Category Archives: Entertainment

Thursday Dust in the Wind

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Much work these days. Lots going on. Will post again on January 19. The more holidays the better, and I’ll bet — considering the inclinations of the incoming administration — Juneteenth will be a federal holiday before long. Or at least the closest Monday.

Ice crystals on our deck. They didn’t last long. Later came snow, which mostly melted.
To follow Sink the Bismarck!, a taut 1960 British war movie, for contrast I recently watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019), an engaging French love story set just before the Revolution. I haven’t seen many movies as painterly Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

A few weeks ago, before the violent national scrum, we started watching the short series The People vs. OJ Simpson. Top-quality historical fiction. Doesn’t feel historic, just like a good while ago. An increasingly long time ago, more in feeling than strict chronology. When the trial was actually happening, I remember thinking, do I have to hear about that again? Enough time has now passed for the subject to be of some interest.

That said, do I ever feel nostalgic for the ’90s? No. The underappreciated ’70s is more my flavor, and for the exact same uninteresting reason as most people. Nostalgia for one’s youth.

I didn’t know until I read about it a little while ago, but The Great Gatsby is in the public domain now. I could publish 100 words from that book, in order, or maybe reverse order, until I’d gone through the entire book, with the time needed to put the text in my only real cost. I don’t think I’ll do that, but it’s nice to know I could.

The immortal Ella.

A much later version. Recent, in fact, by the highly talented Hot Sardines.

The Hot Sardines’ singing is top notch, but I’m really taken with the animation in the video.

Another recent version by the Speakeasy Three.

Fine harmonies. The video is so stylized that it approaches parody, but doesn’t quite get there. Somehow, that works. Also, am I right in thinking there are celebrity lookalikes in this video? Recent celebrities, not swing-era ones. I don’t care enough about celebrities to find out, but I get that sense.

A site that visit every few months: The Comics Curmudgeon. On Jan 13, he mocks the comic strip Crock, which isn’t hard, but it is hard to be funny while doing it. The writer of the site, Joshua Fruhlinger, pulls it off.

One the characters says to another one, “I can’t wait to meet the blind date you got me. When can I call her?”

“Anytime but the weekends,” the other character says. “That’s the busiest time for blacksmiths.”

Fruhlinger comments: “I was going to go all in on ‘Why is it funny that this woman is a blacksmith,’ but we all know the reason why it’s supposed to be funny: blacksmithery is not a traditional feminine job so can you even imagine going on a date with a woman who would engage in it? What would you even call her? A blacksmithrix? Haw haw! Anyway, that’s stupid, so instead I’m going to focus on something actually puzzling: the assertion that weekends are ‘the busiest time for blacksmiths.’ I guess that’s when most Renn Faires are? Are we dealing with a universe where blacksmiths are a vital part of the everyday economy, making horseshoes and tools and such, or are we in a more modern environment where mass manufactured goods are omnipresent and easy to get, and the only people who go to blacksmiths are weirdos who are obsessed with swords? This is the Crock worldbuilding background that I have a million times more in interest in than I do in Poulet’s love life.”

I’ve started reading American Slavery, American Freedom, subtitled “The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” by Edmund S. Morgan (1975). I’m not far along, but enough to know he’s a good writer. The first chapter is unexpectedly about of Sir Francis Drake in Panama in 1572, but I think I can see where he seems to be going with the narrative, which will get to colonial Virginia before long.

Sink the Bismarck!

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I was surprised recently to find Sink the Bismarck! on YouTube, gratis, no commercials even. Did the copyright lapse? So over the last few days I’ve been watching it as time allows. I think I rented it on VHS in Japan nearly 30 years ago, but I’m not sure; might have seen it later.

Considering that the ships are obviously models, this is a movie that’s improved — to modern eyes, used to better effects — by being on a small screen. Much of the story involves talking, and occasionally the exposition pops through (especially at the beginning), but on the whole it’s fast-moving and, in its way, suspenseful. The main actors all do well, especially the leads.

