Who were the greatest people of the 20th century?

Who were the greatest people of the 20th century?  I've decided to attempt a list.

Charles Babbage (1791-1871):  Ahead of his time, he conceived the first computer, an invention that would transform the world in the 20th century's second half.

Karl Marx (1818-83): Author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, his economic ideas would fundamentally shape the 20th-century world for better or worse, at least outside the United States. We're still figuring out his long-term analysis of the industrial revolution.

Gregor Mendel (1822-84): The founder of modern genetics, leading to today's DNA science.  As with Babbage and Marx, his greatness was posthumous.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): Founder of modern psychology.

Henry Ford (1863-1947): The greatest engineer of his age, designing an automobile for the masses and the assembly line to produce it. (Also an anti-Semitic crackpot...)

Marie Curie (1867-1934): The chemist who discovered radioactivity, along with her husband Pierre and upset the apple cart...

The Wright Brothers (Wilbur 1867-1912, Orville 1871-1948):  The inventors of a self-propelled flying machine heavier than air, which along with the automobile would revolutionize transportation.

Mohandas K. "Mahatma" Gandhi (1869-1948):  A kook even by India's liberal standards, but with his "charismatic authority" he personified the spirit of the movement for Indian independence and created a precedent for non-violent civil rights advocates like Martin Luther King.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965):  British Prime Minister during World War II and Gandhi's foe, he was "50% genius and 50% bloody fool." He couldn't save the British Empire, but his strategic vision was central to the defeat of fascism that saved western democracy.

D.W. Griffith (1875-1948):  He wasn't the first director to produce a feature-length motion picture, but with The Birth of a Nation he brought all its elements together to create what we know today.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955):  Physicist who published the theory of relativity, eventually leading to nuclear armament.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973): The great artist of the 20th century, excelling in a wide range of styles in painting, drawing and sculpture.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945):  President of the United States from 1933 to 1945, he "saved capitalism" (Gore Vidal), bringing the nation back from the nadir of the Great Depression and leading it to world supremacy in World War II.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Russian composer and a leader in 20th century music with revolutionary compositions like the ballet The Rite of Spring.

Zhou Enlai (1898-1976): Mao Zedong, a megalomaniac corrupted by power, dominated China's communist movement for its first 55 years and led it to nationwide control.  Yet it was Zhou's more pragmatic vision that ultimately triumphed through his protege Deng Xiaoping's Four Modernizations policy.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

"George, he's a Russian.  A Russian thinks the butterflies are spying on him!" --Smiley's People

To a group of rambunctious kids: "Swing, monsters!"--Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Last night I saw the cinemacast of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Event Screen, a Young Vic production with Sienna Miller from last summer. (I've seen the movie with Elizabeth Taylor and the TV version with Jessica Lange.) It must be Tennessee Williams' funniest play, in a '50s sort of way, and they're likely to be reviving it forever because it's such a good vehicle for a sexy leading lady!

Sienna Miller was skinny enough to play Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl.  I haven't seen that, but I read that they had her saying about Andy Warhol, "He's changing the way we look at things!" If I'd been the screenwriter I would have had a different character say that, because Edie wasn't nearly sophisticated enough to say that.

Saw the last episode of Smiley's People tonight.  George Smiley was one of Alec Guinness' finest roles.  Now I want to read John Le Carre's trilogy!

Today I finally went to Mark's Work Wearhouse and bought a new autumn coat to replace the one with the busted zipper.

I was reading in the Napoleon biography that when his sister Pauline was holding court in Rome, she had a weekly ritual where important men got to watch her maids washing and powdering her feet. (Oh, you tease!) I've been on a roll lately in Candy Crush Saga--I imagine Napoleon would have liked that game.

DOCTOR DOLITTLE

"As Geothe said, 'You must dance and I must rest'--or is it the other way around?"--Smiley's People

"Lovely man, but he's very rude"--Doctor Dolittle

Saw Richard Fleischer's pedestrian musical Doctor Dolittle at the Yonge & Dundas tonight.  Again there was a big crowd for Black Phantom, and when I left the place was really noisy.  I wanted to see it largely because when I was little the parents were about to take us to see it, but changed their mind at the last minute because it had cannibals. (I thought it was "cannonballs" they objected to!)

