“What does it matter what you say about people?”

A very nice appreciation of Charlton Heston from the NYT last December. I missed it somehow. The picture above was taken in 1961. The quote is from the film "Touch of Evil", with Heston, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich and Janet Leigh.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Played for you by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain:



Thanks to Xavier!

Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest

Excellent new blog.

Now with 25% more cats!

Twenty-Eight Years Ago Today

Covering Reagan's first inaugural for Televiso Turonistani. On Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the FBI building. January 20, 1981.

Eight!

Eight degrees! Bwha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa!

A Movie Reverie

I was watching the opening to the old TV show, "The Prisoner". The star, Patrick McGoohan, died the other day. I especially remember his cool car, a Lotus Super Seven (Still WANT!)

And the opening credits for this episode feature the character actor Finlay Currie.

I remember Finlay Currie for one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen in the movies, the opening from David Lean's "Great Expectations".

The 12-year-old boy is walking through the spooky old graveyard when this guy just LEAPS into the frame and grabs the kid and says, "Keep still you little devil or I'll cut your throat!"

Finlay Currie plays the escaped convict who, in typical Dickens fashion, reappears decades later in a completely unexpected way. But the graveyard scene? I literally jumped out of my chair the first time I saw that. And I still get a tingle out of it.

Kimber Ultra CDP II

This is what's at the top of my wish-list today.
45-ACP, 7+1, aluminum frame and stainless steel slide.
About $1100.

It's Twelve

Twelve degrees Fahrenheit. That's about -11 Celsius, I think.
I wish I was the kind of person who called in sick when I wasn't really sick.

The Most Amazing Bacon Recipe Ever

Courtesy of Bitter.

Yum!

A feller can dream, can't he?
($1500. Includes original box)

The Embalming of The Snark

The International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo.

Jaunty Jackalope

Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 21 seconds. Scheduled for release in April. And look at all the geeks swarming here; 88,000 reads in less than 48 hours:

He Doesn't Do Windows

Interesting article in the NYT about Ubuntu Linux entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth.

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.

That's one of the most famous opening lines in fiction, along with:
"In the beginning ..."
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
"Call me Ishmael."

This is Alfred Hitchcock's movie of Daphne DuMaurier's novel Rebecca. Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine play the leads, along with a fantastic group of character actors: Nigel Bruce, Judith Anderson, George Sanders and Leo G. Carroll.

The title character, Rebecca, never appears in the movie and in fact she's dead when the movie begins. Her mysterious death drives the plot from beginning to end. It's not a typical Hitchcock movie, either. It's also unusual in that Joan Fontaine's character doesn't have a name; she's called "The Second Mrs. DeWynter" and addressed as "my dear" or "madame". We never hear her first name.

Anyway, it's a classic and an excellent way to spend a cold Sunday evening.

Full Moon

Beautiful full moon this morning. Picture taken with a 720p video camera and a 2X tele-extender and shot off the screen by my little Nikon.

Dress Rehearsal

This morning at 7:15 they were getting ready for the inauguration.

Steampunk Monopoly

Very cool!

Via Boing-boing.

The Little House On Butt Hole Road

Or Juggs Close.

Or Scratchy Bottom.

Strange and unearthly place names in England.

From the BBC.

The Baker Street Irregulars

Tomorrow, January 6, is Twelfth Night, and for many people the unofficial end of the Christmas season. But for a certain group of readers January 6 has another significance: It marks the presumed birthday of the greatest fictional character of modern times, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the world’s foremost consulting detective. Seventy five years ago Christopher Morley—the most popular literary journalist of his time—established a small sodality of Sherlockian enthusiasts that soon came to be called the Baker Street Irregulars. Before long this group started to meet for regular sluicings and carousings and Sherlockian disputation on the Friday nearest to January 6. That tradition has never ceased, and on Wednesday I travel to New York for the diamond jubilee of the BSI.

From the WaPo. But what is "sodality"? And what is a "sluicing"? Is that, like, transitive or something?

"Stairway To Heaven" and "Age Of Consent"

The NYT reviews two DVDs of films by British Director Michael Powell. I have a copy of "Stairway To Heaven" and it is a favorite.

But I didn't know that Powell also directed the even-more-obscure "Age Of Consent" (1969) starring James Mason and the 23-year-old Helen Mirren, who was cast principally because she was willing to play a nude model, er, mostly in the nude.