My favorite record album titles

"She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and telephones.  She discovered that simple arts required sophisticated training.  She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden"--Main Street

The part of Main Street dealing with Carol's ill-fated attempts to stage a local play is really funny!

On Twitter last week there was a really heated discussion of Israel that crowded out the rest of my notification feed!  I ended up muting a few people, something I normally avoid. (Muting isn't the same as blocking, it just means I don't get notified of their posts.)

The other day I started a Twitter thread asking people what their favorite record album titles were.  Other tweeters mentioned the Mothers of Invention's Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Caravan's For Girls Who Go Plump in the Knight, The Cum Drops' Balls Out and Other Acts of Freakery, and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.

Now here's my list of favorite album titles, including a few I've just thought of now. (Of course, this has nothing to do with the contents of these albums, most of which I haven't heard.)

Bob Newhart, Button Down Mind

Bill Cosby, Wonderfulness

The Rolling Stones, Goat's Head Soup (not so much that I like that title, but I have to admit it's original!)

Miles Davis, Bitches' Brew

Ted Nugent, Scream Dream

Van Halen, Women and Children First and (read it slowly) OU812

Reo Speedwagon, Hi Infidelity

Oh No, It's Devo!

Elton John, Too Low For Zero

The Police, Synchronicity

Styx, Kilroy Was Here

Foreigner, Agent Provocateur

Wynton Marsalis, Hothouse Flowers

Wham!, Music From the Edge of Heaven

Peter Gabriel, So

Kate Bush, The Hounds of Love

Joe Walsh, Got Any Gum? (I like the sheer goofiness of that title)

Tom Jones, The Lead and How to Swing It

Iggy Pop, Naughty Little Doggie

LONGSTREET

"She was like the revolutionist at fifty:  not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades"--Main Street

What am I watching on Youtube these days? (I refuse to spell it "YouTube"!) The 1971 TV series Longstreet, about a blind detective in New Orleans. (It requires some suspension of disbelief...) 

The show's as much about Mike Longstreet's PTSD struggles and his need to be a big achiever as about the insurance investigation mysteries he solves. He hires Bruce Lee--yes, that Bruce Lee!--to teach him martial arts. There's an episode or two where a tough guy attacks him but he turns the tables by putting out the light!  The bomb that was meant to kill him only killed his wife and blinded him, so he clearly has a "survivor's guilt" issue. (Back when I was little I remember seeing a promo for the pilot  episode with this really sad scene where he's in the hospital after the explosion, his eyes bandaged, and he jumps out of his bed and makes a scene, drawing in a crowd of orderlies.) 

The show was developed by Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar for his In the Heat of the Night script but ended up writing disaster movies for Irwin Allen.  The TV networks in 1971 were making a belated effort to look "relevant" in the wake of '60s social change, and even the unsuccessful shows back then tend to sound more interesting than most of the stuff on today's broadcast networks.  This one lasted just one season because the too similar hit Ironside, with Raymond Burr as the crippled detective, got moved to the same time slot.

But I find it a remarkably good show, more mature than the usual middlebrow detective fare.  I saw a few Youtube episodes of it a few years back before the copyright police removed it, and I hope I can see the rest of it before it gets removed again.  James Franciscus was hardly the biggest talent around, but he has his best role here.

Just today I saw a particularly good episode, despite using the voiceover flashback cliche too much.  Mike goes undercover to investigate robberies at an electronics plant, getting hired through a program the factory started for hiring handicapped people and living in a group home with other "differently abled" hirees.  The robberies have all been accompanied by distracting sabotage explosions in areas where the hirees work, putting them under suspicion and the program in danger of cancellation.  (Spoiler:  it turns out to be the work of the woman supervising the hirees!)

As I said, the show's about Mike dealing with his handicap and his need to excel.  In an early scene his supervisor warns him, "You're out if you can't cut it," and he says, "I'll cut it." (That could be Mike's motto!) He has a hard time getting friendly with the other hirees in the home, partly because of the investigation but also because, as he admits, he's in a bit of denial about being handicapped himself.  At the end, when they thank him for solving the case and saving the program, he refers to the handicapped as "us," a step forward for him.

This got me thinking about my Asperger's Syndrome.  I don't like to think of myself as autistic, since my problems pale next to what low-functioning autistics have to deal with.  But maybe I should think of autistics as "us" too!

WOMAN REBEL: THE MARGARET SANGER STORY

"You mention the word 'co-operative' to the merchants and they'll lynch you!  The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that farmers' co-operative movements may get started"--Main Street

I'm now reading the graphic book Woman Rebel:  The Margaret Sanger Story (by Peter Bagge, who also did Credo about Rose Wilder Lane). What a hero she was!  Birth control is something we take for granted today, but we can do that because people like her took on the Roman Catholic Church and the United States government, and never gave up.

