Bicentennial Man (1999)

This is an odd movie, which is maybe a bit too long, but features an AI robot played by Robin Williams.
The movie is based on a novelette in the Robot series by the master science fiction author of the mid-twentieth century, Isaac Asimov.  It was awarded a couple of prestigious awards for best science fiction novelette of 1976, a time when artifical intelligence and a robot who thought and felt like a man seemed very far off indeed.  Not so much so today.
According to the foreword in Robot Visions, Asimov was approached to write a story, along with a number of other authors who would do the same, for a science fiction collection to be published in honor of the United States Bicentennial.  However, the arrangement fell through, leaving Asimov's the only story actually completed for the project.  It is the basis for this movie.
So the story is solid.  Richard Martin (Sam Neill) buys a gift, a new NDR-114 robot. The product is named Andrew (Robin Williams) by the youngest of the family's children. The movie follows the life and times of Andrew, a robot purchased as a household appliance programmed to perform menial tasks. As Andrew begins to experience emotions and creative thought, the Martin family soon discovers they don't have an ordinary robot, and slowly but surely trouble ensues.

We All Need to Be Greta

Two things.  The fury that Greta unleashes is so real, so deep within her, and so inspiring.  Her speech before the United Nations brought tears to my eyes.  The second is that people who disagree with her are afraid of her. So afraid that even though she is just a girl they treat her with such anger that you know she has them running for cover.  She is right, and very soon, everyone will know it.  As it stands the oceans are rising.  There are heat waves that course through the water.  The skies are less predictable and the wind and rain that form hurricanes will be common place.  The coastlines as we know them will disappear and unless we start changing things right now, we are in in bigger and bigger trouble.
It is clear that the fury of youth will be the wave of momentum that will wash us towards change, just as it did in the late 1960's.  She is one of many, but her fearlessness and ferocity makes her stand out above the rest.  She has adoring eyes for those who have been working for the planet for decades.  The picture of her with Jane Goodall is priceless.  Everything they are thinking is so transparent that a caption if completely superfluous.  She is the change I want to see in the world. 

Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick

 I am on a non-fiction kick these days and so when I read a review of a book on a subject that I know nothing about, I put it on my library hold list, and this is one such book.  The loss of language is like all the other extinctions we will be watching unfold, and understanding what we lose when that happens is well worth thinking about.
As a young anthropologist, in 1985, Don Kulick, the author of this book, traveled to the most remote reaches of Papua New Guinea to study how a language dies. Motivating his quest was a haunting consensus then emerging among linguists that fully half of the world’s 7,000 languages are teetering on the brink of extinction. As he made his way across the vast mangrove lagoon at the mouth of the Sepik River, wading through malarial swamps to reach a narrow slit in the jungle that would be his home for many months, he was acutely aware that every fortnight, somewhere in the world, some elder carries into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue, and another language is lost. His destination was the village of Gapun, home to just 130 people, 90 of whom were fluent in Tayap, one of 600 extant languages kept alive by fewer than 100 speakers.
Papua New Guinea, a nation the size of California with a population of 8 million, has more than a thousand distinct languages—not dialects, but actual languages, 350 of which have never been spoken by more than 500 people.  He went back over the next three decades and what he has to say about his experiences are like nothing I have read before.  Honest, frightening, and enlightening.

Find Me (2018)

I really loved this indie film featuring an accountant's road trip, where the real attraction is some really spectacular scenery in three National Parks.  Given that the current administration is rolling back public access and protection in these parks and ramping up private use of public lands, the timing couldn't be better to drum up a little support for keeping some parts of the country natural.
Joe is the accountant, and he has hit a rough patch following his divorce.  He reluctantly looks out for his aging parents who pressure him constantly, he works, he has the same take out dinner every night, and he spends time with his son.  The highlights of his work day is his interactions with his work friend, Amelia.  She encourages him to get outside of his comfort zone and live a little.  She has been.  In recent weeks she has been gone a lot, and she tells him tales from the wilderness.  There is a crisis where she shows up at his house in the middle of the night, and disappears the next morning for good, leaving him a diary entitled Easy Adventures, which in her mind start with flat accessible hikes and end in spectacular scenic glory.  Weeks pass and Amelia doesn't return, so when he gets a letter from her pleading with him to find her, he drops everything, and goes on a scavenger hunt first in Zion, then Death Valley and the road ends in Yosemite.  Scenery so great that you will be tugged to return to those places, and a good story holding it all up.  Streaming on Amazon Prime.

Double Chocolate Bundt Cake

The cookbook for the Food 52 Baking Club is The Artful Baker this month, and this cake is an exceptionally good chocolate bundt cake.
We took it to a fancy dinner centered around truffles, and it was the clear winner.  Follow the timing included for best results.

For the cake

5 ounces (140g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped

1/2 cup (50g) Dutch process cocoa powder, sifted if lumpy

1/2 cup (125ml) heavy cream

1/2 cup (125ml) strong coffee

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups (280g) flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

7 ounces (200g) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 3/4 cups (350g) sugar

4 large eggs, at room temperature

For the glaze

5 ounces (140g) semisweet chocolate, chopped

3/4 cup (180ml) heavy cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 325ºF (160ºC). Set the rack in the center of the oven. Generously, and thoroughly, butter a 10-inch (23cm) bundt pan.

2. Put the chopped chocolate and cocoa powder in a medium sized bowl. Bring the heavy cream and coffee almost to a boil, remove from heat, and pour over the chocolate and cocoa powder. Let sit for 30 seconds, then stir until the chocolate is melted and smooth. Stir in the vanilla.

3. In a separate medium sized bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

4. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or by hand in a large bowl, beat the butter at medium-high speed until smooth and creamy. Add the sugar and continue to beat until light and creamy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, stopping the mixer between additions, to scrape down the sides, so the eggs are incorporated.

