Saturday, February 28, 2009
TiVo
posted at 11:52 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Lots of people know all kinds of good stuff about TiVo what with recording and wishlists and season passes and all that but having just gotten to see one of t2cgitw opening a birthday present I sent her even though I won't see her in person for a couple of weeks, I'm reminded of the awesome video and photo sharing feature. She's smiling and waving at the camera (me, in this case) so I feel as if I actually spent a few minutes with her. Fantastic!

Labels: ,

Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tower of Love
posted at 9:24 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
If you already know and like Leonard Cohen's music, the announcement of a tour and new album/CD will make you very pleased indeed. If you don't know his music, you really probably do and just don't realize it (Hallelujah, Suzanne, I'm Your Man, Tower of Love, Bird on a Wire, plus on and one). In any case, this article in today's NYT's art section is good reading. At one point, I spent several months listening to almost nothing else. There's something about his music and lyrics - not to mention his voice - that can be extraordinarily moving and compelling. There's strength, gentleness, humor, gracefulness, depth, silliness, word play... everything.....

Starting tomorrow (2/26), a selection from last week's Beacon Theater concert will be streamed online on npr.org/music and/or nprmusic.org. (That could make for an unusual office atmosphere.)

This piece from NPR's site is fun to read and fires you up to go see the man.

Labels: ,

Monday, February 23, 2009
Oscar
posted at 9:21 AM | Permalink | 2 comment(s)
I watched only some of the 81st (yikes - 81st?!) Academy Awards last night. Partly because I'm still expecting them on a Monday night in March (childhood sets patterns and expectations in stone, apparently). Partly because I hadn't seen any of the films. And partly because celebrity madness increasingly makes me mad, in both senses of the word, and there is no more celebrity-mad show than the Oscars. From what I did see, however, this piece by Mary McNamara is a slightly snide yet fairly accurate and amusing take on the evening.

One of the things I liked best was Angeline Jolie's earrings. Those big green teardrops were gorgeous, especially with everything else black. The other thing I liked best was Queen Latifah's singing during the "in memoriam" photos. I also liked the hope and optimism speeches of the "Slumdogs" winners, as I mentioned last night.

By the way, everyone raves about how gorgeous Kate Winslet is but could the emperor be wearing new clothes again? Am I the only one who thinks she looks a lot older than thirty-four, not physically so much as the expression on her face and in her eyes, and that when she smiles broadly her mouth turns down so much that she looks as if she's sneering really really hard?

Labels: ,

Points for optimism
posted at 12:37 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
My arms are metaphorically up over my head to shield myself from the pelting of phff-phff hailstones some readers may fling upon my head, but I must point out that the 2008 Oscar winners for best score, adapted screenplay, direction and film spoke explicitly and in careful detail about how hopefulness and optimism were their primary driving force when writing "Slumdog Millionaire" as well as the explanation for it getting made at all, not to mention finding a distributor who took it off the straight-to-dvd pile and got it so much audience exposure and enthusiasm that it earned 10 Oscar nominations and 8 wins.

Labels: ,

Saturday, February 21, 2009
Optimism and hope
posted at 9:45 AM | Permalink | 8 comment(s)
Former president Clinton talked yesterday about the importance of optimism and hope. Yes it's tough economic times, he said, but there is always a place for hope. Whether a few months or a couple of years or even longer, there is always an end to strife and it's important to keep that in mind.

I thought about that game where one team pulls a rope one way and another pulls it the other way. The team that pulls strongly together always accomplishes more than the team that argues and pulls apart.

It is important that we think and speak hopefully about Obama's plan for turning things around even if we think a different way would have been better. Pulling together accomplishes a goal; pulling apart does not.

Nothing is permanent - not war, not recession, not inflation, not depression - nothing. Living through difficulties, perhaps finding ways to weather them in creative and clever ways, can teach us how resilient and strong we are, show us that we can withstand storms and financial problems. We are people, hear us roar (to paraphrase Leon Russell).

I feel hopeful about Obama's presidency partly because so many people were touched and roused by his call to hope and change. He inspired a wonderful sense of optimism and excitement about life and the country and everything else. I'm sorry he has not been speaking with the same tone, recently talking more about how long and hard this will all be. There's a difference between realistic and negative. Right now we need realistic and positive.

Obama got our attention and gained our support for his ideas and proposals with beautiful words and oratorical skill. More, please! We need to continue to feel excited about trusting ourselves, the good in us, the good things that we can accomplish and be.

