Saturday Updates

The foot gets a little bit better every day. In the meantime the lawn has gone straight to hell. We had at least six inch high grass in the back. Yesterday we were warming up our little Ryobi electric (it gets the job done) but figured that the gig would probably just re-injure our foot. Then we saw (and heard) a couple of Mexican guys mowing a lawn up the street (we're one of the only men around here who does his own lawn). They had a truck, a trailer and one of those big rig stadium grade riding mowers. We hobbled after them, hand in the air and shouted, 'Aye muchacho! Mowo el Lawno!' $25. 

Word is President Trump will be nominating Judge Amy Coney Barrett. It's a trap! The Dems will slam her Catholicism, they won't be able to help themselves.

Our study of the War of the Rebellion has ground to a halt. We'll pick it back up though, soonish.

Instead we're giving World War 1990: Nederland its final readthrough. Good golly we hate this part. As usual we're finding a typo here, a wrong word choice there. This is why one does the final readthrough. November... Fiiiiirssssst?'

World War 1990: The Final Storm is 40,000 words and is really coming together. We've written all the 'Prime Minister, President Bush on the phone for you, sir' scenes and tried to give each a bit of differentiation. Just how many characters from previous novels must we do updates on? We did the Cubans, the French, Poles....etc...etc.

Seven Stories isn't acting like a new book, but it isn't acting like a flop either. Instead it's selling like a backlister, picked up here and there, which is better than we thought it'd do. At least we're not reduced to blackmailing reader(s) of this blog like we did with Blooms. 

So we watched Midway last night. This is basically a reboot of the 1976 Midway. Meh. The CGI had a huge uncanny valley effect, the battles felt like video games, and the pacing was weird. Dennis Quaid chews the scenery. Woody Harrelson plays himself. 'There's Nick Jonas on a machinegun' is a sentence we never thought we'd say. The characters had weird affectations, like chewing gum, to make them seem more 1940s. Modern man can't do 40's man. American men are too tall, too broad and too athletic. Lemme put it this way; in 1950 Cleveland Indians slugger Earl Averill was described as 'burly' at 5-10, 175. We're 5-11, 255 and dwarfed by many of the guys we see at the gym. We did like Tadanobu Asano's portrayal of Admiral Yamaguchi and we're visibly moved when he chose to go down with the ship. While Midway (2019) might not be a Michael Mann film, it is still a Roland Emerich film. Sorry fellas, Midway (1976) was better. Or are we just middle aged?