Category Archives: Entertainment

Midwinter Stasis

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Here’s a picture of my back yard from early January.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnd here’s one from early February.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAIt’s been a snowy winter so far. Maybe a record, or near a record, but I’d have to look that up, and don’t feel like it.

When I heard last week that Pete Seeger died, it was a sad moment, but only a moment, since I didn’t actually know the man. I only know him from his recorded voice, films, two live appearances in Tennessee in the mid-80s, and what little I remember from reading, many years ago, the 1981 biography How Can I Keep from Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger, by David K. Dunaway. I’ve long had an unusual interest in Pete Seeger for someone my age.

Ninety-four is a good run. More than most of us get.

Send More Chuck Berry

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Time for another winter break. The better to admire the snow drifts and icy sidewalks and salty roads and bare trees. Back to posting around February 2 — when I’ll still be able to see those things out my window and under my feet.

I didn’t know until recently that Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” a fitting song for the pit of winter, was included on the Voyager Golden Record. But so it was. Dark is space, cold is the void.

This handy JPL web site tells us that Voyager I, for its part, is now 19+ billion km from the Earth, or more than 126 AU, with a round-trip light time from the Sun of more than 35 hours (so that would be about 17.5 light hours out — not even a light day). The thing’s been flying for over 36 years. Lesson: space is really big.

I did remember that “Johnny B. Goode” went with the Voyagers. Probably because of a SNL skit that mentioned it.

Kreeg Antwoord: You see, it all started on August 20th, 1977, when NASA put up a recording of the sounds of Earth on Voyager I. A two-hour long tape included natural sounds of animals, a French poem by Gaugliere, a passage from the Koran in Arabic, messages from President Carter, United Nations Secretary Kurt Waldheim, music — everything from classical to Chuck Berry.

Maxine Universe: Uh — and you’re saying that the — another civilization has found the tape?

Cocuwa: Yes. They’ve sent us a message that actually proves it. It may be just four simple words, but it is the FIRST positive proof that other intelligent beings inhabit the universe.

Maxine Universe: Uh — what are the four words, Cocuwa?

Cocuwa: The four words that came to us from outer space — the FOUR words that will appear on the cover of Time magazine next week — are [he holds up the magazine: Send More Chuck Berry].

Arcane Sunday Bits

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More snow on Saturday, which probably removes the risk that we might see patches of ground again before sometime in March. More shoveling last night, though this time Lilly helped. That was the price of borrowing the car today.

Tenchi Meisatsu (Samurai Astronomer) was an interesting movie. As I was watching it yesterday, it occurred to me that I knew little about the pre-Meiji Japanese calendar, except that it had been borrowed from the Chinese, and tossed out in favor of the Gregorian calendar. Tenchi Meisatsu (2012) is the story of Yasui Santetsu, the first official astronomer of the Tokugawa shogunate, and his dramatized efforts to reform the Japanese calendar in the 17th century.

As the reviewer at the imbd points out, that’s an unusual subject for a movie, yet it’s effective. As a Japan Times reviewer points out, “it’s probably the best film about calendar making you’ll ever see.” So far, that’s true. I don’t expect to see an action thriller about Pope Gregory any time soon, and poor old Sosigenes didn’t even rate a mention in the HBO series Rome that I recall, though he seems to have been a character in the 1963 movie Cleopatra.

Another arcane matter: It’s never occurred to me to have a favorite map projection, but I know enough to find this funny. I’m fond of most any map, except for grossly inaccurate tourist maps. That is, the sort that have a few vague lines of actual geography, but which mostly sport drawings of famous places or random fun-time activities. They aren’t real maps anyway.

These are some interesting maps. Especially this one.

Tuesday Recommendations

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Butter toffee from Guth’s End of the Trail Candy Shoppe in Waupun, Wis., a burg southwest of Fond du Lac. Every year a PR company I’ve long dealt with sends me a box for the holidays. It’s the only time I eat toffee. It’s insanely good. Only a few pieces will make you feel a little queasy, so rich is the confection. But you eat them anyway.

The Man of Bronze. It’s the first Doc Savage novel, and probably the only one I’ll ever read. With genre pulp, that’s usually enough. I have memory fragments of the mid-70s Doc Savage movie I didn’t see – not many people did – so I’m probably remembering the commercials. My friend Kevin recommended Doc Savage as an entertaining read of no consequence, and I’ll go along with that so far. You have to like a yarn that begins with the sentence, “There was death afoot in the darkness.”

