Farmer's Market -- 27 March 2016 - (Daffodil Day, 8th of Germination, Year 224)

Pink lady and gold rush apples, scalded rye bread, spinach, four lettuce seedlings, and two largish tomato plants.

I'll plant the lettuces this week (and the pansies I picked up at the hardware store) but wait another two weeks to plant the tomatoes. We've had a really warm March so far, but we're having a cold snap right now, so I'm waiting on those.

I still have to weed my garden and try ripping out the recurring mint. And then plant snap peas and fava beans, which are my first crops and nitrogen-fixers for the summer crops.

Movies: 'Rams' and 'Chandu the Magician' -- (Daffodil Day, 8th of Germination, Year 224)

I went to see Rams at the AFI last night. The description is: 'In a remote Icelandic farming valley, two brothers who haven't spoken in 40 years have to come together in order to save what's dearest to them - their sheep'.

My initial reaction was 'my god, it's Norwegian Bachelor Farmers!', except they're Icelanders. But I was with ellen_fremedon; and the Vegan Knitter, and she agreed it was totally Norwegian Bachelor Farmers. Though when we got to the end, she pointed that once you've run away to the mountains, that's the last step to becoming an outlaw and your story is over; so the ending was perfect, at least in the context of Icelandic sagas.

This afternoon I went to see Chandu the Magician with greenygalas part of the William Cameron Menzies retrospective. It had a good bit of painfully dated orientalism, and a good bit of raygun gothic with a 'death ray' as the central macguffin, but it also had some amazing set design consider it was made in 1932, some nifty special effects (and lots of van de graaf generators and tesla coils) and correct use of 'thou' and 'you' between a master yogi and his student Chandu. You could definitely see the seeds of both the Jedi and Indiana Jones in the movie.

Next up, there's short run of Harryhausen films, including King Kong and Jason and the Argonauts at the AFI that I'm going to go to, and a two-day only run of Project Itoh: Empire of Corpses, which is a steampunk anime alternate history -- 'Ever wonder what the world would be like if the British Empire had been built upon a working class of reanimated corpses?' -- so I will go see it even though it's only showing weekday nights.