Labels: ,

Thursday, February 19, 2009
Breaking a cycle
posted at 9:12 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Not breaking a bicycle - you might brake a bicycle but why would you want to break one?! I'm speaking of breaking the cycle of abuse that one may have seen and therefore almost inexorably repeat. I recommend this article by Leslie Morgan Steiner for its simplicity and clarity, rare attributes for writing on this subject. I particularly appreciate her gracious and well-described awareness of how an abuser, almost always also abused or at least a witness to abuse, is miserable and deeply unhappy but caught in a trap that seems to find no release except through repeating the behavior.

Labels: , , ,

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Laura & Bernard Ashley
posted at 1:06 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
The co-founder of Laura Ashley has died in Wales, age 82. Bernard Ashley co-founded the design company named after his wife and opened the first shop in Machynlleth in Wales. When Laura died in 1985, there were 220 shops in 12 countries but at its peak, there were 500 retail stores worldwide.

He set up the new and unique fabric design company, Elanbach, combining digital printing technology for printing the fabrics with exclusively internal design by only four designers (himself, Regine Burnell (his wife), Emma Shuckburg (his daughter), and Tom Parr). The designs and fabrics are available online through a well-designed website as well as in Wales, in Paris and at Charles Spada Interiors in the One Design Centre Place in Boston. They apparently pride themselves on high-level customer service. Hmm, wouldn't new curtains and pillows be nice . . . .

Labels:

Monday, February 16, 2009
Renown(ed) Pictures
posted at 5:37 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
*From redoubtable blog friend Laura, I have learned that the title of a soon-to-be-published dvd collection uses the name of the production company publishing the collection, not an adjective-masquerading as a noun, as I thought. I feel I must apologize because the fact that it never would have occurred to me is no excuse for not doing a bit of research. To boot, Renown Pictures seems to have a mission I champion and is quite interesting.

Labels: , ,

New HRH Website
posted at 2:06 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
The monarchy of the United Kingdom has launched a revamped website. It's quite nicely done indeed, as they would say, by which I mean very simple, very navigable, easy to find what you want (assuming you're interested), etc., etc.

I wonder if HRH will ever tell her beauty secrets considering that she's an octogenarian and, in my opinion, looks better than she did in her sixties. I suppose she doesn't seem to have much to worry about from a so-called normal point of view but one person's ceiling is another person's floor, after all. Anyway, cheers to the thistle-bedecked-nearly-83-year-old and her new website.

Labels: ,

Discount shopping
posted at 1:13 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
So, after getting my car its 30,000 check-up and on the enthusiastic recommendations of two friends, I went to BJs to see what it was like. Yes, I'm one of the 11 Americans who had never stepped inside a shopping warehouse on my own steam until today (although I did go to Costco once with my daughter). I methodically walked up and down and across the aisles for over an hour and found several neat things. They have organic ravioli of various interesting kinds, paper sheet covers about half the price of Office Depot, Paneira soups (yum), packages of what looked like eight thousand batteries for about the price of 4 in regular stores, sealed-together cans of 12 cans of tuna for the price of 4 usually, fresh vegetables (even some organic though no organic bananas which disappointed me), loads of deli selections, etc., etc., just to name a few things that caught my eye. So I'm a member now, right? Especially considering their on-site bakery and that I wanted to grab a dessert for tonight, right? Well, no. Nope. Wrong. And here's why. I brought my one-day pass up to member services and the guy stirred from his elbow-leaning conversation with the other person there and roused himself enough to point to the coupon and say, "See this? just to let you know you'll be paying a 15% surcharge unless you join." Mind you, I'd seen the comment but interpeted it to mean the discount would be a fixed 15% on the first visit even if prices were lower for members. The fee is $45 a year. Assuming a 15-20% discount over regular prices, one needs to spend $300+ before the fee pays for itself. That's not much of a problem since their merchandise is pretty good but I wanted to think about it before committing myself. It's a large commitment. The guy didn't even say "gee, sorry" or "occasionally we have free days or anything like that" (which someone standing in line did tell me). I would have coughed it up with just a small incentive or encouragement. But none was forthcoming. So I put the stuff I'd gathered back and, instead, rewarded my car for its check-up by getting it washed.

Labels: ,

Sunday, February 15, 2009
Anniversaries
posted at 9:28 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Nice juxtaposition of birthdays today - Matt Groening and Gallileo.  I bet Groening likes that.

