a parking spot hiding in plain sight?

I may have discovered a parking spot hiding in plain sight.

First, let me describe the venue -- Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, between Midland Parkway and Edgerton Blvd. It's a commercial zone, and about a bajillion buses have stops there. Lots of people pick up or drop off passengers at the subway, since that's where the termional for the F train is -- and there are more than a few exits from the station along that stretch. Everyone knows there's nowhere to park along there, since the whole stretch is bus stops.

Or is it?

The other day I noticed something peculiar on the north side of the street, near the eastern end. See the picture below, which shows the north side of the street, facing west.

When I took the picture, I was standing in the crosswalk. West of the crosswalk is a "No Standing" sign with an arrow pointing east. That precludes parking east of that sign. Immediately west of the sign is a short stretch -- room for one car, maybe two if they're smart cars -- with no parking control indicators, except for yellow paint on the curb. Next is a bus stop sign with a single-headed arrow pointing west. That precludes parking to the west of that sign.

So what's the story with the stretch between the two signs? Normal intuition would tell me that you can't park there, but there are no signs telling me that. The curb is painted yellow, but I read enough of Gridlock Sam's columns to know that paint on the curb has no legal weight within New York City.

I'm not going to park there. If, for some reason I'm overlooking, it's not a legal parking spot then I could get a ticket which I'd have to pay. If it is legal then I could still get a ticket (because it doesn't seem like a real space, and police are people too) -- and then my best case is not paying but having aggravation. Not worth it.

But curiosity has me wondering.

I'm going to email Gridlock Sam with a link to this post and ask him if the spot is legal. If he gets back to me I'll follow up.

But, regardless of what he says, I'm not gonna park there.

subway dream fulfilled

In the last week I finally finished a quest that began more than forty years ago...I have ridden the New York subway to everywhere it goes.

There were a couple of years in elementary school that I had to take the subway to school, and that was when the interest was sparked. But I generally shared that ride with my father and sister, and it was a relatively short ride in a relatively safe part of the city. I was too young to go off on my own riding everywhere the system went. But the itch had begun.

In high shool, living in Eastern Queens and attending high school in Manhattan, I had my first taste of the freedom to ride to subway on my own, unsupervised. The optimal route had me taking the F train to 14th Street and transferring to the LL (which is now the L), but I made a point of taking other routes -- the E to the LL, the F to the GG (now the G) to the LL, the F to the 7 to the 4, 5 or 6 to the LL...there were a few others. And there was a stretch where, on Wednesdays I would take a train to Brooklyn to ride a route that I'd never been on before. But in that time, I didn't go on most of the routes in the Bronx -- This was the late 1970's and early 1980's, and there were areas that were unsafe.

Since then, there were a few more places that I have gone (e.g., Yankee Stadium), and I went on some of the new routes that have opened since my high school years.

So, going into the end-of-year season, I was missing most of the Bronx, the 2 and 3 trains north of 110th Street, and the 2nd Avenue line north of 72nd Street. And, for some reason, I decided that, while taking a few days off work, I would finally get to these places. I did it in three afternoons, one of which was with Ethan. I could have pushed myself and done it in one, but I wanted to be able to enjoy the experience -- not be thing "Geez, when will it be done?"

Railfanning isn't as much fun as it was when I was a kid. Back then, the motorman's cab only took up about a third of the width of the car. So you could stand by the front door and look through the window. On the newer trains, the cab takes up the full car width. It's much better for the motorman. But now the best you can do is look through the door into the motorman's cab and see through to the door in front of the car. You don't get the same wide angle, and you don';t feel the same closeness to the space in front of the train. For a taste of what real railfanning was like, watch this video that someone took on an A train going from 207 Street in Manhattan to Rockaway Park. It was taken on an R-32 subway car, which is significant because the R-32s had passenger-accessible front windows. Most of the route is underground, but at around 72 minutes it emerges. The remainder of the ride -- especially the parts as it approaches and goes through Jamaica Bay -- is one of the most scenic sections of the system. I watched it at 2X speed.

I won't bore you with the exact itinerary. Instead, I'll bore you with a few observations from the trips.

