Category Archives: Entertainment

Divers Content on a Freezing Cold Thursday

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Inspired by yesterday’s natterings, I stopped at the library and checked out River of Doubt (2006) by Candice Millard. Subtitled “Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey,” it’s about TR’s expedition into darkest Amazonia in 1913-14. As the book makes clear from the get-go, the journey nearly killed him. Even he-man action presidents have their limits, after all.

I didn’t know until today that Andrew Sachs died not long ago. There are many clips available of him in fine form as Manuel, such as this one or this one or this one.

I’ve had these glasses for a few years now. Bought them at a garage sale for (I think) a quarter each.

Coke Cans Make of Glass

They were clearly some kind of promotional item from Coca-cola but also McDonald’s, because three of them have McDonald’s arches on the bottom. The interesting thing to me is that they’re precisely the same size and shape as a 12 oz. soft drink can.

While writing about a hotel today, I encountered something in the hotel biz known as a “spiritual menu.” The concept isn’t exactly new, but I’d never heard of it. The following is from the Christian Post in 2008.

“A hotel in Nashville will be the first known in the nation to remove the standard Holy Bible from its rooms and replace it with a ‘spiritual menu’ that includes other religious books… Hotel Preston, a boutique owned by Oregon-based Provenance Hotels, will require guests to call room service to order their religious book of choice…

“The religious book list includes the Book of Mormon, the Qur’an, the Torah, the Tao Te Ching, The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, Bhagavad Gita (a Hindu text), books on Scientology, as well as the King James and New American Bible versions.” @#$%&! Scientology?

Hm. The Gideons can’t be too happy about being replaced. And the following lyric just doesn’t have the same ring: Rocky Raccoon/Checked into his room/Only to find a spiritual menu.

Captain Canuck & President Polk for Christmas

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My last Christmas present came via UPS today. Lilly ordered it not long ago, some time after I assured her that a little while after Christmas is close enough. It’s an attitude that makes the holidays less stressful; more people should consider it.

I’d suggested the item almost off-handedly. In our time, such whims are easily gratified online. It’s alarmingly easy. Here’s a closeup.

Captain Canuck!

It’s a Captain Canuck t-shirt, 100 percent cotton, made in Nicaragua. Accept no less.

Also for Christmas this year, but some time earlier, Jay got me a t-shirt with another larger-than-life figure, though from the annals of U.S. history.

James K. Polk, Napoleon of the Stump

None other than James K. Polk, Napoleon of the Stump. Also all cotton, but made in Haiti. On the back it says POLK 11.

Lull-Time Reading

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The lull time between Christmas and New Year’s is also a good time for reading, so I alternatively read Between the Woods and the Water, the second part of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s remarkable travels on foot in Europe in 1934, and American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (2013) by Deborah Solomon.

I picked up the latter at Half-Price Books not long ago after reading a bit of it in the store, and realizing that I knew next to nothing about Rockwell, besides what his paintings look like, and that he’s been the subject of revisionism lately. Maybe more than one cycle of scorn and then revision have come and gone, for all I know.

Solomon skillfully makes the case that Rockwell’s work is well worth thoughtful attention. “Each of his Post covers amounts to a one-frame story complete with a protagonist and a plot…” she writes. “In some ways, Rockwell’s paintings, which are grounded in the rendering of the particulars, demand to be ‘read’ like a story. The experience they offer is literary as much as visual, in the sense that he cared less about the sensual dazzle of oil paint than the construction of a seamless narrative. The public that saw and appreciated his paintings walked away from them thinking not about the dominance of cerulean blue or cadmium yellow but about the kid on the twenty-foot-high diving board up in the sky, terrified as he peers over the edge and realizes there is only one way down.”

As for Rockwell the man, he comes off as a decidedly odd duck. An enormously talented odd duck. While perhaps not the most colorful of personalities — which is often just a way of denoting a jerk, anyway — he’s worth reading about too. (Then again, his family might have had some thoughts on Rockwell as a jerk.)

