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The weather was great, we drove around for a while taking pictures of snowmen (found 4 or 5) and went to the museum. I was going to meet with Tanya to edit some video together but she's sick and didn't want to get us sick. I found out the other day that her roommate is Scott Fulton, brother of Shawn. This afternoon I shot another "Hot Wheels" movie with William, this time alone rather than with Daniel. However, things went smoother so there weren't any crashes, just a quick race and narration. This made it a bit less dynamic, but he liked it anyways. I used to think it would be a great job just to be someone's personal filmmaker, following them around and making home movies or whatever they wanted (presumably someone rich), but of course job openings of that sort don't arise often.

This evening we watched The Black Hole, the Disney film from the early 80s. On some levels I liked it, it was really old fashioned in that Forbidden Planet sort of way, but with much better effects. However, it became impossible to watch it without wondering about so many technical things like when asteroids start hitting the ship, why all the air isn't sucked out in a moment. Why the woman with ESP is always surprised when men walk up behind her. And why an old ship that was not supposed to have artificial gravity (since the newer one didn't have it) has a chandelier hanging in the dining room?

174

Yesterday I managed to make my nanaimo bars, they worked quite well as I didn't put as thick a chocolate coating on top as last year and I cut them while that chocolate was still warm. Success.
Yesterday I also ordered "Song of the South" on dvd. This isn't coming from Disney or any reputable source, even though it is a Disney film. I have an entire chapter on it in a really good book on Hollywood animation called Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to “Toy Story”, a 1997 book by Sefan Kanfer. It's a really boring title for a really interesting book, it chronicles what is happening in each of the main animation company one decade at a time with the context of what was happening in the market. The chapter on "Song of the South" talks about how everyone told Walt Disney that producing it would bring trouble, but he kept ignoring them. Uncle Remus was no longer a popular icon by the 1950s, and he didn't become more popular as Disney, against everyone advice again, continued to release it every few years, promising never to do it again. The last time they released it was about 1985 on vhs, so my hopes for a good copy is thin, but something is better than nothing.
Today was William's last day of school. It'll be tv and hanging out for two weeks.

95

Starting to catch up on TV. Last night I watched the first two episodes of "Chuck". This is a perverse reversal of the 1969 Disney film "The Computer who wore Tennis Shoes" with Kurt Russell. Both use the same idea of a young man accidentally having all of the knowledge and computational ability of a super-computer. In the 1969 film, the character shares his secret with his hippie friends as they try to hide from, and even subvert, the establishment. In "Chuck", the situation differs in that the title character trusts only the militaristic government agents and keeps his ability a secret from his slacker friends and sister, whose lives appear to be irrelevant and trivial. While the show takes on the guise of power reversal, giving a civilian some influence within the arena of the CIA, a comparison of the two shows demonstrates how far the USA has wholeheartedly and unabashedly fallen into the right wing ideology. It cannot even be as subversive as a B-grade 1969 Disney film.

17 x 3

William turned 6 today and Margaret began a month long job as a full time temp admin position at the Dunlop, so I took William to "Underdog" which hasn't been getting good reviews but we both thoroughly enjoyed, him for basically everything about a super powered talking dog, live action with fur rather than the old animated version which is simplistic, hairless and "freaks him out", and me particularly for the performance by Patrick Warburtan whom I personally remember most for being "The Tick", although he was apparently in Seinfeld as well, but I have seen so few of those that I think I missed him but might go back and watch for him because he is certainly, in my mind, the perfect superhero, although technically he is a supervillain in this, or actually just a villain, or perhaps more accurately he is a henchman, but his hair is great, which makes this whole Underdog thing more about hair again as William will not watch even a minute of the old Underdog series but loves the live action, and loves the live Disney versions of Inspector Gadget far more than the original, even though he's been watching those finally as I can record them every morning, commercial free, off of YTV.

Gerda came to visit this evening and brought a card that featured images of the wood and wool sheep that she brought William as a birth present from Estonia, so we sang happy sixth birthday to both William and "Bricks" the sheep and had a great time until William overpowered Gerda, knocked her into the stairway, and darn near gave her a concussion. The boy is growing up fast.