Wait, this guy is THAT GUY???

Posted on September 24, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Our dog is a “rescue,” and back when we first got her from the Humane Society (and she was extremely restless), we somehow realized that playing “Monk” episodes (the quirky, comedic detective series starring Tony Shalhoub) on our television would calm her down. Now whenever she needs to be left alone in our house, we switch on the TV to keep her company, and “Monk” still seems to work.

For whatever reason, our dog is restless this afternoon. Actually, she has calmed down in the last few minutes. At the moment she is dozing on our couch. But the reason she has calmed down is that I switched on the TV a little bit ago to play some Monk.

Here is the kicker and the reason I am writing this blog post. As the episode began, I noticed a familiar name flash across the screen. No way, I thought. I’ve seen all the “Monk” episodes multiple times, and that person absolutely did not appear in this particular episode.

But then I started thinking. Was it possible this actor might have played the environmentalist? A tiny, bit part that doesn’t last much beyond the opening credits?

And the answer is yes.

Believe it or not, especially if you recognize the “Monk” episode where the power goes out because a wanted terrorist who was once in league with the tree-hugging environmentalist) plants a bomb at the power plant to keep anyone from seeing him at a Willie Nelson concert on TV.

This guy . . .

. . . is THAT GUY!!!

(WHAT????? Mind blown.)

Judge Reinhold is an amazing actor, clearly! (Even aside from all due credit given to the hair, makeup, and wardrobe personnel!) I can usually spot actors pretty easily, even when they appear in very different roles, and I probably drive my family crazy by constantly pointing out “Oh my gosh, that’s the security guard from . . . the mom from . . . the teacher from (film/TV title)!”

But honestly, if I hadn’t noticed Reinhold’s name today at the beginning of this episode, I never would have known!

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Posted in Popular culture, Television | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Crazy Quilt

Posted on September 5, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

No symmetry to be found in the window shade department at this office building in downtown Milwaukee. On a sunny morning here, it’s a free for all!

Office building with window shades drawn to various lengths

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Posted in Milwaukee, Photography | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Bunny update

Posted on August 24, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

When I went to put our dog to bed last night, maybe around 8:45 PM, I stopped short at the sight of the mother rabbit near the bunny nest in our backyard. Poor Coco. She was very confused about why she had to wait in the house. And in the end we had to take her out on the leash to the side yard because the baby bunnies were moving around in the yard within about six feet of the nest out back.

What you see in the video below is the mother rabbit about two feet away from the nest. Our garage light is set to turn on with any motion in the backyard, so that’s why the light is on at first, and that weird orangey color in the upper left is the reflection of my hand in the glass of our storm door.

In the very beginning of the video you can see one of the babies hopping up to the mother from the right. I missed the babies leaving the nest because I had to run and get my phone. But when I first opened the back door, not only did I see the mom, but I saw one of the babies hopping toward her. This setup surprised me. I thought when the mother came back to the nest at night, she would push aside the mat of dead grasses and lie down with her babies to nurse them, the way a dog or cat would. But no, she is standing there and the bunnies came to her. I imagine this is easier for her if she needs to run off quickly to draw a predator (like the family dog😂) away from her babies. The video ends pretty much when our garage light turns itself back off, because you can no longer see anything. And I’m sharing just because I’ve never seen anything like this before and thought someone might be interested😀

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Posted in Life, Nature | Tagged , | 2 Comments

A Podcast to Follow

Posted on August 23, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

School starts for me next week, with meetings this week and summer projects to wrap up. I’m staying home today, though.

Because the Republican presidential primary debate is happening at Fiserv Forum in downtown Milwaukee tonight and some sort of associated “fair” (and, like, maybe merch sales?) is happening all day in the outside plaza— on the hottest day of the year, unfortunately for them—lots of streets downtown between my house and the Milwaukee School of Engineering campus are closed.

Anyway, in checking my Gmail—which, remember when you could only get a Gmail account if you got an invitation from someone who already had one? I was invited by a student who was already working for Google and got to experience a brief moment of feeling like a very special tech-hip kind of gal😂—I saw that an online writer I follow has started a podcast. I have liked this guy for a couple of years. Both what he has to say about the writing process and his own ideas and essays on many interesting subjects are always interesting , inspiring, and thought provoking to me.

