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The Fetching Mrs. and I saw Extraordinary Measures this afternoon. This is the true story of a father, John Crowley, played by Brendan Fraser, with two kids stricken with Pompe disease, who goes to extraordinary measures to find a treatment with the help of a brilliant but cranky scientist, Robert Stonehill, played by Harrison Ford. Kids stricken with this disease cannot process glycogen properly and end up with all sorts of problems such as enlarged organs, and die before the age of ten.

At the beginning of the movie, his daughter, who is afflicted, has her 8th birthday. Immediately after, she catches a cold and goes into respiratory failure. She survives but the scare causes Crowley to flip out a bit and he leaves a staff meeting to go to Nebraska, where Stonehill is doing his research at the University. He stalks Stonehill and begs him to see his research. Stonehill tells him he is underfunded so Crowley promises Stonehill 500 large from the Parents of Pompe Kids or some such bogus group he makes up on the spot to keep the brilliant but lacking in any redeeming social skills scientist from telling him to fuck off. Things pretty much progress from there, with the end result an enzyme that helps Pompe kids process glycogen. The movie ends happily with the two Crowley kids, who were able to be the first Sibling drug trial for the enzyme through some yelling by the cranky scientist and some passive aggressive manipulation by Crowley, giggling uncontrollably from their first ever sugar rush, proof the enzyme is helping their bodies process the sugar.

The movie is pretty linear and somewhat emotionally flat. Yes, there was the requisite tearjerker moments, but the movie seemed manufactured, as if the director pulled out all the parts from Tearjerker in a Box kit and assembled them in order according to the instructions. What made it interesting was the fact the movie was filmed in and around Portland.

This is how much of a big dork we Portlanders can be. In the opening scene Brendan is trying to get to his daughter’s birthday party and he misses his train. Look, it’s Pioneer Courthouse Square! Portland’s Living Room! (seriously, they call it that). And he misses a Blue Line MAX! The party is at Big Al’s? I’ve been there! But that’s cheating because everyone knows Big Al’s is all the way over on the east side of Vancouver which is really on the other side of the Columbia River in Washington and the MAX doesn’t go there.

Hey look! Portland Rose Hospital is really OHSU (Oregon Health and Science University). How clever is that?! There’s the tram lobby. I’ve actually sat in those chairs! How cool is that! The first time there was a shot of Mt. Hood, I shit you not, I saw a guy in my row actually point at the screen and say Mt. Hood, as if we didn’t know that because we’re all not really from Portland, where on clear days you CANNOT miss seeing the mountain, it’s right there.

I’m poking fun. Seriously, I have to admit I was just as much a dork about it as the rest of the people in the theater. I just didn’t go pointing at the screen every five minutes like that other guy. No, I whispered locations in The Fetching Mrs’ ear, instead. I guess it’s because movies aren’t filmed here very often, we get all exciting looking for our favorite spots. Even when the plot involves Portland the movie is made elsewhere, like Shreveport, LA (Mr. Brooks, I’m talking to you).

This movie had Portland all over it and it looks like they shot it in early to mid summer, really catching the area’s good side. Everything was lush and green and the sky was that intense, deep blue I’ve not seen anywhere else. I really felt proud to live here.

If that makes me a dork, I can live with it.

I was visiting my mom in Phoenix for her birthday when the towers fell. I was scheduled to come home that day and was in the shower getting ready to leave to go to Sky Harbor airport when mom frantically called me in to watch the news. I ran into the living room just in time to see the second plane hit the tower. My mom and I just stood there, me dripping water all over the carpet, as the news replayed the attack over and over.

We stayed glued to the news for quite a while as news of the attack on the Pentagon came in and then flight 93 crashing in Pennsyvania. It must have been an hour or two at least. When they announced that all of the airports were closed, including Sky Harbor, I remember jumping up as if out of a fog and ran in to get dressed and figure out what I was going to do to get home. Greyhound was an immediate choice, but within an hour after Sky Harbor closed, all of the bus lines were closed too. I tried renting a car, but all of those were snapped up pretty quickly as every other stranded person realized the same thing I did at the same time.

I remember a constant stream of phone calls to and from Sally in between calls to car rental agencies. I remember being frustrated by how long it would take me to get home by bus. It was late morning as I looked at getting a bus ticket and I wouldn’t get home until almost 8 PM that night. I remember being glad I didn’t bother to try to get a ticket after the bus stations were closed.

