Edgar, Ian, Bill, Lynne, Sue, Helen, Steve G, Bob, Will, Steve L, Jeanette.
This blog is very skimpy as my iPhone battery appeared to collapse - better now, though, so I must have been abusing it (don't ask!).
I managed to do no more than record who turned up, a list graced by the appearance of Sue's mother Helen, over on one of her regular visits from England. And we had the welcome return of Javier, whom some thought we would never see again - though that mood arises every time he ventures south of the border. Juan did a great job, but it was great to see Javier again, complete with a very severe military haircut that made it look as if he had stopped off at Camp Pendleton on his way back to Pasadena!
Steve gave me some very sound advice about not using cowboy repairers for the dent in our Dodge Neon, instead sending me and Lynne off to Holmes Body Works on Colorado Boulevard. They were very professional but wanted $2,600, a bit too much for a car that cost only $8,500, so dented it will have to stay.
Bob, Steve and I tried to make sense of Musharraf's overthrow in Pakistan, while Sue told me all about how she and James had built their wonderful amphitheater below their home - and, as luck had it, they were putting on a concert that Saturday, featuring some magical Indian sitar music on a perfect warm summer's evening under the stars.
Er, that's about it. No Diner Diary next week because of the Ernest Borg9 evening in South Pasadena - and maybe not the following week either, because of Labor Day and Cinecon. Back to normal after that, I hope!
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Pure White Eugene
Jim, Will, Ian, Regina, Bill, Lynne, Barbara, Bobb, Glenn, Edgar, Ray, Steve L, Jeanette, Bob Birchard, Andy
After Libby ended a long absence last week, it was Ian's turn to return, though after not so long. He had been at the Oregon Festival of American Music in Eugene for two weeks, where he reported a tempestuous time with the Festival's director, and with the airline that was supposed to be flying him back from San Francisco to Burbank.
"Eugene is pure white," said Ian. "Not a black in sight, apart from one of our singers, just lots of people with very white teeth and skin."
Ian had seen a stage performance Wizard of Oz in Oregon and the Conrads conversation turned to the back story of the characters that were well known to people going to see the movie. The tin man for example had really been an accident prone chap who kept chopping bits of his body off while working in the woods and had them replaced by tin parts. Like so many fictional characters, it was based on a not-very-far-removed true-life original.
Ian was due back on Sunday night, but didn't reach Burbank until 11 o'clock on Monday morning. A cancelled flight meant a night in a dingy hotel - why do the airlines think they are enhancing their reputations by treating customers so badly?
While he was in foreign parts, Ian bought the New York Times in Starbucks every morning and found what many of us have long thought: that it is far superior to the LA Times, which once saw itself as a rival. Sadly the LAT under the odious Sam Zell is sinking fast and becoming little more than the parish gazette for a fairly large provincial city. It is now absurd to compare it with any of the major international titles such as the London Times, Figaro, Le Monde, the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. The NYT is infinitely more professional, and if it weren't for its continuing obligation to be NY-centered it could easily became a proper US national paper.
Lynne and Will had been enthralled by a well written story in LA weekly about two elderly women in the upscale Pacific Palisades who fed rats and added an estimated half a milion to LA's Westside rat population. Despite this, the authorities did nothing about it. Lynne and Will, both vegetarians, wondered if the pair could be such animal lovers becuase the very long piece said that, while the twins didn't want to kill animals, they loved eating chicken. This says much about the ability of the butchery industry to divorce the meat they sell from the cuddly animals that provide the raw material.
The internet is creeping up on all the mainstream press, newspapers and local weeklies alike. Which is why, as Barbara pointed out, the Chinese authorities employ 60,000 functionaries to police the level of internet access available to its 1.3 billion citizens.
It is surely a losing battle for the bureaucrats, hampered even further by their government's decision to host the Olympic Games. Apart from bringing thousands of journalists to Beijing, such a huge event fosters the trend towards the interconnected world. Censorship is getting harder and harder. While this has been a boon for the porn industry, it also means that free speech is freer.
Such freedom could yet put Paris Hilton in the White House as the first female US president, after her elegant political broadcast replying to John McCain's unwise decision to drag her into his tetchy battle with Barack Obama.
