Random Dark Thorness

Or is that Random Thar Dorkness?

Random things from seeing Thor: The Dark World tonight with Sharon.

1. I liked Thor much better in 3D. It was still an excellent movie in 2D, but 3D was a far better experience.
2. That is the first movie this has been true for me. Josiah said he finds Marvel to always be worth the 3D price.
3. We went to Flix Brewhouse. I'm sure their beer is good, but I know their coffee is.
4. The pepperoni / bacon / cheeseburger was really interesting. Not my favorite ever, but I would definitely eat it again. And not just because of BACON.
5. But still... BACON!
6. The current Marvel movies' Loki is the Best. Villain. Ever.
7. At Flix, like Alamo, you order food and eat during the movie. After I finished eating by alternately leaning way forward and by holding my basket under my mouth, I noticed the gal in the seat next to me had pulled the desk/tray all the way to her seat. I didn't realize they did that. I didn't feel too dumb after all the other people saw me play with mine and try theirs.
8. Since I've also been watching Agents of SHIELD, I have to ask why the Asgardian guards (Asguards?) at the palace had such lame weapons that the dark elves pretty much just rolled over them.
9. They borrowed a little too obviously from Star Wars in places. Can't blame them, but it was very blatant.
10. The monochrome plus red comics when the end credits start are brilliant.
11. I had to cheat and google to see who Don Payne (RIP) and Steve Scott were / are.
12. I still have no clue which one was Steve Scott.
13. These are some of my favorite actors, based solely on the Marvel movies.

This is mainly the fault of Jim Kohli and Robert Norris. Well, after Stan Lee, Don Payne, Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Joss Whedon, et al.

Mama Died

I type this listening to songs from It's a Beautiful Day by the band of the same name. I played "White Bird " for Mom and she loved it as much as I did. I don't recall what she thought of the rest, but several of the other songs are strangely apropo as well.

It's been several years since Mom died. To this day, though, for some unfathomable reason, when I say or type "Mom died", I hear the Grateful dead singing Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried" as "Mama died, mama died."

We had seen her for the first time in a while at Esther's boot camp graduation. Kathleen said she had finally convinced Mom to go to the doctor about her severe stomach pain (IIRC). We headed home a few days later, not too concerned. But we soon got The Call.

"The doctor says Mom's skin is a big bag full of cancer and she has very little time to live." We were on a plane back east within a week. We watched Mom go downhill over the week, but we had so much fun! We relived all sorts of fun, weird, sand, and scary times. I'd brought my guitar; we sang her a song. We laughed, we cried, we ate...

We had been at Dad's 80th birthday that spring and I had promised Mom we would go to her 80th birthday. Since it was now clear she wouldn't be here for that we celebrated early. We went to her favorite restaurant. She was occasionally confused about the occasion and didn't eat much, but we still had fun. It was wonderful how much she remembered, and how interesting our life with her had been, and her life had been before us.

Somewhere in there Dad asked me if I would ask Mom if he could talk to her (their divorce had been, and had remained, less than amicable). Mom agreed, Dad came over, and the rest of us disappeared for a while. They somehow came to terms with each other, with themselves, with life, and reconciled. I find myself in tears just typing this. Obviously I wasn't happy that Mom was dying, but under the circumstances I don't think any of us could have been happier.

One day Wink (who calls herself Mean Old Stepmom but has been a Godsend for Dad and us), a counselor and hospice director, called the kids together to prepare us for what we would be going through. But we had been through enough to know, and shortly in she lost control of the conversation as we joked about Mom, her funeral, the grave, whatever. Her eyes were pretty big as we laughed til we cried, talking about bronzing Mom as a tombstone. But she realized we were coping in the O'Neal way, and she relaxed.

we flew home and Mom was dead within a week. She went downhill much faster that week; I think she had quit fighting after she got her time with all her kids and grandkids. Reconciling with Dad probably helped as well.

The morning of the funeral Bill got a call that we couldn't put Mom in the remaining family plot. Despite the lack of a gravestone, despite the cemetery records saying the space was empty, a relative who shall remain Nameless insisted there was a baby buried there, and that she (Aunt Nameless, not the Dead Baby) would go to court if necessary to prevent Mom being buried with her family. Bill, normally very calm, was nearly apoplectic.

