Black Widow is fan-fiction written by someone who has issues with what happened to the himbos and dimepieces in Moonraker. Let me explain.

My favorite scene in Black Widow comes about twenty-five minutes into the film. Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), the “Black Widow,” is on the run from…authorities…personified by Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt). It’s not really explained who he is and what authority he has. If you’re watching this, you probably saw Captain America: Civil War and already know the answer. If you haven’t seen that movie, go watch it instead because it’s (a) it’s a better movie and (b) this one assumes familiarity with the other Captain America movies to the point that it ought to be titled Captain America: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Budapest.

Anyway, my favorite scene comes about twenty-five minutes into the film. Natasha’s holed up in a safe house (trailer) somewhere in Norway. She’s made dinner, she’s dying her hair, and she’s watching Moonraker. It’s towards the end of the movie; they’re still on Earth, James Bond has just defeated Hugo Drax’s python at the Amazon base, and Drax is remonstrating with him. Bond quips that the python “had a crush on [him].” Natasha’s speaking the words as the movie plays–this is far from the first time she’s watched Moonraker. Let me offer a reading of how this scene explains the whole purpose of the movie.

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I’m in Portland, Oregon, for the holidays and I just finished writing 600 words about an abandoned railway line that one week ago I’d never heard of. I’d like for you all to meet the Forest Grove branch.

A pattern of behavior

Back in July 2018 I took the train out to St. Louis, Missouri, for WPCampus. I took the Capitol Limited from DC to Chicago, then the Texas Eagle down to St. Louis. In St. Louis, I took the MetroLink light rail out to the Delmar neighborhood where my AirBnb was. I bounded up the steps at the Delmar Loop station and came face-to-face with what could only have been a train station, though it wasn’t one now.

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This weekend I moved one of our Moodle environments from one AWS account to another. That’s a straightforward exercise: deploy the new infrastructure, sync the uploads, import the database, and update DNS. It took less than an hour and there weren’t any hiccups.

Until today, when we noticed that our user provisioner had stopped working. The root cause? A missing language pack. Read on…

Language packs

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There is a long, rich tradition of Battle of the Atlantic movies. I see Greyhound as in conversation with two other movies in particular: The Cruel Sea (1953) and Das Boot (1981). The Cruel Sea, adapted from a novel of the same name by Nicholas Monserrat, follows a British captain and his first officer throughout the entire war (1939-1945). Das Boot, adapted from Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s novel, follows a German U-boat over the course of a single, fateful patrol in 1941. Now, we have Greyhound, adapted from C. S. Forester’s novel The Good Shepherd, following an American captain during a single convoy sailing in early 1942. I think of this like Dunkirk: we’re telling the same story, but from three different viewpoints at three different speeds.

The Cruel Sea is a personal favorite and one of the best war movies ever made. The tone is weary, almost somber, though not grim dark. We follow two ships, a corvette and a frigate, under the command of Jack Hawkins, a merchant navy officer and reservist. A U-boat sinks the corvette part way through, killing many of the characters we’d gotten to know. Hawkins survives, but is traumatized. There is almost no sense of triumph at the end of the film, more of a sense that “well, we survived.” Appropriate for a 1950s Britain conscious of having won the war and lost its empire and place in the world.

Das Boot has the tricky task of being a West German film about World War II from the Nazi German point of view. You’re making a movie where you want the audience to sympathize with the protagonists, while never losing sight of the fact that Germany started the war and will lose it. You can make movies about the Allies losing during World War II–They Were Expendable (1945) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) are good examples–but you really can’t make a movie about Germany or Japan winning. Das Boat threads this needle by emphasizing the humanity of the participants and the inhumanity of the war itself. The finale, in which the crew brings their battered U-boat back to France only for it to be sunk in an air raid and many of them killed, is devastating.

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The “Troma Team Release” title card gives me a shudder. I had a college roommate who was really into Troma and Troma-adjacent horror. I’m not sure what all we watched, but it was enough to know even then the crucial difference between things that Troma made themselves and things that Troma distributed. I respect Lloyd Kaufman’s accomplishments as an independent producer but broad grossout splatter isn’t my bag.

