Always on the forefront of hard journalism, the Washington Post alerts us that Elena Kagan is "frumpy," "dowdy," "doesn't seem to care" about her appearance and doesn't cross her legs when she sits.
Two full paragraphs about our next Supreme Court nominee not crossing her legs. According to the Post this is UNUSUAL (all caps theirs).
There are no words.
I'm not a sports fan (understatement of the year) but I have a soft spot in my heart for the World Cup. Because we got married four years ago, and our honeymoon was during the last World Cup, and we watched the Mexico-Argentina game at the Ceaser's Palace sports book. The room was packed, people yelling, cheering every play, extremely into the game. Two guys in the back had a giant Mexican flag which they unfurled when they scored, and a woman carrying an Argentina flag ran across the front when they scored. It was so much fun that for the first time I felt like I understood why people are into sports.
So that's why I'm really looking forward to the 2010 World Cup. Which starts in a couple of weeks! I've decided I'm going to root for the North American teams. Go USA! Go Mexico! Go Honduras!
This afternoon to get in the spirit, we watched the UEFA Champions League championship. They ran a three-minute promo by Nike during half-time, that blew me away. Do US sports have ads this good? If so, I should really start watching them.
I've been fighting a headache all day and just feeling kind of blah. It's not great to be in a production facility during a headache because sometimes the work is noisy and you can't very well ask them to keep it down.
Enough whining. (or whinging, as the kids say.) At lunchtime I went over the Wendy's to get my salad and tea, as I do every day I'm in Hillsborough. I go there so often that I kind of know everyone who works in the drive-through, though I only know a couple of people's names. When I got there the manager was outside Windexing the drive-through window between customers. He saw me pull around and stepped back so I could drive up -- then when I got to the window he leaned over and started cleaning my windshield!
I heard a burst of laughter and "Squeegee man! Tip him a dollar!" from inside, and then one of the guys (who sounds like he's from NY or maybe NJ) leaned out and said "Hey! No soliciting!" Brightened up my whole day and definitely made me forget about the headache. Thanks, Wendy's crew! As always, you are the best.
Here's a gem I found while looking for state songs. I decided not to play it in the 4th of July show because it's satirical, and the show is about celebrating the 50 states, not mocking them. But the song is so funny that I have to share it.
It's called "Over On the Jersey Side" and it's about the fact that New Yorkers wouldn't be caught dead in New Jersey. I think it's hilarious that this particular snobbery is so old. It's kind of the funniest thing about the song. This recording is by Billy Murray and my guess is it's from early 1909 because there's a joke about Taft having just become President.
It's fiendishly catchy, or maybe I've just listened to too many of these really old recordings and my standards are warped. But I find myself humming this song all the time. "Jersey, Jersey! I wonder who invented poor old Jersey?" I have to mention here that I don't share the general prejudice against New Jersey. I grew up in Delaware and my memory of New Jersey was the beautiful South Jersey countryside. If you hear "New Jersey" and all you think of is the Newark Airport, you really aren't being fair to the Garden State. That said, I'm a sucker for a good old-timey comedy song, and this is a great one.
Warning, the song contains an offensive, though somewhat archaic, ethnic slur in the first verse. If I were going to play it on the air I'd try to remove that part in Audacity, but since I'm just linking to it I think a warning will suffice.
Was just listening to a 1949 episode of Dragnet and heard a character refer to "Dogtown." Is that a different Dogtown from the one in the movie Dogtown and Z Boys? Because if it's the same place, it thoroughly debunks the guy in the movie who claims to have coined the term decades after this Dragnet episode was recorded.
I should be reading my Benny Goodman biography, which finally arrived yesterday, since the Goodman tribute show is in a week and a half. So what am I doing? Planning the 4th of July show instead, of course!