“On most days, he felt lonesome and loveless,” notes Solomon. “His relationships with his parents, wives, and three sons were uneasy, sometimes to the point of estrangement. He eschewed organized activity. He declined to go to church. For decades he had a lucrative gig providing an annual painting for the Boy Scouts calendar, but he didn’t serve as a troop leader or have his own children join the Scouts.

“He was more than a bit obsessive. A finicky eater whose preferred dessert was vanilla ice cream, he once made headlines by decrying the culinary fashion for parsley. He wore his shoes too small. Phobic about dirt and germs, he cleaned his studio several times a day. He washed his brushes and even the surfaces of his paintings with Irovy soap.”

Naturally the book is well illustrated with his work, though only a fraction of (say) his Saturday Evening Post covers, since he did so many (323 from 1916 to 1963). That made me look up more images posted by the Rockwell museums, one in western Massachusetts, another in Vermont (seemingly more of a store for Rockwelliana), both places that he lived. Just more things to see if I ever make it back that way.

Lull-Time Entertainment

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We opened our presents early on the morning of December 22, since Yuriko and Ann were off to Japan later that day. Christmas itself passed quietly, though we did prepare a nice dinner. As for New Year’s Eve, Lilly went out with friends — as you should do at 19 — while I stayed home with the dog, a more fitting evening for middle age.

In between those moments, work slacked off, and I enjoyed the lull. Among other things, Lilly and I watched various TV shows when she was home, such as episodes of Frasier (it holds up well) and the newer and considerably different, but also very funny Louie. I also had her watch the “Turkeys Away” episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.

We saw an episode of Bob’s Burgers that involved a gingerbread house contest. Could those really exist? I asked myself later. Yes indeed. Just Google “gingerbread contest” or the like and you get many hits about various events, such as the 2016 National Gingerbread House Competition at the Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC, held just before Thanksgiving.

“It all began with a small group of gingerbread houses built by community members in 1992 as another way to celebrate the holiday season with no plans to continue the following year,” says the competition’s web site. “There was no possible way to know that more than two decades later The Omni Grove Park Inn National Gingerbread House Competition™ would be one of the nation’s most celebrated and competitive holiday events.”

We’ve tried to build those things before. We aren’t dedicated much to the task, so it usually ends up more like a gingerbread trailer park after a tornado.

On the evening before New Year’s Eve, Lilly and I went into the city to see The Christmas Schooner on stage at the Mercury Theater, a mid-sized Chicago venue on the North Side not affiliated with Orson Welles that I know of.

The play is a musical set in the 1880s, involving a German-immigrant ship captain in Manistique, Mich., who hits on the idea of shipping Christmas trees to Germans in Chicago. The trouble is, sailing on Lake Michigan in late November/early December is dangerous, especially in the days of small wooden vessels and no weather reports. Eventually the captain goes down with his ship but his widow and son figure out a way to keep the trade going. The story is a fictionalized account of the real Christmas tree trade between the UP and Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which claimed a number of ships and men, notably the Rouse Simmons, which went down with all hands in Lake Michigan in late 1912.

I’ve long been impressed by the level of talent involved in the Chicago theater, and The Christmas Schooner was no exception. The acting, singing and dancing — or rather, motions on the stage, not a lot of formal dancing — were all first rate. It reminded me that I need to see more live theater in the city, now that the logistics of parenthood isn’t quite as complicated as it used to be.

Xmas Oddities

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From the December 21, 1976 episode of Laverne & Shirley, “Christmas at the Booby Hatch” or “Oh Hear the Angels’ Voices.”

Featuring Michael McKean (Lenny) and David L. Lander (Squiggy). I don’t think I saw it 40 years ago — I only watched the show intermittently — but nothing every really goes away on the Internet.

