On A M. Hulot Kick, and Walking Down Memory Lane

Watching "Mon Oncle" by Jacques Tati tonight. I love M. Hulot's house:

I love the hodge-podge that is old French architecture. His apartment and the way to get to it reminds me of a missionary apartment I lived in when I served in Blois, France.

The building, built before Columbus discovered America, had a presence on the main street in town, La Rue Denis Papin. Where the barber/tattoo shop is, there was a Singer sewing store. "Singer" in French is a verb meaning "to behave like a monkey," which was fitting.

While we did have access to the building from the street, our address was actually on "Les Petits Degres St. Honore," a staircase from the main street to the level above.

Good ol' Number 12. From the main street, we had to go up two flights of stairs to get to our apartment. From this door, it was one flight down.

I loved that apartment. We had a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a living room that doubled as a bedroom. Part of the way through my stay there we had to swap apartments with the sister missionaries, who were living in a modern building on the ground floor, which wasn't as secure as the mission wanted for sisters so, alas, we had to move.

Back to M. Hulot. A commenter on the video posted above says he/she knew the building had been in their neighborhood, but has since been replaced by a car park. Just what Jacques Tati was commenting on in the film. Old vs. New.

Puzzled

People are puzzles.

Dump the pieces out of the box

Look for the edges

Prop up the box somewhere nearby so you can see the shape this particular human takes.

But pieces stick to your forearm as you puzz.

Others get bumped off the table and the dog eats them.

Then you look at the box and the picture has changed and some of the pieces on the table don’t have any color on them at all, no matter how many times you flip them over.

But keep puzzling.

Keep puzzling.

Some of the edges you’ve assembled

Spontaneously detach themselves

And there are some pieces that are too big to fit with the scale of the puzzle

Some are too small.

The box, momentarily with the photo on it, shows it’s a thousand-piece puzzle

But there are only 496 on the table.

And it doesn’t matter because the picture fades again as you look at it.

And what you thought was going to be a pleasant picture

Distorts and beautifies as you assemble more pieces

The puzzle is missing pieces

It has holes in it.

Some of the pieces are from different puzzles of different sizes

But you still have to put them together

And hope you don’t mix up your pieces with the pieces of the puzzle the person next to you at the table is assembling.

The dog coughs up the piece it swallowed and it’s a mess, but you pick it up anyway.

Your memories of the image on the box fade and twist

Sometimes you invent new facets, or find forgotten facets that fell on the floor or were swept up by another puzzler and rejected for their puzzle because it doesn’t fit.

Sometimes they fit and the puzzler who got it won’t surrender the piece you need, so you use one of theirs.

It might fit.

You might have to jam it in there.

And the puzzle is never finished.

Just like people.

Dear Elder Davidson No. 6

Dear Isaac,

As always, good to hear from you.

I wish I had exciting things to report. I do not. Life continues to be boring, which I guess is a good thing.

When I left for work this morning, it was still raining. It had rained all night. The street up the road from our house was flooded curb to curb – we know now the house right on the curve is where our new stake president lives. John Adams was also flooded a bit, and the geyser at John Adams and Curlew was bubbling away. I hit a lot of standing water all over town as I drove to work. We may have to start figuring out what a cubit is and building an ark.

I’m sure Lexi told you that she and Keaton had a waterfall flowing into their basement from one of their windows. I went over and looked at it (that was about all I could do; all anyone can do until the rain stops, except for manning the pumps). Keaton and I think there’s a French drain in the window well that’s collecting water from somewhere else and is overflowing. Once the rain stops, he’s going to dig around in there to see what’s going on. I’d say not to worry too much about it as we’re getting some exceptional rainfall, except for they had some minor flooding in there in May after a few rainy days. Keaon caulked some, but the water was really flowing in, this time through the gaps around the window.

It did inspire me to go home and check our window wells. Everything looks good, but I do need to get up on the tall part of the house to clean gutters out. I either need a really big extension ladder or to borrow some scaffolding from Albert. That or Liam will have to hold the ladder for me as I climb up onto the house from the garage. But I gotta do something because the gutters overflow even in a moderate rain. Wish you were here to go up there for me. I promise to take pictures if I end up falling off the roof or through the roof into the house. I told Liam maybe he should stand on the ground with a mattress he could throw on the ground if he sees me falling and can estimate where I’ll splat on the ground. That or set up the trampoline again . . .

What I need to do is clean them out and then put some kind of lath over them to let the water in but keep the leaves out. Worst thing is that they’re really not our leaves, but leaves from the poplar trees next door.

This is:

1. The kind of high-quality Old Man Whining you’re missing out on.

2. Going to happen to you when you get hit by the Old Age Truck.

So, as Ernest says, “Yuk it up.”

This was part of our view on Saturday, in the rain, from the Conant Creek trestle on the Ashton-Tetonia trail. Up high where we were, fall had already passed, but in the gullies and valleys like this, there was still some color. When I look at places like this I think it might be fun to live there – but don’t catch me there in the winter. Way too much snow and wind.

But wouldn’t it be fun to own that property and build a little cabin on the flat with an outhouse and just a log stove for heat in the winter. Until you went mad having to dig your way to the privy after every snowfall.

I’m a fair-weather homesteader, to be sure.

We’re headed to Pocatello tomorrow for Randy’s sentencing. I’m grateful he’ll finally know what lies in the future for him, but I’m sure he’s nervous. I’m nervous too. I’m going into this not knowing what to think. Anything could happen.

We (Albert, Serena, Maaike and I) aren’t heading out until 11 am, so I’m debating going in to work for a few hours beforehand. I probably should, because I forgot to activate my out of office email and remind my boss I’m going to be gone. But frankly I’d like to go in so early I could disappear before the bulk of the others arrived. Maybe the dogs will have me up at 3 am again. 