So I thought I’d share. Partly to support him and partly because I genuinely think that it is some thing that would be of value to others.

I think this link will get you to his article that describes the project and provides links that will lead you to the podcast. In case it doesn’t, his name is David Perell, and the title of his podcast is “How I Write.”

Link to David Perell’s article/post: https://ckarchive.com/b/gkunh5hd64owebrh5055699?utm_source=convertkit&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Monday+Musings+%28Big%2C+Big+Day%29%20-%2011545735

And actually, here is the latest “podcast” recording on YouTube, just to make it extra easy to check out.

You also might like to take a look at the kind of stuff he writes on Twitter (@david_perell). Aside: Twitter will never be “X” to me! That’s an affectation (PR stunt?) I hope Elon Musk will at some point abandon, just as Prince eventually left behind his weird, unpronounceable symbol.

On a completely unrelated note (no pun intended until I noticed how the word “note” matched up with the rest of the sentence, which you haven’t read yet but at which point I decided I did indeed intend it to be a pun after all😀), this song popped into my head this afternoon, and I couldn’t resist pulling up the video. It gave me a smile, so I thought I’d share it with you, as well❤️

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Posted in Creativity, Milwaukee, Popular culture, Writing, blogging | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The Pittie and the Bunnies

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

We have a nest of baby rabbits in our backyard. This is a new development, and not a happy one given that our dog, Coco, LOVES her yard, especially in summer, when she spends much of the day lying in sunny corners, basking in the warmth. The arrival of these vulnerable new neighbors has put a bit of a crimp in her/our style.

Once we realized we had a rabbits nest in our yard a couple days ago, we read up online about what to do if you also have a dog. The advice generally seems to agree that you should put something like a laundry basket with plenty of air holes on top of the nest during the day. We have this crate that we’ve overturned and weighted down with a large stone from our garden.

(Aside: Stones are very, VERY heavy for their overall size, way heavier than a similar sized block of concrete. I tried a concrete paver and then tried a rock. No contest. Stone must be a far denser material.)

Then we surrounded the overturned crate with a garden fence for added deterrence. Apparently mom rabbits always stay away from their nest during daytime hours, hiding nearby in a garden, etc., to keep an eye on things, and then they return to their babies at night. We’ve been putting up the crate and fence in the mornings and then putting them away again in the early evening, when the only remaining time for Coco to be in the yard is right before bed, and then she’s only out there on a brief visit to do her business and can easily be supervised. Apparently the babies should leave the nest in about three weeks—although then what? I shudder to think about a family of tiny rabbits wandering around our yard all hours of the day. Hopefully by the time they leave their nest, they’ll be big enough and smart enough to run fast for the fences.

However, that’s a problem for the future. First thing to know for today’s post: Coco’s daily naps hug the edges of our yard and tend to follow the sun. So the driveway and the wall of the garage, along the back fence, next to the garden in the side yard, and finally near the gate that leads to the front yard. She always sticks to that perimeter and, I guarantee you, has NEVER ONCE lain between the silver maple and the stone retaining wall below our back porch.

Check out her two new fave spots as of this morning. Like, what? She’s just trying to find a relaxing place to chill. So innocent 😂

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Posted in Life, Nature | Tagged | 8 Comments

Will “Oppenheimer” save cinema? (Or, Going to “The Show”)

Posted on August 7, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Which is what we called it in my small town back in the day. We had one movie theater in town and thus one movie available to us per week. Hence, “the show.” Not “a” show, and not even “a” movie or “the” movie. The. Show.

I belong to a Facebook group called “Friends of 70 mm,” the membership of which is extremely knowledgeable about cinema history from a projection perspective. I found out about it from one of my friends, a software engineering professor who comes to be a guest speaker in my film and media studies class every year. His dad was a movie theater technician who traveled around the state (sometimes multiple states!) to repair projectors and keep them in good working order. My friend knows a lot about the technical end of cinema, and he always brings cool things to share with my students, like a 1920s hand-cranked miniature film projector he threads up with film before switching on the tiny light bulb inside and throwing the image onto the white classroom wall. He can crank one frame at a time and then speed it up to create the motion picture, which is fun.

