Author: Guy Bergstrom

Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot.

Mother goose calls the cops to save her baby

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Goose with gooslings or ducklings or whatever they are called

A crazy and touching story: mother goose calls the cops for help.

Technically, she pecked at the patrol car door to get help and didn’t dial 911, but that’s only because she dropped her iPhone over Lake Michigan.

Let’s break it down and go deeper.

It’s perfectly believable that a bird would (a) recognize that its baby is in trouble and (b) realize it can’t fix the problem. The leap is in (c) coming up with the idea that a human could help and (d) pecking at the door of a police cruiser. The next step–(e) honking and getting the police officer to follow–is perfectly believable for anyone who’s seen a single episode of Lassi.

So let’s talk about the big, surprising thing, step (c), that a wild animal would think to ask for help from a human.

Here’s why it makes perfect sense: Every day, we’re learning that everyday animals like squirrels and crows are far smarter than we ever suspected. Any mammal or bird is probably smart enough to realize that humans run this place.

To animals, we are hairless space aliens who control the earth, the sky and everything around us.

We’re wizards and gods who travel in magical metal horses when we’re not flying across oceans, sending things into space or staring at tiny screens that let us tap into storehouses of wisdom and technology or communicate with any other human on the planet when we’re not playing Candy Crush.

So if you’re a mother goose, yeah, you’re not going to bug Mr. Squirrel, who’s busy burying nuts and wouldn’t help anyway.

And you wouldn’t honk at the stray dog who always chases you when he’s not peeing on every tree in sight.

In a time of ultimate desperation, to save your baby goosling (or whatever they are called), you’d ask for help from the weird two-legged wizards who run the place.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR does the impossible

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What’s hard? Ice skating uphill. What’s impossible? Flying to the moon in a Cessna or making people love a character who’s about as inherently lovable as AquaMan, which is saying, not lovable at all.

Batman is easy to love. Captain America, not so much.

Never read his comics. Never liked him.

So more than anything else, I’m impressed with how Marvel has turned Captain America into one of the most likeable and enjoyable characters on screen today.

This is just about impossible. Robert Downey, Jr. is an incredible actor playing a great part. Iron Man is far more fun on paper. I’m pretty sure Chris Evans hasn’t been nominated for Oscars and he’s a pretty good bet to never be seen as a Serious Actor.

Yet he’s perfect as Captain America.

Instead of taking a role that could easily come off as self-righteous, he makes it human.

WINTER SOLDIER was the darkest and deepest Marvel movie, yet it still had humor and joy. And of all the Marvel movies, it had the most developed relationships. They didn’t feel like cardboard characters reciting lines before more things exploded.

More than the fights, I remember moments like Cap doing laps around Falcon in the beginning, and driving with Black Widow in a stolen truck. The whole thing was beautifully done.

With CIVIL WAR, the Russo brothers out-did themselves.

It would’ve been easy for a movie with so many Avengers to fall apart from the weight of all those characters. Everybody got their time on screen, with interweaving setups and payoffs.

And the relationships are the strong point. Any film or TV show can have amazing special effects today. But can you make us care about the characters?

I cared about all of them.

And one of the best moments in this film is a kiss, I kid you not. That’s an achievement.

CIVIL WAR brought up big questions that don’t have easy answers. It was surprising, fascinating and fun.

Fun is the most important part. As a huge fan of the Batman movies, I have to say Marvel beats DC in the fun department. Every single Batman movie (except for the George Clooney disaster) has been dark and grim.

WINTER SOLDIER and CIVIL WAR prove that you can mix dark moments, tough choices and betrayals while still having an incredibly fun movie.

It’s an impressive achievement for what’s really an Avengers movie, since everybody except Thor and Hulk are in this thing. And I liked it better than either of the Avengers films.

Verdict: A+. I’ll buy it on Blu-Ray and would happily watch it again tomorrow.

Student makes insanely great 007-style musical opener for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

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007 intro to empire strikes back

Star Wars – Episode V “The Empire Strikes Back” Homage (Title Sequence) from KROFL on Vimeo.

This is a special kind of music video: a blockbuster title sequence song, made famous by the James Bond movies, though you see them with other big-budget monsters.

Except this one was created by college student Kurt Rauffer, who should immediately pack a suitcase, get on a metal tube filled with explosives and fly to Hollywood, where they’ll give him stacks of green paper to work this magic for IRON MAN 4: ROBERT DOWNEY, JR. CHEWS ALL THE SCENERY.

