Misadventures with Christmas TreesPosted by admin on December 17th, 2009

Once as a child, I remembered going out to our family land to find a good-sized tree and bring it home as our Christmas tree. Everything went perfectly- probably because my dad, grandpa, and other relatives actually knew what they were doing. Not like when I attempted the same feat for my fledgling family.

I am a city boy, raised mostly in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles County. But I do love the country, the peace and quiet, the slower pace of life. When my wife and I moved to Northern Virginia, we had the opportunity to visit her family down in the country frequently. Her mother owned a piece of land in the middle of the woods outside of Charlottesville. When Christmas rolled around, we thought, instead of paying upwards of $30 for a Christmas tree at a lot, why not just go cut one down ourselves. What could go wrong?

We didn’t have a real saw, but we did have a hacksaw. So we took the hacksaw and drove 3 hours down to the woods. To our surprise, once we arrived we could not find a single, substantial pine- nothing that could pass as a Christmas tree (you know, with the inverted cone shape). Finally, we found a little tree, shaped like a oval. We figured we could just trim the tree into a cone-ish shape. Oh, and the tree was covered with little barbs. But it was all we could find, so we would just make due.

We cut down the tree with our hacksaw- it took forever. Then we wrapped it up in a tarp and strapped it to the roof of our minivan with bungee cords, ropes, and whatever else we could find. It wasn’t strapped well enough apparently because it kept sliding back and forth across the top of the van. Finally, we got home and stuffed the tree into our little apartment, trying to avoid the barbs. The tree was too short for our ceiling and, no, we couldn’t trim it into a cone-ish shape. 

Even decked out with ornaments and lights, the tree was a pitiful site – a close relative of Charlie Brown’s sorry little tree. Over the next couple weeks, our little toddlers would scream out in pain as they ran past the ugly tree, little barbs stuck in their feet. Instead of filling our home with the rick aroma of a Douglas Fir, it let off a faintly musky odor. We had made a mistake.

Finally, two days before Christmas, overwhelmed by barbs and depressed by the tree, we stripped off the decorations and put it in the dumpster. Then we went and bought a fake tree at Target on clearance (which I highly recommend). 

 



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Nat’l Genealogical Society Conference in SLC in 2010Posted by admin on December 8th, 2009

Great news for all you family history nuts in Utah! The National Genealogical Society will be holding its annual Family History Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah at the Salt Palace Convention Center on April 28 to May 1, 2010. The conference is expected to deliver workshops and speakers on family history work international and American. The conference will even include a mini-performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Sounds like fun to me! Anyone else planning on being there?



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The (Surprising) Joys of 3DPosted by admin on December 4th, 2009

Few things are more annoying than gimmicks. The dictionary defines a gimmick as "a concealed, usually devious aspect or feature of something, as a plan or deal." Like how stores lure you in for sales on Black Friday only to have very, very limited quantities of the items advertised. That’s how most people have always thought of 3D- a flashy label they slap on otherwise mediocre films to get someone- anyone- to show up on opening day, a sign that the film is not good enough on its own. 

 
Thanks to advances in the way filmmakers use 3D, it is finally becoming more than just a gimmick.
 
Anyone who has seen Disney’s A Christmas Carol, based on Charles Dickens’ holiday mainstay, can tell you that 3D has now become art. Rather than toss orbs at the audience’s face or point sharp objects at them teasingly, director Robert Zemeckis uses 3D to give us an awe-inspiring depth of field to beautifully composed shots and to lend real texture to the crags and crevices of his characters’ faces and the environments they inhabit. The CGI characters look all the more real because of the 3D and less like video game marionettes. Indeed, the audience finds themselves drawn into the world because of the 3D, rather than being distracted by it.
 
Zemeckis’ Christmas Carol and the upcoming Avatar from James Cameron represent a new wave of 3D movies. With groundbreakers like Forrest Gump, Terminator 2, The Abyss, Titanic, and Contact under their belts, these directors have reinvented the way Hollywood uses visual effects to tell stories. And they are not alone. Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and George Lucas are also joining the push to make 3D more than a gimmick, each planning their own movies using the new technology.
 
There has been some resistance from critics and set-in-their-ways moviegoers. For many, the stigma of 3D, evoking such bombs as Jaws 3D, has them turning their noses up in discontent long before they even enter the theatre. Purist critics decry 3D, despite advances and differences in usage, as mere distraction from the story and gimmickry. Then again, before Spielberg proved how awe-inspiring CGI can be with his towering Jurassic Park creatures, critics poo-pooed the technology as nothing more than a fad. Before Peter Jackson used motion capture to give us The Lord of the Rings‘ Gollum, one of the most haunting characters in modern cinema, critics gave the technology a thumbs-down. Critics and more traditionalist moviegoers, it seems, prefer not to go on faith, but on things seen.
 
No doubt, with such forces as Spielberg, Cameron, and Lucas behind this technology, 3D will soon take its place as another powerful tool of the film medium. 


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