Virginia Is For Families

We were off yesterday to see another movie with Academy Award talk swirling around it. This movie is the second one we have seen recently about the emotional crisis surrounding the move of a family member to a nursing home. Julie Christie played a married woman with Alzheimer’s disease. So she is up for the award in the Actress in a Leading Roll category.

And in The Savages Laura Linney is up for the same award for her role as the daughter of someone who needs to be placed in a nursing home.

Allen Page of course is also up for the award but her chances are not great I would say. And in her movie we are dealing with arrivals and not departures. Baby boomers will soon be transfixed with all sorts of ideas about nursing homes as thy approach en masse the realization that there are far fewer than are needed to care for them all.

For this reason alone I suggest the award will head in this direction.

The movie The Savages we found very interesting and entertaining to a degree. There was a scene in an airplane that prompted me to head for the popcorn machine. We have two adults who are confronted with the need to care for the father who left them long ago. And they are surprisingly compassionate.

They grow during the movie. That is one of its most satisfying features. And they manage to resolve the crisis with some help from Medicaid. Their father has nothing so there are no battles over property or savings.

I didn’t enjoy it as much as Juno but it was better by far than Away From Her with Julie Christie.

The other two nominees deserve another post. So here are some videos that I thought were pretty good. My good buddy YouTube is a real help these days.

And here is a review of The Savages in the NY Times if you want to read maybe a real review of the movie before you go see it.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/movies/28sava.html

*

*

*

This is so cool. I have a new toy this morning. And I now understand why YouTube is such a phenomenal deal. For instance Beth and I went to see Juno as we go about seeing Academy Award nominated films. It was a great film and thought provoking at times.

Juno is a beautiful young woman and she reminded me for some reason of Bridget Bardot although she has a very outgoing personality and relies not a bit on her beauty. But maybe I am out in left field (again). Who knows? So now I can add a trailer from the movie and you can decide what position I am playing on the field. And, more importantly, you can decide whether you are interested in the film.

Some readers say that “Nobody talks like this”. Juno’s mind does work very quickly and she has an interesting vocabulary. But she is very intelligent and could conceivably talk this way if she was a real person. She certainly demonstrates her smarts in the movie by unwrapping the perspective parents of her child. She gets to the bottom of their situation with just a few visits and is able to make an informed decision about them. W0uld this happen in real life? Ever? It’s very doubtful. And this is where the movie stretches credibility.

However I think we go to movies expecting to have our credibility stretched. We can always say it is conceivable if not credible. Stranger things have happened and will again within a couple of minutes somewhere in the world. Here’s the trailer.

It is early Saturday morning and I sit here trying to undo some of the mess I have created in the past week. It is not worth getting into the sad details but the whole situation was prompted by the idea of adding YouTube music videos here. And it seemed like many of them would not fit in this three column template. The template is great in most regards so it’s not going anywhere. And then I decided to put the videos over on my other blog. It has only two columns and photos and videos tend to fit better. But going back and forth is not good. It’s just not good. Google would probably wonder what was going on after awhile and start uninviting me to the dance.

So I took a deep breath and went to YouTube prepared to read some instructions and figure out what I could do to fit all these wonderful music videos in Virginia Breeze. And I am happy to say it has worked out pretty well to this point.

It is simply a matter of creating a custom music video player and embedding it in a post. Then (and this is the most important part) I had to change the values for width and height before closing up the post. I quickly learned that once this was done you can never mess around with the post again. If ANYTHING is changed or modified it will blow the thing up. At least that is my experience.

I also was able to create lists of music once I established an account. I now have a list of Andrea Bocelli videos and a list of Jordin Sparks videos for example . And it is fun to add to them and also create new lists. One thing that is really helpful is the fact that you can add music videos to your lists later on and they automatically are added to the custom player in your blog.

So here is the music video I created for Jordin and her new CD. She reports that it has reached platinum status. I have no idea how many copies that would be and maybe will look it up if things ever reach a relaxed status around here. Here is an example of a custom player loaded with music videos. You choose the color and embed it in the Code section of the Write Post section. And then as I said you do everything you need to do. It reminds me of those movies where they set demolition charges and wire everything up. They check it about fifty times and then throw the switch. Except hopefully in this case the explosion does not happen.

If I do make a mistake and need to “Go back in” it’s simple enough to go back to my account and grab the embed code again. Maybe there is a simpler way but I would not know.

So if a word is misspelled and I see it later it’s too bad Jack. Maybe I better make sure right now and then we will try to leave a video player here.

*

More Writing About Blogging

http://davidnotes.com/2008/02/18/technorati-authority-how-to-increase-it-increase-traffic-too/

*

Sometimes you come out on top and sometimes the top hammers your butt. Early this morning I decided to visit downtown Richmond and their nice park on the James River. But it turned out to be very different from last week’s adventure. No wonderful sunrise because there were no clouds. It showed clouds on the Accuweather forecast but they must have detoured around Richmond. Then I started having pains in various parts of my body. The lower back tightened up. On Friday around 2 am I was awakened from a wonderful dream when the muscle in my calf decided to was time to play “Can we make him wake up the neighbors?“. So that was still sore as h*ll. And someone had thoughtfully leaned the portable john at a 45 degree angle against the fence. So pain was my middle name as I went out on the river and watched for the geese. Apparently they were watching for me too because two of them came roaring out of the darkness and within ten feet of where I was standing. It was still pretty dark and no way could I get a shot of them. They were gone in a second. This was the only shot taken during this time that is worth posting.

I call it “Seagull On I-95″ and it’s the story of a seagull that was tired of being pushed around. So he gains several hundred pounds and starts playing “chicken” with truck drivers on the Interstate.

Maybe I do have the flu after all. Or something worse. So after arriving home and going into a fifteen minute rehab program I found Sploofus waiting patiently in the Gmail department. Sploofus for the uninitiated is a trivia game that you can play on the web. It keeps track of your ranking and points. It even has page for each contestant to put a photo and other information. Like just about every other place on the web!

The questions start out easy but they are just setting you up. After about the third question you have to start guessing a lot. Well maybe you don’t but some of us do.

Beth and I are going to the ballet this afternoon to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Zachary and his very beautiful and intelligent girlfriend Ashley. Hopefully we are going to get together soon so I can practice taking photos of actual human beings at close range. Beth and I watched another Academy Award nominated movie last night at home. La Mome is the story of the amazing French singer Edith Piaf. To say she did not have an easy life would be an understatement. Marion Cotillard does a wonderful job of interpreting this role.
Two good movies two nights in a row.

*

*

***