Category Archives: Entertainment

Entertainment Oddities, Some Involving Actors Named West

Posted on by

As it happened, on July 4 one of the channels was running a Batman marathon, and by Batman, I mean the one starring Adam West. Accept no substitutes. I watched two episodes, which is about enough at any one time, a pair originally broadcast one night after the other in 1966. Catwoman was the villain. At one point, after capturing the Dynamic Duo, she separates the two using a vacuum tube, saying: “It’s time to separate Damon and Pythias.”

Did I hear that right? A casual Classical allusion on mid-60s TV? Yes, indeed. Hadrian and Antinous would have been funnier, but even more obscure.

At a grocery store parking lot not long ago, I saw an ordinary sedan, one car among many, except for one thing: “NCC-1701” was detailed on either side. I couldn’t help mocking the owner in abstentia on the way into the store (Lilly was with me). “To boldly go shopping,” “Hope he doesn’t use his phasers in the parking lot,” etc.

She Done Him Wrong (1933) is an odd movie, at least to modern eyes. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to see the movie new, when it wouldn’t (presumably) have been so odd, but it was hard. Still, the movie must have had its attractions in its time, since it made Paramount a bucket of money in the pit of the Depression.

Mae West is one of those people now mainly known by reputation, and that includes my impressions of her. I’d never seen one of her movies until last week, when I watched this one. She’s famous for her one-liners, and justly so. And of course for her sex appeal. I think it helps to have been born around 100 years ago to fully appreciate it.

Another thing I wondered about was the setting. The movie was set in the 1890s, which the intro refers to by its common sobriquet, the Gay Nineties, a ’20s invention. I wonder just what kind of nostalgia people of the 1930s felt for the 1890s. It’s possible to be nostalgic about anything, so I guess that applies to a decade marked by its own depression and bitter labor disputes.

The Field & the Basilica

Posted on by

As of June 21, 2014, there was no new development that I could see at the Field of Dreams movie site, which is near Dyersville, Iowa, about 20 miles west of Dubuque. Apparently there’s been a hubbub – or maybe a brouhaha (not sure which is greater dustup) – about plans for further development at the site.

I won’t dwell on that. Enough to say that the new owners of the property, who have a mortgage to feed, want it to be more than a baseball field amid the corn, while some residents of greater Dyersville and others very vocally do not want that to happen. More about the fracas here.

This is the kind of tourist that I am: although I’ve never actually seen Field of Dreams, I wanted to see the accidental tourist attraction created in haste in the summer of 1988 to serve as one of the main sets for the film. Why? Because it’s there. Or more exactly, because I was going to be near there anyway.

Besides, Yuriko had seen the film. As we drove in the vicinity of the Field, her eyes widened a bit. “This is what it looked like in the movie,” she said. She saw it a long time ago, and couldn’t really remember the story. I’d never seen it, but knew that the movie involved ghost baseball players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson. (Maybe Shoeless Joe got a raw deal from Baseball in his lifetime, but in terms of posthumous fame, he’s one of the better-remembered ball players of the early 1900s.)

The site is appealingly simple. You drive down a small road to get to it, park nearby, and walk a short distance over to the baseball field. It looks pretty much like any other non-pro baseball field, except in a wet late June, the backfield is bordered by lush rows of corn.

Field of Dreams, June 2014The immaculate white house stands nearby, along with a red barn. I understand that the movie producers added the white picket fence around the house to make it look more like our collective notion of rural Iowa (and they had to paint some of the surrounding vegetation green in that drought summer of ’88). Odd, it didn’t even occur to me to go see if the house was accessible. It looks like someone’s house, which it was until recently, so approaching too close would have seemed like trespassing.

A fair number of people were visiting on that Saturday in June. No one was playing a game, exactly, but people were tossing and hitting balls, including a man taking swings at a ball pitched by a kid who probably was his son.

Field of Dreams, June 2014Naturally, there’s a gift stand. It’s a modest operation, not generating enough revenue to feed a large mortgage, I bet. In any case I bought a few postcards and a souvenir spoon for Yuriko.

Field of Dreams, June 2014The Field of Dreams isn’t the only thing to take a look at in Dyersville. The town is home to the National Farm Toy Museum, and while in theory that might have been interesting to visit, we bypassed it to take a look at the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, an enormous and very ornate Gothic church right in town.

The interior was restored in 2000 and ’01, so it must have some of the brilliance of the original 1880s design. How many small-town basilicas are there in this country? Not many, I think.

Thursday Debris

Posted on by

It’s been a brilliant run of late spring, early summer days here. Rain, but not too much. Heat, but not too much. A few mosquitoes, but not many. Last week at the Klehm we did run into some large clouds of gnats, however, especially on the narrow trails.

