THOUGHTS RANDOMLY

"No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good."
-C.S. Lewis

A few random things I've been thinking and writing about lately:

Quentin Tarantino needs to drop all his projects and go back to his roots.  He needs to make a 70's era period cop drama.  One that the Beastie Boys video for Sabotage evokes, a gritty one with all the sensibilities and camera shots used in the time period.

Speaking of movies, I watched a couple of James Bond movies.  License to Kill was one, and its a better movie than I remembered.  I still think it owes too much to Miami Vice in theme and feel, but its quite good except for the semi on one side to avoid a missile (why on earth would that work?).  I continue to think Dalton was the best Bond ever.

And Eric, I owe you an apology: Octopussy is better than I remembered.  A lot better.  Yes it has cheesy jokes in it, but it actually is quite good, I'd call it one of the top 3 Roger Moore bond films.

If I had a billion dollars, I'd get a retro-Sci Fi MMOG made, based on the worlds of Buck Rogers and so on.  Rocket packs, alien princesses, ray guns, brilliant mad scientists, etc. It would be wonderful fun and I think very popular.  In fact, I'm pondering writing up one of my fantasy ideas set in that sort of world instead.

Almost 15 years ago in 1990, archaeologists discovered an ossuary containing the bones of Caiphas, the high priest.  This is the same Caiphas who tried Jesus Christ before the Sanhedrin.  It was not revealed to the public until 1992 when they had confirmed the authenticity of the bones, and I hadn't even heard of it before today.

Even the BBC has admitted that global warming has "paused" for over a decade.  Since 1998 there hasn't been any global warming.  How long does it "pause" before they just admit its not happening?

In other global weather disaster news, ice sheets are more stable than previously believed.

Agent Coulson's first name is "Phillip," not "agent."

I love how girls look when they jog with a ponytail.  It swishes from side to side and looks so neat, I wonder if it feels neat?

According to a study, the more economic freedom a nation has, the more racial tolerance it displays.  One of the few exceptions: France.

Racial Tolerance seems like a pretty uncomfortable term to me though.  You tolerate ideas you dislike; racial tolerance doesn't strike me as a positive, really.

Australia has a show called Dirty Laundry that is a sort of Daily Show take on the news.  They have an adult rating of MA for mature audiences. They've been put on notice that they are going to have a change in their rating because they are... too clean.  That's right, they have to be more filthy or they will get a more general audience child-friendly rating.

Kitty wants to be petted, really bad.  How could anyone resist?

Finally, an idea came up on the podcast "Comic Dorks" which I really think is brilliant.  Why hasn't Hollywood done this by now?  They should make available a service or black box you can attach to your home entertainment system which allows you to get any of their films for a fee.  The cost could be pretty steep, because you have to figure lots of people will be watching the movie at once.  And they could put new releases out the same day they hit theaters for a hefty fee ($50 or more).  Get a box, invite your friends over, pay 5 bucks each to the kitty, and watch Star Wars episode VII in your living room the day it comes out.  Yes this would enrage and horrify theaters, who make their money on the later weeks of new releases, but it would be good money for the studios.  Streaming would cost a lot less than packaging and shipping out films (although digital films are a lot cheaper to ship), and it would make studios a lot of money.

The only thing I can figure that's holding them back - other than sheer obstinance and being stuck in the 20th century - is fear of easy pirating.

OLD TIME RADIO: GUNSMOKE

"Around Dodge City and the territory out west there's just one way to handle all the killers and the spoilers, and that's with a US Marshal and the smell of ... Gunsmoke!"

Doc, Marshall Dillon, Miss Kitty, and Chester

In the 1940s, CBS chairman William S. Paley was a big fan of the Philip Marlowe radio show, and directed his programming chief, Hubell Robinson to develop a western version of the detective show. Philip Marlowe was a hard boiled detective show, and what Paley wanted was a hardboiled western with a lawman as the star.

The result was Gunsmoke, with Matt Dillon as the main character, a US Marshall with his main office in Dodge City.  It was a huge hit, almost immediately popular with fans for a variety of reasons.  One of the main ones is that it was a western targeted at grown ups rather than the typical radio western fare which was for kids (The Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid) and it was the first western for adults.  Another reason it was popular was the quality of writing, which sets is apart from almost every show in every era, on any format.

Gunsmoke holds up extremely well to this day by being gritty, historically accurate, well-acted, well-written, and intelligent.  The setting, actions, language, characters and so on are all mature and clever.  Another bonus was that the main characters stayed with the same actors for the entire run.  

Matt Dillon was played by William Conrad, who was brilliant in the part.  In fact, had he been a more slender man he would have been in the TV show, but he always was a heavy man and was passed over for the more classically western type with James Arness (brother of Mission Impossible's Peter Graves).  John Wayne was actually offered the Dillon part for the show, but he declined, focusing on film.  Conrad's voice was powerful and commanding, and he had a lot of range and created a very likable, honorable, and trustworthy character.

Gunsmoke won piles of awards and accolades, especially for its historical accuracy.  The treatment of groups such as American Indians and Mexicans was balanced and thoughtful - some were good, some weren't and all were just people.  Co-Creator and producer John Meston was a sort of deconstructionist, but he was not interested in tearing down the legend so much as historical accuracy.

