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November 17 movie: Ice Station Zebra. Rock Hudson, Patrick McGoohan, Ernest Borgnine and Jim Brown star in a cold war submarine movie. It's not a great movie, but it kept my attention. There's a beautiful sequence early on where the submarine travels underneath the arctic ice. On the downside, the Ice Station Zebra set is laughable. It looks like they're standing on a soundstage with white stuff on the floor. Nothing at all like an icy wasteland.

This movie was previously known to me as "that movie that caused the worst ever episode of The Prisoner." Because McGoohan was off filming this movie so they wrote an episode where Number Six was put in another guy's body, so they could use another actor, and it's a terrible episode.

November 17 movie: Foreign Correspondent. I think this is Hitchcock's most underrated movie. It never shows up in lists of his great films, but it's one of my favorite Hitchcock movies, top 3 maybe. Joel McCrea and George Sanders play journalists who get caught up in a plot to steal British government secrets on the eve of WWII; Herbert Marshall and Laraine Day play a father and daughter involved in a peace movement which has been infiltrated by spies.

The great strength of the movie is the acting by Marshall and Sanders. Their characters are the most complicated and they do the most with them. Sanders in particular is wonderful as always. I love McCrea too, and he's great as the likable everyman who finds himself in the middle of intrigue. Edmund Gwenn has an unlikely turn as a nefarious character. There are also a couple of terrific set-pieces: one inside a windmill, and one on a plane that is just terrifying.

We went back to trivia with D. and S. for the first time in ages. We had a great time! And I'm not just saying that because we won!

The questions were really hard, and we thought we had done badly. In fact we had done badly, just not as badly as everyone else. We had a couple of strong answers -- Georg and I knew the names of all the members of the Fellowship of the Ring, which we thought was a gimme but from the groans around the room, maybe not; I knew Vitruvian Man (that's the name of that Leonardo painting of the man inside a circle and a square); and D. had the genius moment of the night, correctly guessing what the Mexican government gave citizens in exchange for weapons in a weapon reduction program last year. (the answer: an X-box. Who knew?)

The place was mobbed! Trivia night was always crowded like that when we used to go all the time, and I guess it hasn't changed. We got there an hour early and we might not have gotten a table if D. and S. hadn't been there already.

My cold seems to be waning and I felt a lot better today, but right now I've lost my voice again. A whole evening of talking, and talking loud to be heard in a noisy bar, and I'm ready to lie on the couch, watch ANTM, and not talk. I have a meeting tomorrow at 11:30 and if I'm careful I won't have to talk at all until then.

This evening was the Annual Laying of the Straw. That's the day when we look at the weather forecast, go "oh fuck! we're having a hard freeze tonight!" buy a bale of straw on the way home from work, and run around in the evening dusk laying straw over all the tender perennials, trying to finish before it gets too dark to see the plants.

We covered the fig, the gerber daisies, the snapdragons, the gardenia, the bay leaf, the dahlia, the artichokes, the amaryllis and the crinum lilies. I don't think the snapdragons, the bay or the crinum lilies really need it, but we had the straw and it won't hurt them. I'm not optimistic about the artichokes. Georg suggested that if they die, next year we try again and build them a cold frame. I saw on a TV show how to make one out of PVC pipe, clear plastic and zip ties. I wonder if it's really as easy as it looked on the show. I guess the hard part would be remembering to remove the frame during the day, so the plants don't cook in the sun.

I kept feeling like we were missing something. I must have been thinking of the Easter freeze two years ago, when we covered the blueberries and the hydrangeas in a (failed, as it turned out) attempt to protect the spring buds.

The one thing I regret about spending so much time on political volunteering this year, was the total neglect of my garden. In July and August I never do much because it's so crazy hot. And this past year, by mid-September I was volunteering almost every day and didn't have time to work in the garden. I still have a couple of perennials sitting in pots that I bought in July and never got around to planting.

We were pleasantly surprised to see how well the garden has held up in the face of such neglect. Okay, so everything is covered in weeds. The basic structure is still there, and since we got a lot of rain, a lot of plants are doing well. The bay leaf, for instance, was about a foot tall in early summer, and is now high enough to be seen outside our window -- about 6 feet I think. The verbenas are still blooming and generally going nuts. Next year we're going to have to cut them back; they're threatening to swallow up nearby plants. Several other perennials are giving us their last flowers of the season. And the artichokes (photo above) look great. Supposedly if we can keep them alive over the winter, they'll produce edible artichokes next year.

