Pumpkin Spice Cake

This year the compost pile sprouted a couple of pumpkin vines. One yielded pumpkins big enough for jack-o’lanterns, the other produced seven pie pumpkins. A lucky thing because the two hills of pumpkins I planted on purpose produced only two, still green, struggling to ripen before frost. The compost pile pumpkins, glowing a deep orange, have already proved useful, and the recipe that follows used one of them.

I was hankering for a spice cake that would use pumpkin. I crossed up the oil, butter, sugar, buttermilk, and pulp mixture from a favorite zucchini cake with the flour and spice combination from a favorite spice cake and came up with a sheet cake to frost with lemony cream cheese icing.

One pie pumpkin ought to make one pie, or when cooked produce about two cups of pureed pulp. I ended up with about one and three-quarters of a cup, which is just a tad less than a standard fifteen-ounce can of prepared pumpkin. A couple of tablespoons one way or another makes so little difference that I don’t worry about it.

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Movie Review—The Snowman

British theatrical release poster

by Peter J. O'Connell  

The Snowman. Released (USA): Oct. 2017. Runtime: 119 mins. MPAA Rating: R for grisly images, violence, some language, sexuality and brief nudity.

Scandinavian films had a certain popularity in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. Some liked them because they offered more “skin” and sexuality than American films of the time. Others liked them—notably, the films of Ingmar Bergman—because they offered more probing of deep psychological/philosophical/theological issues than did American films. But interest in Scandinavian cinema waned in the last quarter of the 20^th century. Over the past two decades, however, there have been several bursts of interest in it, particularly in the type that has come to be known as “Nordic noir.”

Nordic noir doesn't have much philosophical or theological probing. It often, however, has sexual and psychological themes, but usually in the context of a dark and downbeat drama centering around crime. Often the protagonist—whether a cop or a civilian—is a brilliant but emotionally damaged individual, perhaps depressive and/or a substance abuser. In these films both the meteorological weather and the emotional weather are usually bad. There may be considerable quiet brooding but also, usually,  instances of shocking violence.

Perhaps the first burst of American interest in Nordic noir came in 2002 when the Norwegian film Insomnia was remade as a U.S. film of the same name starring an A-list cast of Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank. Other NN-influenced works of note followed, particularly The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), which was a U.S. remake of one of the films in a 2009 trilogy of Swedish films. Both the Swedish trilogy and the American remake attracted attention from moviegoers and 

movie critics. The spreading influence of Nordic noir from Scandinavian films and their remakes led to American and British works along the same lines, but not necessarily based on Scandinavian originals. A number of these works appeared as cable TV and “streaming” movies or series and even as broadcast TV series. 

Now we have The Snowman, a British movie based on a Norwegian novel and filmed in Norway, with all dialogue in English. Tomas Alfredson, a Swede, directed, with an international cast, including Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Chloe Sevigny—as twins, Val Kilmer—with an odd hairdo, J.K. Simmons—with an odd accent. Michael Fassbender stars as Harry Hole, the lead detective of an elite Oslo police unit. He is also depressive, alcoholic, and insomniac. (And both those amused by his name as seen in print—or seeking symbolism in it—should know that it is pronounced “Holy” in Norway but means neither “hole” nor “holy.”)

Harry is tasked with investigating the disappearance of a woman on the first snow of winter. He comes to believe that an elusive serial killer, operating for years, who leaves snowmen as markers of his crimes or threats of murders to come, may strike again. Joined by a bright new recruit (Rebecca Ferguson) who admires him, Harry strives to outwit the killer—whose victims are usually women who have neglected or abused their children or had abortions—before the next snowfall. An effort to obtain an international sports festival for Oslo is also part of the plot. 

The mystery that Harry has to solve is a difficult one. It's also difficult for the audience to understand what's going on in this movie. Many thrillers these days have convoluted plots, but that of The Snowman is beyond convoluted; it's incomprehensible. According to an astonishing confession by director Alfredson, there's a reason for that: “Our shoot time in Norway was way too short, we didn't get the whole story with us and when we started cutting we discovered that a lot was missing. It's like when you're making a big jigsaw puzzle and a few pieces are missing so you don't see the whole picture.” 

