Merry Christmas from Florida no. 2

Behold the Christmas Cactus. We've discovered the secret for growing one: Hang it in a protected place and ignore it (but water now and then):

Merry Christmas from Florida

This wreath was put together by one of our daughters from Boston using boughs from her brother's Christmas tree in Colorado. He and his wife are due in this evening, so this wreath is perfectly symbolic of having a family home for Christmas, or most of us, anyway. They wanted warm weather and they will get it, all week. Merry Christmas!

Aunt Susie meets Santa

"Meets" isn't the right word, here. When you are 91 years old, you've developed a long-standing friendship with the old boy. She was concerned that she was too old to sit in his lap, but everybody around her told her you are never too old. She almost had him sitting in her lap.

Aunt Susie turns 91

May we all look so good when we are this close to a century! (As usual, click on the photo to enlarge.)

congratulations, me

Time Magazine has named "you," meaning me (and by inference, you, because you are reading this), as "Person of the Year" for 2006. The theory is that I, and my roughly seven faithful readers, are controlling the Information Age. We are engaged in community and collaboration. We are writing WikiPedia, an on-line encyclopedia of dubious integrity, and we are loading up servers and filling the ether with home movies of our pet iguanas and photos of our tattoos on YouTube and MySpace.

Time Magazine has made a serious argument for bringing their silly tradition of naming sombody as the Person of the Year to a conclusion. Now.

Never mind the madmen who are murdering people around the world; never mind people like Bill and Linda Gates who are trying to find a good and humanitarian use for their billions of dollars; never mind . . . OK, you get the point. You could name somebody worthy of the honor.

But seriously, one person? for an entire year? for the entire world? Naming "you" as the person of the year is an easy out, and an admission that the concept is absurd.

If you want a more honest view of 2006, check out the St. Petersburg Times' annual Sour Orange Awards or Esquire Magazine's Dubious Achievements issue.

finally

I promised to stay on the positive side for the rest of the holiday season. As you can see, I haven't been inspired to say much on the positive side.

I could tell you about my new HD television and my new DVD player that will "play" digital photos on the TV screen. We had friends over the other night who put on a spectacular digital slide show with their photos from Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and other places you've got to see to really appreciate. I could tell you how I got my audio hooked up digitally to my surround-sound system. But that would sound like bragging.

No, the good news for today is that we (the city I work for) won a federal lawsuit involving billboards. Not the huge kind of billboard you see along the Interstate Highway, but little mini-billboards that have sprouted up around town like weeds, renting at $7.00 a day. Some of them have been around for years, which was one of their arguments against code enforcement.

This case has been pending in court for more than a year since the last activity in the case. For the past six months, the case has been in an "any-day-now" status and the waiting has just about driven me crazy. (It would have been a very short drive.) We get notices of activities in the case electronically and I've been looking at my email morning, noon and night, waiting for notice that the word has come down from the mountain.

The case is not terribly monumental in the overall history of American jurisprudence but it will help our city look better and the decision meant a lot to me. I am not a gracious loser to begin with, and this one attracted the attention of one of our High Officials. Losing the case could have been career-threatening.

It ain't over yet. The fat lady doesn't sing until the appeal period has expired (or, if appealed, until that's been decided). But I've seen the fat lady in the dressing room, warming up her vocal cords, and she's wearing our costume. She's a very pretty fat lady and I hope she doesn't go wandering off too far.

move over, Sean Connery

I've been a fan of Sean Connery since 'way back, beginning with his best James Bond film, From Russia with Love. That movie is my "gold standard" for Bond films and Connery has always been, in my humble opinion, the best Bond actor. Until tonight.

Tonight we saw Casino Royale, with Daniel Craig as Bond. Our group of six veteran movie fans agreed that this is probably the best Bond film ever and that Craig is (take your choice but you've gotta see the movie first) every bit as good as Connery, or even better. Our six-person jury didn't take a vote on that question.

Craig doesn't look as smooth and urbane as Connery does in a dinner jacket but he is tougher than all of the other Bond actors. They ran him through some extraordinarily difficult and implausible (aren't they all) stunt scenes, but he looks like he could have done it all without stunt doubles, even when he walked through a wall after jumping from the top of one construction crane to another and onto a rooftop. Craig kept reminding me of somebody and I finally realized who: He is Steve McQueen reincarnated with slight touches of Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman when he could play a bad guy with a straight face, and the cyborg from The Terminator. Only tougher. I mean, he could take Chuck Norris.

The movie runs nearly two and a half hours but doesn't drag for one minute, even near the end. It is pure Bond. Chase scenes? Check. High stakes poker? Check. The beautiful woman? Check. One is played by Eva Green, although she's the first I can remember not willing to hop right into bed on first meeting Bond. That role is played by a beautiful Mediterranean actress, Murino, wife of one of the bad guys. We are missing only the underwater Scuba diving scenes, boat chase scenes, sky diving scenes, and skiing scenes. Hmmm, OK, it isn't the composite of all Bond movies but they promise he will be back.

Can hardly wait!