In the end, Sally, my mom, and I agreed to meet halfway. My mom and I would drive to the California border and I would get a hotel room in Blythe, wait for Sally and then drive home the next day.

I remember being angry, so fucking angry that someone had the temerity to do such a heinous thing. What sort of sub-human animal could so callously sacrifice human lives like that. As the news began to report who had done it, who this Osama bin Laden guy was, I remember thinking it would a very good thing for our military to reign fire down on his ass, or better yet, how it would be very nice for him to be captured and presented to the families of the victims and how that meeting could be televised for the world to see what righteous, justified anger looks like.

In the weeks that followed and as details of the plot, the hijackers, and Al-Qaeda came to light, I remember trying to come to grips with such hatred that defied all logic and reason. Even if you grant that whatever grievances they felt towards the West and U.S. are valid, what they did on 9/11 went so far beyond what a rational human would do that it boggled my mind. It still does. It was an act of war, this generation’s Pearl Harbor and what makes it worse, what fucks up the equation is how it was an extra-national organization which pulled it off. How do you declare war against a group with no single defined home country?

The drive from Phoenix along the 10 is some of the loneliest stretches of road anywhere. There is literally nothing but rocks, dust and heat between Phoenix and the Colorado river. On a timescale that we live by, nothing changes, everything is the same. I remember that drive vividly because as I looked out at a landscape that never changes, everything else had. The drive out was pretty quiet. My mom and I were pretty muted in our conversation, the occasional dirty joke, which normally would lift our spirits, did nothing.

Once we got to Blythe, and I was alone in my room waiting for Sally to show up later that day, I remember feeling empty. Something vital has been ripped from my soul, something I didn’t know was there until it was gone. A part deep down that connects each of us to each other without us consciously knowing. It was ripped out violently in a ball of ignited airplane fuel and what bothered me the most was that I didn’t know what to do to get it back. I felt helpless. When Sally finally showed up later that night with my son Ian, I remember hugging them with enough force to actually go through their bodies.

It’s been eight years now and a lot of what I felt then has been absorbed into the background radiation of my day to day life, but I have a superstitious fear that if I ever go visit my mom again, something like 9/11 will happen again.

I know. For a person who puts a lot of stock in logic and reason as a means to get through life, being afraid of somehow causing another 9/11, like some sort of cosmic joke butterfly effect, is pretty damned stupid. I’ll go visit my mom at some point in the next year and nothing will happen. That doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking about it.

Saturday, per the No Lies! note, I was out on the deck sanding away with my little 5″ rotating sander. After a couple of hours of work I had MAYBE 1/4 of the deck sanded. Yesterday, while at Home Depot buying more sanding pads, I wandered into the tool rental area per the wife’s instruction to see what it would take to rent a floor sander. You know, one of those really big round ones that have been the staple of comedy movies and Three Stooges shorts since the dawn of time.

Didn’t rent one of those big, bad boys, but I did rent a 4X24 belt sander. Got it home, plugged in with a new sanding pad and set it on the deck. I looked at Sally and said, for the record, “This will either be the best thing ever or the worst Tim Allen moment of all time.”

She looked at me quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“You know. Home Improvement. We could have a Tim Allen fucks with the dishwasher and now it belches fire moment.”

She just shook her head, sat back on the jacuzzi step and took a drink of her Bubble Up*.

I squat down, grab the handle, place my other hand on the front grip, not too tight, and squeeze the trigger. The sander leaps forward like my Ford Mustang at a green light and wobbles around three or four boards before I get it under control. I stop it and look at my initial ‘handiwork’. Bare wood is showing in long, flowing curves which follow the contours of each board. I laugh and make ape noises, turn that bad boy back on and get to work.

Thirty minutes later and two sanding bands later, we’re done.

*I had bought a ‘vintage soda’ 12-pack from New Seasons. Three bottles each of Dad’s root beer, Bubble Up, Nugrape grape soda, and Nesbitt’s Orange soda. For the record, Bubble Up is SO much better than 7-Up.

Or Snowpocalypse 2008, if the thought of a snowgasm leaves you a bit queasy and desirous of a shower. Both have been bantered about on Twitter and used with equal frequency. The media is calling it Arctic Blast 2008, which is nicely non-sexual and unhip and with just the right amount of gravitas to sound really bad. You can say it really fast in a deep voice: Arctic Blast! The exclamation point is thrown in for free. I’d caution against the use of jazz hands as you say it, though. You’d just look stupid.