I was pretty skeptical. Even if there was a baby buried there, why was it a big deal to Aunt Nameless who had never bothered to put any sort of marker up, and couldn't really explain who the baby was? (I have since wondered if this wasn't a baby born out of wedlock or out of a "shameful union" and best forgotten from times when such things were scandalous at best.)

Eventually the cemetery found something indicating there was, after all, a baby buried there. They found an alternate location and dug it up. Fast. May I suggest that a cemetery should perhaps be more careful and have accessible records? But we appreciated their speed once they found the mistake.

The funeral occurred, as they are wont to do. Mom was interred. We all went to eat, caught up with cousins, aunts and uncles (Aunt Nameless was absent), nieces and nephews, and assorted relations. We all went home.

Mom's tombstone was delayed as well. Given the cemetery fiasco, it surprised no one. It eventually showed up.

The following Valentine's Day I heard a commercial for PajamaGram. I was inspired. I decided to order a negligee and have it delivered to the cemetery, where it would be draped over the tombstone with a note, "I miss you, Mom! Your loving son." Mom would have loved it, but this was Selma, AL, and I figured the next time one of my siblings showed up at the grave they might get arrested, so I didn't do it.

Yet.

I keep thinking how hysterical Mom would find that.

The Great Coffee Disaster

That should be disasters. Plural.

OK, full disclosure. I haven't been involved in any monumental coffee disasters, at least of the magnitude that requires the EPA or WHO to get involved. But on a personal, need to wake up level... well, that's when most coffee disasters happen, when you need to make coffee but can't function because you need to make coffee. Classic Catch 22 writ small.

I think I have made almost every mistake you can make with a Mr Coffee style drip coffee maker:

• No grounds- great for making hot water, which is great of your name is Eb and you want Hot Water Soup for breakfast.
• No filter, no grounds- ibid
• Using beans you forgot to grind- great if you want soggy coffee beans to eat. Except that they happen to be revolting.
• No basket, no pot- great if you need an excuse to clean the counter and floor before you are awake enough to do that, either.
• No filter- great if you like the grounds in your coffee a la wild west coffee at a campfire.
• No water- the only disaster here is the wait while you wonder where your coffee is and then finally add water.
• No pot- a lovely coffee waterfall, only a disaster if you don't get your mouth under it, or don't like your coffee scalding and black with counter crud.
• Double grounds- hardly a disaster, but it does waste some for the coffee ability of the grounds, which is a terrible tragedy.
• Double water- ugh. Weak coffee is disgusting!
• Pouring water into the grounds- makes a mess, costs time, wastes coffee and water (in a drought you think about these things).

Eons ago we used a stove top percolator. We still have it for emergencies. We made nearly all the mistakes you can with that as well; there are less possible. At least we never melted the pot leaving it empty over a flame too long.

Sadly we never had a stove top espresso or single cup maker. Apparently you can launch boiling grounds 8 feet if you leave the strainer out. Or at least that's what I gather from author Sally Hanan's Facebook page.

The worst was the day I was making a full pot (12 "cups" (who uses a 6 oz coffee cup?)) extra strength and dumped the grounds in without a basket or pot, putting most of the grounds on the floor... in front of everyone I was making coffee for. And it was half of what I had left. Two grinders full later, after sweeping and cleaning the counter, we started a pot of coffee. Thankfully the next morning I found my emergency cache of Starbucks Double Shots.

Growing Up Miles, Part 3a: The Espionage Days

In fifth grade I wanted to be the Miles version of Harriet the Spy. (If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it.) Despite my nearly boundless imagination, I almost slavishly tried to copy Harriet. This led to difficulties.

For reasons I can't recall, I wanted a spy outfit identical to Harriet's. This would have required:

• a flashlight I could hook onto a belt,
• wearing a sweatshirt year round in El Paso, Texas,
• convincing my mom to never wash a certain pair of jeans,
• using my allowance for notebooks instead of comics, and
• trying to sneak around a completely flat neighborhood consisting of wide open front yards and completely fenced in back yards, with no other cover at all.

I solved the flashlight problem by making a hook from a piece of wire. Of course, I then had the problem of sneaking my Dad's flashlight out and looking like a goofus because I pretty much couldn't' go anywhere at night. A flashlight is somewhat conspicuous at 4 in the afternoon in broad daylight. Even if I could have snuck around at night with a flashlight this was extremely west Texas in the 60s. I'd probably have been shot or eaten by dogs.

I also gave up on the sweatshirt, deciding that tee shirts were anonymous enough and would attract less attention than passing out from heat stroke. (West Texas, remember?)

