Miraclo Miles

    A reminder that I'm part of The Consortium of Seven , a group blog where each of us has a day of the week for a new post.  I have Fridays there, and an at least initial topic of tv and movies, while the other six are generally doing more interesting things with their spaces.    I'm trying to get my blogging muscles back, while trying to leave facebook mostly behind, save for the small things it's good for. Any (positive) traffic and comments would be appreciated, both here on the slowly-reviving Miraclo Miles, and on the group blog.   Thanks.

  Y eah, this is one of those things that apparently reached Cultural Touchstone or Landmark status along the way that I've simply never seen. It's not a judgement, just a matter of opportunity and interest never being in the same place at the same time. I also know that much of it is a matter of deep nostalgia for the fans, so it's highly unlikely I'd ever hold any of these in anything approaching the regard their general fanbases do. Much of it's that I can't re-convert myself to 8 years old before taking it in, and so make it a more formative experience.    It's not a competition, but I do know that giving a tepid "it's pretty good" reaction to something someone else has on a personal pedestal is not a good place to be. People seem to take it almost as a personal attack. A secular blasphemy. I was reminded of that when I finally got around to seeing Into The Spider-verse, which came out December of last year, and I made the social e...

    I've at least momentarily gotten into a mindset of working ahead on various things. Of trying to get things done and lined up weeks, months and even longer before they're to be presented or used.     Some of these habits were ones I started to develop within weeks of my wife's sudden and unexpected death back in 2010. A combination of factors, including her deteriorating health over most of two decades, leading to formal disability, and the should-be-criminal, predatory, for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, had gradually dug me into a pit of debt despite my being steadily employed and technically insured all along.  I needed to dig in and get serious about my finances, and part of that was getting into the habit of allocating resources to my best advantage, and getting ahead of any new and recurring debt. I want to stress that this really wasn't possible back when we were having to deal with all of the ongoing expenses due to her...

    Released eighty (80!) years ago today, on October 6th 1939     A rags to riches story, and so something very welcome during the era of the Great Depression.     A bit of topicality modern viewers are likely to miss: Late in the film Moe tells Curly to wish for quintuplets, and he tells him that honeymooning in Canada is how to make it come true. These are references to the then extremely famous, Canada-born Dionne quintuplets , two of whom are reportedly still alive , having turned 85 back in late May.

Geriatric Baby Steps     A separate blogging project (details to come in a later post) organized by someone else has brought me back into the Blogger environment after over seven years.   Now it's time for me to start to reacquaint myself with how this all works, not having been in here since the very start of 2011. I recall opting to take care of my own html code back in the day, but I suspect - at least to start - I'll opt to let the site tools take care of that this time.   Any who happen to stumble across this, I ask your kind indulgence.

Ready Or Not It's 2011, and I wasn't even ready or even willing to deal with 2010. Resolutions - for me, at least - stink of pre-ordained failure, like something taken from the freezer and thawed only to reveal they'd likely turned before being frozen. I still have to have objectives and above all I have to move myself to action. Whether I want to or not. Today should see some time spent on those -- albeit quietly and privately. Some people succeed in such things by making them public declarations, putting it on a stage for shame or glory. That doesn't work for me. All it makes me want to do is delete the posts and kill the witnesses. The concept of a New Year is distantly attractive, but in reality it's a sham. There's no Reset button. There's no clean slate. Same shit (and producers of same), just under a different year's label. I suppose I just posted something here because I wanted to have something new here, and this is much easier t...

The Final Birthday Present Essentially lost in the haze of this darkest April for the Nortons was that a new Heroclix set - Brave and the Bold - hit on April 14th. Flawed in execution in ways I won't bother to go into here, it nonetheless held some promise, and it was if nothing else a new set, and one timed to hit the day before my birthday. My wife pressed to make a birthday present of a case of it for me, so the order was placed. Flash ahead to the early morning of April 5th, when so much changed irrevocably here with her sudden and unexpected death. The days that followed were a painful haze, increasingly filled with details and magnified worries as I began to grapple with the new reality, which, as is the case for us mere mortals who walk the financial edge along the abyss -- something we especially came in for with my wife's illnesses and all of the battles with the thieving "gatekeepers" of our health care system (Oh, what a friend we have in the privat...

Pay It Forward Something for all days. A phrase popularized by Robert Heinlein via his 1951 novel Between Planets , as so: The banker reached into the folds of his gown, pulled out a single credit note. "But eat first — a full belly steadies the judgment. Do me the honor of accepting this as our welcome to the newcomer." His pride said no; his stomach said YES! Don took it and said, "Uh, thanks! That's awfully kind of you. I'll pay it back, first chance." "Instead, pay it forward to some other brother who needs it." ...and goes back, at least in concept, as far as Benjamin Franklin, who on this date in 1784 offered the idea in a bit of correspondence: I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you [...] meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I h...

Long past minor and certainly no miner, nevertheless, today I'm a forty-niner An odd birthday to note, it's more than a little foreboding to me. The countdown to 50 begins seriously. As noted to a friend sometime last year, fifty has the potential to hit me like a freight train if I haven't successfully addressed various issues that have grown to be of great importance to me. I suppose what I choose to do about them before this date rolls around again will be the true measure of how important they are to me. I wrote all of the above months ago, trying to at least have a few posts ready to auto-publish so something would appear here. At the time I had no clue how tragic a turn life would take even before reaching this.

Dark Anniversary Earlier this week a murder-suicide incident that happened essentially next store came to mind, and upon looking back I saw the anniversary was to be on the 25th.