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Good ThingsIt's been a pretty good week here. First of all, Debbi has a new job! The job market around Silicon Valley is still not that great, which I think was discouraging for a while (certainly it got discouraging for me, as I heard all the details and really sympathized), but next month she'll start work at Genentech, one of the leading biotech companies and a company which has made several lists of the best companies to work for. (I'm also amused that their stock symbol is DNA.) I think it's pretty cool, and I'd had a sneaking suspicion that she'd end up at Genentech, though I'm not sure why. Maybe just because I knew that she knows someone there, and that seems to be the best way to find your way into a company these days. Congratulations, Deb!
 Friday evening we watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), since I'd like to go see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sometime soon. Willy Wonka is a childhood favorite of Deb's. I must have seen it before, but I didn't really remember it. Based on a story by Roald Dahl, it features five children - four nasty little tykes and the protagonist Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) - who find special golden tickets inside candy bars and are the first in years to be admitted to the chocolate factory of the enigmatic Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder). As they witness the wonders inside the factory, the children are gradually separated as they fall prey to their weaknesses and faults, each time their fates being summed up by a song by the Oompa Loompas, the workers in Wonka's factory. The film is in fact a musical, famous for the song "The Candy Man". It fits rather weirdly between the colorful musicals of Gene Kelly and the (to my mind) increasingly strange and dark films that Hollywood was producing in the 60s and early 70s. It's a morality play, of course, and is full of surrealist decor, but ultimately it's Ostrum's exuberance which makes the film work (along with Jack Albertson, who plays Charlie's Grandpa Joe), and it's got a cheerful, optimistic ending at the conclusion of the odyssey. Debbi's a big Gene Wilder fan, and I've enjoyed him in several films (most recently, of course, Young Frankenstein), but truthfully it seemed to me like his heart wasn't in this one. His lines often seemed mumbled, and he seemed to play the role rather stiffly. Maybe this was a deliberate approach, but I felt that it left Wonka devoid of personality. I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't it. I'll be curious to see how Johnny Depp tackles the role in the new film (assuming Tim Burton doesn't overshadow everyone with his sets and direction, as he sometimes does). An enjoyable film, though. I'm sure it lost something for me since I didn't see it in childhood. But that's the way the chocolate cracks!
Following a reasonable mild week, it was another sweltering weekend here in the Bay Area, although I understand the rest of the country is sharing (or exceeding) our misery. We spent much of the weekend just sitting around with a couple of excursions for errands. The cats spent most of the time sitting around, too. Too darned hot! My cherry tomato plant has been yielding up dozens of little tomatoes. I'm hoping it's not going to be done by the end of the month, as it would be nice to have some into August! Maybe next year I should plant another one. The roma and heirloom tomato plants are just now starting to ripen. The two pepper plants are also starting to ripen, but they're producing only a few peppers, which is disappointing. Maybe they'll yield more fruit later in the summer; I've never grown peppers before, so I don't really know. Lastly, as you can see in the sidebar, I finished the new Harry Potter book. I've been reading a lot of random stuff over the last couple of months, which is why I haven't been updating the sidebar. For instance, catching up on my subscriptions to the "big three" science fiction magazines, as well as the large backlog of Marvel Masterworks hardcover comic book collections that have been stacking up. So it's been a pretty good week. If it cools off again, then this coming week might be even better!
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