I also decided that dirty, smelly jeans might not be required spy gear. Spies in the movies seldom wore dirty jeans in the suburbs, so I might just get away with it.

We had no alleyways to skulk through. Peeking in windows or going over walls in plain view of an entire neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else seemed like a good way to get my backside tanned. Once per neighbor who caught me and a second time at home when they called my folks.

This left only the problem of... The Notebook. If you have read the story, you know that notebooks are the heart and soul of a spy's life. Poking around the house I realized that while we didn't have a surfeit of notebooks (I wasn't willing to touch my comic book money) we did have lots of 3x5 index cards. I found some wax paper envelopes just the right size to hold several 3x5 cards, which would make organization easy-- at least until I had a lot of notes on a subject. This was probably when I started writing in very small letters.

Every spy has to start somewhere. I started by taking notes on my family, neighbors, school mates, and teachers-- just like Harriet did. Faithfully following my hero's example, my notes were generally derogatory. I might, for example, have written that "Fred Mickle is mean and ugly. If I were that mean and ugly I'd have myself hung as a horse thief." (That name is completely fictitious.) I'd like to hope that I hadn't yet finished the book and seen where this would get Harriet, but I probably just thought I was safe since I could put my cards in my pocket.

I'd been a spy for a couple of weeks when Mom ran across my notes while I was out playing. After I explained what they were she read some of them out loud.

"How would these make you feel if your family and friends had writing these about you?", she asked.

"But Mom, they aren't about me!"

Eventually I got her point, and it all hit home.

This left me out of a job. I had no idea what else a spy might write about other than communists (this was, after all, 1965 or 1966). I was pretty sure I didn't know any commies because they all looked evil and foreign in the comic books. I didn't know anybody like that. I destroyed the cards and hung up my spy gear, a has been at 10 or 11, a forlorn, minuscule footnote in the annals of spydom. I hoped I'd never meet Harriet, or that if I did my failed career wouldn't come up. Thankfully, we never met outside her book.

I still reread her book about once a year.

Tesseract Me, Baby

If you look really closely at the end of the movie you'll realize that Asgard entrusted the tesseract to me.

Essentially infinite energy!

I could drop a whole herd of pregnant elephants on your house quicker than your Mini Cooper gets away from a stop light, and it wouldn't cost me a plastic penny.

It does attract the odd alien invasion but that's what the Avengers are for.

Grown Up Miles- Adventures in Musicland, Part I

After years of not playing guitar much I got serious about playing again in 2009. This was prompted by a need for live music at church (singing along with CDs can only take you so far). I realized that the prospect of playing in front of the congregation didn't bother me nearly as much as I thought it would. That was a fairly big (if happy) shock. To find out why, let's hop into our 1967 Shelby Time Machine (the muscle car years were also the glory years for time machines, despite Doc Brown's later work with Deloreans).

---

The first time I can recall playing guitar and singing in front of more than two people was at the Midtown Mission in Atlanta. I'd practiced one of my songs on my electric, but at the last minute chickened out of playing an electric in front of this particular group of people (who would have undoubtedly been fine with it, but I apparently needed things to be nervous about). So I borrowed Will Bozeman's brand new acoustic. As I walked up to the music stand (too nervous to trust my memory for the lyrics) I whacked the guitar really hard against the massive, steel, music stand. I tried not to think about what Will was going to say about the dent in his new guitar.

When I started to sing the music stand collapsed on itself. I nervously mumbled the first thing that came to mind, something about the magic stand I brought as a joke. I somehow made it through the song despite wondering how I could afford to replace this lovely guitar. My knees were knocking, my voice developed a tremolo, and I was sweating so much I figured the people on the front row were ready to build an ark. Everyone was shocked later when I told them how nervous I had been. ("You seemed so relaxed, making jokes and stuff!") And the guitar was intact. It was a couple of years before I played outside my living room again...

---

I met a guy named Alan who wanted to start a band. We jammed a little and decided to practice some songs together (I had a couple and he had a couple of dozen). After two or three months, when I was just beginning to think that some day I might be good enough to play in public, Alan says, "I got us a gig next week." The phrase "panic attack" hadn't been invented yet, but I had one, anyway. "Oh, don't worry, it's just a small party at a friend's house. They'll have food, and we'll just play 20 or 30 minutes while people hang out. No big deal."

