happy tunesday! ("i'm the urban spaceman" by the bonzo dog doo-dah band)

This week, we commemorate Neil Innes the comedio-musical genius behind the Rutles and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Innes passed away this past Sunday at age 75.

I have long enjoyed Innes' music and humor. RIP.

ca-fiend!

Being that caffeine is one of most important ingestibles, I am trying to keep track of the caffeine content of various soda products. I've known for a while that Pepsi has more caffeine than Coke, and Dr. Pepper has more than Pepsi. Oh, and Mountain Dew has even more. But at some point it gets difficult to remember the entire heirarchy.

Rather than go to a store and just check all the labels, I have gotten into the habit of checking cans when I either have one (Ssshhhh! don't tell Marina!) or see a friend or colleague having one. The table (so far) is shown in the illustration.

Here are a few comments and notes:

• This is still a small sample (maybe if ,my reader is nice I'll post an update when the list is longer)
• It appears that all products with the same branding (e.g., all types of "Coke" or all types of "Pepsi") have the same caffeine content. I assume that the difference between the 12-ounce can of Coke (2.8333 mg caffeine per ounce) and the 20-ounce bottle of Orange Vanilla Coke (2.8500 mg caffeine per ounce) is due to rounding. Similarly for the difference between Cherry Pepsi and Pepsi (with real sugar).
• For now, this is just about sodas. Not iced teas or energy drinks. I may change that approach if I feel like it.

You're welcome.

amazon go: customer service the way it should be

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the new office location is its location near an Amazon Go Store. What I really want to talk about is their ace customer service, but first I have a long digression.

Now, here's where I'm of a mixed mind. As much as there are some modern marvels that amaze me, I generally don't write about them. There are so many ways that I feel as if I'm living in the future, but everyone knows about these technological miracles, so I'm not saying anything new. But as far as I can tell there are only four cities with Amazon Go Stores, so it may be that my reader doesn't live near one and is unfamiliar with them.

So bear with me if you already know about this.

The Amazon Go Store is like a small market. Some groceries. Some prepared foods. It's kind of designed for hardworking Manhattanites who either need to pick up something for lunch, or who want to grab a few groceries quickly to carry out to their uptown apartments. What makes it stand out is how it works. When you enter, you have to scan in with your phone. You and take a bag (or don't), and take the items you want. You put them in your bag or your pocket, or you just carry them out. Somehow the system knows what you've taken, and your credit card gets charged.

Now, I have no idea what technologies they use in order to know what you've taken, but it's very good at it. Sometimes I buy one item. Sometimes a few. On one occasion I bought 20 items (including 17 packaged soups from Hale & Hearty). I've put things in my bag, then changed my mind and put them back. I have a friend at work who has gone out of his way to trick their system -- putting things back in the wrong place -- and his bill has never been wrong. From my experience, they get it right about 94% of the time -- I've purchased stuff there 33 times, and my bill has been incorrect twice. Actually, their success rate is better than that indicates because there have been a couple times that I've gone in, taken things off the shelf, then put them back and left without making a purchase.

Now that that's out of the way, I can talk about what I wanted to talk about -- their customer service. On the two occasions where my bill was wrong, I was charged for an extra item I hadn't taken. But getting it corrected was really a snap. When the itemized bill shows up on my phone, there's an order number at the bottom and a link to contact them about the trip. With a couple clicks, I can have my phone call Amazon (or, more precisely, to have Amazon call me). I have to tell them who they're talking to, but other than that they know what bill I'm calling about and what's on that bill. None of this reading a number to one representative, getting transferred to another, then reading the number again, and telling them my name, address and blood type forty gagillion times. So in both cases I told the representative which item on the bill I hadn't taken. The rep apologized and the bill got corrected in short order.* Easy, peasy, George loves Weezy.

That's what customer service should be.

One final word: As cool as this is, I also find it oddly creepy.

*Notably, I assume that part of the reason I have had no trouble getting my bills corrected is that I've only had to do it a couple times. Presumably if I went in there every day and complained after each visit I'd start to get push back. I don't know what technologies they use, so it could also be that they have full video surveilance and someone can review the footage to check up on me.

cinema history class: shock

Session: Horror-Noir—Does It Exist, Week 3
Movie: Shock (1946)
Directed by Alfred Werker

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

Plot:
A woman goes into shock when she witnesses a murder. A psychiatrist is called in to treat her, but guess what... Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:

I had a bit of trouble categorizing this movie. Horror? Not really. A whodunnit? No, since we the viewers know exactly what happened. A caper film? That implies more planning on the part of the criminals. I eventually settled on psychological thriller.

