Movie Report: Some Like It Hot (1959)

Book coverSo after a couple of meh movies (The Day After Tomorrow and The Son of the Mask), I decided to go old school here with this black-and-white film on videocassette which I bought sometime, but I am not sure when–it must have been fairly recently as it was atop the cabinet, but I don’t see it in any gleanings from the recent past.

At any rate, the story: A couple of down-on-their-luck musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) in Chicago, 1929, see a mob hit, so they go on the run by posing as women so they can join an all-woman band heading by train to Florida on a several-month-long engagement. One of them (well, the both of them) are hot for the lead singer, played by Marilyn Monroe. Monroe’s character hopes to find a millionaire instead of a no-good saxophone player. Curtis’s character, the saxophone player, also portrays a millionaire to woo her. Lemmon’s character (whilst portraying a woman), however, draws the attention of an actual millionaire whose trappings Curtis’s character uses in his deception. Then, the mobsters show up at the same hotel for a country-wide mobster meeting, and hijinks and more gunplay ensue.

Definitely a more grown-up film than The Son of the Mask. And it’s a bit more sophisticated than what you get out of modern comedies even though some of its themes match what we might have seen on the big screen up until recently, where everything got so serious. Or television–I couldn’t help but remember Bosom Buddies (the trailer played before the film, and it said starring Marilyn Monroe and her Bosom…. Buddies). What’s weird is that Wikipedia says it was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Actor–but only won for Best Costume Design. I guess it won that because many of Monroe’s gowns made it look as though she were effectively topless. Or just dressed like a celebrity in 2025.

I liked it. And I’m starting to think I should pick up any black-and-white film I find on home media whenever I can just so that they don’t end up in the landfill somewhere. I’ll probably like most of them better than the 21st century fare I come across.

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Movie Report: Son of the Mask (2005)

Book coverClearly, I have decided that it’s the right time to clear out some of the lesser films in the cabinet. And, brother, the cabinet is full of lesser films. I bought this sequel to 1994’s The Mask at some point in the past (before I was fastidious and fatuous in enumerating most of my media purchases here on the blog). I saw The Mask in the theaters one night when I was staying with Dr. Comic Book on one of my excursions to Milwaukee right after I graduated. I remember that he and some of his city friends, who were some miscreants, got a hold of a video cassette of a non-Milwaukee town councilman shooting himself at a news conference, and we watched it several times because they thought it was a hoot. Me, not so much, but I can still see it in my mind’s eye. Eh, but we were talking about The Son of the Mask, a sequel that came out eleven years later when Hollywood was new to mining old movies and properties. Although two of the last three films I have seen were dated 1993 (Grumpier Old Men) and 1997 (Alien: Resurrection), so maybe this has been a constant Hollywood thing which Millenials Discover and post on the Internet about. After all, my pool company is named after a swimming champion who played Tarzan (Buster Crabbe), and that’s not the swimming champion who played Tarzan that my boys and I watched (Johnny Weissmuller), not to mention the Tarzan I watched on television (Ron Ely) or the film that we saw on HBO (Christopher Lambert). But I really am going at length to talk about anything but this film.

Well, enough of that. In this film, the mask from the first film has washed to Fringe City, where a dog finds it. The dog belongs to a cartoonist who’s working as a costumed character at an animation studio (played by Jaime Kennedy, whom I think was supposed to become a thing at that time). Cartoonist’s wife wants to have a baby, but cartoonist is unsure. But when he needs a costume for a Hallowe’en party, he puts on the mask and revives a party from its doldrums, and he comes home and sires a baby. But! Because he was wearing the mask, the baby has the powers of Loki. Which somes in handy, because Odin has charged Loki with finding the mask because it’s causing havoc amongst the mortals. Then the wife has to go off for a week and leave the cartoonist, now tasked with coming up with a pitch for the networks based on the antics of his character–him while wearing the mask at the party. The dog, jealous of the baby’s attention, puts on the mask, and we get the dog and the baby competing for the father’s attention, sort of–the baby, fed on a visual diet of cartoons (so the cartoonist can work), tries to make the father crazy so he can go to the psychopathic hospital. Also, Loki is closing in to find the mask.

