Category Archives: Entertainment

Half-Assed Journey to Babel

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Our most recent Star Trek episode was “Journey to Babel,” in which the Enterprise ferries a number of Federation delegates to a meeting, with murder and other danger in the offing. How long had it been since I’d seen that particular episode? More than 40 years? Probably. In this case, it was worse than I remembered.

Sure, we’re talking about a weekly TV show slapped together and broadcast without a care about anything beyond a rerun or two. The wonder is that some of them are as good as they are.

Still, I feel like grousing. Sometimes you should run with that feeling.

How is it that Kirk didn’t know his first officer’s father was an important figure in the Vulcan government? What kind of personnel records does Starfleet keep?

There’s no kind of surveillance on the Enterprise. During this episode at least. Do I remember right that the ship’s computer can, on request, find the location of a specific person on the ship? So how come there’s no record of a murder committed in one of the corridors?

How could the suicide mission ship be fooled so easily by the Enterprise playing possum? Also: a suicide mission. Man, that’s Al-Qaeda-level devotion to a cause that really boils down to facilitating smuggling and arms dealing. Well, that’s alien psychology for you.

Why wasn’t the blue alien with faux antennae who attacked Kirk in shackles when they brought him to the bridge? Aside from his known murderous tendencies, as a rule aliens on the bridge have an unfortunate habit of taking over the ship or otherwise causing trouble.

What was the point of his attacking Kirk anyway? We got to see Kirk going mano-a-mano against a knife-carrying blue alien — guess that was the point.

In sick bay, Spock had something important to communicate to the captain, but McCoy rudely knocks him out instead of, you know, giving him a communicator —

Why didn’t Sarak seek treatment on Vulcan in the first place? Turns out it wasn’t a surprise medical condition (except to his wife) so he left on an important diplomatic mission knowing full well he could fall deathly ill in a place where treatment was no certain thing — where’s the logic in that?

When Spock has his dramatic confrontation with his mother, he goes on at length about needing to be in command right now, this very moment, something he’s manifestly not doing. Why wasn’t he on the bridge?

What’s the deal with Vulcan-human mating anyway? How could that possibly work, even within the not-very-consistent confines of the show?

I wanted to see more quarreling among the delegates. Kirk made a big deal about how they were at each other’s throats, but mostly they seemed pretty mellow at that cocktail party. The belligerent pig-men mixing it up with the gold-skinned dwarfs would have been a thing to see.

Thursday Bits

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I’ve heard of other large models of the Solar System, but not about the one in Sweden. There’s one much closer at hand, whose Sun and inner planets are in Peoria, but I’ve never gotten around to seeing it.

A recommended YouTube series: Lessons from the Screenplay. Ann introduced me to it by suggesting one comparing the character arcs of Parasite and Sunset Boulevard, something I would never have thought of. The narrator, who introduces himself as Michael, makes a novel and compelling case for the comparison.

I watched a couple more over the last few days, one about The Shinning — which I haven’t seen in about 30 years, and probably should again, same as Sunset Boulevard — and another about No Country for Old Men. Both videos were thoughtful and interesting, and not too long, which all I ask from YouTube movie criticism.

Looks like SOB lowlifes have co-opted a perfectly good nonsense word that’s been around for years and years. That’s the vagaries of language for you.

It’s time. I’m a little surprised it’s going to happen so soon, but not sorry to see it go. With any luck, the striking Belle Époque pedestal will be repurposed, rather than torn down.

Thursday Slumgullion

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A while ago, I sent a message in a professional capacity to one of Ikea’s subsidiaries. It bounced back, with this message as a reply.

Det gick inte att leverera till följande mottagare eller grupper:
centrespr@ingka.com

Det gick inte att hitta den angivna e-postadressen. Kontrollera mottagarens e-postadress och skicka sedan meddelandet igen. Kontakta e-postadministratören om problemet kvarstår.