• The D train in the Bronx is very boring.
• The 5 train, out to Eastchester/Dyre Avenue, is a relatively interesting ride, as a good part of it runs on an embankment. So you see lots of varied scenery, including people's backyards.
• I wasn't aware that the northern terminal of the 3 train in Harlem is above-ground. The 1 train has elevated stretches in Norther Manhattan, but I thought that was it for elevated subways in Manhattan.* It was fun to see that station, though it could definitely use some maintenance.
• When the 2 and 3 trains split from each each other, north of the 135th Street station, the downtown 2 track crosses the uptown 3 track. Most other places where routes split one or more tracks are graded downward or upward so that they go under and over each other. Building tracks and tunnels the way they did for the 2 and 3 trains is cheaper, but it makes the signalling more complicated and crashes more likely. That said, I am not aware of there having ever been any train crashes at that spot. The only other place I can think of where tracks cross each other like that (and I'm limiting this to tracks that are used in customer service in the New York subway) is just west of the Myrtle Avenue station on the J and M trains.
• On the 2 train in the Bronx, I kept my eyes out around the Gun Hill Road station to see if any remnants of the old 3rd Avenue el (AKA the 8 train) were visible. That train was discontinued in 1973, so I wouldn't really expect to see anything anymore. On the other hand, the old MJ train was discontinued earlier (I think in 1969), and its trestle is still clearly visible over the aforementioned Myrtle Avenue station that services the J and M. Anyway, I couldn;t make out any infrastructure that I could say for sure was part of the old el. North of the Gun Hill Road station, it looked like the trestle had room for what had at one time been extra tracks. But I don't know if that was related. Did the old el  merge with the White Plains Road line at Gun Hill Road? Or did it kind of hit it at a perpendicular?
• Most of the routes that I polished off were old IRT lines. They are, in parts, deliciously twisty.
• The Second Avenue line (or at least what's been built and opened of it) is beautiful, clean and roomy. And boring. WHy did they build it as a two-track line, instead of a four track line that allows for express service. A bajillion years from now, when it's finally extended southward, they'll regret building it as a local only. Maybe -- just maybe -- they actually dug a four track tunnel, and the express tracks are on an as-yet-unopened lower level? It sounds crazy, but when the Lexington Avenue/63rd Street station opened on the F train, there was one track on each level, and the platforms were half-width. There were no visible clues that there was room for another half platform and track on the other side of the wall.

Having said all that, I note that some stretches of subway route have been shut down during my lifetime, and I will never get to ride those. These include (but are not necessarily limited to):

• The Culver Shuttle (which connected the old Sea Beach line (now part of the D) to the Culver line (now part of the F) in Brooklyn.
• The old end of the QJ** (now the J) in Queens. When I was a kid, the QJ, went to 168th Street and Jamaica Avenue. It was shortened to 121st Street. Since then it was extended on a route similar to the old one. It ends underground at Parsons Blvd ("Jamaica Center," whatever the fuck that is). The old line was elevated the whole way.
• The aforementioned 8 train in the Bronx, which was the last remnant of the Third Avenue el.
• The aforementioned MJ in Brooklyn, which was part of the BMT's Myrtle Avenue line.

Mission Accomplished
.
*I am not counting the short stretches where trains come above-ground for the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges.
**Trivia: QJ stands for Brighton to Jamaica.

cinema history class: plan 9 from outer space

Session: Ed Wood Month, Week 3
Movie 2: PLan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
Directed by Ed Wood

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Space aliens are reviving the dead in order to save humanity from itself. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
As far as I'm concerned, Plan 9 didn't live up (down?) to its reputation as the worst movie ever. Having said that, I should note that Dave gave it a 9 quoting the common refrain that it's "so bad it's good," and Sean explained his rating of 4 out of 4 as recognition that it's the quintessential bad movie. But Glen or Glenda, which we saw two weeks earlier was much worse. I guess it was more fun to see GorG in the class, but that was because of the bizarre way it was put together. Plan 9 is a better movie in the sense that it does a better job of satisfying the implicit contract a movie makes with the viewer. If I'm a 1950's moviegoer sitting down in the theater to have a story told to me, Plan 9 is less likely to disappoint.

But that's not to to say that Plan 9 is a good film. There's just too much wrong with it:

• The acting is horrendous.
• The dialog is almost as bad. I love the part where the the alien commander starts repeating the word "stupid" to tell the humans how, well, stupid humanity is.
• Don't get me started on the continuity errors -- police cars change, and scenes are constantly changing between night and day.
• Most famously, there's the Bela Lugosi issue. Lugosi dies during production, and the stand-in they got to film the rest of the scenes was much taller.
• Budgetary constraints forced Wood to use sparse sets, which kind of reminded me of the acting I did in small black box theaters. We had minimal set pieces, and the audience had to use their imaginations. Here, the scenes on airplanes space ships didn't really look like they were on such vehicles, and on;y worked as well s they did because the audience member wants to b e drawn into the story.

But the movie also had enough going for it that I really wanted to like it more than I did.

First, I have to give Ed Wood credit for the story itself. The basic premise that I liked is that space aliens want to get humanity to abandon its pursuit of weapons because, if we don't, we will eventually destroy the universe. There's some technobabble to explain it, and that sounds as reasonable as the worst of Star Trek. But this movie was made in the 1950s, when the US and USSR were stuck in a nuclear arms race. With the two superpowers developing more and more powerful weapons, the message about destroying the universe must have resonated. Say what you want about Wood as a filmmaker, but he had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist.

One simple fact about Plan 9 is that it was probably too ambitious. This had space aliens and zombies, and it tied them together in a coherent plot. And this was a "message" movie (see previous paragraph). I think it was Keith who noted that this should have been Ed Wood's epic -- if he had had the funds for an epic. Instead, he had to make do with what he could manage on a small budget. Given the constraints, he did as good a job as anyone could have expected.

Another interesting thing about the movie is the ending. The space aliens get killed, which would be a standard happy ending, except for the fact that these aliens were actually benevolent. They were only trying to get humans to change from a course that would inevitably lead to the destruction of the universe. But we made their ship explode, so maybe our fate is sealed.