But I digress. The “Friends of 70mm” Facebook group that my software engineering prof friend introduced me to has lots of intriguing, often highly technical discussions about movie sound, screens, theaters, projectors, reels—just really interesting and informative stuff! I come to film and media from an English and rhetoric perspective. But I teach mostly engineering students, and plus I just always like to understand things as completely as possible, because you can find “aha” moments in the most unlikely connections. This Facebook group has helped fill in some rather sizable gaps in my understanding of the technical side of filmmaking and exhibition.

In the past week I’ve seen postings and conversations in the Facebook group to the effect that many movie theaters are scrambling to find projectionists experienced with 70mm willing/able to travel to one of the handful of theaters in the U.S. (only 19, according to the Washington Post) currently showing Oppenheimer in 70mm. Both the film itself and perhaps more significantly the 70mm viewing experience have proven so successful that theaters have extended the movie’s run by 2-3 weeks—but are finding it difficult to staff the projection booths for all the additional showings because so few people are trained to operate the equipment nowadays.

Wouldn’t it be cool if this movie’s popularity, alongside the voices of a small but notable group of filmmakers committed to shooting on film (e.g., Tarantino, Gerwig, Nolan, Spielberg), helped to spur a shift toward revitalizing the larger than life, communal moviegoing experience that “cinema” used to encompass? Although I can appreciate streaming for what it offers (serendipitous discovery of new titles, for example, not to mention the convenience of viewing them on your own schedule), it is certainly not the only way to watch a movie.

And definitely not the ideal way.

(UPDATE: 8/11/23 — I just saw this Variety article from earlier this week about the various extended runs of Oppenheimer in 70m. Link: https://variety.com/2023/film/news/oppenheimer-imax-70mm-extended-tickets-1235689899/)

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Posted in Movies and film, Popular culture, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Crooked lamp with blinds on a sunny day

Posted on July 22, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

My old crooked lamp from the final close-out sale at the old downtown Milwaukee Marshall Fields store (formerly Gimbels) in the 1980s. It’s showing its age, listing slightly to one side, but still capable of doing its job. Like many of us, I suppose😀

Really not much else to say beyond the title of this post, LOL. I find myself drawn to geometric images whenever they present themselves. Which may also be the reason why I so madly adore everything Art Deco!

Crooked lamp with blinds on a sunny day

P.S. You’ll note that the lamp appears to be straight up and down perpendicular in this photo. Maybe the lamp is doing just fine after all, and it’s the rest of the world that’s out of kilter!

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Posted in Photography | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Wildfire sun (in the style of Mark Rothko)

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Yesterday’s evening sun was a strange shade of intense orange, almost something you might expect to see in a Mark Rothko painting. (Like, for example, his “Orange and Yellow” canvas, found at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum: https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/k19568-orange-and-yellow.)

I tried to take a picture, but the sun didn’t show up at all on my phone’s screen. Which was kind of unsettling at first, to be looking right at it in real life but seeing only empty gray sky above that chimney on my screen.

The sun did show up when I tapped the screen, albeit in this weirdly two-toned pinkish orange, yellow-centered orb. The outer rim (pinkish orange) is the exact shade of last night’s sun. Beautiful, but eerie.

IPhone photo of the sun, strangely orange due to wildfire. Odd yellow center is an iPhone glitch

When all is said and done, I have to say that I really like the way my iPhone image turned out, even though it’s clearly some kind of error and patently false. The more I think about it, the more it feels like a Mark Rothko sun. And if that’s what the lens “saw,” well, who’s to say what was or wasn’t there?

