Tag Archives: television

How the Whos Really Dealt With the Grinch

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Ann and I decided to watch one of this year’s airings of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! last night, which, except for the commercials interrupting in places not originally intended for that purpose, was worth a watch, as always. I may or may not have seen the show on December 18, 1966, when it first aired, but I did watch it most years during the early ’70s, and occasionally since then.

This time it occurred to me just how forgiving the Whos really were. Not only did they welcome Christmas with song despite having no presents or toys (and no food), when the Grinch returned all of that, they didn’t toss him in the Whoville jail for burglary.

Or worse. Naturally, I had to come up with an alternate ending.

The Whos organized a posse with care
And tracked the Grinch down near his lair.
You’ve stolen our presents, from largest to least,
You’ve grabbed our Who pudding, and glommed our roast beast.
They hit him hard in the name of their town,
They kicked his shins and knocked him down.
And without a word or even a sniff
The Who posse tossed the Grinch over the cliff.

More Moo Goo Gai Pan

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Back again on November 29. A good Thanksgiving to all. The snow, which has been melting all day, ought to be gone by then, leaving cold mud. But snow will be back before long. Never mind the snows of yesteryear. There’s always plenty more this year.

Sand, as I’ve noted before, is good for adding traction to icy driveways and sidewalks. Something I’ve learned this year: playground sand isn’t what you want. At freezing temps it tents to stick together, which makes for lousy spreading. Tube sand, which I’ve long used, is the thing.

It’s been 40 years since the original broadcast of “Over the River and Through the Woods,” the episode of The Bob Newhart Show in which Emily’s out of town for Thanksgiving, so Bob spends the holiday with Howard and Jerry and Mr. Carlin watching a football game. They get blotto and order an excess of Moo Goo Gai Pan from a Chinese restaurant.

How much pretend-drunk comedy is there now? Not much, I think, though I don’t spend a lot of time watching sitcoms any more. I’ll leave it to others to tease out the social implications of that. It’s enough for me to note that there’s no equivalent of Foster Brooks on prime time that I know of. Then again, there’s not really any such thing as prime time any more.

A Calendar for ’16

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Something to note for the day: Lost in Space premiered on CBS, the Tiffany Network, 50 years ago today (and it’s been nearly 18 years since Jupiter II started its ill-fated voyage). My thoughts on the matter are here. But I left out another thing to like: those hip themes (first and second season, and then the third) by Johnny Williams, who clearly had potential as a composer. Also, there’s this.

Calendars for next year have started appearing. The first one to land on my desk was the “2016 Journey Through America” calendar, a sample that informs me that my company logo and promotional message can go at the bottom. It’s not a bad calendar. The holidays and other days are basic North American ones — U.S. and Canadian civic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim — and the images are the usual high-resolution pretty pics of various places. The only real oddity of a date is National Tartan Day, April 6.

Maybe the calendar makers couldn’t decide on whether to focus on highly famed American sites or photogenic but obscure ones, since it includes both for the monthly pictures. Maybe they just decided to split the difference. Overexposed places represented in the calendar include the Statue of Liberty, Miami Beach, Monument Valley and Yosemite. But it also includes a snow scene in Geneva, Neb.; a covered bridge in Wakefield, Mich.; a sunflower field in Limon, Colo.; and a small dam in Whippany, NJ.

The EMP Museum

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By chance today I saw about 10 minutes of Pompeii, a movie that apparently came out last year. The scene pitted gladiators vs. Roman soldiers, and clearly the gladiators were the put-upon salt-of-the-earth hero and his friends, while the soldiers fought for a cartoon Roman upper-class twit bad guy. I watched anyway. Nothing like a little implausible sword play to liven your afternoon. It didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that overall the movie was very stupid indeed.

But maybe I should have watched the end. According to Marc Savlov in the Austin Chronicle: “We all know what happens in the end and, to his credit, Anderson [the director] totally nails the vulcanization of Pompeii. You want it? You got it: flaming chariot melees, massive tsunamis, and a downright hellacious pyroclastic flowgasm that makes the ones in Dante’s Peak look like so many Etch-a-Sketch doodlings (all of it shot in well-above-average 3-D). Pompeii delivers the goods – well, at least during its final 20 minutes.”