The music is a piece Radiohead recorded for a Bond movie (but wasn’t used), so yeah, it’s perfect.

More perfect: the tone and graphics are spot-on. Couldn’t improve upon this if we tried.

Well played, Kurt the Rauffer, if that’s your real name. Give is moar moar MOAR.

Man leads police on 112 mph chase, crashes, then flees with his pet monkey

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Monkey chase. Photo courtesy of the Burien Police Department.

Monkey chase. Photo courtesy of the Burien Police Department.

Photo courtesy of the Burien Police Department.

This sounds like an Onion story. But it’s not.

As a reformed journalist and unrepentant fan of weird news, this story is classic. Let’s break it down.

Related post, which WordPress put on the front page: How weird news teaches us great storytelling

Continue reading “Man leads police on 112 mph chase, crashes, then flees with his pet monkey” →

Jimmy with the Good Hair

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lemon james

James Corden didn’t forget the funny here. He fully committed: great cinematography, great writing and pacing. The whole package.

That’s the secret to comedy: you have to close your eyes and step off the top of a ten-story building. A little hop off the curb doesn’t do it. Comedy works through extremes.

Stephen Colbert did something similar with his Stephenade bit.

Now, Colbert is a genius, among the best in the world at monologues and interviews. Love him. But this was mildly amusing compared to Corden’s masterpiece.

Why?

Colbert did a sort of SNL-skit version of the idea: let’s take a baseball bat and smash things in slow motion. It was a quick, one-trick thing, and just like a SNL skit, taking it longer wouldn’t work.

Corden went big. You can tell they put time and effort into it. You or I could’ve grabbed a bat and smashed things like Colbert.

Jimmy Fallon fully committed, too, with his frame-by-frame version of Too Much Time on My Hands by Styx.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Here’s the original. I hit play on both and with only a little fiddling with pause & restart, they matched up exactly.

These two late-night comics prove that the music video isn’t dead–and that comedy doesn’t have to involve f-bombs and gross-out jokes.

Things I’m selling that you should buy and such

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MAGIC BREADMAKER

You put water and wheat-powder stuff inside, push a button to use the Force, then POOF, out comes bread.

Sort of like this:

rey makes bread

This breadmaker is in a nice, white box with all kinds of buttons.

Not included: Destroyed AT-AT shelter.

Asking price: Five bucks or one-quarter portion.

DOG HOUSE

It’s cedar, medium-sized and fancy, while our Hound of the Baskervilles is black, large and not fancy at all.

If you don’t have a destroyed AT-AT handy as a shelter, this will do nicely, as long as you’re under 5’3″.

Once I finished building it, our dog sniffed at the treats inside, drank from the water bowl and ran off to chew on sticks and chase rabbits. He never entered it again.

Later, he explained to me that the whole point of being outside is to be outside, rain or sun, and that being rained on is good for you sometimes. It makes you appreciate the sunshine. He also said that kibbles are for cats and that when we’re gone, he sits on every chair in the house, not because he doesn’t know it’s wrong, but because rebellion is good for the soul.

Not included: Dog.

Asking price: An old Jiffy Peanut Butter jar of full of pennies, nickels and a couple of quarters.

FOUR REPORTER NOTEBOOKS STOLEN FROM THE NEWSROOM

I worked at a dying newspaper before working at dying newspapers was cool.

When the death spiral got fast and tight, they started rationing rolls of film, pens and reporter notebooks.

Yeah, they rationed notebooks. If you run out of paper while covering a story, hey, write on your forearm. It’s blank.

The second the supply cabinet got restocked, starving reporters rioted to grab all the film, pens and notebooks.

I still have enough reporter notebooks to roof a ranch-style house. They’re just the right size to put in your jacket pocket. Love ’em.

Not included: Stories for dying newspapers or rolls of film. Sorry. Threw the film out. Nobody even develops film anymore.

Asking price: A moleskin notebook that’s too nice for you to actually use, so you keep on writing on the back of envelopes to save the moleskin for the deepest of deep thoughts.

TWO SANSA MP3 PLAYERS

These are miniature technological wonders, tiny black boxes perfect for playing your favorite songs stolen from the interwebs, now that the only albums people buy are ones made of vintage vinyl and hoarded by bearded hipsters.

If you are not a bearded hipster, load these things up with your favorite songs for when you put on shorts and run around the neighborhood despite having two Hondas and a bicycle you never ride.

If you lose a player, who cares, because you have a spare with the SAME SONGS.