Next, “Ríu Ríu Chíu,” as sung by the Monkees on their show on Christmas Day 1967.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t see that when originally shown either. But it was an inspired choice for the Prefab Four.

Finally, something not about Christmas: “Sailing to Philadelphia” (2000), sung by Mark Knopfler and James Taylor. It’s about Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason.

We are sailing to Philadelphia
A world away from the coaly Tyne
Sailing to Philadelphia
To draw the line
The Mason-Dixon Line

Just how many songs are there about the Mason-Dixon Line? One, anyway. I happened across it not long ago. A delightful discovery.

Now I Know Who Verne Troyer Is

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Ah, Wikipedia. Your charms are endless. I really should give you that $3. Today I was looking at the entry on Seaport Boston Hotel & World Trade Center, a property in the Seaport District of Boston. Among other things, it lists “notable stays,” which looked like a list on a standardized test question — which of these is not like the others?

President Barack Obama
President Bill Clinton
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
President George H. W. Bush
President George W. Bush
Vern Troyer

I didn’t know “Vern Troyer,” so naturally I looked him up. Must be this fellow, Verne Troyer. An actor of diminutive stature, he’s best known for playing Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies, which I’ve managed to avoid since the very first one nearly 20 years ago. And yet I’ve heard of Mini-Me. Some things just burrow their way into the wider culture.

The Full Griswold

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Someone’s already thought of the Full Griswold. Maybe I’d heard of it before, but I don’t know where. I thought of it this evening driving along, noting the proliferation of Christmas lights in this part of the suburbs. Some displays, of course, are more elaborate than others, but I haven’t seen any Full Griswolds just yet.

Once the concept of the Full Griswold comes to mind, one’s mind naturally turns to gradations of it. That’s what I think about, anyway. The Half Griswold, the Quarter Griswold, that sort of thing. I believe fractional Griswolds would have more charms than decimal Griswolds, such as 0.5 Griswolds or 0.1 Griswolds or the like. Too metric for such a nebulous concept.

Then again, the millihelen’s a metric sort of nebulous measurement, so what do I know?

I’d say that I’ve seen a fair number of Eighth Griswolds and a few Quarters and maybe something approaching a Half this year. But the season’s early. My own house decoration would be somewhere in the hundredths of Griswolds.

The odd thing is, I’ve never actually seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation all the way through, not when it was new (1989) and not since then. I’ve seen bits and pieces over the years. Probably because Chevy Chase is best taken in small doses (which can be quite funny).

Rasputin in America

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Early in the morning on Thanksgiving, I dreamed about a TV sitcom, Rasputin in America, that I either was watching or had created. Considering that it was my dream, both are fitting. The Mad Monk, updated to the 21st century but with the same wild eyes and hair (but no beard, oddly), runs afoul of the authorities in Putin’s Russia and comes to America to live with relatives. Namely, Valerie Bertinelli. Hilarity ensues.

It was only a dream, but no worse than a lot of sitcom conceits. Ms. Bertinelli was either Rasputin’s aunt or his niece. The thing about her is that while the actress might be in her 50s now, she’s also always in her teens, at least in the sitcom universe.

I was also reminded of Ivan the Terrible. Not the tsar or the Eisenstein movie, but a TV show I expect almost no one remembers. It came to mind after the dream. I hadn’t thought of it in many years, but I did see it.

The show was a summertime replacement that didn’t catch on. Here’s part of the Wiki description of it: “Ivan the Terrible is an American sitcom that aired on CBS for five episodes during 1976… Set in Moscow, the sitcom starred Lou Jacobi as a Russian hotel waiter named Ivan Petrovsky, and the day-to-day misadventures of Ivan’s family and their Cuban exchange student boarder, all of whom live in a cramped, one-bedroom apartment… Harvey Korman appeared as a Soviet bureaucrat in an uncredited cameo at the close of each episode.”