Oh well, pass the potato salad.

Ratings:
Me: 7
Dave: 9
Ethan: 6
Joe: 9.3
Sean: 4 out of 4

a question about president's names

In a Facebook conversation, a friend* posed the following question:

How many Presidential names can form a relatively prime group? That is, no letters in a President's name occur in any of the Presidents' names in the group. I've come up with several groups of three, but no groups of four so far.

Now, that's the kind of pointless thing that really appeals to me, so I had to work it out. Spoiler alert: Three is the maximum.

For reference, I have listed the presidential last names below. There are only 39 of them (despite there having been 45 presidents) because six last names -- Adams, Harrison, Johnson, Cleveland, Roosevelt and Bush) have been repeated.

Here's how I worked it out:

First, for simplicity, I am going to use the initialism, "RPG" to mean "relatively prime group," meaning (as described above) a group of names, no two of which have any letters in common.

I didn't want brute force this, so I started by considering vowels.** There are five vowels, not counting Y, and each presidential name has at least one. That means that, before going on, we know that the maximum size of an RPG is five or less. Assuming there is an RPG of five, it has to consist of the following:

1. A name with one or more A, but no other vowels
2. A name with one or more E, but no other vowels
3. A name with one or more I, but no other vowels
4. A name with one or more O, but no other vowels
5. A name with one or more U, but no other vowels

Before going on, let me note that that is a necessary condition, but not sufficient. If, for example, you put together such a group, but two of the names have Ns in them, then that group is still not an RPG.

But examination of the presidential last names (listed below) reveals that there are no presidential last names that have I's but no other vowels. Which means there is no RPG of size five. So now the question is, are there any RPGs of size four?

Repeating the same line of reasoning above, we know that every president's last name has an A, an E, an O or a U. If there is an RPG of size four, it must consist of the following:

1. A name with one or more A, but no E, O or U
2. A name with one or more E, but no A, O or U
3. A name with one or more O, but no A, E or U
4. A name with one or more U, but no A, E or O

From this point on, I brute forced it. Let's see what there is:

Let's call the names that satisfy condition 1, "set A." Set A consists of Adams, Grant, Taft and Harding

Let's call the names that satisfy condition 2, "set E." Set E consists of Tyler, Pierce, McKinley and Kennedy

Let's call the names that satisfy condition 3, "set O." Set O consists of Polk, Lincoln, Johnson, Wilson, Nixon, Ford and Clinton.

Let's call the names that satisfy condition 4, "set U." Set U consists of Bush and Trump.

Simple examination shows us that Adams is not relatively prime with either element of Set U. Neither Grant nor Harding is relatively prime with any element of Set E. So if there is an RPG of size four, it must contain Taft.

The only element of Set U that Taft is relatively prime with is Bush. So if there is an RPG  of size four, it must contain Taft and Bush.

Turning to the elements of Set E, we can confirm that an RPG of size four can't contain Tyler (since Tyler is not relatively prime with Taft, which must be in the RPG of size four. So an RPG of size four must consist of:

• Bush
• Taft
• either Pierce, McKinley or Kennedy
• an element of Set O.

Now, which element of Set O could be that fourth item?

• It can't be Polk because Polk is not relatively prime with Pierce, Kennedy or McKinley
• It can't be Lincoln because Lincoln is not relatively prime with Pierce, Kennedy or McKinley
• It can't be Johnson because Johnson is not relatively prime with Bush
• It can't be Wilson because Wilson is not relatively prime with Bush
• It can't be Nixon because Nixon is not relatively prime with Pierce, Kennedy or McKinley
• It can't be Ford because Ford is not relatively prime with Taft
• It can't be Clinton because Clinton is not relatively prime with Pierce, Kennedy or McKinley

Therefore no element of Set O can be in the RPG of size four, so there does not exist an RPG of size four.

There are, however, several RPG's of size three, including (Bush, Taft, Pierce).

So the maximum size of an RPG is three.

QED.

As an aside, I note that Washington is not relatively prime with any other president's name. FWIW.

Presidential last names (in alphabetical order)

1. Adams
2. Arthur
3. Buchanan
4. Bush
5. Carter
6. Cleveland
7. Clinton
8. Coolidge
9. Eisenhower
10. Fillmore
11. Ford
12. Garfield
13. Grant
14. Harding
15. Harrison
16. Hayes
17. Hoover
18. Jackson
19. Jefferson
20. Johnson
21. Kennedy
22. Lincoln
23. Madison
24. McKinley
25. Monroe
26. Nixon
27. Obama
28. Pierce
29. Polk
30. Reagan
31. Roosevelt
32. Taft
33. Taylor
34. Truman
35. Trump
36. Tyler
37. Van Buren
38. Washington
39. Wilson

*I won't share his name, but it has letters in it
**Credit where due: Blair suggested I look at vowels

it's zmedsday!! (ix)

cinema history class: bride of the monster

Session: Ed Wood Month, Week 2
Movie 2: Bride of the Monster (1955)
Directed by Ed Wood

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
A mad scientist is trying (generally without success) to use nuclear energy to give people superpowers. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
First, my disclaimer -- I missed this week's session because I had to work late.* But I'm writing about it for the sake of completeness. And, since I watched it on Netflix (or was it Amazon? -- I forget) I can comment on the film.

