Animated Short Film Oscar Nominations 2020

One of our favorite movie theaters in New York is The Landmark at 57 West. They show a particularly compelling set of films. Here are the films currently showing:

1917

Little Women

Knives Out

Jojo Rabbit

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts - Animation

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts - Live Action

Pain and Glory

Incitement

We went to see the 2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts – Animation. Some of them were rather strange and difficult to understand, but we especially enjoyed three in particular.

HAIR LOVE

Matthew A. Cherry and Karen Rupert Toliver

An African-American father learns to do his daughter’s hair for the first time.

This film tells a gripping tale, presumably based on a true story, but it is not until the final moments that you find out what is really going on. The full movie (about 7 minutes) is here.

MEMORABLE

Bruno Collet and Jean-François Le Corre

Painter Louis and his wife Michelle are experiencing strange events. Their world seems to be mutating. Slowly, furniture, objects, and people lose their realism. They are “destructuring,” sometimes disintegrating.

I am not sure I precisely understood this film the way it is described here. It seemed to me that it was more about a husband sinking into dementia.

SISTER

Siqi Song

A man remembers his childhood and growing up with an annoying little sister in 1990s China. How would his life have been if things had gone differently?

This film also has a rather surprising, albeit sad, ending when you realize what story is really being told.

If you do have a chance to see any of these, animated shorts are really a fascinating art form.

Love,

Rebecca

A shock

I ended my last post, just a few short days ago, with the words “We all need to laugh as much as we can.” Never could I have imagined just how prescient those words would be.

Although a message had gone out just a few hours after the end of Shabbat, I did not come downstairs and check my e-mail until mid-Sunday morning, and was shocked to see the following:

Bereavement Notice- Rebbetzin Annette Wolk z"l

With profound shock and deep sadness, we regret to inform you of the passing of our founding Rebbetzin, Rebbetzin Annette Wolk z"l, beloved wife of our Rabbi Emeritus Rabbi Howard Wolk, mother of Elie (Amy) Wolk, Michal (Rabbi Eric) Olshin, Yo (Lani) Wolk, Rabbi Akiva (Dr. Rachel) Wolk, Gavi (Talia) Wolk and Shimi Wolk, grandmother of Ruby, Sydney and Sammy Wolk and many other grandchildren and legendary Limmudei Kodesh teacher for decades at the Akiba/Yavneh Academy of Dallas

Note: z”l is the English shorthand for the Hebrew phrase זיכרונה לברכה , which means “may her memory be a blessing.”

At first glance, not quite absorbing what I had read, I assumed it was Rabbi Walk’s mother who had died, but then I quickly and shockingly realized that the announcement was about Rabbi Wolk’s wife.

I was able to get in touch with an old friend from our Dallas days to confirm this terrible event. Apparently, Annette z"l had died in her sleep on Friday night. She was staying at the home of a friend while Rabbi Wolk was in New York waiting to leave for Israel after Shabbat. I cannot even imagine the horror that the friends with whom she was spending the weekend must have felt when they awoke on Shabbat morning to find her gone.

As it is Jewish tradition to bury as quickly as possible, the funeral took place on Sunday. Fortunately, another friend sent me the link and we were able to watch as Rabbi Wolk and each of their children spoke about their wife and mother.

We spent our first five years as a married couple on the University of Rochester campus. From 1978-1980, Barry was a postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory and we lived in Patchogue, a small town in eastern Long Island. During those years, Rabbi Wolk led the small orthodox synagogue in Patchogue. There were only a handful of young couples in the community, so we were all very close, and I remember spending quite a lot of time with Annette z"l and the rabbi, who lived in the same garden apartment complex as did we. After completing his postdoctoral fellowship, we moved to Dallas, Texas where Barry was an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas. Just weeks before we left Dallas to move to Sharon in 1986, Rabbi Wolk called us to tell us he was coming to Dallas for an interview, and he was offered and took that post. He stayed there for some years before moving on to a position in West Hartford, Connecticut, but after a few years there he returned to Dallas and the Wolks made that their permanent home.

In my memories of Annette z”l, she was always smiling. I took a look at her Facebook page and found hundreds of pictures of her radiant smile. I have to believe that somewhere she is still smiling at her husband, children, and grandchildren and everyone who had the pleasure and honor of knowing her.

Her memory will be a blessing, as was the life she lived.

