TurkeyMonkey

“The Day After Tomorrow” - B
One of the best popcorn* movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s always fun to see major American cities get pummeled by natural disasters, and it was especially nice that New York was spared with a snowstorm, while L.A. was disemboweled by tornadoes. The special effects were so realistic that I believed every second of the movie–except for when people talked. Then it completely fell apart.

“The Terminal” - B+
Having spent a few hellacious nights sleeping in the airport, this one hit close to home. In the movie, Tom Hanks is penniless and stranded, much like my day-and-a-half in the Bahamas airport at age 17, when I had to beg my fellow travelers for money to pay the mandatory $15 exit tax. On a more recent note: the movie’s sets seemed eerily familiar to Chicago’s O’Hare airport, where I was trapped overnight about a month ago, coming back from a conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan. For anyone who’s ever been excessively delayed, and tried sleeping on the industrial airport carpet, it’s not hard to identify with this story.

* Full disclosure: I actually ate Hawaiian Punch fruit chews, not popcorn.

The imminent $110 overhaul of Philadelphia’s Free Library gives me feelings of hope and despair. Hope because the renovations may finally make the library accessible, practical, and fun for patrons. Despair because–a tear–I don’t live in the neighborhood anymore. When I was an unemployed Art Museum area resident, the library was a three-block walk, and I visited daily. The goal was to churn out 1,000 words of writing a day and thus prove that I wasn’t a full-time loafer. However, the plan never clicked, for a number of reasons. There were no good places tether my laptop; local hoods routinely commandeered the computer banks to porn surf; and the books were confusingly organized. Worst of all was the bathroom situation. Because there was only one restroom, down two flights of stairs in the basement, and because my morning routine mandated a Venti Starbucks, my bladder was always teetering on the brink of a horrific, messy accident. Eventually, I became so obsessive about my daily library routine and, paradoxically, addicted to caffeine, I considered getting one of those strap-on urinal bags, the kind you slip under your slacks and clip directly to your pee-pee.

The Moshe Safdie addition should correct some of the library’s problems. As Inga Saffron’s recent Inquirer article explains, the new wing will be on the back of the library, thus preserving the beautiful neoclassical facade on the Parkway. But it will be truly modern, with huge glass windows, large seating areas, convenient browsing areas (ala Barnes & Noble), and, presumably, a great view of the Fresh Fields supermarket. Still no news on the bathroom situation, but with the extension jutting all the way to Callowhill Street, I suspect crossing the street to the Starbucks loo will at least be an option.

Incidentally, I love Inga Saffron. Her stories are always the most readable and provocative in our local rag — plus, she’s cute, too. If crusading newspaper architecture critics were available to perform wedding ceremonies, I’d hire her in a second.

I know I’ve been complaining about the wedding planning a lot lately. Quite frankly, I’m starting to get a little sick of hearing myself say, “No other guy would ever be this involved in the minutia.” And to be even more frank, I’ve started getting kinda caught up in all of it. From now on, please feel free to call me Groomzilla.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Knot is an essential planning resource for us. The website had loads of vendor specs and how-to guides, and it’s also the location of our handy dandy wedding webpage. But the most useful thing, by far, is Philly message board, which gets something like 100 posts a day. The most common messages are vendor reviews, where people do post-wedding evaluations of florists and DJs, and explanations for how to craft things like programs and menus. Some of the posts are a little more specific (”Mummers or Italian singers for serenade?“) or angry (”The Papery: Rude people!!!“) or sad (”Lonely Bride “).

The other great thing about the Knot message boards are the community bios, little webpages where brides-to-be post their favorite dresses, accessories, and flower arrangements. Ana can spend hours reading through these things (she even has her own, here), and I personally like them because they remind me how, despite my bitchin’, my fiancée hasn’t gone completely overboard — yet. Take, for example, MelDave (I think her name is actually Melody, but we know her by the community bio handle). The woman has not one, but two of these bios (one before the wedding, for planning, and one after, called “MrsMelDave”). It’s useful to look at MelDave’s bios, particularly because she’s using the same reception site and florist. But the problem is that she’s just set the bar so damn high. There is the homemade sign on the front of the Racquet Club, the table cards on wheat grass, the hand-drawn invites, the CD mix, the bathroom baskets, and on and on. At some point she even published her own magazine for the bridesmaids. Every visit to her bio(s) makes us feel terribly half-assed. I tried printing the “MrsMelDave” one because we liked the framing of some of the wedding photos. The bio came out to 26 pages — and that’s before we ran out of printer paper.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ve got RedNeckDiva. Now, this is my kind of wedding party. If this is what it means to lower the bar, then please, lower away!

Remarkably, somebody out there is actually reading this blog! My friend Andy was kind enough to send me the website’s usage stats and–well, they’re bewildering. Has this website really had 431 unique visitors in the last 2+ months? If so, I figure that about 428 of them have to be automated search-engine crawlers. Or perhaps pedophiles. I’ve only told a handful of people about this site. Five by my count. Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted that there have been 3,749 pages viewed. Even better, I’m proud to report that when you now Google “Ted Mann” and “turkeymonkey,” you finally get some search results. Two of ‘em!

One of the great, under-appreciated uses of Friendster is stalking your girlfriend’s exes. It’s better than gossiping or Googling; nothing gets you inside the head of a past boyfriend like reading his personal statement. Take, for example, Oliver Colbert, Ana’s boyfriend during Sophomore year at Penn.

Linking through three degrees of separation, I learned that Oliver is now a software designer in Seattle, who likes Shakira and the martial art of Krav Maga. And, following that train of thought, Oliver says that he’s “Interested in meeting people for: Dating, Serious Relationships (Men).” Might I add, that’s a fetching lai and beaded necklace he’s got there.

