Sunday Miracles

It seemed endless, didn’t it?  Like something that would last forever.  All the hills grey as death, the grass long burned off by drought to dusty brown, blasted, lifeless, and dreary.  Then came the soft rains and suddenly, miraculously, everything was green, everywhere, overnight.



And a white faced calf stopped grazing to puzzle over a car that pulled off the road for no reason,  while little




woolies rambled along a fence line.



Across the street, the Madonna Ranch mares and foals found themselves in a grassy green landscape,
   



and a young colt gazed at his verdant new world.




Meanwhile, poppies struggled out of the suddenly lush grass to turn their faces to the sun,




and even “my mountain” was dressed for Easter.

The sudden, sweet green world, a blessing on the land.  And back home, in my own front yard, the very first Matilija Poppy had opened its splendid, improbable, outlandish petals.  So many moments, so many miracles, in a world made new again.
 

Dissed! Dissed! Can I Have Fries With That?

Ah, well, I guess the days of Board of Sups comity are over.  Years ago, you used to hear things like Supervisor A saying, "Well, I disagree with Supervisor B, but it IS his district and he knows his district's needs best, so I'll defer to his opinion and vote to support his motion." 

Not any more. At least not when it comes to Big Macs. (Or 2-1 vs 1-1 water trade-offs in Paso Robles, hmmmm?) 

I had to work Tuesday so missed the BOS hearing on whether or not Los Osos would get a McDonald's drive-thru, open 24 hours a day!  From talking with friends who were there, it seems it was a lively hearing, with over 100 people showing up, many of whom were adamantly opposed to a drive-thru of any kind and/or to a McDonald's of any shape or size. Also there, as the Tribune reports, were McDonald's employees from other sites who think the place is just swell, so Los Osos should have one, too.

And, from the Tribune story by Nick Wilson, I'm sure Supervisor Gibson argued vigorously against the eatery, claiming that a drive-thru violated the town's efforts to create a more pedestrian-friendly downtown and was a "step back" from doing "innovative things." 

That "discussion" would have been something to hear.  You know Gibson.  Once he cranks up into his stem-winder, Let-Me-Explain-It-All-To-You-So-You'll-Know-How-To-Vote mode, out pours a torrent of words, an endless overwhelming stream of relentless argle-bargle verbiage that floods out in such ever-increasingly vast quantities that it sucks all the air out of the room and  causes heads to explode until everyone's writhing on the floor with their hands over their ears, screaming,  "Stop! Stop! I'll vote any way you want me to, just please stop talking! Gaaaggghhhhh!" 

But this time, I guess the other Sups were wearing earplugs because they were unmoved and they were not into deference on this matter.  After all, if their districts had a McDonalds, then Los Osos, by God, would get one too because, as Supervisor Hill put it, being able to eat there or not was all "part of a freedom of choice."  Supervisor Ray, who doesn't live in the district either, said she didn't have a "problem with the project." 

So much for comity and deference.  Moribund. (Likely from eating too many big Macs.)   

And so it came to be, 4-1, that Los Osos will get a retro drive-thru fast-food eatery because of "seniors who can't easily get in and out of cars."  The only change is that the place won't be open round-the-clock, which will be a huge disappointment to the thousands of Los Ososians who wander the streets, bellies rumbling, at three o'clock in the morning crying, "Freedom Fries!  We want Freedom Fries!" 

Well, clearly, the community will have to do something to remedy that alarming situation.  

Food Fight! Can I have fries with that?

Tomorrow, the Board of Supervisors will be hearing an appeal on whether or not to stand by the Planning Commission's decision that disallows the drive through portion of the proposed McDonald's.  McDonald's says that's a deal breaker -- no drive through, no deal.  There's a whole lot of people weighing in on this, a petition has been passing around, there's a webpage with instructions of who and where to write,  http://www.nomcdonaldslososos.org  That page includes a link to a No Mc Los Osos Facebook page where you can leave comments.   Check it out and tomorrow we'll find out if we'll get fries with that.  Or not. 

Dog Park Party

Saturday, it was fund-raising, garage-sale day for El Chorro Dog Park.  This has been an annual fund-raiser for the park for several years now and is part of the city-wide Garage Sale Day.  El Chorro (located across from Cuesta College on Hwy 1) is maintained by volunteers so every penny of the sale went to the park. The town was packed and there were lots of treasures to be found.  Weather perfect, people out having a good time.

If you've got a dog and are a regular El Chorro visitor and want to get involved in supporting the park by volunteering, there's contact information posted on the kiosk at the park.  

Sunday Lilies

They're outlandish, these huge, overdressed ladies shamelessly wagging their pollen-dusted stamens for all to see, so much pollen that the excess spills all over their petals, staining them rusty brown, like ladies of a certain age and poor eyesight who use a heavy hand at the make-up table and end up with spatterings of face power all over their silk blouses.  Loud, silly, unseemly, excessive, blowsy, blatant, and beautiful. Even the frog is startled. Look at him. "OMG!" he thinks. "Do I run away? Or maybe I'll just sit here under these gorgeous astonishments . . . . and dream."