So it’s a silly little live-action cartoon of a film that lacks the Jim Carrey of the original, and, to be honest, a lot of the stakes of the original. I mean, they did go in a different direction (they actually invoke the difference between Alien and Aliens, which is the second time I’ve come across this explanation for a change in direction in a franchise recently–although, perhaps, the first was when looking into Alien: Resurrection). It would probably have done a little better as an independent story of some sort, but I guess they had enough in the Mask mythos (the comic books and the film) that they rolled with it. Not as good as the original, and more of a cartoon/kids movie.

It did feature Traylor Howard as the wife/mother, though. Continue reading “Movie Report: Son of the Mask (2005)”

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Checking Out The Background Books

So I stumbled upon a YouTube video called Why Isn’t China Collapsing? (spoiler alert: the video does not actually offer an answer), and the podcaster vtuber Mr. Beast meets Zeihan knockoff host, erm, hosts an “expert” on China (I put quotation marks on it because I’m not sure anyone is an expert on anything these days–I mean, I’m not even an expert on napping, but I have studied it for hours a day for decades). And the expert has books behind him. Which I look at closely, of course, which is how I spend my time on Zoom meetings when I can. Which is not often, because young people on Zoom meetings these days have so few books.

To our left (his right), I see a nice, dust-jacketed set of The Story of Civilization. Mine is a mishmash of former library copies, some with dust jackets and some without. I finished the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, in 2023, speculating I could finish the series in a decade if I read one a year. But, oh, gentle reader, I got bogged down in The Life of Greece last year. And just earlier this year, I bought a copy of The Age of Voltaire in Nixa, and I put the lesser copy on the free book cart at church, where it has languished for over a month.

To his left, our right, I see Battles and Leaders of the Civil War which looked awfully familiar. I might have a set of those around here, inherited from my beautiful wife’s uncle eighteen years ago. I see that the “expert” has them shelved out-of-order though.

You know, I should step away from the computer here and sit in the reading chair to work on some reading stamina if I ever hope to get through these two sets plus Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln (4 volumes), Churchill’s history of World War II (6 volumes), Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples (4 volumes), and Ben Wolf’s “Ghost” trilogy (3 volumes).

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They Want You To Feel Like A Hypocrite, MAGA

Two stories on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Web site today:

  • By denying Eucharist to detained Catholics, we fail ourselves, wherein I guess we’re supposed to feel guilty that federal officials are not allowing protestors and priests who march to detention facilities access to give illegal immigrants communion. Because if you were a Christian, you would want illegal immigrants to have all the rights and benefits befitting their status. It’s in the Bible! Look it up!
  • Federal shutdown means less Missouri land for hunting and fishing this year, because you like guns and killing Bambi, don’t ya? Isn’t it worth it to give the aforementioned illegals health care and to restore various other slush funds? Apparently, this program is also part of a federal slush fund paid to states to pay to private landowners, but, c’mon, you guys with camo hats? CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN!

These are things the journalists themselves probably do not value, but they’re writing about them because they hope you will more than you like the thought of a shrinking federal government.

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Movie Report: The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Book coverWhat an absolutely ludicrous movie.

A couple years ago, I took my brother to a medical appointment in St. Louis and spent the next night with him in eastern Illinois before heading home. They watch a lot of television and movies out there, and my new sister-in-law put this film on, claiming it was one of her favorites. I made it maybe 60% of the way through before turning in for the night. So I spotted it in Nixa last August, and I picked it up. And decided Friday night was exactly the night I needed to watch it.