Rex Harrison signed to play the title role on the assumption that he'd be working again with Alan Jay Lerner (My Fair Lady). But Lerner suffered creative block and got replaced by Leslie Bricusse, whose non-songs are actually a fitting match for Harrison's non-singing!  I must say that Dolittle's line "I'm no good with people," also fits that pill Harrison well. (Bricusse's other tuneless musicals include Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Scrooge, in which "Thank you very, very, very much" was actually the best song!) Hard to believe that this was one of the five 1967 movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, along with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, In the Heat of the Night, The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde!

In the end Doctor Dolittle would do little at the box office. (When did I become a punster?) Indeed, it was one of the big-budget flops that killed off the musical genre around 1970, along with calamities like Star!, Hello, Dolly and Paint Your Wagon. The Hollywood Hall of Shame, the Medved Brothers' book about financially disastrous films like Cleopatra and Heaven's Gate, devotes a whole chapter to this one.  

It seems that they chose "England's prettiest village," Castle Combe, for location filming, then turned it upside down, building a dam to block the local river.  (Say, maybe they should have chosen England's second-prettiest village!)  Ranulph Fiennes, a young army officer who later became an intrepid polar explorer (someone who worked with him says he's so fearless because he has no imagination, a particularly British form of courage), was so offended by what they were doing to the village that he tried to blow the dam up with explosives left over from training exercises!

Query:  Even assuming that there's such a thing as an island that floats around the oceans of the world, could it really have a smoking volcano?

SMILEY'S PEOPLE

"You're an old spy in a hurry, George. You always said those were the most dangerous!" "Oh, they are, Toby.  They are"--Smiley's People

Yesterday there was no memoir group because of the holiday.  I was going to see Doctor Dolittle at the Yonge & Dundas in the afternoon, but when I got there I had to wait in this huge queue with all these people going to see Black Panther, so I decided to wait till tomorrow night.

On the way back I stopped at Bay St. Video and rented Smiley's People, the BBC miniseries of John Le Carre's Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy sequel.  Alec Guinness is a phenomenal George Smiley--he knew how to act beneath the surface!  Le Carre is one writer who got the Cold War right, with all the sordid, banal details of the spying trade.  Bernard Hepton, a brilliant Thomas Cranmer in The Six Wives of Henry VIII, turned up in the third episode, as did Beryl Reid as an agent whose phenomenal memory MI5 relied on to retain all the information they couldn't write down. (I could imagine having a job like that...)

Tonight at opera rehearsal we staged all the chorus scenes in The Magic Flute.  We'll start working with the soloists next week.

Last night I dreamed of being in a convertible with Marilyn Monroe. (I've never been in a real convertible!) I also dreamed of wishing to be home in my Toronto house, which I don't think I've dreamed of before.

Fun with inverse series

Russian: "You know what they said in the camps--'It isn't the questions that are dangerous, it's the answers'"--John Le Carre, Smiley's People

On Youtube there are channels that offer mathematical puzzles.  I saw a clip with a problem involving an inverse series.

An inverse series is something like 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+...  The interesting thing about that series is that the individual entries converge to zero, but the sum doesn't converge to a finite level, as would normally happen in such cases.  Instead, it goes on to infinity. (You can prove this through integral calculus and the natural logarithm function...)

Anyway this problem asks you to what sum the following series converges:  1+1/2+1/3 +1/4+1/5+1/6+1/8+1/9+1/10+1/12+1/15+1/16+1/18...  Notice that this isn't the sum of inverses of all natural numbers, which I just said doesn't converge; instead it's the sum of inverses of composites of powers of 2, 3 and 5.

Let's take it one step at a time.  First, the sum of inverses of powers of 2:  1+1/2+1/4+ 1/8+1/16+...  You may be able to see that this converges to 2. Then, the same for powers of 3:  1+1/3+1/9+1/27+...  That's a bit harder, but it converges to 3/2.

Now imagine the sum of inverses of composites of powers of 2 and of 3:  1+1/2+ 1/3+1/4+1/6+1/8+1/9+1/12+...When you think about it, that's actually the product of the two series I just showed you!  So it must converge to their product 2*3/2, or 3.

