Category Archives: Entertainment

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.

The Final Roundup for Woody

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Looks like peak coloration is here. Or least a lot of yellows and reds and browns and even a spot of orange. The skies have been gray much of the weekend, so that adds to the contrast.

Alas, poor Woody. The dog did a little brain surgery on him this weekend. Not sure how he got on the floor. Maybe he was trying to escape while we weren’t watching. I seem to remember some movies along those lines. But the dog seems to have been watching.

I expect we’ll have to take Woody up to Boot Hill and lay him to rest. The dog does exactly the same thing to a number of rubber ducks she’s chewed on. Goes right for the head, she does.

On ira pendre notre linge sur le ligne Siegfried

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Another very warm, practically hot day. Sure, you can use the air conditioner in your car on days like today, but when I was driving along around 1 p.m., I kept the windows down and blasted myself with warm air. Pretty soon driving will be complicated by snow and ice, so I want to feel the warmth, even the sweaty heat, right now.

Ah, these warm days of September. Makes you think about the Sitzkrieg, doesn’t it? No? I might not have either, but not long ago I happened across the bilingual “On ira pendre notre linge sur le ligne Siegfried” (“I’m Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line”), a song I wasn’t familiar with. I like finding moment-specific songs — in this case, the Sitzkrieg — that have been lost to time. (Like this one and this one.)

This version was by French band leader Ray Ventura. Irish songwriter Jimmy Kennedy wrote it. His 1984 NYT obituary noted that “Mr. Kennedy’s songwriting career spanned 50 years. His familiar songs included ‘The Hokey-Cokey’ (which was popular as the Hokey-Pokey dance in the United States) ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ and ‘I’m Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line.’ ”

Odd to think that someone actually wrote “The Hokey-Pokey” and “Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” (Bears’?) though of course someone did. Someone named Jimmy. Songs like that just seem to emerge from the woodwork.

Bombs Away, Mr. Nixon

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Very warm today, a continuing summer that’s going to lead us to a sudden dropoff into cold. Maybe not literally, but it’s going to feel that way in hindsight. One day soon I’ll blink and the trees will be bare and the ground white. I’m wondering how the dog will react – up for romps in the snow, or whining at the prospect of going out in the cold? We’ll see.

Today, for obvious reasons, I was wondering about the quote: “The President of the United States can bomb anybody he likes.” Now where did that come from? One reason it’s so easy to get distracted on line is that you can ask Google such a question and see where it takes you. So I did.

One of the search results I got was this. I started reading it and it was a few seconds before I realized that I’d written it. The quote (though a little altered) is from the movie Nixon, said by Anthony Hopkins’ President Nixon. I don’t know if the president himself actually said such a thing, but I bet the scriptwriter thought it sounded like something he might have said, and it does.

What Kind of Passport Does Tinker Bell Carry?

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Lilly took this picture on Sunday, September 1. “Dog on Deck,” or “My Nose in Your Business.” (To give it a dual title like Bullwinkle episodes.)

Lately we’ve been throwing away, or donating, a fair number of unwanted items.  It’s astonishing how many there are around the house. Things have been turning up that we’d forgotten we had — or at least I’d forgotten. Yesterday the flow of debris included a girl’s purse with a Disney label on it. We might have bought it for Lilly at Disneyland in ’01 or Disneyworld in ’05, but it’s always possible we picked it up elsewhere. More recently it’s been with Ann’s things.

Anyway, I noticed something odd about it. It’s a Tinker Bell purse, and it says Tink America. Tink is holding a small U.S. flag, her dress imitates the Stars and Stripes, and the background pixie dust is red, white and blue. “Isn’t that strange?” I asked Lilly, pretty much rhetorically. “I mean, Tinker Bell usually isn’t associated with America, right? I think she’s a citizen of Never Land.” Or, come to think of it, the realm of fairies, but not the United States.

Then again, what about Never Land? I told Lilly I didn’t think it was claimed by any nation, but considering that Capt. Hook, the Lost Boys, et al. seem to be British, maybe Britain did claim sovereignty at one point. Could be that it was even harder to claim than Pitcairn Is., what with Never Land not quite being in the material world all the time. Still, I bet Capt. Cook visited at least once; he went everywhere.

On the other hand, perhaps American whalers visited too, so lost in the annals of U.S. exploration and commerce is a claim to Never Land. Could be that it was the subject of negotiation in the same treaty that fixed the border between Canada and the United States, as part of one of the lesser-known codicils added later. By this time, Lilly had expressed her usual mild bewilderment at my oddball train of thought.

The Leland & The Aurora

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This fine building stands at 7 S. Stolp Ave. on Stolp Island in Aurora. The 1920s was clearly an age of  fine buildings, and we’re fortunate to still have so many in Chicago and environs.

Built as the Leland Hotel in 1928, it’s now Fox Island Place Apartments. A helpful plaque on the exterior wall told me that the structure is on the National Register of Historic Places. “Designed by Anker Sveere Graven and Arthur Guy Mayger… it was the tallest building in Illinois outside of Chicago.”