Oh, boy. Okay, so the story: Dramatic scene in Antarctica where a team of scientists is retrieving ice cores for paleoclimatic research but an ice shelf happens to break off just then. So Dennis Quaid, who does not call anyone “char” in this film to my disappointment, has to leap a growing chasm to get the cores. Twice he leaps it, dramatically. Whew! Cut to a climate conference where he presents a theory that a dramatic climate reversal can happen if the oceans get too much fresh water, killing the North Atlantic current. But! The Vice President, who happens to have traveled to this climate conference because that’s what Dick Cheney stand-ins do, go to these sorts of things to poo-poo the sentiments. BUT! The ice shelf that broke off at the dramatic beginning of the movie just so happens to trigger that scenario, and instead of a new ice age starting in a couple of hundred years, it happens in the next week.

So the first part of the movie is a special effects bonanza of strange disastrous weather events, from giant hailstorms in Tokyo to super tornadoes that destroy downtown Los Angeles to the creation of super storms which are not only dropping many feet of snow on the northern hemisphere, but also have giant “eyes” like hurricanes where the temperature drops to 150 degrees below zero (centigrade, presumably, but who knows–it was made for American audiences) and anything caught in that eye is flash-frozen instantly. These special effects scenes are broken by groups of people watching news reports about these events, and then some scienting going on, where models need to be run on mainframes, and wake Dennis Quaid when you get the results, which will indicate sudden bad cold which is only possible with Hollywood special effects.

Then, the next bit is a trek bit, where Quaid’s scientist has to go from Washington, D.C., to New York rescue his son, played by Jake Gyllenhal, who is holed up in a room with a fireplace in the New York Public Library where they build a fire by burning the effin books instead of, I dunno, all the wood furnishings, furniture, desks, and chairs in the building first which would, you know, burn longer and better than effin paper, but, c’mon, it’s Hollywood, baby. Does he get there on time? Dunh dunh dunh! Yeah, then end, but not before the scientist convinces the president to evacuate the northern states, which leads to scenes of the Mexicans closing the border to American refugees and Americans storming across the border anyway (how things are reversed!), although anyone with a gorram brain knows that nobody, much less hundreds of thousands of Americans, are driving from Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, Washington, and North Dakota to Texas overnight, and if they are, there’s an awful lot of room in the southern states for them. But, eh, it’s freaking Hollywood, baby.

Apparently, this film made half a billion at the box office. Which leads me to a spurious assertion that there was a time, a couple of decades, perhaps, when a special effects bonanza experience could carry a film–where people would go to see things in the theatre to be thrilled, so the tornadoes ripping apart Los Angeles or the White House (and Los Angeles) getting blown up by aliens (as in Independence Day, another film by the same director) was worth a couple million in box office receipts. But that time might have peaked with Avatar–and when special effects bonanzas, especially the CGI kind, became so commonplace that they stopped being worth seeing a film for alone. But don’t expect me to put together a Substack-length piece defending this thesis.

So: Yeah, this movie was dumb in so many ways. It’s like someone put Independence Day, Zardoz, a bunch of disaster movies, The Forge of God, and a source book by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber into a blender and this script came out. Which is not to say that is not what, in fact, happened.

So: Yeah. Oh, what rubbish, but high budget spectacle rubbish.

But, Brian J.! Of the two The Day After Tomorrows you’ve suffered through, which is worse? The film or the book with Adolf Hitler’s frozen head which got a two million dollar advance and hit the New York Times best seller list in 1994?

Yes.

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Book Report: Brute Force: Betrayals by Dean Wesley Smith (2003)

Book coverWow. I bought this little paperback eleven years ago. I don’t even remember the church where the garage sale was held–it’s probably turned over a couple times since then as it’s a large space on the end of a building with a Subway and fusion Chinese restaurant in it. I’m not sure if it’s a business or church these days–I will have to give it a passing glance when I’m passing by next time.

At any rate, this is a prequel to the XBox game Brute Force which is a squad shooter. Those days were before the Internet-connected games really took off, so it’s one player switching between the characters, and you don’t get to choose the characters. You get a tank, a sniper, a thief, and the other guy. I presume. I haven’t played it, and it does not look to have spawned a franchise like Halo did.