People in the US are so sick of the two main parties and the process which produces such dull candidates that Paris Hilton might stand a very strong chance in November as a protest candidate. Pity that US presidents have to be 35: she is only 27, and it is a little late to change the rules in time for this year's vote.
A mini-tradition which has sprung up on Monday nights recently is to celebrate events and anniversaries with cake. This time it was the publication of Jim's masterly book on Angel's Flight, which was marked with chocolate cake all round.
Who's next?
CAUGHT ON THE BREEZE
I don't make mistakes. I thought I did once, but I was wrong
Magic Moments covered the whole of Perry Como's range
If I wasn't so perfect I'd be perfect
You can't give Ian anything, he has everything
Why do we have two of most things but only one heart and liver?
I always thought Malaysia was a disease.
After Libby ended a long absence last week, it was Ian's turn to return, though after not so long. He had been at the Oregon Festival of American Music in Eugene for two weeks, where he reported a tempestuous time with the Festival's director, and with the airline that was supposed to be flying him back from San Francisco to Burbank.
"Eugene is pure white," said Ian. "Not a black in sight, apart from one of our singers, just lots of people with very white teeth and skin."
Ian had seen a stage performance Wizard of Oz in Oregon and the Conrads conversation turned to the back story of the characters that were well known to people going to see the movie. The tin man for example had really been an accident prone chap who kept chopping bits of his body off while working in the woods and had them replaced by tin parts. Like so many fictional characters, it was based on a not-very-far-removed true-life original.
Ian was due back on Sunday night, but didn't reach Burbank until 11 o'clock on Monday morning. A cancelled flight meant a night in a dingy hotel - why do the airlines think they are enhancing their reputations by treating customers so badly?
While he was in foreign parts, Ian bought the New York Times in Starbucks every morning and found what many of us have long thought: that it is far superior to the LA Times, which once saw itself as a rival. Sadly the LAT under the odious Sam Zell is sinking fast and becoming little more than the parish gazette for a fairly large provincial city. It is now absurd to compare it with any of the major international titles such as the London Times, Figaro, Le Monde, the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. The NYT is infinitely more professional, and if it weren't for its continuing obligation to be NY-centered it could easily became a proper US national paper.
Lynne and Will had been enthralled by a well written story in LA weekly about two elderly women in the upscale Pacific Palisades who fed rats and added an estimated half a milion to LA's Westside rat population. Despite this, the authorities did nothing about it. Lynne and Will, both vegetarians, wondered if the pair could be such animal lovers becuase the very long piece said that, while the twins didn't want to kill animals, they loved eating chicken. This says much about the ability of the butchery industry to divorce the meat they sell from the cuddly animals that provide the raw material.
The internet is creeping up on all the mainstream press, newspapers and local weeklies alike. Which is why, as Barbara pointed out, the Chinese authorities employ 60,000 functionaries to police the level of internet access available to its 1.3 billion citizens.
It is surely a losing battle for the bureaucrats, hampered even further by their government's decision to host the Olympic Games. Apart from bringing thousands of journalists to Beijing, such a huge event fosters the trend towards the interconnected world. Censorship is getting harder and harder. While this has been a boon for the porn industry, it also means that free speech is freer.
Such freedom could yet put Paris Hilton in the White House as the first female US president, after her elegant political broadcast replying to John McCain's unwise decision to drag her into his tetchy battle with Barack Obama.
People in the US are so sick of the two main parties and the process which produces such dull candidates that Paris Hilton might stand a very strong chance in November as a protest candidate. Pity that US presidents have to be 35: she is only 27, and it is a little late to change the rules in time for this year's vote.
A mini-tradition which has sprung up on Monday nights recently is to celebrate events and anniversaries with cake. This time it was the publication of Jim's masterly book on Angel's Flight, which was marked with chocolate cake all round.
Who's next?
CAUGHT ON THE BREEZE
I don't make mistakes. I thought I did once, but I was wrong
Magic Moments covered the whole of Perry Como's range
If I wasn't so perfect I'd be perfect
You can't give Ian anything, he has everything
Why do we have two of most things but only one heart and liver?