It took me a while to remember what EMP stands for in the EMP Museum in Seattle, which I visited on the afternoon of August 28. That evening I said (jokingly) that I’d gone to the Electromagnetic Pulse Museum, because I’d forgotten it stands for Experience Music Project.

The EMP is at Seattle Center, just north of downtown. Seattle Center was the site of the 1962 world’s fair, interestingly known as the Century 21 Exposition. EMP didn’t come along until near the actual beginning of the 21st century, back in 2000, as the creation of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and right-angle averse starchitect Frank Gehry.

It’s a colorful 140,000-square foot blob of a building, roundly hated by many. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t inspire much admiration in me either. I’ve seen plenty uglier buildings, following my own visceral and idiosyncratic standard for ugliness, which is uninformed by theory. Most parking garages are worse. So are many brutalist and otherwise concrete-based structures. EMP just seemed like Gehry being Gehry.

I understand it was a technical marvel to build, with more than 21,000 exterior aluminum and stainless steel shingles all uniquely shaped and designed to fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and an interior defined by strange irregular shapes and held up by 280 steel ribs. I found myself looking up at the interior with more admiration than the exterior. The engineers needed a terrific amount of computing power to design and put the thing together, which somehow seems fitting, considering that a software philanthropist paid for it.

Here’s an odd assertion from the museum: “If [the building’s] 400 tons of structural steel were stretched into the lightest banjo string, it would extend one-fourth of the way to Venus.” That must mean the average distance, since the true distance from the Earth to Venus changes every moment. Or maybe it means the distance between the orbits of Earth and Venus.

Wonder how many ping-pong balls it would take to fill it. Someone at the museum needs to figure that out.

Richard Seven wrote in the Seattle Times in 2010: “A smashed guitar, in honor of Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix and his rebellious style, was the inspiration and template. But the real collision was between one of the world’s most relentlessly anti-box architects, an unfathomable task of trying to freeze the rock ‘n’ roll process, and a wealthy private client who embraced the costs and advances in computing and engineering that allowed a building like that to even stand…

“When he toured the building just before it opened in the summer of 2000, Gehry told reporters, ‘It’s supposed to be unusual. Nobody has seen this before or will see it again. Nobody will build another one.’ ” Probably so.

As a museum, EMP is devoted to pop culture. Though “music” is in the name — and Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana each have their own galleries — that’s only part of the equation. One of the current exhibits, for instance, is “Star Wars and the Power of Costume,” which sounds like a display of costumes from that franchise. It cost extra, so I took a pass.

I didn’t miss “What’s Up Doc? The Animation of Chuck Jones.” That alone was almost worth the inflated price of admission to EMP. Besides original sketches and drawings, storyboards, production backgrounds, animation cels, photographs, and a fair amount to read, there was the opportunity to see cartoons on big screens, such as “What’s Opera, Doc?”, one of the Roadrunner cartoons — I forget which, not that it matters — and “One Froggy Evening,” which I probably hadn’t seen in more than 30 years, and which I didn’t fully appreciate when young. Especially the notion of a frog singing tunes from the 1890s.

The museum features some impressively large installations. One is made of guitars. A lot of guitars, arrayed upward in a kind of mass cone of guitars (and banjos and keyboards and other musical instruments) two stories high. The work is called “IF VI WAS IX,” and it was put together by a Seattle artist who goes by the single name Trimpin.

It’s more than just a cone of instruments. EMP notes that “short stretches of music were played into a computer then organized by Trimpin into a continuous electronic composition, with notes assigned to specific instruments. Customized robotic guitars play one string at a time. Six guitars work together to create the sound of one chord—a mechanical metaphor for how musical styles and traditions continue to influence one another.”

Nearby is the “Sky Church” room, whose main feature is a 33’ x 60’ HD LED screen that projects images on (from?) an enormous wall. The 65-foot ceiling is illuminated with parasols that seem to float overhead, and the space is well equipped with special-effects lighting. Technically impressive.