Regardless of what you call it, the simple fact is we are in the third solid day of snow and freezing rain. The third contiguous day of a string of days stretching back to Sunday last, when the first round hit with cold, dead fingers. Since then, I’ve worked from home three days, four counting today. There is a bit of symmetry to it; I was able to get into the office on Tuesday and Thursday and stayed home Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The pattern would seem to repeat itself this week if I wasn’t already off the 24th and 25th. Although I seriously doubt I’ll be going anywhere tomorrow. The Boy gained an extra week of holiday because of this mess, for which he is thankful. Not so much in June when he finds he has to go to school an extra couple of days on the ass end to make up for now. Like he cares, he’ll take what he can get now and let June worry about June.

It’s pretty and all, but honestly I could do with a respite. The Fetching Mrs. and I were able to get out Saturday and I’m grateful, but our entire neighborhood is covered in at least a foot of snow. We tried to get out in the Mustang yesterday to stock up on foodstuffs, but that had folly written all over it. Even with chains, I barely made it to the end of the street and got stuck in my driveway coming back.

I’m getting a little bit of cabin fever. I suspect that may be partly due to stuff happening at work. None of us can get out of our various neighborhoods without herculean efforts and or a giant hair dryer to melt the snow, so we all remote into our desktops at work and ignore the fact that Windows Messenger does very little in the way of providing the visceral feedback you get from being in the same room with the people you work with and with whom you are currently engaged in solving nasty, business-stopping bugs.

Chat is a weird medium to communicate in. When I read what my co-workers write, my brain automatically uses their voices, but it’s soft and spoken as if from a distance. Almost like having an out of body experience or waking up from a coma or serious accident in the ICU where you hear the voices talking about your lost limbs or that big hole in your chest from very far away. Right before you open your eyes and it all crashes into your experience in that instance before the morphine kicks in. But with chat, you never wake up.

Not that that’s ever happened to me, or anything. Anyway, so, things are white all over and very, very cold. The source I have on my browser states 25.2 degrees Fahrenheit, before wind chill is considered. If I do, I’m sure it’s colder than a witch’s tit in the arctic.

Here are some pictures taken earlier today, documenting proof that Al Gore was right and the world is getting warmer :

This is looking out the front door. Notice the gate isn’t closing anytime soon.

Closeup of the bush in the previous photo. The gate gives some perspective of how deep the snow drift is in our front lawn right now.

Here’s the backyard deck. Know that the top of the deck is at least 2 feet higher than the ground.

Another angle on the backyard. It’s almost like a giant snow lake.

A shot down the street we attempted to get out on yesterday. What road?

I’ll be blunt. If you donate money to help Hillary pay back her campaign debts, you are a fucktard, an Epsilon sub-moron, fit only to clean toilets at the local taco stand after an outbreak of Montezuma’s Revenge using only a toothbrush, a handy wipe, and a six ounce bottle of water.

She’s rich, she can pay off those debts and still have enough left over to wax her enormous thighs. She doesn’t need you, you co-dependent, submissive twit.

Hat tip: Liberty Girl.

McCain meets with business executives to discuss the bailout package and stands firm on no “golden parachutes’ for the CEOs of the failed companies.

That’s fine for McCain to stand his ground. I respect him for that. But I don’t think it goes far enough. What I’d like to see, and I think I speak for the majority of Americans when I say this, is for those CEOs to be paraded to the National Mall, stripped naked, tarred and feathered and be pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables until they’re buried. Then they’re dug out of the pile of stinking vegetation, loaded into a van and driven to every major city in the country so they can be pelted again and again.

I bet the crowds would be huge. They could charge a buck to get in and there wouldn’t be any need for a taxpayer bailout.

Lileks today:

Parenthood: driving by yourself, you see a VW, and you say “Slug bug.” Out loud.

This is something we do as a family all the time. The Boy is the all time points leader only because he’s not driving and thus concentrating on not getting us all killed. It won’t last. He’ll be driving next year and I predict his point total to drop significantly as he concentrates on driving fast and racking up speeding tickets rather than spotting Beetles.

Of course the Wife and I both say “Slug Bug” when we’re driving alone and see one. How can we not. At this point, it’s Pavlovian.