Quiz 74. "Turd"
Why will one word make you laugh if you watch "Homemade" on Netflix? Plus what I'm going to be doing for the next 352 days. Steve's Stay-at-Home Corona for July 25, 2020.
If imagining Queen Elizabeth going skinny dipping with Pope Benedict makes you chuckle, then I have just the thing for you.
Like so many in these stay-at-home days, Sara and I are watching more than our fair share of TV and we are always searching for something new. Thursday night, July 24th, we watched “Eurovision” on Will’s recommendation. It’s the Will Ferrell-Rachel McAdams comedy on Netflix about the European singing contest. It’s not perfect, but it has some very funny moments. Will had read some online reviews--which were not favorable--but he watched it anyway and recommended it to us. After, he told us that he thinks online reviewers are just getting cranky with the pandemic. It wasn’t that bad. There’s even something in it for “Downton Abbey” fans. You won’t believe it.
And so it was that on Friday night, July 24th, Sara and I went searching for something new to watch. She had chosen “Eurovision” the night before so it was my turn to pick. I remembered reading a New York Times review from earlier in the week about a collection of 17 homemade short films on Netflix, all made by directors, producers and actors during the pandemic. It sounded interesting, but when we turned on the TV and fired up Netflix, I could not remember the name.
First, I looked through each of the Netflix search categories. Not in “New Releases,” not in “Trending,” not in “Top 10.” Nothing--which seemed like a bad sign. Sara got out her iPad and tried searching for it within the NYT web page. I then did the same. Finally we found it. “Homemade.” The name should have been obvious, but the name is exactly what made searching for it on the internet that much harder. (Just put the word “homemade” into Google these days and see how many different things come back.)
I typically do not like reading reviews of TV shows or movies because too often the reviews give away key elements and plot lines that spoil the surprise and wonder of seeing something with no preconceived notions. I think you can safely watch the “Homemade” trailer to get a sense of what it’s like without any spoiler alerts.
“Homemade".” 17 short films made at home during the pandemic.
And so it is that I recommend “Homemade” to you--and I hope I can do so without ruining it by giving away too much. The short films are uneven and all wildly different. Some you will love, others not so much. More than a few focus on children. At times, those are hysterical, some tedious and one is heartbreaking. There is something about the Queen and the Pope--and, yes, spoiler alert, there is a joke about them going skinny dipping. But one of my favorite moments in all the short films that Sara and I watched centered around the word, “Turd.” No spoiler alert here. I won’t tell you how it comes up or why. I won’t even tell you which short film turns on “turd.” When you see it and hear it, I promise you will laugh out loud. Both Sara and I did.
This write-up from “The Red Carpet Report” provides a list of the films and the film-makers with no spoiler alerts.
Note Well: Full disclosure, we did not watch all 17 of the shorts in “Homemade.” Not yet. Sara grew tired of them and started to fall asleep so we called it a night before seeing them all. (Maybe not the sort of thing you want to read in a recommendation of what to watch. Oh well. You’ve been warned.)
I had already been thinking of making my own short film during the pandemic and have came up with this. It’s only 29 seconds. I made it today. Saturday, July 25th. You’re welcome to watch.
As a bonus, keep an eye on Happy who enters the dining room only to settle back down on her blanket and bed in the living room.
This is a time lapse video of me scanning photos. Something I have tried to do for an hour a day for the last two months. It’s boring and monotonous but that’s part of its charm and value. It grounds me in an activity with tangible--albeit slow--progress. These are strange times and left to my own devices, I like to fast-forward to the half empty glass spilling out on the floor. Scanning pictures helps calm me down. As Sara has told me many times during this pandemic, “Action binds anxiety.”
What you see in that time lapse is the complete process of me scanning and saving 10 photos.
Before pictures went digital, I saved prints of every photo I took beginning in 1982 when my first daughter Annie was born. The prints are in archival-safe pages within big 3-hole binder photo albums. Each album is numbered by date. Each album holds about 650 photos. My digital photos do not begin until 2003. That means I have 21 years of photos to scan.
My goal is to scan all these photos, going back to 1982. I have no idea how long it will take me so I set up the time lapse today as a timed experiment to get a sense of how long I’m going to be doing this if I do indeed scan all these images. I borrowed Sara’s iPhone and timed the whole thing.
What you see in the video are the steps I take in my scanning, saving and storage project. Using white cotton gloves to avoid getting fingerprints on the prints, one by one, I remove each of the 10 photos from an album page and scan them using my Doxie scanner. As I scan them, I put the prints back in the album pages in the same order so people can still thumb through the bulky albums if they choose. The 10 photos took about 4 minutes to scan, almost 25 seconds a photo—but the process doesn’t end there. Then, I transfer the images from my Doxie scanner to my laptop. I then go into the Doxie app on the laptop and adjust each image to make sure it’s level and properly cropped. I then save the images onto my laptop. Once the images are on the laptop, I put them in a folder and rename each photo with the name from that folder. The name for each folder and image always starts with the year and the month, e.g. “2001-08” followed by a general description of what’s seen from that month. I then upload that folder of images to Shutterfly, putting them into a folder or album with the same name, matching the year, month and general description of the name I have used for the images and the folder from my laptop which I will ultimately save to a hard drive. The whole thing for the 10 images took a little over 14 minutes from start to finish.
Note Well: My system of saving and organizing images is explained in Steve’s Guide to Family Photos from April 10th. I don’t trust the cloud and urge every parent to come up to a system to preserve your family photos in a consistent way across multiple storage systems.
