I hit Price Chopper and the Bakery while I was downtown. I actually got breakfast at the Bakery this morning and picked up some GCs there, in addition to my weekly order of Boar’s Head deli meat.
I visited mom, did two loads of laundry, hand-washed dishes, went for a couple walks with Pip and the dogs, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, and scooped kitty litter. I stopped at Stewart’s on the way home from mom’s (for gas and milk). I mailed a couple more cards at the Post Office and stopped at the library to pick up a book.
I picked up the poinsettia that I ordered from the school band to support Ireland (Sister A dropped it off at mom’s) and am on a new candle scent for the holiday, pine instead of cookies. *g*
I did not have to cook supper because tonight was the garage Christmas dinner at The Bear’s, which is an awesome restaurant. We’ve been going there for years. The meal is served family style, but starts with an appetizer course and a soup or salad course, and is followed by dessert. We get a platter of prime rib (with potatoes and baby carrots) and a platter of Chateaubriand. (I prefer the prime rib.) [And there are plenty of leftovers for people to take home, so I won't have to cook tomorrow, either!]
I started reading Killing Floor.
Temps started out at 23.0(F) (and went down to 21.7 before I left the house) and reached 36.1 (that I saw). It was pretty nice for the drive to the restaurant.
Didn't I tell you," answered Mr Beaver, "that she'd made it always winter and never Christmas? Didn't I tell you? Well come and see!"
And then they were all at the top and did see. It was a sledge and it was reindeer with bells on their harness. But they were far bigger than the Witch's reindeer and they were not white but brown. And on the sledege sat a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him. He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as hollyberries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest. Everyone knew him because, though you see people of his sort only in Narnia, you see pictures of them and hear them talked about even in our world - the world on this side of the wardrobe door. But when you really see them in Narnia it's rather different. Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly. But now that the childred actually stood looking at him they didn't find it quite like that. He was so big and so glad and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt glad but also solemn.
Aka the third Benoit Blanc mystery plotted and directed by Rian Johnson. Now, each of these movies has a main character who is not Blanc whose fate and/or motivation to solve the mystery is at the heart of the story - Martha in Knives Out and Helen in Glass Onion respectively - and in this case it's Father Jud, played (well and movingly) by Josh O'Connor. In each case, the movie's structure harks back to the classic age of detective mysteries with various twists and turns and a grand denouemonet while also commenting on the here and now in its social satire. If Glass Onion among other things went for the tech bros and the self satisfied "disruptors", Wake up, Dead Man! is very much about the US under the Orange Menace despite his name not mentioned even once. And lo and behold - it even offers hope. And hey, there is even a Star Wars gag. (Just for the record, I still stand by The Last Jedi being the only one of the sequel movies which actually tries to do something new and creative with the franchise. #RianJohnsonwasRight . The gag has nothing to do with that at all, though.)
adjective: (literary) everlasting; of never-ending durationeternal
Examples:
Must we imagine Sisyphus to be happy, as Albert Camus proposed? Or would a sempiternal - an eternal, unchanging - life ultimately lack any purpose? (Johanna Thomas-Corr, Help! I’m trapped in Groundhog Day, the novel, The Times, April 2025)
Fires raged and floods drove through streets and houses as the planet became more and more inimical to human life. The sempiternal nurdles, indestructible, swayed on and under the surface of the sea. (A S Byatt, Sea Story, The Guardian, March 2013)
I certainly didn't suspect a number of things: that I'd be soundly beaten by my teenage son; that shortly thereafter I'd become obsessed with table tennis; that my obsession would fuel a grueling initiation that, in a sense, is still going on today; that the sport itself would reacquaint me with some eternal principles of the Perennial Philosophy and afford me new glimpses of sempiternal wisdom; that it would teach me so much about myself, our human condition, and life; and that, finally, in 'humble' table tennis I'd be looking for the living presence that informs the phenomenal world. (Guido Mina Di Sospiro, The Metaphysics of Ping Pong)
A living shell in which its tenant lay dormant, her subjective will to live alone kept this woman going her sempiternal rounds of monotony. (Louis Joseph Vance, Joan Thursday)
He wrote: "Isn't that lovely and tear-drawing? true and tender and sempiternal?" And then he copied out the whole song, in case I should chance not to have the text at hand. (Baron Hallam Tennyson Tennyson, Tennyson and his friends)
Origin: 'eternal and unchanging, perpetual, everlasting, having no end,' early 15c, from Old French sempiternel 'eternal, everlasting' (13c) or directly from Medieval Latin sempiternalis, from Latin sempiternus 'everlasting, perpetual, continual,' from semper 'always, ever'. The earlier Middle English adjective was sempitern (late 14c) from Old French sempiterne and Latin sempiternus. (Online Etymology Dictionary)
Despite their similarities, sempiternal and eternal come from different roots. Sempiternal is derived from the Late Latin sempiternalis and ultimately from semper, Latin for 'always.' Eternal, on the other hand, is derived, by way of Middle French and Middle English, from the Late Latin aeternalis and ultimately from aevum, Latin for 'age' or 'eternity.' Sempiternal is much less common than eternal, but some writers have found it useful. 19th-century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, wrote, 'The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, … to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why….' (Merriam-Webster)
I tried to write an intro for this, but all I can do is gesture incoherently. No, I wasn't a Baldy, I wasn't a skinhead, but the milieu affected my life for Reasons. If you watch this documentary it may give you a better understanding of (some of) what made Minneapolis in the 80s what it was. Or maybe you were there too, and this will be an interesting tour of byegone days.
