Today is significant in history for the 1927 release of The Second Hundred Years, the first Laurel and Hardy film in which they appeared as a team, as well as the 1942 debuts on radio of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and a weekly show by Abbott and Costello. It is also the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire. I suppose Mrs. O’Leary and her cow are a duo, but they are not terribly comic.
Talk about your favorite duo, comic or not.
Last week was pretty dull for me at work, as two of my favorite floor mates were gone, one to Montana, and one to California. They are Developmental Disability Case managers, and I have worked with them for 20 years. We tease, laugh, and help each other out. We only see each other at work. Work is mere drudgery without them. We are all set to retire about the same time, and imagine ourselves waltzing out the door on our last day like Dorothy, the Scare Crow, and the Tin Man.
Tell about your best work buddies. What made them special?
Back to my rant on reactionary headlines. Now I’m seeing news that some videos from quite a few years ago have been leaked from Navy archives, videos that the Navy says are “real”. They show unidentified objects that have never been explained. So now aliens exist and are among us according to the headlines.
Personally I’m not willing to say that we are the only life in the universe. As Matthew McConaughey says in the movie, Contact
However, I’m pretty sure that if there is other life in the universe, the human race doesn’t have it within itself to RECOGNIZE that life. I think that our definition of life is too small. Even our definition of life is based on what we currently believe to be life: “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants form inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity and continual change preceding death.”
I’m also pretty sure that any kind of life/civilization that can get to Earth is/will be way more advanced than we can imagine. So I’m not really concerned that the Navy video is really aliens – if aliens are here, they are advanced enough to keep themselves hidden from us. For all we know, aliens do walk among us and we’ll probably never figure it out?
What place in the universe would you like to visit?
In a TV murder mystery I watched over the weekend, the heroine is trailing some bad guy at a hotel. He leaves the hotel and gets into his car right outside. She comes out and gets into her car which is parked right behind his. That’s when I realized that Aristotle was wrong about art imitating life. When, in any movie or TV show does the hero or heroine have to circle the block to find a parking spot? Or park 3 blocks away and hoof it to where they are going? Or stop to pay a parking meter? Never.
It made me think about other things that never happen on screen. Nobody ever scoops poop when walking their dogs, nobody ever seems to put groceries away (although every now and then there is actually time spent in a grocery store) and nobody EVER stops to worry about birth control.
I think it would be nice to have a world in which I could always find a convenient parking spot and have my groceries put away magically.
What daily task would you love to have disappear from your life?
Wowser! Over lunch I decided to run a couple of errands so I wouldn’t have to do them after work. (I hate doing errands on a Friday after work – I just want to get home!) And, of course, the heat and humidity is in the “you’ve got to be kidding me” range. As I walked through the doors at Joann’s, the first big display is all about fall. Pumpkins, dried vine wreaths, autumn wall hangings, the works. Nothing specific to Halloween that I saw, but I was making a beeline to the fabric section. I’m guessing that if I’d wandered past the initial display I would have seen stuff for little ghosts and ghouls. It was so incongruous to me that they are selling items for the fall when it’s mid-July and 94° outside. If I weren’t already overheated from Mother Nature, it would make my temperature go up!
I’m not sure why this drives me so crazy, but when retail jumps the gun on holidays and seasons, I just dig in a little more. I just want to celebrate the season I’m in, thank you very much- no need to start stocking up on pumpkin-themed items just yet. And of course I’ve ranted here before about the Hallmark Channel running Christmas movies for weeks at a time during the summer months. I adore holiday movies (well maybe not all the Hallmark ones) but they definitely have their place in my world. And that place begins the day after Thanksgiving and not before.
So I guess I’ll just have to stubbornly keep ignoring the fall displays and the holiday movies until I’m ready. Sorry retail America.
What gets your temperature heated up? What do you do to cool off?
I’ve just seen that Doris Day has passed away at the age of 97. Born in 1922, she got into show business at the age of 17 as a big band singer and her first film was “Romance on the High Seas”. The first part of her film career was top heavy with musical comedy but she broke out of that mold in 1955 with “Love Me or Leave Me” which she always said was her best performance.
Her later life was filled with music and her deep care for animal rights. The Doris Day Animal Foundation is a very active presence and supports all kind of animal initiatives. She released her last album “My Heart” in 2011 and all the proceeds went to the Foundation.
Doris Day certainly wasn’t my favorite actress of all time, but I did admire her and thought she lived a full and meaningful life. The world is slightly less buoyant today for her loss.
Tell me your favorite and your least favorite Doris Day films?
In this world of super heroes and avengers, it seems as if everyone needs to get on the band wagon. I see in the news that an actor has been named for a re-make of “He-Man”. I didn’t realize there had even been an original movie, although I do remember the original tv cartoon series.
Apparently the first movie was a flop (or as they say in Hollywood “a commercial failure”) which leads me to wonder why anyone feels the need to try again. But then I see that the latest Avengers movie completed Sherman-tanked its way over box office records last weekend, so who am I to say that people don’t want more super hero movies.
I guess in a anxiety-filled world, imagining that there are super beings who can control a little more of their destiny is somehow comforting?
Tell me about the worst film you’ve ever seen. (Or worst book you’ve ever read.)
I had a nightmare last night. Don’t need to go into it but it combined two things I’m not crazy about and I even know what I’ve seen/thought recently that most likely triggered it. However at 3:25 in the morning, you just want to go back to sleep. I turned on the TV and pulled up Laura with Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews and Clifton Webb. I know the first 10 minutes by heart because that’s about how long it takes me to fall back to sleep with it playing. I didn’t make it 10 minutes in this time.
How to you deal with bad dreams?
Two years ago, when Dale retired from the Trail, I didn’t know anything about usage rights and although I had heard the phrase “public domain”, I didn’t really know what it meant. Dale taught me quite a bit about it and then I did further research to make sure we don’t get ourselves in trouble. That’s why Renee and I sometimes question photos and for the most part, don’t copy poetry and lyrics of other writers.
Since 1998, a work enters public domain 70 years after the life of the author. Before 1998, it was 50 years; to clear up the complexity of that change, they put a moratorium on releasing anything into public domain for 20 years. That 20 years is up and as of Tuesday, everything from 1923 is now officially in the public domain.
Some of the items now free to share are The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair, The Color of a Great City by Theodore Dreiser, The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, Rootabaga Pigeons by Carl Sandburg and New Hampshire by Robert Frost.
So in celebration of Public Domain Day, here is a poem that last week we could not have posted here legally!
Fire and Ice
by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Do you pay attention to expiration dates?
I’m doing my best Martin Luther impersonation this week. His words “Here I stand. I can do no other” were supposedly uttered at the Diet of Worms where he was having to defend his statements of faith before the secular authorities. It’s a motto I think I have to adopt.
You all know about my Sherlock Holmes fixation. I’ve enjoyed not just the original stories but just about every other form of Sherlock that I’ve encountered. Graphic novels from Japan, fiction about his later adventures with his wife, Sherlock in movies, Sherlock on TV, young Sherlock, a farcical comedy with Sherlock and Watson played by women and even Sherlock Bones, with Sherlock as a dog (actually two different authors have written about Sherlock as a dog). I even read a mash-up last year pairing Elizabeth Bennett from Pride & Prejudice with Sherlock Holmes!
But I’m drawing the line this week. There is a new Sherlock movie out and I just can’t do it. I just can’t. Not only slapstick, which I am not fond of in the least, but one of my least favorite actors. On. The. Planet.
So even though I like to think I’m open-minded, I guess there are dark rooms that I just won’t go in, and this is one of them!
Tell me about your least favorite movie.
Trail Baboon 