With that part out of the way, I couldn't help wondering if it was really a flim noir. It had the nervous-making use of shadows that I've come to expect from films noir, but it was missing the clever rapid fire dialog that I've come to expect from the genre. Keith and Dave defended the film's status as noir, noting that there's no one element that's required. They also noted that that's why it's so hard to define film noir as a genre.

Unlike the rest of the class, I'm not a huge Vincent Price fan. I've seen a bunch of those gothic horrors and Poe adaptations that he's in, and I often find him too over the top to enjoy. So I was pleasantly surprised to see this, made before Price had made it big. He was subdued but fascinating. And that's a Vincent Price I like much better than the hammy winking Price.

Ratings:

Me: 9
Dave: 9.8
Ethan: 8

a bunch o' christmas songs

Since I am not a religious Christian, but Christmas is all around me, I figure I'd remind people of a a dozen great but nonreligious Christmas songs. Of course, once I got started I blew right past twelve, and Blair had to drag me away from my computer. I am in no way representing this list as complete, so feel free to suggest others in the comments section. Except for McCartney's "A Wonderful Christmastime." That song annoys the spleen out of me.

Run Rudolph Run
Chuck Berry

Father Christmas
The Kinks

Stop the Cavalry
Jona Lewie

Christmas at the Airport
Nick Lowe

The Only Present I Want This Year
Eytan Mirsky

The Eleven Cats of Christmas
Trout Fishing in America

Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight Tonight)
The Ramones

Christmas Wrapping
The Waitresses

Christmas on the M62
Wreckless Eric

Christmas Christmas
Mojo Nixon

Christmas in Hollis
Run DMC

Space Christmas
Shonen Knife

Merry Christmas
Wesley Willis

A Christmas Carol
Tom Lehrer

Christmas at Ground Zero
"Weird Al" Yankovic

happy zmedsday!! (lvii)

happy tunesday! ("jelly donuts" by dick curless)

OK...it's not really a Khannukah song, but it's about sufganiyot so...good enough.

PS, I really like Dick Curless' music.

on presidential stability

America's first 13 presidential terms (from Washington's first through Van Buren's only) all went off without a hitch. By that I mean they began and ended at the scheduled inauguration date -- none of them died or otherwise left office during a term, or started in the middle of a term. Since then we have not had as long a string of stability. The second longest streak, our current one. It started with Jimmy Carter, and has had ten complete terms with no interruption. Assuming President Trump doesn't die or get removed in the next 13 months, current streak will hit 11. After that, it's a long way down to the third longest streak, which lasted five terms. That was the one that began with the term to which Coolidge was elected in 1924 and ran through Roosevelt's third term. Note that Coolidge became President in 1923 when Harding died, and Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term, but died shortly into it. So, yay for us!

willy wonka and the raw deal

Augustus Gloop got a raw deal.

We were watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the original 1971 movie...duh), when I realized it. For the remainder of this post I will assume some degree of familiarity with the film.

The four kids who got eliminated from the factory tour all got eliminated for disobeying instructions and for some other underlying sin that's part of the kids' basic personality. These aren't all seven deadly sins-types of things. Augustus' is, since he's a glutton. But Violet's sin (as explained by the Oopa-Loompas) was habitual gum-chewing.

To recap, Violet grabs and, contrary to explicit instructions, chews gum which Wonka has been developing, but which has not been perfected. Veruca throws a tantrum (along with a musical number) because she wants a golden goose. And Mike impetuously (and against instructions) miniaturizes himself via the modern miracle of Wonkavision. There are varying levels of wrongdoing here, and arguably the threat of death or major injury is a bit severe, given the nature of the crimes. It's fair to note that at the end of the movie, Wonka does say that these kids will all emerge none the worse for wear. So ultimately their punishment is removal from the tour and loss of their chance to win the grand prize. The key, though, is that each of those three broke the rules and is therefore getting his or her comeuppance.

