Oscars...but no Billy Crystal.

The Academy Awards, aka the Oscars, will be awarded this Sunday.

The first awards were presented in 1929.  The first Best Picture award went to "Wings".  I have seen that movie, believe it or not, and read about the making of the film.  It is truly amazing work for its time.

Fast forward to present day : I have resolved, yet again, to not watch the current awards show so as to avoid ranting and hollering at the television when a succession of people who make their living pretending to be someone other than who they are deign to take the opportunity of their moment in the spotlight to tell the world how to behave (that is a really long sentence, yes).  When this happens, I  begin to spew a vitriolic gospel punctuated, nay, brimming with abrupt common profanities.

My spouse barely raises an eyebrow anymore.

I confess, I will end up watching the show, at least for a while.  I will rant and holler.

It's what I do.

Wondering about the trophies?.

The Oscar statuettes used to be made in Chicago.

Then, just like Marshall Field & Co., and their famed Frango Mints,  Jays Potato Chips, the Chicago (now Arizona by way of St. Louis)  NFL Cardinals football team and a lot of other stuff that I will research some other time, Oscar went elsewhere.  If the trophy source is of interest, here's a link to the current maker and their story  (click) Oscar not Mayer .

As for the performances and productions, this year I have seen more of them than I customarily would have seen,  thanks to the contemporary express method of delivering content which bypasses our local theaters, in my case Apple TV.  The big categories are always of interest:

Best Picture Nominees - there are 9 nominees!   I've seen 5 of them.  My guess is either The Joker or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  That's out of the films I have seen, so if it's one of the others, I cannot comment, other than to snort derisively.  Note: if you cannot snort derisively, I can train you to do so.  I am, as they say, adept in this skill.

Best Actor - 5 nominees, I have seen 4.  Predicted winner : Joaquin Phoenix in The Joker.  Mesmerizing performance!

Best Supporting Actor - I pick Anthony Hopkins in The Two Popes.  Hopkins is one of the best ever.

Best Actress - I only saw one of the 5, so "I got nothin'" here.

Best Supporting Actress - same story.

Best Director - I pick Quentin Tarantino, who I think is absolutely nuts, for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was, in my opinion,  absolutely terrific.  I think the actual chosen winner will be the venerable Martin Scorcese for The Irishman, because Scorcese is part of the old guy network that will want to reward what might be his last best effort, and it was a terrific movie, so I think they're going to give it to him.

There's a lot of other categories that are recognized for their wonderful work, but admit it, you don't really pay that close of attention either.  There is one area to which I have been paying more than usual attention : cinematography.  I'm picking The Joker for this one.

Douglas Fairbanks hosted the very first Oscars.  Billy Crystal hosted the show NINE times. There's no host for this year's show, but it will nonetheless grind on for hours, and we will ask ourselves on Monday why we watched it yet again.

Hooray for Hollywood!

How dare you!

Yes, friends, I am lurching back into your lives.  I have been absent for many moons and here I am.  How dare I!  Thanks to kind family and friends who like to read the kind of things I write and who have gently reminded me that they think I'm a bit of a turd for not offering up anything on a predictable schedule...as if posting every couple years isn't predictable...thanks to them, I'll give it a go again.

I guess she's famous.  

I grew up reading great newspaper feature columnists.  To many of today's adults, that sentence lands with a thud.  Newspapers have never been part of your life, and the people who fill up the internet today seem mostly interested in cyber hollering and bullying. A lot of that stuff is  rooted in politics, and I don't really care about your politics, nor do I think you should be subjected to mine.  I do like to lampoon politicians, though, and my favorite targets lately (like for the past umpteen years) are Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and lately-er Fat Jay.   Another time we can talk about them; not today, not here and now.

Today I want to talk Super Bowl, aka "the Big Game" because the NFL doesn't permit anyone to say "Super Bowl" unless there is "consideration", i.e. a payment involved.

Super Bowl
Super Bowl
Super Bowl
Super Bowl

Ha ha!!  F-U, NFL!!! I'm not paying!

They're probably dispatching a black sedan right now to "pay me a visit".

Anyway, back to the Big Game (see, guys, it was all in good fun), that's this Sunday.  After that, there is nothing but a great void.  Gray and lifeless, time will plod on for weeks with nothing to distinguish the days, one from another.  This is life in the tundra of the midwest.

