Closing credits

Everyone in the house has been ill. We’ve missed church two Sundays. We did go to a special Christmas service in the middle of the week (it seemed, briefly, that we were OK).

My fever broke last night. I’m still coughing. Please excuse the less-than-effusive presentation of this year’s credits list.

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I thank:

Karin;

Jasper and Ziva;

Samuel, Daniel, and Abel;

other relations;

Samuel’s teachers and bus driver;

Daniel’s teachers (the Numberblocks);

our church;

our neighbors;

our librarians;

my reading group;

the Psmiths, for their book reviews (see their latest);

fontsmiths, for their fonts;

poets, for their poems;

Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for domestic fiction;

Sue Townsend, for her “Adrian Mole” books (see, also, the “secret diary” of fourteen-year-old Margaret Thatcher …

… a work of hilarity, not charity);

the Ecuadorian national soccer team – especially, Moisés Caicedo, Pervis Estupiñán (whose year was actually rather poor), Alan Franco, Hernán Galíndez, Piero Hincapié, Willian Pacho, and Enner Valencia;

the Criterion Channel, especially for the Chinese crime dramas Black Coal, Thin Ice (now unavailable) (set in Harbin) and Only the River Flows (rural Jiangxi);

the Fox Corporation (!) for Tubi – especially, for Crime Stories, Da Vinci’s Inquest, From Hell (now unavailable), Lake Mungo, Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry (esp. cartoons with Droopy), and, way back in February, the Super Bowl;

just about every streaming service, for Peppa Pig;

Goodwill Industries, for books and stretchpants;

Jarritos, especially for Mineragua;

and

Taco Bell, for soft tacos with potatoes, lettuce, cheese, spicy sauce, and supplemental guacamole.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 40: Kingpin

I wonder if, when they made The Big Lebowski (1998), the Coen Brothers deliberately set out to one-up the Farrelly Brothers.

Nice comedy, I imagine the Coens saying. But here’s where Kingpin goes wrong.

A bowling movie should be about the LOOK of the sport.

Balls.

Pins.

Wood.

Those props deserve to be lavishly displayed.

Kingpin’s visual treatment of them is perfunctory.

Well – the Farrellies might reply – your own bowling movie isn’t really a BOWLING movie.

It has no sense of sporting drama.

WE showcase the slow tumbling of the pins.

The satisfying sound of the strike.

The agony of the 7–10 split.

Why aren’t THOSE things front-and-center in The Big Lebowski?

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Not that the Farrellies are bowling purists. Kingpin takes the slum-sport formula of movies like The Hustler and The Color of Money and lampoons it.

Bowling, not billiards. Otherwise, the elements are the same.

The general squalor.

A down-and-out virtuoso (Woody Harrelson).

The dame (Vanessa Angel).

The virtuoso’s pupil (Randy Quaid).

But Kingpin has a wild card: the pupil is a nice, strapping Amish farmer who is forced to hide his bowling from the disapproving community. This is what makes Kingpin original.

Other stuff – e.g., Bill Murray’s performance as Harrelson’s over-the-top nemesis – is funny, but it’s been done before.

And yes, it’s funny but unoriginal that the Harrelson character is a bowler with a maimed hand. 1996 was a good year for that sort of thing. Happy Gilmore and Shine are two other movies in which a precocious young man is mentored by an older virtuoso with a maimed hand.

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Anyway, what’s wrong with a little recycling? The Farrellies even recycle their own material. There’s a confrontation at a roadside diner that is pretty similar to a scene from Dumb and Dumber. That’s OK: in both movies, it works.

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Some viewers might take offense at the movie’s portrayal of the Amish. I think Kingpin is a pretty good satire of other cinematic portrayals of the Amish. Two of the funniest scenes – the milking scene and the barn-raising scene – are sly digs at Witness.

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I wish to conclude by praising Vanessa Angel. I don’t remember seeing her in anything else, but here she holds her own against Harrelson, Murray, and Quaid. You can watch those guys in plenty of other movies. Kingpin is Angel’s movie.