Every year I do a special show of all patriotic songs for Independence Day. Like the Christmas show, I look forward to it for months. I even have a list in my phone so that if I ever hear a good patriotic song on satellite radio, I can write it down before I forget. If the 4th falls in the middle of the week, so my show is nowhere near it, I'll sub for someone on Independence Day itself so I can do my show.
For years I've wanted to do a show with a song for every state. This year the 4th is on a Sunday, so it seems like the perfect time to do it. Thing is, two hours isn't enough. I play about 35 songs in a typical show. No problem! The DJ before me agreed to take the week off and give me his time, so I could do a four hour show. That will be perfect: enough time for multiple songs for a few states. Actually, the DJ after me also agreed to, so I get to pick which show I want to usurp. I could be greedy, grab them both and do a 6 hour show, but that would be crazy.
Anyway, I've been having a blast tracking down state songs. To make things easier for myself, I am allowing songs for a place within a state. For instance a song about New Orleans is okay, even if the word "Louisiana" isn't in the lyrics. On the other hand, I'm giving preference to songs that are actually about the state, rather than say a love song that happens to have the state name in it.
Some states provide an embarrassment of riches -- Texas, California, New York -- while others have been difficult. Lots of searching on iTunes and in the online catalogs of Tin Pan Alley composers. Georg found a web page for me with old timey (public domain) songs for every state, which helped a lot. And I have a complete list! I just found songs for the last stragglers -- New Hampshire and Nebraska -- a couple of days ago. There are a few changes I'll probably want to make. For instance, the Nebraska song is a really short (maybe a minute) excerpt in a medley. And I'm not sure about the Minnesota and Maryland songs. (Maryland was surprisingly difficult!) But at least I have something for every state.
May 17 movie: When Ladies Meet. I adore this movie and never miss an opportunity to watch it. It's a love triangle which does a surprisingly good job of presenting both women's point of view. All the principals are great: Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, Robert Taylor and Herbert Marshall. Whenever I watch this I feel like there are two movies happening at once: the one they're telling us about, and another one right under the surface, which overlaps but isn't quite the same. That complexity is what I love about this movie.
[When Ladies Meet passes the Bechdel test. Even though the entire movie was about romance, and there are only 3 female characters (which is almost half the cast), all three interact with each other and talk about other things besides men.]
May 17 movie: The Benny Goodman Story. I've seen a lot of Hollywood biopics from this era and this is one of the better ones in my opinion. It's surprisingly close to factual, at least compared to the ridiculous Cole Porter and Jerome Kern movies. Mostly it's worth seeing for the cast. Many of Goodman's band play themselves: Gene Krupa, Harry James, Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton all have speaking parts playing themselves, plus Kid Ory and Ben Pollack (the first bandleader Goodman ever worked for). Also includes Ziggy Elman, Stan Getz and Martha Tilton in musical performances. And as an extra treat, Sammy Davis Sr. plays Fletcher Henderson (who, alas, had died a couple of years before the movie was made).
Goodman does not appear in the movie: he's played by Steve Allen. I heard that Goodman recorded his own music and Allen just had to do the fingering during the performance scenes. Allen also played clarinet, and wanted some of his playing to be in the movie, but was offended when the filmmakers asked him to record the music for scenes where Goodman is a child just learning to play. Apparently Goodman wasn't capable of playing the unsteady notes of a beginner, so he couldn't do the childhood performances. And they thought Allen would be great at it. I can't imagine why that would have offended him.
I said the movie was surprisingly close to fact, although of course there was still a lot of fictionalizing. For one thing, the movie took place in an alternate universe where racial integration was commonplace by the mid 1920s, and when Goodman hired Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton in the mid 30s it was nothing out of the ordinary. Also, in the movie Hampton was working in a tiny seaside restaurant as the waiter, cook, and floor show when Goodman "discovered" him. In reality (I looked it up) Hampton had been a member of Louis Armstrong's orchestra and was pretty well known among west coast jazz musicians. Goodman was told by a friend to go see Hampton perform in LA. The scene with Hampton running an entire restaurant by himself was hilarious though.