5. Remove the bowl from the mixer and use a spatula to stir in one-third of the flour mixture. Add half of the melted chocolate, then another third of the flour mixture. Finally add the rest of the melted chocolate then the last of the flour. While you're mixing to reach down to the bottom of the bowl with the spatula, as the dry ingredients tend to sink to the bottom.

6. Scrape the batter into the prepared bundt pan, smooth the top, and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out almost clean, but with moist crumbs still attached, about 50 minutes. Don't overbake.

7. Cool the cake on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then turn the cake out onto the rack and cool completely.

8. Make the glaze by putting the chopped chocolate in a medium-size bowl. Heat the heavy cream in a small saucepan until almost boiling then pour over the chocolate. Let stand for 30 seconds then stir until the chocolate is smooth and melted. Stir in the vanilla extract.

9. Set the cake with the wire rack over a sheet of parchment paper. Use a spoon or ladle to cover the cake with the glaze. My glaze was pretty thick (as you can see from the photos in the post), but if yours is too runny, let it cool down a bit until it's thicker.(Any glaze that slides off can be saved to spoon over ice cream, according to Cenk. I stirred it back into the glaze, because there wasn't any cake crumbs in it.)

Serving: Serve the cake at room temperature. It's a pretty rich cake although could be served with whipped cream or ice cream,
Storage: The cake will keep for up to three days at room temperature, covered.

Empire State South, Atlanta, Georgia

I was in Atlanta for a meeting a couple of weeks ago and I was able to meet a good friend for lunch, and she took me here.
It is always good to catch up with people that you have known, even if under limited and largely unhappy circumstances (our sons were both diagnosed with the same type of brain tumor, a situation that makes a lot of current, past, and to an extent, future relationships complicated).  The thing about it is that you get each other on a level that a lot of people really cannot quite achieve, and so it is a breath of fresh air to see her again.
This restaurant is what I would call bold American food with a Southern flair.  They had exceptional iced coffee and remarkably have a selection of options.  For this alone they deserve judos.  I had the shrimp and grits, was was exceptionally good, but did not compare with the farm egg fried rice.  It is made with Carolina Gold Rice, and had an almost popped rice tooth feel and the flavor was really explosively great.  Highly recommended.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Apparently you really need to have four hours of movie in order to really understand the story of  David "Noodles" Aaronson (Robert De Niro) over the course of his live.  
The movie tells the story of five decades in the lives of four gangsters from New York City -- childhood friends who are merciless criminals almost from the first, but who have a special bond of loyalty to each other.  Noodles has a couple of breaks with the gang.  The first is that he goes to jail for the sake of the gang after killing a rival gangster who is twice his age at the the time.  The second is an act that the viewer sees about mid-movie and that is the one that both haunts him and is mysterious.
The movie shifts between their growing up in a Lower East Side slum  in the 1920's, their antics in the 1930's running booze in Prohibition, and then their next criminal enterprises, and then 1968 when Noodles returns to the scene of the crime after decades in hiding to come to terms with his past.  There is a lot of story to digest here, and I am not sure that I really got the deeper meaning of it all, but it is an impressive De Niro movie I had missed up until now.                                             

Smashed Potatoes with Green Sauce

I just joined the Food 52 Cookbook Club, and this month's cookbook is The Little Swedish Kitchen.  I made this for a dinner that was high stakes, in that were was definitely going to be great food and guests who were very discerning.  I had made it for a family dinner, and while I thought it was good, thought that there should be more of the green sauce and so I augmented that component.

1 3/4 pounds of new potatoes
3 Tbsp. butter

Green Sauce:
4 Tbsp. olive oil
4 Tbsp. cider viengar
2 Tbsp. capers
1-2 Tbsp. honey
2 bunches of greens that can include dill, oregano, tarragon, chives, parsley.

Boil potatoes until tender, in water with some salt.  Put into serving dish, salt and peper them, then dot the surface with butter.
For the green sauce, put all ingredients into a Vitamix or food processor and blend until very smooth.  Dot the surface of the poratoes, and serve.

Laos Cafe, West Liberty, Iowa

Last weekend we were out on the east side of Iowa City, way east actually, and while a pig was roasting we needed some ready food, and decided to try this place.
Wow.  This is the best Asian food that I have had in a while in Iowa.  The green curry was blow you away delicious.  Spicy, very flavorful and replete with silky eggplant, it was a flavor bomb.  The pad thai was good, as was the pad see maw, both of which need to be at least decent in order for everyone to be happy.  The General's chicken was nothing like the Chinese version of the dish and quite wonderful.  The standards of fresh spring rolls, fried egg rolls and crab Rangoon were good.  For my return trip though, I plan on getting a yellow and a red curry to really flesh out what the curry options are.  Do not miss this treat.

The Book Shop (2018)

This is a quiet movie, based on a book of the same title.  The three principle stars are top notch actors.  It has an adorably quaint setting, a 1950s-'60s seaside town in England.  It features books and shops and has as its heroine a brave widow who loves to read and is willing to stand up to the village doyenne, one of those villains whose superficial graciousness and courtesy are only cover for ruthlessness and fury.
Emily
Mortimer plays Florence Green, whose husband was killed in WWII. She met him in a bookstore, and she dreams of opening one of her own in an old abandoned building in a small East Anglian town. She is patient but firm in her dealings with the lawyer and banker who clearly think she should not be worrying her pretty head about business.
Florence underestimates how formidable a foe she has in Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson), the wife of a retired general who treats the village as though it was under her command.  The movie winds up as a cautionary tale of what happens when people let bullies get their way.  All with gorgeous scenery Bill Nighy to enjoy.