Peter calling for Peter...

My iPhone called me. I was sitting at my dining room table when my cell phone, nearby but untouched by me for an hour, suddenly rang and announced that I was calling me, and showed me my own photo for confirmation. 

I answered this anomaly and said, "Hello?" On the other end was a recording from the Microsoft Security Department telling me that my account had been compromised and I would lose my services within 48 hours unless I reset my settings, which they would help me with.

I hung up. How did my phone call itself? 

An hour later the same cell phone, untouched since Peter called Peter, suddenly binged and when I looked at it, a text was scrolling on its black face starting with "HEY". I picked the phone up and Siri said, "I'm sorry but I didn't hear that," and came alive with her familiar clucking noises and swirling colors at the top as she waits for a further command or query.

I held my phone still until Siri went dark and silent, then checked my messages. No message had come in and I couldn't find the "Hey" script again. 

I got paranoid and wrapped my phone in a towel so it (or somebody) couldn't see what I was doing through my camera, and hopefully whatever it could hear going on in my house would be muffled. 

I wondered if the infernal being could see through cloth, and speculated that it could probably hear as good as HAL did in 2001 (Hal tried to kill Dave, remember). I googled "possessed phones" and the stories there were many and hair-raising. 

So my question is this. Should I take a hammer to my phone or my phone to a priest?

At Epcot Center

On Sunday morning I flew into Tampa, drove up to Orlando and enjoyed Epcot Center at Disney World. Ever since I did the Inaugural Goofy Challenge at WDW (1:45 & 3:53), I have gone back to the four theme parks there when I could and wandered around each one, reliving those 39 miles as best I could in each park. (Right: Top of the world, Expedition Everest in Animal Kingdom at WDW.)

I had a girl friend during my visits to the first two parks and I subjected her to my "runner moments." You know, "I came through here," "I took some water there," " I rearranged my fanny pack at this spot." All the interesting stuff.

Sunday I completed my task. As the years go by it's hard to remember exactly each twist and turn of the two runs, but I think I got the last quarter mile down pat. I was in a fog of fatigue the second day but I remember a band being there at MP 26, and a body of water that I was running around or by. I certainly remember running up upon the big silver sphere both days that is Epcot Center, where both races finish. It was quite a beacon. Sorta like the Black Monolith in the movie 2001. Maybe you hadda be there, or perhaps you gotta be older, but anyway, it was my breakthrough because both days were huge PRS. (Left: How could you forget, or think, you ran by this landmark?)

The only other thing I truly remember was that I ran through the Magic Castle twice. When I went to Animal Kingdom a year after the race I thought that for sure I had run by the Mount Everest exhibit and was happily reliving that experience until I read in the park brochure that the mountain was created after January 2006. So it goes. (Right: Fourteen months later, I found a Goofy to hang out with in the Swiss Family Robinson exhibit in Animal Kingdom (mileposts 16-18) at WDW. Photo credit S.)

Profiling Movies, Deux

I click into the profiles of bloggers I read because I like to think their choices there give me an insight into their personalities. For instance, favorite movies. I don't go to movies much, so I can't discern much about the movies most (younger) bloggers choose. Consider the screamingly funny twenty-something Kelly in Chicago. Fight Club. Sin City. Donnie Darko. Never seen any of 'em. The title of her triathlete's blog offers me more insight into how purposefully humorous she is, This is a horrible idea...

My local tri friend DC Rainmaker is so busy with his interests, bicycling, running, swimming, technology, food, travel, writing, photography, etc. that he doesn't even list movies. Who's got two hours to spare? Old School Runner, another local blogger who writes excellent posts (his review of The Joshua Tree upon its twenty year anniversary kicked-started my static musical tastes all the way from the Stones' Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out into the eighties) doesn't list anything on his profile. He's very serious, I surmise.

For 2007, I listed my favorite movies as Shane (You talkin' to me?), 2001 (Open the door, HAL), Alien (Here, kitty, kitty), Platoon (I like it here), Fargo (Funny lookin', huh?) and Chicago (Pop, six, squish, uh uh, cicero, lipschitz). One for each decade of my life, see? The fifties to the ohs. I thought they said a lot about me. I fantasize that Shane was the first movie my Dad ever took me to (the small boy in me just remembers that it was some western with an incredible shootout). I'll never forget the night on Staten Island in 1969 when I saw the incredible 2001, nor the afternoon in Greenwich Village in 1972 when I saw it again and figured out, with a little help, that HAL sounds so soothing and otherworldly because the stereo tracks of its voice are very slightly out of sync. All of those movies are special to me for some reason or another.

For 2008, I listed Forbidden Planet, Dr. Strangelove, The Conversation, Blade Runner, Saving Private Ryan and Sideways as my favorite movies. I remember watching Forbidden Planet, which is really The Tempest set in space, over and over again on TV as a boy because it was often on Million Dollar Movie, a space-filler in early TV programing that repeated itself all weekend long. The terrible (invisible) creature would come walking up to the perimeter of the space colony, depicted as a series of advancing deep footprints, while the colonists inside quaked with fear and fought amongst themselves. Monsters from the id! I had no idea what that meant but it sure was a powerful force to be overcome.

Dr. Strangelove, what a movie! After Slim Pickens leaves James Earl Jones and goes off to final combat with the Russkies riding atop an A-bomb, Peter Sellers is left to contemplate life in the bottom of a missile silo for 150 years with certain other select superior beings, bringing along of course some animals to slaughter! This follows his admonition to George C. Scott that there is no fighting in the war room and precedes his witnessing the miracle of Peter Sellers walking again for his fuhrer! Those paranoid times have returned, by the way, thanks to W's constant harping upon how we all cravenly covet our safety above even our ideals.