The big surprise is that several of the roses are blooming! There's an old song called "Roses in December" and we almost got there. Two of the climbers, Awakening and I think Sombreuil, have a handful of flowers. The Secret Musk Garden Climbers have also been blooming but didn't have any flowers open right now, just buds. Which alas, probably won't open since we're supposed to have a hard freeze tomorrow night. One of the potted roses was almost totally defoliated by some critter but still managed to pop out a couple of flowers. It's amazing. I always thought roses were fickle and hard to take care of. I guess that's just the hybrid teas. We never spray, never fertilize, I don't think we even watered the climbers this year. I spent several weeks researching before I bought them, and it looks like it paid off.

November 16 movie: Valley of the Kings. Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker star in an adventure movie set in early 1900s Egypt. She's trying to prove some theory that one of the Pharaohs had secretly converted to Judaism and he's the hard-bitten archeologist who helps her search for the pharaoh's tomb. Sound familiar? Georg compared it to Raiders of the Lost Ark though I was reminded more of King Solomon's Mines with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. King Solomon's Mines was a better movie but I don't regret watching this one. It was a decent ripping yarn.

November 16 movie: Platinum Blonde. Romance movie where newsman Robert Williams marries heiress Jean Harlow on a whim, but he really loves newswoman Loretta Young. There are a few good scenes -- notably one where Harlow's butler shows Williams the fine art of puttering -- but overall it's easily forgettable. I predict that within two years I will forget I've seen it and watch it again. Then I'll get to that puttering scene and remember.

November 16 movie: Roberta. As delightful as all Fred and Ginger movies, this one costars Irene Dunne and Randolph Scott. The four leads are really good together. Dunne is one of the great romantic comedy stars of the 1930s and Scott is surprisingly good if you only know him from westerns. Wonderful music by Jerome Kern, Otto Harbach and Dorothy Fields.

Here's an adorable clip of Ginger singing "I'll Be Hard to Handle" in a silly accent, then dancing with Fred. The setup is they're old friends from Indiana, but now she's posing as a Russian countess or something.

November 15 movie: Raiders of the Seven Seas. A very silly pirate movie starring Donna Reed, Lon Chaney Jr., and John Payne as the head pirate, named Barbarossa. I entertained myself by calling him "Barbarella" every time someone said his name. What can I say, after two or three bags of cough drops in one day you start to get loopy.

November 15 movie: Syncopation. This is a bizarre movie about the origins of jazz. According to this movie it was Jackie Cooper and Bonita Granville who brought hot jazz to Chicago. The movie hints at black musicians, and there's a character who's supposed to be King Oliver, but according to the movie his influence on hot jazz was to teach it to Granville as a child and then disappear. She's the first lady jazz piano player, Hollywood's version of Lil Hardin I guess. Except for the part about marrying Louis Armstrong (who does not appear in this movie, neither fictionalized nor as himself. For shame!).

This movie is still worth watching to anyone who's interested in jazz, due to brief appearances by a bunch of (white) stars like Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Connee Boswell, Harry James, Gene Krupa, and Alvino Rey. Also because it's so hilarious how they mangle the history. There's a fictionalized version of Paul Whiteman which is particularly funny. They describe his music as "taking jazz and covering it with marshmallows" which is, well, exactly how I'd describe Paul Whiteman. And in truth, Granville and Cooper turn in good performances. I read that they were dating in real life at the time, and it shows. They sparkle together.

(Georg just commented that in the later scenes they made Jackie Cooper up to look like Bunny Berigan, little moustache and everything. And in fact, Berigan did the trumpet playing for Cooper's character, so maybe that was intentional.)

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band

Bonita Granville

WXDU's local news program, Shooting the Bull, did an interview with Durham County Board of Elections director Mike Ashe. In my experience, Mike has the universal admiration of Durham County poll workers. I've never heard anyone speak of him in less than glowing terms, and I share the sentiment. I feel like he's the reason why we don't have to worry about suspicious "irregularities," partisan dirty tricks from either side, and so forth in Durham County.

Also, I love his jokes at poll worker training. This time he showed us a picture of the new stickers he said he'd gotten at a discount from Florida: they said "I Think I Voted." We all joked about being disappointed to get the real ones instead on election day. One of the judges kept saying, "Where's my 'I Think I Voted' sticker?"

I missed the interview live but listened to the podcast. Thanks to the Shooting the Bull guys for doing such a good interview and for posting the podcast so quickly.

(I'm also crushed that I wasn't scheduled to work at one stop on Halloween, and I missed Mike's Uncle Sam costume. Apparently he visited every early voting location so all the poll workers could see his costume.)