I was also somewhat surprised that the movie didn't remake Goodman as a gentile. No one ever says the word "Jewish" but his parents both have Yiddish accents, his father takes him to a shul to learn music, and late in the movie his mother objects to his romance with Donna Reed because "you don't mix caviar and bagels." (by the way, Donna Reed was excellent casting for Goodman's high society wife Alice. I think the documentary said the real Alice's mother was a Vanderbilt.) Maybe because they had Goodman's cooperation they couldn't rewrite his life wholesale the way they did Cole Porter. Though, in reality he didn't get involved with Alice until long after the timeline in the movie. So they did a certain amount of changing history.
[I'm debating whether or not to include the Bechdel test in my movie write-ups. It's useful for what it is, but easy to overgeneralize in a way that is unhelpful. And I clearly don't use it as a deal-breaker the way the characters in the original strip do. So I may or may not make it a regular thing. That said, The Benny Goodman Story fails the Bechdel test. There are four women with speaking parts, but only two ever speak to each other -- Donna Reed and Goodman's mother -- and they never talk about anything but Goodman.]
April 18 movie: The Naked Gun. Now this is more like it. This movie was every bit as hilarious as I remembered. And I remembered it being pretty fucking hilarious. It's so funny the theme music alone makes me laugh, though there's nothing inherently funny about the theme music. It's Leslie Nielsen who makes it work. If he had been winking at the camera, the humor would have flopped. (Come to think of it, that might be why Top Secret! didn't work for me. Val Kilmer I mean.) Nielsen treats every new lunatic development as seriously as if he were acting in a Fritz Lang noir. He reaches a pinnacle of cluelessness worthy of Margaret Dumont.
I do have to mention that OJ Simpson as the good-guy sidekick is more than a little creepy in light of real life events. That's my only complaint about this movie.
April 25 movie: Top Secret! This follow-up to Airplane! starred Val Kilmer and parodied spy movies and Elvis movies. I have to admit, I was dismayed by how not funny I found it. This was the second time I saw it, and I remembered it being incredibly, hilariously funny. Then again the first time I saw it in a theater, which means I was 15 years old. This time I chuckled a few times, and laughed out loud only once or twice.
There was one moment where I felt like they really missed an opportunity: the resistance are in a cafe, and two girls run up to Val Kilmer and say "Aren't you Nick Rivers? Can we have your autograph?" Trying to throw them off, he says "no, I'm Mel Tormé" and they go away dejected. Then the other resistance fighters start to suspect him of being a spy, so he puts a song on the jukebox and does a big musical number. The punchline is one of the resistance guys saying "That's not Mel Tormé."
Wouldn't it have been funny if, when they say "How do we know he's not really Mel Tormé?" the real Mel Tormé had run up and asked for his autograph? That would have been hilarious. They did a similar gag with Ethel Merman in Airplane! and I bet Tormé would have done it. He was performing a lot in those years and that's around the time when he did Night Court. And I have to say, if you're a legendary comedy team and I'm thinking up better gags on the spot while I watch your movie, there's a problem.
May 10 movie: Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Excellent documentary about the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band. They were responsible for most of Motown's hits, and I remember when I found out that all those incredible songs had been performed by one band. I was shocked. I had always assumed that each Motown singer had their own backup band.
May 13 movie: Chained. Lesser (very lesser) Joan Crawford/Clark Gable movie. Crawford is the mistress of a rich guy who's wife won't divorce him. She meets Gable, they fall in love, she plans to leave the rich guy, but just then, dun-dun! The divorce comes through. The rich guy is so pathetically devoted to Crawford that she can't bring herself to leave him, so she dumps Gable and marries the rich guy.
