This may only be of interest to hardcore movie geeks like myself, but I found it fascinating… it’s a two-minute (give or take) compilation of memorable movie-title sequences (and a few from television) dating from the very beginning of the medium right up to the current moment. Several of my favorites appear, including the stark art-deco block lettering of the original King Kong, the creepy burn-through effect of The Thing, Star Wars receding off into the distance, Superman swooping in from behind us, and the delightfully retro animation from Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. I’ll post the complete title list below the fold, if anyone is interested…
Hey, kids, I just wanted to acknowledge that I am aware there are still issues with the comments. I’ve received complaints that people are having trouble signing in using their Yahoo and Google identities (even if they’ve previously done so successfully), and a couple days ago, one of those weird URL string-thingies popped up in place of a commenter’s name again. I have no idea why this isn’t all working more smoothly, and I apologize to any Loyal Reader who’s had a problem.
For now, until Jack and/or I can figure this out, I’ve decided to disable the Google and Yahoo registration options altogether. This means a few of you may no longer be able to sign in; again, my apologies. If you have a problem, just go ahead and create an account here on my host server. In fact, I strongly urge all of my Loyal Readers to do that, since that option seems to be the one that’s working best. It’s quick and painless and asks for no more information than the commenting feature on the old platform did. I believe you’ll get a confirmation email after you register; don’t forget to follow the instructions it contains. Once I get all the regulars set up and “trusted,” I hope we won’t have to talk about this anymore. And I also hope all the hassle hasn’t put anyone off…
If you don’t obsessively follow useless trivia the way I do, you probably don’t realize that Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock — er, I mean, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy — both have birthdays this week, and they’re both achieving the same landmark age of 80 years old. Today is Bill’s day, with Leonard catching up to him this Saturday.
Hard to imagine my boyhood heroes becoming genuinely old, especially Shatner, who, despite his generally goofy latter-day persona, remains almost shockingly vital. In other words, he really doesn’t seem like an 80-year-old. (By contrast, Nimoy appeared rather frail in the Star Trek reboot movie a couple years ago, but perhaps he was just going through a rough patch while they were filming that.) Harder still to contemplate: if these guys are getting old, what does that say about me? I think I’m now about the age Kirk was supposed to be in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and that’s just… weird…
Nice (and surprisingly timely, given the rampant anti-Muslim sentiment in the land) quote here from an old review of Roger Ebert’s for the film Come See the Paradise:
Although we make much of our tradition of freedom in this country, we are not so clever at understanding what freedom really means. Even our president, for example, cannot understand that among the rights symbolized by the American flag is the right to burn it – or honor it, if that is our choice. I have always wondered why the people who call themselves “American” most loudly are often the ones with the least understanding of the freedoms that word should represent.
When the country is threatened, our civil liberties are among the first casualties – as if we can fight the enemy by taking away our own freedoms before the enemy has a chance to. That is what happened in the early days of World War II, when a wave of racism swept the Japanese-Americans out of their homes and businesses, confiscated their savings and investments, and shipped them away in prison trains to concentration camps that were sometimes no more than barns and stables. Later on some of these same Japanese-Americans fought with valor in the same war, perhaps because they understood better than their captors what they were fighting for.
The review is dated 1991, so the president he’s referring to would have been George H.W. Bush. And indeed, I do recall that flag burning was quite a hot-button issue back then. Simpler times, I guess. For the record, my position has always been the same as Ebert’s. I don’t approve of burning flags — I think it’s stupid and does nothing but piss people off — but cries to outlaw the practice rub me the wrong way. Naturally the senior senator from my state, Orrin Hatch, seems to propose a Constitutional amendment to prohibit it almost every year. I really dislike that man — one of these days, I’ll tell the story of the time I met him in person and he demonstrated such an utter dickishness that I’ve never gotten over it. And this was even before I started having much in the way of political opinions!
One final thought: I never saw Come See the Paradise, but it sounds good. The Japanese-American internment camps are an interest of mine; one of them was right here in Utah, only about two hours’ drive from my home, out in some of the most desolate territory in the whole damn country. And one of these days, I might write about that, too…
The fabulous Bennion Compound holds many secret treasures.
Moments ago, while walking through the section that encompasses my father’s junkyard, The Girlfriend suddenly halted, took a couple of steps backward, and then asked, “Is that a flamethrower over there?”
I took a look at the object in question and confirmed that, yes, it is indeed a flamethrower. Well, of a sort. It doesn’t actually project a stream of burning gasoline — which would be way-cool, by the way — but it is a long wand-like gadget designed to produce flame at the tip. Dad cobbled it together a number of years ago when he needed to thaw something out in the dead of winter. I forget what.
Anne shook her head and said, “You know, when your parents die, we’ll have to figure out what to do with all this shit.”
I replied, “Yes, and then the flamethrower will be ours.”
It figures. I get myself a shiny new blogging platform complete with comments and everything just in time for the cyclical insanity of my job to come back around like the weighty business end of a whirling bola. I hate to say it, but keeping my head down and the red ink flowing nonstop for eight (or more) uninterrupted hours a day leaves me with little inclination to do much with my verbal skills at the end of the day. In other words, I haven’t felt much like writing for a while.
But hey, I care — I really care — about you crazy kids waiting around out there in the early-spring twilight for me to entertain you, so how about my usual fallback for times when I don’t have much time to write something that actually means anything: yes, it’s a music video!
(The truth is, I’ve been missing my Friday Evening Videos feature anyway. I went through a phase in my early teens when I wanted to be a DJ — that would be the radio variety, not the modern-day guys who scratch records in dance clubs — and these entries let me play at that role a little.)
