October 24, 1996
Dear Everyone:
Last weekend, while
“Marshall” and “Jeannie” were frolicking at the
Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival, I stayed home and
winterized.
“Winterizing”, in this part of the world, consists of cleaning
the filter in the furnace and running any small space heaters outside on
the patio until they’ve burned all the dust off the coils.
Cleaning the furnace
filter is a little more complicated.
You can’t just go to the hardware store and buy a replaceable
filter. That would be too
easy. That could only happen
if the guys who installed the furnace in the first place had cut the
hole in the closet floor to match the standard filter size of 14”X25”.
Instead, they cut the hole to 13”X27”, too narrow and too long
for a standard filter. Then
they cut a “reusable” filter to exactly (more or less) match the hole.
The manufacturer
recommends cleaning the filter once a month.
To which I reply, “Nonsense.
It takes that long just to get the cover off and back on again.”
The manufacturer recommends spraying the filter with a hose in
the back yard (back yard?), then letting it dry overnight before
replacing it back inside the furnace.
In the dead of winter I’m going to leave the filter outside
overnight? Think again.
Instead, I clean the
filter with the hose attachment of the vacuum cleaner.
This seems to do the job well enough without requiring garden
implements and shivering for two days waiting to turn the furnace back
on. On Sunday, I winterized
“Jeannie’s” place. Just in
time, too; the temperature dropped below 60o just the other
night.
Winterizing did not
take so much time that we couldn’t go to the movies on Sunday.
We saw
Sleepers.
This is director
Barry Levinson’s
study of four boys, from
New York’s
Hell’s Kitchen,
who are sent to a
reformatory, where they are abused, and how that affects them as
adults. In the hands of another
director, this could easily have degenerated into one of those trashy
movies that show up on
USA on Wednesday
nights.
But Levinson chose
to go First Class all the way.
Robert De
Niro plays a priest who has to choose between the truth and justice.
Dustin
Hoffman, as a defense attorney, is probably on screen for a total of
10 minutes. But he turns
what would have been a bit part into a pivotal role.
Kevin Bacon,
as the head guard in the reformatory, explores the other side of his
role as an abused prisoner in
Murder in
the First.
Barry and his actors
are looking to pick up a few of those
little gold statues
that get handed out on the last Monday in March, and none more so than
Brad Pitt.
I have a theory about Pitt and why he keeps choosing such dark
roles:
He’s cute.
Cuter than a bug’s ear and there’s no denying this fact.
You look at Brad Pitt and what you see is a real cute guy.
Trouble is, that’s what the members of the Academy see, too.
They don’t see “serious actor”, they see “cute”.
So, he’s going to continue to pick dark, serious roles until he
gets the recognition he deserves.
Let’s hope he gets the
Oscar for this
one and then maybe we can see if he can do comedy.
In the meantime,
Sleepers is the best Oscar
contender to show up so far.
Well worth seeing.
Love, as always,
Pete
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