I always thought Malaysia was a disease.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
The horror you can't see
Edgar, Will, Libby, Bobb, Barbara, Bill, Lynne, Jim, Mary, Steve L, Jeanette, Bob, Ray.
First appearance for several months by Libby, who I can report had a very pleasant evening and as a result is thinking of popping in every couple of months - as quite a few of the crew already do - subject to her other Monday night commitments. Let's hope we see much more of her.
If this blog seems on the short side, it's because there was little or no general discussion so I can only cover what was going on in my immediate vicinity - which may tell some of you things you missed, but it means that I missed plenty. All contributions gratefully accepted!
Question: what is the worst horror you can imagine? Answer: the one you can't see. Too many modern horror films are in your face, but if you go back to hits such as Quatermass and Frankenstein it was the fact you couldn't see the monsters that made them all the more frightening... which of course makes radio the ideal medium for the scary stuff and worked so spectacularly well with Orson Welles's War of the Worlds in the 1930s.
Strangely enough, this fits in with a little-discussed and genuinely frightening corner of the real world - torture. When the British SAS is training its soldiers to withstand torture, the main message is that the worst thing about it is the anticipation - which quite a few captors exploit by playing tapes of people screaming in agony before they begin questioning someone. The reality, the SAS assures its people, is never as bad. Don't want to test the theory, though!
Talking of radio, Bobb Lynes reminded us that the Gunsmoke western series was on radio before TV - and, naturally, a very different cast was employed for the screen version. I say naturally, but Bobb rightly pointed out that the radio team fought a valiant fight to make the transition, on the grounds that they looked more like real cowboys (ie, ugly, misshapen, totally unglamorous). They even organised a still photoshoot at Knot's Berry Farm in 1953.
The ugly argument might work today, but in the 1950s James Arness's 6ft 7in rugged good looks won easily over the radio Matt Dillon, William Conrad - a little fat guy who happened to have a deep voice. Howard McNear's Doc Adams was supplanted by Milburn Stone. Kitty Russell went from Georgia Ellis to Amanda Blake and Parley Baer had to yield Chester Proudfoot's character to Dennis Weaver, who adopted what became a famous limp (the TV character was renamed Chester Good).
Another TV series to get the backstage nostalgia treatment tonight was The Avengers, led for so long by the quirky-looking Patrick Mcnee as John Steed. Will revealed that the name of Steed's sidekick, Emma Peel, came from the requirement to provide Man Appeal, which became M. Appeal and transmuted into Emma Peel - true, according to the excellent Avengers entry in Wikipedia, which records the entirely believable reason for the series' end: it was up against the Rowan and Martin Laugh-In, which slaughtered it in the ratings. I had also forgotten that the show was invented by a Canadian, Sydney Newman, who worked for Associated Television (ATV) in Britain. He lived in Hampstead, North London, in the 1960s, when I knew his daughter (no, not that well).
However, I must correct one wild misunderstanding by Will, that Mcnee was brought up in a castle full of lesbians. The grain of truth in that claim is that his parents divorced after his mother declared herself a lesbian. However, Mcnee was educated at Eton College, the top English public (ie private) school. He himself, now 86, claims to be a distant relation of Robin Hood.
Universal's lost films from the April fire largely recovered. There is no film equivalent of Library of Congress - should there be?
The ever-patient Bob Birchard is probably sick of being asked about the films that were feared lost in the Universal Studios fire on June 1, but it turns out the material has been largely recovered. This is good news for Bob, as he is now confident of receiving 8 of the 10 Universal films he wanted for Cinecon at the end of this month. There were copies of everything, but the question was whether Universal would pay to copy everything that was lost, or even the films such as Bob's, that were on order. Universal's initial public stance was that it would be too expensive to restore everything, but as the fuss has died down the archives department has quietly started replicating most of the material lost in the fire. Sounds like it was largely down to money and office politics - as usual.
There is no film equivalent of Library of Congress - should there be?
CAUGHT ON THE BREEZE
I used to write with a quill - but the hedgehogs objected
Is that Rowan Atkinson on your t-shirt, or the Mona Lisa? Oh, both.
That was my brother-in-law on the phone -I haven't spoken to him for six years.
I could never do leapfrog, I always preferred to have people leap on me.
