{"id":1484,"date":"2008-03-10T19:47:50","date_gmt":"2008-03-10T23:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=1484"},"modified":"2008-03-10T19:47:50","modified_gmt":"2008-03-10T23:47:50","slug":"if-im-too-tired-to-spring-forward-can-i-just-crawl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=1484","title":{"rendered":"If I’m too tired to spring forward, can I just crawl?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not a bad weekend,<\/strong> in spite of the fact that it was the debut of a new, absurdly early date for the start of Daylight Saving Time, which, according to the link in this earlier post<\/a> of mine, doesn\u2019t necessarily save any energy at all. Back when I was a lad, (in the time of Henry VI, Part 1), you had some consolation for losing an hour of sleep in the knowledge that spring was coming soon, and it was getting warmer). Now we\u2019re making the change in the dead of winter (though today got up to about freezing, and the rest of the week looks good. But spring it ain\u2019t).<\/p>\n

I got together will my old buddy Chip on Saturday, and we went out to lunch at a marvelous place called The Fifties Grill. I\u2019d heard about it but had never tried it. As you\u2019d expect, the ambience is Ron Howard\/Henry Winkler, and the waitresses wear poodle skirts. But the hamburger I enjoyed was better than anything I remember getting in a grill during the Eisenhower administration. If you live in the Twin Cities, you can find the place in Brooklyn Park, hard by Brookdale Mall. (Of course if you live in the Twin Cities, you probably knew it long before I got the hint.)<\/p>\n

Then we went to a bargain theater to see \u201cNational Treasure: Book of Secrets.\u201d<\/p>\n

My evaluation: Fun, but dumb.<\/i> But you knew that.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s nice to see a movie where they actually manage to talk about America without irony. But I\u2019m too obsessive to just take the thing at face value. I had a couple problems with it.<\/p>\n

One is, I just don\u2019t like Nicholas Cage. From the first time I saw clips from \u201cRaising Arizona\u201d (which I\u2019ve never watched), I haven\u2019t liked his flat, dull eyes. I would not buy a used car from this man. He\u2019s probably a great guy for all I know, but when you\u2019re an actor, your eyes are a big deal.<\/p>\n

Secondly, I\u2019m too much of a writer to entirely enjoy a movie that plays that fast and loose with logic. I\u2019ve talked about \u201cmovie logic\u201d before. Movie logic is when somebody leaps a car over a river in a film. It all happens so fast\u2014vroom<\/i>, they\u2019re gone\u2014that you don\u2019t have time to stop and think, \u201cWould a vehicle with a heavy front end and a light back end actually stay horizontal through a jump like that, or would the front end dip?\u201d Movie logic is when something explodes in a building, and the hero runs out and beats the fireball to the exit. It doesn\u2019t make sense in the real world, but you just saw it happen right there on the screen, so you buy it.<\/p>\n

In the National Treasure movies, they come up with these obscure clues (traveling all over the U.S. and Europe to follow them up), and once they\u2019ve read them, Nicholas Cage says, \u201cThis has to mean X.\u201d So they run off to check out X, and of course he\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

In real life, a clue that esoteric could probably mean a hundred things. But the process of actual and trial and error would slow down the movie, and the task of producing clues that actually make sense would tax the creativity of the writers. So they fall back on movie logic.<\/p>\n

And it works, in terms of entertainment.<\/p>\n

But it’s lazy, and I don\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n

I also finished reading The Face<\/a><\/i> by Dean Koontz. I\u2019ve done enough Koontz reviews in this space, but I just want to say that, although it doesn\u2019t bear close examination theologically, this is an intensely, though subtly, Christian book. The payoff was very elegantly done, and I wish I\u2019d written it.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not a bad weekend, in spite of the fact that it was the debut of a new, absurdly early date for the start of Daylight Saving Time, which, according to the link in this earlier post of mine, doesn\u2019t necessarily save any energy at all. Back when I was a lad, (in the time of … Continue reading If I’m too tired to spring forward, can I just crawl?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}