So, apparently, the best that a moviegoer trapped in this incomplete cinematic jigsaw puzzle can do is look at The Snowman as a travelogue rather than a story, noir or otherwise. The cinematography of Oslo and Bergen and the surrounding areas, seen from various angles and altitudes, is quite striking. Norway is certainly a beautiful country, and its landscapes, seascapes, architecture, and infrastructure are impressive. Some may feel that the film's makers should jettison The Snowman's ostensible plot and put what's left on the National Geographic TV channel rather than put a film full of holes in a movie theatre.   

  

Better Business Bureau warns consumers to guard their CHIP card

The Connecticut Better Business Bureau is alerting people to watch for wear to their CHIP-enabled credit cards. The CHIP on the card could fall off because of repetitive use. as repetitive use can cause the if the CHIP falls off  the card’s owner vulnerable to fraudulent purchases made in their name.

“Unfortunately, if somebody finds a card’s CHIP, all they have to do is glue it onto another card and they can go on a shopping spree at your expense,” said Connecticut Better Business Bureau spokesman Howard Schwartz in a news release. “This is not something that is widely known, and as we approach the holiday retail season, credit cards can take a beating. Unless you check the credit card CHIP’s integrity, it may fail while when you get to the checkout counter.” 

In the event of fraud, cardholders have zero liability, however, it is best to inform the card issuer as soon as possible in the event of a CHIP failure or loss. 

BBB has a checklist to avoid CHIP card damage:

Don’t wait for the CHIP to fail - If a chip begins to peel or come loose, contact your card issuer immediately. They will send you a replacement card and a new account number. 

Inspect your CHIP cards - Check your cards from time to time. It can prevent the inconvenience of having a credit transaction being rejected, and more importantly, prevent fraud.

Limit excessive wear and tear - Credit cards have a limited lifespan and they won’t last as long if they are jammed into point of sale card readers, scraped or carried in a pocket or purse with keys or anything else that may scratch them.

Ask for protective sleeve - Many cards come with them, but if you don't have a protective envelope or sleeve, contact your card issuer.

Movie Review—Blade Runner 2049

Theatrical release poster

by Peter J. O'Connell         

Blade Runner 2049. Release date (USA): Oct. 2017. Runtime: 163 mins. MPAA Rating: R for violence, some sexuality, nudity, language. 

For about the past 40 years, science-fiction films generally have fallen into three lines of descent. There have been the Star Trek pictures, which have been, well, Star Trek pictures. Then there have been the Star Wars pictures, war and adventure stories with an overlay (underlay?) of mysticism. And there have been the Ridley Scott pictures, directed and/or produced—sometimes “de facto”--by that British auteur, or influenced by his work. Some of the “Scott pictures”--the Alien franchise, for example—link science-fiction and the horror genre. Others, like Blade Runner (1982), with its enormously influential production design, link sci-fi to film noir and a dystopian vision of the future. Such films also may have convoluted plots that involve abstruse concepts of space and time from post-Newtonian physics and/or recondite philosophical speculations about such things as being and nothingness and what it really means to be human.  

This year has brought forth Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the 1982 film. The sequel is directed by Denis Villeneuve, with Ridley Scott as eminence grise. Set 30 years after the time of the original, the movie puts us into the teeming, polyglot, polluted, neon-lit Los Angeles of K (Ryan Gosling)—hat tip for that name to a certain Prague author! K is a “replicant” (android). He is also a “blade runner” tasked with hunting down rebel replicants and executing them. K's bleak existence is given some cheer by Joi (Ana de Armas), his lovely “girlfriend,” who is actually a hologram that can instantly change from one type of woman to another.

On one of his assassination assignments, K comes across some items that set him off on a convoluted quest for Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), the blade runner from the 1982 movie, who has gone into hiding. The quest eventually becomes one for K's actual identity. Along the way K becomes the hunted as well as the hunter, for the corporation that manufactures replicants pursues him for its own evil ends. 