Also, it’s reasonably accurate in terms of its history, though since the movie came out in 1960, it wasn’t up to speed on the fact that British intelligence had cracked German codes, or that the men on the Bismarck scuttled her at the very end. No matter, it’s been a good diversion from the pace of work and the woes of the nation.

Debris Under the Tree

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Another Christmas, come and gone. We opened presents in the morning that day, as usual.

Not as usual, we had a family Zoom in the afternoon. My brothers, and my nephews and their expanding families, Lilly, and Yuriko and Ann and I were all linked. A geographic diversity: Texas, New York, Washington state and Illinois. We had an enjoyable time, even if the connection was wonky occasionally.

Later in the day, our Christmas movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original version, of course. I hadn’t seen it in at least 30 years, but it was as good as I remember. The movie also inspired me to look up its source story, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, originally published in Astounding in 1940. No doubt a copy of that edition is somewhere in the house in San Antonio, among my father’s sizable collection of SF. I’d never read the story before, so I found in on line. I did know about its unnerving, surprise ending, however. I heard about it from a college friend years ago.

Another New Year’s Day has gone as well, featuring ice precipitation on top of an inch of two or snow that had fallen a few days earlier. Not enough to rise to the level of an ice storm, but enough to keep us within our walls, occasionally listening to the tap-tap-tap of ice hitting the ground or roof, but mostly paying attention to electronic entertainment, or lost in a book or two, for me including American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Jon Meacham, 2009) that I put down this summer and which I’m finishing now, about half way through. Big things ahead: Old Hickory is going to destroy the Second Bank of the United States and go up against nullification, and win, along with a second term. He’s already set the Trail of Tears in motion.

Another One Bites the Dust

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Busy day, including an early evening errand that took me past a nearby Family Video location. What’s that? Looks dark in there. Also, there’s a fence around the building and its parking lot. With some kind of demolition equipment parked inside the fence.

I’d say that the store has bitten the dust. I hadn’t noticed, so it must have been a fairly recent occurrence. As indeed it was, along with some hundreds of other locations. But not that recent: about two months ago, according to the Journal & Topics. Guess I haven’t been paying attention.

“The entertainment business has suffered during COVID-19 and that trickled down to movie rentals, as Vale told the Journal & Topics,” the article notes. Vale was a manager with the chain.

“ ‘There aren’t any new releases right now and that plays a big role in our rentals,’ said Vale.”

New releases. That’s the thing about Family Video that I never quite took a cotton to, its walls of new releases. Three or four or a half dozen DVDs/Blu-rays each of the latest movie confection, only occasionally worth renting. In the center aisles were older titles, but even that selection was meager for someone with sometimes-eccentric tastes.

Sure, give the public what they want, etc. Who would ever thought that the Hollywood torrent would dwindle to a trickle? But as soon as the various casts and crews get their shots, the entertainment factories will be humming along again, if only to feed the on-demand beast. Too late to save the northwest suburban Family Video, though.

Verschiedene Artikel (Donnerstag)

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Still above freezing most of the time, and no snow or ice. My kind of winter. But rain is slated for the weekend, devolving into snow. Maybe. That might interfere with getting a Christmas tree.

Not long ago I visited a high floor of an office building here in the northwest suburbs, something I don’t do to much these days. The view included the roof of a major retail location.Not very green, that roof. Besides whatever sustainability might be achieved, a roof that includes plants is more interesting to look at. Such as can be seen here and here. I don’t get to visit green roofs that often — ones such as the Chicago City Hall are inaccessible — but I did see one in suburban Toronto during my green press tour in that metro area. Didn’t take any pics.

Just behind the retailer is the office building’s nigh-empty parking lot.

Parking takes up a lot of space, no doubt about it. This study only focuses on a few cities, however, not the endless suburbs.

I set the background of my laptop to change every minute, and to keep things interesting, and I change the collection of images the computer uses every few days, if I remember to. Yesterday I directed the computer to use the images in the file July 5, 2019, which was our first day in Pittsburgh last year.

