captainsblog | Aug. 26th, 2023

Assorted things from this week to catch up on, nothing really tying them together.

The week began with the final resolution of the Money Order from Hell tale, the one that began in the middle of June. An ATM decided to play footsie with my deposit of a payment from a client, and after four rounds of visits to various branches, a stop at the post office and a lot of anxiety, I finally received a replacement check from the post office on Monday.

I took this one in person to the branch where they know me the best, and where my friend who works there had been an enormous amount of help in restoring a “provisional credit“ they added and then subtracted while we sorted the whole business. Monday was also my opportunity to bring her a thank-you card and the Josh Allen bobblehead I'd picked out for her to show my appreciation for her effort.

She loved it, saying, “It’s my first personal item!” She promised to take care of reversing the provisional credit, since I have now been made whole by the replacement; and I left in a happy mood, knowing that that was finally that.

Until it wasn’t. Because the very next day, another letter showed up from the bank. I thought this would be my official confirmation that they were taking their provisional money back, as well they should have at that point. Um, no. It was instead a letter confirming that after an additional “thorough investigation,” M&T decided to make the provisional credit permanent. So now, after all that, I was up the amount of the money order that got mangled in the first place.

That meant one more trip to the branch, where this time Mary, no doubt on the lookout for my car to arrive again, ducked out of work before she had to deal with this yet another time. I just left a copy of the latest correspondence on her desk, with my promise to not spend the money until they figure it out when to take it back. She called later, and said they’d take care of it. At least I got to see that a day after I delivered them, both Josh and my card were still in her cubicle. At least I hope they resolve it by taking the money back, because if she has to make much more effort at it, I’ll have to get her a wide receiver bobblehead so Josh has somebody to throw to. (He just played a series in the final preseason game, scored a touchdown, and promptly came off the field for the rest of the game uninjured, which is the only part of an exhibition game I care about, way more than caring about the scrubeenies finishing it with a win over Da Bears.)

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Last weekend, after watching all our friends' short films, I returned a DVD of a commercial one to the library. On the "just returned" shelf were three I wound up bringing home: one, a longlost favorite, but two other more recent ones that I hadn't heard anything about but we wound up enjoying.

Oldest and best-known was a 1980 film by UK director Bill Forsyth.

Director Edgar Wright has his "Cornetto trilogy" of Simon Pegg/Nick Frost comic horror films. This was the first of what I can now similarly term as Forsyth's "Capaldi trilogy" of Gregory's Girl, Local Hero and Comfort and Joy. All except the middle one are almost impossible to find on DVD- our copy of the last one is a decrypted Australian-region disk- and while Peter Capaldi only appears in Local Hero, his family's Glaswegian ice cream was a major prop in Comfort and Joy, and this one also includes a stop at his family's chip shop.

If you can find it, or grab it from the liberry now that we brought it back, it's a sweet and hilarious coming-of-age adventure from a simpler time and space. Its Wikipedia notes include it having worked its way into BAFTA's all time top 100 list of British films, and several have noted (such as this one with quite a rundown of its backstory) that it's one of Scorsese's favorite films, There's also a giant six-foot-tall walking penguin that is never explained but whose performer gets his one and only film credit.

This film has been in our "saved queue" of Netflix DVDs forever. Or, I should say, our FORMER "saved queue." They're no longer even tracking "films we'll send you if we ever find it" anymore because they won't be sending ANYTHING in a month. All thirty-odd missing gems, now reduced to tumbleweeds:

The other two more recent films picked up also turned out to be good, and both just caught my eye for one actor or another on the DVD box. First was a 2016 adaptation of a John le Carré novel titled Our Kind of Traitor. Ewan McGregor was who it said on the tin that sold me on it, but many Auntie Beeb/RSC regulars are there, too, including Who and Sherlock's Mark Gatiss as well as Stellan Skarsgård, father of that famed Swedish acting family, playing a lovable but demented Russian Mafia dude. Unlike so many other fictional franchises that lock into a single character such as a James Bond or an Ethan Hunt, le Carré's thrillers tend to get adapted into standalones with different and more complex heroes each time, and McGregor pulls off quite a task both as a character and as its performer.

More recent still was Maggie Moore(s), which was not only good but tied into our usual experience of everything we watch being one degree of separation away from something or someone else we just have. I picked it up on account of the stars listed on the DVD case: Jon Hamm, who we just saw in Good Omens, and Tina Fey, who was previously in and has just returned to, Only Murders in the Building in ITS current season. I didn't recognize anyone else in the cast other than Ted Lasso's Nick Mohammed as Hamm's police sidekick, but many of the new-to-me performers were just as good as the two leads. Plus, Eleanor quickly noticed that the director of Maggie Moore(s) was John Slattery, and we just saw HIM, playing himself, in a current-year episode of What We Do in the Shadows. Coincidences aside, the film has some ridiculously silly and funny moments but also a sweet ending once all the Maggies are no mo(o)re.

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I'll end with just add some bits of visual silliness from the past few days.

Noticed in the office the other day: what happens when the K-cup dispenser people don't talk to the people who design the boxes you put IN the dispensers:

Then this, seen at a local hospital where I was bringing a client a document to sign:

Schrödinger’s floor.

Still, I can't pass on the comedy opportunities coming out of the latest Trump arrest earlier this week. I thought of his bizarre boast at his booking that he's 6 foot 3 and 215 pounds, particularly after spending a decent part of today up on an extension ladder cleaning years of accumulation out of our rear gutters. This was likely in slight violation of OSHA regulations:

But hey, Mr. 215 Pound Indicted Felon! Come on over! Still have a few sections left!

The mugshots that accumulated over the week, ending with his two nights ago, led to some other online shenanigans:

♫Here's the story of a big election
The incumbent said, "I need 12,000 votes!"
All his friends went to Atlanta,
Like some suckers,
To fight the Kemp turncoats

Here's the story of an insurrection
When they lost in court, these lawyers had a hunch
That a coup could somehow keep his power
And that's why we call them The Indictment Bunch!

Indictment Bunch!
Indictment Bunch!
And that's why, we call them, The Indictment Bunch!♫

"Mom always says, don't commit RICO violations in the house!"