Holy Mud Puddle

Thank God Darren Aronofsky got Russell Crowe to star in his wet hot mess of a movie, “Noah.”  Crowe’s massive presence and incredible skill at playing men much put upon and beset by trials and tribulations keeps the film from sinking into total silliness.  Like Kevin Costner, -–remember “The Postman? -- Crow has a rare gift for making the viewer think that, no matter what it is, Crowe actually believes it in that moment.  And since film is made up of moments, many moments, it’s enough to convince me and keep me seated. 

And “Noah” needed everything Crowe could bring to this fascinating, awful, ridiculous, moving, powerful, silly movie. 

We’re all pretty familiar with the story – God, man’s wickedness, the animals, rain, a dove – but the story in the Bible is only two pretty straightforward chapters.  That’s it. And no explanations.  A few minutes reading and you’re done.  But a movie has got to last two hours and has to ‘splain things, and so Aronofsky had to cook stuff up.  Like The Watchers, fallen angels who were punished by God for the sin of helping mankind, and were turned into waddling Transformers made of chunks of stone, one of which was voiced by a rumbling, growly Nick Nolte, if you can picture that.

So now we’ve got God, man’s wickedness, the animals, rain, a dove and . . . . Transformers!  You see something like that and you gotta  say to yourself, “Maudie, I think we’re in for some kind of wild ride here.”

Well, really, what can you do with this story that a few sci-fi bits wouldn’t help?  And special effects, and fabulous CGI work (all the animals were computer pixels, speaking of which, spoiler alert: The Noahs, Fred and Wilma, cooked up some herbal concoction and smudged the whole ark, putting all the animals into a deep sleep, which neatly solved the problem of poop, massive piles of poop  being popped out for 150 days And dog and cat fights and seasick elephants trumpeting in fear and lurching from one side of the ship to the other like shifting ballast in high seas.)

And, this being a spectacle, there were way cool explosions, creepy symbolic visions, requisite battle scenes out of Game of Thrones With Rain and a preposterously wonderful ark, the building of which caused it’s own back story.

Seems the movie was filmed in Iceland (Better visuals to indicate the crappy state of the earth and how beset and put upon Noah and his family were.  Also no explanations of where their rather large yurt came from since they were only carrying small backpacks ), which means we had a terrible, bare hardscrabble landscape with no trees.  So early on I was on alert wondering how they were gonna write their way out of that problem; Ark, wood . . .  no trees.

Well, silly me.  That’s where the screenwriters and the CGI boys come in: Methuselah (Noah’s grandfather (Anthony Hopkins), who had been living in a cave.  Don’t ask.) has a magic seed that when planted suddenly causes a whole forest to spring up, so, ka-boom, trees!
See how it goes? 

Unfortunately, the problem of patching plot holes wasn’t as easy to accomplish when it came to the “issues” going on with Noah’s family.  For some odd reason, the screenwriters conflated the story of Noah with the story of Abraham and Issac.

In the Bible, Noah and his wife and their sons Shem, Ham, Japeth and their three wives entered the ark.   They and their wives and all the animals were saved so they could repopulate the world.   In the film, Noah decided that God only wanted to save the animals .  And in this version, the sons had no wives, only a rescued young lady whose reproductive organs were damaged, which meant that there was only one fertile female (Mom) so the race of man would just die out.  So now we had a “family situation” going on: One son gets child-free nooky, the other son doesn’t.   Enter Methuselah (again!) and he magically fixes the young girl and she gets pregnant.

And suddenly we’re bang in the middle of Abraham’s narrative:  Noah declares that God chose him to make sure that mankind dies off (providing nobody looked at Mom and figured out she was capable of begetting.)  So if the baby was a son, it would live, if a girl, Noah would kill it and so carry out God’s commandment.
 
Oh, the drama! And with much wailing and hollering, twin girls are born and what’s a crazed Grandpaw to do? 

Well, this is Hollywood in the 21st century, not BCE, when the God of the Old Testament was as changeable and terrifying as a Bridezilla on PMS.  So, unlike Abraham, whose murderous hand was stayed by God only because Abraham was actually willing to kill his son, in this muddled script, Noah fails God’s instructions (kill all mankind) and finds his hand stayed by “Love,” a New Testament concept seriously out of time and place to the original story.

What am I saying?  We have Noah and Transformers, so, sure, “Love.”  O.K. Fine. Fine.
And that’s where Russell Crow always earns his fabulous salary.  A man seriously beset who somehow endures and prevails and triumphs.

Fadeout.

Oh, and the angelic Transformers?  Before dying in battle, Nick Nolte begs God’s forgiveness  and ZAP! all the fallen angels are returned to their fiery glory and zipped up to heaven like reverse comets.

Which made me wonder, “Why didn’t they ask sooner?  Would have saved a good deal of time painfully shuffling around encrusted with mud and rocks.”