Just A Peck 0062 // Butterflies, Board Games, Books

9/13/26

Welcome to the latest issue of Just A Peck. I'm glad you're here!

JOURNAL

The weather was gorgeous this week. We had some rain, but there were multiple opportunities to sit on the deck and read, or chat with Jody, or just watch the butterflies.

A copy of The Humana Festival resting on the deck railing, with Lake Superior stretching out to the horizon under a blue sky

A monarch butterfly flying over our deck, half in sunlight and half in shadow

Last Sunday, my friend Patrick invited a group to watch a double-header of Fred Zinnemann movies with strong political subtext: A Man for All Seasons and High Noon. (He also made us all a fantastic dinner in addition to the great movies and conversation. It was a pretty outstanding evening.)

A black and white photo of Fred Zinnemann and crew beside the camera on the set of High Noon, with Gary Cooper in his marshal's costume

Jody's first day with her new second-grade class was Tuesday. Her tooth pain was manageable enough that she made it through the day without issues. I also suspect that meeting her new class is such a magical experience every year that it helped to ease the pain a little. She had her root canal on Wednesday, and it was awful, but the worst seems to be behind her.

Jody smiling in the entryway on the first day of school, wearing a maroon top and a lanyard, with a red tote bag over her shoulder

On Thursday, the Prius died while Kaylee was on her way to work. If I've never told you the story of how someone made the mistake of selling me a bumper-to-bumper lifetime warranty on that car, buy me a drink sometime and I'll regale you. Suffice it to say that we've put over 300k miles on it since then without ever paying for more than routine maintenance. However, the one thing not covered in that warranty is the battery, and the warning error on the dashboard this time is "Hybrid System Issue." Stay tuned to see if it's finally time to send the Prius to that great big junkyard in the sky. (Or Fredenberg, or wherever those scrap metal salvage places are.)

Our black Prius parked along the curb of a tree-lined residential street

Thursday was also opening night for Kaylee, who is stage managing A Chorus Line at the Duluth Playhouse. (Did you get your tickets yet?)

Kaylee and the rest of the creative team in evening gowns posing on the red carpet in front of a gold sequin backdrop and balloons on opening night of A Chorus Line

On Saturday, we played board games with Tom & Brandy, which was even more fun than usual because we're in the peak of the annual monarch butterfly migration, so hundreds of butterflies were fluttering by us all day while we played last year's Spiel des Jahres winner, Bomb Busters. Also on Saturday, I had my first game of the season for our Wingspan League. Yes, you read that correctly, we have organized a competitive league around one of the least competitive games of all time.

Tom, Brandy, Jody, and Justin grinning in a selfie with a stack of board games, including Bomb Busters, and the lake behind them

Brandy and Tom laughing across the table behind stacks of colorful Cursed Court chips

I like recording the books I'm reading (and buying, argh) in these newsletters and I want to start doing the same thing for the plays I'm reading. I read a lot of them, and I think it would be helpful for me to be able to search back through my archives to see when I read a given play. We'll see. I reserve the right to abandon this new section at any time.

A tall stack of play scripts on the kitchen counter, including The Internationalist, Shipwreck, The Children, Gloria, Uncle Vanya, and Dead Man's Cell Phone

WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK

A Man for All Seasons (1966). Paul Scofield is so good in this. Welles appears to be rotting from the inside out. John Hurt is a weaselly little Ringo Starr lookalike who you love to hate. Leo McKern as Cromwell is great. I worked for two Dominican friars when I was young — hauling brush, raking leaves, and cutting the grass at their Thomas More Center. I always admired their intellectual approach to their faith, focused on quiet study, research, and teaching. Remember when people of faith would consider it a moral failing to abandon the tenets of their faith to bend the knee to their corrupt overlords?

High Noon (1952). Better than I remembered. It looks like it's a western, but it's actually a bleak depiction of moral cowardice, hypocrisy, and dereliction of duty made by artists who were faced with the horrors of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the McCarthy-era communist witch hunt. It's not subtle, but what need is there for subtlety in times of "This Is Fine" levels of willful blindness? Gary Cooper's wooden stoicism feels appropriate, and there's a strong supporting cast (including Grace Kelly, who has to be one of the most beautiful people ever captured on film).

Coyote vs. Acme (2026). I had a good time with this. Despite the poster, I hadn't expected it to be a retelling of The Myth of Sisyphus for children, nor did I expect that the gonzo violence of the cartoons from the 50s would be preserved so well. The animation was wonderful, the writing was clever enough, and Will Forte and John Cena are both great. You should go see it, if for nothing else than to give a giant middle finger to the bean counters who wanted to bury this entire thing as a tax-evasion strategy.

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK

Finished:

The cover of Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead by K.J. Parker

Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead, by K.J. Parker. (Audiobook) I'm not a big fantasy guy, but K.J. Parker's brand of smart, snarky storytelling is right up my alley. A mystery-solving duo consisting of an atheist monk whose expertise as a copyist makes him a master counterfeiter and a devout, foul-mouthed nun who is a deadly killing machine attend an Ecumenical Council, where they struggle to figure out the theological, philosophical, and ontological nuances of the "long game" between good and evil. (Or is it just different factions of evil? Or is it just run-of-the-mill factionalism?)

Holding up a copy of The Humana Festival: The History of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville by Jeffrey Ullom

The Humana Festival: The History of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, by Jeffrey Ullom. A fascinating and detailed academic breakdown of ATL and the Humana Festival — the mistakes and triumphs, the finances, the personalities, the public relations, and the experimentation. Can what Jon Jory did there ever be replicated?

The cover of Hell House by Richard Matheson, with a sketch of a looming Victorian mansion

Hell House, by Richard Matheson. (Audiobook) I was doing some reading about ghost stories and ran across a Reddit thread that named this as one of the scariest ghost stories ever written. Rather than tell you how much I didn't like this book (and make no mistake, I really didn't like it), I'm going to tell you an embarrassing story. The whole time I was reading it, I was thinking, "Boy, Killing Mr. Watson was so much better." I only realized afterward that I had read the entire book thinking that Richard Matheson was Peter Matthiessen.

QUICK LINKS

WHAT I'M EXCITED ABOUT

This week I start a weekly Fundamentals class at the Great Lakes Academy of Fine Art, a world-class classical training studio modeled after and descended from the traditional European atelier system. I started classes there during the pandemic, but decided that I wasn't quite ready to start breathing the same air as a bunch of other people in a small, poorly-ventilated room, and it hasn't worked with my schedule to get back to it until now.

Students working at easels in the sunlit studio of the Great Lakes Academy of Fine Art

MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Hope is not wishful thinking. It's the dogged determination to do what is in our power to make the better future we wish for actually happen. Without hope, we fall into apathy—and do nothing. And the greatest danger to our future is apathy."

— Jane Goodall

That's it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!

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