Usually, I scan a bunch of album pages at one sitting until I get bored--and then I take the other steps with the laptop a few days later whenever I have time. But, in making this time lapse video, I wanted to get a sense of how long the whole process was actually taking me, compressing everything into one sitting from scan to transfer to upload. 14 minutes for 10 photos. Roughly 1 minute and 15 seconds a photo. I have 26 albums left. Roughly 650 photos an album. 16,900 photos. It will take 21,125 minutes of scanning and uploading to be done. 352 hours. If I can work on the photos for an hour a day, I’ll be done in just under a year. That’s actually a very comforting thought.
I take a lot of pictures. I always have. I documented, preserved and am now saving the milestone moments as Annie, Ted and Betsy were born and grew up. In our now blended family, the newer images (now digital) include birthdays and graduations for John and Will as well as family vacations, day-to-day moments of Sara and me and, most recently, time with our grandchildren, Turner and Marin.
Right now, as I scan my pre-digital images, I am scanning images from 2000 and 2001. There are 4 photos to highlight. 1 group shot and 1 for each of my children.
When you take a lot of group shots, you get a lot of different looks. This one of Annie, Ted and Betsy from Easter, 2000 speaks for itself.
In August, 2001, we went to the Outer Banks. Ted was 15 and came up with the genius teenager idea to use selectively-placed sunscreen so that his name would be spelled out in the combination of sunburn and suntan across his back. I took a photo of it--and Ted’s idea actually worked. You could read his name on his back and near the end of our beach week, we were in a grocery store when we overheard a stranger who had walked by us and overheard them say, “There's that guy ‘Ted.’”
I was always the family photographer and worked on ways to get myself into the picture. In this picture of Annie reading on the beach, look for my wave in the shadow on her leg.
Each year at the beach, I’d make sure that there was one picture of me standing with each child. In 2001, Betsy was just 11. It’s remarkable to me how little she was back then. She’s now a 4th grade teacher and will be 30 next year.
It occurred to me in looking at these images from August, 2001 that this was one month before 9/11. There is no clue of the horror that was to come. In one painful moment on that one day, nearly 3,000 died and the world changed in ways we never could have imagined. We lost things in that moment--and they still impact us nearly 20 years later.
With more than 1,000 dying each day and a national death toll approaching 148,000 deaths from the coronavirus, the loss of life has been nearly 50 times the loss on 9/11, stretched over 5 months—with no clear end in sight. The pandemic is deadly and dreadful—unfolding in slow motion.
I still look back at my last day in New York at the start of the pandemic. Monday, March 9th. At the time, coronavirus was still a distant rumbling on the horizon. The night before, the CDC had issued guidelines for US travelers to avoid cruise ships--and quarantines from ships were in the news, our biggest worry, seemingly only for the unlucky or perhaps even unwise people who had gotten on board a virus-infested, cruise ship. The workday itself was nothing special. When I left work that Monday night, I had no idea that I would be leaving my office behind until 2021. When I got home and decided the next morning to ask my boss if it was okay to work from home because I was 63 and wanted to avoid commuting on mass transit and NYC’s subways, it still felt a little extreme and completely temporary. Something I’d do for a few days. The shutdown of New York-New Jersey metro area did not come one week later on March 16th.
I wish I had a picture from my last day in the office. Something to document that final moment, but I did not know then that it was a moment. The dividing line between before and after.
These are extraordinary times. I am still taking pictures, documenting these pandemic days as best I can. From wearing masks to making homemade chocolate, peanut butter cups to the trip Sara and I took to the Jersey Shore on Thursday. It rained for the first fews hours so we just drove around, parking in our minivan and looking at the ocean through rain drops.
At noon, we picked up our take-out, contactless-pick-up lunch of lobster rolls. We drove back to Sandy Hook and ate them in a parking lot at the Federal Park there. After an hour, the sun came out and we walked to the beach, sat in our chairs, socially distanced and close to a rock jetty. There were people around but not too many. With the sun out, more people showed up and we left. Mission accomplished.
If you look closely in this last picture, you can see the NYC skyline in the distance which is visible from Sandy Hook.
Parts of watching “Homemade” felt a little too close. We’re still in the pandmeic. Who wants to see other people living it? Its genius is capturing the magic of this moment. The few shorts that focused on kids reminded me to think what it must be like for them. What will they take away and remember from all this when they’re grown up and looking back?
For me, the pandemic now will always conjure up a mental image of Queen Elizabeth skinny dipping with Pope Benedict.
And that “Turd” moment? Just watch “Homemade” and tell me you did not laugh out loud.
What did NOT happen?
A. In Quiz #73. 3 Things from Steve, I asked readers to give me a list of 3 things they wanted to do WTAV, “When there’s a vaccine…” High school friend Tom noted that, in asking for those comments, I sent around the form for a 5-star review so that his comments (and others) were “involuntary” 5-star reviews. Tom noted that, “After there is a convincingly safe and effective vaccine, I might be willing to fly again, maybe even to the East Coast. Could be a while yet;”
B. College friend Brooks simply wrote, “I’d do nothing differently. I kind of like this whole social distancing thing. Are you still drinking those god-damned whiskey sours made out of applesauce?”
C. My sister Ginny wrote, “1. Visit with my family in person without social distancing. 2. Sing with a choir. 3. Go to church and go to the theater (really two things so I had to cheat a little);”
D. Annie’s work friend Nikki wrote, “WTAV I will travel to England to visit my relatives because it did not happen this year. My aunt will be 92 then-all being well-so I would like to see her... Fingers and toes crossed;”
E. My daughter-in-law Erica wrote, “Go to a concert, family trip to Mexico or somewhere, have a party.”
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Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #75. I’m Sorry.
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #73. 3 Things from Steve.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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