I've started translating a new Korean picture book. (This one's actually a Tolstoy story.)

Yesterday at Crowdreads, the question was "Do you need money to do what you love?" Well, it depends on what you love doing, doesn't it?  I couldn't resist mentioning a Julia Phillips line from You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again that people either see money as lifeblood, to nourish; as seeds, to grow things with; or as shit, to get rid of. And I read a bit more from Main Street about Carol trying to decide what to do with her life.

Did I mention that Main Street is great?  Here's another quote, on the grain elevator wheat buyer and his wife.

This was their philosophy complete... in the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism:

The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. 'We don't need all this newfangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's ruining our young men in colleges.  What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us.'

The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.

All socialists ought to be hanged.

'Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out of 'em.'

People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked.

Europeans are still wickeder.

It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell.

Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.

Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.

The farmers want too much for their wheat.

The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they pay.  

There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm.

I think I recognize this America! (The age of Trumpism isn't so different...)

June is busting out all over...

"Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world:  It's art but is it pretty?"--Main Street

Today I finally finished planting the seeds in our garden (carrots, beans, peas, kale). I would have done it Sunday but I mowed the lawn instead.  It was late this year, but it'll be early in the years to come!

Saturday I joined my singing group for a front-porch concert as part of a big fundraiser in Carolyn's neighborhood on Monarch Park Avenue.  Then I went to Crowdreads where we discussed sports. (I've been hearing noisy Raptors fans in my own neighborhood lately.) 

I read the opening pages of Main Street, which is a really sharp satire!  The joke is on the city-slicker heroine as much as the parochials.

Sunday was the Classic Book Club, where we discussed Brave New World. (Jane hated it!) Once again, over twenty people said they were coming but only five showed up.

On Youtube lately I've been watching cartoons with Ludwig von Drake, whom I liked on The Wonderful World of Disney long ago.  Paul Frees was a great cartoon voice actor! (He did Boris Badenov too.) I remember watching the last minutes of Hymn Sing while waiting for Disney to come on, then the first commercial after the closing credits would be for the latest Disney movie release.

Last week I dreamed of Robert Mitchum in the film noir Out of the Past.

MAIN STREET

"Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters"--Main Street

I've finished that book of Australian history and started Sinclair Lewis' 1920 novel Main Street, for the Classic Book Club.  It's a sardonic satire about a librarian who marries a doctor, moves to a Minnesota small town and tries to improve the place. (Someone who'd rather not be named lent me a copy of the book, but I misplaced it and borrowed one from the library, so of course afterward the first book showed up after all!) Very sharp writing, right from the start.

I didn't have time to finish translating that Korean book about engineer Jang Yongshil before returning it to the library, but I managed the first half or so, getting to the point where he's about to spend a decade building a water clock system that'll ring the time automatically.  Maybe I'll finish it someday.

I've started a new document going into detail on Korean verbs, with the help of that new book.  I've also started reviewing what I learned on Duolingo.

Last night was the History Discussion Group, where we discussed the Turkish Empire.  There were 15 people, as many as January!  I left behind the porch light bulb I've been using as a talking stone, but one of the members is holding on to it until our next event.

The other day I finally went to the Bay and bought a new set of pajamas.  They're very comfortable, and the only drawback is that the words Tommy Hilfiger glow in the dark!

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE

"That should be in a museum!" "So should you!"--Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Wednesday I saw Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at the Yonge & Dundas, for the first time!  I saw it mainly for Sean Connery as McGuffin-hunter Indy's father. The plot didn't really make sense to me. (Spoilers!) This rich industrialist working with the Nazis hires Indy's father Henry to go to Venice in search of the Holy Grail, then they decide that Henry's getting too close to it, so they spirit Henry away to this German castle and hope to grab his diary with all his search notes and continue the search without him, except that Henry has already mailed the diary to his son, bringing Indy into the race... Frankly, Nazis are easy villains!

Movie plots aren't as comprehensible as they used to be.  I recall that Executive Decision in the '90s had a plot where some terrorists have an A-bomb or anthrax or something aboard an airliner heading toward (endless foreshadowing) Washington, D.C.!  Then the terrorists take over the plane just to make sure that it arrives...

Thursday Moira and I finally went out and bought seeds for the garden.  I've planted the head crops, and only the carrots and beans and such are left.

I just bought a book showing all the different forms of Korean verbs.  That's something I could use just now, since Duolingo and Google Translate aren't so useful for learning that stuff.

I've switched browsers, from Chrome to Brave.  I can no longer get into the games Forge of Empires (and I was getting close to the Industrial Age!) and Candy Crush Saga, but that's just as well.