The film is...how do I put it delicately? The film is bad.

A few of the problems with it:

• There are times when it seems that he is kind of self-consciously doing Lugosi shtick -- purposely delivering his lines in an over-the-top fashion.
• Why an octopus? Seriously, The octopus makes no sense, and could have been easily replaced in the script with snakes. Or crocodiles. Hell, since there are already crocodiles, that would have made more sense.
• Maybe Wood used an octopus because he was able to borrow or steal (storrow?) a mechanical octopus from some other production. But the mechanical elements were broken so the actors, trapped in the octopus' grasp had to move the tentacles around themselves in a fruitless attempt to appear to be in mortal danger.
• I got the sense that there was a lot of wasted dialogue. The exchange between the newspaper delivery boy and the cop serves as a good example (though there were others). The movie would have moved along better without these dead-end conversations. I can't help wondering if Wood was trying to pad things out, given how short the movie was.
• The nuclear explosion at the end. Blair conveyed to me that Wood was promised extra cash if he included footage of a nuclear explosion in the film.But the fact that he had the explosion occur within ten feet of the characters makes no sense.

It's hard to know how I would have rated this movie had I seen it in class with the guys, and I won't even attempt a guess.

Ratings:
Blair: 7
Christina: 7.5
Dave: 7, 9 as entertainment
Ethan: 7
Sean: 2 out of 4

*Yeah, it kind of sucks. But if there weren't work to do, they wouldn't pay me to do it.

at the dmv -- number problems

So we spent a few hours at the DMV yesterday in order to get state IDs for the kids. Thrills, thrills...

But the fact is, the DMV is not nearly as bad as it used to be. The experience is much improved, but there's still more that can be done. And that's the point of this post.

I remember the olden days. You went to the DMV and started in one long line. When you got to the front of the line you told someone what you wanted to do, and that person directed you to the appropriate line for that action. So you could literally spend hours waiting on line.

There are two big improvements since those days.

The first is that that first line has been replaced with multiple lines, cutting the wait time down -- like a supermarket going from one cashier to several.

The second improvement is that time spent on the second line has been replaced by time spent sitting. At the end of the first line, the clerk gives you a ticket with a letter followed by a number (ours was B362). You sit and wait as codes are called and windows indicated "E481, please go to window 13." The letter prefixes each indicate a certain small set of actions. "B" indicated applying for a new permit, license or ID. "E" indicated returning old license plates, etc.

It's all much better. The one big area that can be improved involves the assigned number ranges. The problem is that numbers are assigned in a Bingo-like way -- each letter has its own range of numbers, presumably to avoid confusion. So, for example, there are only 50 B's -- B325 through B374. When they run out of numbers, they start over again. That would work well on a slow day. But on a crowded day like yesterday, customers (do you call the "customers"? come in faster than they get processed. By the time our number was called, there was already another B362 issued. So at our window the clerk had to compare timestamps to determine who is the real next B362. To make matters worse, it's a two-step process. So after the first clerk performed the first processing of the applications, we had to sit down and wait for our number to get called again to go another window for final processing and payment. By this point there was another B362, so whenever the number was called, we had to converge at the window to find out which one of us was being called.

This could easily be mitigated by increasing the range of B-numbers -- actually by changing all the ranges. Their system has room for three numerical digits after the letter prefix. So everything should start with 000 (e.g., B000) and run through 999. Yeah, there may be some confusion, as they call B051 and have people with C051 and W051 coming to the window. But I think that extra confusion is easier to deal with than having multiple people with the same number all converging on a window.

it's tunesday! "12 days of diarmuid" by meep and diarmuid

gimme the antihero

I've been watching Designated Survivor lately. It's the show starring Kiefer Sutherland as a relcutant successor to the Presidency after the rest of government is destroyed in a terrorist attack. I'm about a quarter of the way into the second season, and I find my heart just isn't into it. I can't fault the acting or the direction. And the premise for the show is very creative. A lot of the plot lines are well done. But I find myself uninterested in Tom Kirkman, the protagonist.

Why?

In recent years I've streamed several action/drama TV shows. It started with Breaking Bad, for which I owe my cousin a debt of gratitude. I liked that enough that I went on to Boardwalk Empire, House of Cards, The Americans and Better Call Saul. And I liked or loved all of them*

So, what is it that these other shows had in common that DesSurv doesn't? An antihero.

In none of the other shows can the protagonist really be called a good guy. The closest is Better Call Saul, in which Jimmy/Saul has a heart of gold, and really does try (for the most part) to do the right thing. But in all these shows the protagonist is conflicted. Despite having good qualities, they are all fundamentally bad people. And yet, the shows are written to make them sympathetic.

I could root for a Frank Underwood or a Nucky Thompson, knowing what terrible people they were. And I cried as I watched Walter White spend his last moments admiring chemistry equipment. It was all incongruous, but it was fun. And, more importantly, these antiheroes are interesting.

