2013 — 23 November: Saturday
I see1 my current sleep debt has been paid in full.
Microsoft Live Mail?
My attempt to open an email attachment (of, I suspect, a web page saved from Tranquil PC's online shop) from a chum this morning was effectively thwarted by a pop-up inviting me to sign up to some unwanted gorp / facility from Microsoft. It would probably not have caused any such trouble if packaged as a zip file from which I could have reconstructed the page, but this .EML wrapping proved slightly too bothersome to handle before breakfast.
I ended...
... yesterday evening's entertainment by re-watching just the first hour of "The Hunger Games". (The film gets a lot less interesting once they enter the "arena".) The portrayal of the Panem society and its various lifestyles is fascinating.
And this morning's current musical entertainment is a lovely CD I've borrowed from Roger: a 1971 performance by Alfred Brendel of Schubert's Piano Sonata in Bb and of his Fantasy in C "The Wanderer". This latter I immediately recognised when Roger played me a bit because themes from it had been used, in rather simplified2 form, in Joe Wright's 2005 film of "Pride and Prejudice".
JFK
An email from a chum laments the over-abundance of "Doctor Who" 50th anniversary 'crap' we're being bombarded3 with. "AFAICS" (he adds) "the only useful effect of this event is to suppress the proliferation of Kennedy 50th memorabilia. As I get older I get even more cynical (surprisingly, that is possible) and Kennedy worship irritates me more and more. I tend to remember him for three things — putting a man on the moon, announcing to the citizens of Berlin that he was a cream bun, and being assassinated. I have a horrible feeling that if event 3 had not occurred, I would be remembering him primarily as yet another politician who fell from grace because he couldn't keep his fly zipped."
Well, JFK was a popular President later revealed as normally flawed... in the sense (for example) that he seemed to believe only having a new woman every two or three days could banish his headaches. Though the story was also put around that the steroid treatment he received in aid of a back injury sustained during World War II service in the Navy had the effect of increasing his sex drive. There's an interesting story about this sex drive of his in John Lahr's 2001 edition of Kenneth Tynan's diaries...
[Marlene Dietrich] was a friend, in the thirties, of Joseph P Kennedy, and her daughter swam with his boys on the Riviera before the war. In the autumn of 1962 she was appearing in cabaret in Washington. Bobby and Teddy came to see her, but of course the President does not attend night-clubs; and she was sad about this until she received a summons to have drinks at the White House the following Saturday at 6 p.m. In her words:
I remembered about his bad back — that wartime injury. I looked at him and he was already undressing. He was unwinding rolls of bandage from around his middle — he looked like
Laocoön and that snake, you know? Now I'm an old lady, and I said to myself: I'd like to sleep with the President, sure, but I'll be goddammed if I'm going to be on top!...
Just as I was getting into the elevator, he said: "There's just one thing I'd like to know." "What is it, Jack?" I said. "Did you ever make it with my father?" he said. "No, Jack," I
answered truthfully, "I never did." "Well," he replied, "that's one place I'm in first." Then the lift door closed and I never saw him again.
I couldn't quite say why, but it amuses me to know that John Lahr (an excellent writer) had the cowardly lion from "The Wizard of Oz" for his father, and was (last time I checked) married to a former Mrs John Cleese — the rather wonderful Connie Booth.
I keep...
... an occasional eye on John Walker's website. Thus, today, I learned a bit more about bismuth. Not to mention the state of the universe in years to come. (Link.)
What do you get if you cross a dog with a frog? According to RL Stine: "A dog that can lick himself from across the room." (Just heard on NPR.)
For no good...
... reason, I belatedly realised that I had largely forgotten what was on the second Blu-ray of "extras" from "The Hunger Games" when I bought it a little over a year ago so, after first watching the rest of the film — started last night — I made myself my evening meal and then settled down, as it were, to digest both that and those over the next three hours. Absolutely fascinating and, now that I understand just how much Gary Ross poured into the film, I find myself worrying slightly that he's not the director doing the sequel.
It was the same with the "Twiglet" films, to be honest. Catherine Hardwicke did such an excellent job on the first one, it was an act that Chris Weitz, David Slade and Bill Condon all found hard to match.