So the stories often turned stereotypes and typical western patterns on their head, and the result was a more accurate type of show that actually has a more plausible, more reasonable feel these days.  Something that surprised me was how incredibly fast and deadly Dillon was.  I always got the impression that he was not so much a gunman as a good lawman, but he was both.  Matt Dillon was given respect like Bill Hickock and John Wesley Hardin in the show, but he was never cocky or certain, always careful to avoid a gunfight if he could.  And he was strictly law and order, even to his own detriment.

Gunsmoke's cast was excellent as well, and many of them show up on other radio shows because of their skill and voices such as Parley Baer (doc) who got more work than Michael Caine in his heyday.  I've listened to more than fifty of the radio episodes online and even the weakest shows are very well done.

The radio show Gunsmoke ran for nine years from 1952 to 1961, with over 400 episodes.  In 1955 the TV show started up, and it ran for 20 years until it was canceled in 1975.

This show is seriously a gem, something everyone would love to listen to.  If I could, I'd get an animator and put them on Youtube now because I think people would really get a kick out of them (including the old cigarette and public service ads).

RENEWING DOMAINS

"I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere."
-Marissa Mayer

So its that time of year again, time to renew my Google domain for this blog.  Its pretty cheap and I actually have some cash I can pay for it with.  It used to be around Christmas but that was too much conflict for my limited budget, so I moved it up a bit. 

Previously its been easy, Google sent an email saying "you're running out, click here to renew."  Not this year.  Google has been juggling around all their various business and web options like adplus and so on, trying to get them all under one umbrella.  Now its called "Google apps" as if everything you do online is on an Ipod.

Hey Google, if its on a computer then its called a program.  Despite what you may think, most people use their computer to browse the internet  Yes, we've been told for decades that the desktop is dying out, but it isn't, there still are hundreds of millions of the things out there - billions maybe - and people still use them for all sorts of things.

At any rate, I got an email telling me that my domain is about to expire, in a few days in fact.  So I tried to renew it.  But there's no link to do so in the email.  It just tells me to log into Google Apps to renew.  Stop reading and type "google apps" into GOOGLE and see what you get.  Which of those do you suppose I want for my little blog domain?  Do any of them stand out?

Why in the name of God on high wouldn't the email just have a link that I click to go where I want?  Surely people at GOOGLE are familiar with the concept of links you click on to go where you want, given that their entire business is built around this fundamental device of the internet, right?

To complicate matters, I tried to use the browser Chrome to do it.  You know, Google's personal browser called GOOGLE CHROME.  It crashes half the time, sometimes so bad it reboots my computer.  Firefox sometimes crashes, but its never seized up my work system thirty to ninety seconds, then sometimes rebooted.  I tried to get a new version, but I already have the newest version.

So I poked around the Google Apps trying to find anywhere to renew my domain, and it asked me to sign in.  You sign in using your website and a drop down menu has the helpful-sounding option "domain management."  Perfect!  So I hit the "sign in" button and it asks me not to log into my google account, but some entirely new account I've never even seen before, based on my domain name.  It wants this:

Never in my years of using blogger and Google have I ever created any account of any kind which is like this.  I have never been given, nor seen a username attached to my WordAroundtheNet domain name.  When I use their "I can't remember my user name" option, it sends me to log into ordinary google account like I do to get into my blog innards.  Then when I try to get on to Google Apps... it asks the same thing, which I do not have.
I tried my name, I tried my login, I tried my usual password, nothing works, this site is looking for an account which does not exist.

So I search for help on this and get... ads for godaddy and other domain sites, and I had to screen out several words to finally get to GOOGLE on their own damn search engine.  And none of the help was of the slightest assistance in any remotest sense.

I still don't know how to get to renew my blog.  Its not on the blog controls.  Its not in my google account.  I can't find it anywhere, except in that one area, which asks for a login I DO NOT HAVE.  Now I'll eventually get it done, I'll some day figure out how to get where I need to go.

But upon what possible planet did they think this was a good way to manage their accounts?  Who at Google was the inbred retard that designed this?  Were they just really stoned when they set it all up?  Was it done by a committee of people each of whom speaks a different language exclusively?  Was it given to a room full of monkeys with typewriters to code?  I really want to know, these aren't rhetorical questions.  I want an answer to how on earth something so simple and necessary to make the company money was made so idiotically complicated and unusable.  I really do.

AN AMERICAN WATCHING PARIS

"Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here but it sounds better in French."
-Jerry Mulligan

I try to watch classic and beloved movies, to catch up to ones people have long enjoyed which I've missed, such as Jaws (it was okay, although Roy Scheider is an overlooked genius of an actor).  Generally speaking, big movies and films which have endured for decades are excellent and worth seeing, even if they're a genre you don't care for.

So while I was at the Oregon coast last week, I watched An American in Paris, with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.  It was a pretty fun movie with some absolutely spectacular dancing and set design, good songs, and one astounding concert performance.  I do like George Gershwin's music, and Gene Kelly is absolutely at his finest dancing form so it was spectacular.

