It’s been exactly eleven months since my last Covid shot. Tomorrow I will receive the new booster. I assume we should expect that Covid shots, like flu vaccines, are now an annual ritual.
Category: All Posts
Parade’s Personality Change
Parade magazine will cease print publication on November 6.
https://news.yahoo.com/parade-magazine-digital-only-035900562.html
The end of the once-ubiquitous Sunday newspaper insert will come within a couple of weeks of the 59th anniversary of my peak Boomer-era family being featured in its pages. We had the unfortunate timing of appearing during the weekend after JFK’s assasination.
That’s me leaning over the tail light.
Cranky Peevishness
“Happy Birthday in Heaven” notices on Facebook for deceased public figures really annoy me. I see this quite often, even for non-Christians. “Remembering [insert name] on their birthday” is standard for many organizations, and it’s the practice that should be followed by everybody.
Please, Sir
Watching Hitchcock’s 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much, that I shared a couple of days ago, brought to mind the climatic rooftop scene in David Lean’s superb screen adaptation of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Robert Newton, who has my vote as the greatest character actor of all time, is terrifying as the villain Bill Sykes.
https://youtu.be/qelzn2njS9c
Director Cuts
George Lucas didn’t leave well enough alone when he began using digital technology to “improve” the special effects in Star Wars. To the dismay of just about everybody but himself, Lucas kept tweaking until eventually he had Greedo rather than Han shooting first in the Cantina.
Alfred Hitchcock remade The Man Who Knew Too Much to get out of his contract with Paramount and/or because he thought he could do better in 1956 than he did in 1934. Either way, I’ve watched the earlier film many times, and the later one only once.
https://youtu.be/MOAlp-oIQBE
Lynch Mob Rule
Fritz Lang displayed a few touches of German Expressionism in Fury, his first American movie, but otherwise it’s directed in a straight-forward way. In the middle of the movie Spencer Tracy can’t use his left arm, and it’s almost a foreshadowing of his performance twenty years later in another powerful morality tale, Bad Day at Black Rock. The only complete online copy of Fury I found has Spanish subtitles, but it’s very watchable.