Now consider the series of inverse powers of 5:  1+1/5+ 1/25+1/125+...  That turns out to be 5/4.  See a pattern? A series of inverse powers of n converges to n/(n-1).  Anyhow, the solution for the convergence of the original series is similarly the product of that and the previous series:  2*3/2*5/4, in other words 15/4. (I'm so confident of the answer that I didn't watch the video to confirm it!)

Then I got thinking, what if you continued and took a series of inverses of multiples of powers of 2, powers of 3, powers of 5 and powers of 7?  That would give you 15/4*7/6, or 35/8.  Add in powers of 11, and you get 77/16.  With inverse powers of 13 too, it becomes 1001/192, et cet. ad nauseam.  As you progress through the prime numbers you'll get closer and closer to that simple inverse series of 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+... that I mentioned at the start.  Which doesn't converge, of course but goes on to infinity.

I know that a lot of people can't follow this, but it fascinates me!

No Politics!

"If Bonaparte became a ruler of exceptional treachery and mendacity, it must be remembered that he emerged from a political background [the French Revolution] where a man's word meant nothing, honor was dead, and murder was routine"--Paul Johnson, Napoleon

Saturday Dawna and I saw some more '60s TV.  We saw a two-part episode of Mission:  Impossible in which they tricked a slave-selling Middle Eastern ruler into putting his brother's English wife up for sale!  And there was an episode of The Time Tunnel where they arrived at the scene of a 1910 coal mine disaster and miners were trapped underground but nobody would rescue them because they thought Halley's Comet was about to destroy the world anyway! (I don't like these plot setups with everyone being willfully passive--neither here nor in High Noon.)

Today was the latest Reading Out Loud Meetup.  The topic was political writing and the event was called "No Politics!" I read "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury" and a 1988 Alexander Cockburn article from The Nation about exposing the My Lai massacre.  We also read a Nation article by Ring Lardner Jr. listing all the stupid stuff many Americans believe; a bit from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind with Rhett Butler saying that all wars were about money; Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach";  Robert Frost's poems "The Gift Outright," "Mending Wall" and "America Is Hard to See"; a Saul Alinsky passage about the haves and the have-nots. Someone also showed a Bolshevik poster that said, "There are two parties:  the Communists and their enemies"!

I was thinking some more about Excalibur.  As I know from posting my old diary, 15 years ago the first regular Space Shuttle, the Columbia, blew up at the same time as I was reading The Once and Future King.  That got me to thinking, back then, about how if the Kennedy presidency was like Camelot then the Space Program was like the quest for the Holy Grail.  And I just remembered that the Columbia made its first flight back in 1981 at about the same time as Excalibur was first released!

NAPOLEON

I've started reading Paul Johnson's short biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.  It's well written and very readable, though simplistic in places. (On change in 1780s Europe: "Virtually everyone wanted it.  There was little opposition to it." Oh, really?) 

The first page of the introduction gave me something to take issue with: he calls the French Revolution an accident 

"because the example of Britain and the Scandinavian countries showed that all the desirable reforms that the French radicals brought about by force and blood could have been achieved by peaceful means.  As it was, the horrific course of the Revolution lead, as was almost inevitable, to absolutism..."

Well, Britain and Scandinavia didn't have to deal with the weighty legacy of Louis XIV, the original absolutist. ("I'm the state!") He should really say that the Revolution led back to absolutism, albeit with more bloodthirsty leaders and a more systematic bureaucracy.

I recall thirty years ago when right-wing bloviator Johnson wrote Intellectuals, a book attacking all the left-wing intellectuals he disliked. (A David Levine drawing in The New York Review of Books showed him as a boxer using a brain-shaped punching bag.) Private Eye magazine wrote a review with this passage:

Having proved that brains are bad, Johnson fails to consider the opposite question:  whether it's possible to have too much of a good thing.  Is there an optimum level of cretinization?  Has Prince Philip exceeded it?

Reading this book got me consulting Wikipedia all about Napoleon's family and background. (Did you know that his mother never learned to speak French?)  Before becoming Emperor he rarely used his first name--which comes from Naples like the name Roman comes from Rome and was a reminder of his Corsican-Italian heritage--preferring to call himself Lieutenant Bonaparte/Captain Bonaparte/General Bonaparte. Famous Corsicans include young Casabianca, the boy who stood on the burning deck, and supermodel Laetitia Casta. Viva Wikipedia!  I'll have to make another contribution to it someday.