By contrast, Kirkman in Designated Survivor is a choirboy -- honest, selfless and true. As good as the show around him may be, he himself is simply boring.

Give me the antiheroes.

*with the exception of House of Cards season 6, which I wrote about here.
**Except for Frank Underwood from House of Cards, who does not appear to have any redeeming qualities.

glen or glenda: parting thoughts

A week and a half ago we saw Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda in cinema history class -- it was the first thing we saw in Ed Wood month. I wrote about it here. I realize that there are two general observations that I should have addressed.

The first is the fact that the movie would probably have been better if producer George Weiss hadn't interfered. Weiss had wanted a film that would exploit the sensationalism the then-knew phenomenon of sex-reassignment surgery. But Wood turned in a semi-autobiographical film that focused on his own cross-dressing. Weiss, displeased, insisted on having additional footage focusing on transexualism. As a result, the movie feels like a poorly constructed anthology. As I noted in the above-linked post, it destroyed the reasonably good poetic ending that Wood had created. I'm also assuming that the long sequences showing industrial machines talking to each other about sex-reassignment were added at Weiss' behest. This is not to say that it would have been a good film if not for Weiss. It still would have had that PSA feel, and wtill would have had bad acting. Plus it would have been way too short. Still, it would have been better.

The other observation is that the movie, though very progressive for its day, would, today, be seen as very outdated. Homosexuality, cross-dressing and gender dysphoria are all conflated, and the movie treats them as essentially the same thing. I have to wonder how many people, watching it today, would judge it by today's standards rather than in relationship to its time.

matt shea takes on steve harvey

Prologue: Some years ago we were on a family roadtrip, and Asher was watching a livestream by prominent Youtuber Matt Shea. I may get some of the details wrong -- it has been a while -- but this account is directionally correct. I commented that Shea sounded constipated. Asher posted a comment that "My dad says you sound constipated." Shea saw the comment, read it aloud and said, "Well, that's interesting."

Asher still likes Shea, and makes a point of watching his videos. I've been somewhat agnostic. Until this week. When I saw this video:

I've had a strong dislike for Steve Harvey for a bunch of years -- ever since I saw a clip in which he insulted atheists. In fact it's one of the clips that Shea included in the video above. I have mentioned it to a variety of freinds, and the general response is a yawn. One, however, responded by asking about the prominent militant atheists that are out there. A clear case of whataboutism.

Anyway, Asher started showing me the video. I kept having him pause so that I could interject. Over and over, when Asher resumed play, Shea gave the same responses I did. In a couple places he used the same words.

Thank you, Matt Shea.

it's zmedsday!! (viii)

at shake shack -- how did the scam work?

I'm pretty sure I saw someone steal from his employer. But I don't quite know what the angle was. Maybe if my reader has a sense, you can clue me in.

Ethan and I went to Shake Shack and ordered three sandwiches. We were using coupons, so two of the sandwiches were free. We were paying for the third. Given that, there were a few things that were odd:

• The cashier insisted on splitting the order in two -- one order consisting of the sandwich we were paying for, and one consisting of the free sandwiches.
• We got a buzzer with a number for the paid-for order -- that's normal. But for the order with free sandwiches, the cashier put it in under his own name and said he'd give it to us when it was ready.
• When processing the order with the free sandwiches, the cashier pulled a credit card out of his wallet and ran it through the reader.
• Each order came a receipt showing the full purchase price.

I assume this had something to do withe processing the free order as if it was being paid for, and then processing a refund through his own credit card. But we didn't pay for that order, and I don;t understand how he was able to process a refund for something that was never paid for in the first place?

it's tunesday! "every little thing" by carlene carter

jea security meeting

We had a good meeting (with good turnout) for tonight's Jamaica Estates Association security meeting. Topics discussed included illegally parked cars, suspicious behavior and crime prevention.

Captain Tom Molloy, representing the 107th precinct talked about issues of crime in the neighborhood. He gave tips on preventing oneself from being victimized. He also took questions from community members about what to do in specific situations, and about various rules and regulations.

Anthony La Bella, the Vice President of Bay Ridge Security talked about the role of the security patrol in preventing crime, and other related services that the patrol provides for the neighborhood. This was an important presentation because we're in the middle of the membership drive, and the Association's ability to pay for the patrol is dependent on members. Fewer members means fewer hours of patrol.

John Brehany, representing St. John's University spoke about the relationship between the community and the schol -- specifically the students who rent houses in the area. He discussed the role the university plays in maintaining order.

cinema history class: glen or glenda

Session: Ed Wood Month, Week 1
Movie 2: Glen or Glenda (1953)
Directed by Ed Wood

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
A transvestite struggles with the question of whether -- or, more accurately, how -- to tell his fiance his secret. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
Perhaps I would have been better prepared for this if I had had more experience with Ed Wood films. But, alas, the only two of his movies that I'd seen were Plan 9 from Outer Space (which I slept through) and The Young Marrieds (which did, I'll admit, keep me up). So I'd heard that the man;s movies were a bit...off. But I hadn't really taken it to heart.