I really want to get together and share stories of those times. For now, here, have a pretty good documentary:
They then factored in other variables that can affect life expectancy, including physical inactivity, employment status, and educational level. The association between insufficient sleep and lower life expectancy still held. Only smoking had a stronger link.
Good, adequate sleep is a survival need. Modern society often sabotages it.
However, this study suggests that banking sleep on weekends can mitigate the effects of lost sleep during the week. I used to do that in school, and people said it didn't work, but it certainly helped my energy level. It may be a trick that some but not all bodies can do.
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day (merriamwebster_feed) wrote2025-12-1412:00 am
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 14, 2025 is:
multitudinous • \mul-tuh-TOO-duh-nus\ • adjective
Multitudinous is a formal word with meanings that relate to multitudes. It can mean “existing in a great multitude”—that is, “very many”; or “including a multitude of individuals”; or “existing in or consisting of innumerable elements or aspects.”
// The two old friends reminisced about the multitudinous ways in which their lives had changed.
// The author’s appearance is expected to attract a multitudinous gathering that will fill the auditorium.
“Launched as Holton’s artistic inquiry into his own Chinese heritage, the project has evolved into a profound examination of family dynamics, migration, and cultural hybridity in contemporary New York, where the American identity is multitudinous.” — Natasha Gural, Forbes, 11 June 2025
Did you know?
“I am large, I contain multitudes.” So wrote Walt Whitman in his most celebrated poem, “Song of Myself.” He was expressing his ability to hold within himself contradictory statements, facets, opinions, beliefs, etc. Another, if less poetic, way of saying “I contain multitudes” might be “I am multitudinous,” using the sense of that five-syllable word meaning “existing in or consisting of innumerable elements or aspects.” Multitudinous doesn’t have a lot of meanings—three to be exact—but each one concerns, well, a lot. In addition to serving Whitmanesque purposes as noted above, multitudinous is the kind of highly expressive word that you can rely upon when you want something a little more emphatic than plain old numerous, as in “multitudinous possibilities.” Lastly, its original sense—still in use today—is a synonym of populous meaning “including a multitude of individuals,” as in “the multitudinous city.”
Stormaggedon was less than the snow that canceled class last week and no one made a stink about that one. I'm not complaining mind you. I have enough snow to look pretty without being obnoxious. No power loss and no one is complaining about that.
I finished the last of the grading and the gradebook is done. Me being questioned by the students is not. eye roll.
Most of the day was spent editing fandomtrees which took longer than it should have but two of the stories are posted. I have more editing to do and then back to writing more.
I started wrapping gifts. Didn't get far. I am...not too happy with myself. I need in all seriousness to make that file I was talking about. On the other hand 2 people I have enough for their birthdays next year too. Now I have to decide how to distribute things.
Tomorrow is supposed to be brutally cold here. So far Rocket seems content to be inside.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the greatest adventure films of all time — if not the greatest adventure film of all time, full stop — but here nearly 45 years after its release, it’s also a hugely interesting cultural artifact. When it was first made it was explicitly an act of nostalgia, a throwback to the serial adventures of the 30s and 40s, where every 20-minute installment ended on a cliffhanger to drag you back to the theater the next week to find out what happened. Filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg kept the 20-minute cliffhangers, they just strung them along into a two-hour movie. Into that movie they poured a hero who discovered ancient treasures, beat up Nazis, wooed pretty women who had spunk, and even had a few supernatural events occur, because of course they would, if you’re pilfering the storage locker of God, what do you expect would happen?