This film is essentially just a showcase for Gershwin's songs and Kelly's dancing (as well as Caron).  The French singer played by Georges Guétary had an amazing voice as well.  It was the big musical spectacle reduced almost totally to its core elements of music and dance, with very little plot or dialog.  In a way, this is the ultimate musical, with no pretense of being anything else and designed to be nothing but songs and dancing with a weak story to prop it up.

That doesn't make the movie any less entertaining, if anything it may be more so as a result.  And it is a classic because of that - and because of the amazing end dream piece which was a sort of ballet in a strange surreal setting of Parisian images.  This section was offered instead of any explanation to why Leslie Caron's character Lise Bouvier leaves her fiancee for Gene Kelly's Jerry Mulligan.

Really, you don't need to know why because you can imagine the conversation in the car based on dozens of previous movies and the story.  And here's where I had a problem.

The movie is this great sweeping romance with wonderful music and beautiful people, and Gene Kelly is at his absolute most charming.  You just get pulled into the story and ride along, and its not unusual to see ladies crying at the end because its just so romantic.

And were this not such a show piece rather than a serious attempt at telling a story, I'd hate it.  Not because of the romance, but because of the way the story plays.  Strip out all the setting and the songs and the dancing and so on and here's the basic story:

Girl is engaged to a guy, but when a handsome charming man shows up, she goes out with him repeatedly behind her fiancee's back, doesn't tell either one what she's doing, and the fiancee only finds out by accidentally overhearing the girl finally tell her why she's leaving to marry another man.

Compounding this as a problem, the movie has a nasty flaw that almost all romantic movies and stories do: the girl has little personality or reason to be loved other than being really pretty.

And its odd, Leslie Caron isn't a real beauty, she's not a stunner like Ingrid Bergman or Grace Kelly.  She's cute enough (although she looks half Gene Kelly's Age), but her behavior and the way she reacts, physically, to events and statements is very charming and attractive - she is prettier than she looks, in short.

But even Jerry Mulligan admits "What gets me is, I don't know anything about her. We manage to be together for a few moments and then off she goes. Sometimes we have a wonderful time together and other times it's no fun at all."  And love is like that sometimes; you can't really put a finger on why you love them - at least not without more time and thought.

The problem is, it always strikes me as implausible that the guy is head over heels in love so much he'll sacrifice everything to be with her when all she is is pretty.  That's not enough, and it has to be frustrating for actresses - and it is, from what I've read and heard - that they aren't given any more part than "be pretty."  When you're as painfully gorgeous as Ingrid Bergman that can work, but the truth is, guys like more than a cute face and a hot bod; at least to keep and love.

Leslie Caron's character Lise is little more than a young, cute dance partner who is very pliable.  The writers tried really hard to define her character more in a dance sequence near the beginning of the film, which was charming and well done by Caron who obviously has ballet training at that point, but all she ends up being is a incomprehensible series of contradictions which tells us nothing.

And what makes matters worse is that she's essentially untrue and a liar.  She maintains a double lie, lying to both men without any attempt to set things straight.  Its almost as if the stereotypical Parisian attitude about love is being displayed in the movie.  That love excuses everything, and even if its fake, love is worth doing anything to have.  Georges Guétary's advice to Kelly about telling the girl he loves her follows these lines, telling him to say it even if he doesn't mean it because women fall all over you if you do.

And since hundreds of French books and movies have been made repeating this basic philosophy I have to wonder if it isn't accurate about at least Paris, if not France in general.  But think a bit about the girl: she's engaged to marry one man and runs around with another, and that's supposed to be wonderfully romantic.  Its not like they were just dating a bit, she made an absolute commitment, a promise to be with him alone and is about to be married.

Now, the writers try to excuse this by saying she's young and confused and she was just following through on a promise because Henri saved her life, and so on, but at any point she could have indicated to him that she was having second thoughts and maybe they should back off a bit.  She doesn't, it never even comes up.  Neither man has the slightest clue what is going on, so much so that it leads to a hilarious scene where mutual friend Leslie Caron (Adam Cook in the movie) desperately tries to prevent either from finding out what is going on.

Again, I don't want to be too critical of the film because it is not meant to be taken seriously or examined for deep philosophical implications.  Its a silly fluff piece; a song and dance bit extended into a 114 minute film.  But I couldn't help but get the impression that the reason Henri lets Lise go at the end is because he knew he couldn't trust her.  And if there's one thing you can rely on, its that if she'll leave him to be with you, she'll leave you to be with the next guy.  That's not 100%, and certainly these are special circumstances, but it is something that a guy like Henri would know.

So to me, it didn't have that big swelling romantic heart burster at the end like it was supposed to.  All I could do was see Mulligan being set up for a big fall when the next charming guy came along.  It just didn't have that pop at the end it was supposed to.

Incidentally, Oscar Levant is terrific in the film, and his concert piano scene is astonishing, the man is a genius on those keys.

One final interesting connection: Nina Foch, the rich American lady who collects artists, also played Dr Mallard's mom in NCIS.