We had a big storm late last night and limbs came down from trees all over Bethelehem. Luckily, not much happened at our place (or immediately adjacent) but this happened to a house on Rita, not 2 minutes walk from here:
Home Improvement
I went for a long walk this morning, all the way to the bank on Delaware and back. This may have been ill-advised, since it was bastard hot and because I wore flip-flops (aka ‘thongs’ to the aussies). Probably because, you know, I like to live on the edge.
By the time I got home, some 2.5 hours later, the soles of my feet were very sore. Almost sore enough that I didn’t want to look at them in case they were bleeding. (Thankfully, they were not).
Cut forward about 3 hours. I drove to the hardware store and bought some ‘industrial strength’ concrete cleaner. This stuff is designed to remove any stain from concrete and blacktop, which means to me that it should do the same to paint. You see I want to clean the grit off our front steps to prepare it for a new coat of paint. I already tried sanding it off with little success. So I have to resort to a powerful, chemical solution.
I got home and immediately poured a bunch of it on the steps, deliberately ignoring the suggestion to test a small amount somewhere unobtrusive. This stuff is powerful! It instantly lifts stains that the sander had no effect on. And I mean instantly. I’m pleased.
But, entrepreneur that I am, I’m wearing flip-flops again. Safety warnings be damned! Especially the one about the stuff touching your skin 🙂
Invariably, during the sloshy cleanup, some of the stuff (even in a dilute form) gets on my feet. Specifically between my sole and the flip-slop. I don’t see this happening, but holy cow do I feel it.
I burned! And I mean burned like fire! I hastily grabbed the hose and blasted my foot. And even then it took a few seconds for the pain to subside. I think it must have thought the top layer of my skin was grit to be removed, and was doing it’s best to take it off.
The moral of this story? Take your pick of three:
– follow all safety precautions or
– don’t wear flip flops when pouring acids on the floor or
– keep a hose handy at all times 🙂
Hancock
I went and saw Hancock today. The film, about a strung-out superhero in need of rehabilitation, has been maligned by critics. Ironically, this was the exact reason my interest had been piqued, and even more ironically it was exactly what critics seem to dislike about the story that I thought worked so well.
In short: I loved Hancock. The film seemed real and I very much enjoyed the fact that the story was (deliberately) obtuse and unpredictable. I was entertained from start to end.
Perhaps the true reason I felt so drawn to Hancock was the feeling I was watching something of my own creation. Some of you will recall that many years ago I used to scratch down voluminous amounts of prose. These were often in the form of snippets of stories, or very short self-contained tales. I have a book full of this somewhere. One of them was called Brando Pineapple, and was about superheroism in the Australian outback. The tale is still kicking around in my head (along with many others) today.
Someone made a movie based on this story, and called it Hancock!
I’ll skip the details, but I assure you the similarities are astounding. In my story Hancock was called Brando, and ‘the girl’ was called Jelly. The situations were different, but the key element (let’s call it, in the spirit of not spoiling the tale, the ‘inversely proportional conceit’) was the same. Even the endings were similar (even though my version of the story was never close to completed).
So you can imagine watching Hancock was, for me, an unexpectedly amusing and somewhat moving experience 🙂
(As an addendum, one of the trailers before the film was for an apparent remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, starring Keanu Reaves (as Gort?). I had no idea the film was coming, and no idea what the trailer was for until the very end. But my mind said The Color Out Of Space. Alas not. A true, big-budget Lovecraftian masterpiece is apparently still not in the near future…)