Since it's Christmas already , I think a good idea might be to investigate the possibility of cataloguing all weblogs. It could be done, in a way that would fairly represent the infinite weblogs that are out there. "Blogalogue" is what I have come to call it. I have two ideas about this:
It makes sense to treat them in the traditional manner.
The only dull thing about working on Christmas Eve is that everything is closed. It's nice there are no people about. That's a bonus. It's almost like being a hermit, but it shares with that a lack of amenities, such as coffee and so on. In addition, the Entities that decide how things are to be done have chosen this moment to have drainage work performed, featuring live sewage. So the ground floor smells bad. They think, "Only the peons who work on Christmas Eve will be here, so ... they're right, of course.
Bad comedy tends to drive out good comedy, I notice. When a funny movie or tv series comes out, it's followed by lots of shoddy imitations, which, despite their ineptitude, take their wrongful place and seem to be accepted as the real thing. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was good, so they immediately thought, "Let's have another crack at it, only this time he ... let's see, okay: he blows up the baby!" The problem is, those two things are very different. Miniaturization is fun and exciting. Enormous babies are dull. Normal babies are not terribly exciting to begin with, because they can't really have adventures, and can't have had much experience. An autobiography of a baby would probably be thin on material. What the producers have done, then, is take something dull and make it really big. (I suppose they couldn't really just have him shrink the kids again. The thing to do would have been to blow up the kids and then tell the story from their point of view. That way the whole world would be an amusing microcosm for them).
I was at a meeting recently. The usual business of N people seeking to sit in N-1 chairs. Then M. Ermerod mispronounced the word 'gratuitous'. He said it as if it were 'grat-wheatus'. Now, I have nothing against a man who mangles his speech in this homey, easygoing way, why, many a political candidate has sewn up a diffident rural vote by means of this show of disarming simplicity, but M. Ermerod is nothing if not cautious about his linguistic competence. Even to imply that he had misused a word—let alone mispronounced it entirely—would be objectively to support Saddam Hussein. So no-one wanted to say anything, in fact we were all busy scribbling down the important fact: from now on, the word gratuitous' is to be pronounced 'grat-wheatus'. We add it to our lexicon of boss-speak.
On TV Bill Hemmer, who normally appears on CNN's morning news programme, is now looking at us from Iraq itself. I notice he's not wearing glasses or a tie. That's because he wants to appear more like a real foreign correspondent. I don't suppose he needs his glasses to read the teleprompter or answer questions from the home office. And strangely enough, there's Tucker Carleton, of Crossfire!. Glasses? No. Bowtie? No.
I wonder if, conversely, Patrick Brown even owns a tie. I'm sure he would have to, for various affairs, but can he put his hands on it at a moment's notice? Maybe it's stored in an old chest along with some old katars, idols, and things.
The last episode of Psi Factor that I saw had Matt Frewer explaining something to his dumb, eager assistant. Something about a vessel called the USS Eldridge that had been used in an experiment in 1943 to test some 'stealth technology'. The ship was engulfed in (as far as I could understand) an electromagnetic field, in the hopes that it would be undetectable by radar but, of course, all the crewmembers were killed. By that egregious electromagnetic field, obviously.
That sounds like nonsense, doesn't it? I'm no expert, but I don't think radar works quite that way, and I wouldn't have thought magnetism was all that harmful to people.
What he might have meant is the practice, pioneered by the British a bit earlier than that, of neutralizing the ship's magnetic field in order to avoid setting off magnetically-actuated mines. It wasn't really 'stealth technology' at all. It worked, moreover, and it did not cause any injuries to crew. All this 'USS Eldridge' stuff comes from an imaginative story that people just made up. It may seem like a small thing to be complaining about, but balderdash like this is just annoying and tends to ruin an otherwise mediocre tv show.
Today the Chronicle Herald ran a nice story about the film group Alliance/Atlantis closing down Salter Street Films. That's the only one in town that I've ever heard of. A while ago they reduced its staff, and now they've fired the last four people or so who were still hanging around the office.
Paul Donovan, who runs it, was out of the country when all of this happened, so there was no point in asking him anything. It was left to his vice president to say that they would, of course, continue to produce some shows, but "we have reduced our staffing levels to conform to what we think will be an appropriate production and distribution model going forward."