Labels: ,

Saturday, February 14, 2009
New DVDs
posted at 8:16 AM | Permalink | 3 comment(s)
Fans of pre-code films should be saving their pennies for the next few weeks. Laura who muses writes that two collections of pre-code dvd's will be released shortly. At the end of March, Warners' Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 3, will be available and then, on April 7th, Universal will release its own pre-code collection. And there's a British film goodie coming out soon, too.

Warner's set includes movies directed by the marvelous William Wellman. The films are Other Men’s Women (Mary Astor and Richard Toomey), The Purchase Price (Barbara Stanwyck, Lyle Talbot and George Brent), Frisco Jenny (the fabulous Ruth Chatterton), Midnight Mary (written by Anita Loos and starring Loretta Young), Heroes for Sale (Richard Bartlemass) and Wild Boys of the Road (Frankie Darro and Dorothy Coonon who later married William Wellman). Details galore at DVD Times. The films have been remastered of course and there are tons of bonuses included such as "two feature-length documentaries profiling the director, along with new commentaries, original theatrical trailers, vintage Warner Bros. shorts and cartoons of the era."

Universal's set includes the films Merrily We Go To Hell (Fredric March and Sylvia Sidney), Hot Saturday (Cary Grant, Randolph Scott and Nancy Carroll), Torch Singer (Claudette Colbert), Search for Beauty (Ida Lupino and Buster Crabbe), The Cheat (Tallulah Bankhead) and Murder At The Vanities (a young and awesome Kitty Carlisle and Victor McLaglen). Details at ClassicFlix. No extras except a short documentary.

British films fans also have cause to rejoice because a collection of three fantastic films made in the 50s is being released at the end of March entitled British Cinema - Renown Pictures Literary Classics Collection (The Pickwick Papers / Tom Brown's Schooldays / Svengali). One feels some alarm at the VCI Video folks' using "renown" in the title instead of "renowned" (nouns used as adjectives being as annoying as nouns used as verbs, cf. "to medal") so I hope the production values are not similarly problematic since aside from that * It looks wonderful.
* Update here.

Labels: ,

Friday, February 13, 2009
Ouch
posted at 10:43 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Disaffection.  I want to hear a positive spin on these.

Labels:

Saturday, February 7, 2009
A bit sad, really
posted at 10:24 AM | Permalink | 1 comment(s)
Realizing that this is written by someone who is not exactly a fan, it is nonetheless a piece that makes me feel a bit sad (here). I guess "be careful what you wish for" applies to everything and everyone.

The present time is becoming progressively weirder and weirder, on many levels. I mean, consider that it was exactly 45 years ago today that the Beatles landed in New York for the first time. All that's happened since then and all that's happening these days, in all kinds of ways.

Labels: ,

Thursday, February 5, 2009
King vs Meyer et al
posted at 11:59 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Come on, let's get our teeth into a controversy that's worth the time and effort (sorry, I'm being facetious). The headline reads: Stephen King denigrates Stephanie Meyer (author of Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn) and other popular writers.

All of which seems awfully silly since they both write books that tweens and teenagers absolutely adore. I mean, since when do writers of horror or vampire novels talk like smug intellectuals? Lots of people read Harry Potter, Nancy Drew, the Goosebump books, etc. Does it matter if they're on anyone's Great Literature list or not? I mean, what's really going on here? Is King concerned about his legacy in three or four hundred years?

I have to say that it amuses me that the main focus of his attack, she of the Twilight books, is a namesake of the same saint as he. On the other hand, it doesn't amuse me that King wildly slams other writers with such cavalier disdain. Actually it's rather offensive. He must think awfully well of himself. I guess he thinks he is such a fabulously good writer - that would be good in the sense of "of-the-ages" as opposed to successful and/or popular - that it's reasonable for him to assess and judge other writers, and throw the phrase "terrible writer" at some "very successful" writers like JK Rowling (Harry Potter), Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason and others), Dean Koontz and James Patterson.

But wait a minute. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't King also wildly successful? And when did any critic or academic ever suggest or imply that he's as "good" a writer as, say, Ovid or Addison or Thackeray or Trollope? Why does he think he's superior in objective and qualitative ways to other best selling and successful writers? In the interests of honesty, I have to acknowledge that I've no personal knowledge of his quality as a writer, so I'll more than willingly stipulate that he is phenomenally good. But how can even a really really good writer of horror fiction put his nose so ethereally high into the air and draw such negative comparisons with others and be so rude about it? (Keep in mind that the interview was given to a USA Today reporter so if he wants to get all high and mighty, there could be some aspersions cast as to that rag's intellectual status, though only if we wanted to go there.)

