Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Watch party difficulties

The Friday before last, I was going to show The Informer at our History Meetup. (That's the John Ford movie about the Irish Troubles with Victor McLaglen ratting out his friend for the reward money.) But when I shared it from Google Play, for some reason the sound wouldn't come on!  In the end Sam from Texas suggested I show The Atomic Cafe instead, and I found it on YouTube. (That's the 1982 documentary about fallout shelter craziness in 1950s America, including the classroom film with Bert the Turtle and the ear-worm song "Duck and cover"!) Sam saved my skin...


For next week, I decided to circumvent Google Play problems by buying a DVD player to show movies that way. (I'd been planning to do that for a while anyway, because there are so many films I'd like to show that you can't get on Google Play!) On Monday I went to Best Buy and bought one, but it turned out to be for Windows instead of my Mac. Dumb, stupid, stupid, stupid!  Then I bought another machine but it wasn't the right one either...


Finally, last Friday I did another last-minute change.  I was going to show the D-Day movie The Longest Day but instead showed John Huston's Civil War movie The Red Badge of Courage from YouTube.  It may have been a great movie before a nervous studio gutted it, but it's still pretty good, with Audie Murphy's best performance.


The next day the whole family was here for Indian food!  Donald figured out that I could solve the Google Play problem by using the Firefox browser instead of my usual Brave.


I've started reading Pierre Berton's Klondike:  The Last Great Gold Rush 1896-1899 for my History Meetup next month.  It's pretty entertaining.


I finished watching Upstairs, Downstairs and Sharpe on Britbox and cancelled our subscription.  It'll soon be time to subscribe to something new:  I've found a site that streams the original Danish version of The Killing!


I haven't given up on getting that DVD player...

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