But I view Augustus Gloop's case differently. His crime was drinking from the chocolate river. But when he did that, he had no way of knowing that it was wrong. Wonka brought everyone into the great candy room, telling them that everything in the room is edible. He never told them not to drink the river, so it seemed only reasonable to young Gloop that he could drink the river. So he should not have lost out.

In fact, Charlie should have been eliminated from the tour for stealing some of the Fizzy Lifting Drink. The fact that he, through a combination of luck and cleverness, avoided injury doesn't change the fact of the theft. At the end of the movie, he does appear to lose his prize as a result of the theft, but he redeems himself by returning the gobstopper -- even when an angry Grandpa Joe is swearing to give it to Slugworth. Now, I'm all for the concept of repentance and redemption. But none of the other kids were given a chance to redeem themselves. And Augustus didn't even do anything wrong that should require him to earn his redemption.

Fuck Willy Wonka.

cinema history class: detour

Session: Horror-Noir—Does It Exist, Week 2
Movie: Detour (1945)
Directed by Edward G. Ulmer

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

Plot:
Hitchhiking across the country to meet up with his girlfriend. But the trip doesn't go as planned. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:

Well, this was definitely a film noir. You had the dramatic use of shadow, the German expressionist-inspired camera angles, the snappy clever dialogue. But was it a horror film? I didn't see the connection. Keith explained afterwards that this crossed the line into horror because Vera, the female lead, rather than being a femme fatale, was an out and out psycho who had grabbed complete control of Al's life. That explanation was good enough for me at the moment, though the more I think about it the less I'm convinced. But, whatever...I enjoyed the movie whether its was a horror film or not.

But Keith is definitely right about Vera being an out and out psycho. And she was brilliantly portrayed by Ann Savage who, Keith explained, established a template of sorts with this character.

This was a short movie, clocking in at just over an hour, but it was well paced and suspenseful. It did keep me guessing. As far as predictions go, I guessed some of what would happen. But my big guess -- that we would find that the actual Charlie Haskell was an imposter -- was never borne out. The guess made perfect sense to me, but since nothing was said of it, I guess I was completely off base.

The only thing I really didn't like was the very ending. I would have preferred to have the voice over trail off as he wandered off. The final touch, in which he gets picked up by the police was a bit of heavy-handed moralism. I should note though, that this was forced on Ulmer because of the Hays code.

Ratigs:

Me: 8.4
Dave: 9.5
Ethan: 8
Joe: 10
Sean: 2 out of 4

it's zmedsday!! (lvi)

happy tunesday! ("k'she'at bochah at lo yafa" by arik einstein)

This song has been on my mind a bit lately. I'm not sure how it entered my head, but it did. This is one of those situations where I found out that a recording I love is actually a cover version. I first knew the version by T-Slam, and only years later came across the original version by Arik Einstein.
I like them both, but have a strong preference for the original.

The title translates to "You're Not Pretty When You Cry." There are other Youtube videos of Arik Einstein's recording that have better sound quality. But they don;t have the groovy visuals.

As a side note, New York musician Eyta Mirsky recorded an accoustic version for his Youtube channel. That one is here:

And, hell, while I'm presenting different vesrsions, here's the T-Slam recording that I first knew:

cinema history class: the leopard man

Session: Horror-Noir—Does It Exist, Week 1
Movie: The The Leopard Man (1943)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur

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

Plot:
After a leopard escapes its handler, people start dying -- apparently by leopard attack.  Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:

The story was interesting enough, and there were a few good moments -- notably the blood ozzing under the door during the first attack. And the story was kind of interesting. But there really wasn't enough in this movie to really grab my attention. Joe adamantly disagreed with me, which prompted me to rewatch the movie on the intertubes (thanks, dailymotion.com). It's just too slow-moving to hold my interest. In class, I gave it a 7 (as reflected below). After trying to rewatch it, I need to revise my grade down to a 6.

But I should note that this did clearly make the case that there is a nonempty intersection of film noir and horror. Logically speaking, I don't see how that's even a question. Film noir is about style -- lighting, camera angles, tone. Horror is defined by the story. There's really nothing to make the two incompatible.

Ratings:

Me: 7
Dave: 9
Ethan: 7
Joe: 10

cinema history class: the new york ripper

NOTE: I have corrected this. As initially posted, it had incorrect ratings.