Thanksgiving ’16

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One of the good things about Thanksgiving is that, while the next day technically isn’t a holiday — and some years ago, I worked for a skinflint who insisted that people work that day — it really is part of the holiday. So for me the thing stretched from Wednesday afternoon to Sunday afternoon (I usually get back to work on Sunday evening, since things need to be filed Monday morning).

Our Thanksgiving meal was pretty much the same as it has been for the last few years, after Lilly took over the making of the major starches: mashed potatoes, stuffing, macaroni and cheese. The meat, ham. The bread, King’s Hawaiian. The drink, Martinelli’s sparkling cider. The dessert, pecan pie. Call it habit, call it tradition.

Time to read: a valuable commodity. Needing something light, I buzzed through Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (2015), a popular history by Sarah Vowell, which guarantees a humorous tone. Humorous, but with genuine historical information included and, something I particularly like, accounts of her visits to often obscure places and monuments associated with the subject. In this case, sites associated with Lafayette. In the case of the only other book of hers I’ve read, Assassination Vacation, sites associated with the deaths of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley.

There was also time over the holiday to watch a few movies, two on the small screen, one on the big screen. Radio Days, which I hadn’t seen since it was new. I appreciate the wonderful soundtrack a lot more now than I did then. Then there was Twelve O’Clock High, a first-rate war movie and Gregory Peck vehicle that I’d never seen before.

On Saturday, we all went to a nearby movie theater. Lilly and Ann wanted to see The Edge of Seventeen, a coming-of-age flick. Yuriko and I weren’t interested in that, so we saw Doctor Strange, a superhero movie about a character I knew virtually nothing about. Been a while since I’ve seen a comic-book inspired movie, especially in the theater. It was better than I expected. The story wasn’t great, but it managed to avoid outright stupidity, and the CGI was astonishingly good.

I also saw pieces of movies over the holiday. Days off or not, I see more pieces of movies now than whole ones, because there’s work to do, but also because I often don’t feeling like sitting through a whole movie, especially ones I’ve seen before, or already decided I don’t need to see.

Between Wednesday and today, I saw pieces of (no more than 30 minutes, no special order): Swing Shift, The Gay Divorcee, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Marie Antoinette (2006), The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Gone With the Wind, The Godfather, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Capote, Juno, and Gran Torino. The last two were the only ones I’d never seen before. I lucked into some justly famous scenes in a few cases, such as the escape from burning Atlanta in GWTW, and the particularly memorable Phoebe Cates scene in Fast Times.

CineFix

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I was able to eat lunch on my deck on yesterday, and sit there and read after I mowed the lawn. There’s some chance those things might not be possible again until some unexpectedly warm day in March. Or there could be a string of dry, warm days throughout this month. You never know with October.

CineFix does a nice job on YouTube of the usually vapid format “Best 10” lists about movies, certainly a lot better than the dimwitted WatchMojo, though it does use the annoying construction “Best X or Most Y of All Time.” That’s always bothered the nitpicking editor that I am. It should be the “Best X or Most Y So Far.”

Still, the production team behind CineFix, whoever they are, clearly knows a good deal about cinema, and they write well about it. The lists are organized not so much as a countdown, but as a collection of movies that share certain characteristics (more or less). For instance, Movie Villains includes outright evil characters, likable bad guys, repulsive villains, amoral killers and so on. Each of these subcategories is illustrated with a handful of movies, with one ultimately picked to illustrate the point best, in the opinion of CineFix.

Though the majority of the picks are English-language movies, as befitting the audience, CineFix isn’t afraid to praise movies with (gasp) subtitles, old movies, even silents, or black-and-white movies. I’ve never understood the prejudice against any of those kinds of movies. Quite a few of all them are included in the videos. As illustrated by Character Arcs or Rule-Breaking Movies or Most Beautiful Animation.

Best of all, I’ve come away from some of the lists wanting to watch some of the movies mentioned. Some I’ve heard of, a number I knew nothing about before. Not a bad use of YouTube at all.