The perfect venue for, say, the restored color version of A Trip to the Moon. Or “Steamboat Willie.” Or “Duck Amuck.” Or the “Thriller” music video. Or any of many possibilities. All short, all worth seeing on a vast screen. Maybe shorts like these play at the Sky Church, but the day I was there, the venue seemed mostly to pump out music videos for people under 30.

I’ve read that the full name of the museum used to be the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (with the clunky initials EMP|SFM), but some years ago, the science fiction aspect was demoted. The museum still covers science fiction, as well as the horror genre, but in two galleries in the basement.

Not bad displays. I enjoyed seeing an assortment of SF movie and TV show props, such as the original Terminator’s leather jacket and I forget what else (no Lost In Space Robot, though), and playing with at least one of the interactive features: a large globe that would take on the likeness of each of the Solar System’s planets, along with the Moon (and Titan?), at the touch of a button.

Oddly enough, I got more out of the horror exhibit than the SF one. Besides static displays and props and the like, the horror gallery included a number of alcoves in which you can watch well-made short films on various renowned horror movies. These proved interesting, even though I don’t much care one way or the other about the genre.

Because of these shorts, I’m now inspired to watch two horror movies I’ve never gotten around to: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Exorcist. The former was on TCM late Sunday night, but I didn’t want to stay up late to watch it; such is middle age. I did see the haunting green credits, however, and I’ll get around to the whole thing before long.

There’s also a first-floor gallery devoted to the fantasy genre, but by the time I got there, I was a little tired of the museum. At least I happened to see the costume that Mandy Patinkin wore as Inigo Montoya.

As mentioned, two Seattle musical acts, Jimi Hindrix and Nirvana, had their own galleries. Of the two, I spent more time in the Hindrix room, despite being too young when he was alive to fully appreciate his talents, since he was common enough on the radio well into the 1970s. As for Nirvana, I was too old to appreciate them when they were around, and in fact out of the country during their heyday. I remember hearing about Kurt Cobain’s suicide right after I arrived in Hong Kong in April 1994, and my first thought was, Who?

Both galleries apparently change from time to time, rather than being generic tributes to the artists. The Hendrix exhibit I saw was  “Wild Blue Angel: Hendrix Abroad, 1966-1970.” It detailed his travels as a successful musician. As the museum explains: “At the height of his fame, Jimi Hendrix performed more than 500 times in 15 countries and recorded 130 songs in 16 studios. He was a musical nomad, his life an endless series of venues, recording sessions, flights, and hotels.”

His passport was on display. I got a kick out of that. Even better, while the original was behind glass, you could leaf through a replica, which I did. The dude got around.

Ann Arbor-Toledo Eats

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The Ann Arbor-Toledo trip was less than 36 hours and only about 640 miles, but we managed to eat four different interesting meals. Interesting by my lights, anyway: cheap one-of-kinds eking out their living at the margins of a fast-food economy by being better than fast food (actually, two of the places were part of a small local chain; and by small, I mean three or four locations). The food was American and not particularly healthful by current standards: doughnuts, hamburgers, eggs-and-meat breakfast food, and chili dogs.

I did a bit of snooping around before we went. Remarkable what you can find, even apart from the likes of Yelp or Urban Spoon, and soon I got wind of Sweetwater’s Donut Mill, with three locations in Kalamazoo and one in Battle Creek. Just the thing for between breakfast and dinner, without stopping for a delaying lunch. I noted that the main branch was in Kalamazoo just off Sprinkle Road — that’s a good name for a road — which was accessible by an exit on I-94.

Except that the Sprinkle Road exit was closed. Both the exit and the bridge over the Interstate are being completely rebuilt. So I figured I’d wait till the next exit and turn around, but miles and miles passed before the next exit. Soon I decided it was too far to go back for; we’d find something else off of one of the exits into Battle Creek (one of these days, I should take a look at the Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center, which used to be the San, but I didn’t want to look for it last Friday).