Session: Welcome to My Nightmare, Week 4
Movie: The New York Ripper (1982)
Directed by Lucio Fulci

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

Plot:
Young women i New York City are being stalked and viciously murdered by a serial killer. A grizzled police detective teams up with an academic psychologist to solve the case  Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:

I'm glad this wasn't the first Fulci film I ever saw because, frankly, it was more graphic and brutal in its violence than his others, and it's good to have gotten my feet wet with the others.*

If you want a solid hardcore slasher movie, this may be just right for you. The blood was gross. The plot was interesting, and everything was tied together pretty well. There were some good red herrings that kind of threw me off, and that's good to see.

I also liked it because I'm into movies having good realistic footage of the New York subway (as opposed to scenes meant to be set on the New York subway that obviously weren't filmed on it). But, in general, this had some good scenes of the gritty pre-Giuliani New York City. This was the city of my high school years. It's easy to romanticize it -- and I have plenty of friends who do -- but I don't really want to go back to it. That said, it's fun to see it portrayed in the movies.

But that damn duck voice was really frickin' annoying. It actually was important for the plot, but I hated it. I wish they could have worked without it.

Ratings:

Me: 8
Dave: 9.9
Ethan: 10
Joe: 10
Sean: 3 out of 4

*Analogous to this, the first Elvis Costello album I ever bought was Imperial Bedroom, and my first Bob Dylan album was Desire. It was hard to appreciate these works without having the context of their previous careers.

father/daughet breakfast -- a new tradition

Sharon and I are working on building a new tradition -- weekly father/daughter breakfasts.

The idea came to me a few weeks ago. Sharon wants to get a part-time job, and needed paperwork from the Department of Education. Afterwards, she was hungry so we went for a bite to eat.

And it was nice. Hanging out and chatting with her. Neither one of us staring at our phones.

I already spend a lot of time with Ethan. We have our (more or less) weekly cinema history class, and our weekly trips to the farmers' markets. And Asher gets a lot of my attention because, well, at home he demands it. But Sharon spends a lot of time at home working with the Overwatch team that she manages, and on her artwork. It would be easy enough to simply forget to interact with her, and I don;t want that to happen.

Since our unplanned lunch, I have started making it a habit to go out with her Saturday mornings (or early afternoon, if that's what works). We've done it now for two week,s and will be doing it again next week. It's great to spend the time with her. Just chatting and eating. I hope this tradition lasts.

it's (belated) zmedsday!! (lv)

happy belated tunesday! ("blitzkrieg bop" by the ramones)

In honor of my daughter first learning about The Ramones. And she learned about them because of politics. With all the dopey hoo-hah about President Trump's Zelinsky speech and how people put it to music, Sharon asked Blair who the Ramones are.

cinema history class: pieces

Session: Welcome to My Nightmare, Week 3
Movie: Pieces (1982)
Directed by J. Piquer Simon

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

Plot:
Women on a college campus in Boston are being killed by a maniac with a chainsaw.  Hilarity ensues.*

Reaction:

There was a lot to like in this movie. There was suspense and action. There was a clear, well-paced plot. And, it being a slasher film, there was blood. Ooh, was there blood. And, if you're into Fulci, there was a moment worthy of the best of Fulci films -- I won't spoil it here. Of course, Fulci isn't really my thing, but I have to acknowledge how well it was done.

But here I think it's more to the point to address the things I didn't like.

For the most part, what I didn't like about Pieces had to do with visuals.

• The prologue, taking place in 1942, had several clear anachronisms. Of course, we were able to laugh this iff and it's not really a fatal flaw.
• The architecture wasn't right. This movie is supposed to take place on a college campus in Boston. But the architecture was clearly not Boston. Further, a lot of the scenes on campus did not look like a college campus. There are some scenes at an indoor pool, but it is clearly a pool in someone's home. And the shower/locker room scene near the end was clearly not in a college shower/locker room. Now, I don;t know why I'm being such a prick about architecture and the buildings. I really should be able to look beyond that. Yet, for some reason it bothered me way more than it should have.
• A lot of the people didn't look like real people. The makeup looked terrible, and the characters looked plastic. Keith explained that this was probably due to the fact that Pieces wasn't meant to be watched on Blu-ray, but that's what we were watching. The extra clarity can expose a lot that shouldn't have been exposed.

Beyond the visuals, the supernatural moment at the end made no sense and left me annoyed. If this had been a movie with supernatural elements throughout, then it would have been fine. But tossing it in for a cheap thrill at the end didn't feel right.

