Acquisition & Divestiture -- with FREE BOX!!!

Acquisition:

I was at an estate sale this weekend and found some medium-good boring postcards. They weren't marked -- estate sale faux pas, in my humble opinion -- but when I ran down the owner he carefully counted them up before announcing they were $2.00 apiece. $2.00 apiece! You know what Michael5000 does when you try to sell him old postcards for $2.00 apiece? HE LAUGHS IN YOUR FACE, that's what! Albeit civilly.

Oddly, the guy let go of this 1941 map, which you could probably squeeze ten or twenty bucks from in the right situation, for a measly dollar!

It's not quite like anything else in my vintage map collection! It's not a road map so much as a page from the old Rand McNally Commercial atlases, folded up inside a booklet along with an exhaustive gazetteer. Just the thing for the travelling businessman who visits a lot of obscure rural communities, in 1941.

For my money ($1.00, that is), the best part is this little blurb for the company's world atlases:

Hey, Pop! "Where are the Azores?" the ad text asks. "Where are Pieping, Suez, Istanbul?" I mean, really? When you think about it? This is heady existential stuff.

Meanwhile, in a nearby Free Box, I found this perfectly unremarkable 2002 map of Seattle, which will be a modest improvement on the 1999 map of Seattle that has been in my truck's glove compartment.

Divestiture

Speaking of Free Boxes, today we're taking this cherished City of Roses tradition online with the first edition of:

The CASTLE5000 FREE BOX

Here are some items that we, the 5000s, are finished with and ready to divest of. Want 'em? As a member of the L&TM5K community, you get first dibs! First come first serve! Postage paid by us where reasonable!

• An old-school military-style duffel bag, olive drab.
• The two quilting hoops that no one wanted when I mentioned them here.
• CD: Lalo, Symphonie espagnole. Anne-Sophie Mutter, soloist. EMI Classics.
• CD: Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Come On Come On.
• CD: Camera Obscura, Underachievers Please Try Harder, not exactly a store-bought copy.
• CD: John Mayer, Room for Squares
• CD: Russian Folk Songs. The Patriarchal Choir of Moscow. Naxos.
• CD: U2, All That You Can't Leave Behind.
• CD: Professor Longhair, Crawfish Fiesta. Caveat Emptor: his hair is actually not especially long.
• CD: Britten, A Ceremony of Carols, Friday Afternoons, others. New London Children's Choir. Naxos.
• CD: Elgar, Violin Concerto. Nigel Kennedy, soloist. EMI Classics.
• Old-style "UO" logo enamel University of Oregon keychain.
• One of those little compasses you stick on your dashboard, with two ineffectual suction cups.
• One computer keyboard, still in box.
• Three (3) irons, all three of which leak water but which work just fine as non-steam irons.
• Nice poster-sized National Geographic map of the world, folded.
• The 1999 map of Seattle that has been in my glove compartment hitherto.
• Book: Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow. Hardback First Edition, excellent condition, not worth much. Caveat Emptor: this is one seriously disappointing book.
• Book: Octavia Butler, Kindred. Trade Paperback.
• Last but not least: Great Expectations (by Charles Dickens, duh), unabridged, on 13 cassettes. Awesome reading of an awesome book, and I bet you still have a tape player somewhere around the house, don't ya.

That's all for this time. Don't be shy! Everything must go!

Your Sunday Boring Postcard from Michael5000

CAMP ANNISQUAM, W. GLOUCESTER, MASS.

Provenance: Unsure.

Want a boring postcard from Michael5000? Just ask -- he's got plenty!

BP Wants You to be Safe!

I bumped into this coloring book the other day, and can't decide whether it's funny or fair or even noteworthy, but whatever. We'll give it a shot.

Oil and Energy MegaCorporation "bp" -- the MegaCorporation formerly known as "British Petroleum" -- presents the 2001 bear-oriented publication Home Safety: An Educational Coloring and Activity Book!


bp wants to make sure you know exactly what to do in the event of an emergency!

bp says "Take extra care around fire and heat!" Be careful around things that can be hot. And it's a good idea to have a fire extinguisher around!

bp wants you to take an oath that you will follow all of the safety rules! Because it's all about keeping your home and family safe!

Here endeth the cheap shot.

Flag Friday XII

Flag Friday is a periodic discussion of the world's national flags; the project is explained and indexed here.

These discussions are about graphic design, and perhaps about nationalism and national symbolism in general. They should not be taken as critical of the countries, ideals, cultures, or people that the flags represent.

Egypt


Parsons: Approving of "good colors" but disliking "graven images," he gives it a "C+", 60/100.