Recent movies seen here at home, as if they would be anywhere else, include The Stranger, an Orson Welles noir that I’d never gotten around to seeing; I’ll go along with Variety’s contemporary assessment, quoted in Wiki — it’s a “socko melodrama” — and it made me sorry Welles didn’t get to make that many pictures. Chicago, which was better on the second viewing; the first was when it was fairly new. For a Few Dollars More, which was as good as I remembered it. The pointlessly rejiggered version of Star Wars, which Ann hadn’t seen any version of. The Hundred-Foot Journey, a fair-to-middling foodie movie.

Star Trek watching continues: “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” “The Naked Time,” “Space Seed,” and — because I thought Ann should see some of the lesser lights of the original series, “The Way to Eden,” which is the episode that features space hippies. She continues to get a kick out of the series, especially the costumes, and double especially the space-hippie garb. Made me smile, too.

“The Way to Eden” was bad enough, but not quite as bad as I remember. With a few tweaks, such as making the hippies at least slightly sympathetic, it could have been a much better episode.

Speaking of TV, I had an encounter with the spanking-new HBO Max today. As in, something I wanted to watch on a service I already pay for suddenly disappeared into this latest scheme to tunnel into my wallet. FO, HBO Max. There’s nothing on TV I can’t live without. Nothing.

Last Saturday, which was part sunny and later rainy, I did a lot. A lot of the kind of things you do to keep life running more-or-less on track. I record it here because, if in some future time when the memory of the day has faded, I want to marvel — assuming I survive middle age to marvel — at how productive I was that May day during the pandemic. The rest of the family was likewise busy that day, going all Marie Kondo on the upstairs bedrooms, from which much debris has been removed. Call it spring cleaning.

Besides taking my meals and watching an episode of the remarkably good (if basic) Greatest Events of WWII, I mowed part of our lawn, repaired a windchime, did some of the laundry, cleaned the inside of my car, went to the bank, post office, and drug store (all drive through), walked the dog, helped Ann remove a lot of items from a high shelf in her room, did a first run-through of my taxes, helped Lilly fill out her taxes, vacuumed the living room, swept two rooms, fixed a leaky pipe under the kitchen sink, and washed a lot of dishes. I ended the day reading a bit of Moby-Dick, which I’m slowly working my way through.

Thursday and Everything’s Tickety-Boo

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Well, not really. We’re well enough here in our little spot, but the world’s never all tickety-boo. I only bring it up because I learned that word a few weeks ago. How did I get to be my advanced age without knowing it? Sure, I’m not British, but that’s never stopped me from learning some Briticisms.

Besides, it isn’t exactly new.

At least I know it now. Looking into the word, origin uncertain, and the song (by Johnny Mercer and Saul Chaplin), naturally led me to read a bit about Danny Kaye. Per Wiki: “Kaye was cremated and his ashes were interred in the foundation of a bench in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. His grave is adorned with a bench that contains friezes of a baseball and bat, an aircraft, a piano, a flower pot, musical notes, and a chef’s toque.”

Those reflect his talents. A multi-talented fellow, he was. Wait, there’s a town called Valhalla in New York? Guess so. Hope there’s a really boss mead hall in town. These are a few other clips of the talented Mr. Kaye.

Tickety-boo or not, it’s Thursday, which has the advantage of having all of Friday and Saturday to look forward to. I wondered earlier today: how many songs have Thursday in the title? I couldn’t think of any, but that’s just me. There are some.

Interesting selection, including some bugs in bright — make that psychedelic — amber.

The list also includes songs by a band called Thursday. Didn’t know them. “A significant player in the early 21st century’s post-hardcore scene, Thursday formed in 1997 in New Brunswick, New Jersey,” Allmusic says. “Thursday’s frequent gigging and furious passion fueled a grassroots response, and by 2002 the band was on the main stage of the Warped Tour and enjoying MTV support for the single ‘Understanding in a Car Crash.’ ”

Good for them. One more thing for this spring Thursday during the pandemic. We ordered pizza for pickup today, supporting a local chain. Been a good while since we had any. The scene at pickup.

With any luck, scenes of this sort will be fixed in amber before too long.

The Weekend of the Anthropomorphic Carrot

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Saturday: cold rain almost all day. Sunday: pleasantly sunny and warm. Had the whole variety of spring weather this weekend. We probably would have stayed home Saturday even in normal times, for reading, watching TV, cleaning up, etc.