Ratings:

Me: 6.5
Dave: 9.5
Ethan: 6
Joe: 10
Sean: 3 out of 4

happy zmedsday!! (liv)

happy tunesday! ("gettysburg" by the brandos)

Today is the 156th Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. So, in honor, here are the Brandos singing Gettysburg.

I'm not what you would call a huge Brandos fan. I don't have any of their albums on CD -- in fact, I don't have any idea how many albums they recorded. I'm sure I could look it up now. There are ways of finding out such things on the Intertubes. But that's not the point.

So, yeah...I'm not a huge fan of theirs, but I do like what music of theirs that I do know -- which is, basically, some of the tracks from their album, Honor Among Thieves. I got a review copy when I was in grad school doing record reviews for The Michigan Daily.

They did some solid rock and roll with a slight country flavor. Not enough for me to think of them as cowpunk, but enough that it couldn't be denied. And it made a strong enough positive impression that, decades later, I can remember the refrains from several songs -- "Strychnine," "A Matter of Survival," "Nothing to Fear." So I guess I did like them. But not enough to have felt a compelling need to buy their CDs.

Take it for what it's worth.

a stoopidstats look at presidential influence on the supreme court

Ethan and I were talking about the Supreme Court and the various presidents' influence on it.

As a result, I came up with a StoopidStats-based way of measuring such influence.It comes down to two statistics:

• SCOTUS Days: Is designed to be a measure of a President's impact on the court without any consideration of how long the President served. It is the total number of days served on the court by justices the president picked.*
• SCOTUS Days Ratio  measures a president's influence relative to the length of his tenure as President. It is SCOTUS Days divided by the number of days the President served.

The full file is here.

It's not terribly surprising that Franklin Delano Roosevelt has the most SCOTUS Days, with 52,535. He served more than three full terms, which is longer than anyone else, and picked eight SCOTUS justices.  George Washington picked 11 justices -- SCOTUS was a new thing, and he had to pick all the original justices. But they served much shorter terms.

But, while Roosevelt has more SCOTUS Days than any other President, he is 11th in SCOTUS Day ratio, at 11.880. First is Abraham Lincoln, with a ratio of 25.373. He has over 38 thousand SCOTUS Days, resulting from a presidency that lasted a little more than one term.

A few interesting notes:

• There have been four Presidents who never got to pick a SCOTUS justice: William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Andrew Johnson and Jimmy Carter. Carter is the only one of those who served a full term.
• Of those who did pick a justice, John Quincy Adams is the only one whose ratio is below 1. This means that the justices he picked (OK, there was only one) collectively served less time on the court than he did as President.
• Mahlon Pitney was on the court for exactly 4,000 days.

 * Few notes about methodology. I treated Cleveland's two nonconsecutive terms as separate presidencies. All statistics are as of this coming December 31, with the assumptions that Trump is still President at that point and the makeup of the court remains the same until then.

on the study of history and societal heroes

On Monday, Ethan and I were at the Penn Club of New York, watching a panel discussion titled "Is History a Thing of the Past?" This was part of the University of Edinburgh's 300 Years of History celebration. For clarity's sake, The University is over 400 years old. But this celebration is to mark the 300th anniversary of the appointment of Charles Mackie as the university's first history professor.

The panel discussion featured Professor Joanne Freeman (Yale University), Ms. Abena Boakyewa-Ansah* (Vanderbilt University), Professor Ewen Cameron (University of Edinburgh), Professort Frank Cogliano (University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Gayle Lewis (University of Edinburgh).

The major point of the discussion was that history matters because it helps to put current events into context -- both in terms of explaining why we are where we are and as a comparative. Freeman, an expert on early US history, noted that she is often asked if today's rancorous political environment is the worst this country has ever gone through. This point gave Boakyewa-Ansah, whose field is the Civil War, cause to chuckle. It also ties into Freeman's recent book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. Freeman noted that, when people ask about how the current climate stacks up against the past, they usually fall into one of two camps: those who want reassurance that things aren't so bad and those who, for prurient reasons, want to think that the world of today is uniquely bad.

But my favorite part of  the talk came during the Q&A when Cogliano, responding to my question, did a good job ofcrystalizing an issue I've been thinking a lot about. During the talk, there were repeated references to the current phenomenon of removing statues of people who are now deemed unworthy. Christopher Columbus' name came up of course, and so did Thomas Jefferson who, despite having written the Declaration of Independencewhich declares that "all men are created equal" owned slaves.