Problem is, she's the worst liar in the world. Whenever anything reminds her of Gable -- and everything reminds her of him -- she falls apart, nearly crying at the opera, the races, out in traffic, you name it. Eventually the husband figures out what's going on and voluntarily lets her go. The husband's transition from "You're my entire world, I'd die without you" to "I want you to be happy. Fly and be free!" is so abrupt I got whiplash. But even more weird was the actor -- I recognized him as the rich villain in Saboteur. His delivery is exactly the same in both parts, which left me holding my breath, waiting for him to do something incredibly evil. The fact that he never did just made his gentle smile that much creepier. I guess that's why Hitchcock cast him as a villain.
The war on bamboo continues. We spend time on it every single day. Just walking around the bamboo patch snapping off new shoots. I've heard that May is peak growth season, and I hope it's true, because I don't think we could handle more.
For most of April, what came up were big shoots. Easy to find, easy to snap off, and didn't grow back where we cut them. Starting a couple of weeks ago, clusters of tiny skinny shoots are appearing everywhere. They pop up from exposed roots, from shoots we broke off before, everywhere. All over the place. The little ones sprout leaves immediately, which is bad because the goal is to prevent the bamboo from getting any sunlight. They're also, bizarrely, harder to break off than the big stalks. I have a sore spot covered with tiny cuts on my thumb and forefinger from those damned bamboo shoots. I guess I should use pruners. But I tend to step into the bamboo patch whenever I have a few minutes, like coming home from work or an errand or whatever, and I don't want to stop and go get the pruners.
You can sort of see what we're dealing with in this photo:
Little green shoots sprouting up among the ponji sticks. On the left edge of the photo is a whole cluster of shoots growing out of a couple we snapped off before.
Then again, no one said getting rid of bamboo would be easy. I've settled into a routine: a few minutes on the bamboo every day, and a long session -- an hour or so -- twice a week. Georg also works on the daily bamboo check, and he's been great about filling the truck with cut bamboo 2-3 times a week so I can go to the dump whenever I have time. We're slowly but surely getting rid of the mountain of bamboo, which feels great. In the past week he's also started digging up bamboo roots, which is crazy hard work in the concrete-like soil back there. (Really, it's a mixture of sand, clay and gravel.) Between the two of us we're staying on top of it. For now!
Here's a more pleasant photo: my favorite rose! It's Crepuscule, which I think means "sunset" in French? Anyway, I planted it right by the house because I love the orangey color. I'm thrilled to see how big it's getting. When I first planted the climbing roses I heard a saying: "First year, they sleep. Second year, they creep. Third year, they leap!" It seems to be true. I need to build a support for it so it isn't just dangling over the fence there. I want to train it to grow along the wall of the house and over the window.
In other garden news, well the front looks like hell, because bamboo has taken up all the time I would normally have spend weeding, and then some. The vegetable garden is getting a good start. We have sugar snaps, radishes, eggplant, poblanos, and tomatoes doing well. And spinach which was started too late, but who knows, we might get something from it. The squashes and pumpkins I planted in containers in the bamboo patch are taking off, with the melons not far behind. The giant alliums (or would that be giant allii?) I planted last fall bloomed and look gorgeous. I want to plant them on either side of the path up to the shed, half of which is currently under the mountain of bamboo. Well, this fall will be the time to move them and by then we'll have the bamboo cleared.
May 13 movie: Upperworld. Melodrama starring Warren William as an upper class businessman who, bored with his wife, starts an affair with showgirl Ginger Rogers. Not a great movie, largely because Rogers isn't in it enough. Still worth watching for the scenes she's in, and for Warren William. He had such star power. He always brings a movie to life. I read that he died young which cut his career short & is probably why he's not better known now.
May 15 movie: Benny Goodman: King of Swing. Good documentary of Benny Goodman. Lots of interviews with Goodman's family members, bandmates, and Goodman himself. Plus clips of many performances. My only complaint is there were no extras. It would have been nice to have the full performances that were excerpted in the movie, as extras.
