Fun Notes

Michael Hennessy makes fun stuff with heart

Blow, Winds, And Crack Your Cheeks! (But leave my apples alone)

Whatever was left of Hurricane Lee passed through my neck of the woods this weekend. Lots of rain and wind, but I didn’t lose any trees or branches, and my apple tree made it through fine. Wasn’t a good year for apples, though, not like last year. Let’s see what we can do for next year.

Apples still on my apple tree after Hurricane Lee.
Apples still hanging in there.

With the storm past, the temperature dropped today and has definitely let me know we are about to head into fall. And when fall hits, it will be time to create a bit of fun every week with Pokémon Go for the AMDHHA. If you’ve never heard of Pokémon Go, it is an augmented reality mobile game where players walk around in the real world and capture Pokémon (a portmanteau of “pocket monsters”.) And in the past year, the Doucet Hennessy House has become a Pokéstop, which is normally located at select places like historical markers, monuments, art installations and other places of interest, where players can stop by and get free goodies. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do: walk over to the house and record my weekly Pokémon Go updates and share them online.

The Pokéstop page for the Doucet Hennessy House.
Free goodies for Pokémon Go players, served up daily.

This blending of current gaming & technology at a local heritage place is absolutely my kind of jam, and I’m going to get much more into this over the next year. Consider yourself now in the loop on a little bit of what I will be working on, as I create collaborations using gaming, technology, and heritage in several projects.

And here’s a little bit more of what I will be working on soon, too: a draft of a contained horror script, starting on October 1st and with a goal of getting to Fade Out on Halloween. It will be scary, indeed, and to paraphrase LOVE, ACTUALLY, mostly scary how bad the draft will be. And that’s what rewriting is for, right, folks? Right. Trick or treat, draft complete, give me something good to eat. (Yes, I will raid my kids’ loot late on Halloween night.)

Bluesky tweet: "All right, okay, so I walked into this because of @abovewill.bsky.social. 😂This October 1st, I'm committed to taking the outline for a contained horror script I have in my drawer and writing a draft from page 1 to Fade Out by Halloween. Thanks, Ava. Thanks a lot. 🕯️🐺💔😱👻🔪🕛💀"
Must finish script by Halloween or I can’t raid my kids’ trick-or-treat stash!

The Study Of Pressure And Time

There’s nothing quite like a great fairy tale. And that’s what The Shawshank Redemption is, after all, despite Red’s protestation that “prison ain’t no fairy tale world.” Although I will say that Red is both perfectly wrong and perfectly right here, as he is more than once in the film. The prison itself is no fairy tale world, but when you look at the world entire from inside the prison, this in fact a fairy tale world – the unrepentant evil are punished harshly, the bad who genuinely repent are redeemed, and our hero gets what he wants most in the world.

One of my favourite instances of Red being wrong/right comes from his reaction to the the expression of hope at Andy’s absolutely lowest and darkest moment. In this quiet moment, the two talk as openly as only the closest of friends can, and Andy reveals he still wants to get to his own private Zihuatanejo. Red, hoping to protect his best friend from what seems like harmfully hopeless dreaming, tries to tell him the way things really are.

Red’s response to Andy’s talk of living the Zihuatanejo way: “These are just shitty pipe dreams.”

Andy responds to Red’s efforts with the classic line,”Get busy living, or get busy dying.” The conversation ends shortly thereafter, with Red more concerned than ever for the mind and safety of Andy. It leads into what Red describes as, “That was the longest night of my life.” The next morning, Andy doesn’t show up outside his cell for morning roll call, and then we get treated to five and a half minutes of the most emotionally satisfying combination of voice-over and extended flashback in any movie, ever. And among the wonderful payoffs from countless earlier plants, we have Andy on his way to freedom, after having smashed his way into a shitty pipe using a chunk of concrete.

“Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit-smelling foulness I can’t even imagine. Or maybe I just don’t want to.”

If you haven’t watched The Shawshank Redemption in a while, it’s always a good time for a rewatch and to savour the little nods scattered throughout, like Red’s cell number matching the cursed hotel room number from The Shining – 237. And if you’ve never seen it before, go get it from your local library this weekend, give it two-and-a-half hours of your attention without a second screen, and experience & enjoy a fairy tale friendship.