It was fascinating reading about Pasquale Paoli, an insurgent who took over most of Corsica in 1755--limiting the Genoans to a few fortified ports--and founded the first republic with a written constitution in the Enlightenment style. (Some American revolutionaries admired him.) Napoleon's father Carlo Buonaparte became his close assistant. But Genoa despaired of retaking the island and sold it to France for a song, and the French soon overwhelmed Paoli's guerrilla resistance. (Napoleon's mother, pregnant with him, joined her husband in the hills for several months!)

Someone should make a movie about Paoli and Buonaparte! Paoli went into exile in a sympathetic Britain, where he joined the Literary Club that included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (who'd written glowingly of Paoli in a famous book about visiting Corsica), Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick and Oliver Goldsmith.  In the 1851 Owen Bailey engraving at the top, Paoli's sixth from the left.

Meanwhile, Carlo Buonaparte became a "collaborationist," becoming friendly with the French intendant and using their relationship to get his famous second son a military school posting in France proper at the age of nine. Before dying at 39, he'd squandered his small fortune on gambling and bad investments--another form of gambling. (Whenever Napoleon played cards, he cheated!)

Paoli actually got a second chance when the French Revolution broke out, being acclaimed by the National Assembly and allowed to return to Corsica.  But the British had recruited him as an agent and ineptly pressured him into attacking Savoyard Sardinia.  He agreed, but arranged for the attack to fail, leading to a rift with young officer Napoleon.  Paoli chose the monarchist side and broke with Paris, depending for two years on the support of the British navy (just driven from Toulon by Napoleon) until they had to evacuate, and he returned to Britain for the rest of his life.  He became a friend of Maria Cosway, who'd been friendly with Thomas Jefferson in Paris back in the 1780s, leading to one of James Ivory's less successful movies...

History rocks!

EXCALIBUR

"In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a specified recognition of it.  She desired this birthright; something definite to reject.  It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged"--The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Merlin (failing to catch a fish with his hands): "Remember, there's always something cleverer than you!"--Excalibur

Tuesday opera rehearsal was back at the Bickford Centre, and we staged the Fidelio finale.  I know most of it, but some parts still need learning.

Thursday I saw John Boorman's curious Excalibur (for the second time--I first saw it on its 1981 release) with the History Meetup.  Irish locations superbly photographed by Alex Thomson, with lots of Jungian symbolism and Wagnerian music, as well as "O Fortuna!" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, which I first heard in this film. There are also several actors who'd later become famous:  Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson.

Oddly, King Arthur (Nigel Terry) feels less like a great man than a man wrestling with great forces.  In this version the real protagonists seem to be rival sorcerers Merlin (Nicol Williamson) and Morgana La Fey (Helen Mirren at her sexiest)--even when they aren't present the movie's about them!  It gets pretty weird in the second half: what is this Holy Grail they're after, an object or a secret or wisdom?  At times I couldn't help thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail! ("Only a flesh wound...")

Just finished The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  Muriel Spark was one imaginative writer! (The movie combined Sandy with Rose and Mary with Joyce Emily.) Those girls were pretty awful the way they treated Mary!

Doodles

The other week, in bed and still awake, I took to wondering how you'd design a building with only horizontal, vertical and diagonal faces so it would be close to a hemisphere. (Such a shape would minimize the ratio of surface area to volume, making insulation easier.)

I came up with this thirteen-story design, with the help of Moira's graph paper.

I made it so that each storey, except for those with the same area as the one below, would be surrounded by a vestibule ring area that wouldn't get the central heating but would still be windowed off, with diagonal glass ceilings. There'd also be a glass pyramid on top of the penthouse.

This is how it looks from above:

The extra contours indicate the diagonal covering. 

Then it occured to me to design a five-story mansion so that a semi-hemisphere would face south for the sun, while northward there'd be a steep diagonal. (There'd still be the vestibules.) Here, north is on the right.