I rented this because I'm doing a birthday tribute to Benny Goodman on the 30th. I also ordered a couple of books from Amazon, a biography and a discography. I'm so frustrated that they aren't here yet! This morning we went to the dump, did some yard work, and then in the hot afternoon I stayed inside and relaxed. It would have been the perfect time to start reading my books.
So I haven't posted in a long time. My excuse is that the blog had a bug and wouldn't let me post, and I didn't have time to deal with it, and I was using Facebook so much instead that it hardly seemed worth the effort. Well, recent developments on Facebook make it seem like a good idea to get the blog going again.
Let's get started with tonight's movie: Match Your Mood with Westinghouse. Outstanding! TCM has been showing a short training film overnight on Friday each week. The kind of thing AV Geeks does. This is by far the best one I've seen from TCM. It was an ad from 1968 for a refrigerator with removable panels which could be covered with veneer, textiles, wallpaper, etc. Lots of groovy parties full of groovy people who match the groovy fridges.
Rather than describe it, it's easier just to post the video. Thanks, Youtube!
direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKuIbTvXaFw
I have to say, "Astro-Glo Bronze" would be the best pseudonym ever. In fact, I may start using it. If you ever encounter someone online with that pseudonym, it's me. Glo for short. You heard it here first.
A couple of weeks ago I was saying that I was expecting an explosion of new growth in the bamboo patch, and I couldn't understand why it hadn't happened. Well, it's here! All it took was a week of hot sunny weather, and bamboo growth season has begun.
Georg and I walked around the bamboo patch this evening and found dozens of sprouts. When they're really small, it's easy to snap them off with your hand or foot. Though I wonder how small is too small. If I break off a sprout that's only an inch tall, will it continue to grow and just be stubby on the end? Guess we'll find out in the next few days.
The weather is turning and today was less insanely hot -- it was in the low 80s by the time I got home around 5:45. And we had a busy evening: besides the bamboo sprouts, Georg loaded the last of that old stack of lumber into the truck, finished mowing the lawn, and dug out bamboo roots to clear 4 spots in the bamboo patch. So I could set up 4 big containers in which I planted melons and squashes! Woo hoo! Moon and Stars watermelon, honeydew melon, mini pumpkins, and Sweet Dumpling squash. It's a winter squash somewhat similar to Kabocha that I got from Fedco. I've wanted to grow melons and winter squash for years, and could never find a place for them. I think this will work great. They'll have plenty of room to spread out, and maybe they'll even help to keep the bamboo down by shading the ground.
In other news, we bought a new TV. It arrived yesterday & we set it up last night. It's not a monster huge set -- vertically the screen is about the same size as the old CRT -- and it uses 1/3 the power. Less than an incandescent light bulb. Woo hoo!
So all those people a few months ago, crowing about how because it snowed, therefore there is no such thing as global warming. Now that we're having a week of high temperatures 20° above normal, those people are all buying electric cars and writing letters of apology to Al Gore. Right? Right?
I didn't think so.
This afternoon we went to the first baseball game of the year! The season doesn't start for another 2 weeks; this was an exhibition game between the Durham Bulls and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, for whom the Bulls are the AAA team. That made it a really fun game especially since a bunch of the Bulls were called up to the Rays over the winter, so there were fan favorite players on both teams.
We were expecting the Bulls to lose, and our expectations were met. Though we were pleased that the Bulls put up a respectable opposition, and came close to tying it up a couple of times. The final score was 9-6, Most of the damage was done in the disastrous second inning, when the Rays scored 6. The Bulls just weren't able to recover from that.
It was nice to see a major league team, and their mascot came too! The Rays' mascot, "Raymond," is a Dr. Seussish character with a big moustache. He and Wool E. Bull both participated in the game where the mascot races a small child around the bases. This time the child was particularly young and Raymond did a cute running-in-place move to let the kid get ahead. Unfortunately we were on the first base side, and Raymond stayed on the third base side near the Rays' dugout. So I never got close enough to take a photo.