Marc Ambinder has a really interesting post on the Obama campaign's data systems called How to Tell Your VoteBuilders from your MyBOs, Your Catalysts from your VANs I spent a lot of time working with VoteBuilder and I think I knew it was integrated with MyBO, because I peeked at my own VoteBuilder file and saw records of volunteer events I had signed up for on MyBO.*

I knew a little bit of this at the time because I asked my field organizer what was this Catalyst that I kept reading about on blogs, and how did it differ from Votebuilder. She told me that Catalyst was the data and VoteBuilder was the interface, which is pretty similar to what Ambinder says. She also told me that VoteBuilder was only called VoteBuilder in some states & that during the primary in Iowa, it was called The VAN. I think that means she was working for the campaign so early that they hadn't yet given VoteBuilder its name.

We had a volunteer in the final week or so who had trained to be a "data fellow," which was apparently a volunteer data specialist. But then it turned out she couldn't travel for the campaign so she didn't get to be one. Anyway she said they had taught her what VoteBuilder is and how it all fits together, but they really hadn't shown her how to use the program at all. She was got up and running pretty fast though, no surprise considering she must have known way more about the program than we did, and we'd been using it for months. I wish I had been able to take that course. Just from a technical point of view it must have been really interesting.

*The main reason I peeked at my file -- and Georg's -- was to give us the "Do Not Call" activist code. I also told friends of mine who volunteered how to do the same. I felt like we earned it by volunteering. Besides, we were definitely going to vote so there wasn't any need for the campaign to call us.

This morning I learned that if you lose your voice from coughing all night, Skype is a good way to communicate with the people in your house. Better than passing notes.

This morning we saw a pro-high fructose corn syrup ad. Freaky. The sad thing is, I bet the ad will be effective. It implied that people don't know why they're scared of hfcs and in reality there's no reason to avoid it. I think it's true that most people don't know why they think hfcs is bad. And they may be persuaded by the argument that since they can't identify the problem, it must not be real.

Also, just saw an ad for a personal injury law firm, which featured a client saying "They were more than lawyers. They were human beings." Such frankness is rare.

one last thing: along with a bunch of other art car drivers, I just sent in an application for the inaugural parade. Our being accepted is highly unlikely; Georg put our chances between slim and none, and I think he's right. Four years ago they accepted 57 entries out of only 300 applicants, but I bet this year they'll get ten times that many applications. Still, it doesn't hurt to try. And how amazing would it be if we were accepted.

November 14 movie: Mary, Queen of Scots. Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson star as Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I. I'm a huge fan of Elizabeth R and I rented this mainly to see her. Elizabeth is kind of the villain, though I couldn't see her that way because I loved her so much in the miniseries. Redgrave's Mary is a sweet naif, which I have a hard time buying, but movies about her often take that point of view. It's kind of crazy to show a sweet naif having a tender love scene with her soon to be third husband, while her second husband lies in a drugged stupor in the next room. But there you go.

Anyway, there's a great cast here: Trevor Howard as William Cecil, Patrick McGoohan as Mary's brother James Stuart, Ian Holm as Mary's advisor Rizzio, and Timothy Dalton at his scenery chewing best as Mary's husband Lord Darnley.

November 14 movie: Sabotage Agent. This was the best of the spy movies from the past couple of days. A tight thriller starring Robert Donat as a British spy in Prague, and Valerie Hobson as a member of the Czech resistance. The movie was exciting from beginning to end. Also good work by Glynis Johns as a young Czech girl.

November 14 movie: Pot O' Gold. A break from the spy movies, this was a silly screwball comedy starring James Stewart and Paulette Goddard. The plot hinges on a radio program giveaway.

November 13 movie: Nazi Agent. This one was depressing. A peace-loving German expat is forced to spy against the US by his evil twin brother.

November 13 movie: Espionage Agent. Passable spy movie starring Joel McCrea as a diplomat and Brenda Marshall as his wife, a German agent.

November 13 movie: British Intelligence. It must have been Espionage Day or something on TCM. This was an incredibly convoluted movie about German spies in England. Everyone in the movie is an agent, double agent, or in one case even triple agent. It keeps moving at a snappy pace; I enjoyed it. Stars Boris Karloff and Margaret Lindsay.

November 13 movie: Stamboul Quest. Did you know that before Nick and Nora, Myrna Loy played vamps? Dangerous females from foreign locales. I guess they thought she looked exotic or something.

Here Myrna plays a spy during WWI. A sexy spy. Most of the movie takes place in Turkey, but she's German. Whatever! George Brent is the American civilian she falls in love with.