Klehm Arbortetum May 2014

See the gnats? Maybe not. The camera’s not that good. But they’re there.

I just finished reading Neither Here Nor There, an entertaining Bill Bryson book. Mostly he dispenses with background detail about the places he visits, and focuses on his own experiences in getting from A to B and seeing what he sees in A and B. Even better, his enthusiasm for going out to see things shines through. Not many writers can pull that off without being a bore, but he does. A small example, describing Rome:

“You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you’ve just missed a parking competition for blind people. Cars are pointed in every direction, half on the pavements and half off, facing in, facing sideways, blocking garages and side streets and phone boxes, fitted into spaces so tight that the only possible way out would be through the sun roof. Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.”

Since the travels he describes were in Europe in 1990, as well as flashbacks to the 1970s, he’s also detailing an increasingly obsolete style of travel, but one that I well remember myself, at least that of the last two decades of the 20th century. That is, pre-Internet, pre-smartphone, pre-debit card, pre-Ryanair travels. It won’t be long before — if it hasn’t already happened — smartphones or glasses tell tourists absolutely everything about getting to and being at a place. That’ll drain the life right out of the experience.

I wondered today whether the half-season finale Mad Men, broadcast Sunday, used all the lyrics of “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” I wasn’t very familiar with the earliest recorded version, so I looked it up.

As many songs were in the 1920s, much of it is instrumental. So yes indeed, the show used all of the lyrics. The 2010s recalling the 1960s recalling the 1920s. A remarkable scene.

That Cold Blood Moon

Posted on by

It was too cold this morning to drag myself outside and document the snow clinging to the April grass and trees. Why bother anyway? It looked more-or-less like this.

Actually a little less snow coated the ground this time than seven years ago, at least as recorded by my pictures. There wasn’t quite as much sticking to the branches, and none on the street. In any case, except for shadowy spots, all the snow vanished in the afternoon sun, pale and weak as it was.

Missed the early morning Blood Moon, as some headline writers seem to be calling the latest lunar eclipse. They’re nice to see, but not worth getting up at 3 in the morning, especially when it was snowing when you went to bed a few hours earlier. It’s a hard enough sell when it’s merely cold outside, as it also was this morning.

I didn’t miss the season opener of Mad Men, which apparently got low ratings. As a casual viewer of TV, the last thing I care about is ratings, especially for a show that’s going to end on a schedule anyway. It was a decent episode, neither the best nor the worst of the series, and as usual seemed to inspire a lot of commentary, so I won’t really add to that total, even in my small way.

Writing about television in general seems to inspire a body of ridiculous, or at least pointless, writing. Not long ago I saw a headline something like this: “Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead Occupy the Same Universe.” The only reasonable reaction to that is, who cares?

Winter Strikes Back: Sorry!

Posted on by

Here on our small patch of North American earth, we have a few hardy flowers, some buds, and a little green in the grass, along with a few bugs. Saturday proved to be as warm as advertised (70s F.), cloudy sometimes, sunny at other times. Yuriko and I took a pleasant walk at the Spring Valley Nature Preserve.

On Sunday, the warm air held the promise of rain all day, but it held off long enough to allow me to replace a dodgy hinge on our wooden gate and do other things around the back yard, such as pick up the wintertime debris that collects here and there. Lilly and I sat around on the deck for a while, and I could feel the air cooling down. In the span of about half an hour, we lost 10 degrees.

Today, cold and snow. So cold that it stuck, as of the early evening.

On Saturday evening, Ann wanted to play a board game. She plays more video games than any other kind of game, so I thought it was a good idea to oblige her. We don’t have that many games, though, and decided that Monopoly and Risk would involve more time than we wanted to commit. So we played Sorry! Lilly and a friend of hers played, too. Not the most engaging board game in the world, but it has its moments.

BoardGameGeek (“gaming unplugged since 2000”) mentions a Sorry! alternate that sounds interesting: “Sorry! can be made more of a strategic game (and more appealing to adults) by dealing five cards to each player at the start of the game and allowing the player to choose which card he/she will play each turn. In this version, at the end of each turn, a new card is drawn from the deck to replace the card that was played, so that each player is always working from five cards.”

Someday I need to teach Ann and Lilly the rudiments of Risk. Maybe they’ll never play it, but maybe they will. Once or twice a year in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I played Risk with some of my high school friends, and I have fond memories of the games. Eventually, we got to know each other’s strategic thinking pretty well, such as the fact that one of us (and he knows who he is) inevitably took the offense. That is, attack! Outnumbered? Attack! Surrounded? Attack! Just do it! Sometimes it worked out for him, usually not.