The fact is, this is a mess of a film. As Keith explained it to us, producer George Weiss wanted to make an exploitation film to take advantage of Christine Jorgensen's then-recent sex-reassignment surgery. But his director, Ed Wood, delivered a sort of semi-autobiographical documentary about life as a transvestite. Weiss insisted that he add more, so Wood quickly added in a story of a transexual who goes through with the surgery and lives happily ever after -- told largely with stock footage. As a result, the there's a disjointed quality that's jarring. The most noticable instance occurs when Glen finally tells his fiance about his trasvestitism. She thinks a bit about it, then stands up and hands him her angora sweater. That would have been the perfect ending, and indeed it was Wood's original ending. But as released, the film continues onward with other story lines.

But that's not the worst of it. The ever-present narrator describes most of what occurs in that sort of chirpy style that we've all seen in PSA's. And despite the existence of a narrator, there's Bela Lugosi (credited as "Scientist") who appears from time to time giving pointless commentary or waxing philosophical. There's really no need for him to be there, other than the fact that Ed Wood liked him. A couple of guys in the class are big fans of Lugosi, and liked seeing him. But...what was he thinking (other than, "hey! an easy thousand bucks for me!")? OK, I did find some of his stuff amusing.

In other parts, there were long segments of stock footage. Onscreen we see clips (sometimes the same ones, over and over again) of highway traffic or of machines in some kind of metal-working plant. It kind of makes it seem that these heavy machines are talking to each other.

A couple of us really had no idea how to rate this movie, given how far it deviated from standard narrative movies.

Ratings:
Me: A drunken night playing cards in Vinnie's basement
Dave: 7.5 to 8 as a movie, 9 as entertainment, 9.8 for strangeness
Ethan: 4
Joe: 1978, 1:15 in the morning, with Sheri
Sean: 1 out of 4

no frickin' clue...

Last night, Sharon's Overwatch team had a match that was broadcast on Twitch. It was part of the Owlet Tournament. In case you want to watch, the video is on Twitch.

The most salient facts? Sharon is an Off-Tank for Team Verdant. Their opponent was Gucci Gank. Oh, and they got their butts handed to them. It didn't help that one of the players had to leave during the match, and the replacement wasn't actually in a good state to play.

I tried watching, but I really had no frickin' clue what was going on. I was even more confused with this than when I tried watching a cricket match with a friend from England. Anyway, all those characters hopping around on the screen like mice? I had no idea what they were doing. Same with the dragons that sometimes appeared. I would have had no idea who was winning if not for the announcers. But other than that, they didn't really give me any sense of what was going on. Maybe if I was familiar with the game it would have made some sense to me.

I did feel surges of pride whenever I heard the announcers mention Sharon (of course, it was by her screen name, "Gamsha"). Even more so when they complimented the walls she built. I don't know why she was building walls, but since she was, I'm glad they were good walls.*

If I understand things correctly, Team Verdant will be going up against WisdomOW tomorrow night.

*Insert Trump/Mexico joke at your own peril.

creepee monkees

I was thinking about The Monkees and their new albums (2016's Good Times! and this year's Christmas Party). Actually, I was thinking about the videos.

They tried to replicate the musical sound that made them pop music sensations 50 years ago. And, to a degree, they succeeded. Not as spectacularly as many of their fans want to think, but certainly better than they did with their previous reunion albums. And that's cool and all. Granted, I'm still pissed at them for the way they screwed their biggest fans over. But this post isn't about that. If you want to read about that, please go here.*

But I find the videos creepy. Before I elaborate, here are the four official videos from the two albums. As far as I know, they only did two official videos for each of the two albums.

I find it vaguely creepy that, four videos in, they're not showing any contemporary images. It's all cartoonish (and, in three cases, comic book) images of the group as it was 50 years ago. I probably wouldn't have even thought about it if it was one video. But four? That's off.

*And don't forget to click on the ads!

it's zmedsday!! (vii)

cinema history class: bloody pit of horror

Session: Italian Gothic Horror Month, Week 4
Movie 2: Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)
Directed by Domenico Massimo Pupillo

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
The crew and talent from a photoshoot are stuck in a castle with loon who fancies himself a centuries-old excutioner. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
It's unclear how much this was an earnest attempt to make a serious horror movie. The fact is, it's pretty goofy. Mickey Hargitay (not exactly known as a great actor) prances around in his red tights, cowl and cape, is more wrestler than executioner.

Actually, this film kept reminding me of the old Batman TV show. The henchmen are dressed in matching striped shirts which reminded me of characters from the old TV show (though Sean recognized them as matching outfits from some other movie -- I forget which). The deadly spider web trap reminds me of the bedeviling contraptions that the villains always stuck Batman and Robin in before the cliffhangers. And the fight scenes are only missing the onscreen "OOFS" "POWS" and "BAMS." To be clear, this movie was made before Batman, so I guess it wasn't ripping that show off. Maybe the creative minds behind that show had seen this movie.