In the case of Chris Dimase, another of Ana’s exes, I’m actually in his immediate circle. Chris and I were housemates in college and we still remain friends, but nonetheless, I can’t resist the temptation to spy a little. Like Oliver, Chris is also interested in “Dating,” but he adds the all-important parenthetical nod to women.
For all you ladies out there, take note: Chris has hiked through the jungles and mountains of Venezuela — as evidenced in this picture (left). He’s also moving to New York to work for the District Attorney’s office. And he just bought his own apartment in Brooklyn Heights! But the best part of Chris’s profile is the withering honesty and openness in his personal statement. To quote, “I’m fun, generous, sometimes intellectual, sometimes wacky. I like reading the paper on Sunday morning.” Precisely!

Chris already told me that he’s macked the Friendster connection into a few dates. If memory serves, they weren’t TLC material, but I still give Chris props for being ballsy enough to canoodle complete strangers. Plus, he gets the TurkeyMonkey gold star of the day for having a monkey with a snowball on his profile.

If there isn’t already a term for this kind of Friendster stalking, I’d like to suggest one: Fralking. (Not to be confused with “frocking,” as in, to put on your frock.) I’m not sure it’ll catch on in the same way as Google stalking, or Galking, has, but it’s always good for a raised eyebrow or two.

By the way, still no luck tracking down Ana’s ex from D.C., partly because I can only remember his first name: Roy. As for my one and only ex, I prefer to read about her adventures in the Penn Alumni magazine. The latest alumni notes section proudly announced, “Jackie Taylor C’99 L’03 has joined Wachovia Trust Company in Philadelphia as a trust associate.” Upon reading this, one of my friends (Jackie’s ex-roommate, actually) reflected, “I thought that notes section was for when you got married and, maybe, just maybe, when you have a baby. What kind of person announces to the whole class of ‘99 that they got a job?” Awwww snap!

Herewith, the third and final adventurous installment of our Flat Stanley trilogy. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (June 1 and May 20), we’ve been getting a series of little cardboard-cutout characters — all with the same unfortunate, but suspicious, name: Flat Stanly — from Ana’s nieces, the Mendes triplets. The goal is to provide each of them with a fully documented and illustrated adventure, something that’s sufficient to entertain a classroom of third graders. After treating Olivia’s Flat Stanley to a baby-filled weekend in Boston and Greenwich, and then taking Julia’s Flat Stanley to the new Phillies ballpark and the local dogpark, we knew the bar was set awfully high for the inevitable arrival of Gabrielle’s Flat Stanley. The solution, we decided, was to treat “C” to a day of racing go-karts.

My dad’s company had organized a boondoggle to Lime Rock, a “Karting” track in northwestern Connecticut, where they were going to celebrate the latest consumer products company they’d merged with. He invited my brother, brother-in-law, and I to come race and take on the investment bankers. Bad idea.

What I thought was going to be a lighthearted day of innocent bumper cars turned into a viciously competitive day of high-impact collisions. Little did we know that the “karts” manage speeds of about 50 miles-per-hour and that the bankers would use them to inflict bodily pain on anyone in their path. With only a helmet and rib-cage pad to protect me, multiple bruises and concussions were sustained (I think). The last impact took the wind out of me for so long that I had to retire from the race early — after the first lap, actually. Thank God Flat Stanley was safely tucked beneath the pad and racing jumpsuit or else I fear he would’ve been flattened into oblivion.

Later on, I heard that Paul Newman had been at the track earlier in the day, racing the big-boy cars. This news was seriously depressing. Here I am at age 27, and I can’t handle a little bumping and grinding with the glorified Big Wheels, but 105-year-old Paul Newman’s out there leading the pack. And, as a random aside, I also heard that George Bush is going to be skydiving on his 80th birthday — for the second time, no less. The only conclusion that I can draw from all this is that I’m precariously close to pussydom, and I need to grow a sack fast. Bring on the bachelor party, I say! What better excuse to go bungee jumping and running with the bulls. If only there were a way to combine the two …

–The extended Mann family. From left to right, Doug Mann, Dan Raiche, Ted Mann, Diana Wheeler, and Peter Mann.

After bawling my eyes out watching “In America,” the sweet-but-not-saccharine film about an modern-day immigrant family from Ireland, I vowed to not cry for another movie this year. I’m just not the type to go all weepy, no matter how wrenching the story. I’m not that easily manipulated. …

Well, so much for that plan. One whole day later and, again, I’m squeezing a few drops for yet another film, this time HBO’s “Something the Lord Made.”

I decided to watch the movie partly out of work-related curiosity. My employer, Penn Press, published a book which the movie was loosely based on, and we got a check for $60,000 for the film rights. It originally came out with the hefty title, Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery. We later retitled it Partners of the Heart, but, wouldn’t you know it, HBO credited the former, not-so-inviting version. Truth be told, we were incredibly lucky to get as much money as we did, considering that the book is a totally impenetrable read.

The movie is about the two men who pioneered open-heart surgery, an unlikely pairing of a white doctor and his black janitor, who, it turns out, is every bit as gifted a surgeon as the doctor. Ultimately, the two men figure out a way to operate on “blue babies” and they cure the condition, but more compelling than the overt medical drama is the undertone of racism that haunts the doctors in their research, but never completely derails their quest. The movie was a tearjerker, yes, but one that’s completely free of sappiness and stereotypes. The actors are superb, especially Alan Rickman (who plays the surgeon, Alfred Blalock) and Mos Def (who plays his partner and Penn Press author, Vivien Thomas). It was easily one of the best films I’ve seen this year. For a second opinion, read the overwhelmingly positive No Comments »