Centuries Come, Centuries Go

Posted on by

Last week I took note of some of the monumental items at the Oriental Institute Museum, but of course the museum is home to a lot more artifacts, and most of them were more modest in size. But no less interesting for it. Such as some dice from Roman Egypt.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERACool. Especially since anyone alive now, two millennia after they were made, could look at them and know exactly what they’re for, even if the games of chance aren’t quite the same. Even cooler is that dice were ancient even then, so much so that their origin is obscure.

Also on display were some knucklebones, an alternative to dice that are probably just as old, if not older (and the ancestor of modern playing jacks?). According the museum, “knucklebones of sheep or oxen were used to determine the number of moves on game boards. The four sides of each bone are distinctive, and each was assigned a specific number. They were normally thrown in pairs, allowing for ten possible combinations.”

The museum also sported plenty of figurines.

Eygptian figurines 1Still charming after all these centuries. Thought to come from a tomb of a courtier named Nykauinpu at Giza, made of limestone and dating from the Old Kingdom, Dynasty 5 of the 25th century BC. So by the time of Julius Caesar, this statue was already older than anything from the time of Julius Caesar is now. Even on a human scale (not to mention geological or cosmological), time’s mind-boggling.

On a sign describing another man-and-woman set of Egyptian figurines, I noted these lines, referring to the way the woman was dressed (emphasis added): “This style of dress was popular for the entire 3,000 years of pharaonic history.” I’ll say one thing about the ancient Egyptians — they found something they liked and stuck with it.

Flashback Within a Flashback

Posted on by

In March 1987, I’d just moved to Chicago; a year earlier, I still lived in Nashville, but made a number of forays north for recreation.

March 17, 1987

Today I saw the green, green Chicago River and watched the downtown St. Patrick’s Day parade on Dearborn St., which was crowded and mildly boisterous. I’m glad I’m fairly tall. Visibility must be poor along crowded parade routes for shorter people – at least those interested in who’s parading by.

It was a lively parade. Not so many Shriners in little cars, as I saw in Nashville. But a lot of high school marching bands and politicos. Pretty sure I saw Fast Eddie Vrdolyak go by. [Best known as the anti-Harold Washington faction leader in the Chicago City Council, but by 1987 near the end of his political career; just a few years ago, he went to prison for a short spell.]

About a year ago, Nancy & Wendy & Kim & Susie & I all went to Chicago on $25 Southwest Air tickets – an introductory price the airline was offering on its brand-new Nashville to Chicago route. It was as spontaneous a trip as these long weekends get. Stayed with Rich while the others stayed elsewhere, but we’d meet periodically to do things.

Saw Rap Master Ronnie at the Theatre Building, ate Romanian food at Little Bucharest, where the portions are enormous. Rich introduced us to Erin W. over a Swedish breakfast that was actually dinner at Ann Sather, and we got into a long discussion over whether the equinox was the first day of spring or not. I took the opposing view, pointing out that it was nearly freezing outside.

The larger group gathered Saturday night and we went to Neo and danced [remarkably, still there]. Later, we tried to get into Medusa, but couldn’t [it seems to survive as a nightclub in Elgin, but at this time it was in the city]. Nate nearly got into a fight with the bouncer, but fortunately didn’t. Good thing we didn’t get in, anyway, because it was nearly 3 a.m. and for my own part I wanted to sleep. As we drove away from Medusa, Kim claimed that she was still up for something else, going somewhere else, but in mid-sentence fell asleep. Luckily as a back-seat passenger, not the driver.

Untimely Demises

Posted on by

Woke up from a dream this morning with the notion that Ed Asner had died. That was a little odd, considering that I seldom dream about well-known people. For a moment I wondered, did that happen? No, I dreamed it. I wish Mr. Asner well, and hope he has more years yet.

Guess it would have been really strange if I’d dreamed about Harold Ramis, whose passing made me wonder, for a moment, what his colleague – co-conspirator – Douglas Kenney would have done if he’d lived as long. Probably not too much on-camera work, though he had a single, memorable line in Animal House, which he co-wrote.

Speaking of untimely death, not long ago I got around to seeing a Smithsonian Channel documentary, The Day Kennedy Died, which first aired in November. Narrated by Kevin Spacey and directed by British documentary filmmaker Leslie Woodhead, it’s a first-rate bit of work. A lot of the material’s familiar, of course, but it also included less-familiar aspects of the story, along with lesser-known images, deftly woven into a strong narrative that eschews the conspiracy speculation that’s encrusted the event.

