Here I am at this year’s Boston Marathon, turning the corner onto Boylston Street, getting my first look at the finish line. Those last 385 yards are a killer!
I’ll be running another half marathon in October, but won’t tackle a full 26.2 miles again unless I feel I can get my time back down to something approaching four hours. The facial hair is now gone, by the way.
[Sorry, but I had to remove the embedded YouTube video link because Studio 100 had all of the clips removed.]
Comic book fans have been full of talk about the Watchmen movie for quite a while. Time.com just put out an article about the Watchmen preview at the Comic-Con in San Diego, going on right now.
This sort of coverage represents a validation, approval and acceptance of comics that was unimaginable to me as a kid. The catch is, today’s comic books hold no interest for me, in part because I felt when the Watchmen series came out it was the final word on the super hero genre. Writer Alan Moore had succeeded in extracting everything there was to be said about costumed heroes.
The best place to see the Watchmen trailer is the official site, but I’ll post it here for convenience, if you want to avoid all of the Flash animation that’s typical of movie sites.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/JUL/Watchmen.flv 640 272]
Overall, it looks very promising, but the Vietnam scenes have a fake appearance, and Dr. Manhattan isn’t quite as convincing as he should be. Rorschach’s voice is too similar to Christian Bale’s Batman. But all of this can be fixed in post-production. I’m also a bit concerned that if the big climax in the story isn’t handled just right, it will be unintentionally humorous. We’ll know in March.
The air conditioner has been replaced, it works great, and I paid what I expected, a little over $1400, including the initial diagnosis; i.e., the cost of replacing the compressor. So that’s that. Time to move on to whatever coming’s next.
I have the book by Brian Sibley, the BBC movie based on his original play is waiting to be watched, and on Friday my favorite (excuse me, favourite) radio station, BBC Radio 2, begins airing Ian Richardson’s serialized reading of Shadowlands. We Yanks will have to hope the installments appear on the listen again link.
Saturday note: “Audio stream is unavailable at this time” is what it says here.
It’s working! Go and listen now at that link above.
Considering Jo Stafford’s stellar career and her versatile singing talent, it’s somewhat ironic that she won her only Grammy for a comedy record. Jonathan and Darlene Edwards were the alter egos of Jo and her husband Paul Weston. They were a dreadfully earnest — or earnestly dreadful — lounge act, with Jo’s perfect pitch helping Darlene with her tin ear utterly destroy songs with stunning off-key precision.
You’ll find a wonderfully awful collection of Jonathan and Darlene here on MySpace. The link to Jo’s label, Corinthian Records, is wrong. Use this one instead.