Back to the salt mines

On Sunday, we attended a large, Amish-style meal for the birthday of Karin’s grandpa. Then, yesterday, we entertained visitors from noon until five. We liked those visitors, but it was a tiring conclusion to the weekend (what with our sitting in chairs all those hours).

Now that Labor Day has ended, the real labor must begin.

No, not the kind that produces a child. That can wait another month. What I mean is, tomorrow I’ll have another job interview – the fifth one of this job search (I guess I’m not so impressive in the flesh).

Tonight, Karin & I went to our church’s small group meeting. One of the children who’d tagged along volunteered to pray for us:

“Dear God, I pray that John-Paul gets hired so that he and Karin can have lots of money to buy things for the baby.”

Mary took me to the store to help choose some clothes for tomorrow’s interview. After I brought them home, Karin realized that the security tag was still attached to one of my new shoes. She spent an hour figuring out how to pry it off without spilling ink everywhere (that’s what the tag is designed to do to shoplifters). I offered to help, but she was intent on doing it herself.

She watched YouTube videos about how to pry it off with a couple of forks. In the end, she managed with a flathead screwdriver, the claw of a hammer, and some pliers.

Once more to the lake

… that is, once more for Karin, who spent much of her childhood there. For me, it was the first time.

The lake is in the most Amish part of Middlebury, on the eastern edge of Elkhart County. This is some of the prettiest countryside in all of Northern Indiana. Its hills are very steep; its pastures, very green; its cows, horses, and sheep, healthy and frisky.

On the road, we met more buggies and pedestrians than motorcars.

Then we turned down a long, narrow lane with a sign that said “Private Driveway.”

It took us to the gated community of Foxwood Hills, where young and old were driving golf carts and motorized scooters. The streets had names like “4th of July” and “Iraq” and “Common Sense.” Everywhere were U.S. flags, pictures of eagles, and the like.

We encountered Karin’s sister, Lily, who was riding a bicycle. She escorted us to our parking space. All along the streets were trailers and prefabricated houses. This was one of the nicer ones:

Another nice house had a cage out on the front lawn with four young raccoons in it.

Karin’s dad’s generation is the third to own the family’s four lots. But the family’s trailer hasn’t been habitable for many years. Karin’s dad and his relations keep waiting for “Aunt Kimberly” to clean out the trailer; meanwhile, they visit the campsite during holidays and weekends, sleeping in tents and using the toilets in the bathhouse at the top of the hill. They sit in camping chairs around their fire pit; and when they tire of that, they take their chairs down to the lake and sit there for a while; and then they go sit around their fire pit again; and so on. There isn’t much to do at Foxwood Hills.

For the children, there are playgrounds, and one can always bathe. The lake itself isn’t too shabby:

It’s possible, also, to stroll along one of the four trailer-lined canals:

But the adults don’t do a lot of strolling or bathing. Mostly they just sit in their camping chairs. It helps that they also have coolers of picnic food and beer and vodka.

Anyway, it was good that Karin & I went there on Sunday and not on Memorial Day, when t-storms and tornadoes swept through the region.

The Carter project

Our Indiana county is the site of this year’s Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, an intensive building campaign by Habitat for Humanity. Later this week, Karin will help to build one of the houses.

I wanted to peek at the Carters, and so, yesterday, Karin & I attended the “project launch,” which was held inside Notre Dame’s basketball gym in front of thousands of people. I thought Jimmy Carter might say a few words about the Bible. Alas, what transpired was an hour of mutual congratulation by the local bigwigs.

I did learn that one of the dignitaries – an architect named LeRoy Troyer, the designer of the main building of the Ark Encounter – had long worked with Habitat for Humanity, and that he’d been inspired by the Amish practice of raising barns.

David Letterman told a few jokes and introduced the Carters. Jimmy Carter said very little. Even so, he was the night’s best speaker. As the proverb has it: when you reach the end zone, you should “act like you’ve been there before”; that was what Jimmy Carter did.