Author: DOuG pRATt

Down in Jersey Land

Not even a million hits yet? 832,017 to be precise. Well, 832,018 now that I’ve watched it.

Personally, I see the bridge blockade as a typical Republican trick, but I don’t see Christie as the dirty trick type, so I take him at his word that his staff ran wild on this one, but of course that raises the question of why he didn’t have better control of his office. Also, for something as disruptive as the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, you’d think he would have been getting to the bottom of it in a hurry, and if he did then why didn’t he know how it came about?

Jimmy Stewart’s Swank apartment

I had lots of fun calibrating the video projector. Assuming my consumer-grade colorimeter is reasonably accurate, the test numbers indicate that the picture is now just about perfect. Fifteen years ago, when I bought the Sony 32XBR100 TV, which is still working fine by the way, after first adjusting it I watched the then newly-restored “Vertigo” on LaserDisc. I watched it again today, but streaming from Amazon.

“Vertigo” is now at the top of some lists as the greatest movie of all time, beating out longtime champ “Citizen Kane,” and I have to agree with that assessment, on the basis of the premise that a man’s obsession with a woman is inherently more interesting than a man who is obsessed with himself. At the more trivial end of what makes “Vertigo” interesting is a magazine in Jimmy Stewart’s apartment. There’s a copy of Swank, which was one of the many periodicals published by Martin Goodman, Stan Lee’s boss at Marvel (then Atlas) Comics.

By coincidence I happen to be reading an excellent book, “The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman’s Empire” by Blake Bell and Dr. Michael J. Vassallo, which goes into detail about the creation of Swank to compete with Esquire, only to fail in competition with Playboy.

Follow-up: The authors of “Secret History of Marvel Comics” tell me that the magazine does not appear to be a legitimate issue of Swank — “The cover doesn’t match up to either any of the Martin Goodman issues, nor any of the earlier incarnations. So it seems it was a mock-up for the movie.”

Recalibrate!

I’m in the middle of an extremely “First World” sort of project, re-calibrating the video projector, now that it has more than 500 hours on the lamp. Grayscale tracking is done, and tomorrow I’ll tweak the color gamut. The next thing after that will be figuring out what to do with the tangled mess of A/V cables.

Recalibrate