Love,

Rebecca

A priceless handshake

We were back up in Sharon last weekend. We spent Shabbat afternoon with Eliana and Julia, and then Saturday night headed up to the Maimonides vs. Gann Academy varsity basketball game which was held at the Gosman Athletic Center at Brandeis University in Waltham. Our M-Cats won! On Sunday, we headed up to Brookline and met Simmie and Eliana for lunch at Pure Cold Press in Brookline (https://www.purecoldpress.com/), a really terrific restaurant. Simmie headed back to Sharon while we went with Eliana to see the M-Cats play Cristo Rey at a beautiful, relatively new (opened in 2011) venue, The Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center, not far from the restaurant. Cristo Rey was a tough team with a lot of very tall players and the M-Cats played hard but could not get out ahead.

On Tuesday evening we headed over to the 92^nd Street Y for this:

Paul Krugman in Conversation with Samantha Bee: Arguing with Zombies

Join Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman for a conversation about his new book, Arguing with Zombies—along with the most crystal-clear crash course in contemporary economics, politics and public policy you’re likely to get ahead of the 2020 election.

As the Trump administration rolls back nearly every New Deal-era law America has relied upon for a century, Krugman breaks down the myths surrounding public policy issues at home and abroad—from tax reform to healthcare to Brexit—with the characteristic intelligence, wit and passion that have been on display for two decades in his writing for The New York Times.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable hour, in some ways rather surprising to me. I really enjoy reading Krugman’s Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times, and was heartened to see that even with his amazing resume, he comes off as being very down-to-earth. But Samantha Bee was the big surprise. She is certainly very funny but she is also impressively well-read and smart, and really held her own quite well with this Nobel Laureate.

I suppose that because we had tickets for this event, a few hours before it I received an e-mail about tickets being available to see a taping of Samantha Bee’s show, “Full Frontal,” for the following evening. After ensuring handicap accessibility at the CBS Studio where it is taped, we decided to go for it and ordered the tickets. Chatting with another audience member before the show, I was reminded that we had done this sort of thing just once before, when we had gone to see a taping of the “Colbert Report.” I cannot remember just when that was, but it must have been before I started blogging in 2012 because I cannot seem to find any mention of it here. That show aired for 1,447 episodes between October 2005 and December 2014. It no longer seems possible to obtain tickets to see Colbert since he took over hosting “The Late Show;” believe me, I have tried!

It was a lot of fun, but to be honest, as performances go, we really enjoyed the 92^nd Street Y talk far more. However, there was one highlight of that taping that will stick with me forever. Because I was in a wheelchair, they sat me at a designated spot right in the front on the far left. And when the taping ended, Samantha Bee made a point of coming over to me and shaking my hand. Wow! I really did not imagine she would have even noticed this old grey-haired lady with the oxygen sitting in a wheelchair, let alone come over to thank her for coming. But she did. And all I can say is that although I may find her raunchiness a bit much at times, she now has an enormous fan for life!

Here is the full episode.

https://www.tbs.com/shows/full-frontal-with-samantha-bee/season-4/episode-34/january-29-2020

We all need to laugh as much as we can!

Love,

Rebecca

a postscript

Postscript to last post:

After receiving a couple of comments on this post, I was reminded of another recent misuse of the English language you may appreciate. The other day, I heard part of a recent speech given by Prince Harry of the UK, who presumably speaks "The King's English," in which he referred to "the decision that I made for my wife and I to step back..."

Took me a while to find it, but here it is....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55OQ7aC7hW4  

He later refers to being grateful for the support that his grandmother has given "Megan and I." Oh dear.

A Final Jeopardy! we definitely knew

On the Jeopardy! aired last night, the Final Jeopardy! category was U.S. Territories and the answer was:

Of the 5 inhabited U.S. territories, this is the

only one where cars drive on the left.

We got this immediately, having spent many wonderful weeks over the years vacationing on St. John in the Caribbean: The correct question was,

What are the U.S. Virgin Islands?

That question got me to wondering, what are the other four inhabited U.S. territories? Isn’t Wikipedia a wonderful thing?

The U.S. has five permanently inhabited territories: Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in the North Pacific Ocean, and American Samoa in the South Pacific.

Puerto Rico

U.S. Virgin Islands

Northern Mariana Islands

Guam

American Samoa

Driving on the left side was initially a bit of a challenge, but over the years we certainly became used to it. For those who might be curious, the cars there, which presumably are manufactured in countries with right-side roadways, have drivers’ seats on the left side, so it is, I suppose, a bit odd for those coming from the UK and other countries where the cars are made to accommodate the different driving patterns.

We may be able to drive our cars on different sides of the roads but you would hope we could agree on some basic rules of grammar. Perhaps because I have been subjected to too much media (print, electronic, and television) lately, I am finding myself annoyed almost every day with the flagrant disregard for those rules. Here is one you see frequently that I just picked up in a fundraising e-mail:

Let’s do it again in 2020: pitch in $10 or more now to help Adam and I win our re-election campaigns and hold the House so we can keep making progress.

