“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is quite a disappointment after reading the celebrated “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Marie is a tedious accounting of detective Dupin’s laborious thought process in breaking down the information that’s available about the murder. I attribute the story’s failure to Poe taking the events directly from an actual contemporary murder, rather than coming from his own imagination. I’ll move on to “The Purloined Letter,” which has a much better reputation.
Category: All Posts
Disney-
A year ago I began subscribing to Disney+ to watch Peter Jackson’s Thanksgiving premier of The Beatles: Get Back. Lately I’ve been watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars in chronological story order. I was expecting that Disney+ would price itself closer to HBO Max after they had built up a subscriber base, so this notification wasn’t a surprise.
We wanted to let you know of an upcoming price change to your Disney+ subscription. Effective on December 13, 2022, your subscription will now be called the Disney+ Premium plan and will change in price to $10.99 per month. Your payment method on file will be charged unless you cancel your subscription before December 13, 2022.
We are committed to providing a variety of offerings and quality content to our subscribers. You now have the option to choose our new, lower-priced plan, Disney+ Basic (With Ads), or upgrade to one of our Disney Bundle plans.
Yeah, okay, so the price is going up a few bucks per month. But then, a week later, it was followed up by this message that is not okay with me.
Disney+ now requires additional information from the primary account holder, including your birthdate and what best describes your gender. To avoid any interruption to your streaming, please update your account with this information before December 8, 2022.
Note that once submitted, your birthdate cannot be changed without contacting the Help Center. Your gender can be changed at any time by navigating to your Profile Settings. If you’d prefer to keep your gender private, you may select “Prefer not to say.”
They’re threatening to interrupt service to paying customers if we don’t do as they say? Disney seems to have forgotten that customers are not employees.
If they want to know the primary account holder is over 18, that’s what they should be asking. Instead, they seem to be fishing for marketing data. I’m not going to play this game, and if I end up having to contact the help center I will lie about my birthdate, and tell them so.
Follow-up: I don’t know if “Seiko Eloise M” is an AI bot or an actual person. Via live chat she confirmed the requirement is for the primary account holder to be 18+, and she said it’s okay to lie about my age to provide that confirmation.
I completely understand your feedback about this. We care about your input and will be passing it along to the right teams here for further review.
No worries, Douglas you can lie on your birthdate as long as it is associated with 18 years old and older
Seiko Eloise M
6:27 PM
The birthdate I entered is May 25, 1977 — the release date of Star Wars.
Brideshead Revisited Revisited
I greatly admire the superb television production of Brideshead Revisited, that I first watched on a 19-inch black & white TV when it originally aired in 1981. Brideshead is as far from British Kitchen Sink Realism as it gets, this side of Shakespeare.
The series was co-directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, whose name was heard often a year ago when Disney released The Beatles: Get Back. Lindsay-Hogg directed Let It Be, and his original reels of film were used by Peter Jackson for his project.
The complete Brideshead series is here, although the playlist has the eleven episodes out of order. I’ll leave it to you to sort them out from the drop-down menu.
The Narrow Margins
With so many midterm elections too close to call between the Democratic and Republican candidates, I’m watching The Narrow Margin. Directed with great tension by Max Fleischer’s son Richard, Charles McGraw is perfectly cast in a rare leading role. There is no music, except in bits from a record player that becomes an important plot device. This one is really, really good. Really!
Two thoughts about the possible influence of The Narrow Margin on other movies with action aboard trains. Jacqueline White begs a comparison to Eva Marie Saint in North By Northwest, seven years later. It’s almost as if Hitchock had Saint watch White’s scenes and instructed her, “do it exactly like her.” The big fight scene between McGraw and one of the thugs reminds me very much of the life-and-death struggle between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love, more than ten years later. If I can think up a comparison with the train scenes in A Hard Day’s Night, I’ll update this post. 😉
Mem Drive and Mass Ave.
I first thought about mentioning my peripheral connections to MIT after reading this item in Technology Review at the end of June.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/29/1053303/how-mit-ended-up-on-memorial-drive/
My conversation this week with an MIT astrophysicist has nudged me into action. Did we discuss cosmic rays? Black holes at the center of galaxies? Or was the topic her particular area of expertise, the search for dark matter?
No, it was something quite Earthbound and mundane. A contractor had sent her to me for a reference.
Unknown to me for many years, when my family moved to Massachusetts, my father’s cousin Jane was at MIT, getting her PhD in Political Science.
In the 70’s my father worked at the MIT Sloan School of Management for a few years. In the 80’s my twinster Jean worked at MIT while I was working at a nearby company named after MIT, founded by a couple of its grads. A friend who’s reading this is an MIT grad.
Night at the Museum
Is the Smithsonian haunted?
Does Linus really think it would be good to meet the Great Pumpkin?
“Stupid, am I??”
