Weekend Roundup

School news: I’m already behind on my reading. And now that I’ve gotten there, I’m sure I’ll probably stay there.

Weather update: Wet this weekend. After a dry winter last year — it pretty much stopped raining after New Year’s 2007 except when I was out riding my bike, is how I remember it — and a dry start to this rainy season, everyone here was thinking drought. But suddenly we’re in the middle of one of our classic mid-winter wet spells, where it rains day after day after day until you have seven or eight days in a row of water gurgling along the curbs or seeping down retaining walls or bubbling up through the sidewalk; or 12 or 13 or 14 days, who knows. I’m sensitive to the fact I have readers further north, where 14 straight days of rain is part of the civic charter. But here, it makes an impression on you. It saturates the ground under the house; you can smell the wet soil in the house when you come in. It causes sump pumps to startle you with gushes of water into the the gutters. It makes you appreciate a light drizzle in place of a downpour, and it makes you look forward to the day a month or two from now when it will seem unnaturally sunny and warm and everything here will be green and growing and on its way to summer brown.

Movie news: Saw “The Weatherman.” From our Netflix queue. Liked it, a lot (come on: Chicago. Weather. Ice in the lake. TV meteorologist continually pelted with fast food. Semi-realistic family dysfunction). I know Nicolas Cage isn’t to everyone’s taste. No matter what he does, and I guess he has a lot to answer for, in my book he’s got a lifetime pass for “Raising Arizona.” And “Moonstruck.”

3 Replies to “Weekend Roundup”

  1. Like I said to you the other day I thought The Weather Man was good (as in well made/acted) but unrelentingly bleak… (I did say that didn’t I?) I mean come on it’s hard to cheer up after a movie when the point of it can be summed up by Michael Caine’s line… something about expectations or some such… looking through the quotes from that movie just made me depressed all over again… oh well…

  2. For reasons I shall not attempt to explain or defend, I saw “Valley Girl” (1983) this weekend, and Nicolas Cage was great in it, too. A better film Cage appeared in from that same year is FF Coppola’s Rumble Fish, based on the S.E. Hinton novel.

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