Vintage TV

Somehow we've lately been catching parts of very old TV shows (Hee Haw!) and movies (Destry Rides again with James Stewart; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Marilyn Monroe; Tarzan the Ape Man, with Johnny Weissmuller.) Dreadful stuff. Marvelous for their time but perfectly awful now. (Well, except for Destry, which held up pretty well, I thought, as long as you were willing to suspend the laws of physics and to believe people could die of a gunshot wound without actually bleeding on the floor while they gave up their 'last words.')

Special effects are particularly interesting in old movies. In Tarzan they had a bunch of stock footage of Africa which they projected onto a screen, then placed the actors in front it and turned on the camera. Very, very odd effect; particularly when the 'background' and 'foreground' were basically occupying the same space. Some of the 'chimps' were real but one was a man in a gorilla suit - the one that got shot out of a tree, of course. The size differences were odd, to say the least. And since there is no background music to set the emotional mood of the scene in these old movies, the dialog somehow comes out as particularly stupid. The story line elements stretch the imagination too - in Tarzan, right after losing half their party to raging hippos and crocodiles, they decide they will set up camp 'here' for the night - right on the very banks of the river where the critters came from in the first place.

In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a scene on the deck of the ship had a 'view' of the ocean horizon and clouds in the evening sky that was simply painted onto a board and moved up and down to suggest the motion of the ship on the water. I guess we're actually lucky they thought of such a detail. And just watching Marilyn Monroe move parts of her face around which were never really meant to move independently from one another when she talks makes you want to twitch. (But, damn, didn't she have an interesting voice?)

Hee Haw was just fun as a reminder of the 'big hair' era of country music with such gems as "May the bird of paradise fly up your nose; may an elephant caress you with his toes; may your wife be plagued with runners in her hose; may the bird of paradise fly up your nose" and "Gloom, despair and agony on me; deep dark depression, excessive misery; if it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all; Gloom, despair and agony on me." And yes, Minnie Pearl with the price tag hanging off her hat is still fun.

We really have to get a life.

And in other breaking news...

We bought another house!

It's a small house. Older. Nothing at all like the Kentucky house. It's in a quiet (we hope) neighborhood with a fairly big lot and a fenced yard. It isn't too far from work but is out in the country a bit - an 'over the river and through the woods' sort of drive. There's a guest room and a place for the piano - and the china cabinet with its reminders of Grandma. There's a place for our bright red Adirondack chairs in the back yard under great big cedar trees. There's even a place for the bird feeder.

We can move right in, without putting a lot of work into it first - which is good because owning two houses isn't going to be easy on the finances. We'll trade expensive seafood dinners out for yummy hamburgers grilled on our own patio. And if we ever manage to get rid of that other house, there are a bazillion projects I can already imagine doing to remodel this one and make it our own.

Things are looking up.

Returning to a familiar topic again

You have seen, I'm sure, the news about a shooting at a Jewish Center in Seattle. It was on 'Breaking News' on the local stations late this afternoon, with local reporters. I always find it interesting, outside of the drama of the story itself, to see how the media play up and down various aspects of a story, particularly given their need to fill in time during a live broadcast in which they can't really "send it back to the newsroom" and go on to a scripted story. The local 'authorities' can be pretty interesting too.

For one thing, there was a great deal of elaboration about what the attacker allegedly said before opening fire - the actual quote, from someone who wasn't actually there but had heard it from a friend who might have been, was only about 5 words long - but the reporters filled in quite a few adjectives and verbs and pronouns and prepositional phrases...

And then there were the videos of a couple of policemen running down the street with a couple of women, presumably escorting them out of harm's way. One of them was obviously hurt - bleeding - but was being hustled all the way down the street, past alleys, other buildings, groups of policemen crouched in doorways and around cars... Way down the street. Couldn't they have gotten her some help and safety without the marathon run?

Or the police and FBI and goodness knows what other representatives of other agencies, all with their weapons held at the ready, and basically, (and inadvertently, obviously) pointing right at the heads of other policemen who were huddled right in front of them in a tight group. Were they not paying attention to what they were doing? Did they not realize that they would have shot each other if they'd been called to open fire?

Finally, we were shown a related story about how police protection had been called out to all the area Jewish Centers in case this was an organized "politically motivated" act of terrorism. Which was fine - a good side story - except that the picture they showed us was of 5 or 6 cops, hanging around a single police cruiser, all stuffing their mouths with food of some sort (I could be trite and assume they were donuts, and am sorely tempted to do so) and sharing a good laugh; hardly the sort of picture that should have gone with such a story.

But they WERE covering the news 'as it happened.' That should count for something.

A little bit of fun

I found a little bit of fun in my ‘wanderings’ today that I thought I’d share, just for the sheer enjoyment of saying them out loud – alliterative epitaphs credited to (but not likely actually written by) Spiro Agnew as he attacked the liberal press in his speeches. He called them:

• "nattering nabobs of negativism"
• "pusillanimous pussyfoots"
• "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history"

Today’s politicians just seem to blunder. Old Agnew set a standard for quotes that few have met since!

Inquiring minds want to know…

If individual skin cells last only about a week, and are continually being displaced by millions and billions of new cells pushing up from the ‘germinative layer’ underneath, why do I still have a scar, 43 years later, from when the cat scratched me on my wrist? Shouldn’t that scarred skin have been scraped off years ago and replace by new skin that hadn’t been scratched?

