Just spent my 2nd consecutive evening in an E.R., this time at Methodist Hospital with my father, who somehow managed to break a bone in his hand while at the nursing home -- probably by jamming it into the wheel of his wheelchair, or something along that line. He really didn't like the splint they strapped onto his hand, wrist & forearm -- kept trying to pull it off, against all advice. (Alzheimer's patients are not easily swayed by logic.)  Looks like he'll be okay, at least physically.

Anyhow, two evenings in a row spent at emergency rooms is a heckuva rotten way to spend a weekend.
Who's up for getting sick tomorrow night, help me make it three in a row???     :)

Drove a friend of mine to the emergency room tonight. She was in her 2nd day of extreme pain, ranging from jaw to fingertips, and when she talked to a med-line and described her pain, they recommended that she call 911 or head immediately to an ER. Not surprisingly, this did not make her feel better, but she was calmer by the time I arrived and drove her over. The pain seems to be due either to a severe side-effect to a drug she was prescribed for a major sinus/eye infection (the side-effect possibly causing tendon damage), or else to a rotator cuff injury. She's feeling better, is beginning treatment, and will get an MRI next week to see what the problem is, but she was mad as hops at the med-line person for scaring her with the 911 recommendation. Our best figuring was that, when they hear the words, pain ranging down the arm to the fingertips, they immediately conclude heart problems and recommend accordingly. Problem is, this sounds like a policy more rooted in legal liability than in medical practice. I do see their point, of course -- mis-diagnose a heart attack, and you spoil everybody's day.

Highlight of the evening: when one, and then another, person at the ER referred to me as her husband, requiring explanations that I'm a friend only, I winked at her (smarmy, yes -- couldn't resist) and said, "You know that if one more person says that, it means we're engaged." Got her best laugh of the evening with that one.

Stayed in all day, still recuperating, but right now I'm watching the Syfy channel's latest weekly debacle, "Meteor Storm." Truth to tell, I'm only watching it because Kari Matchett is one of the leads. I've had a major crush on her ever since she played two dozen different roles on "Nero Wolfe." (Several times playing more than one character in a story. She's talented as well as drop-dead gorgeous.)

Meteor Storm is rotten, of course, as are almost all of Syfy's made-for-TV movies, but one thing really caught my attention. In two different scenes - one of two characters standing on the shore, looking across the harbor at Alcatraz, and the second a head-on shot of a man riding a motorcycle, I would swear that the shot was created with rear projection. I know that Tarantino used rear projection several times in Kill Bill, mostly to give it a 1960s cachet, but aside from that, I didn't think anybody was using rear projection anymore. I suppose it's possible that they were just doing really bad green screen, or that they thought they were doing something clever by using an outmoded (and inferior) technology, but my guess is that they either merged two shots really badly, or that they actually did use rear projection. It genuinely looked like it.

Kari Matchett was terrific, by the way, giving credibility to her character, in a movie that needed all the cred it could get.

Lifeforce -- Halley's Comet, spaceships, vampires, demons, zombies, possession, magic swords, London burned to the ground, a great Henry Mancini score, Patrick Stewart, and Mathilda May as the gorgeous naked queen of the space vampires. (She's French, you know!)

In the four months that my father's been in the Alzheimer's floor of a nursing home, I've had the flu, four different colds, the shingles, and a couple of other ailments. In addition to the stress of all this, I blame the 5-6 per week visits to the nursing home that I've been obliged to do, owing to family transportation, family pressures, etc. Just finishing up the most recent cold/sinus thing, and I feel like I'm now developing a stomach thing. I suspect it's just due to being exposed to pretty much every damn thing there is at the nursing home, five or six days a week.

I'm still hoping to get to the Dr. Farrago burlesque show tonight at Ground Zero nightclub. (Doors at ten, show at eleven!) Nothing like seeing a bunch of beautiful women take their clothes off in public to brighten a winter's night.

A new Conan the Cimmerian  movie is being made; it starts filming this March in Bulgaria, and it stars Jason Momoa, late of Stargate: Atlantis, as Robert E. Howard's barbarian. A couple of things have been annoying me about this, none of them about the movie itself.