Michael5000: Egypt's color scheme is not entirely to my personal liking, but it is certainly a dignified and regionally distinctive palette, so I can get behind Parsons there. As for the "graven image, let's take a closer look:


There is some fussiness here, but it is redeemed in my book by strong geometries and, especially, that the insignia is rendered in a single color. The local Betsy Ross, if she or he has sufficient appliqué skills, should be able to render it out of whole cloth. There is writing on this flag -- I am surprised that Parsons, who is a real writing hawk, did not beat me to this observation -- but it is subtle. I suppose that if I could read Arabic, the presence of words might bother me more, but there you go.

Grade: B


El Salvador


Parsons: Complaining of bad colors, writing, and a design that is "too busy," Parson adds that "not only did they write the name of country on the flag, but its full mailing address, in a living language." He gives it a D-, 36/100.

Michael5000: This is another case, as with Ecuador last time around, where at first you might at first wonder if Parsons is actually seeing the flag in question, or is merely hallucinating. But he's not. The civil flag, shown above, is as innocuous a tricolor as one could imagine, but El Salvador is another of many Latin American countries where the formal state flag gets a lot of popular use. So, here's the flag that Parsons was commenting on:

The seal, with its text -- Republica de El Salvador en la America Central -- is indeed rather busy. Here it is in schematic:


Mrs.5000 noted last week that the Haitian flag contains an image of itself, and found this -- if I do not put words in her mouth -- totally trippy. Well, the state flag of El Salvador ups the ante, with a whopping five images of itself in its central seal. The central triangle discretely spares us the knowledge of whether those five flags have five flags of their own, and so on, and so on, and so on. In any event, this seal is exactly the sort of thing I don't like to see on a flag, but even so you really have to look pretty closely to find "bad colors" here.

But in any event, Flag Friday's policy is to critique the civil flags of the world, and the civil flag is a simple white-on-blue sandwich. It is nothing remarkable, but would certainly seem restful on the eyes if you'd been staring at the flag of Austria for a while.

Grade (for the civil flag): B


Equatorial Guinea


Parsons: Complains of "writing" and "graven images," assigning a "D+", 45/100.

Michael5000: Small, culturally isolated, and with worse-than-usual quality-of-life problems across the board, Equatorial Guinea hardly needs grief about its flag. Yet I confess that I feel that Dr Parsons is essentially correct in his complaints, if a bit harsh in his grading.

It's fussy. The central elements are all simple: a shield, a tree, words on a banner, six stars. But four elements (or five, or ten, depending on how you count them) add up quickly, and soon start to look just a bit like a yard sale happening on the central stripe. I like the blue chevron, but it seems a bit thin, a bit... timid. Equatorial Guinea doesn't need a new flag or anything; it's just that its existing flag could stand for a bit of a makeover.

Grade: C+


Eritrea



Parsons: Condemning "bad colors," he gives it a "C+", 60/100.

Michael5000: In reference to the flag of East Timor, frequent L&TM5K commenter Jennifer noted that "there's an optical illusion for me caused by the two triangles that makes the right side of the flag look wider than the left side." Well, Jennifer, welcome to Eritrea.

I rather like the colors of the Eritrean flag, and I like the emblem -- and in answer to your question, that would be an upright olive branch within a wreath. Yet the optical effect that Jennifer noticed in East Timor is very pronounced here, creating the illusion that the rectangle is way out of true on the right-hand side. This uncomfortable effect is, in fact, the dominant feature of the flag for me, and it makes it really hard to enjoy the other elements.

Incidentally, the Eritreans went with a 5:3 ratio for a few years before switching to 2:1. Camp followers will know that I am no friend to the 2:1 ratio, but there's two sides to that story and there were some great comments on that point made after Flag Friday XI. In this case, anyway, the point is moot: the flag seems to be swelling out of its seams on the right-hand side in either ratio.

Grade: C


Estonia


Parsons: Without comment, he assigns a "B-", 65/100.

Michael5000: You may already know of my enthusiasm for this unorthodox but mature tricolor, a striking and lovely banner which I awarded "Best Flag (Tricolor)" all the way back in 2008. (It was, in fact, the Estonian consulate's gracious response to this accolade which led to that Baltic country's Most Favored Nation status for this blog). Indeed, I am the kind of guy who, without a known drop of Estonian blood in his ancestry, might make a point of dressing up for Estonian Flag Day:


So you KNOW I'm not going to give it a measly B-. I am in fact going to give it an:

Grade: A

More Movies: No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men
Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007

Ebert: 4 Stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 95%

My Official Preconception: Some kind of grim Western deal, maybe?

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Back in the day, you knew what to expect from a movie set in the arid American West. The noble cowpoke, living according to a rugged, manly code of honor, held fast to his freedom against the always threatening encroachment of rules, fences, due process, and womenfolk. There was plenty of violence, sure, but that was what a man had to do to protect himself from Native Americans and other, black-hatted cowpokes who sought to encroach on the property rights of others.