Gravity. It’s a really engaging Man Against Nature story, or to be more exact, Woman Against Vacuum. With a one-damn-thing-after-another plot that keeps your attention. Also, worth the extra money to see in 3D, and not too many movies are. In fact, the depiction of space alone is worth the price of admission. A few of the space-science stretchers bothered me a little – I don’t think hopping from spacecraft to spacecraft is quite that straightforward – but not that much. I don’t want exact space science from a movie, just high verisimilitude, and this movie delivers.

Lizard Point Consulting’s geography quizzes. Every now and then, I make Lilly and Ann take some of the easy ones, such as U.S. states or capitals. It’s my opinion that every adult American citizen without cognitive impairment ought to know all of the states.

But I can’t brag about a lot of the other quizzes. It’s clear that my knowledge of, say, French regions is fairly meager, and sad to say I don’t do that well on Japanese prefectures, either – I tend to remember only the ones I’ve been to, plus a scattering of others (like Aomori, where Aomori apples come from, because it’s due south of Hokkaido).

Even quizzes that ought to be easy-ish, such as African nations, have their confusions. Without looking, which one is Swaziland, which one Lesotho? Which is Benin, which one Togo? Which one is Guinea, which one Guinea-Bissau? (That should be easy, Guinea’s bigger.) Similarly, it’s hard to keep track of which –stan is which in Asia, except for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kazakstan.

To Dully Go When No Man Has Gone Before

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More snow today. Seems like we’ve already gotten more snow this winter than last, even ahead of the Solstice. Which is just the Solstice, not the “beginning of winter.” Winter got out of the gate early this year.

File the following under (1) movies I’ve seen pieces of lately and (2) movies I saw long ago that I never need to see again in their entirety, which is actually most of them. I chanced across Star Trek: The Motion Picture the other day, about which I have vague recollections from early 1980. That is, I vaguely remember it being a yawn.

So I watched about 10 minutes of it. The Enterprise had encountered one of those sprawling, amorphous energy beings that it seemed to run into with some regularity, and the ship was boldly going into it. Or at least going in with some trepidation.

Two things struck me. First, the purpose of the scene seemed to be to show off the movie’s special effects, which probably did look swell on the big screen in 1980. But the scene went on and on, with the characters and the audience seeing light patterns go by, something like the “through the star gate” scene in 2001, only a lot slower.

Also, everyone on the bridge just stood there, wide-eyed. This is the bridge crew of the Enterprise we’re talking about. They’ve seen a lot of outer-space marvels and weird things in their time. So why weren’t they at their instruments, trying to figure out what the thing was?

Twilight Filler

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We’ve arrived in late January already, down in the bitter pit of winter a little early. Good thing it’ll warm up some later in the week — up toward, but not actually above, the freezing point of water. So the ice crystals I can see on my lawn will stick around a while.

I saw an episode of the original Twilight Zone the other day that I don’t ever remember seeing before, “The Mind and the Matter.” (Been a while since I’ve seen any episodes.) I looked it up later – the urge to do that is a minor curse of the Internet age – and found that it first aired the month before I was born, which was a mildly interesting thing to find out.

Mostly, though, the episode confirmed that every TV anthology is going to have filler. Except for a few moments, it was flat and uninspired, and the cheapness of the production – which often isn’t an issue in the series – was all too clear.

A generally forgotten comedian named Shelley Berman starred (still alive at 88, according to Wiki, and maybe sour about Bob Newhart’s success). He plays a miserable, misanthropic office drone who – with remarkable ease – learns to wish away the rest of the human population of his New York-like city. Almost immediately he’s bored, and decides to wish everyone else to be like him. Almost immediately after that, he discovers that a world of miserable misanthropes is no good either, so he puts everything back the way it was.

My question is, if suddenly everyone else is gone, why would you report to the office to do any work, which is what he does? (Because the show didn’t have money for another set.) And why wouldn’t you be concerned, even in passing, that the utilities would soon go out? Maybe the idea was that this fellow has no imagination whatsoever, but if so, I’m supposed to be sympathetic with that? Never mind. Filler isn’t worth thinking about too hard.

Cold Tuesday, Clutch, Dog ‘n’ Tree

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This from today’s Chicago Tribune: “The temperature [this morning] dipped below zero overnight at O’Hare International Airport, the earliest that has happened here since 1995… The temperature fell to one degree below zero around 12:55 a.m., according to the National Weather Service. That’s the earliest subzero readings here since a low of minus 4 on Dec. 9, 1995.”

Those are two-fisted Fahrenheit readings, not any namby-pamby Celsius, either. Remember last winter, when it didn’t seem to get cold at all, with little snow? Not this time. So far. More snow is supposed to fall in the wee hours tomorrow.