This is the vertical view, with north up:

It all got started from thinking about how if you have a circle centered at (0,0) with five units radius, it would touch (+/-3,+/-4) and (+/-4,+/-3), eight points in addition to (+/-5,0) and (0,+/-5). Similarly, a concentric circle with thirteen units radius would touch (+/-5,+/-12) and (+/-12, +/-5) as well as (+/-13,0) and (0,+/-13). In addition, a sphere centred at (0,0,0) would touch points at (3,4,12) or whatever order and whatever positive or negative you want!

Inside an Aspie mind...

TIME magazine

I used to read Time magazine back in the '70s, and to a lesser extent in the '80s.  I'm ashamed of myself:  I had no taste back then! Time Magazine has always been the standard-bearer for middle- class semi-educated tendentiousness in America. (Read their "letters to the editor" section and watch who gets the last word!) What's most annoying about it is its favouritism, sometimes for rather loathsome people.

Consider President Nixon, around 1972.

It wasn't common for Time to name the same Man of the Year more than once, or to name more than one at the same time.  So why didn't they name Kissinger alone?  I imagine they wanted to feel they were presenting the "last word" on the 1972 election. (Unfortunately for them, there was this little matter of Watergate...) Speaking of Nixon, here's their  first two covers after Tricky Dick's resignation:

"The healing begins..." A note of wishful thinking there! I don't care for consecutive covers with the same subject, which they also did with Charles and Diana's 1981 wedding, Carl Lewis at the 1984 Olympics, and the GOP's 1980 Detroit convention:

Their serving as Ronald Reagan's spin doctor was particularly contemptible. Consider these covers in his crucial first year.

That last cover involved Reagan winning a Congressional vote on the Air Force AWACS system which wouldn't have been remarkable, except that there was talk he might suffer an embarrassing defeat.  And of course, there was this disingenuous 1986 cover:

Hmm, could worshipful press coverage have something to do with it?  

What's annoying is that they'll do cover stories like that just to reiterate what they've said before:  their favouritism isn't just shameless but repetitious! Like with Margaret Thatcher:

I like those flowers on the last cover, as if she'd been crowned Miss America!

And of course, they have their non-favourites:

Compare their cover on the 1980 Democratic convention with the two on its GOP counterpart!  I mention the Idi Amin cover because that headline "The wild man of Africa" always bothered me. It sounds like a sideshow attraction!

If you see a copy of Time magazine, burn it and flush the ashes down the toilet!

THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN

"Are you thinking, Sandy, of doing a day's washing?" "No, Miss Brodie." "Because you have got your sleeves rolled up.  I won't have to do with girls who roll up the sleeves of their blouses, however fine the weather.  Roll them down at once, we are civilized beings."

"Step on it, Jimmy!" "I'm trying, Lois, but this is a 35 MPH zone and I don't want to get a ticket." "You're right"--The Adventures of Superman

Friday afternoon I saw the first episode of the '50s TV show The Adventures of Superman with Dawna.  The whole production oozes literalness and cheapness:  I like the way Superman always managed to delay his rescue to the last possible second!  She also showed the 1978 Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, but I only stayed for the first part with Marlon Brando. (Blink and you'll miss Trevor Howard!)

Friday night we had fish and chips.  I couldn't resist eating too many chips, and felt unwell later on.

Saturday afternoon I went to the Royal Ontario Museum's Christian Dior exhibit with the Fashion Meetup.  But I got a headache and had to leave early.  Oh well, from all the trips to London where I crammed everything into two weeks I've learned to go through exhibits quickly.

Tonight I went to another opera master class at St. Michael's.  They sung arias from Mignon, Romeo et Juliette, Rigoletto and Werther.

I was reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie on the subway and got so involved that I missed my stop! (That's one measure for how good a book is...)

The other night I dreamed that I had just come back from London and was about to go back; and that I was going through the motions of trying to find a job, and had a self-pitying moment where I said, "I'm not suited for anything but delivering milk in the morning, and I can't even drive the truck!"

WAR GAMES

"The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine school, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away"--opening sentence of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

"How could anybody get a D in Home Ec?"--War Games

Tuesday I finished the book about Vietnam.  The next day started Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for my book club.

At opera rehearsal we staged The Magic Flute.  As Eric our director described Sarastro's followers, they remind me of the Manson Family!

Yesterday Moira and I had lunch with Puitak.  When I got home I had a huge headache!