The cycle begins in November.  There is the end of college football, then Christmas and New Year's and bowl games.  Then comes the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl--oops, the Big Game.  That pattern of entertainment prevents cabin fever, a period of 10 to 12 weeks where you avoid depression because there's no sunlight and outdoor activities are generally sucky, like shoveling snow and trying not to have a big grabber.  The daylight hours grow fewer until almost Christmas (maybe we should trademark "Christmas" and make people pay to say  it or call it "the Big Presents Day" or something) and there's Seasonal Affective Disorder and stuff like that until St Patrick's Day and March Madness, where everyone skyrockets out  of winter by getting blasted out of their minds and talking about each other's brackets and trying to sing along with songs to which they've never learned more than mumbling melodies.

So party party party this Sunday.  It is the natural order of things.  In the tundra, anyway.

Binging With My Girls

Binge watching TV shows is a recent phenomenon, or maybe just a new term for an old behavior.  While it is  pretty disruptive to your normal routine, binge watching is  a great immersive entertainment experience.

The term and the activity are pretty mainstream these days, with the advent of streaming services like Netflix, but binge watching may have originated back when TBS and some of the other cable originals would run marathons.  The slow evolution of binge watching popularity was probably due to the (lack of) quality of offerings and minimal control.  There were not that many people interested in devoting free weekends to The Gilligan's Island Marathon or The Gunsmoke Marathon.

Actually, there probably never was a Gunsmoke Marathon, because there were 635 episodes of Gunsmoke,  which would have been reallllly long weekend, like 26 days of non-stop watching of what was usually the same story every week. Mimsy argues that Gunsmoke "wasn't really that popular".  The show was only on for 20 years, dear...

James Arness was Sheriff Matt Dillon. Once
a week for twenty years.  With commercials.

Binge got bigger with the arrival of home videotape, placing control in the viewer's hands, then came CD's, and the breadth of the selection-- and the convenience-- exploded.  You could watch one after another of any crappy old show that caught your fancy and never connect to actual, real life--and no commercials!

We discovered binge watching --of a rudimentary sort-- during the time we lived in the Caribbean.  We paid about a zillion dollars a month for satellite TV that offered the crappiest programming imaginable (like endless novellas from Puerto Rico and island governmental meetings).  For actual entertainment we ultimately turned to Netflix.

Problem solved...not so well, it turned out, as our internet service (which likewise required an immense monthly ransom payment), worked sporadically, slowly and unpredictably.  We would watch for a few minutes, then let it buffer for a few minutes, then watch again, trying not to lose the storyline. It was mind boggling, all these wonderful state of the art  technologies smashing into each other like a NASCAR accident and ultimately working like a big pile of electronic crap.  HD big screen smart TV + satellite technology + the internet + fabulous entertainment, all  operating on infrastructure that couldn't reliably run the original pong game.  So binge watching required dedication, patience and a lot of time. 

My felonious girlfriends from Orange,..most of them, anyway

.

Back in the present tense and real world,  electronic stuff works as it should. We have since bonded with spies(Homeland),  meth cooks and junkies (Breaking Bad), cowboys, Mormons and hookers all doing their part to build the transcontinental railroad (Hell on Wheels) more cowboys and hookers (Deadwood), and probably some others I can't recall. 

I've made new video friends I would never have expected, as we've  just finished binge watching Orange is the New Black. It's an incredible show about the residents and staff of a fictional women's prison in upstate New York. Pair up great entertainment with the binge commitment and you may end up with unexpected results.   We've watched the available four seasons of Orange, getting to know everyone, night after night, bonding, as it were, and now must wait for months until the next season becomes available. 

So here I sit, in withdrawal, desperately missing my white/black/Hispanic lesbian transgender female felon TV friends as I await the release of Season V.

 Keep the faith, sisters, I will be here when you return...and I never promised that to Gilligan or the Dodge City folks.

Thank You, Harry Callahan

You might be mumbling, right about now "so you decided to come back...where were you last week..."  If you are so inclined to have a good mumble on my account, I am deeply grateful, as it indicates that you missed me, and we all like to be missed, now, don't we?

I was incapacitated last week; incapable of communicating any series of discernable thoughts, rendered mumbly myself, and at my own hand.  I had a dandy hangover and within that context was reminded of the foibles of age, why we are supposed to be wiser as we get older.  The message was powerful.

'Cause hangovers, at this point in life, are a two day process.

Goddamn, what a mess!  My sweet godchild, Alyssa, came by to visit on Friday evening.  She is lovely, glib, and entertaining, and she has been a special person in mine and Mimsy's life forever.  So, as we sat around the kitchen table, getting caught up on the wonderful things going on in her life, I had a cocktail.  We chatted away, and I had another, and...run this one out to its logical conclusion.  Now fast forward to Saturday morning.

I was crippled. 