As soon as we’d gotten to the first traffic light after the exit, Lilly said, “Isn’t that the doughnut shop you’re looking for?” And it was. The Battle Creek branch of Sweetwater’s was right there in a strip center. So we went in and got a half-dozen doughnuts.

Clearly, God wanted us to have those doughnuts. The Lord does not mislead, either. They were large — larger than my palm — tender and delicious, and no more expensive than a large chain shop’s doughnuts. We had chocolate-, vanilla- and custard-filled varieties. They were so substantial, in fact, that we didn’t finish them all till the next day, and they were still good then.

That evening, after wandering around U-M for a few hours, we repaired to Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger, an Ann Arbor storefront hamburgery not quite like any other I’ve been to. You order your burger cafeteria style — from the staff who cook and otherwise assemble the meal in a small cooking zone behind the counter as you stand waiting. Posted on the wall are “rules” for ordering. Rather than rules, they’re really more-or-less a description of how the ordering goes down.

When it is your turn to order:
1) First, the deep fryer order: french fries, fried veggies, etc.
2) Then, what size Blimpy: double, triple, quad, quint
3) Next, decide what kind of roll: plain, onion, kaiser, etc.
4) Any grilled items: onions, mushrooms, peppers, etc.
5) Just before the burger comes off the grill, you will be asked to pick what kind of cheese you prefer, if any.
6) After the burger comes off the grill, you will be asked what type of condiments you would like – please start with “wet” items like mayo, ketchup or mustard… and only say what you want and NOT what you don’t want!

The fellow who took our fry order looked like a student doing a summer job. He might be a descendant of the late Krazy Jim. Cooking the burgers was a petite black woman who’s probably the most enthusiastic short-order cook I’ve ever seen. A dervish of a fry cook, this woman. When it was your turn to order, of course you didn’t have to remember what to say. She’d ask in rapid succession — what size? what kind of roll? what do you want grilled? If you started to give your cheese order, she’d respond: No cheese order now! Not interested! Later, when the meat was cooked, she asked about cheese. She not only took orders, she had about three or four orders going at once, kept track of them as they cooked, removed them when they were done, joked with the other staff, and had the most Wicked Witch of the West cackle of a laugh I’ve ever heard — so distinct that we’d hear it periodically as we ate, audible over the noise of the other diners, the sizzle of the grill, and the clanging of cooking utensils.

Another employee, to her left, put on the lettuce and tomatoes and the like, and a fourth person rang up the order and ran around the place doing other things. Quite an operation, but it would have been for nothing if the burgers weren’t so good. All that effort produced a hamburger like you make at home, provided you’re really good at making hamburgers. We left the joint satisfied.

The next morning we had Hippy Hash. Or rather, Lilly did. “Hippy” is just as a colorful moniker, and “hash” in the sense of a breakfast food conglomeration: hash browns topped with grilled tomato, green pepper, onion, mushroom and broccoli topped with feta cheese. Where does one find Hippy Hash in Ann Arbor? At the Fleetwood Diner. It’s a genuine, honest-to-God diner, a small fleck of a survivor of the pre-Ray Kroc time when companies near Lake Eire manufactured diners, and diner kits, for diner entrepreneurs to set up all over the country.

On the outside, it’s a small metal diner with awnings and tables and chairs in front of the entrance. On the inside, there’s a cooking zone, a counter, and space for a few tables. Some hundreds of stickers — geographic, slogans, advertising, all kinds of things — adorn the walls. The grill is always sizzling and the waiter and waitress are in constant motion.

Lilly, as I said, had the house specialty. I had scrambled eggs and bacon and hash browns and toast, the simplest diner food imaginable. It was very good. It wasn’t expensive, even though they didn’t short on bacon: four slices. Lilly said she liked the Hippy Hash, but could have done without the broccoli.