I practiced like a driven man the next few days. By the day of the party I was confident I could play a set for 15 or 20 random strangers who were all concentrating on their food and talking to each other. Background music, no big deal. We arrive at a pretty big house... and there are 20 to 30 cars.

"What's all this?" I asked

"Don't worry, maybe it's a little bigger party than we thought."

We carry the first load of gear in (two amps, a small PA, a few guitars). There's a stage set up with drums, keys, a half dozen amps and stacks of guitar cases nearby! There are 40 to 50 chairs set up in front of the stage.

"Alan???"

"Um, well, I didn't want you to be nervous, so I never got around to mentioning that everyone here is a musician, and they'll all be playing tonight." Further questioning revealed that the other bands had all been playing together for years.

Years.

We were on first. Of course.

Alan and I had worked out an introduction with a little stage patter. I have a vague recollection of forgetting everything and ad libbing something as Alan stuck to his lines. (I had the script on my music stand, but momentarily forgot how to read.) I fumbled the intro to the first song (Alan's song, my lead part). The next song was one of mine, and just as I started to sing, the mic cut out. Vague jokes, panic, somehow we got things working again. Maybe someone swapped mics; it's all a hellish, vague memory. As we started again, a string broke. Swap guitars, start AGAIN. I don't really remember the rest of the set except that the room was very attentive, much too attentive, rare specimen under glass attentive. My vocal tremolo returned. I don't recall ever flubbing anything so horribly in public. I was sure the applause after the set was either for Alan or sheer relief it was over. As we started to remove our amps and guitars for the next act to go on, I excused myself to go put some of the gear in the van. I stowed the gear, then stowed myself on the van floor where I sat in misery for a few hours.

Alan finally brought the rest of our gear out. "Where have you been? Everyone wanted to meet you and tell you what a great job you did!" We hardly talked on the way home. Eventually he convinced me that I did fine, that everyone felt that way some days ("though not to the extent of hiding and snubbing the hosts and guests"), and that if I ever did that again he would feed me my guitar and maybe my amp.

We had some crazy gigs after that (and I had plenty more running sound for a couple of bands), but no matter how weird things got, after these first two times playing in public, the others were all much, much easier.

---

If there are lessons to be learned here, I guess they are:

1. It's not nearly as bad as you thought it was. It might even have been good.
2. Get over yourself.
3. Don't embarrass Alan unless you are prepared to eat a guitar and maybe an amp.

For the record, I never had to eat my guitar or amp.

Kissing The Twins

One afternoon shortly after Sharon and I were formally engaged, I'd gone to her dorm to pick her up. Guys were not allowed upstairs so after calling to let her know I had arrived, I waited downstairs at the pool table. I was playing eight ball, solo. I forget whether I was winning.

After a few minutes Karen (Sharon's identical twin) came up behind me and said, "Hey, honey." This was not unusual; we were in the deep south and everyone talked like this. Additionally, Karen often called me this as a joke. I had never had any problem telling them apart, but she sometimes pretended we were together, just to mess with people.

Concentrating on a tricky bank shot, I said, "Hey, Karen". I took the shot, sunk the last solid, and smiled over my shoulder at her. But she was disappearing back around the corner. A couple of seconds later I heard giggling. I knew instantly.

They had plotted together to fool me. "This!", I thought in a Daffy Duck voice, "This! Means! WARRR!"

I called the eight ball in the side pocket and sunk it, mostly on luck. (I still don't recall if I won, or the other me won.) I laid the cue on the table (there was no rack) and headed around the same corner Karen where Karen had disappeared. The twins stood side by side, grinning. I gave them my biggest smile and looked at Sharon.

"Nice try! If you ever do that again, I will act like you fooled me and give her," (here I nodded toward Karen), "a bigger kiss than I have ever given you... Are we ready to go?"

They never tried it again. Sharon swears to this day it was just because there was no point (I had never had any trouble telling them apart). And that may be the truth, or most of it. But I know they both looked a bit nervous at the time!

Would I have done it? I can't honestly say whether at the time I would have tried to give Karen that kiss or not. I can say Sharon would have gotten an even bigger one. But it was a moot point. They've never tried to fool me again. At least in person. On the phone they sound very alike, so I'm never sure whether it's intentional or not.

Bu that's OK. I'd rather wage love than war, so I let it slide. Plus, I'm totally content with Sharon's kisses. Never look a gifted kisser in the mouth; just hold on and kiss back.

Dental company excepted.