That’s my ideal job right there.

Well, I can’t keep my eyes open any more. This old man is going to go collapse on the basement floor and start drooling.

Love, Dad

Way too Late at the Movies: Mr. Hulot's Holiday

I've long been aware of Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot character, and the "modern silent" films he made, but I'd never seen one start to finish.

Remedied that this weekend by watching "Les Vacances de M. Hulot," or "Mr. Hulot's Holiday," on YouTube.

I want to watch more full films. Had this been my only Tati experience, I might not have bothered with any more. It's slow, the visual jokes come and go, but many of them are subtle; but not near as subtle as some of the jokes based on sound, and the story - such as it is - felt a bit choppy.

Nevertheless, glad I watched it. It's primed me for more Tati.

I marve4l at visual comedy, particularly that done without computer-aided special effects. Everything in the film is done practically, and I'm sure through a lot of effort. Watching that paint pot drift in and out with the tide then come back makes the film worth watching.

Hey, Donothings . . .

Sent to Sens. Jim Risch, Mike Crapo, and Rep. Mike Simpson

Please tell President Trump, and remind yourself, that you can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding.

President Trump seems to think he can fix the fuel problem by making a deal with Russia and sell out Ukraine, rather than stopping the idiot war with Iran he should not have started in the first place.

If you do nothing, you are complicit in shaking the devil's hand as well.

Fully expecting you to do nothing but toe Trump's line, I remain an unsatisfied constituent.

Sincerely yours,

Brian Davidson

Ammon

Soggy Hiking

Today as the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel began dumping its load locally, we went on a hike.

We tagged along as the support vehicle for Troop 1010's 20-mile hike to finish up the Hiking merit badge. They opted to hike the Ashton-to-Tetonia Rail Trail State Park, which is a favorite of ours.

Michelle and I decided at one point to hike from Drummond to the trestle bridge over Conant Creek. It was a great hike, though we hiked during a pretty good downpour from the storm and got soaked.

Still, even in the rain, the views are spectacular.

Though fall is mostly over along the upper elevations on the trail, but down in the hollows and gullies there was still some color to be seen.

Begone, Bag O' Wipes

Story time with Brian.

See that bag of wipes flopped over in the hallway? We've had it since Covid Times. The hallway is where it lives. Though I know that is where it lives and occasionally use a wipe from the bag, I am also constantly tripping over it or kicking it and having to put it back into place.

Also, the wipes have dried out a bit, so they're more of a slightly abrasive pad than a wipe, but we do not throw things away in this house.

Today I took a wipe out of it, and noted there is only one wipe left.

I will be glad to see it go.

Super Intelligence?

I want to talk about the trickle-down we got at work today about having to say "super intelligence" rather than "artificial intelligence" but I'm still hung up on the fact that one of the forwarders of the message included what looked like a Donald Trump emoji in the email chain.

It's an Affront to not Use Affresh, and other Linguistic Musings

I've been amused of late reading the product names for various items coming out of Asia. I know they make fun of Westerners - and rightly so - when we get tattoos of their word characters that mean something along the lines of "giraffe pimp" and not what the tattoo artist says it means, but I think it's just as fair to mock their mangled English as they try to sell the output of their factories.

Here are some of my favorites:

I remember watching Bob Ross put paint to kamvas in PBS. I guess this is a digital thing.

This might be my favorite. My first thought is toxin, but if you feel it's more in the medicine field you're not far off, as the -oxin suffix is, in Greek, related to the heart. So maybe this is either heart-friendly or poisonous stuff.

Comedian Daren Streblow talks about a son with a speech impediment, who added -oy to a lot of words. I guess he's working in marketing Chinese products now.

It's an affront not to use Affresh. Some of the ad copy just writes itself.

Jackery. So close to hackery. And given this is Chinesium, the name is probably chillingly ironic.

 

From the Hudson's Bay Company to Parachuting Beavers

History, of course, is written by the victors.

And, in some cases, by researchers and writers who don’t hesitate to deliver a few delightful, backhanded gallantries at events big or small, at personages eminent or obscure, and at enterprises holy and grotesque.

Thus I read in Elizabeth Haroldsen Lovell’s “Benjamin Bonneville, Soldier of the American Frontier.”

Lovell takes some jabs at the Hudson’s Bay Company in the book.

On Page 66, this:

In their own bailiwick in Canada, the policy of Hudson’s Bay Company was to harvest judiciously, but of areas open to both Great Britain and the United States, company officials wrote “The country is a rich preserve of Beaver, which for political reasons we should endeavor to destroy as fast as possible.” Peter Skene Ogden and Joh Work with their Snake River brigades had obeyed orders, and by 1833 the results were painfully evident.

She also elicits a jab at the American mania for progress, seen today in the likes of SpaceX and Silicon Valley and such ilk. On Page 118:

The country had gone mad with railroad building. Earlier, it had been canals, but even before many waterway projects were off the drawing boards there was talk they would soon be made obsolete by the railroads. To get somewhere quickly was an obsession which grew in America as naturally as hickory and maize, only faster. It was a stylish thing to “go by the cars.” Engines glistened with bright paint; passengers cars made up a “brigade.”

Lovell tells Bonneville’s tale well, intermixed with an excellent smattering of history much more broad than the soldier/adventurer’s life.

I picked up this book at a local thrift store and enjoyed reading it, seeing as I live in a county that bears Bonneville’s name. The book may be a little dry at times, but Lovell does her best to bring in livelier bits and to help us see one man’s story in context with the growth and growing pains of a nation.

And her stabs at Hudson’s Bay Company were comic.

Puts the parachuting beavers of the 1940s into some interesting historical context.