1) The first story I read about this referred to Conan as a "comic book hero," and that the role was originally created by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Pulp magazine hero, if you please -- Conan was in Weird Tales a good forty years before he was in comics, and for that matter, for the better part of a decade before comic books were even invented. Conan was an invention of the written word, and later of the brilliant paperback covers of Frank Frazetta, not of Marvel Comics. As for the 2nd point: I will grant you that superior actors can "create" a role, take the bare bones of a character given to them, and breathe life into that character, making it real, making it magic, making it their own. Superior actors. Real actors. Not Arnold.

2) The second thing is more serious, a bit of a rant. A pulp magazine group I belong to has a couple of members who have reacted very negatively to Jason Momoa being cast as Conan, making refererence to "black" actors being given roles that were written as "white" characters. I didn't get deep into the thread, just made one posting wherein I stated that I felt that these are actors, that they are not the people they are playing. I made a specific reference to Raymond Chandler's private eye, Philip Marlowe, being played to perfection by both Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, neither of whom resembled Marlowe -- or each other -- in the least. It's my belief that acting, of all professions, should be colorblind, since it's all about make-believe and pretense, anyhow. (I didn't state my other desire, to someday see a woman play Hamlet, because I think it'd really freak 'em out, but I think a woman playing the melancholy Dane might bring a marvelous new insight in to the play.)

Part one of my rant: Jason Momoa isn't "black." If it actually matters to anyone, his grandparents were Hawaiian, Native American, German, Scotch, Irish, a traditional American melange. My feeling is, that he's big and muscled, moves with grace, is a pretty good actor, and can exude a convincing air of menace, and that could add up to a pretty good Conan. I think these guys saw his last name, looked at his photo, and they're the kind of people who immediately think that if a person isn't 1950s Ozzie & Harriet "white," then they must be black.

And that's the other thing: I'm so sick of "race." Let's get real, people. There is no such thing as "race." There is no white race, no black race, no Chinese race, none of it. Race as we practice it is a mid-19th century invention, created by Victorian era power elites to justify their running the world and stealing the rest of the world blind, and just because a lot of people -- most of them really stupid people -- believe in it, doesn't mean it's real. Race belongs to the same grouping as angels dancing on the heads of pins, UFO kidnappings, Elvis sightings, the Rapture, the Yellow Peril, Communism, the religion of the "Free" Market, all that crap. And yes, God, too. Inventions, one and all, and none of 'em for real. The curious thing about "race" is that, while "race" isn't real, racism is. We've invented a means for hating people based upon a quality they do not possess, one that no one possesses. And that ain't good.


Think I need to watch some TV now...the old Bob Newhart Show sounds about right.

Met a couple of friends, my 11-year old buddy & his mother, at the Mall of America today, spent a few pleasant hours with them. I'd bought the little guy a birthday present gift card for the A.C.E.S. flight simulation place, and he was eager to hit the skies. After his 10-minute briefing, he hopped into the cockpit of his F-18 fighter jet and spent the next 30 minutes blasting everything that moved from the air. (Not even sparing a few ominous clouds!) On his debriefing comment card, his mission report read: "Amazing!" (He's got a flair for words.) It did indeed look fun. His mother and I were able to watch his cockpit view on a nearby HDTV, and his mother -- perhaps the most pacific person I know -- kept muttering, "Shoot! Shoot!" every time an enemy fighter came into his gunsights.

It's a computerized simulator, with a full-size cockpit, machine guns plus air-to-air missiles, and a certain amount of in-flight instruction. He had a great time, and an equally great time sharing every detail with me while his mother shopped Sephora. He's eager to try it again, and have a dogfight with me. Which would be fun, I freely admit. It does cost $30/half hour, so it's not something to do with any frequency. But it was a great afternoon, and a delight seeing him walk around, feet floating six inches off the ground, for the rest of the afternoon.

I haven't shaved in a couple of days, so evidently I'm going through my annual midwinter "should I grow a beard again?" crisis. I do like the way I look with a beard, but I think now it'd be mostly gray, rather than just a dramatic sprinkling, and I suspect that'd be depressing. So, probably shave tomorrow...or the next day.

On a related subject...I have my great-grandfather's old straight razor in a dresser drawer. Never met the man, so I guess it's kind of a low-grade family heirloom. But even were it in usable condition, there is no way in hell I could ever bring myself to shave with one of those things, or to allow anyone else to shave me with one. I cringe at the very thought.