Tonight at the Flashback Film Festival I saw John Badham's War Games (for the second time--I first saw it 35 years ago on the same day that my grandfather died).  Some of the details are shameless, like the general chewing Red Man tobacco and Matthew Broderick repeating Robert Redford's Sundance Kid line "I can't swim," but by the end it gets exciting. Ally Sheedy was cute!  I recognized Michael Madsen (of the Tarantino movies) as one of the missile silo operators in the first scene.  Maury Chaykin, in small role as a computer expert, looked just like Norbert Leo Butz as Kevin in Bloodline!

I must say that Americans were lucky to survive the Cold War, let alone "winning" and "losing." Even the early Reagan years were dicey:  the same year as this movie, there was a close call in Germany!

Last week I had a nightmare where I'd been adopted into a rich family like the Kennedys of Massachusetts, but realized that my new brother was a murderer and didn't know whom to tell because I was afraid he'd come after me next!

Desert Island comedy

I decided to post some comedy video clips I like (or at least funny videos), again courtesy of Youtube.

Laurel & Hardy, Dirty Work.  Classic comedy duo at their considerable funniest! "Somewhere an electric chair is waiting..."

A "Trailers From Hell" discussion of the trailer for the Warner Brothers musical Footlight Parade.  As I've said before, if you removed the musical numbers from that film, you'd still have a great comedy!  Joan Blondell was one of my favorite '30s actresses, and Ruby Keeler was a cutie!

W.C. Fields' It's a Gift, the "blind man in the grocery store" scene. (It wouldn't be considered "sensitive" today.)

Bugs Bunny's square dance from Robert McKimson's Hillbilly Hare. "Whomp him low and whomp him high, stick your finger in his eye!"

Part of the climactic "Girl Hunt" ballet number from Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon.  Hollywood dance at its funniest in this Mickey Spillane spoof, choreographed by the genius Michael Kidd. How can anyone think that twerking is sexy?

Bill Cosby, "Go Carts." Sure, I understand that to a lot of people Cosby no longer seems funny.  But this routine is still a classic!

SCTV, "Sunrise Semester with Norman Gorman." A lesson in speaking New Yorkese! IMHO, Joe Flaherty was the funniest SCTV comic of all. (Shame he didn't have as big a later career as most of the others.)

South Park, "Fat Abbot." True, this cartoon show is very uneven, and it started wearing thin after the first couple of years. (Didn't care for the movie, though I liked the "Blame Canada" song's line, "They aren't a real country anyway." Touche!) But this gangsta spoof of Cosby's Fat Albert makes me laugh!

Cinema Sins, "Everything Wrong With Titanic in 9 Minutes or So." This Youtube channel goes through movies and picks out everything wrong with them! In the case of the cheesy, overrated Titanic, that's well deserved. (He spent about 20 minutes on Batman and Robin...)

George Carlin, "The American Dream." Carlin at his most cynical!

#56

"You're an agnostic." "I've got a cream for that!"--Hot Fuzz

Today was my 56th birthday.  I bought my own birthday cake yesterday.  We had Chinese food, as usual.

Saturday Dawna was showing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which didn't interest me.  That evening I did see another Flashback film festival movie, Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, at the Yonge & Dundas.  

Hot Fuzz is a really funny British cop movie spoof starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. (Wright directed the two of them in the similarly funny zombie-apocalypse movie spoof Shaun of the Dead.) The parody details range from The Professional (the portable house plant) to Chinatown ("Forget it, Nick, it's Sanford!") to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (the murder by dropping a castle turret).

People have been talking about Joe Kennedy III (I thought he was the fourth?) responding to Trump's State of the Union speech.  I was just thinking that he reminds me of Jesse Plemons as Todd Alquist, the young hoodlum on Breaking Bad.

Salon has a very interesting interview with Elizabeth Catte, the author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia.  I guess Appalachia is the USA's Arcadia, like the Maritimes and especially Newfoundland for Canada.

Desert Island Discs, Part 2

I decided to link to some more of the music I'd take to a desert island.

Handel, "Eternal Source of Light Divine." Kathleen Battle's voice with Wynton Marsalis' trumpet, doing a piece Handel wrote for Queen Anne's birthday.