At any rate, this was enjoyable to watch and worth many a good laugh. It probably would have been well-suited to being sent up in MST3K, though I don't think it ever was. It's not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm glad I saw it.

Oh, and it was filmes in "psychovision," whatever that is.

Ratings:
Me: 9.5
Christina: 8.5 (10 for fun, 7 for the film itself)
Dave: 8.7 (9.2 for entertainment, 8.2 as a movie)
Sean: 4 out of 4

it's tunesday! "shoot me in the ass" by wesley willis

house of cards falls apart

Having now watched the final season of Netflix' House of Cards, I can render my verdict: Season six sucks.

The first two seasons were great. Chronicling the rise of Frank Underwood from ambitious congressman to President and featuring Kevin Spacey's compelling acting, this was great television drama. Every time he broke the fourth wall he commanded you to pay attention.

But things changed in the third season. The first season had chronicled Underwood's rise to the Vice Presidency. In the second season he rose to the Presidency. But starting with the third season, there was nowhere nowhere else to go. So the writers -- or whoever makes these decisions -- had to come up with new story lines. The next three seasons were often aimless. Underwood faced a variety of crises -- international, domestic and personal. And these were often meandering and silly. The worst for me was his battle to get elected to the Presidency, as he got to that position through succession. And they made all sorts of mistakes about our electoral system*, which annoyed me more than they should have.

But I kept watching because of Kevin Spacey.

And, as much as I bitched about how the show wasn't as good, I enjoyed it.

But the sixth season? Well, that just sucked. After the allegations of sexual misconduct, Spacey was kicked off the show. Robin Wright, as the lead, just wasn't interesting. Whereas Kevin Spacey, in his monologues, was captivating, Robin Wright was just eye-rollingly dull. I don't know if it's that she's not as good as Spacey, or if the writing and direction just weren't as good. But the bottom line is that I just didn't find it as interesting to watch her. And, instead of just tying things up, the producers deided to introduce a whole bunch of new characters to complicate things.

In all fairness to the whole House of Cards team, Spacey's last-minute departure left them in the lurch. The sixth season had largely been written, and was going to center on the final climactic battle between Frank and Claire. And I probably would have loved watching it. And maybe if gthey had had more time they could have made the season work without Spacey. But the writers had to scramble to rewrite the season without Frank, and that included having to develop new plotlines and a new final dispute to settle -- this one pitting Doug Stamper against Claire. And Doug Stamper against Nathan. And Nathan against Claire. And Claire against Jane. And Jane against Doug Stamper. And...

As a result of the last-minute scramble, there were all sorts of half-baked plot points that didn't make sense -- For example, Claire's weeks-long faked depression for the purposes of -- what? forcing the cabinet to try to remove her via 25A so she can fire them and hire a new cabinet in secret? Fuck that nonsensical shit.

What should they have done? End it.

By the end of season 5, Frank had resigned, thereby making Claire President. The deal was that she would pardon him. As the last episode closes, she refuses to take his phone call. Then she looks at the camera ans says "My turn." I know that they didn;t intend to end the series there, but it would have worked. Much better, certainly, than the drawn out battle that we get for season six.

*To win the Presidency, a candidate needs to get a majority of the electoral votes cast. The 270 that we all think of as the number of votes needed to win is based on the assumption that all states (and DC) cast their votes, which then total to 538. If a state doesn't cast electoral votes, than those don't count in the total, and a candidate needs fewer than 270 to win. The candidates and parties can't simply agree to a do-over. And no candidate would pick his or her spouse as a running mate because the electors from the candidate's home state are not allowed to vote for both POTUS and VPOTUS from their own states. These are just a few of the issues.

i like nick lowe -- an adventure in kippington lodge

I love it when these little things confirm that I like what I like -- whatever that means.

The background: I am a big Nick Lowe fan. And I'm also a bit of a completist. Nick's first band was Kippington Lodge, which he joined in 1967. The Lodge eventually changed its name to Brinsley Schwarz.*

Back in the days of vinyl -- and remember that this was also before ebay, Amazon and the like -- I got my hands on a single of "Shy Boy" and "Lady on a Bicycle." Both songs kind of sucked. Over the years I've managed to get a couple other Kippington Lodge tracks on various Brinsley Schwarz compilations and Nick Lowe bootlegs. None of them really impressed me. So, when I saw a Kippington Lodge compilation available on Amazon I didn't exactly rush to order it.

But curiosity and my obsessive nature eventually got the better of me, so I ordered it. Assuming you can trust the title, Shy Boy: The Complete Recordings, 1967-1969, the 15 tracks represent the totality of the band's recorded output. So, yeah, I got that down.

But my point -- and, yes, there is one. I listened to the album, and found 14 tracks to be uninteresting at best. But track 15, "I Can See Her Face," Is pretty good. Good enough that, when I was listening to it, I found myself marveling that it was the same band. Then I looked again at the packaging and noticed for the first time that that was the only song on the disc that Nick Lowe wrote.

So, yeah, I like Nick Lowe songs.