In the last three or four decades, movies have followed historians into a more sophisticated understanding of Western history, and many a fine Western has taken seriously the experience of Natives, women, Hispanics, and so on, has looked at the regional ecology as an integral part of the story rather than just a scenic backdrop, and has considered the contests for power among elites that shaped the lives of humble folks trying to get on from day to day west of the Mississippi. These films are often called “Anti-Westerns,” and many of them are pretty cool.

The Western trope that is most dramatically inverted in No Country for Old Men is that of the masculine protagonist’s doomed battle against the forces of civilization. In No County, the “good guys” represent civilized virtues and values, and their battle is against the forces of chaos and lawlessness. In the central plot, those forces are manifested by nasty business in the cross-border drug trade and by a spooky hit man who kills lots of people on drug-trade business, but also in fulfillment of his own rugged, manly code of honor. So, what you have here is perhaps not as much an Anti-Western as an Inverted Western.

Now then. It is beautiful, and depicts the West Texas landscape with exquisite care and sensitivity. It is also thoroughly saturated with senseless violence, and therefore not a good pick for those averse to scarlet sprays of blood in their filmed entertainment. The acting is beyond reproach, with characters vividly realized from the leads right down to the non-speaking extras. (For those of you following along with the DVD, take a look at the scene where the Bad Guy has his procedural showdown with the trailer park manager. You could write a book about that marvelous woman behind the desk. In fact, let’s get that character actress’ name into this review, for she is fabulous: Kathy Lamkin).

Set in 1980, the film is more or less presented from the point of view of a retiring sheriff who feels overwhelmed by a rising tide of lawlessness and disorder. Towards the end, after the movie has deviated from the expected narrative arc – was that a spoiler? – the sheriff pays a visit to a shoestring relative, a character we have not met before. He complains of how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. People have been letting him make this complaint unchallenged throughout the entire film, but his relative responds with a story of senseless violence from 1909, and points out, correctly, that “Whatcha got ain't nothin new.” Then, in the penultimate scene, an entirely respectable young man literally offers a stranger the shirt off his back. So, violence may be part of the West, or the world, but this is not something unique to these times, or those times, nor is it going to be all-pervasive in the present or in the future. And the movie’s final scene, a quiet reverie, is a subtle but perfect affirmation of this basically optimistic message.

So that’s the intellectual underpinnings, anyhow. But mind you, don’t forget it’s a blood-soaked serial-killer chase movie. It's adapted, apparently pretty faithfully, from a novel by Cormac McCarthy. The title is in some ways perfect, but also makes me wonder how closely McCarthy read “Sailing to Byzantium,” the Yeats poem from which it is taken.

Prognosis: * * * 1/2. I can't really give four stars to a movie about an implacable serial killer, even if this is a damn fine one and not "about" serial killing per se. Random murderous rampages are so very rare, and to pretend otherwise in our movies, as convenient as it is for a filmmaker who needs a direct route to our most thrilling fears, is socially corrosive. Having said that, if you don't mind seeing depictions of bloated corpses, execution-style murder, bones sticking out of the skin, and what-not, I recommend this film as highly entertaining and damned near technically perfect.

Your Thursday Boring Postcard from Michael5000

Franklin St., So. Framingham, Mass.

The Street we are living in just now

Provenance: Gift of frequent L&TM5K commenter Yankee in England, June 2010.

The Wednesday Quiz III:10 -- O Canada!

The Wednesday Quiz -- Season III -- Quiz 10

O Canada!

The Wednesday Quiz is a "closed-book" test of knowledge and intuition; please do not look up answers, ask others for help, or answer as a team.

Questions about the rules and the ~Fabulous Prizes~ are answered here.

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Ten questions about the North American nation that is home to the world's largest Indium mine!

1. ____________________ , in addition to having by far the smallest population among the Canadian provinces, has only about a tenth of the land area of the second-smallest province.

2. ____________, _____________, ____________ are the three largest cities in Canada.

3. The October Crisis of 1970 was, broadly speaking, about __________________.

4. Winnepeg is the capital and largest city of ___________________.

5. Canada's population is roughly the same size as those of
a) Thailand, the United Kingdom, or Italy
b) Algeria, Uganda, or Morocco
c) Portugal, the Czech Republic, or Tunisia
d) Belize, Iceland, or the Maldives

6. Sir John Alexander Macdonald was ____________________.

7. ____________________ became a part of Canada only in 1949.

8. ____________________ separated from the Northwest Territory to become Canada's third territory in 1999.

9. ____________________ is easily Canada's most populous province.

10. The 1931 Statute of Westminster confirmed something that had been in the works for a while, the ____________________________.

Submit your answers, and -- why not -- another blistering guitar solo, in the comments.