Anyone who has watched the ‘Discovery Health’ Channel has seen them – the people who are so obese that they can’t support their own weight and literally can’t get out of bed until someone comes along with a forklift and removes a wall to their houses to take them to rehab. But the truly interesting questions about their lives never seem to get answered in these documentaries. So, really, how do they poop?

If they can’t predict tomorrow’s weather with any degree of accuracy – and they clearly can’t – how am I supposed to get excited about the computer-generated prediction models that are the basis for 'global warming theory' when we still aren't breaking the record high temperatures from a different hot spell 40 years ago before the automobile was so much to blame? (Yes, I know, there is more to it than that, but there is much more to the argument ‘against’ as well. The true question here is why is 'global warming' being touted by our media as 'fact?' It's just another question that will never be answered out loud.)

And just being silly: They are advertising an insulated cup that ‘keeps hot things hot and cold things cold,’ prompting Mark to ask “How do it know?”

We’ve really needed distractions from our troubles lately. But I must admit that our ‘intellectual exercises’ haven’t been quite up to par.


P.S. Do an ‘ask’ search on ‘how long do scars last’ and, instead of dermatology information, you get pages and pages of references to song lyrics – the old-timey country music variety!

Coming out of a funk

I got one of those ‘pass it on’ messages from a friend today that made me laugh – a bunch of quotes about aging mostly – and I thought I’d pass a few of them along here:

• Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!"
• Inside every older person is a younger person -- wondering what the hell happened.
• If you can't be a good example -- then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
• Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out. But I can usually shut her up with cookies.

So with the reminder that life is mostly an opportunity to laugh at oneself, I will try to put some attention back to my blog. An update: We have come to realize that our beautiful Kentucky house is going to be on the market for a long time, and have made financing arrangements to buy a house here without that sale as a contingency. (Thanks to my wonderful mother – one of the best ‘thinkers’ and ‘problem solvers’ I’ve ever known – for inciting that chain of events!) We’ve started looking at houses in the area with a creative and flexible eye, still determined to be able to do more with our lives than make house payments, even in this frighteningly high housing market. And we think we can find something not too far away from Mark’s workplace that meets our very basic criteria. We are looking forward to remodeling, painting, patching, roto-tilling and just generally making the proverbial ‘purse out of a sow’s ear.’

As you may have noticed, Seattle is having a hot spell again – a VERY hot spell – and even the long-time locals are starting to admit that maybe their position on A/C (in a nutshell, that they don’t need it because it is only hot a few times during the year) is more a result of a shared psychosis, possibly initiated by a Chamber of Commerce myth, rather than a sound opinion. Mark finally agreed to the purchase of a thermometer to prove or disprove our individual theories about just how hot it IS, in this awful apartment. (Reality turns out to be a bit better for me and worse for him, but that’s often the case…) Since it is, actually, THAT hot, we haven’t spent much time at home lately, which is probably best, except for Frik and Maddie, of course.

And so it goes… Sorry for the long gap in postings. Hope some of you are still with me anyway! (It would be very nice if you'd post a comment to let me know!)

The mountain, again

I've had, er... problems. Computer problems, heat problems, lack-of-interest-in-practically-anything problems. Some weeks are like that. So the blog has been neglected and is unlikely to be what it was any time in the near future. One might say that life is 'wearing' a bit on me and I just can't seem to get back a light enough heart to do justice to a light-hearted bit of writing. And I'm feeling a bit like Eyore about the whole thing - why bother? Who cares? So what?

But I did have pictures to post today so I thought I could at least manage that. That elusive mountain showed its face today, on just the day that we decided to go looking for it.

That ought to count for something.

The weekend

We had a great time while Todd and Laura were here - ate a LOT of excellent seafood of course, and poked around some of the usual haunts for tourists. Just a few notes about the weekend:

We were at Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic National Park at just the perfect time of year - wildflowers everywhere, blue sky, no 'hurricane force' wind - just beautiful. In spite of all the incredible scenery, I just couldn't resist taking a picture of a Japanese tourist taking a picture of a trash can while we were there. He was putting a lot of effort into this - took several shots from several angles, fussing with the focus on the camera to make sure it all turned out OK. There's one to show the friends back home. Speaking of which, Laura thinks she got a great picture of a deer's butt as well. We got some other pictures too, but I think those were the highlights...

I paid my first 'senior citizen' fare at the Argosy Harbor Cruise. The lady asked if anyone in our party was 55 or older and I said no just as a matter of course until it registered what she had said. "Wait a minute! I'm 55!!" What a rude awakening. I had to call my mother for sympathy.

The Mariner's actually won the baseball game while we were there, perhaps with help from the grounds crew which dances hilariously during the 'clean up' after the 3rd inning. (Or in spite of that?) Anyway, it's an interesting 'act' - catch it if you can. And we did finally find our way out of the parking garage afterwards. Eventually. Still not sure what that was about but it certainly involved tunnels and arrows and underground connections to other buildings. Note to self: NO future encounters with Union Station garage. Just in case.

Anyway, a few other pictures to share:

OK, really, just couldn't resist...