That seems like reaching to find a distinction, but never mind. “In addition to being a first-class hotel, it became an important entertainment center,” the plaque continued. “In the 1930s it was the recording studio for some of the most influential blues musicians of the golden age of blues recording. This plaque honors this historic building, and these artists.”

And it lists some of them. I will too, just as the plaque does. With some links. As the plaque cannot. Not yet, anyway.

John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson – Harmonica Legend

Big Bill Broonzy – Guitar/Singer

Hudson “Tampa Red” Whittaker – The Guitar Wizard

Yank Rachell – Mandolin

“Robert Night Hawk” Robert Lee McCoy – Guitar

Bill “Jazz” Gillam – Harmonica

Big Joe Williams – Guitar

Washboard Sam – Washboard

Lester Melrose – Producer

Across the street from the former Leland is the former Aurora Hotel, now the North Island Apartments. It dates from 1917 and is also a nice bit of work.

Not, as far as I can tell, where bluesmen hung out. A simpler plaque on the building says that one H. Ziegler Dietz was the original architect; hope his commissions didn’t dry up because of the war. The redevelopment architect in 1998 was Carl R. Klimek & Associates.

The Dangers of Philosophy

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The DVD box for the movie The Clone Returns Home (2008) contains the following line, in red, and all capitals: WARNING: THIS MOVIE CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF PHILOSOPHY.

I understand the danger. I knew some guys back in college who OD’d on philosophy. It’s easy enough to do. You start out with Greeks, maybe even some pre-Socratics, then move on to humanists and German idealists, and the next thing you know, you’re strung out on Heideggerianism.

We have to return the disk soon, so I’m not sure I’ll have time to watch The Clone Returns Home, a Japanese movie about an astronaut who dies, is reborn in his clone somehow, and bad things happen to him that allow the audience to philosophize. I don’t mean to snidely prejudge the movie, since I haven’t seen it, but that’s my takeaway from reading the back of the DVD box. It’s probably an interesting movie, if you can suspend your disbelief about certain things, such as Japan having a manned space program.

I rarely get to see whole movies these days anyway, at least at home. Too many distractions. Sometimes I manage to see representative slices, such as a bit of The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) the other day. It might not have been such a great movie all together, but 15 minutes worth of 15th-century French and English soldiers hacking at each other was worth watching.

Lombok

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Not long ago I saw the first 15 minutes or so of Hercules in New York, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie. I soon decided that I didn’t need to see any more, for the usual reasons (life’s too short, who’s going to give me those 91 minutes back?, etc.) In the age of YouTube, watching all of a bad movie isn’t necessary anyway, because you can watch the likes of this.

If you’re interested in a fittingly puerile review of the movie, there’s always this.

According to the imdb, the movie was made in 1969, released in early 1970. I wonder if anyone watching the movie in the theater had any inkling that the muscleman on the screen would ever be, say, the governor of a major U.S. state. Of course they didn’t.

Lombok was an interesting place. Drier than Bali, but still fairly green. This view near the town of Kuta, on the south coast of the island, shows the greenery.

We arrived on July 31, 1994, and stayed a few days. One of the persistent clichés about the island was that it’s “not as spoiled” as Bali, which wasn’t remotely spoiled, as in ruined by its popularity. Bali shrugs her lovely shoulders and the visitors pass through.

Still, that sentiment was in guidebook print, and I heard people talk that way, including one woman who was persuaded that the further east you traveled in the Lesser Sunda – Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, and so on. — the better. I couldn’t say for sure, since we didn’t make it any further east than Lombok. But maybe she was just romanticizing poverty.

Why a Duck?

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Unusually cool for this time of year, with rain a lot of the time, but not so many thunderstorms lately. During such moments, at least when work doesn’t intrude, there’s always the option of parking yourself somewhere with a book. Such as Hail, Hail, Euphoria! by Roy Blount Jr. (2010), which is about the making of Duck Soup, “the greatest war movie ever made,” according to the cover.

From page 15: “… when the director of Horse Feathers couldn’t get the crowd he had assembled for a big football scene to show any enthusiasm for the third or fourth take, Harpo said he’d take care of it. He did a lap around the field naked and honking his horn, and the fans went wild.”

Death Be Not Particular

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Dear Death,

This has to stop – people about my age, famous or not, dying. That means people who I went to high school with, or could have.

Regards,

Dees

I doubt that Death is listening. The trickle of deaths of people roughly my age – there’s always been a trickle – is only going to expand into a torrent in the coming decades until my cohort is no more. C’est la vie, c’est la mort.

I don’t expect to be among the last. You know how very elderly people are sometimes described as isolated because, among other things, they’ve “outlived all their friends”? I expect to be one of the friends.

The odd thing (to only me) about James Gandolfini’s death was that he born on September 18, 1961, exactly the same day as my high school friend Kevin, whom I posted about the other day.

One of these days, if I live long enough, I’ll get around to watching The Sopranos. I hear it’s good.