Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 16

Beep-blooping Treadwell
Chasing Luna's toy robot 
Night cacophony
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 15

Two aliens gather
Around a butterbeer keg
To drink to Christmas
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 14

Christmas: Day 14
Spider in a spaceship plant
Invasive species
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 13

Two giggling gals love
Spreading joy with their green pal
Singing "Peace on Earth" 
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 12

Green potion fuels
Plucky skateboarding robot
Four wheels whiz on ice
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 11

Poor Boo Boo Kitty
Christmas treat for beast or droid? 
Plastic tongue flicks out
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 10

Whirring wheels on soft
Snow-white carpet, Hannah's gift
With tool rack bathos
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 9

 

Four golden compasses
One box of droid parts and a 
Girl in a deer suit

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 8

A blade scraping snow
Electric robot hum sparks
The hippogriff's rage
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 7

"Unhappy Christmas,"
Snarls Malfoy; R7 trills
A hymn for Rover

 

Lego Advent Calendar 2025 Day 6

Old engine rumbles
Robot vacuum whirrs, suction
Sucking vomit beans
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 5

Shutterbug shoots us
"Down with metanarrative!" 
Shattering fourth wall
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 4

"Cho Chang, safety first!"
Cries the robotic pit droid
Ravenclaw folly
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 3

Protocol droid whines
Displayed on Hogwarts altar
Teddy bear trauma

 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 2

The snowy owl hoots
Contemplates a toy grader
Space coffee gurgles
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2025 Day 1

Three December smiles
Silent as the falling snow
Teddy ewok joy
 

Maximus, Helmet in Hand

Maximus, helmet in hand
Crossed the nuke-blasted desert
Wrapped in a cloak of steel
Not his own; 

Maximus, hammer in hand
Fleeing his conscience
Chasing glory
Every ghoul and mutant and raider
Just another nail in his coffin

Three Sisters

Mom, Aunt Jean, and sitting down, Aunt Margaret, the eldest of the four Etsell sisters. All three of these remarkable women have passed on now. They are missed. 

Shadows cast through an upstairs window
Moonlight broken by a cross and black branches
And fluttering wings
But for an instant
 

Farewell, Aunt Jean

We found out late tonight that Aunt Jean, Mom's sister, passed away on Tuesday. I'm grateful we got to see her one last time at Mom's celebration of life this summer. Aunt Jean is on the right in this image with Mom from 1950 or so. 

Aunt Jean was fun to be around. She was a genuine character and a wonderful painter. She was closest to Mom in age and, I always suspected, closest overall. 

Our thoughts are with Uncle John, my cousins Keith and Kevin, and their partners, Heather and Carolyn, and with Aunt Marjorie. We'll all miss Aunt Jean, but none more than these who were closest to her. 

 

Sisko's Pitch

These Violent Movies Have Violent Nanogenres

Some time ago, Letterboxd added theme and nanogenre tags to their films. Only a small subset of Letterboxd's hundreds of thousands of films catalogued have these tags, which is why I suspect my lifetime nanogenre stats make me look a bit crazed. 
 

Pickup Trucks

I really like the off-kilter composition of this photo, as if the trucks are leaning into the sidewalk. Very strange. 

I believe this is Dad's Aunt Amelia (Mely), and Uncle Bill in 1940. 

Grandma and the Snowman

Here's our paternal grandmother, Hope Woods, with a short-statured, fully clothed snowman. Or is it a snowman? The head looks more like paper with a face drawn onto it. Another strange mystery from the Woods family tree. OHO pun not intended, but I'll keep it. 
 

The Hate Pumpkin

Back in the mid-80s, Sean posed for a photograph while holding a jack-o-lantern up in front of his face to make himself look like he had a pumpkin for a head. I just asked Google Gemini to turn that image into a movie poster. It took just seconds. 

I'm not against using generative AI to play around and have fun, but I hate the impact it's already having on working artists. At the very least, everyone who's had their art scraped should be compensated. But how can we make that happen? At this rate, a universal basic income funded by the 1% will be the only thing that prevents the vast majority of people from sliding into destitution. 

 

Plough Horses

This photo was right next to yesterday's in Granddad's photo album, and seems to have been shot a nearly the same place and time. I believe our grandparents lived in Aylsham, Saskatchewan, at this time, though I could be wrong about that. Look how tall the guy in the foreground looks compared to the person I think could be Granddad, based on Sean's comments yesterday and my own reflection. What a hardscrabble place it looks; I remember well how Dad told us his parents struggled to eke out a living here.