Bellini, "Qual Cor Tradisti" from Norma.  A duet just before the finale.  Solo arias get most of the attention, but for me opera is first and foremost about duets and trios and characters interacting! (Not to mention choruses...)

Verdi, "O Terra, Addio" from Verdi.  One of the great opera finales.  Verdi had mixed feelings about the Risorgimento:  his name became an acronym for "Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy," of course, but his own sympathies were republican.  Aida was surely his way of dealing with the Risorgimento and Italian nationalism. (That the enemy was Ethiopia proved prophetic for Italy!) The moment when Amneris prays to the gods to give her peace always gets to me--Verdi had a Catholic way of giving unsympathetic characters a moment of grace.

Stephen Foster, "Hard Times Come Again No More." Another number from the PBS special Songs of the Civil War, here sung by a group including Kate and Anna McGarrigle and Rufus Wainwright.

Harry McClintock, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain." Classic hobo song with an American "The grass is always greener..." spirit.  When I was little we had a record with a more kid-friendly version (no cigarettes or alcohol). In O Brother Where Art Thou? the Coen Brothers used the original version in their soundtrack, which IMHO put the movie to shame!

Leroy Anderson, "Trumpeter's Lullaby." Did I mention that I love berceuses?  Anderson was an instrumental genius!

Miklos Rosza, El Cid soundtrack.  Charlton Heston had one of his best roles in Anthony Mann's 1961 medieval epic, and Rosza composed a particularly handsome score.  IMHO, the best movie composers are the true heirs to the classical composers! (This was the last vinyl album I bought.)

Sam Cooke, "Cupid." Early soul!

Elvis Presley, "Memories." A late Elvis single, co-written by Mac Davis.  A song I like to sing at karaoke!

The Moody Blues, "Ride My Seesaw." The opening recitation reminds me of Spinal Tap, but who cares? This single shows the influence of Phil Spector's "wall of sound." (Another karaoke song for me.)

RAISING ARIZONA

"Give me that baby, you warthog from hell!"--Raising Arizona

On the new streetcars I still feel a bit awkward taking a seat that faces backward, compared to the old ones where they all faced forward or sideways.  But I suppose that life (or history) is like travelling in a streetcar where you can't see where you're going, only where you come from!  Except that they travel along lines that are far from straight...

Last night was the History Meetup discussing the Middle Ages.  Nine people came!  I got a start on collecting dues to pay the year's Meetup fees.

Tonight I saw the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona (for at least the third time) at the Yonge & Dundas Flashback film festival.  What a hoot! Nicolas Cage as Hi reminds me of the TV alien ALF.

For the last couple of days the game Candy Crush Saga has kept choking on me in mid-game, so I cleared my Chrome memory cache.  I've also bought Clean My Mac software to get rid of junk that slows my computer down. Meanwhile, I've got my backlog of unopened emails down to a little over 1500.  

Desert Island Discs, Part I

I think I'll do a Desert Island Discs routine, in the style of the BBC radio show, where I say what records I'd take onto a desert island.

Bach, The Passion of St. Matthew.  Or at least the part that they play in movies!

Mozart, the "Soave Sia il Vento" trio from Cosi Fan Tutte.  Especially the part at 1:34!

Beethoven, the "Appassionata" piano sonata.  Especially the first movement.

Chopin, Etude in E major.  The middle part is breathtaking!  It's known as "Tristesse," but to me it's more about sheer passion than sorrow.

Gounod, "Serenade." I love berceuses (that's a lullaby with a college education), especially this one!

Kathy Mattea, "The Vacant Chair." One of the finest numbers in the PBS special Songs of the Civil War.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." The Carter Family country classic, as recorded by TNGDB and some all-star country veterans for the album of the same name. (No doubt you'll recognize a few of the voices.)

Marvin Gaye, "What's Going On." It's about a lot more than Vietnam! (The intro sounds a bit like "Will the Circle Be Unbroken"...)

Phil Collins, "A Groovy Kind of Love." A cover that surpasses the original, with just the right melancholy tinge, from the Buster soundtrack.

Joan Osborne, "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted." Another superior cover.  JO recorded this with the legendary Funk Brothers for the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown and batted it out of the park!

Ten is enough for now.  To be continued...