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This throwback Thursday reached into the primordial ooze of that distant date Oct 29, 2023, when my sweetie-wife and I went for our weekly trip to the San Diego Zoo.

This is a Bee Eater and in its beak is a bee, a Carpenter Bee I think but I can’t be sure as it wasn’t singing, We’ve Only Just Begun.

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Last night I learned that a friend I had known for nearly 40 years died. Brian’s passing was a not a shock or a surprise but hurts just the same. Last year he was tragically struck with a degenerative neurological disease that robbed him of motor control and the ability to speak. Such diseases rarely allow for people live very long.

Brian was a good and close friend. We had played many a board and card game together, attended several science-fiction conventions, including the one where I met my sweetie-wife, and we even wrote together. Two feature film scripts, a thriller and a period adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Of course, the script went nowhere but I learned from them, and I learned from Brian. A piece of advice that he passed on I carry still in writing characters stricken with grief. People don’t cry, they try to not cry. That is so true so often and trying to capture that struggled of someone trying so hard to not cry and failing makes such moments more powerful.

He was a historian by education and without a doubt I learned so much from knowing him. Before he moved away and before the damned disease, we often went to movies together, though there was a run where every film he picked for us to go to turned out to be a stinker.  When I was laid up for two weeks in the 90s recovering from surgery, he came over every day with a fresh VHS tape and we watched them together,

He was not a perfect friend, no one is, and I learned all too early in life that in the end death comes for us all, but he will be missed.

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Tropical Storm Hilary has swept over San Diego on its way north towards Idaho and here’s the first impression report for my family and friends.

While throughout the country there have been serious effects from so much rain and wind, flooding, downed trees, and electrical outages here and there, overall, it looks as if the county has weathered the storm well and for myself and my sweetie-wife it was super easy, barely an inconvenience.

At our condo we suffered no interruption in the power and very little damage around the complex. at least one major branch has come down off one of the trees, landing on a van but aside from that we have not seen serious damage. During the early evening the internet services might have suffered a little lag but then again that could have been Netflix’s servers producing the glitching as we watched They Cloned Tyrone. Later in the night I watched Star Tek: Strange New Worlds and witnessed no issues with the stream.

It is now nearly eight o’clock in the morning on August 21st and I have finished my preparations to go into work. Aside from rain swept streets and road closures that are not on my commute I expect today to proceed in a fairly typical manner.

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Computer and email issues this morning so this post will be brief.

Wednesday night I had a dream that in itself was quite pleasant but upon awakening was very depressing.

I dreamt I visited a friend of mine who due to health issues is now in an assisted living facility. In the dream we talked, nothing of any terrible importance, just friends chatting.

Then I awoke.

It took the customary few seconds to sort out reality from the dream and as that process played out, I became depressed.

You see my friend is in an assisted living facility suffering from a degenerative neurological illness that gas robbed him of many motor functions including the ability to speak. This is not something one recovers from and that simple dream, sitting and chatting, is quite impossible.

It is not surprising that people flee from reality when reality is so often cold and cruel.

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While I certainly enjoy Christopher Nolan films and consider many to be truly great, I would not count myself as a Nolan Fanboy. Some of his films are simply too flawed for my tastes, with Interstellar far too cynical to the point that it confuses cynicism for wisdom and Following has a plot that in my opinion is less credible than Tenant.

That said the three-hour opus Oppenheimer dramatizing the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer from University through his later years is a magnificent piece of cinema and an outstanding
achievement. The runtime passed for me quickly as the film propulsive plot, and not entirely about the development of an implosion plutonium device, is always compelling and never without character driven human drama. I have watched movie less than half-as long that felt twice the runtime.

Robert Oppenheimer [Oppie] played by Cillian Murphy, a complex man driven equally by ego and curiosity, is most remember as the project head for the Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the first functional, practical atomic weapon. The film touches on the major elements and challenges of Oppie’s life, his association with Communists before the war and during the first ‘Red Scare,’ his elevation to a media figure for his work in the Atomic bomb project, his philandering and affairs including with the tragic Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and his hounding from government programs for being a suspected communist.

In a film that is packed with star power, the story is principally carried by two performances, Murphy’s as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr Lewis Strauss as the story’s antagonist. Much of the film is told with the Strauss’s confirmation as Secretary of Commerce hearings acting as both as a framing device and tool to jump to specific points in the Strauss/Oppenheimer feud.

Photographed beautifully by Nolan’s long-time cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema Oppenheimer presents a lush, lavish, and sweeping frame well encompassing Hoytema’s talents and Nolan’s passion for large format cameras.

Oppenheimer, Nolan’s first feature for his new home at Universal Studios, is an achievement in scope, scale, and humanity that the filmmaker has been building towards for decades, and a movie well-deserving of as theatrical viewing.

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This blog has been quiescent for several days because this author has been battling the worst flu/cold he has suffered in something like 15 years.

Thursday July 6th symptoms began with a nasty cough that made it seem like tiny workmen with sandpaper were busily resurfacing by brachia. I managed to get to my day job on the 7th and after that I was down and out.

Last week was a terrible collage of coughing, hacking, and sweating. I managed to return to work on Friday and even this weekend had far more coughing than I would have cared for.

Now that the worst is behind me, I hope to return to work on my novel and perhaps even make it out to a film.