non-ecumenical ramblings

 Movies for my son to watch

Have done my best to cover the classics, e.g. Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, 2001:  A Space Odyssey, but he's leaving for college in 1½ years, so want to make a list now.  No set order for the films in each group:

To put next on list:

Woodstock

Apocalypse Now

A Glass Menagerie

Death of a Salesman

The best intentions

La Dolce Vita

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Born Rich

A place in the sun

Full Metal Jacket

Cool Hand Luke

Hud

Heaven Can Wait - Ernst version

Bicycle Thief

Barry Lyndon

NFSD

Godfather (I & II)

Hotel Terminus:  Life and Time of Klaus Barbie

SLC Punk

Clockwork Orange

A Streetcar named desire

Cat on a hot tin roof

Garden of the Finzi Continis

Deer Hunter

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Cooley High - SEEN.  Hasn't aged all that great, but interesting time piece.

 Local items:  did hike to Hollywood sign & enjoyed it.

Also made it to El Matador State Beach.

 

Still have not seen:

• Observation Deck at City Hall
• Mount Baldy
• Nethercutt car museum - will wait for car buff brother to come to town

 

Too hard to find the list of places to visit worldwide on previous posts, so current list would be:

Newfoundland & other island provinces (retirement trip)

Antarctica (and South Pole) - only continent not to have visited

 

South America:

Machu Pichu

Rapa Nui 

 

Europe:

Athens (Acropolis and Pantheon)

Milan (Last Supper)

Oslo (The Scream)

 

Asia:

India (Taj Mahal)

China (Terra Cotta Warriors and Great Wall)

Cambodia (Angkor Wak)

Africa:

Egypt (Grand Pyramids, Sphinx, Abu Simbel, Alexandria)

Tunis (Carthage)

US National Parks:

Everglades

Glacier

Isle Royale

Wrangall-St. Elias 

 

Lower list - Miscellaneous:

Canada - perhaps visit the remaining provinces & Yukon territory

Molokai leper colony

Straights of Magellan/Tierra del fuego 

Sunday, March 11th, 2018

Updates:

Still have not seen:

• Observation Deck at City Hall
• Mission Tiki drive in
• Orange Empire Railway Museum - frankly pretty low on the list
• Mount Baldy
• El Matador Beach - work names conference rooms after beaches.  Had never heard of many of the beaches before the conference rooms.
• Romulo Pico Adobe - near work
• Nethercutt car museum
• Hiking to Hollywood sign

Visited:

• Museum of Flying - pretty cool actually.  Would recommend to anyone mucking around Santa Monica airport with time to kill.
• Fowler Museum - nothing stood out
• Marion Davies house - a bit disappointing.  Same architect as Hearst Castle, but there's really nothing distinctive about the house.
• Oakridge estate - a bit disappointing.  Thieves had taken light fixtures and knobs from stove, so what you're left with is a neat old house with nothing inside.  Probably the mural on the wall of entertaining room was the best feature.
• Newland house - far better than i expected.  Unlike Marion Davies & Oakridge, the house was full of mementos from ~100 years ago.  It's the only "old" house in Huntington Beach, so had broad support from the community to house as many period items as possible.  Thieves had stuck at some point, but donations replenished the appeal.
• Walt's Barn - no AC, so a bit hot & a bit small, so recommend going on a cooler day and towards the end of the open period.  If you go around 2:30 the line is very short.  Recommend riding Live Steamers next door afterwards.  The only small train where you're sitting in the open & not in "cars", so has a unique appeal.

• The Bat Cave - guess it's something to see.  Nothing too special, but not bad if you're wanting to see something in Griffith Park.
  
  

Marion Davies house
Walt's Barn
The Bat Cave
Observation Deck at City Hall

Update:
Museum of Flying
Fowler Museum
Romulo Pico Adobe - near work


Left over from previous list

• Mission Tiki drive in
• Orange Empire Railway Museum - frankly pretty low on the list
• Mount Baldy
• El Matador Beach - work names conference rooms after beaches.  Had never heard of many of the beaches before the conference rooms.
• Leo Carrillo SP - just visited today on a drive through...frankly a bit underwhelming

Was reviewing my predictions from 3 years ago.  They've held up reasonably well, so here's a quick cut for January 2021.

Keeping with the education theme, I decide to read "Building a better teacher", which ended up being half of a good book.  The first portion was sad reading about the failed effort at Michigan State - heart wrenching knowing how much effort the well meaning parties had put into the effort.  A specific example to make a general point - previous efforts at improving education had failed.

The second ½ was more of a "how to" book focusing on specific skills - The Discipline of discipline for example, so ended up leaving the book disjoint.  Perhaps when this book is updated in a decade or so when some of the school improvement efforts have reached maturity, it will tell a better story.

So far, of the three education books that I've read, The Smartest Kids in the World is still the best book, evaluating the 3 on what makes a good book - good narrative arc, characters you can care about. The other books (also including Paying for the Party - by far the weakest of the three) are both well meaning, they both lacked the proper structure of what a good story should be, and even non-fiction title should ultimately tell a good story.

There are some common threads in the literature that I've read - teachers should be highly screened & continually trained....and highly paid.  We've reached testing overkill in this country.  Beyond that, not sure what common conclusions one could draw beyond, we've spent a ton of $$$ and resources that have gone to waste.