Click images for desktop size: "Christmas" by Angeloque The big news around here is that Jack, the puppy I'm foster parenting, has had someone express interest in adopting him!
The bad news is that the potential adopter has gone through an interview process but hasn't returned my calls about coming to meet him.
We've decided to just blame the holiday and not to let it dampen our spirits in the slightest.

I'm off work today. Tonsillitis, not resignation, just ill. Its no where near as bad as that time a couple of years ago. That was deadly agony - this is just painful. Again no damper on the holidays.

I have a special visitor for the holidays, as well as another dog I'll be baby sitting. His name is Charles, the dog's name, not the special visitor. Three dogs and two people. Suddenly this house seems very tiny but in the best way that will be nothing but enjoyable.
After my paycheck there wasn't much left except for some few Christmas cards, of which its been said I forgot to sign . . . doesn't matter. What matters is that my wishes were expressed. The wishes matter not the sender. A few years ago I'd have been miffed if you didn't just assume any great unsigned card or present didn't come from me.

An LA friend sent me two movies. Screeners: “Rocky Balboa” and “We Are Marshall”.
I watched the Rocky last night to fall asleep to (especially after BYU and their 24 year old freshmen took it to Oregon). I was surprised.
I liked the John Avildsen original “Rocky”. I liked that Stallone had done something impossible. An unknown actor wrote a film to star himself, and stuck to it. There was a lot of interest in the script and Stallone held fast to get it made starring himself. That took something special. To be broke and walk away from $50,000 to hold fast to a dream is special.
The film was a monster hit in every way and Stallone became a star - he embarrassed himself constantly and in many old and new ways.
I thought “Rocky II” was pathetic, III was amusing thanks to Mr T, and disgusting in its cheap bathos and ignoring the way heavyweight fights are set-up. IV was a bad monster movie and V relentlessly worked to destroy the entire mythos and good feeling that the Rocky character might ever had engendered. Its been 16 years since Rocky V. I can't think of anything Stallone has done since Copland in '97.
As much as I liked Copland it wasn't good enough to wipe out the memories of “Cobra” or “Demolition Man” and certainly not “Judge Dredd”.
I expected more pompous manipulative bombast from “Rocky Balboa” especially after Stallone took an embarrassing turn showing up to be interviewed during the Eagles-Giants game.
I was wrong.
“Rocky Balboa” is a cool Hollywood movie. It has its share of cheap manipulations, questionable coincidences and a fair smattering of bathos. But the core of the story is kind of wonderful in a Capra-esque powerful way.
One thing it does that Hollywood still does better than anyone in the world is to take a ridiculous premise and make us believe it. A 60 year old man fighting a World Champion? Yeah, we see it and we can't help but believe it.
That fragile core is done so well by Stallone the writer that it even survives the damage done to it by Stallone the director.
I recommend the movie. Maybe becasue I'm old and want to believe I still have one more big fight in me. Maybe becasue I want to believe a man can change and change for the better, maybe because there's a dog as an important character. That's a lot of maybes', all of them valid so the sum of things is that maybe I liked this because its a good movie.
I'm hoping to watch “We Are Marshall” tonight. After Matthew McHonikey's “even worse than Stallone's” plug for it during a jaw dropping interview on Monday Night Football, maybe it will be good too.