No movies over the weekend, just TV shows: Rake, a new bilingual Japanese-English cop show called Giri/Haji (Duty/Shame), the first episode of Downton Abbey, which I’d never gotten around to seeing before, the Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror” and because I told Ann she should see one episode of Lost in Space, “The Great Vegetable Rebellion.” Really, how could you do any better — and I mean worse — than that?

I think I last saw part of that episode on TV in a motel room more than 20 years ago, but its fame (notoriety) proceeds it anyway. I’d forgotten that Stanley Adams played the man-like carrot. He of course played Cyrano Jones in “The Trouble With Tribbles.” And how many actors appeared on both Lost in Space and Star Trek? The answer is, a few. I’m hardly the first person to wonder.

Ann was much amused by the whole thing. She also pointed out how amazingly colorful the show was, including not just the vegetables, but the Robinsons’ clothes, something I’d never really noticed before. I told her that color TV was brand new at the time, and that a number of shows took advantage of it to go full psychedelia on the audience.

Though I’m not one of them, “The Great Vegetable Rebellion” has its defenders, such as this amusing essay published by MeTV.

“Packer [the scriptwriter of the episode] had ideas,” the article notes. “A planet populated by sentient plants is an idea. A birthday party for a robot is an idea. Vines crying out in pain like electronic piccolos is an idea. A hippie with purple hair and lettuce heart is an idea. A giant fern attacking Will and Judy is an idea. Dr. Smith transmutating into a massive celery stalk is an idea. An eight-foot, anthropomorphic carrot clutching at his breast and crying ‘Moisture! Moisture!’ before splashing water over his torso from a gas pump — that’s an idea!”

Battle of the Bands, 1979

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I see that Fiesta San Antonio is now scheduled for November this year. The first time in its century-plus-decades history it hasn’t been in April, but such is our time. Social distancing isn’t the norm for Fiesta.

Yuriko and I went to a few Fiesta events in 2000, parking toddler Lilly with her grandmother for a few hours, but I remember my high school Fiestas better. Each year from 1976 to ’79, I was with the Alamo Heights HS marching band in the Battle of the Bands at Alamo Stadium and then — with one exception — the Battle of the Flowers parade downtown a few days later.

It’s officially called the Battle of Flowers Association Band Festival, but no one I knew called it that. It was the Battle of the Bands. High school bands from all over the metro area came to compete.

The best a band could do was score a 1 in music and 1 in marching. For decades, Alamo Heights had always scored two 1s — until sometime in the early ’70s, before I was in high school.

Since then, including my freshman, sophomore and junior years, the band had gotten a 1 and a 2. Very good, but not top.

So we were keen to score two 1s in the 1979 Battle of the Bands. I don’t remember what music we played or what steps we marched. All I remember was the announcement afterward: two 1s! The band exploded with joy.

I can remember only one other exuberant moment like that for the band: early junior year when, after two years of losses, the AHHS football team actually won a game, narrowly. The Battle of the Bands moment was better, though — we’d won that for ourselves.

That was a day or two before the ’79 Battle of Flowers parade — April 26, 1979 — that didn’t happen because of a wanker with a gun. Fortunately for us, at our staging area the band wasn’t close to the shooting. I didn’t even hear any shots, though at one moment heard the roar of a suddenly panicked crowd at a distance.

Even that day had its lighter moments. The parade cancelled, we in the band got back on our buses to leave. Just before we left, a non-band senior got on as well, someone most of us knew. Our band director asked him to leave, and the boy, who was chemically enhanced, got the opposite of belligerent.

“All right, all right,” he said in an almost sing-song voice, smiling and giggling. “I’m getting off now. Don’t worry, I getting off now!” (I’m re-constructing those words; but that was the gist.) It was a little puzzling then, but looking back on it, I think he’d done more to prepare for the parade than drink a little beer or smoke a joint. At that dour moment, he was having a good trip.