Much of the movie takes place outside L.A. in the deserted ruins of Las Vegas, where K finds Deckard. One extraordinary sequence there involves an encounter between K and Deckard while giant holograms of  of Elvis and Sinatra perform. The production design of the film doesn't feature the rain of the 1982 film or the heat of global warming projected by many for the future but instead fog, mist, and snow—the objective correlatives, as it were, of the mind of K and the themes of the work. Eventually, however, after much violence, K, well played by Gosling with a kind of stony soulfulness, finds meaning for his existence.

Blade Runner 2049  is an impressive film in its performances and its visuals but rather tedious in its speculations about what memories are real and what aren't, etc., etc. At a certain point, in fact, one may long for the cinematic equivalent of Dr. Johnson's famed refutation of Bishop Berkeley. It seems rather unlikely that there will be a sequel to this sequel. 

“Footnote” to the film: Where does the term “blade runner” come from? It's never explained in either the 1982 movie or the current one. It's origin is as convoluted as the origins of some of the characters in the movies. It never appears in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the inspiration for the films. Online The Verge of Oct. 4, 2017, explains: “So Blade Runner 2049 is the sequel to a movie [Blade Runner] based on a book [the Dick novel] but named after a completely unrelated film treatment of yet another book [Alan E. Nourse's 1974 novel The Bladerunner, about efforts to secure scalpels in a dystopian future], which was itself published as a third book [William S. Burroughs' Blade Runner] with the subtitle “A Movie.” In case that's not confusing enough, the latest issue of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is also titled Blade Runner. And we won't even get into the three Blade Runner sequel books by K.W. Jeter.”

Why Old School Travel Aids Still Rock

My wife and I had not planned an ambitious vacation for several years. Then we got a wedding invitation from Seattle and thought, why not do a tour of the Pacific Northwest? I figured planning the trip would be as easy as typing “Pacific Northwest” into my browser and that this could be a vacation concocted solely with digital assistance. No more travel books, no more paper printouts of driving directions. My laptop and my iPhone would lead us.

That’s not exactly how it turned out.

Digital Travel Planning: Too Many Opinions

I laid out a sweeping plan. We’d go to the Olympic National Park and see waves crash into cliffs. We’d head up to Vancouver for an urban adventure. And we’d stop at the fabled San Juan Islands for a relaxing coda.

But making decisions about where to go based on the internet is not easy. Everybody has an opinion: “This lodge is great.” “No, it has bedbugs.” “Eat here.” “Don’t eat here.”

So I went to my neighborhood bookstore, bought a copy of a Lonely Planet guide to the Pacific Northwest and was immediately calmed. The author’s voice was knowledgeable and there was helpful advice on what to do and where to stay.

And travel books aren’t just for older people.  I shared my story with a Millennial couple we know. The woman rolled her eyes at my methods, but her husband agreed: The Internet overwhelmed him, so he bought a guidebook for their recent trip.

The TripTik Saved Our Vacation

There’s no need for an AAA TripTik breaking your trip down into mile-by-mile segments anymore, right? Well, I decided it couldn’t hurt, so I requested one. When the TripTik arrived, I discovered I had planned the vacation from hell.

Somehow, I thought the driving distance between each point was a maximum of three hours because the Internet never says, “You know, you’ve got an eight-hour drive ahead of you.” But the TripTik gives you that minute-by-minute, block-by-block itinerary, which must be why 17 million people a year either request one or create one via the AAA app.

So I did a last-minute revamp of our itinerary. Bye-bye, Olympic Peninsula.

How to Pick a Destination

We wanted one more stop to replace the lost peninsula. I tried an old school method: I looked at a map for a place that sounded cool. Lummi Island … love the name! Lonely Planet said it was very nice. So I went back to technology.

I Googled hotels, found one and played hotel room roulette on the Internet — one day there was a room, the next day it was gone, the next it was back. I grabbed it. Turns out, tiny, mellow Lummi Island was one of our favorite stops. Click here to continue reading.