So the book starts off with two different special ops teams handling two different assignments on two different planets; Hawk and Flint are taking down some rebels on a planet, and Tank is inserted to take down some space pirates. Each is on a team of four, but I name the people who apparently make it into the game (again, this is a prequel about how they meet). Each finds evidence that high-ranking officials might be working with the space pirates and/or a religious cult, including high-ranking officials in the special operations heirarchy. So you get a lot of intrigue amongst those corrupt officials and then some set battles with a video game flavor. Game mechanics are nodded to, as the operatives can have a share of the “treasury” of the mission target and buy better armor. So part of the plotting is unraveled, the operatives go on a mission that is set up to eliminate them but emerge triumphant, and then they’re sent on another mission and the book ends unsatisfyingly as it sets the story up for the game. Maybe they were hoping to set up a franchise, but did not for some reason. Apparently, the game was very big in the day, but it never got a follow up.

I know, I know; I dinged Ben Wolf’s book The Ghost Mine for being too informed by video games (and I just bought the others in the series because I didn’t want to hurt the kid’s feelings). So this is a book based on a video game, but its writing is informed by other books–that is, the writing has a little more depth to it maybe than the Wolf books (although I have started on the second in the series immediately upon finishing this book, so I will better be able to speak to that in a week or so). Kind of like old movies were informed by stage plays and books, but modern movies are based on older movies and television shows, so we’re getting photocopies of photocopies now. Maybe I’m painting with too broad of a brush (sorry, Ben, if so).

But I’ve found that older books based on video games are just better than modern self-published books. Perhaps mine included, although I do laugh at John Donnelly’s Gold when I re-read it. Perhaps I should actually write something else to see how I would measure up. But I’m afraid I would find my writing informed by twee blog book reports and one line “ha, ha!”s at modern events.

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Book Report: Vigils by Aline Kilmer (1921)

Book coverI bought this book over the weekend in Davenport, and I asked “Which one will I read first? You know.” Of course it was the shorter book of poetry. I did not take a stack of books with me–I remember from my trip last year and similar trips that I don’t tend to read a bunch in hotel rooms, so I only brought two paperbacks that I did not touch and a couple of magazine which I did. And, of course, I started reading this collection of poetry. I’ll often jump on a new acquisition instead of what I brought (see also The Marriage of Bette and Boo which I bought in Leavenworth in 2017 and started in the hotel that night).

At any rate, this is a book report and not a Brian’s reading habits report (who am I kidding? Book reports on this blog are often just that), so let’s talk about this. Aline Kilmer, as the cover says, was Joyce Kilmer’s widow, and topically, many of the poems in the book actually deal with that lost (with a title like Vigils? Who would have guessed?). The verses are pretty light, with decent rhythm and some end rhymes. Nice, I guess. Nothing earth-shattering, but okay. To be honest, that’s what I remember of Joyce Kilmer, too. I thought I’d read a volume of his work, but I was probably thinking of the time when we covered the poem “The Trees” during our Coronavacation Homeschool Supplementing in 2020.

So, well, nice. The cover is wrapped in mylar, and I guess this book is over a hundred years old now. I see that one sold on Ebay without the dust jacket for $15 this month, so someone is interested in them. I won’t be ordering her other work online, although I might pick them up if I find them in the wild. A quick read to pump up the annual total (currently: 72).

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Book Report: The Complete Odes by Pindar, translated by Anthony Verity (2007)

Book coverAh, gentle reader, this is the best book with two peepees on the front cover that I have ever read. Hopefully, gentle reader, this is the only book with two peepees on it that I own, but given that I own a lot of classical Greek and Roman literature, one cannot be sure.

This book, which I bought earlier this year, contains poems praising the victors at assorted Greek game festivals circa 2600 BC, including the Olympic games but others of across (what would become) Greece. Many of them include some lineage of the victors, some tracing their past to gods, and in doing so, Pindar includes some bits of myths and stories as he name checks gods, heroes, and ancient leaders in the fashion of a rap track calling out or calling out to other rappers. The book itself has end notes in the, well, end, but without any markers for end notes in the poems themselves. It made for easier reading in the moment as one was not constantly dropping eyes to the footnotes or flipping to the back, which made things smooth for me as I just let the things roll over me, but they were there if I needed to look things up to make connections to other works or for a paper.