It seems that the diner’s been named the Fleetwood only since the 1970s. Before that, it was the Dag-Wood, because that was the diner’s brand name. “Dag-wood Diner Inc. — This company was located in Toledo, Ohio,” one web site asserts. “They made the kit that became the Fleetwood Diner in Ann Arbor, MI in 1949. They also made a diner that went to Erie, MI that has now been remodeled beyond recognition… One former owner of a Dag-Wood diner mentioned that no more than half a dozen were made, though this has not been verified.”

Ah, but I fear for the future of the Fleetwood. A single investor apparently owns its site and the buildings next to it — that include Blimpy Burger — and isn’t talking about his plans. I know how these things go. In a few years, there will be redevelopment, and it won’t be nearly as interesting as what’s there now. Glad I got to go before that happens.

One more place: Tony Packo’s in Toledo. I won’t evade the point: the only reason I wanted to go there was because Cpl. Klinger told me it was good. Never mind that he’s a fictional character of a generation ago, and he wasn’t speaking to me personally. And I didn’t even remember the name of the place till I looked it up. That is, Googled “Klinger restaurant Toledo.” Tony Packo’s comes up instantly.

The restaurant’s web site says: “The words that came out of Jamie Farr’s mouth on Feb. 24, 1976 would put Tony Packo’s in the spotlight. Farr, a native Toledoan himself, appeared in the television show M*A*S*H, playing Corporal Max Klinger, a crazy [sic] medical corpsman who was also from Toledo. In the episode that made Packo’s future, a man playing a television newsman talked to Klinger about his hometown. Farr wrote a little local color into his reply. The lines read, ‘If you’re ever in Toledo, Ohio, on the Hungarian side of town, Tony Packo’s got the greatest Hungarian hot dogs. Thirty-five cents…’ ”

The character would go on to mention the place a few more times after that, and while the details didn’t stick with me, the notion of a hot dog stand in Toledo did. Turns out “Hungarian hot dogs” are just as fictional as Cpl. Klinger, and the restaurant owns up to that: “Because Tony was Hungarian-American and lived in a Hungarian neighborhood, Tony’s creation was called the Hungarian hot dog. Until Toledo-born Tony invented it, there was no such thing as a Hungarian hot dog, say those who know the Old Country’s food.”

The hot dog, which is in fact a sausage, was tasty. The chili, which is the other signature item, wasn’t bad. The chili you get in Ohio is going to be Ohio chili, after all, whether it’s a Toledo recipe or the 5-way variety in Cincinnati.

The inside of the restaurant looks like a medium-priced chain (Tony Packo’s is a very small chain), except for all of the signed hot dog buns behind plastic bubbles on the walls.
Tony Packo's Aug 1, 2015We sat behind Clint Black, Al Hirt, Joe Mondello, and some members of REO Speedwagon, among others. Hundreds of them line the walls. Apparently famous visitors have been signing them for more than 40 years, even before Jamie Farr mentioned the place. Of course, they’re not really bread, but artfully painted foam, though the autographs are real. More about the faux buns here.

Thursday Squibs

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Sometimes at the bank I get a roll of dollar coins, which totals 25 all together. These days, most of them are presidential dollars, though some Sacagaweas and Susies are usually mixed in. Since the presidents after Garfield have relatively low mintage — Garfield had a total of 74.2 million from both mints, while Arthur had only about 10 million — it’s rare to see one of the later presidents. This week, a TR coin turned up (one of 9.2 million minted) in a roll. In worn condition. Odd.

“What’s syncopation?” Lilly asked recently. Being in band, I thought she’d know that. Maybe not. I learned about it in high school, but when she asked I realized I’d forgotten how to describe it. Just what YouTube is for: this is a lucid explanation, and he even makes Philip Glass a little more interesting.

In line at a grocery store the other day, a man behind me was carrying on a vigorous conversation on his phone. Nothing unusual about that anymore, unlike the day in 1989 when I saw a woman pull a brick of a phone from her purse at the McDonald’s that used to be on the Mag Mile and start talking into it. Overhearing one side of a call these days might even be annoying, depending on the conversation.