The issue of statues and their removal is something I've grappled with recently, as I try to determine what I think. I recognize that we don't want to honor racism and other hateful ideologies**, but all people were human, and if we expect everyone to withstand a purity test in order be honored (or to ahve their honors stand), then we will be left with no statues, no iconic heores. And I think that, on some level, a society needs heroes in order to believe in itself. It all relates to whether people in a society believe that the society is fundamentally good (even if flawed) or if they believe the flaws make it beyond redemption. If the latter, then a society is doomed. I asked there's a danger in society holding its icons up to impossible standards and finding them, one after the other, to be unworthy.

More and more I've been coming toward a conclusion that what's crucial is what a person is known for - what his or her defining attributes are. If someone was racist or antisemitic, but is known for some major positive contribution to society, then that's what's crucial. Abraham Lincoln believed that blacks were inferior to whites. But he remains a hero because he's primarily remembered for freeing the slaves and holding the republic together. In the case of Jefferson, Cogliano pointed out that, flawed though he was, he authored this country's founding document -- a document which is still a fundamental part of our cultural DNA.

Hearing these historians talk about their views of history and the importance of understanding history was almost enough to make me wish I'd gone into that field decades ago. And if Ethan ultimately decides to be a historian, that will be a good choice for him.

*Boakyewa-Ansah, the only panelist without a PhD, is a graduate student working toward that degree.
**As a point of reference, I attended a high school named after a virulent antisemite. I knew it when I attended and saw his larger-than-life portrait over the stairs every day. While I wasn't crazy about the name, it didn;t consume me. And I emerged from that school none the worse for it. 

happy zmedsday!! (liii)

congrats to the expos on their first world series

The nationals have won the first World Series in the franchise's history. But, since the franchise has been around for 51 seasons (50 of which had a World Series), during which there have been between 24 and 30 teams, their fair share of World Series wins would be 1.8249.* So, with one win, the Nationals have won 54.80% of their fair share.

Of course, the Yankees, with 27 wins have 4.6608 times as many wins as their fare share -- by far the largest ratio of wins to fair share. It pains me to note that the Mets have won less than their fair share -- they have two wins and their fair share is 2.1749. Relatedly, it pains me to note that it has been longer since their last win than they had been in existence when that occurred. In other words, both of their wins happened during what is now the first half of their existence.

The spreadsheet in which I assembled this is here. I should say here that I have been having trouble wrangling Dropbox. If you try to follow this link, please let me know if it works. If it doesn't, I'll try to fix it.

*I define a team's fair share as the sum (over all seasons the team existed and their was a Wold Series) of 1/n where n is the number of teams during that season. Put in planer English, it's the number of World Series wins a team would have if, instead of being won on the field, all World Series wins were evenly split among the teams in existence.

happy tunesday! ("wrong again" by squeeze)

I know this song a Rockpile number, being that I was first exposed to it on Rockpile's album, Seconds of Pleasure. But fans (or, truthfully, anyone who reads things like songwriting credits on record sleeves) know that it was written by Squeeze's Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook.

So just for gits and shiggles I'm sharing this version performed by Squeeze. It was on a plexidisc included in an issue of Smash Hits which was (or is...I have no idea if it's still around*) a British music tabloid. I like Rockpile's version better. It's paced better, as compared to this one which seems rushed. Still, I'm going with the rarer Squeeze version.

*I bet I could look that up, but I don;t really care enough

that's two issues i have under my belt

It's not perfect, but I have created and released the Fall, 2019, issue of the LIDS Newsletter. You can read it here.

Features?

Aside from the front page headline visible in the illustration, there's:

• Pat Sayers talks about how she became interested in daylilies.
• Bob Stanton talks about his entries in the Saxton Seedling contest (including his winning entry which he has since registered as "Margaret Stanton Memorial."
• A rundown of new cultivars introduced by LIDS members in 2019.

This is the second issue of the newsletter since I became editor.

On the nitpicky side of things, a colleague at work* thinks that LIDS Newsletter is a bad name. But I don't have anything better. He suggested LIDS News, but I'm not feeling it.