This popped up as part of the cycle. I’d forgotten I’d taken it.
That was in the Andy Warhol Museum.

Ann and I are still watching Star Trek roughly once a week. I’d say she’s seen about half of the original series. The most recent ones were the “Immunity Syndrome” and “A Private Little War,” both of which hold up reasonably well, though in strict storytelling terms, “Immunity” is better, since the concept is simple and the execution fairly taut. It’s the crew of the Enterprise vs. a whopping big space amoeba.

Best of all, it doesn’t turn out that the whopping big space amoeba is actually a sophisticated intelligence that the heroes eventually learn to communicate with and peacefully coexist with, a la Roddenberry.

That can be an OK track for a story — such as in “Devil in the Dark” — but for sheer space pulp drama, what you want is a mindless menace that needs to be destroyed by the last act. Star Trek did an even better job of that in “The Doomsday Machine,” in which the Enterprise fights a massive bugle corn snack that shoots death rays.

At first I thought “A Private Little War” was the (stupid) episode with the Yangs and the Cohms, in which Capt. Kirk recites the Pledge of Allegiance, among other looniness. No, that’s “The Omega Glory,” which we haven’t gotten to.

“War” is a jerry-built metaphor for the Vietnam War, involving as it does war among alien rustics, a Klingon plot to arm the natives, Kirk’s “balance of power” response, etc. Also, there was a raven-haired femme fatale with a bare midriff that got the attention of the 13-year-old I once was, and a creature that looked like a man in an albino gorilla suit, because that’s what it surely was. Spock bled green from a gunshot wound and Nurse Chappell got to slap him around. Why didn’t we ever see more of Dr. M’Benga? (Seems he was in another episode briefly.) Here’s why: actors cost money, as much as showrunners might wish otherwise.

One more item for today. Not long ago we got takeout at Asian Noodle House, a wonderful storefront that seems to be surviving on the takeout trade. We go there every other month or so. Fortune cookies come with each order, one per entre. Each wrapped in its own little plastic bag.

Today we got three little bags. One of them had two cookies tightly packed within. Is that like getting a double yolk? Does it mean extra good fortune or extra bad chi? Maybe one cookie is ying, the other yang.

The Case of the Missing Article

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Got an email recently purporting to be from a financial services company that I do business with, X. It includes the X logo and small-letter verbiage directing me to visit the X web site in the normal way. Which I expect a lot of people don’t do, but rather click the message’s link.

The big lettering that forms the main message, with a highly visible link in the second sentence, says as follows, sic:

Thank you for your X account information. This message confirms your X account requires update.

To protect and keep your X account up to date, Please UPDATE YOUR X ACCOUNT immediately.

Ah, the want of an indefinite article gives the game away, if you didn’t know that companies like X don’t send messages like this anyway. As in, “your X account requires [an] update.” There’s also the matter of the errant capital letter in “Please.”

A missing article made me think of this scene. Remarkably enough, since I haven’t seen that movie since it was new in 1976. The scene was easy enough to find. I Googled “Murder by Death ar” (as in the first two letters of articles) and one of the auto-suggestions was “Murder by Death use your articles.”

007 Sighting

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A blustery, cold, sometimes rainy weekend just passed. A classic northern November, in other words, and one of a number of reasons to stay home. Most of the time.

Spotted this truck on the street not long ago. A advertising tie-in between DHL and the Bond franchise that I didn’t know about before.
Apparently DHL has paid big bucks to be associated with the latest Bond movie, No Time to Die, whose release has been delayed to April, at the earliest, because now is No Time to Go To the Movies.

I’m not sure I’d want James Bond anywhere near my delivery vehicles. Let’s just say he has a long history of wrecking whatever mode of transit he finds himself in, or wrecking the vehicles of the bad guys chasing him, or both.