I hereby bequeath you my olives
Captions kept me away from Flash Gordon
First appearance for several months by Libby, who I can report had a very pleasant evening and as a result is thinking of popping in every couple of months - as quite a few of the crew already do - subject to her other Monday night commitments. Let's hope we see much more of her.
If this blog seems on the short side, it's because there was little or no general discussion so I can only cover what was going on in my immediate vicinity - which may tell some of you things you missed, but it means that I missed plenty. All contributions gratefully accepted!
Question: what is the worst horror you can imagine? Answer: the one you can't see. Too many modern horror films are in your face, but if you go back to hits such as Quatermass and Frankenstein it was the fact you couldn't see the monsters that made them all the more frightening... which of course makes radio the ideal medium for the scary stuff and worked so spectacularly well with Orson Welles's War of the Worlds in the 1930s.
Strangely enough, this fits in with a little-discussed and genuinely frightening corner of the real world - torture. When the British SAS is training its soldiers to withstand torture, the main message is that the worst thing about it is the anticipation - which quite a few captors exploit by playing tapes of people screaming in agony before they begin questioning someone. The reality, the SAS assures its people, is never as bad. Don't want to test the theory, though!
Talking of radio, Bobb Lynes reminded us that the Gunsmoke western series was on radio before TV - and, naturally, a very different cast was employed for the screen version. I say naturally, but Bobb rightly pointed out that the radio team fought a valiant fight to make the transition, on the grounds that they looked more like real cowboys (ie, ugly, misshapen, totally unglamorous). They even organised a still photoshoot at Knot's Berry Farm in 1953.
The ugly argument might work today, but in the 1950s James Arness's 6ft 7in rugged good looks won easily over the radio Matt Dillon, William Conrad - a little fat guy who happened to have a deep voice. Howard McNear's Doc Adams was supplanted by Milburn Stone. Kitty Russell went from Georgia Ellis to Amanda Blake and Parley Baer had to yield Chester Proudfoot's character to Dennis Weaver, who adopted what became a famous limp (the TV character was renamed Chester Good).
Another TV series to get the backstage nostalgia treatment tonight was The Avengers, led for so long by the quirky-looking Patrick Mcnee as John Steed. Will revealed that the name of Steed's sidekick, Emma Peel, came from the requirement to provide Man Appeal, which became M. Appeal and transmuted into Emma Peel - true, according to the excellent Avengers entry in Wikipedia, which records the entirely believable reason for the series' end: it was up against the Rowan and Martin Laugh-In, which slaughtered it in the ratings. I had also forgotten that the show was invented by a Canadian, Sydney Newman, who worked for Associated Television (ATV) in Britain. He lived in Hampstead, North London, in the 1960s, when I knew his daughter (no, not that well).
However, I must correct one wild misunderstanding by Will, that Mcnee was brought up in a castle full of lesbians. The grain of truth in that claim is that his parents divorced after his mother declared herself a lesbian. However, Mcnee was educated at Eton College, the top English public (ie private) school. He himself, now 86, claims to be a distant relation of Robin Hood.
Universal's lost films from the April fire largely recovered. There is no film equivalent of Library of Congress - should there be?
The ever-patient Bob Birchard is probably sick of being asked about the films that were feared lost in the Universal Studios fire on June 1, but it turns out the material has been largely recovered. This is good news for Bob, as he is now confident of receiving 8 of the 10 Universal films he wanted for Cinecon at the end of this month. There were copies of everything, but the question was whether Universal would pay to copy everything that was lost, or even the films such as Bob's, that were on order. Universal's initial public stance was that it would be too expensive to restore everything, but as the fuss has died down the archives department has quietly started replicating most of the material lost in the fire. Sounds like it was largely down to money and office politics - as usual.
There is no film equivalent of Library of Congress - should there be?
CAUGHT ON THE BREEZE
I used to write with a quill - but the hedgehogs objected
Is that Rowan Atkinson on your t-shirt, or the Mona Lisa? Oh, both.
That was my brother-in-law on the phone -I haven't spoken to him for six years.
I could never do leapfrog, I always preferred to have people leap on me.
I hereby bequeath you my olives
Captions kept me away from Flash Gordon
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