*I won't divulge who it is, but suffice to say he his name has syllables in it.

cinema history class: burial ground

Session: Welcome to My Nightmare, Week 2
Movie: Burial Ground (1981)
Directed by Andrea Bianchi

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

Plot:
Zombies lay siege to a mansion where a bunch of hedonists have inexplicably decided to have a party.  Hilarity ensues.*

Reaction:

In his introduction, Keith said, " Check your brain at the door. This is not gonna be an intellectual think piece."

He wasn't kidding. This thing spends very little time jumping into the zombie action, and there's very little exposition. So, while it's easy to follow what's happening, it leaves one wondering why it happened. Why did the zombies attack the mansion? Why were these jet-setting hedonists hanging out there? The fact that so much was left unexplained was the major reason that I didn't rate this any higher.

That said, there is a lot to recommend Burial Ground. Most notable was the creepily miscast Pietro Barzocchini (AKA Peter Bark) as the teenager, Michael. Bark was in his mid-twenties, and his face looked older than that, but he presumably got the role because he was short and of slight build -- from a distance he could pass for a kid. But between his weird expressions (Star Trek's Charlie X comes to mind) and the downright bizzare incesty nature of the character, he was the most memorable thing in the film.

The special effects were -- well, I don;t want to say well done, but they did do a good job of serving their purpose. And we can see the slasher genre developing here. While we're on the subject, it's worth noting that this movie featured strong cooperation among the zombies. They work together to cut a woman's head off with a scythe. They work together to use a battering ram. And in lots of other instances they go beyond the simple limited thought processes that we usually see in zombies. I do have to wonder, however, why, when they have a man in their clutches and can easily bite him, they feel the need to drag him to a huge miter saw.

As I noted, more stage-setting and explanation would have gone a long way toward getting me to appreciate this more. But the action was really well done, and I couldn't help liking it a bit.


Ratings:

Me: 6
Dave: 9.5
Ethan: 6
Joe: 9.9
Sean: 3 out of 4

happy tunesday! ("my wife left town with a banana" by carlos borzenie, sr.)

Do I really need any justification for this one?

cinema history class: nightmare

Session: Welcome to My Nightmare, Week 1
Movie: NIghtmare (1981)
Directed by Romano Scavolini

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

Plot:
A psychotic made more psychotic by an experimental drug travels to Florida to murder his ex-wife and son.  Hilarity ensues.*

Reaction:

My main thought was "why?" This was disjointed to the point of being difficult to understand. I asked if this was a particularly influential film, and Keith said that it wasn't.

That said, Nightmare was notorious for the graphic nature of its gore. In the UK, its distributor was sentenced to prison for the violence. And it was often cited in the debate over violence in movies. The fact is this was far over the top in terms of the gore. This is true of multiple scenes of violence, but it peaks with the final decapitation (which had been hinted at all film long).

The concept of experimental drugs backfiring is an interesting topic, and the premise does remind me a bit of The Terminal Man, though I haven't seen that movie (I have read the book, though). The whole thing creates a villain who can be sympathetic, having been created through medical intervention.

While this could have been fascinating, the flaws tended to ruin it. Perhaps I would have liked it better if I actually were into slasher films, which I'm not. It was cool, however, that the villain looks sort of like Conan O'Brien.

Ratings:

Me: 2.5
Christina: 8
Dave: 8
Ethan: 4
Joe: 9.8**
Sean: 2 out of 4
T.K.: 3 out of 5

*This plot synopsis was written by Keith. I woudn't want to claim it as my own. I mean, I really would -- it is pretty spot on perfect. But I wouldn't want to be accused of plagiarism.

**Joe missed this week, so he didn't see the movie or get to rate it. I'm just assuming he would have given it a 9.8.

happy zmedsday!! (xlii)

happy tunesday! ("mi yodea madua v'lama loveshet hazevra pijama" by mashina)

One of my favorite songs from Israeli stars, Mashina. The title translates to English as "Who Knows Why the Zebra Wears Pajamas?"

happy zmedsday!! (li)

My apologies to my reader for missing last week. Work was hella hectic.

it's tunesday! ("let's just start with goodbye" by eytan mirsky)

First of all, some housekeeping: I apologize to my reader for missing Tunesday last week. Work was hella hectic and, well, I didn't blog at all during the week. I will have a similar apology tomorrow when I post for Zmedsday -- I missed that one last week, too.