Thursday Dross

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After a cold second half of October, temps have trended warmer in early November. So much so that I had lunch on our deck today, and expect to tomorrow as well. It can’t last. But it’s nice to sit out there and forget about the national hubbub — which I can’t do during my working hours, as paying attention to it as part of my job.

Here’s an article about the House of Tomorrow at Indiana Dunes NP, which we saw last month. A good short read, except for one thing: no date on it, which is a pet peeve of mine. It’s obviously not that old, since it refers to the recent designation of the national park, but you shouldn’t have to rely on internal evidence to date an article.

When I posted about Pounds Hollow Recreation Area a while ago, I forgot to include the short falling leaves video. Here it is.

We’re past peak here in northern Illinois, but some of the trees are still ablaze, and some still wilted yellow-green. Sitting out on the deck was pleasant enough today, except when a leaf-blower kicked to life noisily not far away. Will future generations ponder that leaf blowers were ever a thing? Hope so. As far as leaves go, let ’em stay where they fall on your lawn. They’re nutrition for next year’s grass.

In Shawneetown, Illinois, the new town that is, you can see a memorial erected about 10 years ago. The wave of such memorials, I believe, will continue into the 21st century.
Shawneetown Illinois black family memorialIt’s a tribute to the original group of black families who moved from Shawneetown on the river to Shawneetown three miles inland, where they would start life anew, after the devastation caused by the 1937 flood.

It includes a map of the nearby neighborhood and all the names of the black residents who lived there. The other side has a more general black history of Shawneetown, noting that a segregation-era school stood on the site of the memorial, presumably for the black neighborhood’s children, but it doesn’t say that. The school closed in the 1950s.

Shawneetown Illinois black family memorialAll a little wordy, but not as prolix as the Norwegian Settlers State Memorial.

Near the memorial is a rectangular gazebo. Without corners. Or is it really a gazebo?
Shawneetown ILWhen Ann and I saw the abandoned Texaco station in Old Shawneetown, I asked her if she’d ever heard the Texaco jingle. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but the point of jungles is to bury themselves deep, so it’s coded in my synapses somewhere.

Most Americans my age would know what I meant, but considering that Men Who Wear Texaco Stars are long gone, I didn’t expect her to know. She didn’t.

Later, I showed it to her on YouTube, where it’s a standalone video (and also the grist for truly stupid local TV news).

That made me a little curious myself. When did that jingle first air? As it turns out, 1962, as a snappier tune compared with, for example, what the singing Men With Texaco Stars did for Milton Berle 10 years earlier. The jingle was also incorporated into later Texaco songs, such as this one sung by Ethel Merman.

As jingles go, “You Can Trust Your Car” is memorable indeed. The story of the copywriter (and composer) who came up with it, one Roy Eaton, is even more remarkable. Aside from being a talented concert pianist, he was the first black creative at a major ad agency, joining Young & Rubicam in 1955 and later working for many years at Benton & Bowles, before founding his own company. He’s still alive at 90.

So memorable that it was the basis for an anachronism in a 1977 episode of M*A*S*H (see the trivia section at the bottom of the page).

The Ricki Lee Jones song “Last Chance Texaco” (1979) includes an example of a reference — to the jingle — that was perfectly understandable when the work was new, and perfectly mystifying to later generations.

Your last chance
To trust the man with the star
You’ve found the last chance Texaco

One more Texaco fact: John W. “Bet A Million” Gates was an early investor in the ancestor company of Texaco.

SIU and Buckminster Fuller Too

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On October 10, Ann and I tooled around the Southern Illinois University campus a bit, agreeing that it isn’t the aesthetic experience that some college campuses are. Visitor parking proved hard to find, so we didn’t take a walk on campus.

We did spot the Wham Building on Wham Drive. Ann suggested that the donors were the British pop duo, now about 35 years passed their heyday. Though as a matter of style, it ought to be the Wham! Building. Their connection to SIU? None that we knew, but never mind. Maybe they decided they had enough money to fund a building on a college campus, and they threw a dart at a map to determine where it would be.

