My family is very normal.  And one of the normal things we did recently was visit the famous Alcatraz prison on Christmas Eve.  Because how else would you want to spend such a holy day?

Admittedly, we did have a good reason for doing this.  The guy to the right of my father is Pierre Odier, and he wrote a history book about the prison called The Rock.  The book has sold a lot of copies, and it sold even more when the Nic Cage movie came out under the same title. Presumably, people thought they were buying a book that was connected to the movie.  In fact, they were just fattening the bank account of my sister-in-law’s father.  Ha!  Suckers.

Pierre said that the marketing people thought the book would sell more if there was a naked woman on the cover.  I enthusiastically agreed, but he said he’d rather sell fewer copies than prostitute out his work that way.  I found this comment staggering.  As someone who has spent a great deal of recent time working on a screenplay that has no artistic ambition other than transforming itself into a pile of cash, the whole notion of “artistic integrity” is about as easy for me to grasp as a Jackson Pollack painting.

Still, it’s good to have incorruptible people around, because they can point my attention to details I had missed the first time I visited Alcatraz, such as a red fist that had been painted during the Indian occupation of the island in 1969:

Now that’s spirit of Christmas!

Later, in a bizarre fit of actual normalcy, we went home and prepared presents, such as putting together a gigantic kitchen for my niece:

And come the next day, the kitchen proved to be a big hit--but she also liked my present, a kid’s digital camera:

Which is a good thing, because the camera was sold out everywhere and I ended up bidding against crazy mothers on eBay for it.  I eventually won.  True story.  And the moral of the story? I rule.

Well, okay, there’s another moral.  Which is that after piles of presents and literally hours of unwrapping, I never saw my niece as happy as when her father was giving her impromptu flight lessons:

The best things in life are free--even if they make your arms tired.