Tonight’s selection doesn’t have any story behind it — I just saw it for the first time myself a couple days ago — but I’ve always liked The Bangles, the all-girl group that’s best-known for their number-one hit “Walk Like an Egyptian” (although I prefer the number-two-charting “Manic Monday” myself) as well as the shortness of lead singer Susanna Hoffs‘ skirts. There’s no question that all four members of the band were easy on the eyes, but they were also very tight musically and they crafted quite a few great, hooky pop singles during the mid to late ’80s, probably more than most people realize. This particular song, “Going Down to Liverpool,” is a bit obscure (it didn’t even chart in the U.S., although it appears on their 1990 Greatest Hits compilation), but it’s a nice little tune and one of the rare occasions when drummer Debbi Peterson took over the lead vocals.
However, the real reason I decided to post this one here is… well, I’ll let you be surprised by who guest-stars in the video. I’ll just say that he looks very Mission: Impossible-ish here, and it’s my understanding he agreed to do this because his son was a friend of Susanna’s… and any friend of Susanna’s is a friend of… well, just take a look:
[Okay, I can’t refrain from making one comment: the background music is both overly saccharine and mixed a little too loudly, causing it to compete with Takei’s voiceover in a couple of places. And nothing irritates me more than competing audio tracks or songs, which is a big part of why I don’t enjoy many musicals — I can’t handle the thing where two people sing different songs simultaneously. But hey, this video still carries a good message…]
I just wanted to highlight something Jack said in the comments of the previous entry (did you catch that? I said “in the comments!” Yay! Such a sweet sound…) in case anybody missed it:
As an additional note/caveat, you must have a profile defined for the Google and Yahoo authentication to work.
You may also setup a local blog account with standard email authentication. There’s a “Sign-up” linky-dink in the bottom right corner of the the credentials window.
If any Loyal Readers who’ve already checked in have any discomfort about using their Google or other accounts, feel free to set up a new, local one. On the plus side, doing that will let you choose a new username, if you’re not wild about the one you’ve got. This may be especially handy if the one you have is just a big long string of code. I’ll even delete the previous comments made under another identity, if you wish. Just let me know. (I’m probably overthinking this/making too damn big a deal about it, as I usually do. Feel free to let me know that, too, if you must.)
Anyhow, I promise this will be the last word on commenting for a while, unless something comes to my attention that’s not working. Do as you please, Loyal Readers, and I’ll quit trying to direct you. The next entry will be back to the usual drivel…
First, welcome back everyone! I’m delighted to find that my Loyal Readers (at least the vocal ones) are still out there!
Now then, it appears that the new commenting system has a few bugs, as a number of you have mentioned problems with signing in, especially those who tried to use your Google and/or Yahoo! credentials. Webmaster Jack has done some work tonight and reports that the registration system ought to be working now as far as signing in goes, although he still doesn’t know why some people’s usernames are appearing as big long URL/code strings. I am, of course, completely clueless about all of it and will take his word for it.
In any event, one of the cooler things about this new platform is that allows me to “trust” regular commenters so your remarks no longer have to be held in moderation, i.e., you should be able to make a comment and have it immediately appear. At this time, the following regulars have been so approved:
Puffbird
Jaquandor
Burlaki.com
Ilyuha
CrankyRobert
KonstantinB
(Brian, I figured there wasn’t much sense “trusting” you until we can get the username issue resolved. Nothing personal… )
So, you folks in the list above, please do my a favor by signing in and saying something, then letting me know if anything happens that looks like it shouldn’t happen. Thanks for your support, and hopefully we’ll have this all running smoothly in the next few days…
And just like this, space shuttle Discovery became a museum piece moments before noon EST today:
I don’t have much more to say than I’ve already said many times — I think the space shuttles are magnificent machines that once represented all my dreams for the future, and I’m genuinely sad to see their era coming to an end. Especially as I have my days when I think this just may be the proverbial it for manned spaceflight by Americans. Oh, sure, we’ll keep hitching rides to the ISS on Russian ships for a few more years, and companies like SpaceX are promising some exciting things, but I can’t help feeling like the day of the Space Transportation System — that’d be the shuttle to you and me — isn’t the only one that’s passing. The Space Age that began in the 1950s and always seemed like such a given as I was growing up, such a well-loved and everlasting institution, seems to be winding down, too. There are partisan types who are quick to blame the situation on President Obama because he’s the one who axed the Constellation program that was supposed to replace the shuttle, but it wasn’t his fault. It’s been coming for years. Decades, maybe. We are diminishing, as a culture. We lost our nerve somewhere along the way, and our drive and our curiosity went with it. The human race will spread out into the system one of these days, but I no longer have faith that Americans will be leading the way.
But this also is something I’ve said before. For today, let’s just focus on Discovery and her incredible legacy. She is the most-traveled of the shuttle fleet, clocking up a whopping 365 days in space over 39 missions across a 27-year operational lifespan. She’s circled the Earth 5,830 times for a grand total of 148, 221, 675 miles traversed while in orbit. And as Commander Steve Lindsay noted in his remarks on the Kennedy Space Center runway this afternoon, with his ship standing proudly on the tarmac behind him, she came home today as perfect as on her very first flight.
Discovery‘s next journey will be a comparative hop of only 750 miles, from Kennedy to Washington, DC, where she will become a permanent resident of the Smithsonian alongside her sister ship, the prototype Enterprise. My understanding is that the two spaceplanes will be parked nose to nose, representing the beginning and the end of the program. One day, I intend to stand in front of that exhibit. And I’m willing to bet my eyes will fill with tears for what was, and what I always thought would be…