People who want to be mandarins have to study this style of communication. "Staffing levels", "appropriate", "going forward". "Going forward" really just means "from now on", but it sounds like something good. You're getting things done, you're meeting the next challenge, and above all you're speaking the lingo.
Also, if you read the whole article, you'll see there's not a shred of regret at having to fire all those people. And why should there be? They're going forward. Whoever isn't busy going forward is busy dying. I don't think any of their movies were any good.
It makes me wonder about Conrad Black, or Lord Raglan, or whatever he calls himself. How does one go about losing a publishing empire over a weekend, as he seems to have done? I can see someone misplacing his wallet or bank card after a late night. That can happen to the best of us. But an empire? You'd think that would require years of mismanagement and incompetence.
Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart—I don't know if there are two artists of that measure working together now. I have been watching the restored version of Vertigo on DVD, and I must admit it looks like the real thing. They knew how to fill a big screen back then. There's a bit at the beginning where James Stewart is just sitting in a car, but you could take that frame and blow it up and make a beautiful movie poster out of it, because of the colour and composition.
It was shot in 'Vistavision', so you really need a wide screen to enjoy this. I last saw the original in 1984, which was, apparently, the last time it was shown in theatres. (It was playing at 'The Hiland Theatre' on the Armdale Rotary in Halifax, a venue for old movies until it burnt down a while ago).
According to the information on the DVD, the movie was based on a novel called D'entre les Morts, and the working title was something like 'From among the Dead'. I would be curious to find the book. I imagine it's quite different from the final screenplay.
The music, which is such a big part of the movie, was written by Bernard Herman. It would be interesting to find out more about his work. A score for a film has to run for the length of the film, in this case 128 minutes, so it's a symphony-length work. But I suppose there are special demands. Maybe it's more like a suite, with reprised themes. You wouldn't want the music to call too much attention to itself. Sometimes I've been hanging around theatres waiting for a movie, and if you turn up early (at least in the old-fashioned theatres, not the multiplex) you can hear the music as the previous seance is going on. It's usually fairly dull, as music.
Today our patron, M. Ermerod, was away from work. I understand this completely. I, too, would stay away from work if I thought everyone was sort of trying to give me the cold shoulder. Unfortunately, I can't do that because M. Ermerod demands (and gets) complete control over his staff's comings and goings. Nothing less than an itemized account of your whereabouts every day would meet with M. Ermerod's grudging approval.
Now, of course M. Ermerod is probably tired from his many long meetings, during which various hobbledehoys question everything we are doing, and I am sure he has stuck up for us: 'What?!! Do you realize these people are the backbone of', etc. I'm pretty sure that's what happened, and that's why our chef needed an afternoon off. I would, too. Actually, I should like an afternoon off. But I would have to beg for that from M. Ermerod, and he's not here. Also, he wouldn't make an easy time of it. He would make me feel like a Marine asking to go home on the second day of Iwo Jima.
The other day our patron, M. Ermerod, had a bit of a near-breakdown. We were having a meeting to discuss some new software device, and he seemed to have a bit of a time trying to understand it. It was pretty straightforward, though. Actually, a lot of it was intuitive, and exactly here our boss began to get edgy. "Why, how come, ... ?" etc. We sat there in silence, looking at the screen, or at our hands. Anything to avoid watching a great man collapse over the inexplicitness of it all. They ought to make these things a bit more complicated and user-antagonistic.
Now I am enjoying a nicely-muted Canadian science fiction show, featuring both Michael Moriarty and Matt Frewer. They appear to have exchanged body mass, with Michael Moriarty all puffed up even as Matt Frewer has been reduced to a wise-cracking death's head. Now they seem to be talking to some lawyer-type in a book-lined office with Venetian blinds. Now Matt Frewer and some scientists are looking at something on a gurney—some muck, I bet. Now there are two guys photocopying a lot of stuff. Oh. That's an ad.
Once again they are showing some old war pic. It's full of guys with combat paint on their faces running through a rainy jungle and aiming high-powered rifles at each other. But you realize, watching it without the sound on, of course, that the whole story is really some kind of clash of personalities between our two protagonists. Maybe one of them is a traitor, but I think more likely there are some important issues at work here: they just don't get along, or one stole the other's girlfriend, or something like that. Whatever it is, the war (if that is indeed why they are there) is just a story-telling device. You could rewrite the screenplay and just have them be lawyers, or a same-sex couple, or some other rival guys.