history

Review: The Man From Earth (2007)

The science fiction film by Jerome Bixby, The Man From Earth starts simply with some friend gathering at the cabin of John Oldman. (played by David Lee Smith) He’s preparing to move on, somewhat abruptly, and he has gathered them to say goodbye. After opening the night with some Johnny Walker, they have an extraordinary conversation as the evening develops. His cabin is on the edge of a wilderness. While not an unusual locale, the thoughtful discussion brings to mind John’s past years when he was divorced from human influences. The college professors and some students are relishing the friendship that they share.

As the story progresses into deeper history, John offers his friends a lot of trust. He tells them that in the past he would leave and not explain where he is going nor why. This time, John trusts his friends enough that he can candidly describe his past. These friends prove to the viewer that it’s worthwhile to share an engaging discussion.

John reviews his life forward from the simple culture of prehistoric man. As he saw the world expand, he reflects how he first saw mountains and then the ocean. He has met some extraordinary people through his life.

Jerome Bixby, the author of the screenplay was a successful science fiction writer. Among other credits, he wrote for the original Star Trek and Twilight Zone. This movie was brought to life by his son because Bixby died shortly after the screenplay was finished. According to the commentary, it was made on a limited budget, but I think it is still well made. One effect of that is that due to limited lighting, for some of the footage taken after sunset, the video is grainy.

The Man From Earth is the anti-thesis of an action movie. There aren’t special effects, stuntmen or violent conflicts. Instead, the film ends on a surprising note after John’s ideas are presented at a comfortable pace.

I enjoyed the film and have watched its several times. The situation seems organic and not hobbled with stereotypical characters that are simplistic and stilted.

Review: Frozen II (2019)

A paper airplaneFrozen II is a journey from the comfort and joy of home into an alien and dangerous world. The danger centers on broken trust. Elsa (Idina Menzel) learns that she must resolve a betrayal that happened before she was born. In addition, the trust between the sisters is fragile. Anna (Kristen Bell) wants to help magical Elsa against the new dangers while Elsa wants to stride out on her own.

There is a legend about an enchanted forest that is the focus of the film. It has been walled off from the rest of the world with no way in or out. Elsa hears an ethereal voice and remembers a story from her childhood about the North country. To solve the mystery, Elsa explore the North with Anna, Olaf (Josh Gad) and Kristoff (Jonathan Groff).

Memory is an recurring theme in the movie. Elsa goes on a kind of vision quest to learn what a magical river knows about the past. To resolve that past requires Anna’s fortitude when she realizes what Arendelle might need to sacrifice. The friends come to accept the history of their family, even though it is sad and painful.

The classical four elements, Fire, Earth, Air and Water are important forces in the enchanted forest. They seem dangerous and hostile, but they are gradually tamed. To understand the mysterious forest requires perseverance from both Elsa and the rest of her friends. They find the truth and liberate the forest so that its people can become part of the greater world again.

From the outset, Frozen II lets the audience know that they don’t need to see the first Frozen to appreciate it. In the first scene you see that Elsa & Anna’s childhood had been revised. The movie doesn’t look back and it stands strong on the new foundation.

Often filmmakers strive to bring out a specific emotion at the close of their film. The producers try to close the story with an exclamation point instead of an ellipsis. Frozen II does that better than most by eliciting an emotion that is rare in films. In the coda, that feeling is reinforced with the joy and freedom that fills the new Arendelle with magic.

Mr. Nobody (2009)

Alarm clock
In the year 2092, we meet Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto). He is the last mortal left after humans have been engineered to be immortal. He is dying and the doctors have put him in a reality show to learn his story. Although they are demanding a source of entertainment, he playfully compromises their understanding of history.

As a child, Nemo (Thomas Byrne) smiles at three girls sitting on a bench waiting for school. He is averse to making decisions and these girls fill three different stories as Nemo and the three of them mature. He develops parallel biographies as he gets married to each of them. Visually, they leave the church through different doors. Nemo’s lives go awry and we get lost within his tangled path through time.

In one life, he is passionately in love with a woman he cannot find. In another, he has a devoted wife that he doesn’t care about. In the third life, he has a wife who is desperately depressed and never available to receive his love. These lives start to fracture and crack when Nemo (Toby Regbo) is a teenager.

Nemo’s world is beautiful as he narrates the different lives. Mr. Nobody is happy to show the viewer a kaleidoscope of love and tragedy. The future interviewer of Nemo tries hypnosis to bring back Nemo’s real story, but each time the hypnotist says “remember,” the kaleidoscope shifts and the story changes. The cinematography uses colors to anchor the story to different paths through time.

For the proponents of linear time, Mr. Nobody is infuriating. Time loops and swerves as if it were a leaf in the breeze. The story unfolds as a labyrinth with stories inside of stories.