Actually included: Random music. Charge these up and yeah, there’s music on them. I have no idea whether this was during my Lenny Kravitz phase or not. Could be a bunch of Toad the Wet Sprocket.

Asking price: Two random CD’s you’ll never use again. I’m making a shiny roof for a bat house.

ONE RANDOM BOX FROM MY GARAGE

I’ve lived in NY, WA, Germany, the Netherlands, the Hinterlands, NY again, Spokaloo, Bellingham, Tacoma and now Monte—and every time I packed up to move, most things went into boxes that got transferred from one garage to another without anybody opening them. I paid attention during Greek Lit about that whole Pandora thing. You do NOT open boxes.

Whenever the garage door closes, these boxes put on Barry White songs and start multiplying.

Not included: A single clue as to what’s in the box.

Asking price: A random box from your garage, or enough C4 to atomize at least 45 boxes of stuff I’ll never look at again.

DIGITAL CAMERA

Five years ago, this was hot stuff. Small. Digital. Stick it in your pocket while you travel the world.

This is still the perfect camera for somebody learning to shoot or a starving college kid who realizes that even the smartest smart phone can’t zoom worth a damn.

Not included: Photos. You have to shoot them. Turn the dial to a setting you pretend to understand, frame the shot and push the button.

Asking price: Drive by with your windows down and I’ll happily Russel Wilson this thing into the soft cushions of your back seat.

An ode to Joy (the Cat)

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Joy the Cat inspecting alien technology.

Joy the Cat inspecting alien technology.

Joy the Cat inspecting alien technology.

Joy will never read this, because she skipped school all of her 18 years and the authorities never caught her for truancy. SHE WAS TOO FAST. But I wanted to write it, to have something about her that lasts, even if it’s simply floating on the interwebs.

Joy was always different.

When our son was born, the other two cats fled in terror and stayed in the basement for a month.

Joy stood guard, like a dog, and hissed at people who got too close while he was sleeping. She’d patrol outside his bedroom door, even when it was closed.

Strangers also made our other cats hide. But they were catnip to Joy, who’d walk right up to meow hello and meet everybody.

She was a good a noble cat, always playful, happy to cuddle, and only a smidge bitey if you tried to give her a bath.

I’ve had dogs, cats, salamanders, a snapping turtle and a spider as pets. Joy is one of my favorites.

So we have to put her down today, since she’s got pancreatic cancer. It’s time. She can’t walk much or take care of herself anymore.

There’s an old saying that every kid should have a dog or a cat. That pets are good for kids. They don’t judge you. If you’ve had an epically bad day, and open the front door to see a dog who’s insanely happy to see you, it can’t help to make you feel better.

Put a dog in every office and stress levels would drop like a rock. Joy was the same way.

Pets are good for kids for another reason: they teach you about life. How to take care of a kitten or puppy, how to train them, clean up their accidents, feed them regularly, take them on walks and to the vet. It’s almost training to be a mom or dad.

And finally, having pets teaches you how to let a loved one go when they die.

That’s an important part. Everybody needs to learn how to handle death, how to grieve. I’ve buried a lot of pets and lost a lot of grandparents and relatives. It’s never easy. But you learn to treasure each hour of every day, even it’s just sitting on a couch discovering fun new BBC shows with a cat purring on your tummy.

Thank you, Joy—you mattered, and you’ll be missed.

The Red Pen of Doom takes on GO SET A WATCHMAN by Harper Lee

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go set a watchman

To Kill A Mockingbird is a classic novel that turned into an amazing film.

So when news broke that Harper Lee, who never published another novel, was coming out with a book-like object, and this book-like object would be a sequel to her big hit—well, that was huge.

It was also controversial, with sources saying Harper Lee never intended this to get published, that it was a draft, with the same characters later showing up in To Kill a Mocking Bird.

So here’s the first page, as printed on dead trees, and I allowed the last paragraph to actually finish instead of ending mid-sentence with “folding herself up” and such.

For previous posts bleeding red all over the first page of a novel, click away with your mousity mouse while enjoying some chocolate mousse:

The Red Pen of Doom impales FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

The Red Pen of Doom guts THE NOTEBOOK

The Red Pen of Doom puts a stake through TWILIGHT

The Red Pen of Doom murders THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand

The Red Pen of Doom harpoons MOBY DICK by Herman Melville

The Red Pen of Doom destroys FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen

GO SET A WATCHMAN

Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched (We already know she’s looking and watching, so these words get slain.) The last of Georgia’s hills receded and the red earth appeared, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw (Looked, watched and saw all in the first paragraph, three shining beacons of bad writing, so let’s kill the last two.) her at the first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose.

Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth annual trip home. (Now we go back in time for backstory, which is Boring and must die.) For one thing, she had the life scared out of her the last time she was on a plane: the pilot elected to fly through a tornado. (This would have been good in the present tense, as an exciting start to the novel: “So I’m flying through this tornado, wishing I’d taken the train.” Nope.) For another thing, flying home meant her father rising at three in the morning, driving a hundred miles to meet her in Mobile, and doing a full day’s work afterwards: he was seventy-two now and this was no longer fair. (More exposition and backstory without the barest hint of conflict.)

She was glad she had decided to go by train. Trains had changed since her childhood, and the novelty of the experience amused her: a fat genie of a porter materialized when she pressed a button on a wall; at her bidding a stainless steel washbasin popped out of another wall, and there was a john one could prop one’s feet on. (Nice imagery in the last line.) She resolved not to be intimidated by several messages stenciled around her compartment – a roomette, they called it – but when she went to bed the night before, she succeeded in folding herself up into the wall because she had ignored an injunction to PULL THIS LEVER DOWN OVER BRACKETS, a situation remedied by the porter to her embarrassment, as her habit was to sleep only in pajama tops.

End of Page 1

Notes from The Red Pen of Doom:

You don’t need Michael Bay explosions on every page, especially when we’re talking about lit-rah-sure.

But you do need problems. Get your hero up a tree, throw rocks at them and let them find a way down. 

Jean Louise Finch (Scout) doesn’t get up a tree on this page one. There are no rocks aimed at her head, no suspense or trouble at all, unless you count the porter possibly walking in on Scout wearing only her pajama tops, though that sort of situation belongs more in a book with Fabio on the cover. 

This page one is all description, exposition and backstory.

Later in the book, we learn our heroine is traveling by train to meet the man she’s being pushed into marrying. That’s a real conflict. Why not foreshadow that?

Put her back on a plane instead of the comfortable train, and give us that tornado again, with a first line about Scout gripping the arms of her chair as the pilot headed insanely through the edge of a tornado and she headed insanely back home to a marriage she didn’t want.

Give us something. Anything. 

Because I’m feeling kind, I didn’t get into the brutal reviews of this novel, ones by people who pay the mortgage by reading and reviewing book-like objects of all sorts, or the whole controversial shebang about changing Atticus Finch from an iconic hero into a villain who’s sympathetic to the KKK.

I’m simply going after the first page, and the only job of a page one page is to make readers turn to page two, then page three and finally page 288 or even, if it’s a Stephen King doorstopper, page 1,104.

This first page fails at that job. I have no interest in hearing more about the interior décor of this train, no desire to see more of the scenery flashing by and no hope that this story will get any more interesting as it chugs along.

Verdict: Put it to rest, gently, far from the spot of honor on the library shelf for To Kill a Mockingbird.

BATMAN VS SUPERMAN is 10 times better than I expected

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After hearing about all the reviews, I expected Batman vs Superman to stink up the joint, to be Gigli with capes and masks, somehow worse that George Clooney’s turn as Bruce Wayne–which would be very hard to top.

Nope.

I enjoyed it far, far more than Avengers 2: James Spader Chews Up the Scenery, But Never Makes You Care.

In fact, it’s better than the last of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, which I saw in the theater and own on Blu-Ray with the rest. Batman Begins is actually the most solid and rewatchable of the Nolan’s films.

The Dark Knight has an amazing beginning, and the first five scenes with Heath Ledger rock, but it gets weird toward the end with the random Wayne employee trying to out Batman and the two ferries that are supposed to blow each other up. Meh.

The acid test for any movie is very simple. Would you pay cash money to see it in the theater again? I’ll go see Batfleck in the theaters at least one more time, then buy it on Blu-Ray.

Gal Gadot rocks as Wonder Woman, setting up that solo movie. Batfleck reportedly wrote a script for the solo Batman film he may direct. Aquaman was, for the first time in history, not entirely lame. And I’m crazy stoked for Suicide Squad, which has the best trailer in the history of trailers that don’t feature wheels.

Batman vs Superman performs a minor miracle: though I love Bats and dislike Supes, it made me feel for Superman during their fight. Believe me, this is just about impossible, and Zack Snyder pulled that off.

So yeah, the movie worked, both as a fun time and as a setup for the whole DC Universe to compete with the Marvel Machine to see who can gather the most dollars from us before the Antarctic Ice Sheet melts.

Verdict: Go see it in the theater with popcorn and such.