While Beckle thinks up some ideas for the blog, let’s see what’s doing in Doodlebugville.
Rainy Day Sunshine
The summer heat is hitting the west coast hard, with record sustained temperatures, wildfires and drought. But where I am the ground is saturated and there’s street flooding, with more rain to come.
I don’t know if Andrew Sandoval coined the term Sunshine Pop, but this record is one of the most enjoyable examples of the musical genre. The reference to lemon curd in the song got me started buying the delicious stuff!
Panic Buying and Selling
I’m falling behind on my e-mail replies, because I am once again indulging my fascination with the 2008 meltdown of the financial markets and the Great Recession that resulted from it. Following 9/11, it was the second worldwide crisis of the Internet Age, and it was the first to happen since I began this blog, with the pandemic being of course the second. I’ll probably do more prattling after watching this video.
P.S. I wouldn’t say there’s an untold story in the documentary, but there are couple of tidbits in there I didn’t know. First, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was enduring so much unrelenting stress that he had a probable panic attack after Congress failed to approve a bailout.
After the TARP bailout was approved on a second vote, it was Warren Buffett who suggested to Paulson that the money be given directly to the investment banks, rather than being used to buy their toxic assets. That very unpopular action helped to get the Tea Party started, of course. What makes no sense to me at all was how the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street ended up on opposite sides of the political street.
Boomer Bust
House price inflation continues, aided by the Fed’s ridiculously low interest rates, and compounded by Baby Boomers like myself who are aging in place at home. Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, Millennials!
I Screen, You Screen
Hey tastewar, here’s an idea for an outdoor projector setup! 😉
Petty Girls
In the absolutely delightful film Here Come the Huggetts, perfectly adorable Petula Clark mistakenly believes that her father is involved with a teenage girl. This premise was taken even further a year later in The Romantic Age.
Petula was seventeen when she appeared in this film, playing a girl whose father has fallen under the seductive charms of a classmate. As in the Huggetts, Petula’s sweetness is contrasted with a much more womanly girl her age. But unlike the previous movie, with Diana Dors being only months older than Pet, the libidinous Mai Zetterling was 23 years old.