Good morning. Gigi the parti poodle here to welcome you to another installment of my blog. As you know, I am continuing to take a break from my little stories I tell here while I continue to practice my writing and assist my novelist in penning her newest novel. This week, as is tradition, my novelist and I sat down and watched The Oscars. We have seen many of this year’s nominated films but not all and we are continuing to review them. This week we watched a couple of nominated documentaries together. I have come to find out that these are not comedies. I find myself rather disturbed after viewing them. Last night, for instance, I could not settle down to sleep. I had to shove and push my blanky in many directions. Nothing was comfortable. I also tried walking on my novelist. This did not help. She did not like it. I was finally able to settle down and listen to gentle music while I attempted to meditate and try and forget that the world is for lack of a better word, terrible. Which reminds me, I had a bath this week. I detest baths and yet I keep getting them. Perhaps I will film a documentary on that horror. Until next week, I bid you adieu.

MY BOOKS

You can check out my books Chicane and all five installments of the Musicology book series Musicology: Volume One, Baby!, Musicology: Volume Two, Kid!, Musicology: Volume Three, Twist!, Musicology: Volume Four, Sweetie! and Musicology: The Epiquad on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback editions. You can also check out Musicology’s web site at www.musicologyrocks.com and vote for who you think will win Musicology!

STREAM OF THE WEEK: FLOW (2024) HBO MAX

Hands down the best Oscar award of the night this past Sunday went to this absolute must see masterpiece. This was a tremendous year for animation with three powerhouse films, The Wild Robot, Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and Flow all competing for the prize. Honestly, all of them deserved the Oscar and if I had it my way it would have been a three-way tie with each of them taking home a statue. But if we were splitting hairs, Flow would have been my choice for the win. This visually stunning brilliantly told story became the first Oscar for the country of Latvia and a huge congratulations to them. If you see no other film this year, see this one.

Telling its tale with absolutely no dialogue at all, we find out that humans are gone. Empty houses, empty broken boats. Nothing. Animals, however, have survived. And one of them is a little charcoal cat with big bright gold eyes. The cat is suddenly startled by animals all running away in herds and it realizes something terrifying is coming. The cat runs into a friendly golden retriever who takes a shine to it, but the cat wants nothing to do with the dog. Especially since the dog appears to have other canine friends. The cat heads to its home, a beautiful place with cat statues all over the yard and a just finished sketch of it lies on a desk upstairs with no artist in sight. As the cat looks out the window, it finds the water is rising. Fast. It finds it must leave the house and climb up to the top of a gigantic stone cat structure much like climbing to the top of a large building. And yet the water continues to rise.

Much to the cat’s luck, a sailboat appears on the horizon. The cat struggles to swim to it and when it gets on board, it finds out it is inhabited…by a capybara. Turns out the capybara is kind as well as bright and resourceful. As they sail for awhile the golden retriever catches up to them as well as a meerkat obsessed with shiny things. The four begin to work together as they take a harrowing aquatic journey in search of food and dry land.