When will movie directors finally fall to the fact that the "hero running toward the camera and away from the explosion behind him" shot has become so old, so tired, so boring, that it's become the logo for bad filmmaking?

1st post of the year, and I have a cold. Not major, just an annoying head cold/sinus (massive) headache thing, but it provides a backdrop for recent events. First of all, I turned down three invitations for New Year's because of the cold. Between it and the weather, all I wanted was sleep, and I was in bed on 12/31/09 before ten o'clock. And turning down three invitations for parties from three beautiful women means that I have a will of iron, the viral count of a Mythbusters petrie dish, and the brains of a flatworm. :)

Felt well enough & cooped-up enough to catch "Sherlock Holmes" yesterday. Now, I've been reading Holmes since I was 7, consider myself a Holmes traditionalist, and I really enjoyed this movie. It's over the top, has plentiful anachronisms (poison gas & references to radio in 1890, and such), and yet, I felt that in some regards, it captured the essence of Holmes & Watson rather better than many more traditional versions.

One funny thing at the theater: I got there early, found a good aisle seat, folded up the armrest, dropped my jacket in the adjoining seat, spread out a little, and then, just as the credits started, all the last-minute crowd arrived and started looking for seats: "I can't sit this close!" "I can't sit near the door!" "I can't sit this far!" "I have to sit in the middle!" Anyhow, one of the trendy late-arrivers had to sit beside me, so I spread in, dropped the armrest, and retrieved my jacket. He plopped down beside me, and right then, I let out three good, solid sneezes in a row, followed by a fairly generous noseblow. All the while, I could sense the late-arriver edging further and further away from me, and could sense his regret that he couldn't slide over into the lap of the person on his other side. Shows him right for not showing up early! :)

"It's A Gift" (1934)

67¢ and a window seat...

"Come to my room in five minutes...and bring some rye bread."

Jimmy Durante, as Banjo, in "The Man Who Came to Dinner."*

*written by George S. Kaufmann & Moss Hart

Based on a NY Times book review, I ordered a book entitled "The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death" from the library. It's written by Charlie Huston, and it's a mystery/crime story about a man who makes his living working for a company that cleans up scenes of violent deaths, suicides, and other bloody gawd-awful messes. I thought it sounded an interesting premise, until I started trying to read it.

Evidently, Mr. Huston dislikes quotation marks. He doesn't use them. Instead, he uses a dash at the beginning of a line to indicate spoken dialogue, thus:
---These pretzels are making me thirsty!
Rather than:
"These pretzels are making me thirsty!"

I lasted a chapter and a half until his style irritated sufficiently that I placed the book atop my "Return to Library ASAP" pile. This may be a common practice in some writing circles, but I found it annoying and distracting, and enough so to make me not read his story. And the thing is...I don't think there's a defense for this kind of style. To be certain, quotation marks are commonly used, and among pretentious writers, this means that they are common and not to be used by "superior" writers. But the letter E is also commonly used...do these writers also intend to boycott all use of E? Why did he not drop commas, surely as widely used as quotation marks? I guess my real point is that standard writing style exists for a reason, and someone discarding that standard style needs to do so for a pretty serious reason, such as being a true genius -- not a self-proclaimed genius, and not a genius because your mommy said so -- else you just come across, as does Mr. Huston, as a pretentious hack.

It's A Gift - W.C. Fields

Golfers have groupies. Golfers have groupies! Golfers have groupies?

Oy vey.

I really don't get the sexual excitement some people find in the idea of getting involved with someone famous. Being rather a private person -- which is fully contradicted by one or two items in my life's resume -- I think that the prospect of getting sexually involved with a very famous woman would more likely give me serious pause, rather than pull me in like a moth into a blowtorch.

This is not to say that I'm not hers, should Milla Jovovich snap her fingers in my general direction...

I see that Sarah Palin quit a recent 5k Turkey Trot (in Seattle?) 40 minutes into her race. I'm not a fast runner, but even at 51 I can do a mile in eleven to twelve minutes and could probably do a 5k in 35-38 minutes. Maybe slightly better, if conditions were good and I had a wind at my back.

But to quit an unfinished run at 40 minutes? Average person in decent shape could probably walk it in 45. I get the impression that the ex-gov of AK is incapable of finishing anything she begins.