In the normal course of events I try to avoid featuring the same artist or band in multiple Tunesday posts. And, back in July, I featured Eytan Mirsky's "Happiness" as a Tunesday post. That was here. That was prompted by seeing the movie, Happiness, in my cinema history class. Eytan wrote the theme song for it (and also appeared briefly as a striking worker.

But I'm going with another Eytan Mirsky song, this time "Let's Just Start with Goodbye." The occasion? I met Eytan on the subway last Saturday night. I recognized him waiting on an R train, and horrified Ethan as I approached and asked, "Excuse me, sir...are you Eytan Mirsky?" Ethan was, of course, expecting me to be asking a stranger some random question...He hates when I do things like that. I retreated, ending the conversation because I didn't want to impose on his life. But, thinking about it afterwards (and judging by his resction to my FB friend request), he would have been open to chatting longer.

Anyway, Eytan was very gracious, and we had a little chat about music and the fact that I had never met him before. I also realized that I've gotten woefully behind, and need to get more of his albums. He suggested I can listen on Spotify. And that's true, but I have a thing about wanting to buy the physical media. So I ordered a copy of Everyone's Having Fun Tonight, which is one of Eytan's CDs that I don't have. I picked it since it has "Happiness," which is the song I used for Tunesday back in July. And now this post has come full circle.

This time I went with "Let's Just Start With Goodbye," from the same album. I chose it for its bouncy opening riff that reminds me of The Fabulous Thunderbirds -- and the clever lyrical concept. I'll be buying Eytan's other albums in the foreseeable future, but I've been forcing myself out of the habit of buying a lot of CDs at once.

So it's been a good month or so for the music fan in me. Back in September I met Nick Lowe and Will Birch at a book signing (of course, that was a signing of the biography that Birch wrote about Lowe, so I knew they'd be there).

Add this to other music fan thrills (from past years):

• First seeing a copy of the Milner Brothers' album with one of my songs on it;
• Having Bobtown record a demo of one of my songs;
• Having Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby record a demo of one of my songs -- they also modified the melody and lyrics enough that I am sharing the songwriting credit with them (in case there's ever any money to be made from it, which there won't be, but still...);
• Sharing a beer with Country Dick Montana (that was when he was still alive);
• Keith floating the idea of my writing a song for his next film -- I have no idea if it'll end up happening, but I have my fingers crossed.

so, yeah...enjoy...

cinema history class: targets

Session: Karloff in the Age of Aquarius, Week 4
Movie: Targets (1968)
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

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

Plot:
Mild-mannered Bobby Thompson is about to go hunting people. Embittered actor Byron Orlock is making one last appearance. Bobby and Byron are on a collision course  Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:

The interesting backstory here is that the film got made because Boris Karloff owed the studio two days of work. Bogdanovich was told that he could use Karloff for two days to make any movie he liked as long as he stayed under budget and used footage from the Karloff movie, The Terror. Bogdanovich built the Terror footage in as actual movies being shown within this movie, which otherwise had nothing to do with the earlier film's gothic setting.

Even though this was a  Boris Karloff movie, Karloff is really not the star. That honor goes to the relatively unknown Tim O'Kelly -- according to Wikipedia, this was his one major film appearance. And O'Kelly was good as the psychopathic murderer. The concern here is that there wasn't a whole lot of character development. We're really left without any kind of understanding of why Thompson snapped. I suppose a good argument can be made that such exposition isn;t needed. Arguably, the idea that this can be anyone is even more frightening. And yet, I would have preferred to have more understanding.

Karloff plays his role brilliantly. And after the denouement, I think we should be telling jokes about Karloff instead of Chuck Norris. But he just isn't the star here. Actually, it seems that the stories of Thompson Orlock are almost separate movies that finally come together at the end.

I have to wonder whether the Kennedy assassination, which was still a recent event, was at all influential in this film. The shootings are very different, but a couple of the shots did remind me of the footage of Kennedy getting killed. One shot even reminded me of the Zapruder film.

At any rate, the stars of this were good, but it could have benefitted from more fleshing out.

Ratings:

Me: 5
Christina: 8
Dave: 9.5
Ethan: 7
Joe: 10*
Rich: 3
Sean: 3 out of 4

*Joe missed this week, so he didn't see the movie or get to rate it. I'm just assuming he would have given it a 10.