Not long after that conversation, we heard a local station playing “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.” Coincidence or synchronicity? Coincidence, I’d say.

Not far from campus is a residential neighborhood with a fair amount of student housing, marked by some genteel seediness. Parking was easy around there, so we stopped for a short walk down a residential street.

Some of the residences stood out more than others. Some for their décor. It might be hard to see in the picture, but there’s a neon sign in the window of this Halloween-ready house: PALM READER.Carbondale palm readerOther properties stand out for more fundamental reasons. The R. Buckminster Fuller and Anne Hewlett Dome Home is at the intersection of two small streets in an otherwise unremarkable location in the neighborhood.fuller dome carbondale
fuller dome carbondale
The dome is fenced off and closed. But someone used to live there. Bucky himself, as it happens. A sign on the fence says: “Buckminster Fuller is considered one of the leading visionaries of the 20th century. He patented the geodesic dome in 1954 and it is his most enduring legacy. In April 1960 he assembled this dome home (The Fuller Dome) and lived in it with his wife Anne until 1971.”

How long had it been since I’d thought about Buckminster Fuller? Before finding out about the dome, that is, which was a few days before our visit to Carbondale. A long time, that’s how long. I suspect much of the world can say the same. Whatever Fuller’s contributions to civilization, and I’ll be the first to say geodesic domes are pretty cool, he’s headed for obscurity as surely as Ernie Pyle.

Reading about Fuller made me think of Lucy Kulik, a sixth-grade teacher of mine. She taught us math and I believe also led our participation in Man: A Course of Study almost 50 years ago. I hadn’t thought about her in a long time, either, and checked to see whether she was still among the living. Possible, but not likely, though it turned out she died only last year at 97, and now has a stone at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery next to her husband, an Air Force lieutenant colonel — something I didn’t know about her.

RIP, Mrs. Kulik. The details have faded after a half century, but I remember you were a good teacher.

In class one day Mrs. Kulik mentioned Buckminster Fuller as the fellow who invented a dome made of triangles and who wanted the world to give up the words “sunrise” and “sunset.” I’d never heard of him at the time, or if I had, I’d forgotten.

Fuller suggested the words sunsight and sunclipse to replace sunrise and sunset, arguing that the common words reflect an incorrect understanding of the way the Earth and the Sun move. You could argue that they do, of course, and the words he suggests are perfectly fine, but to object to sunrise and sunset on those grounds itself reflects an excess of literalism in understanding language. That might be a reason his suggestions didn’t catch on.

His domes might be cool — you can’t stand in front of the Expo ’76 Fuller dome in Montreal and not feel a little awe — but I also have to add that a few of them go a long way. In the case of Carbondale, one is probably enough.

Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park, Carbondale

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During the early planning for our recent trip, I didn’t give Carbondale, Illinois, much thought as a possible destination, but then Ann mentioned a park there she’d heard about from a friend who used to live in the area. After a little further investigation, I worked Carbondale, especially the park, into our plans.

“A vocal fan of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, Jeremy ‘Boo’ Rochman was tragically killed in a car accident at the young age of 19,” Atlas Obscura says. “To honor his memory, his father bought a parcel of land across the street from their home in order to build a memorial park. His late son’s passion was for the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, so his father decided to turn the park into a fantasy land that his son would have been proud of.”

Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park is on the outskirts of Carbondale. When you arrive, various painted concrete creatures greet you.Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park
Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park

Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park

Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park

Including an enormous dragon, good for climbing, if you’re agile enough.Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park
The “castle” — the whole place is sometimes called Castle Park or Boo Castle Park — is a wood and stone structure with an elaborate set of passageways and stairs for kids to climb around.
Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park
With plenty of figures of its own.
Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park
Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park
Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park
The park wasn’t overrun with people, but we did notice a birthday party off in one corner.Jeremy Rochman Memorial ParkIf ever there were a good place for a children’s birthday, this is it.