Also worth watching: a short documentary about the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, vintage 1984 and posted on a YouTube channel called Rare Educational and Entertaining Videos. Until I watched the video about the eruption the other day, I hadn’t realized that there’s a children’s song about Mt. St. Helens. But I knew about stubborn old Harry Truman and some of the intrepid scientists who died trying to gather information about the volcano.

Thursday Bagatelle

Posted on by

I drove through thick fog early this evening. Remarkably, the fog disappeared in about 10 minutes as I was driving along – blown away by the strong winds entering the Chicago area that are still gusting outside, and which are supposed to last into tomorrow.

While writing about small-nation participants in the Olympics last week, my thoughts naturally turned to Sealand. (Whose wouldn’t?) Besides no status as an actual country, Sealand has no Olympic committee, either. But it’s always entertaining to read about the place.

The founder of Sealand died only in 2012, which I hadn’t heard. I also didn’t realize that Sealandic coins have been minted, but here they are. Somewhere out in the wide world, there’s a numismatist whose specialty is micronations. There has to be.

I watched the first part of the first episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon today – watched it the modern way, on demand, not when it was first broadcast. It’s been a good many years since I watched much of The Tonight Show. Briefly, just before Lilly was born, we’d watch Jay Leno, but I never took to him. In the mid-70s, I watched Johnny Carson regularly for a few years, which might have been unusual for someone in his early teens, but lost interest later.

I hadn’t seen much of Fallon before. Seems like an amiable fellow, and talented enough for the job. Still, I have the ridiculous feeling that the host of The Tonight Show ought to be older than me. Just to look at him, Fallon reminds me of a young assistant high school principal or a young insurance agent.

At a post office the other day – they say the USPS is losing money, but there’s always a line at my closest one – I saw an ad for replica Inverted Jenny stamps. Turns out they’ve been for sale for some months, with a $2 denomination. If they’d asked me, I would have suggested they be a postcard denomination (lately 34 cents). Sticking even a replica Inverted Jenny on a casual postcard would be fun.

Hadn’t thought about those stamps in a long time. Philately wasn’t ever as interesting for me as numismatics, but everyone ought to know about the Inverted Jenny. I made sure to tell Lilly about it. “That much for a stamp?” she said when I told her they sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the bizarre world of collectibles for you.

Anna Maria Alberghetti in a Wintry Mix, Honey

Posted on by

Another day above freezing. That’s a good thing, except for the current forecast. The following is direct from the National Weather Service, which is worthy of respect for its accuracy, but also the fact that it doesn’t fix cute names to winter storms. The NWS put out this “Special Statement” for my part of the country early this evening.

RAIN AND EVEN SOME THUNDERSTORMS WILL DEVELOP ACROSS NORTHERN ILLINOIS LATER TONIGHT. HOWEVER… TEMPERATURES ACROSS FAR NORTHERN ILLINOIS… MAINLY ALONG AND NORTH OF INTERSTATE 88… [we’re north of I-88 by a few miles] MAY REMAIN COLD ENOUGH TONIGHT FOR THIS PRECIPITATION TO BEGIN AS A WINTRY MIX OF SNOW… SLEET OR FREEZING RAIN BEFORE MUCH WARMER TEMPERATURES ARRIVE THURSDAY MORNING.

DUE TO THE FACT THAT THE PRECIPITATION COULD FALL AT A HEAVY RATE LATE TONIGHT…THIS COULD RESULT IN SOME SNOW OR ICE ACCUMULATIONS ACROSS PORTIONS OF THE AREA BY DAYBREAK THURSDAY… POSSIBLY IMPACTING THE MORNING COMMUTE.

CURRENTLY IT APPEARS THAT A COUPLE INCHES INCHES OF SNOW MAY ACCUMULATE BEFORE THE WINTRY MIX CHANGES TO ALL RAIN EARLY THURSDAY MORNING.

Odd forecast. Deuced odd, it is.

Speaking of odd, it took me nearly 40 years to get the following knock-knock joke, as told by Ted Baxter during the Sept. 13, 1975, episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Edie Gets Married.”

Not that I’ve been puzzling over it for 40 years. I’d forgotten all about it until today, walking around in the fairly pleasant afternoon air, when I thought, What did that joke about Anna Maria Alberghetti mean? Memory works in mysterious ways.

Just as unlikely, I remembered to look it up when I got home, connecting the joke to “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” which I’d heard before – but (much) more recently than 1975. It was clearly a joke for grownups back then, back when sitcom writers actually wrote jokes for grownups.

A lot of singers have done the song. Fats Domino’s version is here.