An image is an image is an image, right?😀

(I actually wrote this post on Sunday. Today is Tuesday. After getting zero views since hitting “publish,” despite rechecking my stats hopefully every now and then, it finally occurred to me that maybe I should check on this post’s status. Could there be a technical issue? Or did people just really not like it. Like they disliked the preview so much they couldn’t even be bothered to open it up from the reader or email and view the actual post! Sure enough, it was a “technical” issue. So to speak. I wrote the post on my phone app instead of my laptop, and for whatever reason, when I pressed “publish,” it did NOT publish. It’s reassuring to know that the main reason I got zero views, comments, or likes is that this post was still in my drafts folder! Fingers crossed that people will respond to it at least a little bit more once I actually hit “publish,” L O L)

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Posted in Art, Life, Milwaukee, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

I ASSURE YOU; WE’RE OPEN!

Posted on May 11, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Quite an existential feat this furniture store has managed to pull off! It is closed, as evidenced by the security gate across its entrance. It is open, as evidenced by the lit-up sign in the window. And it is timeless, as evidenced by the name above the storefront.

Actually, I shouldn’t joke about this little shop. The street in front is all torn up and undergoing a massive repaving project. I assume the store’s sales have dropped dramatically in the project’s wake.

It’s so hard for small businesses to hang on when a city does something like this. In my own inner-ring suburb of Milwaukee, a beloved, decades-old, family-run dime store closed when a similar but larger project commenced without the business’s owners even being informed that it was coming. Of course, part of me suspects that my city-suburb did this deliberately. Our local government officials are greatly enamored of bike lanes, pocket parks, rental bikes and scooters, restaurants with plenty of cafe-style seating on the sidewalks, and other rather “hipster” redevelopment—along with the myriad new apartment buildings needed to house the sizable influx of people who could patronize such amenities. That creaky old dime store with its tiny “departments” (board games, party decorations, cards, housewares, craft supplies, fabric and notions, hamsters and goldfish, and assorted seasonal needs like hibachi grills and Christmas tree tinsel) did not align well with the demographic necessary for accomplishing the city council’s vision of our town’s collective future (my personal opinion😀).

In any case, the title of today’s post was inspired by a comment my daughter made when I showed her my photo after work on the day I snapped it. (I frequently take pictures of stuff and share with my family at night. Like: Hey, do you wanna see a picture I took today of X? My family is very kind and humors me by saying, “Yes.” ❤️) My daughter laughed and said it reminded her of the movie Clerks, the (very!) low-budget 1993 indie film that proved so successful it was followed by two sequels. In that film, when the Quick Stop convenience store clerk arrives at work one morning to discover that the security screen is jammed shut, he hangs a large sign that reads “I ASSURE YOU; WE’RE OPEN!” to counteract any false impression that the store is closed.

What do you think in the case of Milwaukee’s Timeless Furniture store? Open? Closed?

Or maybe something else?

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Posted in Life, Milwaukee, Movies and film, Photography, Popular culture | Tagged , | 11 Comments

A rainy start to May

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Which is OK with me! The alternative for those of us who live in Wisconsin is 1-3 inches of snow, which the poor unfortunates who live about an hour north and west of Milwaukee are experiencing today. Additionally, today’s rain has a nice gentle, misty quality. It’s a gray, wet day, but there is softness in the light and even in the air.

My film studies class at Milwaukee School of Engineering is starting Sunset Boulevard this afternoon. I took the photo below when I went to our department office to print out copies of the film’s cast list, background info, and discussion questions.

I just really liked the pattern of all these little beaded droplets of rain on the glass. If it were windy, as it usually is on rainy spring days, there would’ve been streaks instead of drops. I liked the mix of large and small droplets, and I also liked the varying placement and streaming patterns of the differently sized drops.

That’s all.

I know this is a really boring post today. Sorry! But it’s about all I’ve got left in me at this point in the academic year. Any teacher out there knows what I mean. Like, I can still bring what I need to the classroom, but when it comes to generating anything interesting to say outside of class (including making small talk in social situations with people I don’t know well), I’m pretty much out of gas.

C’est la vie. At least I’m prepped for my upcoming advising appointment and for this afternoon’s class. So now, back to my grading! 😀

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Posted in Life, Milwaukee | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments