tone seems utterly realistic. A wonderful movie that talks realistically about serious global issues but finds the humor of human motivation and the ways human failures can move global issues.

We really liked this movie.

You would think this would be an unlikely Christmas Day opener but Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was indeed our Christmas Day movie of choice.  We saw Charlie Wilson’s War on Christmas Day up in the North Carolina mountains. A musical about a serial killer and his girlfriend who made meat pies out of his victims’ remains may seem a bit twisted as holiday fare but Tim Burton pulls it off.  The blood seemed cartoonish enough and the characters were set firmly enough on a musical stage to avoid reminding us of real serial killers or the awful ways he killed his string of victims. But even big names like Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman weren’t enough to draw in huge crowds.  To date the movie has not even pulled in enough to pay its production costs.  Too bad. The score is inventive, the lyrics extremely clever, Depp an able and quite malevolent Todd, and the set design distinctively Tim Burton.

Maybe that is another problem with this movie — Tim Burton. He has made some real financial  blockbusters: Batman, Batman Returns, Charlie and Chocolate Factory, Planet of the Apes.  All of these have grossed more than $160 million each. And he has grossed more than a billion dollars in his 13 movies, according to Boxofficemojo.com .  But his style is so distinctive that either you are attracted to his expressionist style or you hate it.  We love his style and have seen all his movies, from Peewee’s Big Adventure in 1985 to Sweeney Todd.