I couldn’t pin down his language. It didn’t quite sound like Russian, but it was some kind of Slavic tongue. Maybe Ukrainian. Anyway, he had a good voice, so I listened. There wasn’t much else to do in line anyway. Then I started to notice: talktalktalktalk OK talktalktalk OK talktalktalktalktalktalktalk OK talktalktalktalktalktalk OK.

I know OK is practically universal. (Or do the French resist?) That wasn’t a surprise. Still, I marveled that a bit of 1830s American slang, whose origin even now isn’t quite certain, has traveled so far. So naturally did he use the word, it might as well have been native from his point of view.

New fact for the day (a couple of weeks ago for me, when I learned it): Neil Diamond wrote “Red, Red Wine.” A strange notion at first, but then again he’s written other songs with an alcohol motif. Then I learned that that’s his actual birth name: Neil Diamond, son of Akeeba and Rose Diamond of Brooklyn. It always sounded like a stage name to me.

In Branson in 2012 I met a fellow whose act was a Neil Diamond impersonation (tribute, as they say). He had the enormous mane and the good looks of young Neil Diamond, but I didn’t get to hear whether he had similarly impressive pipes. I’d hope so.

The last episode of Mad Men is on Sunday. A lot of shows now have last episodes, so it isn’t quite like the novelty of watching the end of The Fugitive (which I don’t remember) or even, come to think of it, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (which I do). Here’s an interesting essay about final shows, though maybe covering something that doesn’t really deserve an essay, namely the last episode of Hogan’s Heroes.

Still, I’ll be watching Mad Men. If only to see whether Roger Sterling gets one more funny line or scene.

Spock Makes a Funny

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By chance today I saw about ten minutes of “The Naked Time,” the Star Trek episode in which a pathogen of some kind invades the Enterprise and lowers inhibitions among the crew. At one point, famously, a shirtless Sulu brandishes a sword at various extras, and then shows up on the bridge to point it at the captain. The fiction of Dumas is clearly Sulu’s inspiration.

SULU: Richelieu, at last.

KIRK: Sulu, put that — [discovers that the point is sharp] — put that thing away.

SULU: For honor, Queen, and France! [lunges]

UHURA: Sulu.

SULU: Ah.

UHURA: Sulu, give me that.

SULU: I’ll protect you, fair maiden.

UHURA: Sorry, neither.

SULU: Foul Richelieu! [Distracted by Uhura’s escape, Kirk is able to grab Sulu and Spock does a neck-pinch]

KIRK: I’d like you to teach me that sometime.

SPOCK: Take D’Artagnan here to Sickbay.

Take D’Artagnan here to Sickbay. Nimoy delivered the line as almost an aside, while a lot else was going on, so I thought for a moment: did he really say that? He did. That was worth a chuckle. I must have seen this episode a dozen times — more than 30 years ago, but still — and I don’t think I ever noticed that line. (Or Uhura’s pithy line; think about it.) I wouldn’t have known D’Artagnan in junior high, but later I did. Even so, I missed it.

So the writers gave Spock a joke, or at least a witticism. Not, “Take Mr. Sulu to Sickbay,” or “Take him to Sickbay,” which would be the unadorned, hyperrational thing to say. Nice touch. Nice delivery. RIP, Mr. Nimoy.

Thursday Stew

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A bit of meltage today, with temps around freezing, and the sunshine doing the melting where it hit snow directly. Compared with last week, the air felt good. But hard winter will be back, count on it.

Started working my way through Deadwood around New Year’s. When the show was still fairly new, the profanity put me off it. Not the profanity itself, but the fact that I considered it grossly anachronistic. Now I understand it as an intentional anachronism, done for good reasons. The show’s impressive: one that helps make the argument that now is a golden age of television, or at least the 2000s were.

Ann’s been reading Through the Looking-Glass lately, and looking for our copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has gone missing. Not long ago she read The Wizard of Oz. And she’s asked me to find our copies of The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book, so she can read them. The kid’s got some kind of bug.

I have an ambition to scan more coins, specifically those I’ve encountered lately that don’t feature any Roman letters or even Arabic numerals. In the old days, it was a chore figuring out the origin of coins like that, so much so that for some time as a youngster I had a 1 yen coin that I thought was a 1 yuan coin. These days, all it usually takes is a focused Google search.

