of cats and men

 I've recently seen a lot of comments and posts on social media asserting that cats don't recognize humans as being fundamentally different from cats.

This assertion is made in service of describing differences between cats and dogs. Dogs, the argument goes, know that people are not dogs. Cats, on the other hand, think that people are just incompetent cats.

I call bullshit.

Full disclosure: I am a cat person. Growing up, I had both dogs and cats. And I preferred dogs. But I -- and my family, once I got married -- have had cats since 1995. Right now my family has four -- Red, 18, Wilko and Copic.

I have seen how cats react to new and unknown cats and I've seen how they react to new and unknown people. If you bring a new adult cat into a home with cats who are already established, there's a lot of hissing, growling and swatting. The established cats make it clear that the new one is not welcome. If a new human comes into the house, the cats don't mostly ignore him.

Don;t tell me they don't know the difference.

cinema history class: the living coffin (1959)

The session: "Westerns with a Twist of Monster"

For this year's version of our session of Westerns, Keith is showing us four mashups: Westerns with monsters

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

Week 3: The Living Coffin (1959)
Directed by Fernando Mendez

My Impressions Going In:

Never heard of this one.

Plot:

An old spirit is haunting a sleepy Mexican town, scaring away the residents.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

Almost twenty years ago, my family took a roadtrip from Anchorage, Alaska, to Inuvik, Northwest Territories. I remember particularly, when we stopped to eat in Dawson City, in the Yukon. The restaurant we stopped in had a creepily abandoned feel. Of course, it was mid September, and the tourist season was over, so there were very few customers. And years after that, we went on a driving tour of Centralia, Pennsylvania -- a small city that has been all but abandoned because of an underground fire that has been burning since 1962.

The Living Coffin reminded me of those travel experiences because of the creepily abandoned quality of the town -- especially the saloon. They clearly saved money by having a very small cast. It kind of fit with the whole conceit that the town is in the process of being abandoned, but had the result of making it feel like a stage-play.  I think that feeling was also driven by the sets which had an oddly surreal quality.

I did enjoy the Scooby Doo quality of the plot, and the obvious references to Poe. But there was just too much downtime, so it failed to capture my attention.

The makeup was good, though.

Ratings

Me: 6.5

Bob-O: 8

Christina: 8.1

Ethan: 7

cinema history class: curse of the undead (1959)

The session: "Westerns with a Twist of Monster"

For this year's version of our session of Westerns, Keith is showing us four mashups: Westerns with monsters

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

Week 2: Curse of the Undead (1959)
Directed by Edward Dein

My Impressions Going In:

Never heard of this one.

Plot:

A mysterious disease is claiming the lives of the young women in town. Can Preacher Dan save the day?

Reaction and Other Folderol:

This was much better than The Beast of Hollow Mountain, which we saw the previous week. Beast seemed like two separate movies -- an hour of typical Hollywood Western followed by a half hour or so of a T-Rex running wild through town. By contrast, Curse did a good job of integrating its Western trappings with the vampire plot.

There were a lot of really good one-liners thrown into the dialog, which was fun. For a movie of this type, the characters were surprisingly well-developed. I enjoyed the fact that the villain himself was shown, through revelation of his backstory, to be ambiguously evil at worst. I did feel sorry for him, even as I knew that he had to die. And Ethan took that a step further, observing that, in this movie "you feel every death; the deaths matter." On the other hand, the whole thing did sort of drag around the middle.

It's a fun watch, but not particularly memorable.Were I rating it now, I would have gone a half point to a full point lower.

Ratings

Me: 8

Bob-O: 9.1

Christina: 9.2

Dave: 9.5

Ethan: 8

Joe: 10

art and investments

Ethan and Sharon are taking an art history class this semester. The first session was this morning. When Blair and I picked them up after class, they told us about a conversation. The professor was talking about art as an investment, and said that it’s like stocks, bonds or any other investment. Ethan said something along the lines of “not really…” And they were off to the races.

Ethan is absolutely right. As investments go, there absolutely is a fundamental difference between art (or other collectibles) and stocks, bonds or other financial instruments. But I suspect that he didn’t do a good job of explaining it; he and Sharon reported that he didn’t convince anyone. With that in mind, I’m going to take a shot at the explanation. Of course, brevity will require some oversimplification.

Financial instruments such as stocks and bonds produce income. Or at least that’s the hope. Bonds represent debt, and the issuer is obligated to pay the borrowed money (with interest). A share in common stock represents an ownership interest in a company and, with it, a share of that company’s future income. The value of a stock or a bond is, essentially the present value of future cash flows. It gets complicated because there can be considerable uncertainty around those future cash flows. And a hundred different investors may have a hundred different assessments of the value. And those assessments may be constantly changing. But stocks and bonds have value because, fundamentally, they are expected to produce income.

A painting doesn’t produce income. Its only value is in people wanting to own it for its sake. I suppose there may be people who buy art to rent to others, or to display for a paying audience. But that’s not what the professor was referring to.

To put it more simply, if you buy art to collect with no intention of ever selling it, you will never make any money from it. If you buy a share of stock with no intention of ever selling it, you still expect to get cash flows from the dividends it will pay.

cinema history class: the beast of hollow mountain (1956)

The session: "Westerns with a Twist of Monster"

For this year's version of our session of Westerns, Keith is showing us four mashups: Westerns with monsters

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

Week 1: The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1974)
Directed by Edward Nassour and Ismael Rodriguez

My Impressions Going In:

Never heard of this one.

Plot:

Cattle are disappearing, and cattlemen are fighting over land, money and a woman. Then the prehistoric dinosaur appears.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

I have to acknowledge that, while I love Spaghetti Westerns, I am not a big fan of the typical old Hollywood Western with the white-hatted hero and the black-hatted villain. And that's what the majority of this movie was. An hour into it, we were still watching a simple western. And I was bored of it.

Things did pick up when the dinosaur finally arrived. Watching the dinosaur chase down the cowboys was great fun. I especially enjoyed one sequence where the dinosaur was seen eating a cow -- all in stop-motion. The tongue effect was kind of cheesy, and I had to roll my eyes as we saw what were supposed to be dinosaur legs stomping on the ground. Sadly, there was just not enhough of that.

Too much Western, too little beast.

Perhaps my rating was too low. It's unfair to judge a movie harshly simply because I don't like the genre -- at least that's the case if it's a good example of its genre. So, if you feel that way, then add a point or two to my rating.

Ratings

Me: 4

Bob-O: 9

Christina: 7.8

Dave: 9.5

Ethan: 5

Joe: 10