The Conversation is about paranoia, created by the false reliance upon and worship of technology. The hunter gets trapped. Technology overpowers its users. Gene Hackman sitting alone at the end, playing his saxophone in his torn-apart empty apartment, confirms for me the suspicion and mistrust with which I view our technological advances. Who is not now a slave to his or her blackberry, ipod or cell phone?

Blade Runner is a beautiful sci-fi movie. Gripping, suspenseful, and mysterious. Harrison Ford drives off into the sunset at the end with the girl, but does he really? Are any problems ever finally resolved?

Saving Private Ryan is the best WWII combat movie, bar none. Watching Tom Hanks overcoming his hidden fears while offering up the final sacrifice as he does what is right, not merely what is expedient, is like watching a primer on where we as a society came from and hope to return to. I will never forget the spectacle of all those brave men walking ashore onto Omaha Beach as devastation and horror whirled all around them, or the American sniper beseeching the aid of his deity as he sought to be a surer, straighter and swifter shot than the German sniper taking simultaneous aim at him. When he took out the Nazi, I felt glad!

Sideways is to me a very funny movie. I understand that many women aren't impressed by it because really, both men are such cads. But I love the moment when Thomas Haden Church, having sat through Paul Giamatti's interminable pomposity in describing a glass of wine with all its colors, scents, swirling legs etc., asks, glass poised at his lips, Can we drink it now? Life is imperfect. Life is complicated. This movie reflects that

As soon as I think up six more movies very important to me, each covering a decade that I have lived in, I'll post them on my profile, for their relegation to anonymity there.

Profiling movies.

About Me. I generally look at the Profile section of any new blogger I read to try to determine something about that person. Where they live, what they read, watch, listen to. Isn't this how we get to know any new person we meet? Generally we already know their name through an introduction so then we ask, Where do you live? What book are you reading? What movie did you see last? Which song did you put on your ringtone? If the answers aren't interesting, we move on.

Changes. I'm about to change most of the answers on my Profile for the new year, but you could tell a lot about me from my current selections. Obviously I think that emphasizing that I live in DC says a lot about me. It's a great venue for running with its proliferation of trails, abundance of races and wide choice of running clubs. It is the seat of world power too. Where else could a former Yale cheerleader and an incompetent bird hunter change the existing world order so greatly in such a short time, and exert so much influence on the very principles we have lived by for well-nigh 200 years?

You speaking to me? My movie list ranges over half a century, with one choice for each decade that I have lived. My father took me to see Shane (1953) when I was a little boy, calling it the best western ever made. I remember that remark and subsequently being in the moviehouse immersed in the blazing gun battle of the penultimate scene, a noisy fight to the death between the forces of good and evil. Nowadays when I watch it, I notice the little boy, Joey, swallowing his candy cane in astonishment at the big fistfight that erupts between good and evil (obviously an attempt at diplomacy before the resort to warfare), and Joey running after the receding hero riding away calling, "Shane! Come back, Shane!" Does the movie stand for the proposition that you can never go back again? Or that you can never change your stripes? Or are both queries the same?

Open the pod bay door, HAL. Frankenstein in space, 2001 (1968) is just an awesome movie for me. Watching its light show in a Greenwich Village arthouse in 1969, the theatre filled with smoke, was an incredible experience. You hadda be there to fully appreciate it.

Here kitty, kitty, kitty. I love Alien (1979), the haunted house story set in space. Who could forget the fright of the alien spawn leaping onto the astronaut's faceshield, the horror of the chest bursting scene or the terror of Ripley in the space pod with the Alien. Things that go bump in the night.

I told the padre the truth man, I like it here. Depicting the vicissitudes of men reacting under stress, Platoon (1986) was the best war movie ever made before Saving Private Ryan. A youth with a shotgun and the power of life and death over others, the disturbed Bunny was in his element and speaks his truth about being incountry. The scene before the final apocalyptic firefight, where the competent Sgt. O'Neill, his nerve cracked, uncharacteristically asks the war-mad Sgt. Barnes to let him board a transport out of there because he's got "a bad feeling on this one," is haunting. A good man gone bad? The combat fatigued O'Neill receives the chilling answer, "Everybody gotta die sometime, Red."

Was he funny lookin' apart from that? Accurately capturing how they speak in Minnesota, Fargo (1996) is a tour de force black comedy. Aside from being a hoot thanks to the the inane chatter of the common folks of the northlands ("So, you were havin' sex with the little fellow then."), it chronicles the unintended consequences of poorly thought out choices, ending with the murderous kidnapper Carl Showalter wondering if his crime partner has noticed that he "got f***in' shot in the face!" He had just made the very poor choice of going out and burying the ransom money in a snowdrift by any old fencepost of a long straight snow fence along a nondescript portion of highway. Such is the ultimate use of bloodmoney.

Give 'em the old razzle dazzle. The musical Chicago (2002) is a thoroughly entertaining piece of flummox. I fondly remember one of my lost children singing the murderesses' song the day after I took him and his younger brother, kicking and screaming, to see it one treasured weekend. Pop, six, squish, uh uh, cicero, lipschitz! He only had himself to blame. Would you have done the same?



Cellblock Tango from Chicago.

The inner self. Are all of these movies about finding the true inner self? Will the search never end? Are heroes those souls who have found their inner self, and it is good, and they have acted upon it? I think so.