Sometimes crowd-watching is just as much fun as the game itself. Today we had a couple of characters sitting near us. A woman who sounded like she'd never seen baseball before spent the game asking her male companion all kinds of questions, which was cool that she was showing an interest in the game. Less cool was when she got up and asked a man sitting nearby to stop waving his arms because she couldn't see home plate! Her companion kept asking her not to, but she insisted.
Also amusing was a little girl who got up in the seventh inning and started cleaning her seat with handi wipes. She spent two whole innings methodically rubbing down the entire chair -- arm rests, behind the back, everything -- using about a half dozen handi wipes. Finally she seemed satisfied with the chair's cleanliness ... and then moved to another chair where she sat for the rest of the game. I still cannot figure that one out.
We sat in the sun and even though we used sunscreen, both of us ended up with a touch of burn. We have some nice "after sun lotion" from Burt's Bees which I've been applying liberally. And, this evening we reached a decision on a new TV purchase. I was in no hurry to upgrade to HD, but our old TV has been sporadically emitting a high-pitched tone that ranges from "annoying" to "painful and headache inducing." It's been getting louder and more frequent of late, so it looks like time to replace the TV. We're looking to get something smaller and energy efficient rather than a ginornimous set.
We stopped into Best Buy before the game to see what the different kinds of HD look like -- we'd really never looked into this before, because we weren't planning to replace the CRT and I didn't want to know what I was missing -- and I learned a couple of things. First, the salespeople who ignore me when I'm looking for computer cables descend en masse when I'm part of a couple browsing TVs. Second, the best way to get rid of salespeople is to ask them technical questions they can't answer. Every time they try to make a sales pitch, ask another technical question. It drives them off fast.
My questions weren't even that hard, I didn't think. Just things like, "this one says it's Energy Star compliant, is that Energy Star 4.0?" Or "do you have a spec sheet which says how much power this model draws when in use?" The first salesman kind of offended me actually, because when I asked about Energy Star, well first of all he gave me a blank look. Then when I told him there was a new stricter standard that was going to take effect on May 1, and would this particular tv meet the new standard, he laughed and said "don't worry, they're not going to take it away!" Thanks for that, but I want to know about Energy Star because I want a more energy efficient home. Asshole. Then when I asked if he could find out the power consumption, he didn't even offer to look at the spec sheet, just said no and fled. It's pretty obvious that we can find out more searching online ourselves. My reading indicates that the least efficient TVs (plasma screens) can use 6 times more power than the most efficient (LEDs), so it's not a trivial concern.
It was in the 80s today! I had some work to do, and a meeting in the middle of the day, but I managed to get some yardwork in too:
This was the first day I put the seedlings out. I should have started hardening them off days ago, but at least I finally started! I'll give them another hour or two each day, until they can stay out all day. And then plant them!
Those stumps are the bane of my existence. I've been digging out stumps for ages, and thought I was finally done. But then I looked closely at two "dead" ones, which I thought I could get away with leaving in the ground. And saw new live growth on both of them! Time to bring out the digging bar again. A digging bar is a 5 1/2 foot long iron pole with a chisel blade on the end. To dig out the stump you drive the digging bar into the ground in a circle around the stump, using it to chop through roots and pry the stump out of the ground. It's really heavy, and I'm really out of shape, so I have to take lots of breaks. Georg got home while I was still working on the bigger stump and helped finish it off. That bastard had a huge tap root. It was almost as big as the aboveground trunk!
The best part is, while working on the stumps I found poison ivy in the bed! The leaves are just starting to open. I'll have to pull it early in the morning when it's cool enough to wear long sleeves.
Then I have a couple of bags of soil conditioner to work into the soil, and then I'll finally be ready to plant up that bed. Finally! I'm going to plant candytuft in the very front, then rudbeckia, then sundrops, then a whole bunch of zinnias going up the slope.
Sites I Like