I’m not sure what liberties the translator might have taken with the text–probably not too much, as we’re not steeped in 2007-era slang (although someone does, indeed, have some truck or not with something), but the poems in addition to praise for athletes and gods, includes some insights into the human condition which I noted and will henceforth have quoted.

From “Olympian 2”:

But when some deed has been done, right or wrong,
not even Time the father of all things can undo its outcome;
yet with the help of good fortune men may forget it.
Grief dies when confronted with noble joys,
and its enduring bitterness is beaten down
when fortune sent from a god
lifts a man to prosperity’s heights.

From “Olympian 5”:

If a man waters healthy prosperity
and is content with a sufficiency of possessions,
and adds to his good repute,
he should not strive to become a god.

From “Olympian 6”:

Success without labour is not honoured among men,
either on land or in hollow ships;
but if noble deeds are accomplished through toil,
many people remember them.

From “Pythian 1”:

If you should speak in keeping with the occasion,
plaiting the threads of many matters into a brief whole,
men will find less fault with you;
for wearisome excess blunts the edge of keen expectancy,
and in their secret hearts men are especially oppressed
when they hear praise of other citizens.
Nevertheless, since it is better to be envied than pitied,
do not deviate from your noble course.
Steer your people with the rudder of justice,
and forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.

From “Pythian 3”:

If a man holds to the path of truth in his mind
he must be content with whatever the blessed gods send him.
Gusts of soaring winds blow now this way, now that;
lasting prosperity does not visit men for long,
even when it has attended them with all its weight.
I shall be small when times are small, and great when they are great.
Whatever fortune comes my way I shall respect it with my mind
and nurture it according to my powers.

From “Nemean 3”:

It is by inborn distinction that a man gains authority,
while he who has only been taught is a man of shadows;
he veers further and thither, and never enters the arena with a confident step,
trying out thousands of exploits in his futile mind.

From “Nemean 4”:

And yet, though the deep salt sea grips you by the waist,
hold out against its scheming; we shall enter the contest
in full daylight, far stronger than our adversaries,
while another man, with envy in his eyes,
pours out his empty opinions in darkness,
and they fall to the ground.

Honestly, it’s almost proto-stoic. I’d have to dig into my notes from the part of the first of the volumes of Copleston’s The History of Philosophy (being I only got a couple of chapters into the first paperback in the series, I only have notes on the early Greeks) to see who might have influenced Pindar.

Of course, were I that sort of fellow, I probably would have read the end notes. Or more of The History of Philosophy for that matter. Or even The Story of Philosophy by the Durants which I have around here somewhere.

Also, I want to share that I know what pankration means; it’s ancient Greek MMA. You can be sure that I am working this into conversations as often as possible. This behavior might explain why so few have conversations with me.

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“No Truck” Alert

Ah, gentle reader; I have been on the alert for the “no truck with” slangism since the 1990s, and I have come across it twice in books I’m reading or I have recently read, one from the 1920s and one translated in 2007 (you’ll see in the book reports, gentle reader, eventually).

But I also want to point out that the inestimable Kim du Toit used the very phrase today:

Needless to say, the U.S. will have no truck with this nonsense — at least, the current generation of U.S. leaders won’t….

Have I ever seen the phrase where someone or something has truck with? No, it’s always the negative.

MfBJN will keep you up-to-date on appearances of this phrase. Check back often!

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Good Book Hunting, Friday, October 10, 2025: Davenport, Iowa

Well, this weekend I took the tour of state capitals, driving through three but really visiting none, on the way to CornCon in Davenport, Iowa, and then a quick stop in the Milwaukee area to drop in in family too briefly.

As I did last year, I stopped by the Source book shop on 3rd Street, and Ben Wolf had a table peddling books.

So I got a couple.