But I’ve alternately been too busy and too indolent to do much coin-scanning. I did get around to this one. Forgot to check the box that would correct for dust (the scanner’s got some impressive features for a cheaper model; guess the tech’s improving).

Ethiopian 10 SantimIt’s a well-worn brass 10 santim piece from Ethiopia. 100 santim = 1 birr. The lion, I suppose, is the Lion of Judah.

Entertainment Oddities, Some Involving Actors Named West

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As it happened, on July 4 one of the channels was running a Batman marathon, and by Batman, I mean the one starring Adam West. Accept no substitutes. I watched two episodes, which is about enough at any one time, a pair originally broadcast one night after the other in 1966. Catwoman was the villain. At one point, after capturing the Dynamic Duo, she separates the two using a vacuum tube, saying: “It’s time to separate Damon and Pythias.”

Did I hear that right? A casual Classical allusion on mid-60s TV? Yes, indeed. Hadrian and Antinous would have been funnier, but even more obscure.

At a grocery store parking lot not long ago, I saw an ordinary sedan, one car among many, except for one thing: “NCC-1701” was detailed on either side. I couldn’t help mocking the owner in abstentia on the way into the store (Lilly was with me). “To boldly go shopping,” “Hope he doesn’t use his phasers in the parking lot,” etc.

She Done Him Wrong (1933) is an odd movie, at least to modern eyes. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to see the movie new, when it wouldn’t (presumably) have been so odd, but it was hard. Still, the movie must have had its attractions in its time, since it made Paramount a bucket of money in the pit of the Depression.

Mae West is one of those people now mainly known by reputation, and that includes my impressions of her. I’d never seen one of her movies until last week, when I watched this one. She’s famous for her one-liners, and justly so. And of course for her sex appeal. I think it helps to have been born around 100 years ago to fully appreciate it.

Another thing I wondered about was the setting. The movie was set in the 1890s, which the intro refers to by its common sobriquet, the Gay Nineties, a ’20s invention. I wonder just what kind of nostalgia people of the 1930s felt for the 1890s. It’s possible to be nostalgic about anything, so I guess that applies to a decade marked by its own depression and bitter labor disputes.

Thursday Debris

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It’s been a brilliant run of late spring, early summer days here. Rain, but not too much. Heat, but not too much. A few mosquitoes, but not many. Last week at the Klehm we did run into some large clouds of gnats, however, especially on the narrow trails.

Klehm Arbortetum May 2014

See the gnats? Maybe not. The camera’s not that good. But they’re there.

I just finished reading Neither Here Nor There, an entertaining Bill Bryson book. Mostly he dispenses with background detail about the places he visits, and focuses on his own experiences in getting from A to B and seeing what he sees in A and B. Even better, his enthusiasm for going out to see things shines through. Not many writers can pull that off without being a bore, but he does. A small example, describing Rome:

“You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you’ve just missed a parking competition for blind people. Cars are pointed in every direction, half on the pavements and half off, facing in, facing sideways, blocking garages and side streets and phone boxes, fitted into spaces so tight that the only possible way out would be through the sun roof. Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.”

Since the travels he describes were in Europe in 1990, as well as flashbacks to the 1970s, he’s also detailing an increasingly obsolete style of travel, but one that I well remember myself, at least that of the last two decades of the 20th century. That is, pre-Internet, pre-smartphone, pre-debit card, pre-Ryanair travels. It won’t be long before — if it hasn’t already happened — smartphones or glasses tell tourists absolutely everything about getting to and being at a place. That’ll drain the life right out of the experience.

I wondered today whether the half-season finale Mad Men, broadcast Sunday, used all the lyrics of “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” I wasn’t very familiar with the earliest recorded version, so I looked it up.

As many songs were in the 1920s, much of it is instrumental. So yes indeed, the show used all of the lyrics. The 2010s recalling the 1960s recalling the 1920s. A remarkable scene.