Thursday Things

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I don’t drive around that much these days, but every time I do the signs of the times are out for me to see. Literal signs.
During a walk this week, a common area closed.
At least the walk around the small lake was open.

The latest movies in the stay-at-home-on-demand-movie-watching-extravaganza: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Ann’s suggestion) and Goldfinger (mine).

I’d never seen the former all the way through. I remember first seeing part of it in the common room of some cheap accommodations in Pusan. Watching it now, I’m willing to argue that there’s a touch — just a touch — of magical realism to the thing. I may be the only one to think that.

As for Goldfinger, I told Ann that if she watched only one Bond movie, that should be it.

Our latest Star Trek episode was “Amok Time,” the one in which Spock goes all funny in the groin because hyperrational Vulcans have to mate like salmon every seven years or something. Ann was much amused by the Vulcan costumes. Yes, I said, the costume designers must have had a grand old time working for Star Trek.

This can be found in our back yard. A retired inflatable yoga ball, you might call it, but I think of it as our model Neptune.model Neptune

Also, an image to play around with, applying the PhotoScape Bokeh function that I didn’t know I had until now.

The dog in a favorite position.
I believe she’s officially an old dog now, though I don’t know which office determines that. Anyway, no new tricks for her. She never was one for them even as a younger dog, though we didn’t try to train her all that hard.

Off on a Musical Tangent

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I go off on tangents fairly easily, but then again they’re about the only trips you can take these days. I had a good one yesterday evening, after work and after dinner and after our walk. A discussion some time ago about writing good headlines inspired me to think about a half-remembered list in The Book of Lists, which I pull off the shelf every few years. Specifically, Dr. Demento’s 10 Worst Song Titles of All Time.

I checked. It’s on p. 178. Back when I originally owned the book, in the late 1970s, you’d read such a list, be amused, and that was that. You might hear one of the songs on the list on Dr. Demento, if you listened to the show. I wasn’t a regular listener back then, though I did hear it sporadically — often enough to hear the likes of “Fish Heads,” but never anything on the list that I remember.

So I decided, true to form when on a tangent, to look more closely at some of those bad song titles, at least in Dr. Demento’s opinion (a list he created for The Book of Lists). I toyed with the idea of reposting all of the titles here, but most of the 10 titles are pretty long, and I didn’t feel like all that transcription, so I looked to see if they were posted elsewhere on line. As far as I can tell, there are other versions online, such as this one, that certainly features some bad song titles, but none of them are on ’70s list in The Book of Lists.

Or this list, which claims to be a ’90s version of the original, but has only one title in common with it: “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life.”

In our time, you can go to YouTube and see most if not all of the bad-title songs, such as “How Could You Believe Me…,” which I have to say hasn’t aged that well.

So I picked a few of the songs from the ’70s list and looked them up. Such as “Would You Rather Be a Colonel With An Eagle On Your Shoulder Or A Private With A Chicken On Your Knee?” That might count as a bad title, but it sure is amusing.

I was happy to find that it was a WWI song, recorded by Arthur Fields but also sung by Eddie Cantor. If I’m not mistaken, the “chicken” in the title had an innocent connotation in referring to flirtatious French girls, but also a less-innocent connotation for those in the know, referring to French prostitutes.

Next: “I’ve Got Those Wake Up 7:30, Wash Your Ears They’re Dirty, Eat Your Eggs and Oatmeal, Rush to School Blues,” a novelty song recorded by Jimmy Boyd in 1953.

Hm. Couldn’t place Boyd until I read he did the first recording of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” the year before. Ah, that singer. Popularized a song that will not die. Boyd had his heyday as a boy singer, but didn’t have much of a career later — or didn’t want one, hard to say. Anyway, here’s the song.

I decided to look up one more from the ’70s list, three out of 10 being enough for now: “A Woman is Only a Woman, But a Cigar is a Good Smoke.” That was a song title? In college (I think) I told someone that Freud had said that. Maybe I believed that myself. Thought it was a quip from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, though that’s a work I’ve never read nor even lightly grazed.