First, I stopped at the Source, and although I wanted to buy everything in their better poetry section upstairs, I only got:

  • Vigils by Aline Kilmer (Mrs. Joyce Kilmer). I explained to the guy ringing me out who Joyce Kilmer was. I am not sure he was impressed.
  • Departmental Ditties and Barrack-Room Ballads by Rudyard Kipling, a handom 1899 omnibus edition.
  • Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm during the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, which I got in the lower-priced basement local history section. The guy behind the counter said they had several copies, but this is the first they sold.

They had a couple illustrated editions of James Whitcomb Riley’s works a la Old School Day Romances and other old editions of Kipling. They’re not crazy expensive–under $20 or so or maybe $30 for some titles–but they’re not dollar or two dollar books, either, and it wasn’t half-price day. So I limited myself. Perhaps by the time I go back, should I do so, next year, I will have read more about the local history and I can tell conference attendees things they don’t care about.

I asked Ben Wolf what was new, and he asked me what I’d read (The Ghost Mine is all, although I bought a copy of his western and the start of one of his cyberpunk/fantasy series.

He convinced me to buy:

  • The Ghost Pact and The Ghost Plague because when I picked up the second one, he assured me I would want both because the second ends on a cliffhanger. Did I say that I wouldn’t get the next two in the series? Well, that was last year, and I didn’t want to let the kid down.
  • That The Frost?, the first in a Santa versus zombies series.
  • Rickshaw Riot, which he co-wrote with another guy, about a developer who gets sucked into his video game, but others have, and because he came later, all the good classes were taken, so he has to be a rickshaw driver. This one actually was thrown in free because I was buying three other books.

Buying only seven books over a five day weekend is what counts as “austerity” for me, although I spent more than I would for a couple of boxes of books at a library book sale.

Which one will I read first? You know.

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As So Often Happens At Nogglestead

Tuesday, at 9:30, the youngest came down the stairs after work and sought a business self-improvement book for a project due that night. He’s the one who said, in fourth grade, that whatever book Ms. Cole was going to assign them to read, we already had a copy of it. So he was pretty confident that we could get him something immediately.

Ah, and gentle reader, if you pay attention to my Good Book Hunting posts, I have been wont in the past to pick up books on how to be a better salesman, how to be a better manager, and so on and so on and Scooby Doobie Doo. But I have dewonted myself recently from buying more of them because they just don’t interest me that much–much like I’ve moved away from political books which I bought in the early part of the century.

However, no matter how often these books get in the way when I am looking for something to read, I could not instantly find one or more to suit his needs.

I did, however, find two copies of Bocaccio’s The Decameron (bought first in 2021 and again in 2024).

Well, now I have to determine which to put on the free book cart in church, where my duplicates are going to live forever because I’m the only one who looks at the free book cart these days. Maybe I’ll recall all of my free books and put them in the little free library in either Battlefield or Republic where they can likewise molder whilst spicy monster, erm, romances move along (link via Sarah Hoyt @ Instapundit).

Oh, and seconds later, I gave him Tools of the Titans by Tim Ferriss which was probably a gift from my beautiful wife who also owns a copy.

So the so-often-happenses:

  • Son needs a book for a school project at the last minute.
  • We can find a book quickly to fit the need.
  • Brian J. finds a duplicate of a classic.

Also, note that I might yet have another copy of it somewhere if it’s in a Classics Club edition which I might have acquired before the I started with the Good Book Hunting posts (mostly so I can reminisce about buying a book when I finally read it many years later). Which also it-so-often-happens at Nogglestead.

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Book Report: My Turn At Bat by Ted Williams as told to John Underwood (1969, 1970)

Book coverI read Yogi Berra’s It Ain’t Over last month, and when I came across this book, I picked it up.