Koda the Wonderdog, she is a great alarm clock.  Comes to the side of the bed and shoves her furry

AAACCCKKK...Muppet assault

mug into mine around the same time most mornings, sometimes with a soft "woof" to greet me.  When one's brain is marginally functional, however, this can become an alarming experience. Coming to consciousness like floating to the top of a pool, you see...something, and wonder if you've entered the Muppet World.  Then you get a breathy "woof" that is laden with the warm fragrance of tuna or some other gross shit that was in her morning dog food and things start to come back a lot faster.

  What did I do???

That's what spouses are good at: keeping track of the details of your miscreant behavior from the night before.  While the episodes for which she must do this are few and far between, Mimsy has a unique style.  She is rather chipper and happy, smiling endlessly  as she relates what was consumed and what inappropriate behavior accompanied it, her message  somewhere between "aw, it's ok, ya big lug" and "I'm going to have the best time torturing you, you miserable bastard". 

We can fast forward through Saturday, as sitting in the recliner staring at the TV and drinking bottles of water, that isn't so interesting.  It's waking up Sunday and still feeling like an inferior life form, that's the rub here.  Somewhere in the middle of Sunday afternoon, most brain function has returned, but by now the day is a write off and one is left to ponder a younger day, a time when you could go out and raise all hell and bounce out of bed at the crack of dawn and have a full productive day and share the memory of the previous night's bacchanal with nothing holding you back.

Them days is gone, pal.  Now it's Dirty Harry, perched on your shoulder, endlessly reminding you...

Youngblood Hawke is a Band?

Maybe you are familiar with Herman Wouk, the author.  Maybe you think you aren't, but you are, a little bit.  Herman Wouk has written many, many things in his career. 

The Caine Mutiny.

Bogart and Fred MacMurray.  Huh?

Winds of  War.

War and Remembrance.

Youngblood Hawke.

Herman Wouk wrote those, and more.   There's more, and more to the ones listed above.  The Caine Mutiny and Youngblood Hawke were very successful movies.  Winds of War and War and Remembrance were mega blockbuster TV miniseries.

There's another book Wouk published in 2015.  It is titled Sailor and Fiddler : Reflection of a 100-Year Old Author.

Herman Wouk, born 1915, is still writing.  Amazing.  Sailor and Fiddler is a breezy autobiography.  If you've followed his books a bit, you may find it entertaining.  If you haven't, it's probably not going to get you too excited.  The fact that Wouk pumped out a pretty good book at 100 years of age, that is simply remarkable. 

He tells of meetings and conversations with characters who were huge celebrities in their day, and occasionally discloses that he's a little fuzzy on the details, dismissing the gaffe in one instance with the comment "...forgive me, the conversation took place 62 years ago..." 

The reason that I've shared this bit of mildly entertaining information with you today is words.   Herman Wouk is arguably the greatest American novelist ever.   Herman Wouk knows lotsa words.  Lotta lotta words.  I know lotsa words.  Herman knows more. In the first 2/3 of the book, I have jotted down 21 words that he dropped in here and  there that I had to go look up.  Some were vaguely familiar, most could be inferred from context ( you know how we sort of go with it by assuming from the surrounding thought that we know the word and maybe yes and maybe no but it's too much effort to look it up so we plow on through). 

Here they are.  There are  21 of them.  How many did you know before today?

Colliery                                                     a coal mining facility

Precis                                                        a summary of a speech or text

Piquant                                                     spicy, tangy (this one I knew, sort of)

Freebooter                                                pirate (yar! I love saying yar!)

Cormorant (adj.)                                      not the bird, as adj it means greedy

Dactyl                                                      not terra, it is an accented syllable followed by two

                                                                 unaccented, eg "flattery"

Persiflage                                                 good natured banter

Badinage                                                  the same as persiflage.  Howbowdah?

Ephemera                                                something short lived, like your enjoyment of this

Pastiche                                                   this is cool : a dramatic opening in music or literature

                                                                that mimics other works

Evanesce                                                 disappear like vapor.  whoosh!

Anodyne                                                 a pain reliever

Encomium                                                a tribute or testimonial

Limn                                                        to describe or portray

Cerberus                                                  Best One!!! this is the multi-headed monster dog that

                                                                 guards the gates of hell -- to prevent escape!!!

Vagary                                                    unexpected change

Jejeune                                                    Frasier always used this one.  It's naïve or simplistic

Litvak                                                      a Lithuanian Jew

Adduce                                                   cite as evidence

Insouciance                                             indifference

Jocose                                                     playful, humorous

So, how many did you know?