*As I understand it, the group's management decided that "Kippington Lodge" wasn't a marketable name. Yeah, "Brinsley Schwarz" was much better. /s

nyit opens its new esports arena

Yesterday, Sharon Asher and I attended the ribbon cutting for the new eSports arena on NYIT's Westbury campus.

NYIT is one of the many colleges that, in recent years, have created video game teams, and Sharon has now seen the facilities at a number of them -- UC Berkeley and Columbia College (in Missouri) come to mind. NYIT's team was formed within the last couple of years. It was founded by Elieser Duran (class of 2017), who still runs the team -- cleverly dubbed the CyBears (in contrast to the school's traditional teams, which are the Bears). I'd also be remiss if I failed to note that the CyBears recently won the East Coast Conference's Overwatch championship

This CyBears' new arena includes a room off the library with 14 computers, and another room where spectators can watch the game onscreen. Duran did mention to me that there are plans for a bigger arena with forty computers.

Duran offered that Sharon can come back and see the facilities, and maybe interact with the student players at a future date.

it's zmedsday! (vi)

cinema history class: the virgin of nuremberg

Session: Italian Gothic Horror Month, Week 3
Movie 2: Virgin of Nuremberg (1963)
Directed by Antonio Margheriti

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Stuck in her husband's castle (which also happens to have lots of torture implements), Mary is terrified. Not least because women keep seeing to get tortured to death. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
Virgin is, at its core, a whodunnit set in a castle. And it's reasonably well done at that. It's a very tight film, yet there are many red herrings designed to keep the viewer guessing. And the reveal was, for me, anyway, a complete surprise. Actually, in some ways it seems like a Scooby Doo episode. There's the appearance of a supernatural element that is later revealed to be plain old natural. And when the killer, disguised as "The Punisher" (here, explained as a medieval torturer/killer) has the hood ripped off, I couldn't help but think "...if not for those meddling kids." Now comparing the movie to Scooby Doo isn't a knock. The Scooby crew had their formula because it worked. And this movie, predating the show, can't be said to have been ripping it off.

The title is an interesting point, here. The movie had also been released under the more generic title, Horror Castle. The better title refers to an iron maiden that, for whatever reason, had been dubbed "The Virgin of Nuremberg." But seeing that title on the movie, I was half expecting this to have to do with the sexuality (or lack thereof) of female characters. It is, afterall, a standard movie trope that women get punished for being sexual.*

Including "Nuremberg" in the title is a reminder of the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II. Since the movie dates from the early 1960's, the trials were in more recent memory. And the theme does tie in to the murderer's history as a general in the German army during World War II.

Which brings me to a point within the movie that leaves me feeling ambivalent. The General-turned-killer is a tragic figure -- he had been part of an unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler during the war. Most of his co-conspirators were simply killed. But he was tortured -- if I understood the exposition correctly, the skin on his head was removed, leaving him a kind of living skull. The insanity the resulted is, presumably what drove him to kill. Having a Nazi as a sympathetic character is a bit of a stretch, though the story tries to help it along with the story of his having tried to kill Hitler. But his motives are clearly explained -- he wasn't trying to kill Hitler as some kind of repudiation of Nazi ideology. Rather, it was all about Hitler carrying on the war effort when Germany's defeat was clear.

So I'm back to having no sympathy for him. But it does then raise another philosophical issue. As evil as Nazi ideology was, one has to recognize the difference between German foot-soldiers in World War II and the SS. How much can one blame people who grew up in a country and were drafted into its army for the evils of the government they served? In the movie, the General is clearly not a simple soldier. But maybe he was simply a career military man who wasn't involved with the inhumanity. Probably not, I guess, since he was close enough to Hitler to have been involved in the assassination attempt. Ah, fuck him. He deserves whatever torture he suffered.

Oh, and the makeup that made him appear as a monster was really well done. Among the best.

Ratings:
Me: 8
Dave: 9.7-9.8
Ethan: 9
Joe: 10
Sean: 2 out of 4

*Maybe that's an American trope, in which case it might not apply to this, an Italian movie.

stan lee in ralph -- planned or ad-hoc?

I just saw Ralph Breaks the Internet with Asher. That's the sequel to the egregiously bad animated movie, Wreck-It Ralph.

Putting aside the question of whether or not I liked the move*, I noticed that Stan Lee makes a brief cameo. It's one of those blink-and-you miss-it moments, but in a chase scene one of the animated avatars is clearly designed to look like Lee.

Since Lee died on November 12 and the movie was released on November 21, this leaves me with the obvious question: Was Lee's likeness supposed to be in the movie all along (believable, given the number of cameos he's made), or was it added at the last minute as a posthumous tribute of sorts?

By the way, it's a serious question -- I have no idea of the answer.

Well, that was quick. Searching for a video to include in this post, I found one that answers the question.

So, yeah. They were planning to include Stan Lee all along, and he just happened to die before the movie came out. 95year-olds -- men especally -- do have high forces of mortality. Anyway, since I know the answer, I should either reword the stuff above or forget about posting this altogether. But screw that. I'll just add this paragraph as if it were a post-posting update.

*spoiler alert: It was pretty good.

today is tunesday! "hannukah in santa monica" by tom lehrer