Perhaps there is no truth and the 118 year old man is playing the audience. Perhaps he revealed nothing important. He is the topic of a reality show that morbidly votes that he should be allowed to die. Mr. Nobody’s story leaves the observer puzzled and he ends up laughing at us all.

Clutter on the disks


I have a lot of clutter on my disks. I keep projects around “just in case.” One thought was “Maybe I’ll go back some day.” As I migrated from computer to computer, the files kept multiplying… one copy on the old computer and a companion on the new. As partitions got full, files moved from one to the next, making new copies to add to the clutter. The debris of unfinished projects are everywhere.

This summer I took all of my old drives that were still readable and loaded them into the main computer, allowing even more clutter to spin silently. It’s amazing how small drives were 10 – 15 years ago. I even discovered that I have files of my floppy discs from the pre-Windows computer era.

To help with the declutter project, I wrote a utility that visits all of the files on the computer and records their name, size and where they’re located. I used the logs from that tool to find all of my “NewPoetry” folders. (NewPoetry holds copies of my poetry since 2010 and I really only want the most recent edit.) Now I only have one NewPoetry!

I am searching for an old project takes my poetry and formats them as a website. I haven’t used that tool for several years. I hope that the HTML formatted files can be a companion to http://blog.wwayneb.com blog where I published many of my poems

YYJ – a historian

One of my current projects is yyj (for lack of a better name. It’s the archive file’s suffix.). It’s a file historian system. It disclaims any aspiration to be a version control system. It is primarily meant to be used by a single user.

The goal of the system is to efficiently maintain a history of documents. It is not based on a check-in model. Instead, the history is updated continuously in the background. If a file was saved every half hour, each update would be available without any intervention from the user.

It make use of the fact that .docx and .ods files are actually compressed with zip. I believe it would be efficient Java .jar files. It is optimized for XML files.

I’ve been using variants of yyj for many years and find it useful. The versions I’ve been using aren’t useful by anyone else because there is no UI. Variants have existed since 1989.

My inspiration for polishing it was listening to a student describe his Capstone project at IUPUI. He mentioned having to make copies repeatedly and struggle to keep the copies organized and up to date.

yyj would make that organization trivial. The student could retrieve any past version if it was needed. He would only need to save a single file to keep his work safe from software and hardware failures. Intermediate versions could be deleted when they aren’t relevant any more.

I think that if I succeed, yyj could be useful to very many people.

Gas price history

I’ve found copies of my old gas price spreadsheet. Now I have a history of the Indiana gasoline prices from Nov. 2003 to Dec. 2015.

One of the reasons I wanted to find the data is to show the cliff. Between Oct. 8 and Nov. 7, 2008 the price of gas here dropped 40%.

Online sources show that the price of crude oil dropped rapidly in that period, but not as rapidly as the gas price in Indiana.

A graph of the price of gas

A graph of Indiana gas prices between 2003 and 2015

I’m still looking for data from the 20 month gap in 2009 and 2010.

John Martin Smith’s Books

front view of Willennar Genealogy Center

Willennar Genealogy Center (Original photo from Charlie Chat)

Today I volunteered at the Auburn, Indiana Willennar Genealogy library. John Martin Smith was a historian in DeKalb County. According to his obituary from 2011, he was the founder of the DeKalb County Historical Society and had many other accolades. He had built a very large collection of historical documents and artifacts. His family loaned the materials to the genealogy library to be indexed and archived. The phase that I’m participating in now will index all of the books from the collection.

Books that I indexed today include The Cold Spring Tragedy about a murder near Indianapolis in the 1860s. Also, I added a trade catalog from the Atlas Engine Company and a self-promotion piece about Midwest Engine company from 1919. It turns out that the Atlas Engine company evolved into the Midwest Engine company. The Midwest Engine company was very proud of their part in helping win WW I.

It was very interesting glancing through these books. My part is to take the pre-scanned images of each page and add them to a PastPerfect record. I also write a description of the books and select search terms and subject topics.

The archive software has a locally developed list of subject keywords, but with the books, that list is usually inadequate.  I go to Library of Congress Authorities and search for topics.  After taking Cataloging last year and a related class “Organization and Representation of Knowledge and Information” this spring, I feel pretty comfortable using the authority file.

In the classes, we had access to an OCLC service, Connexion, that has a more powerful interface than the Library of Congress, but we are only supposed to use that for class-related work. There’s another useful tool available, Cataloging Calculator, but I don’t have its URL memorized.

After finding The Cold Spring Tragedy on WorldCat, I found that the authority file has records for the murderer and her victim in the database. I was surprised, but I guess I shouldn’t have been. Some of the collection’s conventional books are not rarities. However, today’s books about the engine companies probably are.

This cataloging project is a lot of fun for me.  It’s a mixture of activities and I get to look at very interesting books, usually from the 19th century.