The U.K.'s Guardian published an article today after Stephen Kings' attack on Stephanie and the others. The good news is that now I know that the Twilight series is written by a Mormon and is about a vegetarian vampire.

Labels: , ,

Two weeks
posted at 9:19 AM | Permalink | 2 comment(s)
Obama has been president for two weeks and one day. Already there are rumblings in the press and polls because of the seeming disparity between promises of change and political as-usualness. Those of us who have been hopeful and optimistic (rather than adoring and certain) were startled but not especially upset when he appointed lobbyists and people who haven't been perfect. I will admit to chuckling at an imperfect moment this week, though, when Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that 500 million Americans are losing their jobs every month. Which would be tricky since there are only about 350 million Americans in existence and that includes children, very old people, statues and who knows all what else. Although maybe it's even worse than I thought and she's counting everyone as having two jobs and saying we're all losing both of them. No that's not it. Anyway, please give me brownie points for resisting pointing out the gazillions of bales of hay the press would have made of it had GWB said such a thing. Notice me resisting. Resisting.... Oh dear, I bet I lost my brownie points just by mentioning it, didn't I?

But to my point. I have to say I quite like the idea of people running things who themselves make mistakes and fell off the straight and narrow, because they know what real life is like. Especially if Obama thinks they're the right people for their expertise or past performance or whatever. We elected him and have to trust him. Isn't that what went wrong with Bush's presidency, to a large extent, after all? And it sure would be real change to have a government run by people who don't pretend to be better than the rest of us. It's smug and self-righteous and hypocritical that frosts most of us, not imperfection.

Labels:

Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Lists
posted at 9:13 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Ha, you probably thought I was going to be serious and have a list of terrorists or great books or something weighty and a little bit important. But no. Nope. Not at all. What I want to mention is this list of the twelve current shows that some writer(s) at TV Guide Online think are "twelve smartest shows." Uh, excuse me, but I can name at least two or three shows whose writers use complex sentences and even word play, not to mention character development, better than at least three or four of this list's shows, so at minimum this is an inadequate list. Admittedly, some of the shows on the list require vocabularies above a sixth grade level and some have mildly complex plot lines but how they can rank Damages below How I Met Your Mother in the realm of smartness is quite beyond me. So call me jaded and cynical but I bet these are really twelve shows whose publicity departments wheedled and cajoled said tv guide writer(s) to write about their shows and this was the oh-so-cleversmart hook they came up with to get people's attention. It worked, too, didn't it?

Labels: ,

Monday, February 2, 2009
February 2nd
posted at 6:12 PM | Permalink | 1 comment(s)
Don't you wonder who the heck was the first person to get up one morning, look out his or her window and say, "hey, is a groundhog casting a shadow today?" And why did he or she think there was a connection between whether that groundhog did cast a shadow (or not) and whether there'd be more winter weather (or not)? And how did he or she have enough marketing savvy and know-how to get the whole thing publicized all over the place to such an extent that it became a quasi-holiday? And why did he or she pick today instead of yesterday or tomorrow or even next week, for goodness sake? And has there been a reliable analysis of the reliability of groundhog shadows and winter weather on into March and April?? And what's the difference between a groundhog and a hedgehog, just by the way? Well, whatever and however all of that, today is Groundhog Day - an annual moment that's always a good excuse to watch Bill Murray's often hilarious movie - directed by Harold Ramis and written by Danny Rubin. I suspect many of us can recite the whole script by now. Can you? and do you have a favorite scene?

Update. For another take twist on it, don't miss Venomous Kate's Groundhog Day post.

Labels: ,

An outbreak of snowball fighting
posted at 4:20 PM | Permalink | 2 comment(s)

Westminster Bridge and Big Ben
Scottish sheep
 
Snowball fight in Parliament SquareA sand snow castle of Parliament

Snow in the United Kingdom is unusual, and a heavy one is very unusual. This week's snow surprised and disarmed many people. Some are amused, many are inconvenienced, some are annoyed and some are enjoying the enforced time off since trains and buses are not moving and driving is almost impossible with streets nearly impassable because it snows so infrequently that there are few industrial-size plows.

The Guardian reported that the snow "led to school closures and a widespread outbreak of snowball fighting" which is going to be my favorite caption for a while. Their photo album is fantastic - or, as they would say, brilliant - replete with pretty pictures that will be collectors' items since U.K. geography is so rarely blanketed by the white stuff to which we are all somewhat accustomed this year.

Labels: ,