It was everything you could want in an old-timey adventure but more — “more” in this case being a decent budget ($20 million, not extravagant by 1980s standards but more than any Republic serial ever got), a rising star in Harrison Ford instead of whatever second-order actor could be cheaply assigned by the studio, and two of the hottest young filmmakers in Hollywood, Spielberg and Lucas (three if you counted Philip Kaufman, who co-wrote the story with them). Spielberg had just flubbed with 1941, so there was some minor tarnish there, but only minor, and Lucas, well. When you have a calling card like Star Wars (followed up by The Empire Strikes Back, which went out to theaters almost exactly the same time as Raiders started principal photography), you have some credibility to burn.
Spielberg and Lucas did not burn their credibility. Raiders was the smash of 1981, the number one movie of the year by a considerable margin, and a massive cultural event that might have been even bigger than it was, had its filmmakers not wedged it between a Star Wars installment and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. We were not starved for absolutely ridiculously huge blockbuster entertainments in the early 1980s, I tell you what. Spielberg and Lucas were cottage industries in of themselves.
45 years on is actually a really good time to think about Raiders of the Lost Ark, because 45 years prior to its release, 1936, was the start of a golden age of movie serials: Universal’s Flash Gordon made its debut and was an instant serialized smash, becoming Universal’s second biggest hit of the year, while Republic Pictures jammed out Darkest Africa and Undersea Kingdom, both with “exotic” locales and/or wild fantasy elements.
By the time 1981 had rolled around, however, serials were very old news. Some were re-edited and repackaged as single films that lived a weird afterlife in local TV channel movie slots, but most were just gone. Flash Gordon had enough cultural cachet that in the wake of Star Wars, Universal decided to make a big budget movie with the character, but not enough cultural cachet to have that movie actually be a hit (Lucas, who had wanted to do a Flash Gordon movie before making Star Wars, may have dodged a bullet).
The serial, as a format, was long dead before Spielberg and Lucas mined its corpse in Raiders, killed by television, a wholesale change in film distribution and theater ownership, and the end of the studio system that give film studios actors under contract that they could plug into these mini-movies at will. Raiders brought back the vibe of serials, but it also upgraded everything about it on the technical and filmmaking side, from story to special effects. No serial was ever as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark. They didn’t have to be; they were mostly filler in a whole program that also included a newsreel, a cartoon, a b-movie and a feature film. Raiders was the main course. It was always meant to be the elevated form of the serial, and was.
And now, how does Raiders fit in to the modern landscape? Well, like the serials at the other end of this timeline, its moment has run its course. The most obvious sign of this was the 2023 installment of the series, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, being the lowest-grossing installment of the series even without factoring for inflation (when you do factor for inflation… ooooof). The film also cost $350 million to make, and was the first of the series not to make a profit at the box office. There are lots of reasons for this, not the least of which was that an octogenarian action hero strained credulity, no matter how much one may love Harrison Ford in the role.
But a lot of it is simply that the world is a different place than it was. An American archeologist grabbing artifacts from their native soil plays a lot differently in 2025 than in 1981, and “it belongs in a museum!” is not the rallying cry it once was. Not to mention that Dr. Jones’ method of procurement for many of these objects is, shall we say, highly unorthodox and possibly ethically suspect. These facts were famously lampooned in a classic McSweeney’s article from 2006, in which Dr. Jones has learned that he has been denied tenure, for the reasons above, and the fact that he has “has failed to complete even one uninterrupted semester of instruction.” Even in our current new and regrettably stupid era of American Exceptionalism, Dr. Jones, his methods and his goals, are now relics.
(Plus, Raiders a little and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, rather a lot, trade in the casual racism of the era, in a way that ranges from mildly annoying to outright ugly. The 80s! What a time to be alive!)
If anything saves Raiders from this latter-day change in the opinions regarding respectable archaeology (and there will be differing opinions about this), it’s the fact that in this movie, and in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, easily the best of the sequels, his actions are at least keeping important and supernaturally-charged ancient objects out of the hands of the damn Nazis, who want them to get a mystical buff to their world-conquering plans. There has never been a bad time to punch a Nazi at any point in the last century, and, alas, this is true even and especially now. Say what you will about his methods and modes of science, but when it comes to punching Nazis, Indiana Jones has no peer.
Time may have passed on Indiana Jones for various reasons, but Raiders of the Lost Ark remains a masterclass in adventure film making. You can follow the action, for one thing — the Michael Bay style of rapid-fire cutting to give action a cocaine-snort boost is still a decade and a half in the future, and very few directors are or have been as good at coherent action and fighting than Spielberg. His battles are physical! And followable! And that makes them enjoyable to watch, rather than exhausting or disorienting, or both. Are there better action directors than Spielberg? I mean, allow me to pull John Woo, for one, from behind the arras. But if you have to deploy John Woo in this sort of argument, you’re already at an exceptionally top-tier level of action competence.