Ted Williams is seven years older than Berra and played with the mostly unsuccessful Boston Red Sox for his career. This book delves into his life story, especially his early years, a little deeper than Berra’s book. His family life was a bit troubled when he was young, but Williams found an outlet in baseball and played pick-up games, and then some organized games at the neighborhood park, and then into high school and a minor league team before breaking into the majors very young–one of his nicknames was “The Kid.” He always had a good eye, and he worked at hitting, and he became very good at it (in case you needed me to say it, gentle reader). He talks about his troubles with the Boston press, and even in this, his own book, he comes across as a character who was a little prickly at best.

Like the Berra book, it’s almost an oral history more than an organized autobiography. It came out at a different time in his career as well: Williams played until 1960 and was mostly away from baseball for a decade until he got an opportunity to manage the Washington Senators. The book was written/told to at that moment: he’s about to embark on his role as manager. Berra’s book came out after he had over a decade of work as a coach and a manager and after he was a national celebrity for being Yogi Berra. So perhaps it’s not fair to compare them, but one cannot help it.

So, a good read with a ballplayer’s insight into the first half of the 20th century. Williams holds a bunch of records yet, and he lost several years of playing time as he was called up for both World War II and the Korean War. I probably have a bunch of other such books seeded amongst my stacks. I won’t dodge them now that baseball season is over.

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Movie Report: Grumpier Old Men (1993)

Book coverBack in 2023, I watched the first one (also on videocassette). So when I saw the sequel in a thrift store in Berryville, Arkansas, last year, I picked it up. Like Alien: Resurrection, this title was in my video cabinet. So maybe it’s almost time to reshuffle and condense the holdings into the cabinet as much as possible to make it so I want to watch the recent acquisitions before a decade elapses.

At any rate, the film picks up not long after Grumpy Old Men. Lemon’s character is still involved with the Ann-Margaret character. The Mattheau character is leading a lonely existence. Their kids are planning their wedding. And an Italian woman, played by Sophia Loren, plans to open an Italian restaurant in the old bait shop. So the bulk of the movie is really the two men trying hijinks to keep the restaurant from opening; Mattheau’s character and Loren’s character starting off as rivals but becoming lovers; and tensions arising as the old men “help” with the wedding planning. When tensions boil over and the bride declares the wedding to be off, Mattheau and Lemon revert to their rivalry of one-upmanship in pranks.

So an amusing film if you’re of a certain age, which is probably “old man.” And the film does feature Sophia Loren, who was, what, 63 when this film came out? Still very stunning. Of course, I’m closer to that age than I was back then.

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Movie Report: Alien: Resurrection (1997)

Book coverI grabbed this film from within the cabinet because I didn’t want to watch the dozens of titles which I’ve recently purchased. And, I thought, “It’s the one with Winona Ryder, the third one.” Ah, if you’re a real fan, you are already telling me that this is the fourth installment in the franchise, and Alien3 is the third one of the series, the one in the orbital prison. Ah, yes, well, gentle reader, I eventually got that sense, too, when they were talking about this film taking place 200 years after previous events, and, oh, yeah, Ripley is a clone. So I’ve got the other one shuffled into the cabinet somewhere, and I guess I know how it ends.

So: Uh, spoiler alert for the previous movie, but Ripley dies, sacrificing herself after being impregnated with an alien queen. On a military research ship operating on the fringes of the solar system, the military is working to clone the alien by cloning Ripley from a blood sample. A group of pirates/mercenaries brings aboard some people in cryostasis to use as the hosts for breeding xenomorphs. Among them is a new crew member, Call, played by Ryder, who breaks in to where the scientists are holding Ripley in hopes of killing her before the scientists can extract the embryo queen, but she’s too late. And when the scientists actually grow some xenomorphs, donchaknow those gosh-darned killing machines escape at the same time as the pirates are trying to escape the space marines who think they’re up to something. So basically, it turns into a chase across the military ship while the xenomorphs. Fortunately, the new Ripley has xenomorph DNA mixed in with hers from the cloning, so she’s strong and resilient, but unfortunately is a little sympathetic to the aliens.