But no: it’s from Kipling. From a spot of late Victorian comic verse. In 1905, tunesmiths Harry Smith and Victor Herbert wrote a song called “A Good Cigar is a Smoke,” so perhaps Dr. Demento didn’t quite get the title right, though one of the lines in the song is, “For a woman is only a woman, my boy, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

You know, I ought to claim that Smith and Herbert actually just translated the song from German. Sigmund Freud wrote it and included it Jokes, which was published in 1905, same year as the English version of the song. Mere coincidence?

The tangent trip isn’t over yet. Just getting to the best part. After I listened to “A Good Cigar is a Smoke,” the YouTube algorithm suggested “Ashokan Farewell.” Pretty song. I hadn’t heard that in a good while, so I listened to it. Then the usually dense algorithm suggested this.

“Wayfaring Stranger” performed by Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra. A Norwegian band, of all things. Wow.

Thursday Tidbits, Including Doggerel

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Usually it’s bad to brag about your ignorance, but there are exceptions. I didn’t know this until recently and I’m not sorry. It’s an example of the ridiculousness I miss by not paying attention to social media memes. That is, by not being one of the callow youth who use social media as the thin straw through which they obtain all their information, a practice that surely stunts their brains.

Speaking of callow youth, when I was a child I thought the prestigious journalism award was the Pulit Surprise. When I typed that out, I laughed at the thought of it. Then again, it might be a surprise to some of the recipients.

As mentioned yesterday, we’re watching more movies than before. Toward the end of March, I discovered an bunch of pre-WWII Universal horror pics on demand, and we watched those first. In order: Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man and The Invisible Man. All first times for Ann, but not me, except I couldn’t remember whether I’d seen The Invisible Man, though I read the book years ago.

Ann said she enjoyed all of them, but The Invisible Man most. The main character wasn’t just a murderous psycho, he was also positively playful while committing less-harmful pranks, she noted, which humanized him a bit.

Since then, our viewing has been less thematic. Along with the aforementioned Groundhog Day, we’ve watched Intolerable Cruelty (a lesser Coen Bros. effort, but not bad), The Terminator, Space Jam and The Death of Stalin.

We also watched an oddity called John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch, which is as long as a short movie, but more like a TV special, which I believe it was. As a pseudo-kids show, it had many entertaining moments, and on the whole was slightly demented, like Mulaney’s comedy.

Some silly verse I wrote last year. My entire output of verse of any kind for the year. I’d forgotten about it until the other day.

Blake was a flake, and
Shelley ended up in a lake.
Byron was mad, bad and a cheater, while
Coleridge was a lotus-eater.
Wordsworth really liked his abbey, and
Keats’ odes were none too shabby.
In doggerel about poets Romantic,
Best not to wax too pedantic.

See also “The Krystal Cabinet.”

The Next Generation Watches Star Trek

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Woke up to a light blanket of snow this morning that slowly melted as the day wore on. Still cold out there. Sheltering in place is better when you can spend time outside comfortably, but the weather doesn’t care about merely human concerns.

Beginning in mid-March, at Ann’s request, we’ve been watching more TV shows and movies together than we usually do. As an old-timer, one of the shows I’ve suggested is the original Star Trek which, remarkably, she’s enjoying a lot, though only two episodes so far.

She likes them, she says, because they’re fun. Many more recent shows are too serious. So I think she’s taking them in the right spirit, which is to say, as entertainment. She also commented that the character dynamic between Kirk and Spock is particularly strong, which of course it is.

The two episodes we’ve watched so far are “Mirror, Mirror” and “Devil in the Dark” (last year sometime, we also watched “The City on the Edge of Forever” and “The Trouble With Tribbles”). They are all particular favorites of mine, so I recommended them. Who doesn’t like Spock with a beard?

As for “Devil in the Dark,” it has a special place in my recollections. It’s a solid episode, but that’s not it. In 1973, a San Antonio station started showing Star Trek in the afternoons, part of the cascade of reruns that kept the franchise alive, though no one would have put it that way then. I was in junior high, the perfect age to start watching Star Trek. The first episode the station aired, for whatever reason — such inattention to correct order would probably outrage fanboys these days — was “Devil in the Dark.”