Tonight, Amazon Prime suggested Blood Hook, which we hadn’t heard of before. It’s a slasher set around a lakeside community in Wisconsin’s north woods. It was directed by Jim Mallon, now best known for helping start Mystery Science Theater 3000. The production companies, Spider Lake Films and Golden Chargers, are both one-shots; the former is named for a community in Wisconsin near Hayward, Wisconsin, where the film was shot. Troma distributed the film. Vinegar Syndrome did a Blu-ray of the 111-minute cut in 2018, and I’m pretty sure that’s what we watched on Amazon.

This type of production hits a sweet spot for me. It’s low budget, but not bottom of the barrel. They shot on location, and by the look of it relied mostly on local talent. Most of the actors have no other film credits. I’m from Michigan, not northern Wisconsin, but the accents sound authentic to me. Arthur Marks did this with some of his films, like Detroit 9000 and Tbe Monkey Hustle. I enjoy watching a movie where I feel like a group of people got together for a month and created something. There’s Nothing Out There, another Troma distribution, is in the same space.

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I’ve ridden 117,534 miles on Amtrak, or almost five times around the globe. 111,519 of those miles are since January 4, 2009, when I took the Empire Builder from Chicago to Portland for a Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Reed College. We encountered snow and ice and bad-ordered equipment. I took one of my favorite photographs of all time. We hit Spokane at least twelve hours late and had to be bussed to our final destinations. I had a blast and the rest is history.

This account is based on my contemporaneous notes in 2009; all the pictures were also taken in 2009 with my Canon PowerShot. See the 2009 Reed gallery for all of them.

Beginnings

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I use thumbsup to manage my gallery site. Since the site is entirely static, I use exiftool to store the description and tags as metadata in the images themselves. To simplify managing the metadata I wrote a small Symfony application that writes and updates the metadata from CSV files.

The workflow is straightforward enough, but the code deployment on my laptop looked like a messy bedroom. The Symfony application lived in one directory. My fork of thumbsup, supporting custom album covers, was hanging out within .nvm, tied to given versions of NodeJS. My customization of the cards theme lived in a separate directory, passed by argument to the Symfony application. This was messy and unsustainable.

I’ve used Nix for several other projects, and this felt like a good use case for getting everything in once place. In this case, I would centralize in the Symfony directory. First step: adding all the relevant packages:

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I’m back in Mt. Pleasant for Thanksgiving and after watching the Lions dispatch the Bears (not handily, but never mind that) I went out for a short bike ride through Mill Pond Park. The main bike trail comes out at Broadway opposite the old Ann Arbor Railroad station, now the Mountain Town Station brewery and restaurant. I’ve photographed it many times over the years, but tonight the fading light felt really special.

I grew up in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, a county seat and college town of about 20,000 people that hasn’t seen a passenger train in over 70 years (and counting). We had two railroads: the Ann Arbor Railroad main line, running northwest from Toledo, Ohio, up to Frankfort, Michigan, and a branch line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (originally Pere Marquette), running northeast from Mt. Pleasant up to Coleman.

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This past week Amtrak suspended travel between Albany and New York because of a deteriorating parking garage in Hell’s Kitchen. Service has resumed, but it’s a reminder of how fragile infrastructure can be in the United States. This is also the second time in about a year that a privately-owned building threatened the Empire Corridor, and the last time it happened it nearly wrecked my vacation plans.

Back in August 2022, I needed a break, and I drew up a plan to visit my sister up in northern New York and a friend in Boston. I’d take the first Burlington-bound Ethan Allen Express up to Middlebury, where my sister could pick me. After a few days, take the Essex-Charlotte ferry over to Vermont, and take the Ethan Allen Express back down to New York City. A day or two in Brooklyn, then an Acela round-trip to Boston.

The first portent of doom was waking up to see a missed call from Amtrak. Amtrak doesn’t call me unless there’s a problem with my train:

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Mark Hoolihan passed away on August 24, 2019, at the age of 49. I didn’t know him well. He was an adjunct at Kalamazoo College my senior year. I took one class, an evening seminar in Jewish History.

Winter terms at Kalamazoo were rough. I imagine they still are. The college was on quarters (trimesters); the winter term started the first week of January and ran ten weeks, plus exam week. Spring break came after, followed by the spring term. January and February in Michigan are cold and dark. I can remember a February where it snowed two days out of three and the sun never broke through the overcast.

The winter of 2005 I had to overload and take four classes instead of the usual three. I had a political science course (“Modern liberalism and its critics”), Advanced German, French Revolution, and the Jewish History seminar with Hoolihan, which met in the evenings.

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