  A call from dispatch comes over the radio, late morning on a Saturday: A man with a gun—possibly multiple weapons—has been spotted by a trail runner at the Chautauqua Overlook. The air is warm, 75 degrees, and getting warmer.   Lee Pace and I have formed a sci-fi book club. His idea. Without anyone intending it, dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Brooklyn has turned into our club's unofficial first meeting. There's The Lord of the Rings and Dune, of course, which the actor has read more times than he remembers. He also sings the praises of his favorite writer, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the universe-rattling Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu. He pulls out his Kindle to show me the Bobiverse series, which he's currently reading, and to download a couple books I suggest (Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice and Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire). I have no doubt he'll read them immediately. "We have to get back together and discuss," he says.
 I made 16 lemon drops last Friday night. Kacey Musgraves's Star-Crossed movie was finally streaming, so my friends gathered at my apartment to get buzzed on the summery cocktail while watching our gal rock the hell out of sequined eyebrows. Eight women, two rounds of lemon drops, 16 drinks—a feat that you might assume would've chained me to the bar cart, measuring and shaking away from first song to last (no skips). But no, after stumbling through some mental multiplication, I was flying through those lemon drops, mixing three at once without having to fudge the ideal ratio of vodka to lemon juice to triple sec to honey simple syrup, without dousing my shirt in booze, and without over-diluting or under-chilling the final product. And then, movie wrapped, the death of matrimony celebrated, my roommate breezed through a round of dirty martinis for the group.  Are you looking to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on whisky? In September, the oldest single malt scotch ever to be bottled and sold was released by Gordon & Macphail, marking a seismic event for scotch fans. I was lucky enough to try the 80-year-old whisky, which was distilled at The Glenlivet in 1940 and spent its lifetime in a sherry butt, and can report back that it aged rather gracefully—oaky, leathery, and musty on the nose, a hit of sharp tannin on the palate, followed by orange, sour cherry, grape hard candy, and just a hint of Honey Nut Cheerios. Its cost will surely be astronomical; the first of 250 decanters will be auctioned off in October by Sotheby's for an estimated $100K to $200K, with proceeds going to charity.
 Why is Ben Platt in my screening of Dear Evan Hansen starring Ben Platt? I'm kneeling on the floor of the fancy Whitby Hotel screening room, frantically cleaning up the entire box of popcorn I've knocked over. That's when I notice him. The lights dim as I pluck the last few kernels up, and I look up to see—is that? It is. It's Ben freaking Platt claiming one of the bright orange seats in the back marked RESERVED. Of the 130 seats in the theater, only a dozen or so are taken, one of them, now, by the star of Dear Evan Hansen, the film we're about to see.  To completely take the wind out of all of our sails, coming up with a perfect list of the 110 greatest movies of all time is... well, it's impossible isn't it? To get cerebral about it, when lists like this come together, half the fun is going through and seeing where (or even if) your favorite made the list. Taking in how your tastes and experiences line up with whomever devoted this much time to this monstrosity. With film being such an expansive and subjective form of art, there is hardly a wrong answer to what is and isn't deserving of making a list like this.
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Sunday, September 26, 2021
The Crisis Facing America's Park Rangers
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