Movie Review—American Made

Theatrical release poster

by Peter J. O'Connell

American Made. Released (USA): Sept. 2017. Runtime: 117 mins. MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and some sexuality/nudity.

Tom Cruise first attracted widespread attention in 1983's Risky Business, as a young entrepreneur in a dubious enterprise. In 1986's Top Gun, he became a superstar by playing a swaggering, smirking Navy pilot. Many of the actor's subsequent roles have shown the influence of these two roles. This year's American Made, a dramedy directed by Doug Liman, is no exception.  

Loosely fact based, the movie tells the story of Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), a commercial airliner pilot—the youngest in TWA history—who has some wild and crazy adventures, on both sides of the law, in the wild and crazy late 1970s and the 1980s. Bored in his job with TWA, Barry accepts an offer from Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson), a CIA operative, to work for the agency flying clandestine reconnaissance missions over rebel camps in Central America, in a small plane at low altitude with cameras installed. Barry's cover is as an “Independent Aviation Contractor” (love those initials!). 

Successful in these dangerous assignments, Schafer has Barry start functioning as a courier between the CIA and Panama's General Manuel Noriega (Alberto Ospino), who provides information on leftists but also has ties with the notorious Medellin drug cartel of Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia). The cartel abducts Barry and gets him to agree to fly cocaine with him on his return trips to the United States. Soon Barry is flying large quantities of coke into the Louisiana swamp country and making huge amounts of money. The CIA looks the other way, but the DEA doesn't. To save Barry from arrest, the CIA moves him and his family to Mena, a small town in Arkansas. 

There Barry continues his drug smuggling with the aid of some cronies whom he dubs the “Mena Air Force.” After a time Schafer has Barry bring in counter-revolutionary (Contra) Nicaraguans for training, most of whom split into the American night as soon as they arrive. Schafer also has Barry run arms to the Contras in Nicaragua itself, but Barry soon starts trading these arms to the cartel. 

Swaggering, smirking—and sweating in the tropical heat—Barry manages to keep all these balls in the air while being a good family man to his wife (excellently played by Sarah Wright) and kids. He is making money by the suitcase-full but remains pretty much a “good old boy,” happy when he is in the small Southern town.

The atmosphere of hijinks with an edge is well maintained by director Liman throughout the movie, aided by interesting cinematography and a score of 1970s-1980s hits. (Particularly effective is a sequence of Barry under fire in the sky scored to “Hooked on Classics.”) Inevitably, however, what goes up—like all those balls in the air—must come down. The film's mood darkens as Barry offends the cartel and finds CIA support disappearing. The roguish antihero's swaggering and smirking—done so entertainingly by Cruise—become definitely replaced by sweating, the cold sweat of fear at that.  

Social Security benefits to get 2% boost in 2018

Social Security recipients will get a 2% increase in benefits in 2018, an amount slightly lower than what was projected this summer but up sharply from the past two years.

The cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) covers more than 61 million Social Security beneficiaries and more than 8 million recipients of Supplemental Security Income benefits. Some people get both.

With the boost, the highest since a 3.6% bump in 2012, the average person will get about $25 more a month. The average monthly Social Security payment is currently $1,258, or about $15,000 a year.

The rate of the increase is tied to the Consumer Price Index, an inflation gauge.

The Social Security Board of Trustees had projected in July that this year's increase would be 2.2%. While it fell short of that amount, it came after an increase of 0.3% for 2017 and no change in 2016. Click here to continue reading.

Movie Review—American Assassin

by Peter J. O’Connell  

American Assassin. Released USA: Sept. 2017. Runtime: 112 mins. MPAA Rating: R for strong violence throughout, some torture, language, and brief nudity.

Do we need another butt-kicking secret agent with a license to kill? Probably not, but director Michael Cuesta has given us one in American Assassin, based on a novel by Vince Flynn, an author popular with Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives. The “assassin” is Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien). The film about him may not be necessary, but it is diverting enough to make a visit to a multiplex worthwhile.