So it’s been a couple of years since I watched the first film (2021), and it’s certainly been a while since I bought the first, third, and fourth films (2013), so clearly I am not the biggest fan of the series. But I’ve seen a lot of things that slag on the movies after the second. Although the first was almost cosmic horror in tone as well as a slasher movie in space, Aliens was an action film, and this, too, is an action film and not so much a horror film, although it does have some budget for gore. So it’s an okay action film, with plot-dependent bad decisions and reveals/side quests/sacrifices that are necessary because the screenwriters are under pressure to deliver something cinematic.

So, okay. Given how long it’s been–almost thirty years(!), I am comfortable seeing them out of order. And I’m pretty sure I have not seen Aliens, the second film, available secondhand at book sales or garage sales. Apparently, people still hold onto it of all the films in the franchise.

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Movie Report: Who’s Harry Crumb? (1989)

Book coverI bought this movie last weekend and watched it right away. Actually, of that haul, I first picked out Revenge of the Nerds, but I then discovered that the disc was cracked and would play. Ah, gentle reader, I have not been in the habit of checking the condition of the dollar discs I buy–I have honestly only relatively recently gotten to the point where I consistently check to make sure that the folder contains the matching disc, but I might have to start checking the condition of the discs as well. Or not, if I don’t remember.

So this is a 1980s comedy whose plot we’ve seen before. When the daughter of a wealthy man is kidnapped, he contacts the Crumb and Crumb detective agency to investigate. That fellow, played by Jeffrey Jones (the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, if you need a reminder), is not a Crumb, and he puts the bumbling current generation of that well-reputed family of detectives on the case. Crumb bumbles his way through various plots at cross-purposes, including the wealthy man’s oversexed second wife, played by Annie Potts, who hopes to kill him before he can change his will, and the head of the agency itself being behind the kidnapping, hoping to get the ransom money to be able to afford the lifestyle that the oversexed second wife wants.

So it’s a series of often slapstick set pieces populated by Canadian comedians, and, you know what? It’s not a bad bit of film. It has its moments of amusement and isn’t a bad way to pass some time. You remember when these kinds of mid-tier movies, not blockbusters but not complete slop. They probably made more economic sense when you had a whole tail of other revenue possibilities for them besides the theater–video store rental sales, home video sales, licensing to cable or television…. Now you’ve got, what, cinema and streaming? So we lose out on films like this. The pity.

So I’m not the biggest John Candy fan, but I’ll think about picking up Uncle Buck if I can find it for a buck.

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Well, She Is From Up North

Not sure why my beautiful wife put Braunschweiger on the shopping list, but Braunschweiger she will get.

You know, we have been married for a couple of years now, and I am seemingly less equipped to read her handwriting than when we were younger. Of course, I have trouble reading my own handwriting at times. But I posit a thesis: Handwriting is used less to communicate between people these days and is more used for only taking notes for one’s self or for making lists. So it’s becoming, generally, less legible for other people to read than it had been.

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Right There With Adaptive Curmudgeon

He said:

“Depression People” wasn’t all old people, just some. You could tell by how they acted. They hoarded the tiniest resource. I remember seeing a box labeled “small bits of string” that had, you guessed it, small bits of string. It wasn’t a person who needed the bits for some logical reason, say a fly tying hobbyist. This was a person who’d been through The Great Depression. It created a desire to preserve things they might need. I remember other things; jars of buttons, dull needles, bent nails. All available for a song in the 1970’s. All carefully stored in case the “plenty” of 1970’s disappeared.

* * * *

Does some portion of each successive generation become “Depression People”?

I do not have a box labeled “bits of string”. I do have a bunch of campfire wood culled from old pallets. I’m damn near there aren’t I?

Who, me?

One of the reasons that I’m not making much headway on the garage is that I have so much stuff that I might use or repair someday, so I cannot throw it away today.

And AC talks about a broom that he didn’t want to get rid of. Ah, brother, I have not only a collection of brooms that do only an okay job and backup brooms that only do an okay job in the garage and a trashcan full of such tools in the shed, but when it comes time to retire them, I cut the broom handles off and save them for some unknown use in the future.

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