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.