Even then, Raiders, I have to say, outclasses nearly every other action film across all sorts of levels of filmmaking. It’s not just Spielberg working here. It’s Spielberg and Lucas and John Williams and Philip Kaufmann and Lawrence Kasdan and Ben Burtt and Richard Edlund and so on. Raiders is a murderer’s row of filmmakers, all at the top of their game. The movie was nominated for eight Oscars, won four, and was given another for special achievement in sound effects editing. I would argue that you might have to wait for The Lord of the Rings for another film (taking them all as a single film, as they were shot at the same time and shared most of their cast and crew) to get at that level. And The Lord of the Rings was a very very very different sort of adventure film.
One final thing to love about Raiders: Indiana Jones is our square-jawed hero, who is (by the standards of the time the movies are set, and the time the movies are filmed) upright and outstanding… but he also gets the shit kicked out of him a whole bunch. In Raiders and the rest of the series, he bruises, he bleeds, he aches and he limps. He punches the Nazis, yes, but the Nazis sure as hell punch back (he just ends up punching them more). There’s a limit to this because Indiana Jones has to survive every adventure, sure. But in Raiders and in the other films, Spielberg and other folks crafting the stories aren’t afraid to take him right up to the line. If Indiana Jones were real, he would have a massive case of PTSD, and by the time of the final film in the series, he probably wouldn’t be able to walk.
I am a relic of the 80s as much as Raiders of the Lost Ark, and while I acknowledge how storytelling has changed between now and then, as a storytelling vehicle, in many ways it is still peerless and endlessly watchable. It’s distilled the best parts of movie serials from the past, and still has lessons to teach the moviemakers of today in terms of pacing and plot and technique.
I don’t want today’s filmmakers to make another Raiders of the Lost Ark. I want them to look at it and do what Lucas and Spielberg did when they looked at the serials that inspired it: Take all the things are amazing about it, and use today’s tech and techniques to make something that blows the minds of the audience of today.
surgical recovery continues apace. The incision has mostly healed, although the knot of dissolving stitches at one end got caught when I was trying to clean it and pulled it slightly open, so I've now cut off the knot, put a fancy steri-strip over it to hold it together, and a little circular sticking plaster over that. Internals still noticeably sore, externals are itchy; have been putting 'scar therapy gel' on which seems to help (it was in the cupboard; I do not know what any of the ingredients are). I see the surgeon on Tuesday for follow up.
reviewers comments for my candidacy proposal are in (received late on Friday). I'm not actually sure what the next step is -- I'll work it out tomorrow. I think it said 'no edits' which is a surprise, given that I have been reading and annotating weekly since submitting, and there are a lot of 'this could be clearer' and 'what did you mean here?' notes. Also, I found another answer to one of the reviewers questions from the presentation about why books and not films/tv, which is that I'm hoping to get a wider range of cultural influences (and I have a paper from Italy in which almost all of the TV/movies that the kids reported was from the USA, which very much supports my 'this would be an issue' argument)
there was an HDR and supervisors lunch run by the school I'm in on Monday. This was very interesting and I met a lot of people. Including one who I was unsurprised to discover is an acquaintance of Youngest. Very queer (not very surprising) and neurodiverse (should not have been surprising) bunch that I met.
weather has been Warm. To the point that artisanat has been volunteering to put the air-con on.
There have been some changes to the mix of South Asian grocers on High Road. One of the two north of Bunnings has gone (and the one still there no longer stocks palak paneer in their shelf-stable preprepared meals; not the regular nor the tofu/vegan option. They do, however, still have some vegan options). There is a new one that is further south than the ones I was aware of -- nearly to where the petrol station is. To the point that it is still so new that not all the shelves are stocked; we couldn't find the box meals there at all, but we had to rush because we ran out of time. Thus there are still three that I'm aware of.
Monday's rehearsal I went with the intention to play pizzicato, which was mostly fine, but I got there to discover the C string broken (spare was at home) so had to transpose some of the work up an octave, which ah, that needs practice. As does one of the sections we hadn't got to that I'd failed to realise has a lot of fast notes.
craft has stalled
reading - one of these week's I'll get around to doing another reading post. Over on the Book Club of Habitica Discord I've joined the TBR Bingo challenge for Dec/Jan and set myself a bingo card of 16 books from my 'paused' list. So far, I've finished 1, which is progress but not as fast as I want.
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