What a Swell Girl

The Age of Consent (1932) is a pre-Code campus romance that takes a couple of surprisingly dark turns in the second half. The movie title isn’t about the girl in the video, who is college age. It’s a reference to a seductive underage waitress at the restaurant where this delightful sequence takes place.

The guy is jealous because the girl he’s been dating is going out with his rich friend who has a new car. They’re like an instant old married couple. There’s an abrupt cut where I spliced out a bit of video to keep the focus on them.

The pin to reattach her strap, for either her bra or slip, is his fraternity pledge pin. It’s funny that even back then, before the Hays Office clamped down on Hollywood, she said “shoulder strap.”

The absolutely charming girl is Dorothy Wilson, who ended her short Hollywood career after getting married. She passed away in 1998 at age 88. Dorothy was a secretary at RKO, taking dictation for the director. In classic Hollywood fashion, he realized that Dorothy was perfect for a part in his next picture. Despite or perhaps because Dorothy had no acting experience, she is utterly natural and believable. Her glib, assertive patter is right up there with Myrna Loy, in my opinion. Co-star Richard Cromwell later married 19-year-old Angela Lansbury, who quickly realized he was gay and they split up almost immediately.

All Gassed Up With Nowhere to Go

Under the Covid lockdown it took a long time to use up half a tank of gas, just driving back and forth to the grocery store twice each week. I couldn’t believe the price to fill the tank — only $1.38/gallon!

Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider died recently. I don’t have any Kraftwerk records, but like most everybody I know “Autobahn”. The single version made it to #25 on the Billboard chart.

Five years after “Autobahn” was Gary Numan’s album “The Pleasure Principle”, with his own electronic auto-related song “Cars”. The single cracked the Billboard top 10, peaking at #9.

https://youtu.be/E4Lo-D8NQF0

Stamp Out Stupidity

Remember when those red Netflix DVD envelopes were everywhere? Digital streaming technology put an end to them, depriving the United States Postal Service of a source of revenue that was helping to make up for the rapid decline of first class postage in the Internet Age.

As John Oliver explains, in 2006 — the year I started this blog and was a 3-disc Netflix subscriber — a new law clobbered USPS finances and hobbled its ability to recover. Trump should be locked in a room with this video playing repeatedly, until he agrees to support the USPS. He doesn’t even have to admit he’s an idiot about everything, which he is, just the post office.

A point that John Oliver doesn’t make is that in many places, like where I live, Amazon deliveries are rarely made by regular mail anymore. Amazon has a large distribution center in a neighboring town with its own fleet of trucks. So in addition to the USPS not losing money on the Amazon deliveries it still makes, it isn’t making nearly as many as it was. Which gets back to one of Oliver’s points about service to rural areas, where many of Trump’s hardcore supporters live.