We first meet Mitch as a carefree young American frolicking on a Spanish beach with his finance, Katrina (Charlotte Vega). Suddenly, pain descends on Spain as Islamist terrorists raid the beach, killing many, including Katrina. Mitch gets a good look at the terrorist leader, Adnan Al-Mansur (Shahid Ahmed), and embarks on an 18-month intensive program of research into Arabic, Islam, and terrorist networks. He is burning with desire to take cold, cold revenge on the man who killed his beloved. Eventually, he gets the opportunity when he receives an online invite from Al-Mansur to come to Libya and be considered for membership in a terrorist cell.

Mitch is about to be accepted into the cell and be able to take his revenge when Orion, a CIA “black ops” team, suddenly stages a raid on the Libyan site and takes out Al-Mansur itself. Mitch is frustrated, but he has impressed Deputy CIA Director Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan), who invites him to join Orion—if he can complete a special, incredibly rigorous, training program, run by a rock-hard, tough-as-nails veteran Navy SEAL, Stan Hurley. Hurley joins a long line of tough mentor/trainer characters in movies and is terrifically played by Michel Keaton. Keaton’s skill at portraying so well such diverse characters as those in Birdman (2014), The Founder (2017), and American Assassin is truly impressive.

Mitch manages to complete the training and becomes part of an Orion mission to foil a plot emanating from Iran and directed at Israel and the U.S. Navy. The team’s efforts take it from Warsaw to Istanbul to Rome and involve combating turncoats as well as terrorists.

These adventures are somewhat generic but, as mentioned, diverting enough, and the performances are adequate—in Keaton’s case, as mentioned, excellent. One welcome aspect of the plot is that Islamists and Iranians are specifically designated as the evildoers rather than some shadowy organization or super-villain as in the Bond flicks or the CIA itself as in the Bourne franchise.     

Can Technology Predict Falls in Older Adults?

The prospect of aging can conjure up a multitude of horrors — a mind stolen by dementia, a body debilitated by illness, a soul crushed by social isolation. For most, fear of falling would be well down the list.

But falls are, in fact, one of the more common and consequential risks faced by older adults. The statistics, compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, are both eye-opening and alarming.

One out of four Americans 65 or older falls at least once every year. Every 11 seconds, an older adult in the U.S. is treated in an emergency room for a fall; every 19 minutes, one dies from a fall. By 2020, the financial cost related to falls by older adults in the U.S. is expected to top $67 billion per year.

Figuring Out the Early Signs of Falls

So, it’s not surprising that an increasing amount of research is focusing on ways to predict if, and even when, a person is likely to fall. The goal is being able to take actions to reduce the risk. Much of that effort is built around using emerging technologies — from infrared depth sensors to brain imaging to virtual reality.

“Technology allows you to monitor people in their homes in a way you couldn’t have in the past,” said Marjorie Skubic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri and director of the school’s Center for Eldercare and Rehabilitation Technology.

She’s been refining the use of sensors and motion-capture technology to study older adults in their homes for more than a decade, and she’s enthused about its potential for helping people age in place. “We’ve found that once sensors have been in a place for three or four weeks, people completely forget about them. And that’s what we want — to capture their normal activity in their homes.”

Here’s how Skubic and other scientists are using technology to sharpen their ability to predict falls:

Gait Watching

While Skubic’s research has focused broadly on how sensors can help detect early signs of physical and cognitive decline, a recent study zeroed in on finding a more precise correlation between a person’s walking gait and his or her likelihood of falling.

Using sensor measurements of walking speeds and stride length of residents at TigerPlace, a retirement community in Columbia, Mo., researchers found a clear connection between a slowing pace and the risk of falling. In fact, analysis of the multi-terabyte-sized set of data, gathered over 10 years, showed that people whose gait slowed by 5 centimeters per second within a week had an 86 percent probability of falling during the next three weeks. That was four times more likely than someone whose walking speed hadn’t changed. Click here to continue reading.