Open questions: Is Clutch Cargo enjoying some kind of vogue among hipsters? Otherwise why is the Music Box Theatre, a fine revival and arts house on the North Side of Chicago, screening five episodes of the show on Friday?

Yesterday, girls decorating the Christmas tree. Today, a snap of dog and tree.

Payton+Tree

She hasn’t shown much interest in the tree, unlike certain other trees during her walks. I figure dogs have their own holidays, which somehow have something to do with epic events in the history of smell.

Im Cabaret, Au Cabaret, To Cabaret

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What’s winter up North without a spot of snow? Last winter, that’s what. So far this winter — which seems to be under way, despite what people say about the solstice marking the beginning — has more snow than last. At least, we got some today.

The dog likes to run around in it.

On Saturday, Lilly and I watched Cabaret on DVD. That movie and I go back a long way. In fact, I was taken to see it with the rest of my family when it was new, though I was too young to understand much of it. Since then, I’ve seen it — four? five times? It’s one of my favorite musicals, though technically I suppose it isn’t a musical, but a drama with a sort of Greek Chorus. We had the soundtrack on LP and later I got it on CD.

Some time ago I saw Cabaret on the stage, and more recently read The Berlin Stories, which count as the source material, though it’s remarkable how different all the iterations are. For instance, I remember working my way through Christopher Isherwood’s stories and thinking, when is Sally Bowles going to show up? She does, in one story. In the greater scheme of the narrative, she’s one of a number of passing characters. Well drawn and with some the elements of the later Sally, but not the main character she’d ultimately become. If I were a completist, I’d look into the ’50s movie I Am a Camera, but I don’t have a particularly strong urge to do so.

Lilly had something of a 16-year-old girl reaction to the film. Which is only reasonable. She didn’t like the fact that by the end of the movie, Sally and Brian weren’t together any more. But they weren’t right for each other, I said. No matter, that isn’t the ending she wanted. She reported greater satisfaction from Catching Fire, which she saw on Saturday night with her friends and assorted millions of others. Wonder which entertainment will stick with her longer.

Showing Unwanted Guests the Door

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Gray and then more rain today, though not as intense as the storm of a few days ago. In fact I didn’t realize it was raining until I opened the back door to let the dog out late in the evening. Such is the isolation from the elements possible when you’re at your keyboard, the shades are closed, and various other electronic noisemakers are on in other parts of the house.

This is a good collection of sketches. I hadn’t seen some of them in many years, especially the Dirty Fork sketch. But I can’t take it seriously as a “Best of” Monty Python list if it leaves out the Spanish Inquisition and Spam.

Today’s main achievement was destroying a vexatious program that somehow or other installed itself recently on the machine I use to make my living — a program that apparently inserts ad hyperlinks on various words on various web sites I visit (including BTST). That by itself wasn’t so bad, but in the last day or two, the thing morphed into a monster, opening pages when I didn’t want them opened and (I figured out later) slowing the machine down intolerably.

Who, exactly, believes this kind of shenanigan is going to lead to higher sales of anything? Or is it simply an automated way of running up clickthrough totals? I don’t care, I’m just glad it’s gone.

Thursday Bits

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In the mid-afternoon, a call center employee called me, pitching an extended service plan for a major appliance I bought about a year ago. That doesn’t count as violating the do-not-call list, I suppose, because of some verbiage in the sales agreement. She was about 15 seconds into her pitch when I offered up a curt “no thanks” and hung up.

My reasoning about most service plans and extended warranties and so on is fairly simple. If it were to my benefit, the company wouldn’t be offering it. The odds are I’d pay them to do nothing, and they know it. I know it too.

I saw about 20 minutes of Geronimo the other day – the latest in a long line of movies I’ve seen bits and pieces of. It’s vintage 1962, so while the Indians were portrayed sympathetically, the title character wasn’t actually played by an Indian. I recognized him at once: Chuck Connors.

His blue eyes weren’t the only Hollywood stretchers in the movie. In 1886, when the story takes place, Geronimo was already in his late 50s. Connors was about 40, and a buff 40 at that. The Apache warrior’s wife was played by an Indian, however. An actress born in Bombay.

Never mind. One of the U.S. cavalry officers looked awfully familiar. The one who wanted to let Geronimo surrender, rather than blow him up with artillery, as his commander seemed eager to do. Who? I thought for a minute. Adam West. A pre-Batman Adam West.

Here’s a lesser-known Geronimo story: as an old man at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

I had reason to be out briefly at about 11 p.m. tonight, under a near-cold, clear sky. I had to look for him and he was there, off in the southeast, large and rising over the horizon: Orion. Harbinger of winter in these parts. So are the chill in the air and the increasingly bare trees, but it’s good to have celestial cues, too.