Category: All Posts

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.

Dr. Jane Pratt, 1943-2013

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.

How Much is Free Advice Worth?

I don’t follow personal finance gurus, like PBS favorite Suze Orman, and not because her sales pitch is directed mostly at women. The inspirational self-help tone, with its “pay yourself first” catchphrase advice, isn’t for me. Here’s an Orman podcast with another cutesy slogan.

The Freakonomics podcast has a related discussion. What do academic economists think about personal financial advice? After all, the spending decisions made by consumers, in the aggregate, are what drive 70% the economy.