To help Adam and I? You want to help I? What ever happened to helping me? When did “me” become a forbidden word? Somehow people have the impression that “me” is too informal. But, no, and here is the distinction:

·       “I” is the subject pronoun, which means that it is used as the subject of a verb, the one "doing" the verb.

·       “Me” is the object pronoun, which means that it is used as the object of the verb.

So, please, if I need help, then I will ask you to help ME!

Be well, and drive safely!

Love,

Rebecca

Seeing clearly enough

The “Greatest Jeopardy Player of All Time” was determined in just four two-game segments. James Holzhauer won the second, while the first, third, and fourth were won by Ken Jannings, earning Ken the title and the $1,000,000 prize.

On that fourth evening, Brad Rutter hit on a “daily double” late in the game and bet everything. Unfortunately, he was unable to produce the correct question, bringing his score down to 0 points, and the game ended soon thereafter with Brad’s final score at 0. When the second game was initiated, host Alex Trebeck announced that they would now remove all the first-game scores and reset everyone’s tally to “0,” with the idea that at the end of the second game, the highest total two-game score would belong to the winner. When Alex announced this, James Holzhauer shouted out “they forgot to change Brad’s score.”  While I freely admit that I have never been particularly fond of James, I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he thought he was being humorous, although at least one friend shared with me that he saw the comment as rather mean-spirited.

One weakness of this tournament was that luck, rather than skill, may have played too large a role in the outcome. Why? Because the scores may have depended a bit too heavily on when the players found the “daily doubles.” This impact was apparent a number of times for Ken Jennings, who found the daily double late in the game and was able to achieve a very high score by betting his entire earnings and providing the correct response. Having said that, James Holzhauer would have won the fourth game had he correctly responded to the “Final Jeopardy.” Had there been a fifth game, we will never know what the outcome would have been.

Now we are back to regular “Jeopardy!”, and Barry and I were stunned last evening that none of the three contestants knew the correct question to this answer in the category of “US Representatives.”   

Finally, you might be wondering why I called this post “seeing clearly enough.” Although I have not driven a car since before 2002, I continue to carry a New York State driver’s license, if only because it is such a widely recognized form of identification. But a couple of months ago I received a notice that it was time to renew. I stopped in a local drug store that conducts the vision test, and unfortunately was unable to pass. I was overdue for a visit to my ophthalmologist, the same one I have been seeing since he was recommended to me by a Pfizer colleague over 25 years ago. Needless to say, we are both getting older. I was really nervous about this visit. But the assistant conducting the test of visual acuity was very patient, and went up to that very first line and had me read each one. As soon as I got to around the third or fourth line I started having a bit of trouble, but for reasons I cannot fully understand, I instinctively found myself “copying” the letters with my finger on my lap, and this helped me to correctly identify them all as far as I needed to go to indicate 20/35. Anything better than 20/40 is considered acceptable, so I “passed”! While I still have no intention of trying to drive, I was simply elated to be able to complete the renewal application and am really looking forward to that new card coming in the mail in a couple of weeks.

This has been a busy week of medical visits, including a follow-up CT of my bladder which continues to be negative for any signs of cancer, as was a recent cystoscopy. We are actually now talking about perhaps ending the pembrolizumab treatments in a few months, when I will have completed two years. It is not a simple decision, because the original trials were two years in length and there is no published long-term follow-up data to guide the decision. Even if we do stop treatment, I will need to continue careful follow-up.

I am so glad all these medical appointments are behind me because winter has now returned in earnest – it is very cold and that four-letter word beginning with “S” is back in the forecast. So, stay safe and warm!

Love,

Rebecca

A fascinating story

Sometimes we wake up too early in the morning, and we have found that putting on the television is not a great idea. I am fortunate that Barry finds us all sorts of interesting podcasts, and this morning we listened to a fascinating story. Of course, the story was a bit too fascinating in that it did not serve the purpose of helping us return to sleep!

It is the true story of two identical twin brothers, Farrell Randal "Randy" Sklar and Jason Nathan Sklar, born January 12, 1972. The two boys were so alike that even their parents could not reliably tell them apart, so their mother took to using color-coded diaper pins. This worked well until she took them to the doctor for a routine visit, and while she was not with them, the nurses replaced their cloth diapers with disposables, dutifully returning the four diaper pins to their mother. For the next 40 years she was never 100% certain that she had correctly identified her two sons. The story here tells of how the family was recently able to solve the mystery, but I do not want to divulge the ending because it is such a fun experience to walk through this with them.

Fascinating story

As adults, the two brothers are comedians. You can read about them here:

The Sklar Brothers

I hope you will enjoy it as much as we did.

Love,

Rebecca